The Witch of Exmoor (28 page)

You will note that it did not occur to Gogo that Frieda had been affectionate, or generous, in the making of her will in her grandson's favour. Nor did Gogo see the inheritance as a blessing. Make of that what you wish.

The memory of the house at Ashcombe, during this first week or two, pressed down upon Gogo, hung over her like a storm cloud. What had her boy done to deserve to be threatened by this gloomy pile with its midden full of shells and bones, its black fungi, its long-plundered Old Barrow, its leaking radon? Her boy was bright and beautiful, he was the future. This dump was the pit of the past out of which we may never never clamber. It sucks at our ankles, it pulls off and eats our shoes, it drags us under. Gogo went to the Bloomsbury Public Library in her lunch break, and found, in the dark nineteenth-century dinner-smelling gravy basement of Topography, a County History, which told her that Ashcombe had in its grounds an old leper colony as well as an old kiln. She shuddered. She was not superstitious, but she shuddered. And she discovered worse than that, worse than the lepers and the radon. She discovered rape and murder. She rang the estate agent in Taunton, to ask if she could speak to the young woman who had first showed Frieda round Ashcombe–hoping that in some way she could normalize Frieda's aberration, hoping to turn Frieda back into a harmless nature-loving eccentric who had chatted her way round the battlements in the spring sunshine with gay Amanda Posy. And the estate agents told her that Amanda Posy was dead. Twenty-seven, and dead. Had they not heard? Amanda Posy had been killed by a man posing as a client. She had shown him round a house up in the woods behind Luxborough, and he raped her, throttled her and buried her in Treborough Tip. A copycat killing. A newsprint death. There had been a spate of estate agent killings and abductions. Amanda Posy was one of several.

Gogo was appalled by this discovery. It prompted her to action. She rang Daniel, who was staying up in Madock, and asked him how he was getting on with the question of probate. Had he managed to get a copy of the earlier will out of old Mr Partridge? Were there reasonable grounds for disputing the Goltho & Goltho will? She very much hoped there were.

Daniel, not sure what Gogo was playing at, but eager to exploit what seemed to him to be an excess of generosity on her part, confirmed that there would certainly be grounds for disputing Goltho & Goltho, who were known in the profession for practices both sharp and slack, but that Mr Partridge was not very happy about releasing the terms of the former will until death and cause of death were established.

‘Not
a very good situation, at the moment,' said Daniel, with a hint of question in his tone. If he got Gogo to agree over the phone that Frieda's last will and testament was unfair, would she stick to it, and would her opinion stand up in court? But Gogo had jumped quickly to the next stage.

‘But until we see the other will, how can we be sure it's not even worse? She might have left everything to the Cats' Home. Or to the Exmoor National Park. Or to that ghastly chap Cedric. I'd rather Benjie got it than Cedric.'

Daniel said nothing to this, though he noted it. He promised to pursue the solicitor. He promised to ring Mr Rorty about the progress of the investigation, to check if the paths to the old kiln had been thoroughly searched.

‘And one last thing,' said Gogo. ‘That computer she had there. I think we should remove it, don't you? Who knows what might be in it? Rosemary says she knows how to work it. I think we should get it back to London.'

 

Can you feed your will to the Internet? Can you send it through Cyberspace? Can you send your money out to the stars?

 

The news of his good fortune seeps through to Benjamin. He overhears conversations. His cousins telephone him. At first it does not seem to affect him much, but slowly he begins to sink. Imperceptibly, the poison fills the bloodstream. He grows silent at home and in class. He rejects his food, he bites his lips anxiously. He is wary and withdrawn. Mrs Nettleship, his class teacher, notes the change in his behaviour, but puts it down to adolescence. Boys do get moody at this age.

Fools' gold, fairy gold. Lying awake late one night, sick with anxiety, Benjamin remembers that withered orange on Frieda's cabinet. The bone needle had been stuck through it, from Britain to Guyana. She had skewered him, transfixed him. What is he to do? What has she demanded?

 

His aunt Rosemary is ill also, though she has not yet found a way of pinning her sickness upon Frieda. The prim and dapper doctor is interested in her case but has not yet come up with an explanation. He gazes at the lurches of the print-out of her erratic pressure chart with a neutral expression of respect. He sends her to clinics where she offers her arm for the extraction of vials of blood and her urine in small jars for testing. He prescribes pills and tells her to eat less salt. Rosemary cannot tell from his demeanour whether hers is an everyday problem, or whether she is on the eve of kidney dialysis. He has shown an excessive interest in her kidneys. She assumes there must be something wrong with them. She does not confide her fears to anyone. She tells herself that she has two kidneys, and that they cannot both be failing at once. Can they?

Rosemary is a fastidious woman. She greatly dislikes the feel of alien fingers upon her body, the sight of specimens of her own body fluids in bottles. The blobs of cold jelly upon her wired breasts and heart disgust her. Her heart throbs with indignation. She can see it pulsing angrily like a green volcano on a television screen. She dreads that she will be asked to mount a public treadmill. She is a Private Patient, but not all processes are private. She does not trust the clinic's procedures. She has heard too many cases of mixed results, mislabelled diagnoses. Every news bulletin on the radio brings some new medical scandal. One is at the mercy. She takes to writing her name in large print on every piece of paper, every test result, every ECG or Blood Test Request. She does not trust the numbers.

Rosemary's spirits are not good, but she conceals the causes of her short temper. Her husband Nathan sympathetically assumes that she is worried about work, for he is worried about work himself. He and his firm have taken on a brave task and he is not sure if he is up to his part in it. Renfrew & Wincobank are to update the corporate image of the National Health Service.

‘Update' is the word that is used: ‘alter' is what is meant. It has become clearer, as we approach the end of the twentieth century, that we cannot afford a National Health Service for everybody, all the time. Some may have kidney transplants and some may not. Some may have their varicose veins tended, and some may not. Some may live to be ninety, and some may not. So we must alter the perceptions of the people. We must adjust their expectations. We must encourage private health insurance. We must persuade the community-minded, the socially aware, the meddling middle-class egalitarians, the David D'Angers of this world, that it is their social duty to save resources by paying into the pockets of insurance companies, in order to release funds for the sick and the poor. We must teach the poor and the sick that they cannot have what they want. We must reassure the rich that they have a right to have what they want provided that they pay so much for it that the surgeons, the anaesthetists, the pharmacists, the insurance brokers, the insurance companies and the shareholders all get what they want too. And they want a lot. They want at least ten times more than the hotly disputed, oft-rejected and as yet fictional Minimum National Wage. Some of them want and expect a hundred times as much. This makes health care very expensive indeed, and ever more inaccessible. There is no justice, no equity in this situation. Nobody would choose this if their eyes were veiled by ignorance, for each of us knows that we may pull the short straw. We can't all imagine being poor, but we can all imagine being disastrously, expensively, prohibitively ill. Nathan's powers of invention and persuasion will be stretched to the limit.

Nathan Herz finds himself curiously depressed. He knows he ought to find the gross effrontery of his brief to deceive the nation a challenge, but it doesn't inspire. Building up the corporate image or identity of an insurance company, or a shipping line, or a bank, can be amusing. But health is depressing. However many suggestions for happy images of healthy children and smiling nurses and hotel-foyer-receptionists he generates, Nathan cannot forget that his own father died in his fifties, after a short life of overwork. He died on a street corner. Many of his blood had died in the camps. Thinking about Health turns Nathan's thoughts to Death. For however you package the whole thing up, however many Healthy Smart Cards and Credit Points and poster campaigns and little TV ad-dramas you invent, Death is where it ends. If you're lucky, you can afford to die in a clean bed. If you're not–well, there's the street corner. Man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets. Ecclesiastes 12:5. An atavistic Jewish melancholy seeps through Nathan, and at times he enjoys it. At least it is better than all this febrile pretence that we are all having such a good time and will have it for ever. Looking around a restaurant at the munchers, he thinks to himself: in thirty years most of you will be dead. You can chomp away, but you can't devour Death. If you pay those spiralling insurance costs, you may be able to die privately, on individually ground mince and personalized liquidized slops, but it's going to cost you a packet. And you may not be able to afford even that.

He finds himself wondering how it will be for him. He cannot help wondering how it was for Belle. Slow, sudden, hopeless, hopeful? Had she struggled or had she gone under quietly? He wonders if Belle had been Jewish. He knows nothing of her family, nor does he wish to. Belle had been a happy soul. She hadn't been rich, or famous, or extravagantly talented, but she had been happy. So it could be done. But how?

Nathan and Rosemary are not happy. Would winning the lottery make them so? Would a successful challenge to Frieda's will make them so? Rosemary begins to think that nothing can make her happy again but the purchase of some new kidneys. They are not yet available for sale either on or off the National Health, but Nathan will surely be able to get round that little problem for her. He can recover the trading instincts of his ancestors, and buy some in from Bangladesh. Surely any husband would be glad to do that for his young and pretty wife? It is not much to ask. Quite a small organ. Quite a young wife.

 

Nathan dreams he is back in Venice, a city he loves above all others. The water of the canals laps upon the mossy steps. The steps lead down, oh so easily, so graciously, with so sweet an invitation, into the water. The water laps and sucks, sucks and laps. The green weed stirs and rises, rises and falls, like tresses of green hair. Steps of yellow, grey and pink, scooped by age, scooped and fretted by the ceaseless gentle tide. One could step into eternity. One could embark from these steps for the Orient, for one's Long Home. Nathan loves canal paintings, marine painting?. Canaletto, Guardi, Turner, Claude Lorrain. The little frisking waves of the harbour, the steps, the temples, the prospects, the far horizons. We have said that Nathan has no taste, but that is not true. He does have taste, but he does not have taste that he can afford. He does not like modern paintings. He could put up with a Hockney swimming-pool and palm trees, but what he wants are Canaletto, Guardi, Turner, Claude Lorrain.

He wakes, with the sound of the Thames lapping in his ears beyond the double glazing. He has always loved the water's edge, although he cannot swim. He wakes, and wonders: could he market, not life, not health, but death? Could one take upon oneself the challenge of changing the corporate identity of death?

He thinks of Frieda Haxby, in her kingdom by the sea. Her coast is too wild for him. She has drowned in too savage a spot. He prefers the city steps.

 

Benjamin D'Anger's health deteriorates. Gogo takes him to the doctor, who can find nothing wrong. Perhaps he has been working too hard at school? He takes his schoolwork so seriously, for a boy of his age. He should get out and about, enjoy himself more, not frowst indoors over his books.

Simon Palmer is not in good shape either. He has not been home since the summer, so nobody has noticed the change. Nor would they have been able to interpret it, had they seen him. His tutor notes that he's not been turning in any essays recently, indeed hasn't been seen round much at all, and resolves to have a word with him about it, but he himself is in the middle of an expensive divorce fuelled by a drink problem, and he never gets round to it. He drinks a bottle of Scotch a day instead, and thinks himself heroic.

Emily Palmer, far away in Florence, worries about her mother and her grandmother. She is fond of them both. But what can she do about it? She alone is of the hope that Frieda is alive and well. She imagines Frieda sitting in a bar in Georgetown in the sweltering heat, or travelling upriver amongst the piranha fish and jaguars to see the mountains of gold. She thinks this would be admirable. She herself has for some time taken the line that family life is destructive, and she has decided to detach herself from it. And if Grandma has done the same–well, good on her.

Daniel Palmer cannot be so relaxed. The demands of river pollution prevent him from devoting too much time to Frieda, but he pursues old Howard Partridge, who had been Frieda's solicitor for many decades, who dated back to the days when Andrew Palmer had been upon the scene. (Daniel, unlike his sisters, has authentic though not very reassuring memories of his father. Meal-times of shepherd's pie. A walk along a towpath. A visit to a museum. Walt Disney's
Fantasia,
at the Romley Gaumont.) Howard Partridge, now retired, is an old stonewaller. He has not forgiven Frieda for pursuing the VAT case against his own advice and for coming near to winning it. He cannot resist pointing out to Daniel, over the telephone, that the consequences of Frieda's legal action against Customs & Excise have been unfortunate for other clients who have found themselves in her position. Far from establishing a helpful precedent, she had caused HM Customs & Excise to close a useful loophole. And no, he cannot divulge the contents of her will without proper authority. I am the proper authority, Daniel is on the point of saying, but then it occurs to him that maybe old Partridge knows more than he'll let on. Maybe he is in touch with Andrew Palmer. The possibility of this shocks Daniel, and he puts the handset down with a sick dismay.