The Witch of Exmoor

Margaret Drabble

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780544002951
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

A Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year: "Part social satire, part thriller, and entirely clever" ( Elle ). It is a midsummer's evening in the English countryside, and the three grown Palmer children are coming to the end of an enjoyable meal in the company of their partners and offspring. From this pleasant vantage point they play a dinner-party game: What kind of society would you be willing to accept if you didn't know your place in it? But the abstract question of justice, like all their family conversations, is eventually brought back to the more pressing problem of their eccentric mother, Frieda, the famous writer, who has abandoned them and her old life, and gone to live alone in Exmoor. Frieda has always been a powerful and puzzling figure, a monster mother with a mysterious past. What is she plotting against them now? Has some inconvenient form of political correctness led her to favor her enchanting half-Guyanese grandson? What will she do with her money? Is she really writing her memoirs? And why has she disappeared? Has the dark spirit of Exmoor finally driven her mad? The Witch of Exmoor brilliantly interweaves high comedy and personal tragedy, unraveling the story of a family whose comfortable, rational lives, both public and private, are about to be violently disrupted by a succession of sinister, messy events. "Leisurely and mischievous, " it is a dazzling, wickedly gothic tale of a British matriarch, her three grasping children, and the perils of self-absorption ( The New Yorker ). "As meticulous as Jane Austen, as deadly as Evelyn Waugh." — Los Angeles Times

A BEAST IN VIEW

Autumn advances, and a date for the next election is mooted. It will be in the spring. David D’Anger pays many visits to his dentist and works overtime. He is ubiquitous. His party pledges this and unpledges that. David speaks on social justice and race relations and the food industry here, there and everywhere. He even speaks on social justice and race relations in Middleton. Gogo D’Anger continues to study the neurological conditions of an increasing number of customers and to complain about the decreasing funding of the National Health Service. Her private practice grows. She and David D’Anger ensure their own health privately and at some expense. David finds he cannot insure his teeth. As he doesn’t in principle approve of insurance, this pleases him. But it doesn’t please him very much.

Benjamin D’Anger studies the causes of the Second World War and writes an essay on the Romantic poets and opts to take geology as a subsidiary subject. He draws crystals and synclines and anticlines and lies at the bottom of the bath each night in deep water, seeing how long he can hold his breath. His breath control improves.

Patsy Palmer surprises herself by finding she is obliged to view a porno video which makes her feel slightly uneasy. She had thought she was past such niceties. She also surprises herself by finding herself in bed with a chap from the Home Office. She can’t think how it happened. She hopes Daniel Palmer will not notice. He does not. Daniel Palmer is involved in a protracted case concerning pollution in the River Wash, a river which flows through South Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Staffordshire and some of Cheshire. Nobody seems to want to claim it, but somebody will have to.

Little Emily Palmer is far away in Italy, where she is, in principle, learning Italian in Florence; in practice she is hanging out, and very happy with it.

Simon Palmer is not so happy. He has bad dreams. He dreams of toads and crabs.

Nachan Herz dreams nightly of the white hand of Belle. She torments him by night and comforts him by day. He has never learnt to swim. He is afraid of deep water. Her white hand beckons him.

Rosemary Herz runs around too much to notice anything. She is busy working out lottery schemes, millennium schemes. The rapid triviality of her life is exhausting but it keeps her from thought. She has successfully numbed all introspection, all reflection. Her life glitters with surfaces. It has no darkness and no depth. This is the way she likes it.

They are all too busy to think much about Frieda Haxby, and have to be called back into line rather sharply by Cate Crowe.

Cate Crowe has been to the Film Festival in Lisbon. She had not attended this increasingly glamorous annual event in her capacity as literary agent, but in her new role as partner of Newbrit filmstar, Egg Benson. The Egg’s new movie, Crates of Ivory, was being premiered, and Cate Crowe had dropped all at the office to accompany him. The Crowe was herself something of a glamour-figure, a Vanity Fair trader, and she felt quite at home amongst the stars and starlets. Famed for her ability to drive a hard bargain, and her Marlene Dietrich legs, she justified her trip by telling herself that somebody had to keep an eye on the high-earning Egg, who was given to intermittent bursts of spectacular misbehaviour, and by assuring her partners that she would keep her ear to the ground to see if any talent was zumming along down there.

Cate Crowe had never been to Portugal before, and she liked it. She particularly liked the hotel where she and the Egg were installed, high up in the hills at Sintra: palatial, enormous, and fit for royalty. Vast empty frescoed rooms ornately furnished and full of floral masterpieces led down to yet more vast empty frescoed rooms, and there late at night she and Egg would wander, astonished, like children in a fairy story, like dreamers in a trompe-l’oeil opium dream. Though both had struck the jackpot in life, neither had been reared in luxury, and this whole edifice seemed insubstantial, magical, like a filmset that would be dismantled at any moment before their eyes. Yet it was real. The marble was solid, but the space was not. Usually it’s the other way round, as they both have discovered.

The films on show at the festival were not so easy on the eye, for the fashion of the year seemed to be for black humour, violence, decapitation, dismembering; cannibalism featured not only in the Egg’s own movie but in several other pieces from small nationalist movements through Europe and beyond. There was a Scottish film of singular ferocity. (Cate Crowe had already seen this movie in London, and hadn’t understood a word of its dialogue; the Portuguese subtitles were a great help, even though Cate couldn’t speak Portuguese, and whoever wrote them deserved, as she said several times, an Oscar.) The Croatian and Romanian contributions were also on the cheerless side, and Cate resolved to play truant and skip the rest of the official programme, apart from the banquets and parties; she’d have one last shot, and condescend to attend the film about which everyone was talking. Then she’d take herself back to the real world of the Palacio in Sintra.

The buzz film of the year, Dangerous Exchanges, was scripted and made by a young, unknown, art-house Australian called Claudia Cazetti. It was a philosophic fiction about time travel, in which a group of characters was granted the opportunity of residence in any period of the pageant of history: they were invited to choose, then had to test the consequences of choice. The joke was that they all kept making silly mistakes like forgetting to specify what age or class or even what species they would belong to, and in the end they all got sick to death of their own stupidity and opted for the one remaining choice–to die, or to be reborn as themselves in exactly the spot they’d started from, the spot from which they’d been so keen co get away in the first place. This was Brisbane, 1996. (They all chose Brisbane rather than death: all but one.) Cate Crowe couldn’t follow the intricacies of the plot, as she’d had several glasses of Portuguese red before settling down to the viewing, but she admired the costumes and the special effects, and was much taken with the performance of the principal actress, who played the Fairy Godmother in charge of the exchanges. This actress, as everyone had been saying, had star quality. She was cool, icy, intelligent, superior. She surveyed the panorama of history and the follies and littlenesses of man with a divine indifference. She was rumoured to be Cazetti’s lover. She looked a bit like Greta Garbo.

It was when the name of Garbo surfaced in the sludge of Cate Crowe’s memory that she remembered where she had seen the name of Claudia Cazetti. It wasn’t just the sympathetic alliteration that made it seem familiar: it was Cazetti who had faxed her, months ago, about the film rights in Frieda Haxby’s Queen Christina. Hadn’t Garbo played Christina, a thousand years ago? Cate Crowe knew she’d better get hold of Cazetti. She’d better get hold of Haxby’s book. There might be something in this after all.

Cate Crowe had never read her client’s latest work, and had felt little need to do so. She hardly knew Frieda Haxby, whom she had inherited from Bertram Goldie, an older member of the firm, now retired. She had regarded Haxby as a sleeping investment, a quiet, steady-little-earner whose 10 per cent from those old classics, The Matriarchy of War, The Scarecrow and the Plough and The Iron Coast, was well worth harvesting, and whose lighter works (a heterogeneous mix of popular sociology and rogue political pamphleteering) had proved surprisingly resilient. But she hadn’t read Christina. She’d read the reviews, and that had seemed more than enough. Maybe she’d been wrong?

It wasn’t easy to get hold of a copy in Lisbon. Cate got on the phone to London and told her assistant to dig out the letter from Cazetti, and then set off in a taxi to scour the bookshops. After two hours of unsuccessful trawl, and risky parking, on tramlines and cobbled streets and precipices, her driver suggested the Biblioteca of the Instituto Británico, and there indeed she found at least a trace of a copy: the librarian said she had purchased one, but it was out. On further investigation, she discovered it had been out for some four months. Could it be recalled instantly, asked Cate. The librarian seemed unhappy at first, but, succumbing to Cate’s air of urgency and high talk of film, she agreed to ring up the borrower, a Miss Parker-Sydenham, who lived, as it happened, in Sintra,just down the hill from the Palace Hotel. Cate herself spoke to Miss Parker-Sydenham, who sounded abashed at having kept the book for so long, and agreed to allow Cate to call round and collect it. ‘I’ve nearly finished it,’ she repeated, apologetically, several times.

Cate took the obliging taxi all the way back to Sintra and went to wrest her client’s novel from Ms Parker-Sydenham’s keeping. The lady proved to be not the tax-evading expatriate Salazar-supporter that her name had evoked, but an impoverished English-language teacher aged thirty who came from Huddersfield. ‘I’m awfully sorry,’ she said, yet again. ‘Don’t apologize to me,’ said Cate, and swept off to the hotel with her trophy.

She didn’t have time to tackle it that night, as the Egg rolled home in a right state and needed some handling, but the next morning the sun shone pleasantly enough for her to sit out with it in the gardens below the lemon grove. Two hours into the text, after much skipping, she thought she could see what Cazetti had seen in it. At the very least, there was a fine vehicle here for a leading lady, and plenty of opportunities for feminist deconstruction of the past. Lesbianism and espionage, rape and assassinations, art and abdications–what more could you want? Amazing that the subject hadn’t been snapped up before. Clever old Haxby. Cate Crowe, retrospectively, grew indignant with the reviewers. What had the ignorant little oafs been complaining about? This was a cracking good story, plenty of action, glamorous settings, strong characters. Was there a part for the Egg? Not really, for the Egg was hopeless in any kind of classical role–he was a bald brute of the nineties, he’d never be able to play Gustavus or Magnus. (His attempt at Jane Austen had been risible.) But the absence of Egg in the script was the only defect Cate Crowe could see, and she was full of plans as she made her way in from the lemon grove to see if the man had come round yet.

On her way in she was arrested by the concierge at the desk, a squat and swart and elderly man of some dignity.

‘Miss Crowe,’ he said, ‘I see you are reading a book by our old friend Miss Haxby.’

Cate was surprised and pleased by this recognition: she gave him the book to inspect. He turned the pages carefully, and paused over Frieda’s portrait on the back flap.

‘Yes,’ he continued. ‘Miss Haxby was a regular visitor here. Also members of the Swedish royal family. Also we have received Agatha Christie and Marguerite Yourcenar and Sir Angus Wilson.’

Cate explained that Miss Haxby was one of her most distinguished and valued clients.

‘A very nice lady,’ said the concierge. ‘And how is Miss Haxby? We have not seen her for two-three years now. She used to sit here in the garden to write. Maybe it was this book she was writing.’

Cate said that as far as she knew Miss Haxby was alive and well and living quietly in the country. Writing, it was rumoured, her memoirs.

Frieda Haxby’s memoirs seemed a more interesting proposition today than they had seemed yesterday. So did Queen Christina. Cate resolved to pursue.

Cate Crow’s fax from Portugal reached Rosemary Herz on a bad day. She had arrived late at her office after spending an hour at the Nightingale Hospital undergoing various tests: a routine health check for insurance purposes had recently revealed startlingly high blood pressure which had required further investigation. Today her blood pressure was still up. Were these two freak results, or was there something wrong with her? And if so what could it be? She was not overweight, and she did not smoke, she drank only moderately. Surely Nathan was more of a high blood pressure candidate than she? But his was said to be steady and low.

Stress she did have, and this news had caused more of it. Her Private Patients Policy already cost her a fair sum, Jonathan’s school fees had just gone up, there was talk of removing tax relief on various parts of her pension. Worse than all of that, her job itself was at risk. She had been sitting pretty for three years and had lulled herself into a sense of security. But there had of late been turmoil in the arts world. Resignations, sackings, venom in the press. Robert Oxenholme, one-time Minister for Sponsorship, had denounced the vacillations and pusillanimity of his own department and taken himself off to Bologna for a year to write a book. It was all very well for some. Her budget had been cut and cut again, and her Board was said to be very unhappy about hostile publicity for the last season’s programme. There had been a particularly controversial installation involving live molluscs and crustaceans which had been deplored by some as cruel and by others as political. She had been called to meet members of the Board to review the situation. Maybe she would be asked to leave. Should she ring up her accountant to ask advice on redundancy pay? Probably not. Every time she rang her accountant it seemed to cost her three hundred quid plus VAT.

This situation was enough to give anybody high blood pressure, that invisible and intangible complaint. Could she feel it coursing round her body, throbbing in the veins at the back of her neck, knocking like a death drum in her temples? She was far too young to suffer from such an ailment. This the specialist had implied, as he probed her genetic inheritance. Did high blood pressure run in the family? Did her mother and father suffer from it? This question in itself was enough to make her pulse race. How could she tell this expensively neat old boy that she had hardly known her father, and that her mother had gone mad? Was her work stressful, he had inquired. Yes, she had said. Yes.

Rosemary, reading her morning’s post, drinking a strong black coffee brewed for her by her PA, heard echoing in the back of her memory some words from an otherwise forgettable Leader of the Opposition at some party conference nearly two decades ago. What was it he had said? ‘I warn you not to fall ill, I warn you not to get old’? It had been a fair warning. Was Rosemary right to suspect that even her PA had looked at her this morning with a certain levity? Were people talking about her, laughing at her, waiting for her departure? Treachery was in the air. Would she come back from lunch and find her desk cleared, her paintings stacked with their faces to the wall? Would she find herself dispatched to Hadrian’s Wall, or jobless altogether?

And here, freshly arrived, was a fax from Cate Crowe, asking about her mother. ‘I really need to get in touch with her urgently,’ said the blotchy curly sleek fax paper. ‘Have you any suggestions? Did your brother-in-law ever manage to make contact with her? I’ll be back in London tomorrow, do get in touch. I need to speak to her soonest. I need a signature.’

Rosemary stared at this communication with a baffled irritation. Was she her mother’s keeper? More to the point, was she one of her mother’s heirs? It would be very handy if Frieda were to pop off and leave a tidy three-way fortune. Who knows what she might be worth?

This was an ignoble thought, but Frieda, in Rosemary’s opinion, had done little to induce a warmer regard in her children. Frieda had hated her own mother, and now was hated in turn. Frieda had alienated her children from their father, had brought them up unsuitably. Rosemary had little idea of who her father had been, what he had looked like. Had he been a red-faced, choleric, pressurized man? She thought not. He had been a mathematician and a drinker, a weakling and a runaway. Or this was the picture of him that Rosemary, on slim evidence, had formed.

The three Palmer children had never talked about their father, had never discussed why he had disappeared while they were still in their infancy. Daniel, the eldest, had set the tone of reticence. He could not bear to hear his father mentioned. The girls had not dared to speak of him. The subject was taboo. And Frieda too had kept her silence.

It would be trying to inherit high blood pressure from so absent a parent. Frieda herself had never suffered from it, as far as Rosemary knew: but why should she know? Of what had Frieda’s sister Hilda died? Frieda’s own father had died of a stroke. Perhaps it was the Haxby blood that had broken the little vessels in her eyeballs and treacherously weakened the muscles of her heart.

Rosemary, at her desk, was in mild shock, which intensified into something near panic. She did not want to be ill. She had never been a hypochondriac, had never suspected herself of any ailment. This made the shock the worse. She was untrained in anxiety. Should she ring Gogo and ask her what high blood pressure in a forty-year-old might mean? Or did she prefer not to know the worst? The specialist had told her she must go back to the clinic the next week to be fitted with an ambulatory monitor. If news got out that she was not in perfect health, she would be sacked at once.

Cedric Summerson had been the blood pressure type: you could tell it from his complexion. Frieda had fancied beef-coloured men. Several of the uncles who had featured in their childhood had been red of face, including the most dominant of them, who had lasted a good eight years or more. He, like Cedric, had been stout, solid, fleshly. He had been rich and important and he had brought gifts. Uncle Bernard from Austria. He had been jowled and guttural, heavy and clever. He had been a philosopher and a philanderer. He had many children of his own and several wives, but he had nevertheless seemed anxious to spend his evenings in the Mausoleum in Romley with Frieda. He had helped Daniel, Gogo and Rosemary with their homework from time to time. He liked children, and they had liked him.

Rosemary had not thought of Bernard for years, and recognized that there was not much purpose in thinking about him now: whoever was responsible for her condition, it could not have been Bernard. He was genetically innocent. Innocent, and dead. He had died three years before, and had been buried with pomp. Frieda and two or three widows had attended the Memorial Service at St Martin-in-the-Fields. Rosemary had seen Frieda’s photo in the papers, on the steps, arm in arm with one of the widows, unsuitably sharing a joke.

Frieda had been a scandal, in the days when scandal was less common than now. And she continued to be a scandal. Rosemary looked at Cate Crowe’s fax and wondered what to do next. In the olden days one could have sent Frieda a telegram. Rosemary was just old enough to remember the days when telegrams were little yellow serious messages instead of large Occasional Greetings Cards that take just as long to arrive as normal mail, and a good deal longer than a fax. Was there money involved in Cate’s cry? It smelt like it. Could she send a courier down to the West Country to summon Frieda? Could she a...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• The Vale of Ignorance
• Timon’s Feast
• Lunch on the Lawn
• The Valley of Rocks
• Stepping Westward
• A Beast in View
• The Cave of Gloom
• Hindspring
• About the Author