A Natural Curiosity. Margaret Drabble

recognizes that probably Xanthe Headleand is quite the thing. In whatever circle it is that she and Jonathan move in.

      She’s not very good with the baby, Liz thinks. Doesn’t know how to keep her happy, holds her awkwardly, looks nervous when she cries. At home, Xanthe has a nanny for the baby. I mustn’t interfere, says Liz to herself, as she marvels at the child’s soft blooming skin. No wonder mothers want to devour their babies with kisses, feel the urge to gobble them all up. Cannibal mothers.

      Liz had been, just before Christmas, to the archaeology exhibition at the British Museum, ‘New Views of the Past’, and had stared, along with all the other morbid sightseers, at the strangely preserved, smooth, brown, plump, patterned immortal skin of Lindow Man. Bard or Druid, victim or sacrifice. Ageless, timeless, rescued from the bog.

      Liz is withering, the veins stand up on the back of her hands, and she is even developing dark freckly spots. She is putting on weight, but she is also withering. It is an interesting process, and she watches it with an amused fascination.

      The baby bounces. She is soft, seductive, delicious. She smells of milk and biscuit and sweet breath.

      At the far end of the room, sitting together on the window seat, Jonathan and his brother Alan are in conference. Liz’s tabby cat lies on the rug before the fireplace. A great gold-rimmed jug of yellow chrysanthemums, curved overbred formal globes, stands in the fireplace. Their acrid perfume mingles with the smell of baby, with Alan’s Gauloise, with the sweeter scent from a small cut-glass vase of freesias, with the general smell of dust and room and home and cat and London. The lights are warm and low. A charming domestic scene.

      But the conference is serious. Jonathan and Alan speak in low, worried voices. The men of the family. They are discussing their father Charles, who has, they think, gone mad. Alan runs his fingers through his hair, Jonathan leans forward intently, gesticulating wildly as he speaks. Alan shrugs. Alan is laid back. Mostly.

      Liz cannot hear what they are saying. The baby is getting tired, soon she will summon Xanthe to take her away.

      Liz is not so worried about her ex-husband Charles Headleand. She has spent enough of her life worrying about him, because of him. He can look after himself. Or if he can’t, well, that’s too bad.

      The baby struggles, and makes herself into an angry, tired shapeless shape. Liz joggles her, soothes her, rests her over her shoulder, sings gently in a dull undertone. Cornelia wriggles, settles, wriggles, sucks her thumb.

      Liz has always been good with babies. She is glad she has not lost the knack.

      Liz’s thoughts move to her friend Alix Bowen, who had telephoned earlier that week to say she might come up to London soon. She feels vaguely aggrieved with Alix, and cannot think why. Is it something to do, as Alix supposes, with the murderer, in whom Alix takes such a proprietorial interest? Liz sometimes feels like saying that some of her patients are just as mad and just as interesting as Alix’s murderer, and that if she were to tell all . . . Yes, there may be an element of that, but it is also likely that Liz resents Alix’s having moved out of reach – and resents the fact that, having moved, Alix seems quite happy, and even occasionally delivers herself of comparisons between Northam and London in which London comes out badly. Sour grapes, of course, Liz says to herself, but nevertheless it is irritating. Liz has been deserted by both her close women friends, both her friends of college days, whom she used to see regularly, on whom she relied for gossip and support and provocation, for reading lists and shared memories. Alix had gone north, and the third of what was once a triumvirate, art historian Esther Breuer, had gone to live in Bologna. Liz has been left alone, holding the fort of London single-handed.

      The baby settles, slumps, nestles, and begins to breathe evenly and deeply. Damn, she’s gone to sleep, says Liz to herself: I should have got Xanthe to take her away, now I’m lumbered.

      Liz ponders the subject of infantile sexuality. The oral phase. Cornelia has an engaging way of sucking not her thumb but her knuckle.

      Although Liz does not yet know it, 1987 is to be the Year of Child Sex Abuse. For some years now the subject has been arousing interest and controversy amongst the professionals, but in 1987 it will catch the press and the popular imagination like a fever. 1987 will be a psychotic year, the year of abnormality, of Abuse, of the Condom. Perhaps it is already possible to detect the early symptoms.

      And as if in anticipation, Liz sits there rocking her step-granddaughter and wondering what normality is. Is this it? This comfortable bourgeois room, with flowers?

      If one reads ancient texts – the Bible, the Koran, Sophocles, the Veda – is one not sometimes led to suspect that the whole of human history is nothing but a history of deepening psychosis? That something went wrong at the beginning of human nature, of human nurture, that humanity mistook itself fatally, for ever? False revelations, hoax riddles, grinning sphinxes from prehistory. Murder, arson, pillage, savagery.

      The baby sleeps and sucks, her pearly dewy eyelids a pale veined blue.

      A pity one can’t reinvent the whole thing from infancy, thinks Liz, and get it right. A world without violence, murder, aggression. Some of her calling believed that if you brought babies up properly, if you loved them and fed them and weaned them correctly, there would be no more Paul Whitmores, no more Hitlers or Pol Pots, no more wars: Liz does not believe this. She thinks this is simplistic. The whole thing has got quite out of hand. It is irreversible. Abnormality is in-built, by now.

      Alix, up in Northam, returning again to Tacitus, reaches the same conclusion. Tacitus strikes her as sane. Now what does she mean by this? He is reporting mass historic madnesses that make Paul Whitmore’s aberrations seem trivial. Yet he himself is sane. On the other hand, if you define sanity, if you define normality, so narrowly that only one or two exceptional people can ever achieve it, what does that signify?

      The baby’s little temples beat. Her little life is fragile, hardly yet incarnate. Her skull is soft, frail, open.

      Charles Headleand has been reading the Koran. He is reading the Koran because he plans to go to the Middle East to rescue his old enemy, cameraman Dirk Davis, from the clutches of a bunch of terrorists, who have been holding him hostage for over two years. The Koran has driven the Iranians mad. Who would have predicted, back in the 1970s, the tide of Islamic fundamentalism that has swept the land masses of the East, that threatens even the secular monolith of the Soviet Union? Charles certainly did not, although he knows he ought to have done, because he has always been gripped by News, by day-to-day News, has always been a privileged receiver and passionate disseminator of News. But he had not foreseen the rebirth of Islam, the rise of the Ayatollah, the war between Iraq and Iran, the boy soldiers clutching the Koran, the Turkish women returning despite menaces to the veil, the murmuring in the Soviet colonies, the floggings and the amputations of Pakistan. What is it all about?

      He has discussed this with various Middle East experts of his acquaintance, with Hugo Mainwaring the journalist, with Harry Painter the historian, and with a varied collection of television reporters from various countries, some of whom had once worked for Charles’s own company, Global International Network (a company now, incidentally, in severe financial difficulties). He has discussed it with experts in famine relief, with members of the International Red Cross, with employees of Amnesty International. Some of them, he suspects, had not foreseen all this either, although some of them (himself, most of the time, included) lay claim to hindsight, cast backwards premonitions that they had never truly felt, or had felt late, late, late.

      He had even discussed Islam with one believer, a friend from college days, a gentle-mannered woman married to the American-born WASP director of a multinational conglomerate. She was bringing her children up in the faith. Why? He had wanted to know why? She had explained that the extremists, the fundamentalists, were as far from her conception of the true Islam as Seventh Day Adventists or Mormons or American Bible Belt faith-healers were from the Church of England. How can that be, he had wanted to know, as Ishrat smiled gently and poured him another cup of tea. He had not been able to comprehend her replies. They are fanatics, said Ishrat, but that need not make me an unbeliever.

      It was his ex-wife Liz Headleand who suggested that he should