A Natural Curiosity. Margaret Drabble

atrocious?’

      ‘Well, that’s what I’m trying to work out,’ Alix had said, closing the Tacitus, getting up to put on the kettle.

      Yes. P. Whitmore was very interested in the ancient Britons, and knew quite a lot about prehistory. Indeed, Alix wondered if the book she had bought him was perhaps a little too easy for him, a little too popular in tone? But it was new, and covered the new excavations by Ian Kettle at Eastwold, and had new speculations about the relationship of the Parisi and the Brigantes. And some very attractive photographs of Celtic mirrors and shields. And an authoritative introduction by an important professor, a real professor.

      ‘If it’s not too easy for me, surely it can’t be too easy for him?’ asked Alix, doubtfully, returning with a pot of coffee.

      ‘Don’t be absurd, my darling,’ said Brian. ‘He’s lucky to get any book at all. I think it’s a perfectly acceptable book. I’d be quite pleased if somebody gave me such a nice book. I think you’ve done him proud.’

      And so, really, did Alix.

      So why is Alix Bowen in such a good mood, as she drives across the top of Houndsback Moor?

      Alix Bowen is in a good mood partly because her protégé, Paul Whitmore, is offering her intellectual and psychological stimulus of an unusually invigorating nature. He has come to her by chance, but it is almost as if she had invented him, as an illustration of whatever it is she wishes to discover about human nature. At the age of fifty, Alix had come to recognize that for some reason as yet obscure to her, she, an exceptionally law-abiding and mild-mannered and conscientious citizen, has always been peculiarly interested in prisons, discipline, conviction, violence and the criminal mentality. Is it perhaps because she is so ‘nice’ that she is so intrigued? Does her interest express her other darker ever-repressed self? Will that repressed self break out one day wildly or can it remain for ever latent, as, apparently, can the aggressive nature of Onychomys leucogaster, the stocky stubborn mouse of Utah (see study by L. D. Clark)? It is getting a little late for it to break out now. She is already fifty-one, inexorably heading for fifty-two. Or maybe it is precisely because she definitively lacks this element in her psyche that she is drawn towards it, and has spent so much of her adult life teaching in prisons and studying the deviant behaviour of female offenders? As though in a search for her own wholeness? Or in search of a refutation of the concept of original sin?

      Alix does not know. But she does realize that in P. Whitmore she has stumbled upon an uncannily appropriate subject of inquiry. He fits her queries geometrically. He is like a theorem. When she has measured him, she will know the answer to herself and to the whole matter. The Nature of Man. Original Sin. Evil and Good. It is all to be studied, there, in captive P. Whitmore, towards whom she now drives, bearing her propitiatory copy of The Queen, the Rebel and Rome: A Study of the Resistance of the Brigantes AD 40–AD 79. It is not entirely coincidental that Porston Prison is sited in the heartland of the ancient territory of the Brigantes. The interest of Paul Whitmore and Alix Bowen in the Brigantes has been much stimulated by the location of the prison and by the recent Yorkshire Television programme on the finds of Ian Kettle’s dig. Had the prison been in Newport, or Colchester, other aspects of the historical past might well have captured their attention, other tribes might have solicited their sympathy: but then, of course, they would not have been together to be so captivated.

      Paul Whitmore is serving a life sentence. He was convicted of the murder of four women and one man, although he claims to have killed at least one more. The last of the corpses was that of an old friend and professional acquaintance of Alix’s, a young woman called Jilly Fox, whose severed head was discovered in Alix’s car in a shabby street in North Kensington. Paul Whitmore was in the habit of decapitating his victims. He did not know why, or so he told Alix, but Alix was in the process of working it out.

      Paul Whitmore had become something of a folk monster, because of the sensational nature of his crimes. His personality, however, did little to stimulate that sensation. He was a dull-voiced, monotonous, studious young man, not a flamboyant monster. The Horror of Harrow Road (for such had been his sobriquet) proved something of a disappointment, to those in search of La Bête Humaine. Even the women’s lobby found him rather dull. There was not much to get at, in Paul Whitmore. No obvious hatred of women, no Ripper-like despising of prostitutes. The crimes had not been sexual, or not obviously so. Members of the anti-racism lobby had slightly more to build on, as most of the victims (although not Jilly Fox) had been black, but they had not managed to build much, for even they conceded that maybe the victims had been black for geographical reasons, because Paul Whitmore happened to live at the wrong end of Ladbroke Grove. They suggested that the police might have been more active had the victims been white, pointed out that it was only after the peculiarly noticeable murder of the white Jilly Fox that P. Whitmore had been apprehended, but these arguments did not carry much conviction, even to themselves. P. Whitmore remained unclaimed, unwanted.

      Alix Bowen had kept quiet about her association with him, her claiming of him. She did not fancy poisonous letters from either lobby, or from the general public, which would, en masse, though not human soul by human soul, have liked to see the Horror hung, drawn and quartered and mouldering on Tower Bridge, rather than visited by Alix Bowen bearing an illustrated book on Roman Britain costing £9.95.

      She talked about him to Brian, and to her friend Liz Headleand, and to her employer, the ancient poet Howard Beaver, the Grand Old Man of Yorkshire letters. The ancient poet was way beyond all moral judgement, and was possessed, in the last evenings of his life, with what Alix considered an admirably lively curiosity about Paul Whitmore.

      The ancient poet would listen, fascinated, as Alix described what she had learned of Paul’s childhood and background. The father was a butcher, the mother a hairdresser, in a small town in the north Midlands. When the mother ran off with a lorry driver, Paul had been taken into care for a while, and then returned to his father. He had been taken on a school outing at the age of eleven to see the Bog Man of Buller. He had become obsessed by death and human sacrifice. He had devoured books on the Druids and Stonehenge, on the Celts and the Romans, on the old gods. History had been his favourite subject, although he had also, less dangerously, enjoyed botany. He had no doubt seemed a docile pupil, with a good future ahead. A quiet boy, who liked to avoid the playground’s rough and tumble, who liked to keep his nose in a book.

      Beaver too had been, was interested in ancient Britain. He had even written a poem about the Bog Man of Buller. He was very interested in Paul Whitmore’s interests.

      He made Alix find the poem, read it aloud to her, noisily. It was an uncollected piece, originally published in Collusion. ‘You can read it to your murderer, if you like,’ he offered, helpfully, provocatively.

      ‘No thank you,’ said Alix, primly. ‘I don’t think he’d like it. He’s not into Modernism. He likes Swinburne.’

      Reading Swinburne, alone, in his lonely flat. Dusky ladies, delicious tortures, Our Lady of Pain.

      Paul did not, in fact, read Swinburne, but he might have done, reflected Alix. As she invented P. Whitmore.

      The ancient poet found the whole subject very entertaining.

      A poet and a murderer. Odd company I now keep, thought Alix to herself jubilantly as she traversed the sodden high flatland, beneath a winter sky.

      Ancient crimes arise to declare themselves, to invite detection. Graves weep blood, sinners return to the fatal scene, the primal crime. And Alix Bowen once again finds herself in front of Paul Whitmore, in the visiting room, with its strange huge view. This Victorian building is so designed that once inside, once through the clanging gates and the turning of the keys, one cannot see the walls and watch-towers that surround it. There is an illusion of freedom, of space, of being islanded upon the moor. Not imprisoned, but stranded, with all perspectives opening, helplessly, widely, impersonally, meaninglessly, for ever.

      Alix is entranced and appalled by this view, but looks down from it to Paul Whitmore, who is inspecting Alix’s gift.

      ‘Thank you very much,’ he says, politely.

      ‘It’s