Read Online A Natural Curiosity by Margaret Drabble - Free Book Online

with horror as she recalls the desolation. ‘I can’t tell you,’ she says, ‘how lonely it was, how isolated, how cut off from all social life of any sort . . . if you didn’t make an effort, you could speak to
nobody
, nobody at all, for
weeks on end
. Well,
days
on end. If it hadn’t been for my little trips abroad, my little trips to London, I’d have gone mad, quite mad.’
    Susie wants to ask why on earth Fanny and her husband Ian had spent so long in such an out-of-the-way region, but she does not want to betray her ignorance. Fanny seems to expect Susie to know all about Ian Kettle’s work. She talks about him as though he were famous. As Susie has never heard of Ian Kettle, she has to tread warily, Gradually she pieces together the information that he has been on television, but is not a television personality: that he was vaguely connected with York University, and is now vaguely connected with the University of Northam: that he is, perhaps . . . yes, this must be it, and now it somehow begins to come back to Susie, as though she had known it all along, that’s right, he is some kind of archaeologist, who has spent years excavating burials in the wet dull flat eastern bits of the county . . . 
    ‘Of course, our house was rather grand, and that was a consolation,’ says Fanny. ‘We had house parties. Quite
famous
parties.’
    Susie does not know whether to believe this or not, and slightly hopes it is not true. How could one have famous house parties in that damp wilderness?
    ‘Ian’s people are called the Parisi. I always thought that was a
hint
,’ said Fanny. ‘Parisian parties. You know.’ She insinuates.
    Susie does not know. She has no idea what Fanny is talking about. Ian’s people? Parisian parties?
    ‘Yes, the house was good, but it was
too
far out . . . ’ Fanny sighs, looks round her new residence, which is a detached Victorian granite building high on the ridge by the university, in a suburb once fashionable, now slightly ‘mixed’. It is an area dominated by the great architectural fantasies of the fabulously wealthy nineteenth-century iron masters and by houses like this, the solid comfortable spacious houses of the solidly prosperous. ‘Now
this
house,’ says Fanny, ‘has some party potential, I’d say. Wouldn’t you?’
    Susie nods, smiles. She is out of her depth. She herself sometimes gives little dinner parties for six or, eight, and a cocktail party once or twice a year. She’ considers herself, by Northam standards, a successful hostess. But is she? What new scale has Fanny Kettle introduced?
    Fanny Kettle has a son of nearly seventeen. Susie expresses disbelief. ‘Yes, I can hardly believe it myself, such a big boy now . . . of course I married very young, with all the usual consequences . . . only twenty, I was.’ Fanny Kettle laughs. ‘I’m afraid poor Ian has found me rather a
handful
,’ she says, and laughs again, with display of teeth and rather gaunt neck.
    Susie feels sorry for Ian Kettle. She thinks she has no recollection of him, from their one meeting—or was he perhaps that shadowy figure lurking at Fanny’s elbow?
    Fanny inquires, formally, after Susie’s own children, without displaying much interest: Susie says she has two, William, aged eight, and Vicky, aged six. ‘How sensible you have been,’ says Fanny, as though sense were a commodity she mildly despised. To wait, to have them a little later, when one can afford more help . . . ’
    ‘Yes,’ says Susie, conscious that she has been emerging dully, uncompetitively from this interchange. ‘Yes, we
are
very fortunate, we’re very well placed now, and I have this excellent’—she hesitates over terminology—’this excellent
girl
 . . . a trained girl, you know—who lives in. So life is very agreeable.’
    ‘And you’re quite free, then? To do what you want?’
    Fanny stares at Susie with her shockingly personal, investigative, unmannerly stare. Susie