A Natural Curiosity. Margaret Drabble

meat is against Paul’s principles.

      Paul Whitmore spells it out, as he conjures memories of sides of beef hanging from hooks, of pigs’ heads grinning, of trays of kidneys and livers and lights. These memories fuse suddenly with the image of a woman, sitting in a chair, gazing at herself in a mirror. Her hair stands out from her head in a shining halo of stiff silver spikes, some six inches long. A fevered smell of burning fills the room.

      Paul Whitmore shakes his head, dully, like an animal on which a fly has settled, and the images separate and dissolve. Doggedly, he continues his letter to the Governor.

      ‘Last week,’ he writes, laboriously, ‘I had potatoes with tinned peas, twice . . .’ Paul Whitmore leads a sedate, solitary life in prison, protected from his fellows by Rule 43.

      Alix Bowen, driving home towards her husband Brian and her son Sam, bottles for the Bottle Bank clinking merrily in her car boot, is glad she does not have to look forward to a supper of tinned peas. Tinned peas had been one of the torments of her childhood. They are one of the few foodstuffs she still finds repulsive. Repulsive pulse. She does not blame P. Whitmore for finding them unpalatable, but then, if he’s so fussy about what he eats, he shouldn’t have put himself in a position where he can’t pick and choose, should he? Refrain from Murder and Eat what you Want.

      It is dark now, and she cannot see the white landscape. The river running through the little town above the prison had been fringed with slabs of ice. How the Romans must have hated it, up here. P. Whitmore’s book claimed that they imported vast quantities of wine, olives, figs, mulberries, raisins and a pickled fish sauce made of mashed sprats, pepper, lovage, caraway, honey and vinegar. But these luxuries probably hadn’t reached them up here, the legionaries pitted against the Brigantes probably had to make do with barley and lentils and cabbage and lard. The tinned peas of yesteryear. Or was that view of the diet of Roman legions out of date now? Hadn’t somebody recently proved that the Roman legions, even in the far north, ate quite a lot of meat? A dim memory of an article in The TLS flutters in Alix’s mind. Is nothing safe, is all knowledge to be revised, will not the dead lie quietly with their stomachs full of cabbage, do we have to chop them up and anatomize them again and again and again?

      All sorts of delicacies had reached Northam and Brigantia since Alix’s wartime cabbage childhood. Now one could buy fresh coriander, cumin, mangoes, Chinese leaves, and more than one variety of mushroom. Despite the decay of the manufacturing industries, despite the slump.

      Alix ponders privation. She wonders if P. Whitmore expects her to slip him condoms full of heroin, which she gathers are all the rage amongst the criminal population these days, or whether he has decided she’s a dead loss as far as that kind of thing goes, and good only for bars of chocolate and books. P. Whitmore does not seem interested in drugs, though he had in his time been a heavy drinker. Vodka and peppermint had pepped him up on his night sorties.

      Alix wouldn’t know heroin if she saw it. Once, years ago, when her elder son Nicholas had just left home, she discovered while clearing out his bedroom a carefully secreted old Maxwell House coffee jar containing some strange white powdered substance. She had stared at it with suspicion. What was it? Was it illegal? She did not trust Nicholas at all. She sniffed it, and finally, greatly daring, put her finger in and conveyed a speck to her tongue.

      Detergent. Unmistakable detergent. Daz, or perhaps Persil.

      How deeply law-abiding I have been, thinks Alix to herself, as she drives homewards towards baked potatoes and, she hopes, a nicely roasted guinea fowl, with some spinach purée from the freezer. And, as she drives, pondering her willingness, nay eagerness, to see the upsetting P. Whitmore, a new lump of memory detaches itself from the frozen forgotten backward stretches, and bumps downstream into the light. As a child, as a nice, timid obsequious law-abiding deputy headmaster’s daughter, she had been haunted by the idea that one day she would find herself in the dock accused of a terrible crime which she had not committed. For years, this notion had haunted her, for years she had prepared her defence, her moving pleas for acquittal, her heart-rending reproaches upon conviction. Why? What on earth had all that been about? Alix smiled to herself at the absurdity of her childhood fantasies. What on earth had caused them? Had her mother unjustly blamed her for eating a slice of cake? Had her sister unjustly blamed her for losing her French Grammar? Had she been found masturbating?

      Heroic courtroom dramas she had staged in her head. Innocent Alix Doddridge, a mere waif of a girl, accused of – of what? Murder, infanticide, treason? Alix could hardly recall. Nor could she now remember whether the essence of these daydreams was that she felt innocent or felt guilty. She suspected that she must have felt guilty, or the fantasies would not have been so elaborate, indeed would not have arisen at all.

      Paul Whitmore did not feel guilty, although he admitted guilt. Alix felt guilty when she was not, and knew she was not.

      Alix added this perception to the conundrum, drew this new line into her equation.

      Paul Whitmore was not getting much psychiatric help at Porston. The chap that he saw once a week sounded a fool. Alix had, by and large, a perhaps exaggerated respect for the psychiatric profession, fostered by her friendship with Liz Headleand and Liz Headleand’s first husband Edgar Lintot, both people possessed, in Alix’s view, of compassion and common sense. This chap up at Porston, from P.W.’s account, did not seem to have much of either. Though that doesn’t mean he’s not a professional. Maybe he knows what he’s doing, after all, thinks Alix Bowen.

      But she doubts it.

      Alix sees herself in the dock, pleading her case. She is convicted, perhaps, of participating in the Human Condition. Is that it?

      Alix gnaws on, like the stubborn Utah mouse.

      Nature and nurture. She would like to acquit Mankind, and if she can acquit P. Whitmore, then she can acquit absolutely anybody. Anybody and everybody. Nurture and nature. Alix cannot help believing in the nurture argument, as the nature argument is so unfair.

      Why on earth should Paul Whitmore have been born a murderer?

      Or made one, come to that?

      Alix feels it is very, very unfair.

      The one thing she cannot believe is that Paul Whitmore, of his own free (God-given?) will, chose to hack the heads off various young women by and near the Harrow Road, and chose thus to end up eating tinned peas in Porston Prison. She is sorry, but that she simply cannot believe. And that is my last word on this subject for tonight, she says aloud to the empty passenger seat of her car, as she enters the yellow fluorescent glare of the suburbs of Northam, and sees the steep hillside of home.

      ‘Rat a tat tat, Who is that, Only grandma’s pussycat,’ chants Alix’s friend Liz Headleand, to the step-granddaughter bouncing on her knee. The baby laughs, obligingly, but Liz has forgotten the rest of the rhyme. It is a long time since she bounced a baby on her knee. ‘Rat a tat tat,’ she repeats. The baby does not seem to mind repetition. Liz is delighted to have a step-grandchild. It is about time. Jonathan, her stepson, the father of this child, is into his thirties. Liz had begun to think that none of her stepchildren or children would ever reproduce. Something had put them off family life and babies – her own behaviour, their father’s behaviour, the overcrowding of Britain, the violence of city life, the nuclear threat, the decline of Empire? Any or all of these things could have done it. But Jonathan and his silly wife Xanthe had overcome these hesitations, or else the Life Force had overcome them independently: either way, there bounced and wriggled young Cornelia Headleand, triumphant, in her fancy little smocked and embroidered dress.

      Xanthe does dress the child oddly, Liz thinks. But then, Xanthe dresses oddly herself. All bows and ribbons and bits of glitter on her stockings. Liz thought all that kind of thing had gone out decades ago, but she supposes it could have gone in and gone out again several times while she wasn’t looking. Do other people really wear these funny balloony puffed up Bo-Peep very short skirts? Liz has never seen them around anywhere. Liz thinks Xanthe is a bit batty. Yes, that’s the word for her. Batty. Those bright eyes, those shiny dark-red lips, those very white teeth, that strange vacant giggle.