The Witch of Exmoor Read Free Page B

who does not want to see them. It is against the natural order. What have they done to earn such rejection? Frieda has removed herself from their concern and set off into the unknown. They had seen trouble coming a year or more ago, when she suddenly decided to sell the family home and all that was in it, but they had not expected a removal as dramatic as this. She had sold the big house in Romley (optimistically and falsely described by the estate agents as ‘on the borders of Stoke Newington’) and purchased a dilapidated thirty-room Victorian castle by the sea.
    â€˜But you said she looked well enough,’ says Daniel.
    â€˜Oh, yes, she
looks
well enough. I think she’s lost weight. Well, one would, on a diet like that. Worse than a health farm. God knows where the nearest shop is.’
    â€˜I don’t see how we can intervene,’ says Daniel, who has no wish to be sent off to Exmoor as family delegate. ‘She’s not doing any harm up there, is she?’
    â€˜Not to us,’ says Gogo. ‘She can’t harm us any more. She’s done her worst.’
    â€˜I wouldn’t be so sure,’ says Daniel, rethinking his position as a new light strikes him. ‘She’s only in her sixties.’
    â€˜I’m not so sure either,’ says Rosemary. ‘I told you what she said about remaking her will? She said she was going to reallocate her posthumous copyrights. Is she allowed to do that?’
    â€˜Of course she is,’ says David D’Anger, roused by this brazen assertion of family rights of interest in family money. ‘She can do what she wants with them.’
    The three Palmers turn their eyes upon him, the dark intruder.
    â€˜Perhaps yon’d better go and see her and find out what she’s really up to,’ says Rosemary. ‘She’d listen to you, David. She favours you.’
    â€˜I’d go,’ says David. ‘I’d go, in the autumn. If you thought it was a good idea.’
    His ready acquiescence both pleases and disquiets them. What does David D’Anger hope to gain from a trip to the West Country? There can be nothing to interest him there. Westminster, the West Indies and West Yorkshire, fair enough, he has interests in all of those–but the West Country, surely not?
    â€˜You won’t like it there,’ says Rosemary. ‘You should have seen her face, when she saw me getting out of the car. You may laugh, but it wasn’t very funny.’
    â€˜I’m not laughing,’ says Daniel.
    â€˜Neither am I,’ says Gogo.
    â€˜It’s no laughing matter,’ says Rosemary.
    â€˜Money
is
money,’ says Nathan solemnly, provocatively. ‘You don’t want her leaving it all to pay off the National Debt, do you?’
    â€˜I’m telling you,’ says Rosemary, ‘that building’s like a black hole. You don’t believe me. It’s worse than any of you imagine. It’ll probably slide down the cliff and into the sea. And then where will we be?’
    Although it is no laughing matter, the thought of their mother sliding into the sea, on a dark night, has its comic aspects. They elaborate, and I am sorry to say that they laugh. And, in conclusion, it is agreed that David and Gogo, come the autumn, will risk the journey and the mildew and the corned beef. They will take Benjamin as peacemaker, they volunteer. How will she be able to alienate herself and her fortune from her own children and grandchildren? (If Daniel and Rosemary have suspicions about this plan, they keep them to themselves.)
    Â 
    Upstairs, in the bunk room, the youngest of those grandchildren, Jessica and Jonathan Herz, are playing with the fast-forward button on one of the house’s several video machines. They are trying to find the bit with the child-eating zombies, but they are not trying very seriously: they are waiting, in a state of heightened excitement, for their cousin Benjamin D’Anger