The Witch of Exmoor (34 page)

Nathan Herz knew he would never be in the big league, but he had not realized, until he set sail with the Eagleburgers, that he was a pauper. The rich are different from us. And in the last decade, they have become more and more different. The rich have got richer and richer. Nathan knew he could not afford to keep that yacht afloat for half an hour, for five minutes. Yet until that invitation, until that cruise, he had thought himself to be doing well. His confidence had gone.

Nathan wanders round the perfume department of Selfridges on the Thursday evening that Benjie D'Anger is rescued from the bath. He is looking for a birthday present for his mother, but he is dreaming of the Turner in the Circe Lounge. It had been of a beauty to break the heart. An unfinished oil, of a rocky Mediterranean shore, with caves and a natural arch topped with a brush of trees: in the foreground, on the beach, strayed dimly painted figures, emerging from stone and sand and sea as though from the ancient forms of time itself. And across the blue and emerald water the faint sketched shapes of • antique ghostly ships. Gold, amber, aquamarine.

His mother would not want a Turner, so that's all right. She is the easiest woman in the world to please, and Nathan has always enjoyed buying her gifts, for she is delighted by any small female treat–by soaps, salts, sprays, oils, lotions, perfumes. And Nathan loves the cosmetic halls of the large department stores. Selfridges has a grandeur, a dignity that the new out-of-town malls will never achieve. Its Corinthian pillars, its carved cherubs, its brass plaques, its bronzed marble, its Egyptian sphinx-lions, its pigeon-netting, its lofty lifts, its history. A woman here may be queen for a day, a man may be a prince, a benefactor. He enjoys chatting up the sales girls, as they lean forward with their glowing pellicles and sexy clinical uniforms, fluttering their long false lashes at him, dabbing or squirting fluids on to the back of his hairy wrist. He sniffs the scents of Arabia, the distillations of rose and cat and whale. He has the keenest sense of smell. He is a sensuous man. The perfumes glow gold and blue and amber and crystal in caskets and chalices, in ziggurats and phalluses, in pearls and cubes and apples of clear and cut and bevelled and frosted glass. Their names are the names of Temptation, Obsession, Possession, Frivolity. This is the apotheosis of presentation, the triumph of form over content. Minimal dabs of exorbitantly expensive cream and jelly reside in elfcups magnified by prisms, enclosed in deceitful phials, emprisoned in false-bottomed boxes. Who wants No Nonsense packaging? The package is the product.

Salesperson Tricia Chang insists that the Principessa Venier is the best of this season's new perfumes. She daubs, Nathan inhales. He cannot really get a proper whiff of the Principessa, he complains, for he is already too bespattered by the newest names from Chanel and Guerlain, from Cabochard and Klein, from Lancome and Armani: would Tricia happen to have a spare clear inch or two of her own personal skin to test it upon? He likes the deep sea-green glass of the container, the long old-fashioned scent-bottle slim column of it, the under-watery pearl of the stopper. Could she oblige? Honey-skinned Tricia smiles, with her curved mahogany-red lips, and stares at him with widened, skilfully outlined, china-and-white-and-cornflower eyes: then she modestly lowers her lashes, opts for her left wrist, sprays it, extends it across the glittering counter to the gallant frog-like Nathan. Nathan takes her hand, smells it, breathes her in.

The Principessa Venier and Tricia Chang do not smell good to Nathan. They smell of dankness and drains. He inhales again. Has some sinister chemical reaction taken place? The Principessa smells of death in Venice. Nathan looks up sharply, at Tricia's waxy cherished blandly smiling face: she is not mocking him, she has not turned into a deathmask, she has not begun to decay before his eyes. But this, this is Belle's little dead hand he is holding in his. He squeezes it, and breathes again, sorrowfully, the putrid odour of river water. Tricia is now pulling her hand back again, aware that the quality of his grip has changed from flirtation to desperation. This attractive, ugly middle-aged man is in crisis, she can tell, and he relinquishes her member with a sigh of profound sadness, and shakes his head. No, he cannot say he likes the Principessa Venier. Nor would his mother like it. It is too dark for her. He wants something lighter–something more ?–he searches for a word. More floral? suggests Tricia, sympathetically. She is used to dealing with incompetent, wordless men. Yes, more floral, agrees Nathan meekly. The spirit has gone out of him, the fun of choice has abandoned him. He lets Tricia choose for him. She selects a short list of three, but cannot recapture his interest. He allows her to sell him a small flagon of Vie en Rose, which reminds him of those overpowering synthetic pink roses in Daniel's garden at the Old Farm; Tricia assures him that it is very popular with the more traditional older lady. Tricia Chang wraps it in shiny gift wrapping, and seals it, and ribbons it, and teases its ribbon into butterfly bows and corkscrew spirals, and encloses it in a gift baglet. She does her very best with the packaging. She feels she has failed this mystery man, this man of moods. When he has gone, she covertly sniffs at her rejected hand. She cannot see that it smells bad. She likes the Principessa. But perfume is a tricky, a personal affair. It is, as she has been told on a course she once attended, as much of an art as science.

Nathan boards a cab and on his way home he broods once more on money. He is rich enough to buy his mother a birthday present fit for a duchess, but he is not rich enough to be able to buy his way out of trouble. The lights of Oxford Street glitter garishly. Jingle bells, Christmas sells. The taxi, avoiding roadworks, makes for Blackfriars Bridge. On impulse (is that the name of a perfume?) Nathan asks the cab to stop on the far side, on the Surrey bank. He descends, and then he descends. He makes his way down steps to the water's edge. He thinks of Belle.

He walks under the bridge, past a panorama of painted tiles taken from prints of old designs of Blackfriars. He is not thinking of old London. He is thinking of Roberto Calvi, God's banker, who had hanged himself by a yard of nylon rope from a pile of scaffolding beneath the north side of this bridge in 1982. Or was he murdered by the Pope's henchmen, by members of a Masonic Lodge? Calvi was carrying a crudely forged passport, and his pockets had been stuffed with foreign banknotes and ten pounds of stones lifted from the grounds of the City of London School which Jonathan Herz will soon attend. A good old-fashioned revenge tragedy, here by the water's edge, so near the stones of the Rose, so near the thatch of the Globe.
Mutatis mutandis.
There had been two inquests.

The arches of the bridge curve and soar, the traffic above thunders and rumbles. Road-works are in progress, somewhere up there–when are they not?–and strange lumps of cladding and loose heavy dirty swathes of industrial-weight polythene protrude and dangle and flap in the night air. Grey and black, black and grey, a fine nocturne. They have cleaned this stretch of riverside walk, have tamed and urbanized it, but nevertheless Nathan notes piles of greywhite birdshit and feathery filth, and a heap of red rags abandoned by a nesting beggar. A browning banana skin lies on top of the red rags. The little heap is eloquent–a still life, a dead life. The brave red cries out.

Nathan strides out eastwards along the reclaimed Jubilee pathway, watching the lights dimple and glimmer on the tide. A police boat cruises purposefully downstream, and a little commercial launch advertising advertising buzzes towards him from Southwark.
The Bow-belle, The Marchioness.
Belle drowned, Frieda Haxby drowned, Robert Maxwell drowned, and Calvi hanged himself where he could dangle in the water.

Nathan Herz, with his glossy oblong gold-corded gift bag and his sober briefcase, stares up at the high brick fortress wall of the power station and at the moon lying drunkenly on her back in the November sky. Swags of cloud are lit silver-blue by the moon's aura. Lottery money will transform this power station into an art gallery, but as yet there are few signs of development. Barbed-wire, weeds, demolition, desolation, solitude.

A flight of steps draws him down to the water's edge. He stands on the margin. The tide is rising. His executive shoes gleam black against the oily black. He listens to the sucking and the sighing. The wash of a midstream wake ripples towards him, but he does not step back from it. It laps upwards, splashes his shoes: it subsides and withdraws. He takes one step down towards it, tempting the next wave, but it does not rise again.

The water sighs, and Nathan sighs, and a seagull cries. Roberto Calvi had been strung up for one and a half thousand million dollars, and brought down the Banco Ambrosiano of Milan. Robert Maxwell had gone under dragging the pensions of thousands in a string of silver bubbles after him. Young Nick Leeson brought down Barings Bank for seven point seven seven seven billions of yen. Nathan Herz is not in their league. He is a small trader. A man of the past, not a man of the future. Or so he thinks, on this sad night.

 

Now we may return to Lily McNab. You remember the name of Lily McNab, child psychotherapist? We have not yet been introduced. We have several possibilities with Ms McNab. Is she a scholarly grey-haired owl-spectacled Scot with an Edinburgh accent? An imported American from New York? A Belsize Park matron who walks regularly upon the Heath with a small dog? A lipsticked lesbian from Leeds? She could be any of these characters. We had better take care, in our choice of attributes for Ms McNab, for it is a fact that there are fewer than 350 child psychotherapists in the whole of the United Kingdom, and we do not wish to be sued for libel if Lily McNab should fail. (It is a curious fact that the United Kingdom, which indulges in delightful hot-flushed orgies of recrimination and sentimentality whenever a child is conspicuously abused, injured or foully murdered, has refused to finance the long, rigorous and expensive trainings of these 350–but that is by the way.)

All that we know of Lily McNab, until we are ushered into her presence, is that by some means she has raised the money for this training, and that she must be younger than Gertrude Cohen, who recommended her. But as Gertrude Cohen is in her eighties, that leaves space for speculation. Lily McNab may be in her sixties. Whoever she is, she has what might be considered a daunting assignment in taking on the D'Angers and their son. But she has been trained, we may assume, not to be daunted.

We stand on her doorstep in Dresden Road, and locate her doorbell. Already she begins to materialize, for her terraced house is neat, white-painted and well-maintained, and it has windowboxes with flowering plants in them on the upper floors. It appears that she also has lodgers or partners, for there are other names on other bells. This is an expensive district, and smarter than the area where the D'Angers live. Lily McNab cannot be poor. Will she have a receptionist? Will she open the door herself?

Gogo and David stand and wait. They have come together to confront their saviour. United they stand.

Yes, this is Lily McNab who ushers them in. She is tall, bespectacled, large-featured, in her forties, wearing a rust-coloured trouser suit and a cream silk roll-necked sweater. She also wears lipstick. And she is black.

Well, perhaps not
black
black. More a lightish brown.

David D'Anger hopes that he has not done unto her what has so often been done unto him. But he cannot be sure that he has not.

It will emerge, in the next weeks, that the parents of Lily McNab were Indian Jews from Calcutta. She herself was born in Calcutta but has been educated in Scotland. Her birthname was Gubbay. She is married to a barrister called Jeremy McNab. She has an indefinably hybrid accent when she speaks, and her voice is low and husky.

Is this heritage of any relevance to her profession, to our story, to the fate of Benjamin D'Anger? Has Gertrude Cohen, as David instantly suspects, deliberately matched Benjamin with Mrs McNab? And if so, why? And was it wisely done?

Only time will tell. As Lily McNab explains, as the D'Angers already know, there is no miracle cure. If Benjamin is willing to come to see her–and there will be resistance, it is normal for there to be resistance–then she will see him.

The D'Angers drive back to Highbury with hope in their hearts. They have taken action. Surely love and money can save Benjamin.

***

Will Paine has found himself a job. He has flown east from Jamaica to Trinidad, to cover his tracks, and has been taken on as a cleaner by an American-owned hotel. He has struck lucky. Nobody seems to want to fuss too much about his papers. He has changed his name, and now calls himself Robert. He answers to his new name smartly, and works hard. He sleeps in a room the size of a broom cupboard, and hides Frieda's money in a sock in his travelling bag. He daren't try to bank it. He's afraid of banks, as his mother was before him. He's changed some of Frieda's money into dollars, and he's spent some of it on airticlcets, but quite a lot of it is still in the very same pounds sterling that had leaped from the cash stations of Exmoor. What if the notes are marked?

Will Paine has found friends to hang out with, to smoke a joint with. One of them is a bellboy and wears a red uniform with gold braid and his name on a metal badge. His name is Marvin. Will also knows Marvin's girl, Glory, who works as a masseuse and studied alternative medicine at nightschool. These are nice friends for Will Paine. Marvin is political and talks about Black Power and whatever happened to it and why the Caribbean isn't doing as well as it should. Glory is more into New Age mysticism and thinks that all will be well. Will Paine is interested in what both of them have to say. Sometimes he too speaks. He does not tell them about Frieda Haxby, for she is his secret, but he tries to describe David D'Anger from Guyana and Highbury, David D'Anger, parliamentary candidate for a sprawling constituency in West Yorkshire where Will had once worked in a pasta factory. He attempts, not unsuccessfully, to convey the concept of the Veil of Ignorance. They discuss their own initial positions and whether they would have altered them if they could. They agree that the institutions of society favour certain starting places over others, and that these advantages provoke especially deep inequalities. They affect one's initial chances in life, and all subsequent chances. Marvin and Glory believe they have been disadvantaged, and are puzzled by Will Paine's view that he himself has had a good deal of good luck. They are even more puzzled by Will's assertion that, according to David D'Anger, none would urge that special privileges should be given to those exactly six feet tall or born on a sunny day, or special disadvantages imposed according to the colour of one's skin or the texture of one's hair. As far as they can see, such preferences are being urged, not to say practised, all around them every day.