A Natural Curiosity Read online

  As an afterthought, he writes her name. ‘Angela Malkin,’ he writes, and hands the paper back.

  ‘That’s her,’ he says. ‘That’s what she calls herself now. She’ll disown us, that’s for certain. She won’t want to be hearing from us.’

  He seems to be attracted, now, by the idea of Alix and his wife in confrontation: Alix, the avenging angel with unwelcome news?

  ‘Has she remarried?’ asks Alix, cautiously.

  ‘Nay,’ he says. ‘We’ve never been divorced. Still my wife in law, she is. But Malkin’s not the man she ran off with, if that’s what you’re thinking. Nay, he didn’t last long. She’s been with this one a good few years now.’

  ‘Thank you very much,’ says Alix, carefully stowing the paper in her handbag. He seemed to have cheered up, to be relishing the prospect of further news of Angela.

  ‘It’s a queer place, where you’ll find her,’ he says, with a glint in his eye.

  ‘Queer?’ echoes Alix, nervously. It has already occurred to her that Hartley Bridge is probably less than thirty miles from Porston Prison, that Paul and his mother, unknown to Paul, are within an hour’s drive of one another. Bill Whitmore has not pointed this out, but something in his manner tells Alix that he is conscious that she is conscious of this.

  ‘Yes, queer,’ Bill Whitmore confirms, with satisfaction. Alix does not wish to inquire further. Suddenly she has had enough and more than she can take. She cannot wait to flee from Toxetter. When she gets downstairs, she runs past the meat shops, with wings on her feet.

  Shirley is wandering around Marks & Spencer in Dover. Up and down the aisles she goes, backwards and forwards, staring at pale pink acrylic jerseys, at rows of white cotton blouses, and pale duck-egg blue polyester cardigans, at socks and shoes and pot plants and soap and bath salts, a galaxy of choice, a domestic paradise, a consumer dream in pastel spring shades, fern green, coral pink, forget-me-not blue, primrose yellow, oyster beige, and white, white, white: does it comfort, does it appal? She has come in here for comfort, for the familiar, for the solace of shopping, she knows she blends into the surroundings here, she is undetectable, invisible, a normal housewife, mother of three, nobody will know she is delinquent, on the run. Primrose, forget-me-not, lavender, honeysuckle, cornflower. Dying flowers, imperishable dyes. Up and down she goes. Shall she stop, effect a purchase? Or pace on, and on, and on? She finds herself returning again and again to the lingerie, and finally comes to a halt by the nightdresses. She fingers the material. White, patterned damasked nylon, with thin yellow ribbons. Pretty. Pretty, she supposes. Will the act of purchasing rescue her? After the brutality of the motorway cafe Marks & Spencer is calming, assuaging, clean, sane. She handles various garments, holds them against herself for size. £16.50, the nightdress that she fancies. She takes it to the counter, to the pay here signal. Unlike her sister Liz, Shirley has kept her figure well. Liz, reflects Shirley with wonder and triumph, must need at least a size fourteen by now. The woman at the till smiles at Shirley. She is middle aged, in her fifties, grey haired, motherly. She approves Shirley’s purchase. She folds it with care. ‘Very pretty, the new season’s nighties,’ she says, and Shirley smiles and nods. She understands this kind of conversation. She takes her carrier bag, smiling. She has achieved a purchase, she is a successful shopper, she had made a decision, she has a carrier bag as witness.

  She drifts on, through the well-swept, well-lit, air-conditioned aisles, and out, out of the hospital, hostel, asylum of Marks & Spencer, into the raw wind, the biting cold. Where is she going, what is she doing? The sky is leaden, bruised, pewter dark. She walks through a churchyard. A young man with long bedraggled hair is playing a guitar, busking. Before him lies his guitar case, an old jersey, a cap. The cap contains two tenpenny pieces. He is playing a piece by James Taylor: ‘Oh I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain, I’ve seen sunny days that I thought would never end,’ he mourns to the shoppers of Dover. It sounds vaguely familiar to Shirley: was it a piece her sons had once thumped through the house on their amplifiers? Cliff had been hard on the boys, had over-restrained them, and they had deserted him in their hearts and left him, had grown up, grown away, and left their parents. The young man’s hair is in greasy ringlets, of a dull tarnished brown-gold: his dark face gleams lightly from dirt and weather, his throat is bare to the cold, his wrists protrude from the short sleeves of his denim jacket. He does not look at Shirley as she pauses before him: he is gazing into nowhere, as he strums his guitar, and a bitter smell of coal and cold sweat emanates from him. He does not glance or pause as she throws a fifty-pence piece into his cap. He plays on, and Shirley, as homeless as he, drifts on, clutching her Identity Bag, her pretty white nightdress with its cheap yellow ribbons and cheap knot roses at the yoke.

  Clive Enderby sits alone, watching the local television news, and thinking about Liz and Shirley. Is Shirley perhaps, like Cliff Harper, dead? Had Cliff murdered her? The police do not think so, as they are not dragging lakes and digging up the Harper back garden, but Clive cannot quite get the idea out of his mind. He wishes he had never had it.

  No, it is more likely that she has done herself in. Like her father before her. Bad blood, the Ablewhites. Do these things run in families?

  Those girls had been brought up very oddly. The social services might have got called in, these days. Their childhood ruined by shabby little secrets.

  Secrets, pigeon-holes, little plots. As a solicitor, Clive Enderby is aware that there are far more family secrets in the world than most people know of—well, if they knew of them, they wouldn’t be secrets, would they? People don’t want to think about these things. So they don’t. People want to believe in an ordered, regular world, of faithful married couples, legitimate children, normal sex, legal behaviour, decent continuity, and they will go to almost any lengths to preserve this faith. Any suggestion that ‘real life’ is otherwise tends to be greeted as ‘melodramatic’ or ‘implausible’.

  Solicitors know better. The police know better. Social workers know better. Doctors, especially since the emergence of AIDS, know better. The subplots fester, break out, infect strangers. Dark blotches spread. Life is more like an old-fashioned, melodramatic novel than we care to know. Clive knows more about the Ablewhite girls than they know about themselves.

  The local television news comes to an end. The police are appealing for witnesses to a mugging in the underpass leading from Northam Bus Station to Northam Railway Station. Muggings are rare in Northam. They are still news.

  Where is Susie?

  Where is Shirley?

  Clive Enderby shivers, gets up, adjusts the central heating. It is a cold night, a cold spring.

  Shirley has stepped out of plausibility, into the unknown. She had boldly driven her little car on to a cross-Channel ferry, and is sitting in the bar drinking a Dubonnet with lemon and ice. The ferry is almost deserted: a recent and appalling tragedy with as yet unnumbered dead has brought a deathly chill to this watery transit, and Stygian gloom pervades the smoky grey air. Shirley sits neatly, precisely, her legs crossed. Is she glad that she is not lying crushed and swollen at the bottom of the North Sea? It would be hard to say. Has she yet taken stock of the absurdity of her own flight, or begun to feel sorrow for her husband Cliff, whom she had once loved, and to whom this narrative has so far been less than generous? Again, it would be hard to say, hard to tell from her demeanour. And she herself could not say. Her mind is on other things. It is at the moment preoccupied with an awareness that she is being closely watched by a man at an adjacent table, who is pretending to read a book, but who is, in fact, eyeing Shirley in a manner that she would, when younger, have confidently identified as a prelude to an attempted pick-up. In the midst of death, we are in life.

  Covertly, she inspects him. He is presentable, indeed to her eyes attractive. Late forties, early fifties, a regular traveller, bored, wanting diversion, she guesses. Businessman, executive? Perhaps slightly too casually, a little too shabbily dressed. Media, civil
service, teacher of some sort? May be. These thoughts, for Shirley, were almost subconscious: a sizing up, not a placing. Grey curly hair, a large nose, a broad, good-humoured face, permanently tanned, a little overweight, dark-rimmed glasses, sitting comfortably. A touch of Mr Punch, a benign Mr Punch. She tries to read the title of his book, but cannot quite make it out. It is a large paperback with a bold but plain emerald-green cover. Non-fiction.

  Shirley recrosses her legs. She knows that when she has finished her Dubonnet, he will carefully time the draining of his own glass and offer her another as he passes her table to the bar. She will accept.

  She is interested to discover that this kind of thing is still going on, in the outside world. A cross-Channel ferry hardly seems at this moment in the century, the most romantic of meeting places; indeed, given recent circumstances, there is something ghastly, doomed, menacing in the venue. But this is not, in Shirley’s view, inappropriate. Shirley takes another sip of her diminishing Dubonnet and waits.

  Charles Headleand has acquired, through the good offices of his friend Melvyn Stacey, a visa, of a sort, to visit Baldai. He stares at it, suspiciously, inspecting its small print. Melvyn had been depressing about conditions in Baldai. ‘Journalists and reporters distinctly not welcome, from this part of the world,’ said Melvyn. ‘What does it say on your passport? Better get it changed.’

  ‘It says company director,’ said Charles, slightly hurt: for he was not a reporter. He was (or had been) an employer of reporters.

  ‘Oh well, that’ll do,’ said Melvyn, ‘that’s a phrase that covers a multitude of crimes.’

  Melvyn gave him a few names and addresses. Melvyn was of the view that Dirk Davis was dead, and was sure that Charles was going to get himself kidnapped. ‘Don’t expect me to come and get you out, my friend,’ he said, jovially, shaking Charles’s hand forcefully. ‘On your own head be it. You have been warned. And there are no consular facilities of any sort, got it? Only poor young Bicester who looks after the plumbing. It’s becoming a new kind of game of dominoes, this hostage business, and I’ve no intention of being next in line.’

  Secretly, Melvyn thought it would be poetic justice if Charles Headleand got himself kidnapped. Charles and his like had been responsible for this new hostage industry: their indiscriminating passion for live news of any sort, the nastier the better, had put all sorts of unhealthy ideas into people’s heads.

  ‘I shan’t expect a rescue,’ said Charles. ‘I know how to look after myself.’

  But now, the papers in his hand, he hesitated. He found himself curiously reluctant to ring his fellow-conspirator, Carla Davis. He found himself suddenly wondering if Dirk was still alive, after all this time: was it not a little unlikely? He walked up and down his sitting-room, pondering fretfully. The room was cluttered with the debris of various snacks: the young man who did his cleaning had, yet again, failed to turn up. Charles was beginning to wonder whether he should move into a service flat, if he could afford it. The notion of Carla’s dark muddle, which he had been intending to visit, suddenly lacked charm. He thought of Liz, in her sunny house, and sat down and rang her, on impulse. Liz, he said, I’ve got my visa, for Baldai. Oh good, she said, vaguely, as though not quite listening. Yes, he said, with what he hoped was serious emphasis, I’ll be inquiring about flights tomorrow. That’s splendid, she said, again without due attention; and then, as though she had just taken in what he had said, she changed tone, and addressed him.

  ‘But Charles,’ she said, ‘the boys will be furious. They think you’re mad. Have you told them?’

  ‘Not yet. Do you think I’m mad?’

  ‘Not really. Not more mad than most people. We’re all mad . . . Why don’t you come to supper, before you go, and tell me all about it?’

  ‘All right,’ said Charles, not ungraciously. They arranged an evening.

  ‘Don’t tell the boys,’ said Charles, as he rang off. ‘I’d rather tell the boys myself. And don’t ask them to supper, will you? I’ve had enough of being ticked off by those whippersnappers.’

  Fanny Kettle was drawing up lists. A first round of invitations had already gone out, and she had received one or two refusals, as well as several acceptances/and had now reached the stage of second choices. Some were so grand that there was not much point in asking them, which is why she had not asked them in the first place, but now, emboldened by a couple of gins, she inscribes envelopes. The Marquis of Stocklinch,’ she writes. ‘His Grace the Duke of Devonshire.’ Well, she had met them, after all, had shaken their hands and chatted them up at a university charity banquet: why not invite them? Nothing venture, nothing win. Recklessly, she added the name of that sour disdainful mandarin, Sir Martin Daintry, Professor of Romance Languages: why not? He had prestige, unpleasant and (in Ian’s view) outdated though he was. She chewed the end of her felt-tip pen. Who else? That young couple in the English Department, the Bells, they had looked quite promising. Down they go. And what about Perry Blinkhorn, from the Town Hall? In some curious way, over the past year, Perry Blinkhorn has become respectable, even fashionable: the press has stopped describing him as ‘loony’, has started to quote him as a moderate, a man of ideas, as a possible straw in the wind of a new future. Should she invite him? Ian does not like him, but then Ian lives in the past (albeit the fashionable up-to-date past), not in the future. Fanny ponders Perry Blinkhorn. Perry Blinkhorn is not her type. He lacks style, he is earnest, and his hair looks as though he cuts it himself with the kitchen scissors: his accent is irredeemably Yorkshire, and she suspects him of Low Church leanings. But he may be a coming man. She wonders if he ever has a drink? He does not look like a drinking man, but he clearly does not object to wine being poured in the Town Hall. Maybe it would be interesting, to see what happened to Perry Blinkhorn if he got a drink or two inside him? She smiles to herself and down goes his name.

  The thought of Blinkhorn leads her to Alix and Brian Bowen, whom she has not yet invited, although she seems to remember that she mentioned her party to Alix at the do at the Holroyd Gallery. Perhaps she’d better ask them. Are the Bowens smart, or not? She does not know. Alix dresses very badly, but she is a good talker, and Brian has published novels and is kind to the elderly. One needs such people to pad a party. And after all, Tony and Sam are friends. Yes, down go the names of Alix and Brian. And what about Beaver, Howard Beaver, the most famous son of Northam? Is he past party-going? Well, why not ask him anyway? It does no harm to ask. She has never met Beaver, but that does not deter her. Down he goes.

  Susie Enderby lies on her bed, her eyes closed, listening to Cosi fan tutte and wondering what to wear for Fanny Kettle’s party. She hopes that Clive will agree to go with her. She thinks she hopes that Clive will agree to go with her. Clive has been behaving oddly for this last few days, an oddity she connects with the disappearance of that Harper woman. But then, she, Susie Enderby, has been behaving oddly herself, in a way that is quite out of character, or quite out of the character she had thought she had settled into in her adult life.

  She has been seduced by Fanny Kettle. No, not in that way, no, nothing of that sort, for she and Fanny, even in the worst childhood naughtiness, had always been resolutely, nay, excessively heterosexual, in their fantasies, in their experiments. But she had been seduced, by Fanny, back into these memories. Fanny seems not at all ashamed of them, and it is her lack of shame that has seduced Susie. Fanny seems to think that sexual promiscuity is both natural and normal. Susie does not know what to think, is lost, slightly, as she lies there on her bed. She moans, slightly, as Ferrando besieges Fiordiligi with an impetuous torrent of syllables, a surging outpouring of rapid rhyme. She moans, and touches her own body. She touches, wonderingly, her breasts, her thighs. She does not touch her own cunt. She dare not. She dare not even think its name.

  ‘Io ardo, e l’ardor mio non è più effetto d’un amor virtuoso: è smania, affanno, rimorso, pentimento, leggerezza, perfidia e tradimento!’ laments the half-guilty Fiordiligi, as she breaks i
nto her penitent aria. ‘Remorse, regret, frivolity, perfidy, treachery!’ All foreknown, all foreseen, all familiar.

  Susie breathes lightly, a shallow light breathing. It is midafternoon. The children will soon be home from school, collected by the Swiss au pair girl. They will be wanting tea, chat, games, talk about their homework. A restlessness runs though Susie’s well-preserved, under-used thirty-seven-year-old body. Her skin is smooth, taut, silk. She feels she might softly explode, as she lies there in her champagne silk underwear and her light oyster-grey wrap. She knows she is beautiful, desirable, desiring. She is wasting away. She will buy some new beads, some new pink coral beads, for her new grey-brown pink silk dress. Her hair is now tinted a soft pink-brown, a grey-brown-strawberry-pink. She will wear the new beads to Fanny’s party.

  The telephone by her bed rings. Susie shuts her eyes and listens to its ringing. She does not answer. She holds her breath. It stops. Fiordiligi sings on. ‘Per pietà, perdona, perdona, per pietà!’

  The children will be home in ten minutes. Heavily, with immense effort, Susie swings her mind round to worrying about her children, who seem to inhabit a different universe from the one occupied by Fanny Kettle. The thought of them disturbs, oppresses her. Her very existence seems to be a troubling betrayal of them, of their eager little faces, their gapped teeth, their freckles, their scabbed knees, their satchels full of projects on dinosaurs and wildlife and Roman Britain, their squabbles, their pleading for a pony of their own. They are far too little to have a pony, Clive says, rightly: they will have to make do with a couple of hamsters and a kitten. Susie once briefly had a pony. A little strawberry roan, called Lightfoot. She had been stabled at a farm out towards Gonersall.