The Witch of Exmoor (17 page)

As missionaries, as detectives, they had been failures. David and Gogo turned to Benjamin for help, wheedling him to rack his brains for details, but he wasn't very helpful: yes,
all
the house was damp, with great mushrooms in places, and she said she'd never been into some of its rooms. Upstairs she had a globe and binoculars and a word-processor. She
said
she'd found a human skull under the floorboards, but she might have been joking. No, he hadn't tried any of the taps for hot water. Had they?

The truth was that, confronted with Frieda in a ballgown, they had been disabled. She had taken the initiative. How to assess what she was up to? She had looked well, but was it natural to lose so much weight so quickly? It seemed stupid to ask if she was eating properly, when she had provided them with such a feast–but what did she live on when no one was watching?
Did
anyone ever watch? Did she know anybody in the neighbourhood? Who was Jane? Was Frieda gaga, was she wandering, or was she in more than her right mind? And did that dog have fleas?

Frieda's step had been sound, her voice clear. She had not faltered or trembled. (Benjamin kept to himself her moment of frailty over the fossils.) If one had met her in a tea-room, in Sainsbury's, at dinner, one would not have suspected any form of dementia. There was nothing certifiable about choosing to live alone on the edge of a cliff. And they had liked the view. On the whole, they agreed, as they drove inland over the yellow and purple moor towards the Egremont, they had to take their hats off to her. She looked just fine. They'd have to bluff it out with Rosemary and Daniel. Tell them to mind their own business, tell them they were lucky to have a mother who wasn't moaning at them night and day, or breathing down their necks, or costing them a weekly fortune in a private nursing home.

Gogo had recognized the dress of midnight blue. Was it madness, to wear an evening dress at tea-time?

So Frieda had bought it to wear in Stockholm, with kings and queens and princes. She had been given one of the highest honours of the land, for her work on the iron mines of Sweden, for her careful reconstruction of Mary Wollstonecraft's epic voyage in search of treasure round the Swedish shore. All of Frieda's projects had been slightly crazy. That was how she had got where she was.

‘After all,' said Gogo aloud, ‘if you can't be mad when you're old, it's a pity. And I don't think she is mad. I think she's just gone in for some new form of free association. And at her age, what does it matter?'

‘What's free association?' asked Benjamin.

‘Letting the mind wander,' said David.

‘Exploring the subconscious,' said Gogo. ‘Bumping around in the dark.'

They drove on in silence for a while, until David spoke. ‘Wasn't there some story,' he asked, ‘about an older sister who died?'

‘In mysterious circumstances,' agreed Gogo.

‘An older sister?'

‘That's right. Aunt Hilda. Or, as I've just discovered, Aunt Everhilda. I've just seen her birth certificate. Everhilda Haxby. Can Everhilda be a real name?'

It had an ancient, Anglo-Saxon ring to it, they agreed. Everhilda and Frieda Haxby. Little Nordic Valkyries, little warrior maidens, little Grimm girls.

‘Do we know what happened to her?' asked David.

‘Little pitchers have big ears,' said Gogo.

‘Come off it,' said Benjamin. ‘You can't use me as an envoy, and then refuse to tell.'

Gogo laughed.

‘I'd tell you if I could, Benjieboy, but the honest truth is I don't know. I think she may have committed suicide. Frieda never mentioned her but Gran–my gran, your great-grandmother–she hinted at it once. Something funny happened in the woodshed, but I don't know what.'

‘What woodshed?'

‘Oh, just a joke.'

‘Oh
look,'
said Benjie, forgetting Everhilda. ‘Stop, Dad, do stop. Look!'

And David pulled the car in to the side of the road, for there, on the brow of the moor, was a young herd of andered stags, crested against the evening sun, grouped as for a postcard. Cars were pulled up all along the hillside, as tourists got out cameras and field-glasses. The D'Angers got out and joined the scattered impromptu viewing panel: Benjamin accepted the offer of a loan of some binos. (They were better than Frieda's, he discovered. Hers had been Taiwanese and these were Swiss.) The stags posed, grazed, and raised their noble noses to the evening air.

Gogo and David stood arm in arm, much married, watching their darling boy as he watched the beasts.

‘You can say what you like about Frieda,' said Gogo, as the stags slowly began to saunter away, ‘you can say what you like. Mad she may be, but she's been a worker. When you think where she started from. It's been a long, long journey.'

‘Yes,' said David. ‘And I wonder where she's heading for now. Did you notice, she didn't mention hamburgers or sugar or politics once? And she didn't even ask after Daniel or Rosemary until you brought them up. She must have got some new kind of bee in her bonnet. I hope she doesn't let it loose on me.'

 

Frieda stood by her favourite rock pool in the slanting light. The evening skies of her first autumn promised well. They turned the stones to a sharp, roseate, Pre-Raphaelite pink and purple and blue.

A string of bubbles rose from a crevice at the bottom of the pool. There was always a string of silver bubbles rising from this pool at low tide. They came from the submerged heart of the rock. She thought of a spring near Granada, at the place where Lorca died. She had forgotten its name. There, near the olive grove where the poet was buried, tears of air rose perpetually through green clear water into a tearshaped well. These drops of air had wept upwards for centuries to prophesy his murder and now they would mourn him for ever.

So they had gone and left her to her fate. To be fair to them, she hadn't given them much choice. They'd enjoyed their cream tea. They'd eaten quite a lot. She had caught Gogo reading Everhilda's birth certificate, and David deep in Arthur Rackham.

The Grimm stories had belonged to Hilda. Frieda had stolen them from her sister. When she was little Frieda had loved the goblins, the princesses, the old men of the sea, the water maidens, the raven brothers, the haunted woods. Yet the stories were often absurd, often inconsequential. Frieda's literal, logical battleaxe of a mind had been bemused and entangled by these tales. She had tried to chop her way through the briars. She did not like nonsense. There was a mystery there, forever beyond her grasp.

She began to pick her way back up towards the house.

There were so many versions of the story, and all of them were false. You could begin it this way.

 

Once upon a time there were two little girls, and their names were Everhilda and Frieda Haxby. They lived in a cottage on Chapel Street in the little village of Dry Bendish, which stood on the only hill in the flat, flat lands of the east. Their father Ernest was a poor mar who tilled the earth and sold his labour cheap and was known as one of the kindest and most foolish men in the village. Their mother Gladys was proud and vain and dreamt grand dreams for her older daughter Everhilda. She loved her pretty older daughter Everhilda, who was fair and delicate, but she was cruel to Frieda, who was plain and dull. She called them Little Swan and Little Mouse.

Mother Gladys was a clever woman, and she was cunning too. She was much cleverer than her poor, quiet, stupid husband, and when he brought them gifts from the fields–a nail, a pebble, a fossil, a horseshoe–she poured scorn upon them. She read to her daughters the stories of the old gods, and told them that their ancestors had come from far away, across the iron sea, from the land of the Vikings, to this dry inland hummock. She told them they must be warrior maidens, for this world is but a battleground. They must sharpen their brain-knives, or they would be poor and weak like their father. She set daughter against daughter, and daughter against father, for she saw that Frieda prized her father's gifts. Her own gifts were the gifts of brain and book and word. You are my child, little swan, she would say to Everhilda. Let the little mouse play in its straw.

But Everhilda was cunning too, like her mother, and she saw that her sister was weak, and so she made her sister her slave. She wove a spell over Frieda. The two sisters shared a little bedroom under the eves, and at night Everhilda would creep into the little one's bed to subdue her. Poke, pry, lick, scrape. And as she grew older, she told her stories, stories even more frightening than the stories their mother told. She told tales of children lost in woods and eaten by wolves, of maidens forced to marry cruel dark men from the distant Orient, of little girls sunk beneath the bog in the underworld where great spiders dwelt, with dung beetles and centipedes and earwigs and woodlice and mealworms and tapeworms, and froghoppers and scorpions and scarabs and bats and birds of prey. And spiders would stitch open the eyes of the little girls so that they could never close them, but would be forced to stare unblinking and forever at the monstrous world beneath the world.

(‘Like
this,'
Hilda would say, advancing upon Frieda's bed, and forcing open her sister's eyes with hard little fingers, ‘like
this.
And she can never shut them again, and the insects walk
all over her,
they walk in and out of her nose and her ears and her mouth and her hair and her clothes, and they crawl into her body and they lay eggs down here,
in her body.')

And so the little sisters grew up, and so the little mouse sister whimpered and scuttled with fear. And then a day came when the big sister said to the little sister, ‘Shall we go for a walk, down by the river?'

 

Or the story could have begun this way, of course.

Once upon a tíme there was a little girl with golden hair who lived happily in a cottage with her mother and her father, and her mother and her father loved her dearly and gave her everything her heart desired. But one day there came a baby stranger to the little cottage, and the mother and the father told the little girl she must love and cherish the little stranger. But the little stranger was a fierce and changeling child, and it cast a spell over the little girl, and forced her to be her slave. Night after night, the stranger child would demand more and more stories from the little girl, and would keep her awake in the long night hours, and the little girl was forced, night after night, to invent more stories, for the stranger child said she would die if once she fell asleep. And the little girl grew pale and weak, while the stranger child flourished.

So one day the little girl said to the stranger child, ‘Shall we go for a walk, down by the river?'

***

Frankly, thought Frieda, panting slightly and pausing to cough as she climbed the last short steep flight of steps to the terrace, you could tell the story any old way, as long as you left out most of the circumstantial details. And she's forgotten most of those, as it had all happened so very long ago. But however you told it, you always ended up at the old mill. And after the old mill, the disputed prince.

 

She could remember the walk to the mill well enough. It had been an August day, one of those interminable days when summer holidays lengthened into tedium, when cabbage leaves turned yellow and fell from their scarred stalks, when wasp-eaten apples dropped to rot in the grass, when village boys clustered behind hedges pulling legs from daddy-long-legs or smoking furtive cigarettes. Much of the summer, Hilda and Frieda frowsted indoors, reading library books, for they were not encouraged to play with the village children, and therefore they were despised by the village children. Gladys, true to her roots rather than to her education and her adopted class, made no effort to entertain her daughters. They bored her and she bored them. The hopeful child's cry of ‘What can we do today?' had long been silenced, and sullen, resentful, the girls skulked and sulked. The father saw, and was sorry, and was powerless.

Gladys Haxby had been obliged to give up her job when she was married. That was the law in those days. Married women did not teach in schools. Or not in peacetime.

Three bored women in one small cottage, making the worst of their lives, while Ernie Haxby worked in the fields or at the farm.

And then, one hot day, Hilda had said to Frieda, ‘Shall we go for a walk, down by the river?'

Frieda had brightened, like a puppy hearing its lead rattle. She was ready, she was waiting.

They had walked through the village, past the Wheatsheaf and the Post Office and Caney's General Store, down Church Street, and through the churchyard to the lane which led to the river. They knew the churchyard well, although the Haxbys and the Buggs had been chapel. They knew the tombstones, and Hilda had woven stories about the old table tomb which was coining apart at its stone seams. In it lay bones, and worse than bones–virgins buried alive, with their hearts still beating; old men whose hair grew after death to cloak their bodies with a silver caul; babies strangled by their child-mothers at birth. But now the sisters were too old for that kind of nonsense. Even the dead bored them.

They had plodded along the dry path at the edge of the yellow field towards the river and the mill. Frieda had trotted obediently behind. And they had reached the line of pollarded willows that marked the river, and the bridge by the derelict mill.

Their father had once worked at the mill, humping sacks of grain, in its working days. He was a casual labourer, at the beck and call. But now the mill was abandoned, for the river level had fallen. It stood empty. The slatted wooden wheel was still. Their father worked the beet fields.

The mill yard had been turned into an agricultural dump. Old machinery rusted and weeds sprouted. The sisters had often stood there, on the bridge by the river, but they had never entered the mill. But now Frieda followed Hilda on to its forbidden ground, and edged her way through the broken door, and breathed in the white dust. They heard scufflings, vanishings. And they had looked at the ladder. It mounted to the next floor, from which in the olden days, five years ago, the grain was heaved down the chute. And Hilda had said, ‘I dare you.'