The Witch Of Exmoor Part 4

David D'Anger is a traitor. He has joined the English. So says Will Paine to himself, as he walks back to the house. But he doesn't believe it. David D'Anger is a lucky man, that's all, a lucky man with staying power. You can see his mind follow through. Beware of envy, says Will Paine to himself, envy's a killer. He has seen it kill.

It's not right, that he should nurse this aching solitude. True, Simon and Emily speak to him, Patsy speaks to him, even Daniel sometimes nods at him. But they don't rate him, any more than they rate their poor dumb dog. And they're not all that nice to the dog. He's seen Simon kick the dog.

As Daniel, Patsy, Emily and Will Paine eat their friendly Sunday supper of cheese on toast, Frieda Haxby is scrambling in her Wellington boots over the slanting slate-grey black and purple rocks, clutching a fossil hammer and a kitchen knife. She is after the mussels. She treads with care on the living pebble-dash of limpets and barnacles, for she has just had a narrow escape on her own staircase: she had put her foot through what seemed to be a new cavity, and had saved herself only by clutching the not-so-solid-fake-Jacobean banister. She had cursed herself: that pretty little estate agent, fluffy Amanda Posy from Taunton, had warned her about the stairs, had told her she'd need to get them seen to. (Amanda Posy had not believed that anyone would ever buy Ashcombe. Who could want such a gloomy monstrosity? People only looked around it for a giggle. But Frieda had not been the giggling type.) Frieda, in her youth and middle age, had been deep into cultural appropriation, into appropriation of every kind. She had appropriated middle-cla.s.s education, manners, accent; she had appropriated her sister's admirer; she had appropriated a middle-cla.s.s husband. Then she had moved on to colonize Canada, Australia, Sweden, various campuses in the United States and, through her son-in-law and grandson, Guyana. She had meddled with them all, with insatiable anthropological curiosity. But now her empire was in decline, it had shrunk to this barren strand, this rotting folly, these dark wooded acres, this sunless kingdom by a sunless sea. Frieda Haxby, booted and skirted, picks her way towards the mussel beds. She carries a plastic bucket. She is watched by three crows. They are a faithful three. She knows them well.

The weather has brightened. To the east the swagged clouds are heavy and swollen, but above her opens a bright-edged ragged baroque s.p.a.ce of the purest, clearest virgin blue, from which might descend an angel, a grace, a dove. Arrows of golden light pierce from a hidden source, the curtains tinge with pink. Frieda's castle faces north, and the sun leaves her coast early; its sinking rays stream backwards, towards the brow of the moor.

Frieda pauses for a moment, steadies herself, and gazes at the rent gap in the sky, as it widens and pulses itself open like a great sacred heavenly heart. It reminds her of one of the new paintings she has bought, her new Leland, which still stands in the damp, its face to the wall. She has been naughty with her paintings. They will be ruined if she does not hang them, but she is afraid that if she knocks picture hooks into her peeling walls her house will fall down. Leland paints blue-clay earth and skies of terracotta and salmon pink and crushed rose, and from the raw mines of his clay crawl the blobbed and cellular forms of life. He paints evolution.

She must hang the paintings one of these days, she resolves. They cost many thousands of pounds. She is a patron of the arts.

She reaches the mussels and starts to prize them from their lodgings. The mussels are stubborn, but so is she. Slowly she fills her bucket. Not much lives on this sh.o.r.eline, for it is too stony, but some forms of simple seash.o.r.e life have colonized it. Brilliant orange lichens, periwinkles, anemones. Further west, there are crabs and lobsters. Cancer pagurus, Homarus vulgaris, Palinurus vulgaris. A wash of leathery bladder wrack and thong weed, a sprouting of small succulents with stiff white and dry pink flowersthe common scurvy gra.s.s, she thinks, though it is much prettier than its name. On the salt marshes to the east samphire grows, and she has seen there several times on her wanderings a lone white egret, fishing far from home. What wind had blown it here, so far off course?

Palinurus drowned. Or was he hacked to death by pirates? She cannot recall.

She tries not to break the mussels, but from time to time her knife slips. Her hands are bleeding, but they are too cold to feel the pain. Blood and sea-salt mingle. She hacks, and curses. She has broken a mussel sh.e.l.l, and its living body is exposed. She pulls it away from its rock and a lump of its flesh seems to leap from its crushed dwelling place and attach itself like a leech to her bare and bleeding hand. Horrified, she tries to brush off the clinging fragment, but it sticks. It is fierce and hopeful. It will not die. Its flesh seeks a home on her flesh. She sc.r.a.pes it off with the knife, and it falls vanquished on to the pale purple rock. The mussels in the bucket breathe and sigh. Frieda the murderer turns her back upon the sea, and climbs up the hill.

THE VALLEY OF ROCKS.

For the rest of the summer no news comes out of Exmoor. Frieda Haxby is silent. David D'Anger received a postcard from her in late July, with notes on the subsidy-sheep scandal of Somerset and Devon, with information about a new j.a.panese protein-producing fungus, but it did not require an answer and gave no address. It was posted in Exeter, so either she or some minion of hers is mobile. David has been appointed her conscience: he knows that she expects him to carry on her abandoned work as fleshthorn and neckpain, that she derides his squeamish emollience, his desire to please. But he does not see why he should take on the subsidy sheep of the West Country. There are none, as far as he knows, in West Yorkshire. He cannot take on the whole of the British Isles at her command. He has visited an abattoir, at her prompting, and he will never recover from the horror of it. Does she endorse or deplore the j.a.panese fungus? It is not clear from her card, which portrays, on its pictorial side, a view of the small church of Oare where Lorna Doone was shot by Carver Doone at the altar. (What is Lorna Doone, David asks Gogo. She enlightens him.) Does Frieda Haxby have a postal address, a postcode? The house is called Ashcombe, a dull suburban name for what Rosemary has described as a grand Gothic folly, but Rosemary has insisted that it is beyond the reach of any postman's beat. Maybe Frieda collects letters from a box nailed to a tree at the end of the drive? Maybe she drives into the nearest village to pick up her mail? The house is marked on the Ordnance Survey Map, so it must exist. But Frieda has fallen silent. Neither light nor sound emerge from her remote planet.

Daniel, Gogo and Rosemary are too busy with the complications of their own lives to think about her much, but occasionally they are reminded of her existence. Silly-Season reports of a sheep-savaging Black Beast on the moora puma, a panther?give rise to sardonic speculation. It would be just like Frieda to get herself involved with a Beast. Perhaps she is the Beast. Another story, about tragic deaths in a dinghy off the Island of Lundy, makes Daniel and Patsy reach for their map, for this, they know, is Frieda's coastline. They look at the swirling frills of steep brown-green contour on the OS map, at the marks of the Roman Fortlet and the Old Barrow and the farm called Desolate.

None of them knows the West Country well, though all have touched upon it and pa.s.sed through it: now they turn the pages of their papers and read of stag hunts, of hunt saboteurs, of water pollution, of fires in nuclear-power stations, of an outbreak of meningitis in Tauntonis the virus spreading south and westwards from Stroud? And was it in Taunton that Frieda had seen the photograph of Ashcombe in the estate agent's window? They think it was. It was in Taunton that she had run to earth the story of the meatless hamburger, which had caused David D'Anger to take up the unpleasant scent in his adopted const.i.tuency of Middleton. Taunton has much to answer for.

Occasional inquiries about Frieda reach Daniel and Patsy, David and Gogo, Rosemary and Nathan. Friends, acquaintances, colleagues, visiting Americans, visiting Australians, visiting Swedes: none of them seems to know where she is. The tone of some is reproachful. This, they agree, must be part of Frieda's plot. She has forced them into the role of Bad Children, and wilfully, playfully, cast herself as a Neglected Mother. They hope that most of those who ask after her know her well enough to discount this storyline. Her agent surely must. Her agent Cate Crowe had telephoned Rosemary to say that to her astonishment she had had some interest in the film rights of Christina from some Australian crackpot, and although there would be nothing in it (how could there be?) (well, maybe a few thousand quid at most?) she felt it her duty to pa.s.s it on. But although she had written to Ashcombe, no answer had been received. Did Rosemary know if Frieda had a telephone down there? Or a fax? Had Rosemary any idea of what the woman thought she was up to? Rosemary, not best pleased to be reminded of the embarra.s.sing debacle of Christina, yet anxious to keep on the right side of the powerful Cate Crowe, had m.u.f.fled and waffled her reply about access to Frieda. But she had divulged that her sister Grace would be going down there in late August or early September on a visit. Grace would relay any messages. And Rosemary had rung Gogo and David, to tell them that they must contact Cate Crowe before they headed westwards.

So David and Gogo, during the summer months, collected and listed topics for Frieda. They even wrote themselves an agenda, afraid that the disruptive power of Frieda's presence and the inhospitable extremity of her retreat would, if ever they reached her, scatter their programme to the high winds.

They would tackle Frieda on the subjects of her health, her electricity supply, the safety of her premises, and the wisdom of contemplating a winter beneath the moor. (The floorboards, according to Rosemary, were dodgy.) If it seemed possible, they would raise the subject of her will. They would take a package of letters and contracts and German Income Tax Release Forms from Cate Crowe, and provide a courier service for anyone else who wished to send communications to be delivered into her hand.

This, of course, depended on her willingness to receive them. What if they arrived there and were shown the door? What if she set the dogs on them?

Neither David nor Gogo thought that this would happen. They considered that they would prove more tactful and acceptable visitors than the worldly and impatient Rosemary, who had arrived unannounced and no doubt on high-heels and smelling of Ysatis. The D'Angers would approach in better camouflage. Moreover they would carry with them the talismanic figure of grandson Benjamin, who had always seemed close to her heart. Who could close a door against Benjamin? He had the key to all castles. So they fondly believed.

They encouraged Benjamin to take an interest in their projected outing, and he, a quick and scholarly child, responded eagerly, though he drew the line at reading Lorna Doone. They consulted him about the route, and at once agreed when he expressed a desire to see Stonehenge. Of course he could see Stonehenge, and he could also visit the Valley of Rocks. Would he like to see Wookey Hole and stalact.i.tes and stalagmites and Cheddar Gorge? Yes, he said, he would.

Benjamin was excited about the thought of entering a deep cave. He went to the library and took out books on pot-holes, and studied the diary of the man who set the record for spending time alone underground. The world's largest cave chamber is in the Gunong Mulu National Park in Sarawak, the largest underwater cave is in Mexico, and the largest cave system in Britain is the Ease Gill system in Yorkshire.

Benjamin read about Wookey Hole. In 1935 the caves had been explored with the help of breathing apparatus by a team led by Gerald Balcombe. There was one woman in the party, Penelope Powell, and she had described descending into 'a world of green, where the water was as clear as crystal. Imagine a green jelly, where even the shadows cast by the pale green boulders are green but of a deeper hue; as we advanced, light green mud rose knee high and then fell softly and gently into the profound green-ness behind. So still, so silent, unmarked by the foot of man since the river came into being, awe inspiring though not terrifying, it was like being in some mighty and invisible presence...'

Benjamin looked up fiction about caves and tunnels on the computer index in the library. He read Jules Verne and H. G. Wells and even Edward Bulwer-Lytton. He dreamt of caves. One night he dreamt that he was travelling through tunnels that transfixed the earth: if he went onwards, he would emerge in Guyana, in the green-gold of his own land, where there were waterfalls higher than the eye can see, and chasms deeper than man or woman could fathom. In these tunnels beneath the earth a high wind raged perpetually, a source of unharnessed subterrestrial power far mightier than the winds of heaven which turned the silver mills of the wind field on the ridge behind his Uncle Daniel's false Old Farm.

Benjamin was a rich and prolific dreamer. He dreamt that his grandmother Frieda was standing with him at the prow of a boat on an underground river. The river flowed rapidly through a dark tunnel. Frieda was holding high a banner that swirled in the wind.

Benjamin had also been reading Coleridge, recommended by the librarian, who had become involved in his study of the West Country and the Matter of Exmoor. She recommended Kubla Khan. She a.s.sured him that both Coleridge and Wordsworth knew Exmoor well, which surprised Benjamin, but when he read the notes on Wordsworth's Peter Bell he could see that she was right. (He did not think much of Peter Bell-a silly poem, about an old man and a donkey, not a patch on Kubla Khanbut nevertheless, the Valley of Rocks might be worth a visit?) It is not surprising that David and Gogo and the friendly librarian and Benjamin's teachers at his local comprehensive were proud of the exemplary little lad. All knew that he would go far, and bent upon him the earnestness of their intentions and their hopes. An imaginative, hard-working child, he was well enough liked by his peer group; the worst they ever did to him was yell, 'You're a stiff and your mum's a stiff!' Or, more briefly and more unkindly, 'Your Mum!' (What this meant, Gogo never discovered.) Swimming was his favourite sport, and he could swim a length under water, but like his father he followed the cricket and loyally supported the West Indies he had never seen. He had plenty of friends, and though the tabled food in the D'Anger tea-time bas.e.m.e.nt was on the healthy side, it was easy enough to smuggle in Snickers and crisps, cans of c.o.ke and even bacon sandwiches. The tea-time minders turned a blind eye.

In short, Benjamin D'Anger was a spoiled brat and a teacher's pet. But so strong was the D'Anger charm, so formidable the stiff Haxby Palmer presence, and so generous the minders, that he was not resented.

(One should not ignore, in this context, the influence of Grace D'Anger. The other parents knew it was good to keep on the right side of Gogo. If their brains suddenly snapped, if their parents's carted to dodder with Parkinson's or Alzheimer's or encephalitis, if anyone in the family was struck down with motor neuron disease, Gogo was known to be your woman.) As the date of the excursion approached, Benjamin's excitement mounted. One would have thought an outing to the West Country tame stuff for a child in the 1990s when 40 per cent of families from social cla.s.ses A and B took two holidays or more a year and to parts of the world more exotic than Exmoor. (A slightly larger percentage of social cla.s.ses D and E took no holidays at all but they need not concern us here.) David D'Anger himself was well aware of these statistics; more surprisingly, Benjamin D'Anger was aware of them too, for he took a keen interest in his father's interests, and was very fond of statistics of social trends. A regular little John Stuart Mill, young Benjamin. (He had even tried to read Frieda Haxby's cla.s.sic, The Matriarchy of War, but had found it heavy going, you may be pleased to hear.) Benjamin was well aware that some of his own schoolmates had been to Italy, Greece, Turkey, Spain, the Canaries and Corsica; some of them had been to Disneyland. Others had never been further than the PC games shop, the arcade and the lido. He himself had been to Tuscany, Yugoslavia and France. Yet despite these travels, he was filled with an unusual and appropriately childish joy at the prospect of a week's outing to Somerset and Devon. He crossed his fingers, muttered superst.i.tiously to his private G.o.ds. He hoped that this time nothing would prevent or delay their departure. Let there be no crisis at the hospital, no excitement on the political horizon. This was a dull time of year. Let it stay dull. Let Benjamin have his holiday.

They were to set off, for a week, at the beginning of September, and David and Gogo had written to Frieda at Ashcombe, saying that they would be in the neighbourhood and thought of dropping in to see her. She was to write to tell them if the particular day they had selectedthey named it firmly, suggesting teawas unsuitable. No answer was received.

Much anxious family consultation took place before their departure. The Herzes had returned from their week on the Aegean, and the Daniel Palmers were stuck in Hampshire, entertaining a succession of house guests. Instructions and warnings were interchanged. Beware vipers, Rosemary repeated. Don't forget to ask if she's signed her German tax forms, urged Daniel.

At last the D'Angers loaded themselves and their guidebooks into their family car and set off westwards along the M3. Merrily they bowled along on their adventures, like characters in an old-fashioned children's story. Mummy, Daddy and Benjie. Benjie, from the back seat, a.s.sured Mummy and Daddy that he felt fine, and was not at all sick.

Daddy, at the wheel, fell silent as they pa.s.sed the pigs of Wiltshire in the sloping fields, rooting in the sunshine amidst the barracks of their curved corrugated huts. Wiltshire seemed full of pigs and soldiers. Lucky pigs, princely pigs. They could wander at will. David D'Anger wondered if he would forgive Frieda for dispatching him to the abattoir and the chicken gutters. The stench and tumbled carca.s.ses remained with him. That had been what she had intended. The sc.r.a.ppy raw-pecked self-abusing fowl and stunned curly-headed bullocks haunted him, as did the pale girls in b.l.o.o.d.y overalls, the young men with dull eyes. The human factory farm. Pig skin, chopped gizzards, mechanically recovered meat. Cheap and nasty food for cheap people.

Parliamentary candidate David D'Anger thought of his const.i.tuency of Middleton as he drove through Wiltshire. His future flock. It was a scattered const.i.tuency, of conservative dormitory villages straggling into Pennine farmland to the west, and to the east the dead and disowned villages of the coalfields, leaking red rust into brooks and rivers. Amongst the coalfields had risen the new hangars of Fast Food. Middleton itself was a nothing place, a small town without a heart. The Westerners never went near the old coalfields. Why should they? They drove past them at eighty miles an hour on the motorway. As he drove past these pigs. n.o.body ever stopped to see. One world did not know that the other existed. And David D'Anger had been selected to woo, simultaneously, the Black-Asian vote (3.4 per cent and rising) and the middle-cla.s.s Westerners. The way the polls were going, unless something unexpected happened (which, in politics, it always could) he is sure to be elected. Well, almost sure. Does he really want to be the Member of Parliament for Middleton?

Like most men of politics, David D'Anger is not very good at taking a holiday and forgetting his work. He is not very good at emptying his head of social statistics. He had brought a lot of statistics with him in his suitcase. He had promised himself that he would try to enjoy the landscape and the company of his wife and son. But it was hard to concentrate on pre-history and Stonehenge. He and Gogo managed to reduce even Stonehenge to party politics, to Benjie's irritationBenjie had come to worship, and there his parents were, chattering on about the National Trust and English Heritage, about the Minister for the Arts, about motorways and the newly appointed and hubristically ent.i.tled Director of Stonehenge. What does she think she's going to do, David and Gogo asked one another rhetoricallyrearrange her troops in a more contemporary configuration, and order the noonday sun to shine upon a different dolmen? Benjie thought this was flippant, but perhaps it was no more flippant than the unsightly bunkers of public lavatories, the gift-shops, the tea-room selling Solstice Savories and Megalithic Rock Cakes.

Benjamin tried to abstract himself from the temporal, the trivial. This was the heart of England. All around on the magic turf, amidst sheep and crows and dipping wagtails and flint-white molehills, against a swelling green backcloth of lumps and tumuli, small dramas were enacted. A party of smartly dressed middle-aged j.a.panese women strode purposefully onwards, their sensible neat polished shoes measuring the metres to the next point on their itinerary; they were trailed by their taxi-driver, a local Druid with long dirty yellow hair, dark gla.s.ses, faded jeans and a pink shirt. Two travellers from the New Age sat facing the stones, at some distance, upon an embroidered mat: their eyes were shut, their noses were pierced, their foreheads were bound with embroidered fillets, and their legs were gartered with straps of blue leather. They moved their lips in silent prayer. A fat white baby crowed in delight from its pushchair, and a solitary MidWestern Wordsworth scholar with a backpack opened a pocket edition and read to himself from Guilt and Sorrow. An elegant Indian in a green and gold sari seemed to cross herself as the slight wind ruffled her hem and her long hair. A young woman with flowing red Viking hair knelt at the feet of a dark bearded monkish figure and kissed his hand as tears poured down her pale cheeks. Benjamin gazed at these devotional multicultural figures in the Wiltshire landscape.

His interest in Wookey Hole was if anything more intense, and as they drove on, after an unduly protracted pub lunch (how odd of Gogo to order Scampi and Chips in a Basket, she really must think she was on her hols!), he realized that it was going to be a near thing. They had already decided to skip Cheddar Gorge and take it in on the way home (he'd heard that kind of promise before), but Wookey Hole was still on the itinerary. Now it too began to look at risk. Would it close before they got there? Were his parents already tired of sight-seeing? He feared they were about to betray him by deciding to drive straight on to their pre-booked country hotel for a tedious pre-dinner drink. He kept his eye on the car's clock, and managed by secret map-reading and tactful intervention to prevent them from taking a wrong turn near Shepton Mallet. He got them on course again, and urged them on. They were still in plenty of time in his view, but suppose they turned nasty at the last moment?

His heart sank as they emerged from miles of slow narrow minor road and saw the Wookey Hole car park. This was not promising. It was vast, ugly, multilayered and crowded. Gogo groaned, and David said, 'Oh dear.' Wookey Hole was clearly a Fun Spot for the Ma.s.ses, almost as downmarket and repellent as Disneyland. The car clock told them it was already 4.08. Benjamin knew his parents would try to wriggle out of their commitment. 'There's a s.p.a.ce!' he cried eagerly, as he saw a tin-green Datsun reverse from the ranks on the tarmac. 4.09 said the clock. David hesitated, and took the metallic Datsun's place.

It was a long walk to the cute fake stone shop that sold tickets, and there was a queue. The next tour was not until 4.30, and the D'Angers were informed it would take an hour and a half. Could Benjamin persuade his parents to hang around for twenty unattractive minutes in order to join an uncongenial throng and walk into the floodlit bowels of the hill, chaperoned by a talkative guide? He put on an expression of stubborn pleading and willed them not to retreat. He wanted to see the inside of the Mendips.

Gogo was for cutting their losses and for moving on, but David, fortunately, had decided to take a sociological interest in their fellow visitors, in their group dynamic. He discovered that the visit to the caves in fact took only half an hour; the rest of the tour was optional. They weren't obliged to traipse round the paper mill and the fim-fair. They'd be out and away by five, in plenty of time for a hot bath before dinner. Benjamin's will prevailed. He coerced and chivvied his reluctant parents across the road, along the path up the hillside, past the flowing stream and the hyena lair, beneath the hanging wood, and marched them to the iron turnstile with their tickets in their hands. (It was, complained Gogo, expensive: an exploited cave, a marketed hillside. Who owned it? It was not clear. Who owns the bowels of the earth?) Like docile prisoners they waited, like prisoners they allowed themselves to be ticked off and lined up and filed into the cold and dripping darkness. Benjamin tried not to listen to the guide, who was utterly ba.n.a.l; he tried to concentrate on the hanging horseshoe bats, the exotic tropical hart's tongues, the yellow folds of the limestone. They moved from chamber to chamber as the guide described the Witch of Wookey Hole, who had lived here with her little dog and brought ill-luck to the land: look, there she was, frozen to stone by a monk from Glas...o...b..ry, and there was her little dog, and there was her alabaster witch's ball.

The silver Axe flowed silently and very fast, without a ripple to disturb its surface. It was hundreds of feet deep. The stalact.i.tes and stalagmites were elaborate, magnificent: they hung in carved amber and ivory curtains, stained here and there with vermilion, ochre and sooty black. They were fretted stone in a cathedral. (A poet called Alexander Pope had stolen some of them for his grotto, the guide informed them.) The hillside above them weighed billions of tons, and n.o.body knew why the roofs of the chambers did not collapse. n.o.body knew how deep the water was. The guide described the green underwater world discovered by divers, and the muddy Cave of Gloom beyond Chamber 24. He recounted that the divers had found another chamber, a twenty-fifth chamber, but beyond that none had ever penetrated. Beyond that was a dive into 'the bottomless void'. Two hundred feet down the abyss 'one brave man' had plunged, but had returned, leaving the mystery unsolved. What lay beyond, in the heart of the mountain? What caverns, what lakes, what waterfalls, and what abiding spectres? Benjamin was deeply impressed. The unknown called to him, the depths invited him. He was enchanted and afraid.

He was less enchanted by the paper mill, which his parents rushed him through at some speed, pausing only to read out to one another the optimistic Heritage version of the past presented by the Brochure ('It is silent now, the great rag boiler. The benches are empty where the ap.r.o.ned girls chattered and giggled while their nimble fingers shredded the bundles of rags, cutting away b.u.t.tons and hoods and lengths of whalebone ...') Benjamin was not interested in whether they had chattered or wept, whether they had shredded bundles of rags or their own fingers; he paid little attention as Gogo, her resistance subdued by marketing, underground imprisonment and oxygen deprivation, succ.u.mbed to buying some hand-crafted indigo-blue envelopes made from recycled denim. (They were very deceptively packaged, so Gogo discovered, not to her surprise, when she tried to use one three months later.) Benjamin was not interested in all this. He walked through the fun-fair and the Magical Mirror Maze in a daze, thinking of the one brave man who had plunged and returned. This old-fashioned stuff, these hurdy-gurdies and carved horses and penny-in-the-slot machines meant nothing to him, nor, he could see, did they arouse much nostalgia in his parents. 'The whole outfit seems to belong to Madame Tussaud's and Pearson' he heard them muttering to one another, as they tried to find an exit through the Maze and the fountains and the arcades. It was not easy to get out. 'The bottomless void,' he repeated to himself. 'The Cave of Gloom.'

The young woman at the reception desk did a double-take on David D'Anger. He was used to this, but her response was innocent and unconcealed. She received him at first with a slightly hostile suspicion (Indian chap), then with deference (hadn't she seen him on TV?). She clearly couldn't work out whether she recognized him or not (he suspected, as a practised sociologist, that she might be the type to have endured ten minutes or so of Question Time or News night or Race Watch, just long enough for his features but not his name to register), but she decided to treat him as a celebrity,just in case. And after that, it was plain sailing. He employed the D'Anger charm, she called for a porter, blushed, a.s.sured him that she was giving him the room with the best view, and asked if he and his wife would like a cup of tea. Then she shimmered, in a slightly fl.u.s.tered way, at Benjamin, who was carrying a suitcase and a large canvas bag of books and maps and papers.

She was a pretty young woman, with fair hair, a tilted nose, a fair creamy skin, full lips and a visible bosom. She wore a crisp longsleeved white blouse over a black skirt, belted with a black leather, gold-buckled belt. An English rose. Her name, she informed them, was Felicity, and she was there to help them in any way she could. She blushed again as she spoke. Would they like to book a table for dinner? Would the young man be dining with them? They would find a minibar in Room 12, though not in the young man's room (Room 14) next door. Which newspaper would they like in the morning?

Gogo watched this little comedy from a distance. She never interfered with David's conquests. And the girl was a harmless girl, a countrycounty girl. Not like those sharp-toothed metropolitan vampires at the studio, those ambitious little graduate politicos who offered their s.e.xual services as research a.s.sistants. David's vanity deserved appeas.e.m.e.nt. Let him have it. She could no longer give what he needed.

And in bed that night, as David turned to her, as he now so rarely did, she tried not to turn away. She held him to her. She loved him, for what that was worth, but she was no wife to him. She did not want to lose him, but how could she keep him? Childbirth had traumatized her. She thought of her mother, as David sadly embraced and caressed and entered her, and wondered how Frieda had broken away into freedom. She remembered her grandmother, that sour old bag in Chapel Street, that endless talker, that killjoy: was she herself a killjoy now? s.e.x did not interest her. She had chosen the head, the brain, the nervous system. An ancestral puritan rural deadness had flattened and uns.e.xed her. She suspected that neither her brother nor her sister was much interested in s.e.x. They preferred status, money, power. How had Frieda Haxby managed to break away and run off with so many ill-a.s.sorted men? Or had they been, as Daniel sometimes hinted, a cover? For status, money, power?

Gogo knew that she had done David a great wrong, through love of him. She had loved him so much that she had been unable to refuse his formal proposal of marriage. But for his own sake she should have denied him. Now they were bound to one another for ever by that child sleeping in the next room. Gogo believed that her husband had once loved her. She hoped that he was unfaithful to her, for if he were not, how hard his life must be. She hoped that David had not killed in himself all the natural man. He too had chosen the head, but his body, unlike hers, could still speak. How could he remain with her? Should she not forgo him for his own good? What was this loyalty that kept him by her side?

An inky flood of sad regret flows upwards through the stranded body of Grace D'Anger, and tears fill her eyes. Her husband folds her in his arms and rocks her quietly. She is beyond his reach, and he loves her. But she cannot return.

(Grace D'Anger's suspicions about her sister Rosemary's marriage are, as you will have noted at once, quite false. Rosemary Palmer married Nathan Herz for s.e.x. Anyone but Grace D'Anger would have spotted that. The suspicions reveal more about Grace than they do about Rosemary.

Her speculations about Frieda are nearer the mark.) Four days the D'Angers spent on their slow approach to the siege of Frieda in her stronghold. For four days they strolled streets, climbed hills, ate cream teas, drank shandies, inspected lifeboats. They walked across the dinosaur backbone of the clapper bridge at Tarr Steps, they pulled rea.s.suring banknotes from holes in unfamiliar walls. (Holidays in England did not come cheap.) They thought of visiting the Island of Lundy, but could not discover the times of the boats. High up on the Brendons they ate a sandwich in a pub where they met a dog with three legs and a man with none. They were told tales of smugglers and highwaymen. The night was dark over Exmoor and the stars were brighter than in London.

They also amused themselves by making a personal survey of the ethnic minorities of the South West, both resident and tourist, comparing the evidence of their own six eyes with the statistics provided by David's supply of surveys, handbooks and almanacs. I am compelled to say that the D'Angers do this wherever they go. You might think this indicates an unhealthy obsession with racial origins, and you might be right. On the other hand, you might put it down to a natural sociological curiosity. I don't have to have a view on this, I am simply reporting the facts. The latest edition of The Almanac of British Politics informed the D'Angers that the Black-Asian population of Somerset hovered somewhere between 0.8 and 1.4 per cent, and personal observation introduced them to a turbaned sheik walking alone on the top of the Quantocks, a family group from Wolverhampton eating fish and chips at Combe Martin, a Q8 petrol station manager, a student group of quant.i.ty surveyors of Middle Eastern aspect measuring the beach at Porlock Weir, and a scattering of signs for tandoori take-aways, Chinese take-aways, Taj Mahals and Curry Paradises. The vegetarian curries of West Somerset and Devon were, to David's disappointment, not very good; David needed a curry fix several times a week, which was easy enough to find in London and Middleton, but not so easy in this outpost. David had held high hopes of Watchet, where a consignment of Ugandan Asians had once been billeted, but none of them seemed to have settled. Watchet offered Battered Cod.

No, this was the white man's kingdom. Beaker folk and Belgae, Bronze Age and Iron Age, Celts and Romans, all had been white, or white-ish. There had not been much a.s.similation or infiltration here. David and Benjamin D'Anger were conspicuous in the crowds. But then, thought Gogo proudly, they were conspicuous anywhere.

On their last afternoon of carefree wandering before their planned a.s.sault upon Frieda, they made their way to the Valley of Rocks beyond Lynton. As they left the green car park Benjamin feared that this celebrated stretch of the coast path would prove to be an Old Lady's Promenade, but as they strode on the crowds thinned, and soon they found themselves alone, with black mountain goats skipping like small horned devils above them and seabirds wheeling below them. The path picked its way along the edge of the precipice, and the waves broke on the sterile purple stones. The famous rocks were perched perilously, erratically, in a strange high ridge, in tormented anthropomorphic configurations, as though a scene of great tumult at the dawn of the world had frozen as it cracked. Benjamin could make out a great beaked witch's profile, a goblin's hunched back. These were the bones of the old world. If he half shut his eyes he could make them move, he could make them rise up and drag their buried limbs from the green turf and walk. He could make the ground itself heave and spew forth more boulders. He could open a cavern and entomb these strolling earthfolk for seven times seven years. Darkest night would encompa.s.s them. At his will the rocks would tumble, the seas would rise. He narrowed his eyes and the horizon quivered, the gra.s.s squeaked.

And then they emerged in Victorian Lynton, and had a cream tea.

That evening they sat together in the bar of the hotel where they had become regulars: this was their second night in residence. (The barman complained that English holiday-makers were not what they werein the old days a family would settle for a week, a fortnight, a month: now two nights counted as a long stay.) They ordered drinks and spoke of Frieda. They congratulated themselves on having provided themselves with good camouflage. They were seasoned sightseers now, with stickers and souvenirs to prove it. If Frieda wished to cross-question them on their journey, they had their answers ready. How would she receive them? When they arrived at her gateposts, should they send Benjamin in first, like a sacrificial lamb?

They had come a long way for this meeting, and they set off the next day with uncertain expectations. Already in reconnoitre they had pa.s.sed and repa.s.sed the turning that led to Ashcombe, but now they had to accept its challenge. The little narrow high-hedged lane plunged deeply and steeply. Tracks led off it, to Bolt Farm and Desolate Farm and Sugar Loaf Hill, and there were one or two acorn symbols and coloured arrows marking footpaths and bridle-ways. But they pa.s.sed no walkers and no horses. The lane deteriorated into a track, as Rosemary had said it would, and brought them to a gate called PRIVATE.

Of' this too Rosemary had spoken, but she had found the gate closed, and had got out of her car to wrestle with it. Now, for them, it stood open. Was this, they wondered, a good omen? Had Frieda opened it for them? Was Frieda waiting for them now, at four o'clock in the: afternoon, like a good granny, with the kettle on the hob? With caution they descended, b.u.mping downwards over cattle grids and pot-holes. As yet there was no sign of the house. They pa.s.sed a derelict Gothic gatehouse, and continued down through high Victorian rhododendrons and giant hollies and rowans red with bunched berries of blood. The foliage was reckless, exuberant, profligate. And suddenly there before them, below the next turning, was the house, and beyond the house, the sea.

Cautiously Gogo lurched the car forward over the last few yards, and brought it to a halt before a square archway which led through the front (or was it the back?) of a high three-storeyed grey stone building into a courtyard. As Rosemary had warned them, Ashcombe was not a building of much charm. Of all the charming cottages and farmhouses and gentlemen's townhouses of the West, this was surely one of the ugliest. It sat there, defiant and large and out of keeping. Like a mental inst.i.tution, a penitentiary. Whoever could have built such a thing here, and how, and why? Rosemary said she had thought it had once been a hotel, but had given no reasons for this supposition. It did not look very cosy or welcoming. No Felicity here.

Gogo switched off"the ignition.

'Well?' she said.

'Avanti,' said David. 'Su forza.' (He sometimes spoke Italian when he was nervous. It was a give-away.) 'She can't eat us,' said Gogo, laughing falsely as she opened the car door.

'Fee, fi, fo, fum,' said Benjamin. He was enjoying himself. He knew by no w that she was in there, somewhere. He sensed her. And so it was that, after all, he found himself leading the party. Boldly, he marched beneath the arch and across the courtyard towards a corresponding arch in the far wall: somewhere there must be a door, somewhere here must be the quarters that Frieda had occupied and civilized?

'Grandma!' he called. 'Grandma Frieda! Where are you? Are you hiding? Can you see me? Where are you?'

It was a fine afternoon (how lucky they had been with the weather!) and a clear north light beat backwards up from the sea, which glittered at them through the double arch. They could hear waves upon the rocks and shingle below, and the gentle soughing of wind in small weathered trees. Benjamin called again, and this time, at his call, an ancient black and white sheepdog emerged from a door in the wall of the second arch. It advanced upon him, wagging its tail. Benjamin patted it, softly, for it was a frail and bony dog. Then he followed it into the building. Gogo and David, in the courtyard, looked at one another, paused, then heard him call.

'Here she is! Come along, here she is!'

And they followed the boy and the dog, and there, in the garden room overlooking the lawn and the terrace, where once teas had been taken, was Frieda Haxby. She was waiting for them. She stood, and smiled, with her arm round her grandson.

She too, a hundred years late, was about to take tea. They saw a table, spread with a white cloth, with a china tea-set, with a fluted silver pot and a silver jug and a silver sugar-bowl. There were scones in a heavily gadrooned silver cake-basket and sandwiches upon a. blue Wedgwood plate. A fruitcake embossed with almonds and cherries stood proudly upon a cut-gla.s.s cake-stand. Thick cream was heaped in a cut-gla.s.s bowl. It was a tea.

And Frieda Haxby was wearing her tea-gown. There she stood, shoulder to shoulder with her grandson, in a floor-length gown of radiant midnight blue embroidered with silver. Sequins sparkled on her bodice, and ran in little streamlets down her full soft draped skirt. Silver earrings dangled from the lobes of her ears, and her wispy grey hair was arrested by a diamante pin.

'David, Grace,' she said. 'Grace, David. You have come all this way.'

She sounded moved. What was the old fox playing at this time? Slow-witted, Gogo moved forward as in a dream to peck her on the cheek; David followed her example, with more simulation of conviction.

'I'm so pleased to see you,' said Frieda in a gracious, a sociable tone. 'Do come and sit down, I'll go and put the kettle on. Make yourselves at home. I'll be back in a moment.' And out she glided, with the teapot, in a rustle of silk.

They dared not speak in her absence, for fear of breaking the spell, but they looked around in wonder, and soon they saw that all was not as wonderful as it had seemed. This was a stage set, and you could see into the wings. Only the table and its precious loading spoke of order. The floor was an old, faded, bleached parquet, unpolished for decades, with blocks missing or rising from the plane; the papered walls were stained with damp. The light fittings were askew, and the curtains hung in uneven bunches, tied back by string. The tea-table was spotless, but round the far edges of the vast room stood other tables covered in familiar intellectual Mausoleum clutterpapers, files, cardboard boxes. 'But', whispered Gogo'to David, 'it's all quite clean. And how much weight she's lost. That can't be a trick, can it?'

'No,' said Frieda, returning with a rea.s.suringly blackened and mundane kettle and the silver pot of tea, 'I really am a lot thinner. That's not an optical illusion, I promise you.' She had overheard them, or read their minds. 'I really can get into this dress. So I thought I'd wear it for you. Milk, Grace? Do tuck in, Benjie. The sandwiches are Marmite and cuc.u.mber, not very exciting, I'm afraid. And the scones are Readymix, but I did make them myself. Milk, David? Or do you still prefer lemon?'

As they settled in to their tea, she chatted on, politely, civilly. So good of them to come so far. She'd got their letter, but it was a long way to the post-box, and time pa.s.sed so quickly here. She'd known they'd find her. She'd been looking forward to seeing them. Benjamin in particular. How was Benjamin?

'Fine, thanks,' said Benjamin, his mouth full of sandwich. He could not take his eyes off this apparition of his grandmother. 'Can you get right down to the sea from here? And where did you get that dress?'

'I'll show you round later,' said Frieda, and proceeded to tell them about the dress. She'd bought itperhaps Grace would remember?for the Royal Banquet. And she'd worn it just that once, for the King and Queen, when she went to receive her Swedish medal from the Historical Society for her book on the Iron Coast. The dress had cost hundreds and hundreds of pounds, and it had hung in her wardrobe for years, and was now quite out of fashion. So she had decided to wear it 'about the house'. She was pleased with that phrase, and repeated it. 'I wear it', she said, 'about the house.' She paused, then continued, 'And I wear my other evening dress, that green striped silk one, as a nightie. This one won't do as a nightie because the sequins p.r.i.c.kle and the shoulder pads get caught round your neck when you're asleep. But the green striped one is just fine for bed. And this is just right for tea.' She beamed at them, happily, and with great benevolence.

Oh hard to say what game we play.

After tea, she offered to show Benjamin round the house. She did not offer to take David and Gogo. 'You two can stay and watch the sunset,' she commanded them, and she set off with her grandson. (The moment Frieda was out of earshot, Gogo leapt up and started to rummage.) 'Watch out for the stairs,' said Frieda to Benjamin, from time to time. 'Watch that step. Careful with the doork.n.o.b, we don't want to lock ourselves in.'

The house was enormous. Corridor after corridor, room after room. Frieda pointed out that she lived in a small part of it, but that she liked to know the rest of it was there. 'It's a comfort to me, all this s.p.a.ce,' she said, pausing for breath at the top of an attic staircase. 'All these empty rooms. I could go into them. If I wanted.' She coughed, a dry smoker's cough.

Benjamin tagged behind her, gazing at claw-footed baths with corroded bath taps, at leaning wardrobes, at tiles loosened by damp, at crops of woody yellow fungus sprouting from cornices, at delicate thin-stemmed lilac fairy caps growing from window-ledges, at black spatters and dustings of mildew. Only a few of the rooms showed signs of recent habitation, and all of those fronted the sea.

In one of the front rooms, on the top floor, he could see that Frieda worked. Here hung a barometer decorated with marquetry sh.e.l.lwork. It registered that the weather was set fair. A large desk to one side was occupied by a word-processor. The walls were covered with postcards, cuttings and messages, stuck on with drawing-pins and sellotape. A table stood in the window, furnished with an oil lamp, a pair of binoculars and a lantern-globe. 'Sit down, sit down,and look at the view,' demanded Frieda, and Benjamin obediently sat and stared across the channel at Wales.

She sat by him, and idly span the globe.

'When I was your age,' she said, 'I thought I'd visit every country in the world. Now I don't know if I'll even visit every room in this house.' She sighed, impressively.

'Do you see boats, Grandma?' asked Benjamin, still gazing through the binoculars, adjusting the lenses.

'Sometimes. Big ones, freighters or tankers, going up to Cardiff, I suppose. And fishing boats. In the summer there's a pleasure steamer called The Balmoral. That's quite a sight. There must have been more of that kind of thing in the old days. And they still smuggle, along here. Or so they say.'

'I can see a boat. A little one, chugging. Is that a smuggler?'

Frieda took the gla.s.ses from him, inspected the vessel.

'Could be. How would you know? More likely mackerel.'

'Is it deep, the Bristol Channel? Have you ever seen the Severn Bore? Does it go this far?'

'Full fathom five thy father lies,' hummed Frieda, and fished in her sequined reticule for a cigarette. She lit it with a match, and threw the match out of the window.

'No,' she said, 'I've never seen the Severn Bore, but I did see an air sea-rescue. It took hours and hours.'

'What happened?'

'There was a boat out there. I heard what I thought were shots, but they must have been flares. And then the helicopter came. It circled and circled. It didn't seem to be able to get near. I don't know what the problem was. It kept circling in, then circling out. Like a dance. Like an insect's mating. It didn't seem to be able to make contact. But maybe it did. Then I saw the hull of the boat rise. And the boat went down. And the helicopter flew away.'

'Did it rescue the people on the boat?'

'I don't know. It was too far away. I didn't see the ladder come down.'

'Did anyone drown?'

'Frieda shrugged her huge padded sequined wings. 'I don't know.'

'Didn't you see in the papers?'

'I don't see the papers any more.'