The Witch of Exmoor Read Online Free PDF Page A

part.
    Nathan lights another cigarette. The selling and packaging of England. He has taken part in it. He had intended to be an anthropologist, but reading Mary Douglas on the meaning of shopping had revealed to him the light. He had been twenty-one at the time and about to sit his Finals. Suddenly he had seen it all, revealed in the broad rays of the future. Shopping was indeed our new religion. Consumer choice, in a post-industrial society, was our area of free will, informed perhaps by grace. He would participate in the new faith, as priest, as confessor. He would set up his stall in the Temple.
    God, how right he had been, how horribly, uncannily right. Nathan the prophet. Even he would not have predicted the degree to which shopping as a full-time pursuit would have caught on in the last fifteen years. The supermarket and shopping centre as fun-fair, family outing, parkland, playground, stately home, temple, youth club, old people’s refuge: the shopping arcade as the forum of assignation, rape, abduction, murder, riot. Oh fountains, oh palaces, oh dreams and aspirations! Let us enter those revolving doors, wide enough to take a trolley loaded with £200 of edible merchandise! It is at once glorious and appalling. Is it, he wonders, in his blood? He does not know much about his own blood. His ancestry cannot be traced. His mother would have preferred him to be a doctor or a lawyer. She is timid and conventional and has been much put upon by false images of an alien tribe.
    (But perhaps not quite put upon
enough.
Nathan had turned to her one evening–turned
on
her, that’s how she put it–and asked her why on earth she had called him Nathan. I mean, what kind of a name is Nathan, for Godsake, he had demanded. I’ll tell you what kind of name it is, Ma. It’s a
Jewish
name.)
    Miriam Herz would have liked her son Nathan to be more like Daniel Palmer. Daniel is a successful barrister, as you might have guessed. He could have been a civil servant, for his manner is mandarin, but he chose the law.
    If choice is what he had, if choosing is what we do. Amazing, really, thinks Nathan on the midnight lawn, how we cling to the concept of choice. It is quite clear to Nathan that Daniel is temperamentally disqualified from playing the Veil of Ignorance, because he is quite incapable of imagining a world in which he would not possess a superior and commanding intellect. Daniel knows that in any society he will rise towards the top, so why bother to play with the construction of a society in which there is no top? It is different for David D’Anger, for David, like Nathan himself, is an outsider. An ambitious outsider, living by his wits. His handicap, his blind spot, thinks Nathan, is that he cannot conceive of a society which does not have ambition as its driving force.
    Whereas I, thinks Nathan, staring at the nameless stars, I have given up all hope. Good brains I had and a good education, and what did I do with them? I tried to make a bit of money. I married Rosemary Palmer. I bad two children. I had affairs with other women. Not much to show for a life. And I’m the only one of us, it seems, who would jack it all in. To float free of all this, to begin again. So heavy we become, and so entrenched. Our feet are stuck in the clay. We are up to the knees, no, up to the waist, in the mud of the past. We have lived more than half our lives. There is no future. There are no choices left. It has all silted up around us. We are stuck in our own graves.
    And that mad old woman up on Exmoor, she is preparing for her own funeral. By all accounts she has left one mausoleum for another, and even now is stitching her own shroud. She is determined to make trouble to the end. One cannot but admire.
    Nathan is fascinated by the Palmer family and its history. He is fascinated by Frieda Haxby Palmer.
    David D’Anger is right, considers Nathan, to tease the Palmers about their complacency, about their confidence