Free The Witch of Exmoor by Margaret Drabble Page A

more than he can imagine the nature of the revolution which would bring about the world he thinks he wishes to construct. But you are wrong. The truth is that you, for David D’Anger, are the impossibility. The present world which we seem to inhabit is an impossibility. He cannot live at ease in it, he cannot believe it is real. He believes that the other world is possible. He has left the abstract world of reason and entered the public forum. He has hope. He has ambition, but he also has hope. Look at him carefully. Look at him at Timon’s feast in abandoned Romley, in Romley left to its own decay. Look at him a year and a half later at that more palatable meal in preserved and enduring Hampshire. At Frieda’s prompting he has made good use of the intervening time.
    At the age of seventeen, in Guyana, at school in distant Georgetown, David D’Anger read Plato and Aristotle. They blew his mind. Into the hinterland of thought he travelled, to Eldorado. Along rivers, past strange birds, carmine, azure, emerald. Mother of Gold, Scum of Gold. He read Sir Walter Ralegh and dreamt strange dreams. The Guyanese are the chosen people of the Caribbean, and David D’Anger thought himself their chosen son. East and West meet in Guyana, they meet in David D’Anger. Rivers, waterfalls, great iridescent fish. Greeks, Phoenecians, Egyptians. At seventeen he possessed the globe.
    To know the good is to choose it. This is what he learnt. This became clear to him as a boy and it is clear to him now. He would push the button, he would countenance earthquakes. He would rip away the veil from the temple and force us to choose the good. You know such men are dangerous. He knows that an absence of such men is dangerous.
    David D’Anger is headstrong and he believes in himself and his agenda. His certainties have survived every success, and he has been successful. If he suffers from
folie de grandeur,
he has found others who will collude in his folly. Scholar of the year in Georgetown, he was sent to the old country, to study at Oxford. His family, exiled by Burnham, assembled around him. At Oxford he rose, and he continues to rise. He is courted by institutions at home and abroad. Sugar Daddy America and his tin-nippled hard-coiffed Mother Country have both tried to entrap him. Even the many-teated sow of Europe has grunted her overtures. For David D’Anger is a man for whom the time is right. Handsome, clever and black, he is political plausibility personified. His name helps to legitimate many a committee, his presence sanctions many a conference. He can hardly fail to know his worth. Scholarships, fellowships, awards, graces and favours have been dangled before him. Study-centres in grand palazzi on Italian lakes have beckoned him, and so have residencies in distinguished American colleges. (Perhaps there are not yet
quite
enough clever handsome correct black men to go round?) Even poor Guyana has asked him to return, although she knows she cannot afford him. Choice, whatever Nathan Herz may think, seems to glitter before David with a refracted kaleidoscopic brilliance that would blind a less certain man. But David D’Anger has no intention of being bought or blinded. He thinks he knows where he is going. And if at times there seems to be an ill fit between his grandiose dreams of justice and the bathos of finding himself adopted as a parliamentary candidate for the marginal seat of Middleton in West Yorkshire–well, he tells himself, he is young yet, and uncompromised. He will force a fusion. Everything is going for him. He cannot fail.
    Does his wife Gogo believe in him? Probably. It is hard to tell what she thinks. She has not attempted to check his political ambitions, although she knows that the wives of Members of Parliament are not to be envied. She has her own life, her own career. She does not give much away. She seems to approve his position. She reads some of the books he reads, watches some of