The Witch of Exmoor by Margaret Drabble

Mausoleum. She sits less formally than her two guests, her legs crossed beneath some kind of longish grey garment embroidered with black, which hides her now shapeless body. Her hair is concealed, like Gogo’s, by a scarf, and in honour of the occasion she wears her Baltic amber ceremonial cross. She too appears to be drinking water, which is not like her. She greets her family without rising. Cedric leaps obediently to his feet. Hands are shaken. Rosemary, with diminishing confidence, hands over her bottle of warming champagne. Frieda puts it on the table in front of her, and says, ‘Not for me, thank you. There’s some water in the jug.’
    And that is that. Nobody dares to open the champagne, and there is no other drink in sight, apart from a large stoneware quart jug of what seems to be tap water. They serve themselves and sip its thin fluoride kidney-filtered brew.
    Has Frieda become a teetotaller? Has she become religious? They settle themselves, nervously, uncertainly, and wait for something to happen.
    They wait for a long, long time. It is a deep game. Frieda lights a menthol cigarette and offers one to Nathan. Nathan refuses her offer, lights one of his own, and the others, non-smokers, gaze in greedy envy as they inhale deeply.
    It is not possible to query the situation. It has already gone beyond questioning. Frieda, as usual, leads the conversation. She addresses the subject of vegetarianism. She inquires of Cedric the statistics of the conversion of the young to this modish though hardly new lifestyle, and asks him whether he believes red meat is bad for the body and what the evidence is that it may be. Cedric is no longer in agriculture–he is, some think and David knows, something to do with transport now–but he is expected nevertheless by Frieda to be an authority on such matters, and he struggles, in the hostile circumstances, bravely. What can he be expecting? A primitive and summary execution by the tribe for having once dared to tamper with their mother? He speaks of new dietary advice from the Ministry of Health, of the safety of freezing and radiation processes, of the importance of balance in the diet. He speaks of BSE and CJD. What is this? A seminar? A television cross-examination? At what bar does he now stand and where, oh where is his drink?
    David D’Anger, as so often, comes off best. Frieda pets him. David drinks very irregularly, and never in public life, so the evening is no hardship to him. He is also, by and large, a vegetarian, and he rescues the sagging conversation by speaking lightly and dismissively of his own reasons for this choice–it is not through religion, he emphasizes, for his family are in origin a quarter Muslim, a quarter Hindu, and half Catholic, ‘which would allow me to eat just about anything sometimes’. (He smiles.) But he does not like meat. And a side benefit of this–a political side benefit–is that he offends no one. As he has no principles, he can eat or pretend to eat a little meat if social circumstances demand it. Equally he can decline. ‘Nobody is offended by a vegetable,’ he says–though even as the words leave his lips an image of that offensive Koran-inscribed aubergine which had caused such a scandal a few years back flashes across his mind. He zaps it, censors it, blots it out, and is relieved to see that he has not transmitted it to any of the other guests.
    Frieda is full of praise for his diet. ‘You see how well David looks on it,’ she says. ‘See, how well he looks.’
    It is embarrassing, but they are all forced to admire David, as though he were a slave or (in his case more probably) an indentured labourer upon a sugar plantation in the days of long ago.
    Sugar too David does not much take, and in this choice he admits to political motives. As nobody seems to be prepared to introduce any fresh theme, David is obliged to continue with a set speech upon sugar. The taste for