Spiderweb (8 page)

Stella moved warily amid these intricate connections. People were willingly communicative. It is not entirely true that the English are a grudging lot, mean with their favours. If the approach is considered sufficiently harmless or even congenial, there is no stopping them. And a woman in late middle age is the most neutral figure of all, Stella discovered. She poses no sexual threat nor challenge. For young men, she is of so little interest as to be effectively invisible. For women younger than herself, she is a comforting reminder that they have not themselves got that far yet, thanks be. For those around her own age, she is a reassurance: we are not alone. Accordingly all three groups are reasonably well disposed, the defences are down, an overture will be accepted with equanimity and in some quarters with enthusiasm.

Stella realized that she had been too young, back then. She had been too young out there in the field, as anthropology so bizarrely calls the baffling world at which it stares, introducing overtones of botanical study. She had been too young in the Delta and in Malta and Greece and even Orkney. She had been still a viable woman, with all that that implies. As soon as she stepped into view, the waters were muddied by the implications of age and gender. Both men and women wondered how it was possible for her to be doing this. Men might wonder if she was available, or alternatively if she was to be taken seriously. Women did not know whether to pity her or to envy her. It was not feasible for her to be perceived with neutrality. Her foreign status was one thing, her age and gender were another and equally to be taken into consideration.

Now that it was too late, she found herself with this protective camouflage. West Somerset would cheerfully bare its soul to her. She had only to get talking at a bus stop or supermarket check-out, share a table in a pub, stop to chat at a filling station. Her credentials were instantly apparent: agreeably spoken, no spring chicken, origins uncertain but that’s what you expect these days. Nothing to be lost in a passing exchange (though probably nothing to be gained either).

It was too late, in terms of her trade. She had not the slightest desire to set about some neat little study of kin groups and systems of integration in a rural community. But in another sense it was not too late at all. This new persona was thrust upon her – like most people she felt ambushed by time – but since it had to be, there were certain advantages, she saw. The old and the young are washed to the margins of life – unessential and dependent. They share only the opportunity for untrammelled observation. And for Stella observation had been her way of life.

Certainly, the wider landscape offered more rewarding scope for both observing and sampling some kind of community life than the small enclave of the hamlet along the lane, where she had little to do with her neighbours. The old couple next door occasionally emerged as far as the gate, in which case a few words were had. The farmer would bestow a perfunctory grin and wave from his tractor. Karen Hiscox would wind down the window of her car to hand out some piece of advice – ‘If you need your vehicle seen to, don’t go to that place on the crossroads, they’ll do you down’ – or indulge in a fleeting assault on the pleasures of family life: ‘ … with boys, and especially with boys of that age, you make it clear who’s boss and no nonsense, if you know what’s good for you – that’s me, and frankly my husband doesn’t want to know, off on a job as soon as there’s a problem.’ The weekenders would call energetic greetings if they saw her in the course of one of their noisy, child-encumbered walks.

It was a far cry from her professional experience. She remembered the dawn to dusk interactions of the Delta village, of Greece, of Malta. The old men sitting on a bench under a tree. The street corners on which there was forever a knot of talking women. The informal conference centre that was the shop or the coffee house. The comments and interrogations shouted from doorways. The small excursions on foot from here to there for no particular purpose other than to see who might be around. The house to house visits in pursuit of information or for the exchange of commodities or to pass on some succulent piece of news. In other words, the fervent face to face community life of a world largely innocent of cars and telephones, for better or for worse. What have we come to? thought Stella.

At the same time, she noted the ambiguity – the downright hypocrisy perhaps – of her own response. Would she wish to live like that herself? Is she, indeed, attempting to live like that now that the opportunity is offered? Well, no. She, too, retreats behind her closed door and into the protective shell of her car, from which a wave and a smile will suffice. Her professional life has been that of a voyeur, her interest in community has been clinical. She has wanted to know how and why people get along with each other, or fail to do so, rather than sample the arrangement herself. She has been simultaneously fascinated and repelled. Moving around the world, she was always alert, always curious, but comfortable also in the knowledge that, in the last resort, this was nothing to do with her. Indeed, casting a cold eye back, it now seems to her that she and her like can be seen as parasites. Intellectual parasites.

But she was after something more than observation. She was no longer in the business. Now was the time to prove herself. Even if she could not hope to melt into the ancient levels of this place, even if the immediate community of the lane was a touch unpromising, there were still slots into which she could fit in the wider context. Join things, she told herself sternly. As advocated by Richard. Participate. You are still carrying around a mental notepad and pen – trash them. Join the human race. After all, it is your subject.

‘But it would be neither local nor history,’ Stella protested.

Richard Faraday sighed. ‘Ten meetings a year. We have already wrung dry the possibilities of the Brendon Hill iron mines, the pre-history of Exmoor, the Bristol Channel shipping trade … The net gets thrown wide, by necessity. Last year we had someone’s cruise on the waterways of Russia, with accompanying video, and an account of plant-collecting in the Himalayas by a retired curator from Kew. Both warmly received. You would be a star turn. Please, Stella.’

‘Oh, well…’ she said. Then, ‘Are you the treasurer?’

‘I’ve recently been elected secretary. The dogsbody role. Hence my plea.’

‘All right. If I must. “Lineage structures in the Nile Delta” or “Neighbourhood and community in a Maltese village”?’

‘I think …’ Richard hesitated. ‘If you could frame it rather more as a… perhaps a sort of travelogue. Would this feel like professional degradation?’

‘By no means,’ said Stella. ‘I shall look on it as a challenge.’

The local history society met in the village hall, a small wooden building perched at the edge of a recreation ground. Chairs had been arranged in a group at one end of the room, near to the table with the tea urn, an attempt to domesticate a space which seemed to invite gym displays or flower shows rather than discussion.

‘Don’t be daunted by the size of the audience,’ said Richard Faraday, greeting Stella at the door. ‘Fifteen is par for the course. These are the hard-core members, the enthusiasts. I’ll introduce you all round before we start.’

Identities swam forward. The sprightly woman in her fifties farmed on the Quantocks. The silver-haired man in a blazer who was helpfully adept at setting up Stella’s slide equipment was a retired teacher. That familiar face was the lady who ran the plant nursery in a nearby village. The young couple were potters from the craft centre ten miles away. The two teenagers so valiantly attending were doing A-level history. They would have to put this occasion down to experience, poor dears, thought Stella.

She had decided to talk to them about the baffling nature of cultural identity, basing the discussion around the proposal that interpretation is distorted by expectations. To this end, she had brought along a selection of slides which would illustrate her point, provide diversion and serve as the required travelogue. Once the group was settled, with cups of tea in hand, and the projector proved to be functioning properly, she gave a short introduction. The social anthropologist, she told them, studies human societies in order to understand more about how we behave by recording the range of differences in social behaviour and organization. But the anthropologist, like anyone else, is governed by his or her own beliefs and expectations, and has to learn how to sidestep these for penetration of the codes of the society under study. She treated them to a few illustrative anecdotes from her own experience, explaining that her specialism was lineage patterns and kinshipstructures. ‘There is plenty of existing material on this for comparative studies, but I never wanted to be a desk anthropologist – I always wanted to get out there into the thick of it.’ People’s expressions went from that of polite neutrality to something warmer. They glimpsed Stella as someone younger, more exotic and more provocative, who had lived in a mud hut in Egypt and there made social gaffes, who had had to come to terms with misogyny, religious fervour and a sweep of prejudices and superstitions. Not to mention polluted water supplies, rampant insect life, problematic food and climatic extremes. She saw herself regarded with increasing interest.

‘Right,’ Stella said. ‘Let’s have the first slide.’ The blazered teacher went into action. A brilliant square of tropical landscape sprang on to the screen, luxuriant growth amid which foraged a number of small pigs, observed by a tribesman wearing a loincloth. ‘Now what do you see here?’

Reflective rustling from the audience. Then the Quantock farming lady waded in. ‘Well… some sort of cross, I’d say. There’s a Tamworth look to them, but the boar’s much too lightly built. They’re like something from a rare breeds place. Not much meat on them.’

‘Is that sugar-cane they’re eating?’

‘What’s that gorgeous red flower?’

‘Surely the point is the chap,’ said the teacher. ‘Aren’t we meant to be thinking about him? What’s the stick-thing he’s holding?’

‘Stella,’ said Richard Faraday, with edgy restraint. ‘Do please enlighten us.’

Stella explained that the pigs were indeed the focus of interest, and that these were indeed pigs, pigs somewhere in New Guinea, though she was afraid that she could not specify the breed. But these pigs were significant far beyond appearances. They were meat, and would indeed end up consumed, but to the New Guinea tribesman, they represented a form of wealth more crucial than mere food. The pigs represented a system of political checks and balances on the trotter, as it were. The pig herd would be built up over a period of years and, in due course, slaughtered at an extended ceremony of feasting and dancing which would serve to establish the strength of neighbouring groups and set up future alliances in tribal warfare. To their owners, the pigs are not mere pigs but the means to a further round of aggression and territorial expansion.

‘A new twist to the concept of the arms race,’ said Richard.

There were questions about how the pigs were cooked, about tribal numbers, about weaponry. If her presentation was to be kept on track, Stella saw that she would have to curtail the discussion and forge ahead.

‘Were you there yourself? I mean, did you take the photo?’

Stella replied that she herself had never worked in New Guinea but that the pig culture is a famous instance of complex and initially puzzling social behaviour and for that reason she had wished to use it as an example. ‘And now we’d better move on to the next slide …’

The pigs were replaced by a display of shell ornaments – bracelets made from a single curved slice of shell with some fibre fronds hanging from it, long strings of small pink shell discs with shell pendants and further shell strings attached. Once again, she asked the audience what they saw.

The responses were now more cautious. ‘Jewellery,’ someone ventured. ‘Primitive jewellery? Sort of local craft things – that they’d sell to tourists?’

Actually, no, said Stella. What you see is not for personal ornamentation at all. These pieces are never worn. They are the physical manifestation of a complex system of political and economic relationships. Shells – yes. The armbands are made from trochus shells – the necklaces are strings of pink spondylus shell discs. Quite pretty, to our eye, but worthless. To the Trobriand islanders, however, they are each entirely distinctive, of inestimable value and loaded with implications.’ She went on to describe the Trobriand ceremonial exchange system called Kula, whereby such objects are passed around between island clans in a byzantine process of receipt and obligation, the function of which is variously interpreted as the confirmation of political hierarchies or the safeguarding of trade relationships by way of an established network.

‘The EEC springs to mind,’ said Richard Faraday thoughtfully. ‘Or, to go further back, the Hanseatic League. A long-established concept. Very shrewd of them.’

‘They must be the devil to thread, those tiny shells,’ said the lady from the newsagent. ‘Would they have needles?’

Stella allowed the comment and discussion to continue until it once more showed signs of getting out of hand and then called for the next slide. ‘New Guinea again – a most instructive place, New Guinea, anthropologically speaking. Now what do you think all this is about?’

They were now looking at a log-constructed building, the entrance to which was hung with shield-shaped objects brightly painted in black, ochre, red and white, with what might be stylized human features – grotesque eyes and mouths set amid swirling lines and patterns. In front stood a group of tribesmen, naked except for feather head-dresses, shell and feather necklaces, and curved yellow protuberances attached to their pemses. These phallic adornments were so long and unwieldy that the ends had to be supported by lengths of twine attached to the shell necklaces.

Stella’s audience considered this slide with caution. They were all conditioned by long exposure to television documentaries and knew that such sights are not a matter for ill-bred and ill-informed derision or merriment. At least most of them did. There were one or two pockets of resistance which became apparent when Stella said, ‘Any comments?’

‘Not in front of the ladies, I’d say.’ This came from a bluff middle-aged man who had made little contribution hitherto but was now chortling with appreciation.

The woman from the plant nursery said, ‘To be quite honest, those shield things with faces look like what you see pinned up on the classroom wall in the primary school.’

Stella stepped in. ‘The phallic decor is much as you might expect – a statement of virility. A threat, possibly, to rival tribal groups. The shield-like objects at the hut entrance are tamburans and represent the ancestors. They are respectful references to the abiding power of the tribe’s ancestral past. They remind the tribesmen of their mortality and set them within the context of time. They are icons consecrated to the collective memory.’

‘Is that how they think about it?’ enquired the Quantock farming lady.

‘Good question,’ said Stella. ‘No. It’s how I – we – think about it. We interpret their perception in terms of our own.’

This statement had a rather silencing effect on the group. Stella decided to produce her trump card.

The screen now showed an aerial view of a row of suburban semi-detached houses, several with satellite dishes and three with garden gnomes on the front lawn.

The audience stared. There was some laughter.

‘Acacia Drive, Surbiton,’ said the potter from the craft centre. ‘I know it well.’

‘Look at it with an alien eye,’ said Stella. ‘What is there that is puzzling?’

Someone proposed the satellite dishes. ‘Personally I don’t think Sky is worth the candle. Nothing but sport and bad films.’

‘May I have a shot?’ said Richard. ‘I suppose that if I were a visiting Trobriander – or Bushman or Inuit or …’

The woman from the plant nursery interrupted. ‘Those are Eskimos and they’d have Sky. I know because there was a programme on the Arctic, about how they’re losing their traditional skills, and you saw the concrete bungalows they live in now, all with TV aerials and dishes.’

Richard waited with strained courtesy until she had finished. ‘Or anyone with an untutored eye, I’d say that what we have here is a culture given to the display of totemic objects related to a form of sun worship.’

This idea caught on. It was pointed out that the gnomes, too, could be religious ‘ … like Catholics having Christ on the cross in their living-room’ (a rustle of protest here – this was perhaps a bit near the knuckle for some).

‘Quite,’ said Stella briskly. ‘Anyway, you take the point – interpretation is through the eye of the beholder, with all the inevitable accompanying distortions. We see only what we already understand.’

She had struck just the right note, Richard assured her as they sat down for dinner later. Informative without being patronizing, stimulating without being impenetrable. ‘You went down very well. I shall bask in reflected glory.’

She had already noted the menu with disapproval. She did not like pricey restaurants. Not that she didn’t enjoy a quality meal from time to time, but a bill the size of someone else’s weekly income was offensive. This part of the evening had prompted her strongest reservations. ‘You must let me take you out for a meal after as a due reward. I insist.’

So there they were, amid the soft lighting and pale pink napery of some establishment with all the airs and graces induced by frequent Sunday newspaper coverage.

‘I don’t come here often,’ said Richard. ‘Only when a decent excuse appears. So … what have they got today? Their fish items are usually pretty good. The scallops are probably worth going for. Snails I’ve always drawn the line at, I must say.’ He shot a glance at Stella. ‘Which will seem very wimpish to you, I dare say. You must have eaten a fair gastronomic range, in the course of duty. It is
de rigueurto
adopt the local diet?’

‘It can be expedient. Often there’s nothing else. I’ve not been exposed to the more esoteric menus. The Australian aboriginal repertoire … Grubs can take some getting used to, I’m told. They twitch. Sorry … don’t let me put you off. All this sounds delicious.’

And a terrible waste of money, she thought, but never mind. His privilege, if he so wishes. And I have always been rather too ascetic in my tastes. Which is just as well, or I could never have done what I’ve done or been where I’ve been. But it’s congenital, I suspect. I was ever thus. Couldn’t be bothered much about clothes and prinking, either. Not like Nadine. Great prinker and clothes connoisseur, Nadine.

And Nadine swims into vision, towing Stella round Elliston & Cavell, hoicking garments off rails, hustling her into changing cubicles. ‘You’ve got to have it, you look amazing in it.’ ‘But I don’t need it. Anyway, I can’t afford it.’ ‘Well, I think you’re mad not to,’ says Nadine. ‘But of course you look amazing anyway, blast you, when you want to. It’s always the people who try least… it’s not fair.’

Looking up, Stella caught sight of Richard Faraday in the wall mirror, suffused in flattering strawberry-gold light – the well-preserved older man, one would think, like a tanned actor in some commercial for insurance policies – and with him this woman, thin-faced, coppery hair flecked with grey, who is also given some subtle cosmetic treatment and appears for an instant like an elegant stranger with some haunting familiar echo.

If you have been a beauty, ageing must be intolerable, Stella thought. The process is bad enough as it is – the ebbing away of possibilities, the awful tyranny of the body – but for those who lose their very trade mark, it is savage. No wonder so many elderly actresses take to the bottle. I should count myself lucky, who have never set much store by my own face.