The Witch of Exmoor by Margaret Drabble Page A

explain the legal technicalities of the injunction, the legal technicalities with which Dick Champer seeks to thwart him, but the moment is past, and Daniel manages to divert him to other, less contumaceous matters.
    Is it a form of retaliation that brings the demure Celia Partington to raise the subject of Frieda Haxby over the beans and bacon? She has read a piece somewhere during the last week or two–she cannot remember where, was it in a magazine, the
Spectator
perhaps? about the fall-out from Frieda’s VAT dispute. It seems that any victory she had claimed had been Pyrrhic, that new regulations were being drawn up to prevent further defences along the lines she had pursued. The grey area was being made light, to the taxman’s advantage. ‘Not always wise to challenge, is it?’ suggests Celia. ‘Even when one’s morally in the right.’
    None of them answers. Celia pursues.
    â€˜And is she still up on Exmoor? Has she any plans to return?’ she innocently asks. ‘Will you be visiting her this summer?’
    Solidly the Palmers close ranks. Not a treacherous murmur escapes them. Frieda on Exmoor is as happy as can be, they all agree. Rosemary has been down to see her recently. The house is too large, but beautifully situated. Frieda is taking her time to do it up, but it will be splendid when it is finished. David and Gogo are off to see her next month. They’re looking forward to it.
    â€˜We’re hoping she’ll invite us all for Christmas,’ says Nathan wickedly. Rosemary sniggers, Gogo looks severe, Daniel opens another bottle of Bulgarian, and Bill Partington belches, loudly, and pats his stained shirt front. The children have disappeared into the shrubbery. The man in the attic has come down to become the man in the garden shed. He too eats beans, shyly.
    Â 
    It is raining on Exmoor. Frieda Haxby Palmer sits in one of the many derelict rooms that look towards the sea, and listens to the rain on the roof. In better days this had been a garden room, where cream teas had been served. She cannot see the sea and the black rocks below, for rain obscures the steep combes. She can see only broken paving and the lawn and the abandoned flowerbeds and nettles and dodder and brambles. She has been out walking and now she dries her bare feet in front of a paraffin stove. (Rosemary had been right. It is wet here even in midsummer. It is almost always wet.) A wet dog dries by her side, and a pigeon sits at her feet in an upturned saucepan lid.
    It is not a scene to comfort an anxious or a proud daughter. The room is full of junk. Suitcases, cardboard boxes, packing cases. Books and papers lie open on an old billiard table, on moth-eaten green-baize card-tables salvaged from the building’s hotel life. On one, a game of clock patience is laid out, half played and abandoned. On a heavy mock-Jacobean sideboard stand three skulls, two animal (a badger and a sheep?) and one human. Their grim effect is softened by a cracked red Bristol glass vase holding a peacock feather, a skeleton clock in a glass case, and a large alabaster egg–a
nature morte,
not a shrine or a cemetery. Paintings stand on the floor, their faces to the wall against the skirting board, their canvas backs and their labels of provenance exposed. Next to the alabaster egg lies a brown dried orange pierced at a shallow angle by a bone knitting needle. Now who would wish to torture an orange?
    Frieda has been out walking this morning to Pollock Wood. She walks in all weathers. The dog, Bounce, has followed her. He is not her dog, but he goes where she goes. Old, black and white, shabby, disreputable, Bounce suits her well. Now he stinks and dries.
    Beyond Turgot Common, on the upland, Frieda and Bounce had spotted a dying calf. It was lying in a ditch by a hedge. Its mother was standing near by, watching it and them without any expression of interest. The cow was big, brown, swollen. The calf was a pale dun