The Witch of Exmoor (39 page)

Let us liberate Will Paine. Let the bird fly free. Oh, there are many plots that could enmesh and entangle and imprison him, we all know that. The police, the hard men, bad company, the dope, they all lie in wait for Will Paine. Are there any plots that will let him free? Not in this country, that is clear. There is no place for him in the country of his birth. We have sent him a third of the way round the globe already, across the Atlantic billows, but he is not yet safe, he is not yet far enough from us. Can he fly further? With one more bound he may cross the Pacific and reach Sydney. If we send him far away, out of sight and out of mind, as we sent our convicts of old, may he survive and know the good life? We dispatch him now not to hard labour but to the fantasy of a good job with a decent wage. Will they let him in? Will they turn him away at Immigration? He is not very black.

Fly, bird. Fly, cryptic bird. Take thy flight, thy Qantas flight.

 

Sorrow has come upon the Palmers, the Herzes and the D'Angers. They had seemed to be doing so well. It is hard to say which suffers most. Let us ask first for a reckoning of Nathan Herz, to whom we bear no malice, not the least in the world.

Nathan's end comes suddenly, unpredictably, on a mild night in spring. He has had a good day at the office, and has dined not wisely but too well at one of his favoured restaurants in Soho, with one of his favoured clients. They have been made much of by the
patronne,
who loves Nathan, and who has urged upon him perhaps one glass of Armagnac too many. The liquor had rested warmly upon the
ravioli aux trompettes des morts,
the
pieds de pore Sainte-Menehould,
the
Caprice des Dieux,
and Nathan and his friend Baxter, Marketing Controller of Associated British Unit Plan Trusts, sat long over the filter coffee, exchanging notes on the state of the economy, the old days of their youth, their sex lives, their livers, their loathing of exercise. Nathan and Baxter are old drinking companions, bonded by the bottle, and they share a contempt for the nineties cult of self-regarding health, for the regimes of gyms and jogging and personal aerobic tutors and mineral waters. Why pay good money to run up and down a short flight of stairs to nowhere? They know they are in a minority (which is why the
patronne,
herself of an older and more indulgent generation, loves them so much) but they are defiant. They admire the Bohemians of earlier days who drank themselves to death. Why do people want to live so long? It is unnatural. What makes them think it's worth it?

Nathan feels on this good night that he has no worries at all. Even when he visits the gents, pisses copiously, then has to reach for the wall as he senses a sudden constriction in his chest, he still feels no worry. Conviviality courses through him. He loves the
patronne,
and kisses her goodnight. He loves Baxter, and they clasp hands and hug one another at the end of Greek Street, as Baxter hails a cab. Even now, Baxter suggests a drinking club, but Nathan declines–he is feeling a little odd down his left arm and elbow, and although the distant, almost disembodied sensation causes him not the slightest anxiety, he thinks perhaps he should be sensible and get himself home. He too hails a cab, and sets off south to the other side of the river.

This proves to be a mistake. He should have stuck with Baxter and the booze.

As the cab crosses the bridge, Nathan asks it to stop, and tells it he'll get out here and walk the last few hundred yards along the river path. This also proves to be a mistake.

He tells himself that he needs a breath of air, that the closeness of the restaurant (which, anachronistically, encouraged smoking) has stifled him. As he tries to count out his money, he finds he is very pissed, unaccountably pissed, for he cannot tell one banknote from another. In the end he hands over a fistful of paper currency and tells the driver to help himself to the fare, keep a quid, and hand back the rest. The driver does as he is told, for he is a thoroughly decent old-fashioned cabbie, and an Eastender to boot. The driver watches with some concern as Nathan weaves his way towards the steps down to the towpath. That is the last time that anyone admits to seeing Nathan alive.

Nathan is fished out quite promptly the next morning, and the events of his last evening on earth are subjected to close scrutiny, even before it is discovered that he had suffered a mild heart attack. The heart attack might explain his death, but how can it explain why Nathan was standing at the bottom of a cobbled slipway with his feet in the Thames when he toppled over? Does it explain why he left his briefcase placed so neatly on the sixth step of the stone stairs leading down to the beach and the slipway, just above the reach of a high tide? No, it does not. There will have to be an inquest.

Rosemary is at first embarrassed by the vast amount that Nathan and Baxter Coldstream seem to have eaten and drunk at their last supper, and by the detailed account from
patronne,
fellow diners and cab-driver of Nathan's staggering last hours. Those pigs' feet, so retro, so gross, so indigestible, so monstrously non-kosher, cause mirth even in a coroner's court, and the coroner makes a point of dwelling upon them. But Rosemary rallies and wins through. Even the laughter had been full of admiration. Rosemary decides to be proud of Nathan, not ashamed of him, and once she had adopted this policy it is as though the lock upon her heart is opened and the flow of her old love for him released. She is proud of his exploits. He has done well.

She is fortified in this position by the sincere and extravagant gestures of affection which greet her on all sides. His colleagues claim they will miss him horribly, and they shower her with flowers and other tokens of esteem. The flat by the Thames is transformed into a conservatory in memory of Nathan Herz. Bouquets with mysterious messages arrive from unknown ladies, and Rosemary decides to greet these too with pride. (The Eagleburgers send a case of champagne: is this or is this not in poor taste?)

Rosemary is invited to dinner by Baxter Coldstream, and they dine in the very restaurant where Nathan had consumed his last trotter. Baxter drunkenly implores her not to blame him, and tells her that he blames himself for not insisting on taking Nathan to Carlucci's.

And it is true that if Nathan had opted for common sense and an earlier night he would not have ended up in the river. What can he have been doing, down there at the water's edge? Can it have been a suicide attempt? This, to the relief of all, is finally ruled out. Nathan had nothing to commit suicide
about,
confirm his boss, his colleagues, his friends, his wife, his mother, his stockbrokers. Since Christmas, life had been looking good for Nathan. He had come up with an acceptably risque and imaginative plan for health insurance, he had braved the invoicing of the forgotten clients and been warmly forgiven, he had been given a clean bill at his last medical, and he had won five hundred quid on a tip on a horse at Lingfield. What more could a creative director in a rising advertising agency want? Had he known something about the market that nobody else knew? Had he had a secret grief?

Baxter, holding Rosemary's freckled hand over the Armagnac, and squeezing it until her widowed diamonds pinch, assures her that never had Nathan been in better spirits. They had had a cracking evening, a smashing evening. Nathan hadn't had a care in the world. They'd reminisced about their first meeting at Sharp MacManus all those years ago, and about the night they'd spent carousing after it with Nathan's old college pal, the night they'd ended up in Bow Street. And had Rosemary ever heard the story of the Combined Biscuit Christmas Party?

Rosemary, who has for years fastidiously avoided male tales of debaucherie and camaraderie, who has avoided many a company function, listens with new-found longing, with sympathy reborn. He had been quite a lad, her Nathan. She and he had had good times together too. Baxter is right, one must remember the good times. She sniffs, her nose turning pink with emotion, and returns the pressure of Baxter's fingers. She will miss Nathan. Somewhere beyond the comforting pleasures of this wake lies lasting loss.

But Rosemary's sorrow, ameliorated by recaptured love, will be as nothing to the sorrow and horror of Daniel and Patsy Palmer. Nathan Herz's death was one of happy ease in comparison with the violent death of Simon Palmer. How had his parents not seen the warning signals? Where had they been looking, as Simon descended into the pit? Will Paine could have told them, had once even tried to warn them, but he is not here. Emily had observed symptoms, but even the cool, the sensible Emily had not seen how far things had gone. She too had looked the other way. Simon's tutor (who happened, alas, for these crucial weeks to double as his personal tutor) has been too preoccupied with his own worries to pay Simon much attention–and anyway, all that
loco parentis
stuff had seemed to him old hat. If the idle young of the idle rich wanted to spend their time tripping, hallucinating, needling or ghetto-blasting, what was that to him? Half of them were schizoid anyway. Simon Palmer had almost certainly been schizoid. The only papers he'd even managed to turn in had been disorganized and demented. Hardly worth the marking.

Simon's unexpected body had to be identified by its fingerprints. He hadn't washed pleasantly with the friendly tides as Frieda Haxby and Nathan had done; he had been taken out by a lorry as he walked the wrong way along the hard shoulder of the slip-road leading on to the M3 at the exit that leads to Hartley Bessborough and on to the Old Farm. He had been obliterated, smashed, and run over repeatedly, like a fox or a badger, like a cat or a dog or a motorway bird. The lorry had not stopped; nor, it seemed, had some of the cars that followed it. It was a dark wet night with bad visibility–but even so, even so. After the identification of the body, some reports filtered through from motorists who had seen a wild figure walking southwards on the wrong side of the dual-carriageway of the A34, waving its arms like a windmill and lunging occasionally at the headlights of an oncoming vehicle. A drunk, a tramp, a crazed traveller, all had assumed: all, including Judge Partington, who, his licence regained, had been driving himself to a dinner at his old college in Oxford. Greatly to his credit, Bill Partington had not suppressed this sighting, as he so easily might have done, but had reported it as soon as he realized the import of the ghastly apparition: red jersey, some kind of tattered-looking green jacket, dark glasses, fair hair, average height, unsteady gait, carrying a white plastic bag ... Partington was not a bad witness, though this was in itself little comfort to Patsy and Daniel Palmer.

There was, indeed, little comfort. All they were told, all they could tell themselves, is that he could not have known what had hit him.

Patsy will never recover from the impact of this blow. Mothers, it is said, do not. Daniel, being a man, appears to take the shock more calmly, but he has become even drier than he was before, and finds no solace save in his work. His smile now has the chill of winter frost. He has sustained a double loss: not only has he lost his only son, through what he himself chooses bitterly to describe as his own contributory negligence, but he has also lost his home, in which he had taken such a proper pride. For it is clear within weeks of Simon's death that the Palmers cannot continue to live at the Old Farm, unless they live in it as a prison. There is no way to leave the Old Farm without driving along the stretch of road that killed Simon. This they know they cannot do. So they put the house on the market, and wait. The market remains sluggish, as it has been for years, and property prices are low. They may have to wait for a long time. The pond silts up, the lawn is not mown, bindweed embraces the sundial, and ground elder ramps around the roots of the wistaria. Dock and nettles smother the vegetable garden, and greenfly swarm on the roses. Water drips unnoticed through the leak over the study window. The Aga burns still, but Patsy no longer troubles to cook. The Palmers think they will move east, perhaps to Suffolk, to a smaller house, somewhere without memories, without history.

Patsy's grief is compounded by her fear that Simon had been making his way home as a first and last plea for help. And he had not reached it. Well, a mother, even a bad mother, would think that, wouldn't she? She tells this fear to none save harmless, pallid Sonia Barfoot. Sonia accepts the confidence and offers no comfort. Sonia Barfoot is a connoisseur of pain. She accepts, she absorbs, she forgives.

Would it comfort Patsy Palmer to know that things have turned out better for Will Paine, her surrogate son? Will has fallen on his feet, as he puts it, in Sydney. He is apprenticed to a landscape gardener and he is learning the names of plants. He loves working in the open air. The sun suits him. He is healthier and stronger than he has ever been. He thanks Patsy Palmer for this transformation, and sometimes thinks of sending her a postcard. Without Patsy and Frieda, where would he be?

 

We may turn, now, to the D'Angers. They are slowly and painfully on the mend. Slowly, with the professional help of Lily McNab, Benjamin D'Anger rises from the depths, and begins to emerge from the decompression chamber she has constructed for him. David and Gogo watch and wait. Benjamin will never be as he was, omnipotent and brave. He will not take the whole globe on his thin shoulders. He will dive no more into the bottomless. But he will survive. Or so says Lily McNab.

Gogo finds herself spending more time with her widowed sister Rosemary, who now has time on her hands. They lunch in the hospital canteen, or in a cheap and crowded little Italian trattoria off Queen Square, or in a vegetarian Indian self-service basement restaurant at the bottom of Tottenham Court Road. They talk about their children, their mother, their husbands. They become friends again. They speak of poor Patsy, poor Daniel, poor Simon, and of the admirable character of Patsy's little Emily, who has grown old before her time. They speak of their strange childhood in the old Mausoleum, and of the damage that it has done to them, and of the games they played in the attic. They speak of poor Aunt Everhilda, whom they had never known, and their poor little nameless half-sister, who had died in a gas oven. They speak, obsessively, at length, of their vanished father, so little mentioned for so long; so many children now are fatherless, but in their day they had been lonely in their special social role. They piece together their fears of the past and for the future, and each time they meet a new pattern emerges, a new seam is stitched. One day they will make sense of their ancestry. Are they unique, are they freaks, are they throw-backs, are they pioneers of a new order? Frieda had left them with so many questions unanswered.