A Natural Curiosity. Margaret Drabble

      

      Dame Margaret Drabble was born in Sheffield in 1939 and was educated at Newnham College, Cambridge. She is the author of eighteen novels including A Summer Bird-Cage, The Millstone, The Peppered Moth, The Red Queen, The Sea Lady, The Pure Gold Baby and most recently, the highly acclaimed The Dark Flood Rises. She has also written biographies, screenplays and was the editor of the Oxford Companion to English Literature. She was appointed CBE in 1980, and made DBE in the 2008 Honours list. She was also awarded the 2011 Golden PEN Award for a Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature. She is married to the biographer Michael Holroyd

      ‘Absorbing and thought-provoking’ Sunday Times

      ‘A remarkable mixture of . . . Compelling narrative, psychological insight, generous human portrayal, acute observation, humour, horror, beauty and disgust’ Times Literary Supplement

      ‘Confident and marvellously accomplished new novel’ London Review of Books

      ‘One of the most thought-provoking and intellectually challenging writers around’ Financial Times

      ‘One of the most versatile and accomplished authors of her generation’ New Yorker

      ‘One of our foremost women writers’ Guardian

      ‘The novels brim with sharply observed life and the author’s seemingly infinite sympathy for “ordinary women”’ JOYCE CAROL OATES, New Yorker

      First published as an eBook in Great Britain in 2014 by Canongate Books Ltd,

      14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

       canongate.co.uk

      Copyright © Margaret Drabble, 1989

      The moral right of the author has been asserted

      First published in Great Britain in 1989 by Viking, Penguin Books Ltd

      British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

      eBook ISBN 978 1 78211 439 0

       Friday, 2 January 1987

      A low pale lemon grey sun hung over the winter moor. It swam, haloed, in the grey mist. The road climbed gently into obscurity. Dimly on either side appeared straw-grey tufts of long grasses, pale reeds, patches of dwindling, lingering snow. Grey shades, yellow shades, a soft damp white light. Alix Bowen gazed ahead, exalted. She was on her way to see her murderer. Her heart sang, in the cold landscape, as she drove towards the flat summit of the moor.

      Alix Bowen goes to see her murderer quite regularly. This will be her first visit for a month, her Christmas gift, her New Year’s gift. Some of her friends disapprove of what could now, Alix realizes, be described as an obsession, but most of them are too polite to comment. Her husband Brian says nothing to deter her. He smiles indulgently, anxiously, as he listens to her stories. If he thinks her interest excessive, or unnatural (which it is, and he must), he does not say so.

      Alix’s old friend Liz Headleand is less restrained. ‘You’re barmy, Alix,’ Liz would comment, from time to time, over the phone, as Alix reports her murderer’s latest intimations, her own most recent speculations. But then, Alix tells herself, Liz is probably jealous. Liz, a professional psychotherapist, probably thinks it quite wrong that an amateur meddler like Alix should have acquired such easy and privileged access to so notorious a criminal. Liz had missed her own chance to befriend the murderer. She, like Alix, had been in the same building with him, had been more or less held hostage by the police on his behalf: if Liz had thought quicker then, had acted quicker then, he could by now have been Liz’s murderer, and Liz herself could be driving to visit him across this lonely moor.

      The murderer had come Alix’s way, without much intervention on her part. He had followed her, as it were. He and Alix were inextricably, mystically linked. Well, that was one way of looking at it. It was not Alix’s, whatever her friends might suspect. But it was rather odd, reflected Alix, as she drove along through the mist at a steady fifty miles an hour, that he should have turned up here, more or less on her doorstep. She had moved north from London a couple of years ago, and he had followed her, though less voluntarily. It took Alix under an hour to drive from her north Northam suburban home to reach the desolate top-security prison which now housed Paul Whitmore. Not exactly her doorstep, but near enough: in the old days, when she had worked in London, it had taken her at least an hour and a half to drive across the city to work, whereas here, up here in the north, you could be out of town in ten minutes, in the depths of the landscape in twenty, and safely arrived at the iron gates of Porston Prison in fifty. If that’s where you wanted to be.

      ‘O come, O come, Ema-a-anuel, Redeem thy captive I-i-israel, That into exile dre-e-ear is gone, Far from the sight of Go-o-od’s dear son,’ sang Alix, cheerfully, as the white mist parted for her. She had the illusion of moving in a small patch of light, her own small pocket of clarity. She took it with her, it moved with her. The pale sun loomed. The horizons were invisible, but Alix knew they were there, would be there, and that she herself would see them again. The sleeping place of the sun, near the freezing of the sea. As the Ancients put it. And the sun indeed seems to slumber, up here in its dim haze, in its cold thrall.

      Alix had brought a book as a Christmas present for her murderer. A new, illustrated book about Roman Britain and the resistance of the Brigantes. She had been browsing in it the night before, captivated by tales of Client Queen Cartimandua’s deals with the Romans, by the stubborn resistance of her divorced husband Venutius. Colourful stuff, and colourfully narrated. It would make a good television mini-series, the story of Cartimandua. The treacherous Celtic queen, gold-torqued, magnificent, betraying her people for the civilization and comforts of the Romans: the rejected consort, hiding out in the snow with his bands of warriors. North and South, the Two Nations. One could make it topical, surely – a hint in the portrayal of Cartimandua of the Prime Minister, duplicitous Britannia, striking deals with a powerful America, abandoning the ancient culture of her own folk? Those stiff hair styles would surely lend themselves well to allusion, to analogue.

      Alix had become intrigued, excited, the night before, and had got out her battered old purple Penguin Tacitus to look up the story, and yes, there it was, most aptly prefigured. ‘And so Agricola trained the sons of chiefs in the liberal arts . . . the wearing of our national dress came into favour . . . and so, little by little, the Britons were led on to the amenities that make vice agreeable: arcades, baths, and sumptuous banquets. They called such novelties “civilization”, when they were in reality only a feature of their enslavement.’

      She read this passage aloud to Brian, who nodded agreement: Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, blue jeans, jacuzzis . . . yes, that was surely what Tacitus had in mind. But, continued Brian, mildly, he didn’t suppose that the Brigantes and the Iceni and the Silures were very nice people, really, either. Hadn’t they burned people alive in wicker cages? Hadn’t they consulted the gods by inspecting the twisting human entrails of their tortured and sacrificed victims?

      ‘A bit like P. Whitmore, you mean?’ said Alix.

      ‘Well, yes. Not unlike P. Whitmore.’

      ‘I think those are just atrocity stories,’ said Alix. ‘Roman propaganda against the native population. Recent research seems to indicate that maybe the ancient Britons weren’t even very war-like. They were just peaceful farmers. That’s the newest theory.’

      ‘Really? And the figure of 60,000 Romans put to the sword by Boudicca is just a historical figment too, is it?’

      ‘I don’t know,’ said Alix. ‘I think that’s a different period. And anyway, how can they possibly have known? How can they have counted?’

      She paused, reflecting that P. Whitmore said he could not quite remember how many of the inhabitants of North