A Natural Curiosity (26 page)

Alix and Beaver smile at each other. They enjoy such discussions. ‘Of course,’ pursues Beaver, provocatively, ‘it’s different if you’re a novelist. Like your Brian. You need structure if you’re a novelist. Narrative sequence. Solid chronology. All that kind of thing. How’s Brian’s novel coming along?’

Alix continues to smile and does not answer. No answer is expected. She rocks her chair back, puts her knees against the table, balances.

‘Beaver,’ says Alix, ‘were you reading Lucan, in 1981? A little blue two-volume edition from the Lit and Phil? Translated into heroic couplets by Rowe?’

Beaver ponders.

‘I can’t remember,’ he says. ‘Would you like it to have been me?’

Alix gives the question some thought. ‘I don’t know,’ she says, finally. ‘If it
was
you, then that would be nice, because it would mean that it was a small world, and I know you, and you know me, and we both know Lucan, and here we are sitting talking about him though he’s been dead two thousand years. That would be nice. But if it wasn’t you, then there would be a third, somewhere. A third reader of Lucan. Whom we don’t know. Or may not know. Or may know. And that would be nice too.’

‘Maybe we’ll meet him at Kettle’s party,’ says Beaver. ‘We could go round Kettle’s party, asking after Lucan.’

‘Beaver, you
are
sexist,’ says Alix.

‘What do you mean? Explain.’

Alix explains.

Alix drives towards the evil Angela with even more reluctance than she felt when driving towards Paul’s father. Paul’s father had always been cast in her mind as a non-entity, and so he had proved to be. Nobody, at the trial or the post-mortems of the trial, had found anything much to say about Paul’s father: butcher he may have been (and that had caused some speculation) but of cattle, not men. The defence had tried to make something of Paul’s motherless boyhood, but neither Paul nor his father had co-operated very fully in this version of his evil genesis. Alix instinctively believed in it, but now she was about to put her theories to the test, she felt nervous, anxious. She was frightened of the prospect of Angela.

Paul was very unfrightening, and it was not only the top security of Porston Prison that made him seem so. His victims had not found him frightening either, until too late. He had killed quickly, quietly. Mercy killing. He had been much more turned on by the posthumous butchery. The revenge on a passive, silenced, uncomplaining sacrifice. The
tête coupée
, the augury, the slab. And the law in its wisdom had found him of sound mind. Paul was distressing rather than frightening. He instilled sorrow, not fear. Sorrow for human suffering, for human distress, for waste, for error.

All evil is error, some believe. Nobody knowingly chooses evil. This is not a wild theological heresy, it is a tenable philosophic position. As we have seen, it haunts Alix.

She drives north to Hartley Bridge by a route that is shorter and simpler, if less well planned, than the route that took her to Toxetter. As it is a rural route, avoiding the great industrial conurbations that straddle the middle of upper England, she is not here provoked into much political thought about the nature of the north and How Britain Votes, and you may be spared her occasional reflections on these themes, for this is not a political novel, and anyway her reflections are repetitive and do not seem to be getting her anywhere very fast. Of more relevance to our present theme are her musings on butchers, Sir Thomas More, Bernard de Mandeville and vegetarianism, prompted by a bite of sesame-seed bar taken as she leaves the flat moor, passes the turning to Porston, and enters the northern dales. Had not More forbidden butchers in his Utopia, on the grounds that the butchering of animals brutalizes men? She thinks of the mild Bill Whitmore, the wax-pale Paul. Subdued to the trade we work in. Casual brutality taken for granted. Surgeons’ jokes. Perhaps Paul really wanted to be a surgeon, and had just taken a wrong turning, by, as it were, mistake?

She could not recall how More had solved the problem of meat in his Utopia. He had not, she thought, been a vegetarian, a proto-Shavian. He had probably proposed the delegating of such tasks to slaves or criminals. Disappointing, really, the past, the way it kept begging questions. Give to those already outside the law the jobs that would otherwise drive them outside it. ‘Athens Without Slaves’: wasn’t that a title she’d seen in a catalogue recently?

More’s Solution did not seem quite fair, to Alix.

It came to Alix that More himself had had his head chopped off, and that his daughter had collected it from the spike where it had been exposed on London Bridge, and preserved it in spices until her death. Or so the history books said. But this could surely have nothing to do with anything, except to remind one that severed heads were a commonplace of history, of history much more recent than that of the Celts. Remember Madame Tussaud’s. A morbid fascination. These days, Alix sees severed heads wherever she looks. She collects them. Morbidly. They pop up like King Charles’s head in the memoir of Dickens’s Mr Dick.

No, not a political novel. More a pathological novel. A psychotic novel. Sorry about that. It won’t happen again. Sorry.

Alix leaves the A64, turns on to a B road. The territory seems dimly familiar to her, from school outings of yesteryear. Memories are stirred, beneath the threshold of consciousness. Blackberry picking, wading in a stream, singing in a coach. But Alix is too agitated to allow these pleasant associations to surface from the past. She has reason to be nervous. Angela Whitmore Malkin is not expecting her, has not replied to her letter. Alix knows she will not. That she has no wish to be dug up. She will not be pleased to see Alix, to hear Alix speak of her son Paul. Alix has told nobody of her journey. She has not told Brian, or Sam, or Beaver, or Liz. This is a secret expedition. She can fail silently, if she judges it expedient to fail, and nobody will ever know she has lost her nerve at the last moment. This is only a reconnaissance trip, she tells herself. If she finds anything horrid, she can drive away and think again. Like Julius Caesar, returning from the conquest of Britain. She can recoup her forces, replan her attack.

Alix Bowen has got Roman Britain and severed heads on the brain. To the right of her lies Parisi country. Ahead of her, the heartland of the Brigantes. And Utopia, the Promised Land, where is that? Perhaps, she thinks, disconsolately changing gear as she approaches a steep bend, it would be wiser to scrap the whole human experiment. Let it blow up or die of the plague. That was what Stephen Cox had sometimes suggested. Stephen had seen Pol Pot’s venture as a sort of final testing. A failed testing.

I feel sick, said Alix to herself, as she tried to dislodge bits of sesame seed from her ageing teeth and receding gums. I feel sick, and I am a coward.

She sings to herself, to keep her courage up. ‘Now it is the brave man chooses, While the coward stands aside’, she sings, loudly, from one of her favourite hymns from those long ago days when she and her schoolfriends picnicked in this pleasant pale-green dale. It is a lurid hymn: she is surprised they were allowed to sing anything quite so strong.

By the light of burning martyrs,

Christ, thy bleeding feet we track,

Toiling up new Calvaries ever

With the Cross that goes not back.

A very
odd
hymn really for nice little girls and boys to sing.

Some great cause, God’s new Messiah,

Offering each the bloom or blight,

And the choice goes by for ever

’Twixt that darkness and that light.

And the choice goes by for ever . . . yes, she had liked that extremism, but of course it isn’t quite so, the choice
keeps on beckoning
, the cross
keeps on beckoning
, one never knows if one has irrevocably chosen darkness or light, there is no relief, no remission, no luxury of despair or damnation, even Paul Whitmore struggles on in his darkness, after so many choices, so many damning choices, hoping for salvation, hoping for light, hoping for grace, hoping for explanation, hoping to rejoin the human race.

And here, suddenly, too soon, is Hartley Bridge, a little town—a village, really—huddled round a humpbacked bridge over the Hart, and there, half a mile up the hill on the other side, as the Ordnance Survey map had promised, is the turning to Hartley Court. A white wooden board announces hartley court in large lettering. The lettering was larger than one might expect for a private house. A cattle grid and a gravel drive wound back uphill from the road, through a copse of bare, straggling trees.

Alix sensed that the drive expected visitors: was Hartley Court perhaps an institution—a retirement home, a nursery garden, a prep school? If so, snooping would be a great deal easier. Alix’s courage rose, slightly, and she drove on. Up the gravel, up to the forecourt of a rather imposing white-plastered early-nineteenth-century house, with little pillars and a curious first-floor balcony. There were two parked cars, but there was nobody about. The garden was large, adequately but not well kept: a patchy lawn dotted with not very well-grouped daffodils stretched down to a muddy pond, and high banks of shrubs backed the house and concealed what looked like acres of outbuildings. Alix sat in her car and stared around her. What next? Should she get out and bang on the door?

The front door was imposing. Painted white, studded, with a polished brass knocker in the shape of a woman’s head with flowing locks, a gleaming brass letter-box, an octagonal brass knob of unusually large proportions. In the outdoor porch stood a boot-scraper and a tub planted with narcissi. Was Angela a housekeeper? A mistress? Both?

It was tea time. Alix decided to brave the door. Surely the place would not engulf her like Castle Despair, and never spew her out again? Though it was in some faint as yet indiscernible way sinister, and not only by association with the crimes of P. Whitmore. Alix could not work out what gave the scene a slight uneasiness until she opened her car door, and heard the barking. Had she provoked it, or had it been going on all the time? It was now unmistakable, growing louder and louder, a chorus of barking, from several directions, a barking and a rattling of chains, a scratching and a scrabbling, from within and around the house. Standing and looking now beyond the house, up the hillside at the steeply raked back garden, Alix spotted a huge cage. It was rattling with big dogs. They were leaping and throwing themselves at the wire. Mastiffs. Bulldogs. Something like that. Boxers. Huge, angry, hungry dogs.

Alix shivered, reasoned with herself. It is a kennels, a boardinghouse for dogs. A dog breeder’s. Of course, of course. She sniffed the air. The very air stank of dog.

Alix marched up to the front door, and rang the bell. The knocker, a female
tête coupée
, smiled gravely and impassively at her. It was a common design, the same design that Liz had had in Harley Street, had repeated at St John’s Wood. Alix had never before thought of seeing it as a Medusa, as a Celtic offering. She thought of Jilly Fox’s head, reposing upon her own car seat.

The door opened.

Paul Whitmore’s mother Angela was unmistakable. She had a hairstyle of arranged carved red solid waves rising from her square brow. Only a professional could achieve such an effect. Alix blinked, stood her ground. Angela was wearing slacks—a word not much used these days, but slacks these were, in Alix’s view. Mauve slacks. And a green large-knit large-stitch jersey over a mauve shirt. A cigarette burned in Angela’s nail-varnished fingers. Alix tried to smile, and succeeded. Angela smiled, professionally.

‘Mrs Simpson?’ asked Angela. ‘Come about the two-months bitch?’

Alix half nodded, half shook her head, and stepped slightly forward. She could see a fine entrance hall behind Angela, polished wood, large bowls of flowers, oak tables, oil paintings. No dogs.

‘No,’ said Alix, her foot well over the threshold, ‘I’ve come about Paul.’

Angela looked away, very quickly, but did not slam the door or summon her hounds. Instead she froze. Her cigarette still burning.

‘I’m not talking to you,’ said Angela, eventually. ‘I’ve nothing to say.’

Alix looked around at the solid furniture. On one of the dark gleaming tables stood a little vase of primroses. She took heart. From the back regions of the house, a dog began to mourn and wail.

‘What a lovely house,’ said Alix. The flowers are so lovely.’

‘I’m not talking,’ said Angela.

‘Lovely primroses,’ said Alix. ‘We haven’t had many yet, this year, over our way.’

Angela rose to the challenge.

‘I don’t do the flowers,’ she said. ‘The Colonel does the flowers.’

‘But you do the dogs?’

‘Me and Stanley, we do the dogs. And the Colonel. And Dr Everett.’

Right. Got it, thought Alix.

‘But if you haven’t come about the dogs—’ counterattacked Angela. Angela was knocked off guard, unable to change her tack sharply enough, she was still geared for a servile welcome of Mrs Simpson.

‘I’d like to
see
the dogs,’ said Alix.

‘The Colonel and Dr Everett are in London this week,’ said Angela.

‘But you could show me the dogs,’ said Alix.

And Angela showed her the dogs. Well, what is bait, what is stupidity? Throw in a lump of poisoned meat, and you are over the wall.

Alix was appalled by the dogs, but smiled and did not say so. Bull mastiffs, they were, Angela told her, bred by the Colonel and the Doctor. There were cages at the back of the house, outbuildings, stables full of dogs, a warren of servants’ quarters full of dogs, cellars full of dogs. The cellarage of the house, opening on garden level at one side, owing to the steep incline, was so vast and high roofed it could have taken in a row of double-decker buses or housed a legion of the Roman army. Instead, it bred dogs. There was a smell of dog and dog meat and dog shit and disinfectant and damp plaster, an overpowering, nauseating stench. Angela moved on, occasionally smiling as she showed off a squeaking blind litter, a prancing pup, a swollen-teated bitch, a slavering sabre-toothed dog. Not all the animals were pleased to see Angela. Some of them cowered in corners at her approach, as though recalling past encounters: others hurled themselves against tough wire mesh at her, ready to renew battle. At these, the unfavoured, she smiled grimly. She kicked one pup quite savagely as it tried to sneak past her into a corridor. They passed a room containing a huge wooden butcher’s slab with cleavers. A bunch of unskinned rabbits dangled from a hook.