The Witch of Exmoor by Margaret Drabble Page B

D’Anger’s. The sugar beets of Peterborough and Bury St Edmunds have long since taken over from the sugar canes of Guyana and the West Indies.
    â€˜My father’, says Frieda Haxby Palmer, addressing David D’Anger with a dangerous glint, ‘used to plough the beet fields, while yours was at Harvard. We’re New Sugar, your family is Old Sugar, David. Not that much money came down to us from it, or not that
we
ever saw. Who owns British Sugar pic these days, Cedric? I’m sure you would know, wouldn’t you?’
    Cedric Summerson, who does know, and suspects that she also knows, decides to pretend he has not heard the question. (British Sugar, you may wish to learn, became the British Sugar Corporation in 1936, when Frieda’s father, Ernie Haxby, was a young man: it became British Sugar pic in 1982, was then taken over by Beresford International, and in 1991 was swallowed up by Associated British Foods pic, a thriving conglomerate which also owns Allied Bakeries, Burton’s Biscuits, Twinings Tea, Ryvita and Jacksons of Piccadilly. Nathan Herz knows he ought to know this, but he has become confused with the brand names of Tate & Lyle–who are they? Are they a competitor? And aren’t they British too?)
    Getting no answer from either Cedric or Nathan, Frieda continues. ‘It would be hard to say, David, wouldn’t it, which of our forebears might have expected to do better? If you’d been veiled by ignorance, which society would
you
have chosen to be born into? Eighteenth-century England or eighteenth-century Guyana? How would
you
have calculated the odds?’
    (Only Gogo picks up the significance of this question, for only goodwife Gogo, at this point, is familiar with its philosophic terminology, with the concept of the Veil. Daniel and Rosemary are later to remember it all too well.)
    David smiles, demurs, indicates that the conversation is becoming esoteric, is excluding Frieda’s other guests. Clearly they have been over this ground before.
    â€˜The D’Angers’, pursues Frieda, ‘once owned plantations. They worked their way up. They owned a valley full of eagles and they exported Demerara. Isn’t that right, David?’
    â€˜That’s how the story went when I was a boy,’ says David.
    â€˜Sugar and rum and coffee,’ teases Frieda. ‘Thousands and thousands of pounds of the stuff. While we lived on whalegut and turnip.’ Her audience grows restless. All this talk of food does not make them hungry, but it does make them nervous. What is she playing at? Is it a game? They cannot have been asked round simply for a discussion. Surely there will be dinner? They have been asked for a meal, but there is little sign of one, though there is perhaps a faint smell of cooking somewhere in the recesses of the house, a stale and not wholly appetizing odour of, is it, onion? Or is onion waiting in from some passing teenager’s polystyrene walk-about pack? They cannot have been asked round for a drink, for water is not a drink. Nor could anyone in her right mind ask even her own family to come all the way to the Romley borders just for a drink.
Is
she, they wonder, in her right mind?
    She seems to be, for when she judges that they have suffered enough, she makes a move. ‘I’d better go and see to the cooking,’ she says, disclaiming any help as she heaves herself stoutly to her sandalled feet. ‘No, don’t come yet. I’ll call you when I’m ready. I’ve got something really special for you. I’ve had to go a long way to get this meal together, I can tell you.’ She smiles at David, with a horrible favour. ‘And don’t worry, David, I have remembered that you don’t eat meat.’
    Daniel later claims that it was at this moment that it flashed across his mind that she had some trick in store–cow heels, pigs’ trotters, stewed baby–something of the sort. But he did