A Natural Curiosity. Margaret Drabble

for schoolgirls. But society condoned rather than condemned her curiosity; her mother was revealed as a woman of unnaturally high principle. Mrs Thatcher had posed upstairs for her image here, and so had Bob Geldof, and Kenneth Kaunda and Marie Antoinette (twice, in her case, alive and dead). They’d all condoned it. Alix wandered on, up, towards the daylight. The Hall of Fame, the Chamber of Horrors. Snigger, snigger, have your photo taken with the famous, with J. R. or Red Ken or Marilyn. Oranges and Lemons, say the Bells of St Clement’s. Here comes a chopper to chop off your head. Oh God, the gruesome panic of those party games, the little clutching fingers, the human trap . . . and here, at last, was Baker Street, sanity, traffic, human faces, newspapers, pigeons, double-decker buses in a splendid convoy, tourists, touts, ice-cream vans, gift shops, bureaux de change, roasting chestnuts – for a moment, Alix wildly loved the 1980s.

      Paul Whitmore is carefully copying in fine pencil the famous outlines of the bronze horse mask found at Stanwick. Probably a chariot ornament, the text tells him. The sad blind horse face stares in curved Celtic lines. Paul is a poor draughtsman, he is dissatisfied with his handiwork, he rubs it out and begins again. Bronze, dull bronze, buried, now bright again. The last stand of Venutius. The triumph of the Romans. It has square pierced ears, the bronze mask, holes by which it had once been attached to long-rotted wood. In his mother’s salon, Mrs Murphy had pierced the ears of the young women of Toxetter.

      He rubs out, begins again, discards. The enigmatic horse stares. Heads had hung in rows from hooks. Pigs’ heads. Not horses’ heads. The British do not eat horse. They do not even feed horse to their dogs and cats. Horse is totem, taboo, sacred. But there had been jokes about horsemeat, unkind jokes in the little town. Horsemeat. Whoresmeat. Somebody had made such a pun. He hadn’t known what it had meant, had make the mistake of asking his father, over tea. Had been clipped over the ear, shut out of the house, while they screamed and ranted at one another. Near the end, that had been.

      He turns the pages of Alix’s book. There is a bronze mask boss from the River Thames at Wandsworth. Alix Bowen had lived in Wandsworth, she tells him. Sometimes she describes her life there. She describes the house that is now let to a visiting professor from Australia. She describes the neighbourhood, the shops, compares notes with North Kensington, where Paul Whitmore and Esther Breuer had lived.

      Paul Whitmore does not know the region where he is now imprisoned: he knows it only through books. He knows London, where he earned the sobriquet of ‘The Horror of Harrow Road’, and he knows the small town in the north Midlands, of the hairdressing salon and the butcher’s shop, where he was known as Piggy Paul the Porker (although he is not and never has been fat). He has drifted in other places (a few months in Manchester, a year in Stoke-on-Trent), but he has become a Londoner, a drifting Londoner, a lost Londoner. Now he is nowhere, in limbo, in a coffin. He does not know Northam. He has never been there. It is to him a fictitious city, a city of the mind. Alix describes it to him sometimes. He cannot visualize it well. He knows nobody else who lives in it. Alix is his sole personal source of information about Northam and Leeds.

      He turns the pages of the book, to the paragraphs on Celtic ritual and the impact of the Romans on the Old Religion. A wooden rubbed armless old god from Ralaghan, County Cavan, stares at him expressively, reproachfully, balefully. He reads: ‘A grove there was, untouched by men’s hands from ancient times, whose interlacing boughs enclosed a space of darkness and cold shade, and banished the sunlight from above . . . gods were worshipped there with savage rites, the altars were heaped with hideous offerings and every tree was sprinkled with human gore . . . The images of the gods, grim and rude, were uncouth blocks, formed of felled tree trunks . . . The people never resorted thither to worship at close quarters but left the place to the gods.’ A quotation from Lucan, the poet. Not Lucan, the murderer.

      Paul Whitmore has made of himself a hideous offering. Here he is, offered up. But no one can see him. He is absent, obscure. No light reaches him. No one looks at him, save his fellow-prisoners, the prison officers and the blue eyes of Alix Bowen. Is this what he had wanted? He does not know. He knows there had been a need for sacrifice, for appeasement. The gods had wanted a sacrifice. But of what nature? Had it been accepted? One does not worship at close quarters. It is not safe to go too near the sacred grove.

      As he sits there, chewing the end of a pencil, the people of Britain are still in the process of making him up, of inventing him. He had offered himself up to their imagination, as he had offered up his victims. What will they make of him, of them? Will they fail him, themselves? Sometimes he thinks that Alix Bowen will be able to invent him, that her story will make sense, that it will persuade the newspapers and the courts and the people. Sometimes he thinks she is incapable of doing anything of the sort.

      Paul Whitmore would like to ask Alix Bowen to try to contact his mother. He has not heard from his mother since she ran away, fifteen years ago. He knows that in similar cases parents have been retraced, interrogated, their memoirs have been purchased for vast sums by the tabloids.

      So far, he has not dared to suggest this course of action to Alix. He does not quite know how to bring the subject up. It is a little delicate. He is hoping that she might think of the idea for herself. On her next visit, perhaps, he will drop another hint. By months, her visits are measured. He will wait for the next moon.

      It is early March, and daffodils bloom in London window boxes. A faint false spring deceives the buds, and trees turn bronze, pink, lime green. Liz Headleand is lunching with her old friend and enemy Ivan Warner, as she does once or twice a year. They gossip. On Ivan’s part, at least, seriously, professionally. Ivan is a gossip columnist. He likes to pick Liz’s brains. He is always hoping that Liz will present him with a psychiatric scoop. As one of her specialities has been the problems associated with the reuniting of adopted children with their true parents, maybe she will one day find for him an abandoned princeling, a reclaimed cabinet minister, a film star’s rejected babe, a tycoon’s incestuous marriage with his own daughter? The plot possibilities in Liz’s line of business are endless, he reminds her, as he plies her with Pinot Chardonnay and admires the little pastry fish swimming in the saffron sauce of her ivory sole.

      ‘No,’ says Liz, ‘nothing. Nothing exciting at all. Sorry.’

      She smiles at him, amiably. It is only a game. He knows she will not tell. Her heart softens to Ivan, over the years. She used to think him a dangerous little man, but time has mellowed him or strengthened her, she is not sure which, and she no longer half fears him. She indulges him. And he her.

      ‘I had heard,’ said Ivan, in that inimitably suggestive way of his, ‘that we were to be honoured with the sight of you on television? Can this be true, I asked myself? I had thought you didn’t approve of the television.’

      ‘Who told you?’ asked Liz, disconcerted despite herself.

      ‘I can’t remember,’ said Ivan.

      ‘Well,’ said Liz. ‘I did agree to be on this panel thing. That’s all.’

      ‘I wonder why?’ insinuates Ivan.

      ‘I don’t know why,’ says Liz. ‘I mean, why not?’ But she also wonders why. She admires, yet again, his sense of her weak spots, her Achilles’ heel.

      ‘It’s just not your style, that’s all,’ says Ivan.

      ‘No, I suppose not,’ says Liz. ‘But they were very pressing. And I thought it was time somebody talked some sense.’

      ‘So we shall have the pleasure of seeing you talking sense?’

      ‘I hope so,’ says Liz, briskly, staring hard at his inquiring small black well-hidden eyes.

      ‘Well,’ says Ivan, ‘you’re a brave woman.’

      ‘But of course,’ says Liz.

      ‘I didn’t know you knew Christopher?’ says Ivan, gently probing, cutting in half a green bean with the edge of his flat fork.

      Liz’s mind races. Christopher? Does she know a Christopher? Ah, yes, she has got it. Christopher What’s-his-name, newly appointed Director of Programmes for PPS. What is his name? A false trail. An utterly false trail. So that’s