The Witch of Exmoor (29 page)

Some news, after days of waiting, comes out of Exmoor. The cliff paths above and leading down to the old kiln have been searched, without success–no corpse, or signs of disturbance there, apart from a few cigarette ends and the wrapping from a Kit-Kat. But Mrs Haxby Palmer's friend Jane Todd has turned up and been interviewed by the local police and by Mr Rorty. She is upset about her new friend's disappearance and simply cannot account for it. She would be happy to come up to town to talk to the family about Frieda, as she can well imagine how worried they must all be feeling. She has to come up to town in a couple of days to see an exhibition and attend a lecture at the Cochrane Gallery: would they care to set a time to see her?

Daniel, Gogo and Rosemary agree that they are all intrigued by the existence of this Exmoor friend. Who can Jane Todd be, and how can she and Frieda ever have got together? Patsy, who has spoken to her on the phone, says that she sounds very pleasant and very ordinary. ‘You know,just ordinary. Not Mummerset or anything.Just ordinary.'

This is even more curious. Daniel regrets that he cannot make lunch on the day in question, but both Gogo and Rosemary converge upon the ordinary little Italian restaurant in St Martin's Lane which Rosemary has selected as an appropriate meeting place. They get there early, to be ready for their guest, and are discussing kidney transplants when they see her approaching their reserved table. There is no mistaking the lady from Exmoor. She is wearing a good suit in a bold grid of bobbled green and heather tweed, enlivened by a sporting scarlet fleck. She has polished brogues, and a felt hat with a feather in it. She carries a highly polished maroon leather bag with a gold clasp and a gold chain. She is autumnal, and her face is delicate and soft and wrinkled and faded. She smiles at them vaguely, sits herself down, introduces herself, as she accepts a gin and tonic.

‘I'm Jane Todd, from Exford,' she says. ‘This is so worrying. So very very worrying. I
did
like your mother. Such a nice woman.'

Her vague smile flitters, pleasantly. She has sharp blue eyes, pepper-and-salt hair, and gentle folds of becoming chin. She butters her roll vigorously.

She had met Frieda, she tells them, in a pub in Simonsbath. Both had been taking lunch while sheltering from heavy rain. She herself had been out walking and collecting specimens–‘I do a little botanizing, just as a hobby'–and had been examining an ivy-leaved bellflower through a hand lens when Frieda had introduced herself, and asked the name of the plant. They'd got chatting, and Jane had been most interested to learn that Frieda lived at Ashcombe, for she'd known the house in the old days. She could remember it as a hotel, and then again when it had been inhabited, briefly, by a Mr Silver from Vermont. They had talked about the house, and its curious history, and Frieda had asked her to come round for a drink one day. And so they had become friends. They'd had lunch out together several times–they'd discovered another pub which did a cheap Thursday lunch for pensioners, and thought its landlord needed their support. Frieda had been interested in Exmoor stories, and she herself had known the area all her life, though she'd lived abroad for years. Yes, she was widowed, and retired there now. Frieda had been to her cottage on a couple of occasions, and admired her botanical drawings. Jane Todd was interested in botanical drawing, had built up her own collection, was off to see this new show at the Cochrane. The flora of Alberta. With a talk by Montague Porter. Frieda had known quite a lot about flora. But of course, they would know that, wouldn't they?

Gogo and Rosemary, making their way silently through their
penne all' ambbiata,
had exchanged glances. Was this woman that Jane Todd knew really their wayward monster mother? Jane Todd made her sound quite usual. But then, on closer examination, Jane Todd herself was not as usual as she looked. It emerged that her husband had been an explorer–yes, an old-fashioned sort of explorer. Jane had travelled with him on many occasions. She could say she had seen the world. She and Frieda had exchanged travellers' tales.

Jane Todd could not believe that Frieda had simply vanished. The last time she'd seen her she'd been so well. They'd had their lunch, then gone for a walk through the woods to the County Gate, talking of Arthur Rackham, and fairy stories. They'd both been brought up on Rackham. Then they'd gone on together to Minehead to look at the charity shops. They'd discovered that they both enjoyed nosing around in charity shops. Frieda had been most impressed by the quality of the stuff you could find in the West Country. Not that she wanted to
buy
much, for both she and Jane had reached the age where they had enough stuff to last them a lifetime–but they liked to look. Frieda had professed herself interested in the economics of this new barter system, this late-twentieth-century rural by-product of an unprecedented mixture of affluence, indigence, unemployment, underemployment and a crazy rating system. Frieda had said that she was thinking of writing a book about it. So they called their visits ‘research'. Jane would report her findings to Frieda, and Frieda would report hers to Jane. ‘Now look at my hat,' commands Jane Todd.

They look at her hat.

‘I got that from the Spastics,' says Jane Todd proudly. ‘You wouldn't have guessed that, would you?'

‘And my bag,' continues Jane Todd, ‘is Cystic Fibrosis.' They gaze at her bag. It shines and swells.

Oh dear, laments Jane, she would miss Frieda. There weren't so many like-minded people on Exmoor.

She was so sorry she'd been so long getting in touch. She'd been in Cornwall, visiting a friend who'd just had a hip op. She only heard the news when she got back. Oh dear what a worry.

Jane Todd did not look very worried. Her morbidity quotient seemed surprisingly low. She was much more interested in pink toothwort and monogrammed silver teaspoons and second-hand hand-knitted Fair Isle pullovers than in sudden deaths, drownings, suicides. She was a very unprying person. When asked if she herself had a family, she hardly seemed to know the answer. Yes, she thought she did have a son and a couple of daughters and a few grandchildren, but she couldn't quite remember where they were these days. Or that was the impression she gave.

Gogo could see that this indifference would have appealed to Frieda.

They agreed, after her departure for Paddington, that her evidence was little help. She could testify to the fact that Frieda, on recent sightings, had seemed cheerful and of sound mind, but that got them nowhere. It could perhaps be used in court to try to establish that Frieda's last will and testament was not the ravings of a mad old woman of the moor, but they would leave that to Daniel to pursue. Should it come to that. Both had noted that Jane Todd had made no mention of a houseboy called Will Paine, or of any other inhabitants or visitors to Ashcombe. Frieda and Jane had seemed to dwell in a remote, unpeopled, fantastical world, detached from human history by age and much wandering, content with trees and rocks and roots and bell-flowers.

 

Jane Todd, at the Cochrane Gallery, listened intently to the lecture on the flora of Alberta, and watched keenly as slide followed slide. It all went in one ear and eye and out the other, but for the space of an hour her eyes were pleasantly occupied by saskatoon and choke-cherry, by monkshood and harebell and gentian, by scarlet mallow and snow buttercups and mountain forget-me-not, by Indian paintbrush and asters of purple and gold.

Frieda's body was recovered three weeks later, washed up twenty miles along the coast off Rampion Point. For more than a month she had ebbed and flowed with the steep tides of the Bristol Channel and the grey swell of the wintry Atlantic. To Lundy she had drifted, and back again, to rest at last on a rocky promontory, at the foot of the iron cliff. Mackerel in the salt water and seabirds and ravens and crabs on the shore had feasted upon her. Her prophecy came to pass, for she was identified not by the scar on her thigh but by the bridgework in her skull. Her scar had been sucked and nibbled away by countless plucking mouths. Her bridgework, loose though it was, had not been washed away. It clung to her jaw. Obstinacy and paranoia had perished, with all other qualities, but the bridge had hung on. The coastguard at Ilfracombe, who recovered what was left of Frieda Haxby Palmer, had known her at once. He had been on the look-out for her. He had felt she was coming his way. He had programmed the charts of tide and wind and weather, and had expected her to come to him. He had waited, and she had come.

He had to send a man down the cliff on a rope's end to collect her. She was bundled into a bodybag, and hoisted up amidst the crying gulls. He rang the police of both counties, wondering which would claim her. Somerset prevailed over Devon, and Somerset rang Derbyshire to inform Daniel Palmer.

There would be an inquest, Daniel told Gogo and Rosemary.

It is not pleasant to think of one's mother so long in the icy sea. Even Frieda's undutiful son and daughters felt the force of this, and could not inhibit their imaginings. But for Benjamin, her heir, her chosen one, the news was ghastly. He took to his bed and would not, could not move. His teeth chattered as with a high fever, although he was as cold as any stone. Gogo sat by his bedside and wept.

There was no hope now of concealment. The newspapers picked up the tragedy, and picked up Frieda's connections. The well-prepared obituaries were long. Her rogue reputation was assessed and reassessed. Reporters rang Patsy and Nathan and David D'Angeir. The story of Will Paine reached the press, and for a while the Identikit drawing resurfaced. Had Frieda Haxby Palmer been murdered? Had she been pushed off a cliff? Had she jumped off a cliff? Journalists made their way to Ashcombe and described it in Gothic prose. It made a good story. The names of Cedric Summerson and one or two others in high or public places were stirred into the brew. Had M15 been involved? Or the CIA?

None of her family welcomed these attentions, and indeed they were not well meant. David D'Anger was accustomed to finding himself the target of the right-wing, but not to finding the chaste and austere name of his wife dragged into the attacks; nor was he at all happy with some of the innuendoes about the private aspects of his working life. Nobody had yet dared to call him a playboy of the media, or to link his name with that of Lola Belize of CNN, but he could see danger ahead. Nathan was not best pleased by mocking references to his occupational practices (lunches, dinners, clubs and nights on the town), and Rosemary knew that, for her, this was ic. The arts were on principle loathed by most of the press, and as a representative of the arts she was savagely derided: she would not be forgiven for the attention she had unwittingly drawn to herself. Daniel, whose case, like the Wash itself, wound on for ever, assured them from Cheshire that the whole business was a storm in a teacup, that Frieda's death would be forgotten in a week, but privately he prayed that there would be no more incriminating faxes from Will Paine.

So far the three Palmer children had stuck together in the face of this unwanted exposure, but all sensed that this solidarity could not last. Gone were those pleasant weekends of tennis and conversat ion in Hampshire, those West End theatre evenings arranged by Nathan Herz, those inconclusive but pleasant plans for weeks in Italy. There would be no family Christmas this year: Christmas would never come again in its old form.

Frieda had ruined it all. Jessica and Jonathan knew that they would never play the Game again. Disaster had come upon them.

Old Howard Partridge no longer had any excuse for not digging out Frieda's penultimate will, but when he produced it it solved nothing. It posed yet more problems, as Daniel, who had first sight of it, knew he should have known it would. It had been no less arbitrary and malicious than her last: indeed in many ways it was much worse. She had named as her executors her recently retired but still sprightly literary agent Bertram Goldie, and Lord Ogden, a heavy-weight legal bruiser now enjoying a comfortable autumn life of overeating as Master of Grotius College in Cambridge. (Daniel, seeing Ogden's name in the document, recalled that Frieda had sat on the Ogden Committee on something or other–Equal Opportunity? Industrial Espionage? The North Sea Bed?)

Goldie and Ogden had been her executors, and the will which they had agreed to execute had left £20,000 to each of her children and to each grandchild a thousand pounds. So far, so good. But she had left the rest of her estate and all her copyrights in trust to her son-in-law David D'Anger, for the purpose of re-establishing the D'Anger family claim to the Valley of the Eagles, and establishing therein the Just Society, to be founded on the principles of social justice, as discussed. There was a lot more about this Society and its trustees, in small print, along with mentions of the Demerara case and the restitution of economic and cultural rights in Guyana. There was even a mention of the Boston Tea Party. Daniel was so enraged by all this codswallop that he could not bring himself to read it carefully, and he could see at a glance why Howard Partridge had not wished to divulge it. How could any reputable lawyer have allowed himself to be a party to such a document? What could old Ogden have been thinking of? What had David D'Anger been up to? If this wasn't a sign of undue influence on an unsound mind, then it would be hard to know what was. The prospect of young Benjamin D'Anger winning the lot began to seem almost acceptable, in comparison with this deliberate, money-wasting nightmare. Daniel does not believe in concepts. He believes, or so he thinks, in people. And Benjamin is, at least, a person.

There is no way of keeping the contents of this document away from the other family members, although Daniel has been the first to see them. Daniel is not sure how to dress them up. He is in a cruel dilemma which he begins to think the wicked Frieda must have foreseen. Shall he go for the second will, on the grounds of its superior clarity and sanity, or for this earlier garbage, on the grounds that there is more money in it for him and the Herzes, and that a subsequent appeal could successfully challenge the excessive D'Anger share and hand it back for equal redistribution amongst the next-of-kin? Would a successful challenge to the first will reinstate the disqualified second will? These are complex legal points.