Free The Witch of Exmoor by Margaret Drabble Page B

the programmes on which he appears. She picks up his references, as we have seen. What more is needed? She is English, she does not show emotion. If she loves both her husband and her son, obsessively, fearfully, you would never guess it. She is the most severe, the most Nordic of Frieda’s offspring. She and David D’Anger make an unlikely, a striking couple, and they know it. David and Grace, the dark sun and the cold moon. One day, she says, she will travel up-country with him to Eldorado.
    In his early days at Oxford, David had been pursued by men, as was to be expected. It was assumed that he would find it diplomatic to surrender. The Master of Gladwyn College himself, a well-known seducer and corrupter of youth, had courted David, and it was widely rumoured that David had succumbed, for the old boy’s manner remained remarkably indulgent over a period of years. Small, vain, preposterous, button-eyed, pursy, plump, treble Sir Roy had petted young David: shaking lingering hands one night after a conversazione, he had murmured, ‘Such a turn on, dear boy, such a turn on!’–alluding, as David took it, to the conjunction of his own smooth dark skin with Sir Roy’s pallid cloistral parchment. This had been at the end of David’s first term. Three years later, having safely survived such favours, David D’Anger had announced his engagement, and old Sir Roy had graced his wedding to Grace ‘Gogo’ Palmer–indeed he had generously held the wedding celebrations in the grounds of his own Lodge. During the course of the party he had pinched David’s arm wistfully and patted his body most intimately: ‘Wisely done, my boy, wisely done,’ he had squeaked, as he winked and peered with lubricious approval at the austerely suited bride, at the flowing jade-green robes of the bride’s stout and eccentric and eminent mother. Had there been some secret pact? Had David D’Anger kissed the arse of the establishment? Nobody knew, or nobody would tell.
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    Fourteen years now have they been married, David and Gogo, and they have kept the secrets of their marriage bed. They present a united front. They have but the one child, and they will never have another. He is the pride of their life, the apple of their eye. He is a genius. He has inherited all the talent–and there is much–from both sides of his family. He is heir to great expectations.
    Frieda Haxby had recognized his exceptional qualities at birth. Well, not quite at birth, for she had been in Canada when he was born, and she had not caught an early flight home to be with him. Benjamin was not her first grandchild, nor she a natural granny. Had Gogo resented the delay? If so, she never showed it. One could accuse Frieda of many failings, but not of preferring her first-born son Daniel to her two daughters. She treated all with equal inconsistency–scattering favours when it suited her, not when it suited the recipient. Until she saw Benjamin. And then things changed. Or so Gogo thought she noted.
    Benjamin was six weeks old when Frieda finally made her way to the D’Angers’ untidy basement flat in Highbury. Lying in Gogo’s arms, he had stared at Frieda, with his large dark long-lashed seducer’s eyes, and he had smiled at her, as charmingly as he had smiled at his Guyanese grandmother. And she had smiled at him. ‘The divine child,’ she said. ‘Oh, the divine child.’ And Gogo and David had smiled at one another proudly, for they too knew that he was the divine child, he was the darling saviour of the world. They had been amazed by the ferocity of their passion for this perfect infant.
    And Frieda had reached out her arms and taken the baby, and he had lain there on her bosom in gracious ease, nestling comfortably, tightening his little fingers round her smooth amber beads. She had walked him up and down the room, singing over him, droning, as she had sung intermittently