The Witch of Exmoor by Margaret Drabble Page B

pink, a naked skinny pink. It kept rearing and lifting its round ugly head from the sodden grass, then letting it slump down again, as though it were too heavy for its neck. Should she let the farmer now? She thought not. The farmer would not care. This much her hamburger research–the research which had brought her to this ditch–had taught her. Farmers do not care. And she did not like the farmer. She did not like his thrumming generator, his barbed wire, his piles of old tyres, his heaps of slurry. Let the calf die in the wet. Bounc e had lowered his head, laid back his ears. Bounce put in no plea for the calf.
    They had descended then, Frieda and Bounce, into Tippett’s Wood, where they had seen a creature yet more dreadful than the calf. It was a sheep. Its matted pelt hung off it in lumps to trail upon the ground. Its wool was yellow-white, and it was stained with blotches of rusty red, the dirty dull red of dried menstrual blood. Its face was thin and shorn and quivering, its body shapeless beneath its ragged outgrowths. It gazed at the woman and the dog in misery. It was the sheep of affliction, the sheep of God. It gazed at them knowingly, then gazed away again. The dog whimpered with a slight fear. The woman stared back, recognizing it, recognizing herself. The scape sheep. It abandoned hope, and limped away, hobbling painfully slowly into the bracken, on its sodden footrot hoofbones. A rotten sheep, a subsidy sheep. The hillside rang with noisy water, and high overhead a yellow Wessex rescue helicopter buzzed, on its way to search for lost travellers.
    Frieda walked on through the ancient woodland. It spoke to her of decay, her own decay. The trees were encrusted with lichen, and small ferns sprouted from them, as orchids sprout from the trees of a tropical rain forest. Fungus grew from living holes and dying trunks and dead logs. Grey-white oyster outcrops clustered. Ash, birch, oak and thorn, the old trees of Northern Europe. Some leant from the steep slope at perilous angles, and others were uprooted, reaching their inverted crowns into the air like great matted discs of red ogre hair, of monstrous curling fibre. Twisted faces peered at her from severed, scarred and stunted limbs. She passed the hollow tree, inside which stood a small lake on which a miniature elfin armada might sail. Scale was crazily distorted in this wracked and rent, this Rackham woodland. There was an overpowering smell of rich wet damp and decay. Stumps rose through the leafmould like old teeth. Frieda’s tongue joggled her bridgework, and from beneath her loose bridge an acrid, bitter taste seeped into her mouth. It was the taste of death.
    Then she had walked back to her fortress, the wet dog following, and now she sits there, amidst the spoils and bones of her history. She listens to the rain. It drums and drums, it ebbs then it strengthens, it gusts, it pours in heavy chains of water from the eves, it hangs in great drops on the salt-smeared window-pane. It pours and pours, but her eyes are dry. The sky weeps for her.
    What is she doing here in her cavern? Well might her children wonder, well might the estate agent and the hamburger men have wondered. Chance had brought her but she has found a correspondence here, and here she has settled, to write her memoirs. Of course she is writing her memoirs. All her friends are writing their memoirs. At her age there is nothing much left to write, or so she might tell herself. (She is not as old as she pretends. She likes to meet disasters halfway, to get them over with.) She sits here, and addresses herself to her final questioning, her last revenge. This must be clear, she believes, even to her dim-witted family. She is here to summon her mother, her father, her sister, her husband from their graves and from their hiding places. As the Witch of Endor raised Samuel to terrify Saul, so she, the Witch of Exmoor, will raise Gladys Haxby, Ernest Haxby, Hilda Haxby, Andrew Palmer. Her