Free The Witch of Exmoor by Margaret Drabble

they did not. Clever they might be, but innocent, he guessed. High-minded, ambitious middle-class innocents–except, perhaps, for Nathan. But Nathan had shown no sign of recognition when the words ‘Hot Snax’ had been mentioned. Nathan had probably never represented any product as downmarket, as obscurely and deviously provided, as
cheap,
as Hot Snax. Nathan was more a Safeway, a Sainsbury man. The trail was not clear. However had Frieda followed it? She was dangerous, as well as impressive. Just as well that she was about to remove herself from society. Just as well that she would, in a court of law, appear as mad as a meat axe. Her testimony was worthless.
    Â 
    Daniel and Patsy had talked of Frieda’s craziness as they drove home that night. So did Rosemary and Nathan. But David talked of social justice, while Gogo drove and listened. Those three peas, he knew, had infected him, as Frieda had intended that they should. He would never expel their message from his system. Like the princess on her twenty mattresses, he would be tormented. He was susceptible. Frieda had known this, and she had chosen to offer him this torment. He would not reject it.
    â€˜In his
Utopia,'
said David relentlessly,as Gogo drove down the Balls Pond Road at midnight, ‘More proposed that butchers should be recruited, as a punishment, from the criminal classes. You would not expect a good man to become a butcher. Fourier went one further and proposed that all unattractive jobs–all jobs that nobody in their right mind would do without constraint–should be simply abandoned. Society would readjust, he argued. Readjust and do without. Kendrick goes one further still and argues that with any fair system of job allocation any society would choose to be vegetarian. No more abattoirs, no more chicken gutters, no more beefburgers, no more cows’ heads. Bernard Shaw said we could live on pills and air.’
    â€˜Shaw was fastidious,’ said Gogo. ‘Like you. Like, it would seem, the reincarnate Frieda.’
    â€˜I suppose’, said David, ‘that I’ll have to go and visit an abattoir. She was pointing at one in my constituency, I assume.’
    â€˜There’s no need to be so competitive,’ said Gogo, although she knew there was.
    â€˜It’s not as though I can’t imagine what’s behind the curtain,’ said David. ‘I know what’s there. That’s why I don’t eat meat anyway.’ ‘Nobody was accusing you,’ said Gogo.
    â€˜I accuse myself,’ said David.
    â€˜My dear David’, said Gogo, ‘you should never have left the courts of theory. Now you must enter the dirty world. And what of the sewers, what of the untouchables?’
    David put his hand on Gogo’s knees. She pressed it. They were set upon a disastrous course, and, like a good wife, a good politician’s wife, she would try to stand by her man. He would betray her again and again, not with a call girl or an actress or a pretty PA (though who knows, perhaps with them as well, for with his looks how could he not fall into temptation?)–no, he would betray her for Social Justice, that blind blood-boltered maiden.
    David D’Anger is haunted by the fair vision of a just society. She smiles at him. Is this possible, you ask, in the late twentieth century? We concede it was possible for men and women to create, even to believe in such images in the past–as late as the nineteenth century these possibilities lingered–but surely we know better now? We are adult now, and have put away childish things. Dreams survive in academe, at conferences and congresses where students and lecturers and professors still discuss the concept of the fair, the just and the good. But they have no connection with a world of ring-roads and beefburgers, with a world of disease and survival.
    Imagine David D’Anger. You say he is an impossibility, and you cannot imagine him, any