The Sending (11 page)

‘I couldn't do much more about it, short of sending him to a psychiatrist, which somehow seemed to me all wrong for Bill, so I told him to confide in the vicar. He said the vicar didn't approve of him. Bloody old fool—the vicar, I mean! There he had an earnest Christian performing minor miracles in his parish and he didn't approve of him! But in the end he seems to have done his duty, whatever it was, and it worked.'

I remembered at once Bill Freeman's obscure remark when he implied that he had been cured of some sickness of the mind by a minister of religion.

‘And the cats?' I asked.

‘Cleared out for a week's hunting on their own, I understand, and returned in a better temper. They tried to apologise by coming home with a fine young rabbit, but rather spoilt the effect by depositing it on Mrs Freeman's freshly laundered sheet.'

How it all fits in! Imagine a village three or four hundred years ago where the inhabitants, though agriculturalists, still retained vestiges of their ancestors' beliefs and sensitivities to nature! Suddenly animals start behaving strangely and there are cases of psychosomatic illness, some of them ending in death. The known and suspected witches, up to then tolerated for their healing powers but distrusted, immediately become the objects of collective hysteria and are gaoled until herded to the assizes to be hanged, imprisoned or acquitted, while their Robin, heartbroken but helpless, finds business abroad.

I suspect that the vicar does not know how to use exorcism—always assuming that it's effective against a curse—but as a man of undoubted faith and simplicity merely prayed with Bill Freeman. There we come into realms of the spirit which Paddy would have understood without words, but I am frustrated and seek for parallels.

Just as the communal praise and the dancing and feasts of animism have power to heal body and mind but appear mere play-acting to most of us, so the solemn ritual of the Church would seem melancholy to our far ancestors in the forest; yet both offer the same access to the Purpose as my own prayer offered in painting. An apparently ‘evil' influence—if it is fair to call Izar and the macaw evil when I have only the vaguest idea of the mechanics and none of the motive—is defeated by the contemplation of unity. Because I can rarely find the beauties of primitive paganism in Christianity, I doubt if anything less than the full hosannas of a cathedral service could have helped me. My own Job-like faith, persisting through the agony, did.

I am reminded that one night, standing with my brother on a barren outcrop of rock above the trees of the jungle, he asked me if I knew what the stars were singing to us. I replied that I heard but it was beyond my understanding, and I translated for him—since the marvel of the words went easily into Munda and perhaps into any of man's languages—‘When the morning stars sang together and the Sons of God shouted for joy.'

Far away a tiger roared, and he said:

‘So does our brother shout, Alf, but we may only shout in the silence of our hearts.'

July 21

Ginny has been bothered by the police again. I thought that we had heard the last of Paddy's death and that they had merely added it to their list of unsolved crimes. They accepted the fact that she would be asleep when my stolen car was returned but were still not happy about the earlier time when it was driven away, which, they had decided, was round about eleven.

She had brought this on herself by saying at the first investigation—trying to cut corners out of loyalty—that of course she always heard me from her flat in the stable block if I drove away in the evening after dinner.

The police had proved by experiment that this was not true. She could not hear a car starting up in the drive if she was in her flat. Very intelligently they now wanted to find out who, besides myself, could be quite certain that she would have gone home to the flat by eleven. It was a vague question, difficult to answer since I seldom entertained at home. Ginny tells me that she could not think of anyone who would be sure, except Paddy with whom I sometimes talked late, in summer usually sitting in the garden or strolling under the trees. She also mentioned Miss Vernon, adding for the sake of propriety that Miss Vernon only called on business when she would be sure to find me in.

She thought this renewed interest plain silly, but I can see what the police are after. They are still wondering if I lent my car to someone and whether I told the loyal Ginny to pay no attention if she were still in the house and heard the car driven away while I was at the Pirrone party.

Then the superintendent had the damned impertinence to call on Rita and enquire—with infinite tact and circumlocution—if she could tell him anything of Ginny's routine. She replied, no doubt with a touch of courteous hauteur, that she was not conversant with my domestic arrangements, but so far as she knew Ginny prepared a simple supper for me when I was in, washed up and returned to her flat.

This I learned when I ran into her on the street and dragged her off for a drink in the Royal George. She insisted on taking me home to her cottage for lunch, tempting me—my God, does she think she needs to?—with an offer of cold guinea fowl in aspic. That, with a bottle of Meursault between us, was too delicate and blue-skied a meal for a conversation which would have been better fitted to the bloody foreleg of a half-grilled deer and the drip from unseen trees hissing on the fire.

‘I think they have let you off lightly,' she said. ‘Your story was suspect from the start. Whoever arranged to take your car knew that Ginny was most unlikely to hear it go off and return, knew your habit of going to Penminster parties on foot and knew that you would have a perfect alibi. Alfgif, who could be sure of all that but you? So from the police point of view it's ten to one that you lent your car to someone without knowing why it was wanted, and afterwards you won't say who it was for reasons of friendship and because you are convinced that Paddy's death was pure accident.'

I told her that if the police thought that, they were crazy. I wouldn't protect Paddy's murderer for a moment. And it was murder, not an accident.

‘It hasn't occurred to you that it could be suicide?'

Yes, it had occurred to me and to everyone else, all of us mystified as to why Paddy did not move out of the way when he must have heard or seen the car. But there were no conceivable motives for suicide, financial, emotional or from fear of incurable disease.

Rita filled my glass and changed the subject, reminding me that after she had given me her report on Concha Pirrone and the macaw we had agreed that the unknown Izar could be responsible for my haunting and she had promised to give me a why if I could give her a how.

‘Now can you?' she asked.

I have never been able to pigeon-hole Rita's beliefs. And what do they matter anyway? My love of her is enough to welcome and include them all. She takes clairvoyance and telepathy as proven and I believe she pays for a horoscope, yet she fails to see that every faith must present its true meaning in the form of myth, and that myth is not a term of abuse. Religion to her is a human curiosity, like ambition, which moves history and is therefore of vital importance. That historical standpoint is useful because, myth or not, she keeps an open mind wherever there is first-hand evidence.

So I started off with a memory of tiger brother who kept, fed and enjoyed the company of a large, tame toad. He told me it was not a toad; it was a snake to frighten away leopards and hyenas. Tigers, being of our clan and friendly, had no need to be frightened. At the time and up to recently I took this as a bit of hocus pocus. I remember writing that tiger brother had no familiar, but now I see how toad fits in to the unity. Shaman hypnotises toad. Toad emanates the snake warning—which exists, all right, if you can feel it—and intruder thinks better of entering hut. Shaman's direct command to the leopard or hyena is not impossible, but he might not be present. The toad-snake, however, always remains in the hut.

‘Wearing a precious jewel in his head!' she remarked.

‘Exactly. I wonder if Shakespeare had learned from some admiring Robin that there was a reality behind the myth.'

That was my prelude to the use of Leyalá and I went on to tell Rita of the experiences of Gargary and Midwinter which seemed to prove my theory.

‘And the creature which is the medium is itself unaffected?' she asked.

‘Yes. Think of that network of brain cells as a computer programmed by the shaman. And you don't expect a computer to get up and run.'

‘Well, if it's a computer you have only to pull out the plug. Kill the macaw!'

‘Not now that I have won.'

‘If you have won.'

I said, perhaps too boldly, that I would cross that bridge when I came to it and that now she must tell me what Izar—if it was Izar—had against me.

‘You know the anthropologists' theory of the king who must die for the people?' she asked.

‘Yes. And I've spotted remnants of the belief here and there in India.'

‘And did you know that was why William Rufus was killed?'

I did not, having only learned the school book verdict that he was a ‘bad' king. She explained to me how historians had been puzzled by all the abuse poured on him by monastic chroniclers, when the rest of the evidence showed that he was brave, just, chivalrous and accepted with love by the English, who hated his father, the Conqueror. Why did the common people follow his bier from the New Forest to Winchester? Why was it said that all the way his blood dripped to the earth? And why when Walter Tyrell hesitated to shoot, did he cry: ‘Draw, draw your bow for the Devil's sake and let fly your arrow, or you will be sorry for it!' And why was his death expected and foretold all over Europe?

‘He was the King and Grand Master, the grandson of Robert the Devil. That's the explanation. Churchmen knew him for what he was and were appalled by his contempt for them; but the mass of the Saxons, who were as much pagan as Christian, adored him for living for them and dying for their land. This isn't a lecture, Alfgif, so I'll just give you Rufus. There's a good case too for Henry II as Grand Master and a better one for Gilles de Rais who was Joan of Arc's commander in the field.'

I presumed that she knew her stuff and I saw the implications, but I said I could not for a moment believe that the gentle Paddy was the secret shaman of Western Europe.

‘Ah, but the Grand Master did not have to die. If he could find a willing victim to die in his place he had another seven years.'

‘You're suggesting that the rite still exists in the Europe of today?'

‘There must be more people than you, Alfgif, who share the vision that all living creatures are one within what you call the Purpose. Their myths and forms of worship may be as odd as tiger brother's. And that's no odder than some of those American sects. I told you I couldn't really believe it but the evidence keeps piling up. And you must admit that your Paddy was a Man in Black.'

‘He had no coven.'

‘Of course he hadn't. A village coven would be an absurdity in these days when one can fly to Paris in the time that it took to ride from Penminster to Wincanton. So couldn't a coven now be international? Remember all the strangers and foreigners who came to his funeral!'

That I had explained by his reputation among horsemen, but it had always puzzled me. So did the fact that a saddler in a little country town had executors of international standing. And if Rita was right, where did I come in? That I did come in somewhere was certain.

‘Why do you think he gave me Meg?'

‘Because he saw you were a kindred spirit, just as your tiger brother did. And perhaps because it was a mark of honour and good for Meg and perhaps because you are loved. Will you start a coven, my Robin, and dance with me on our downs in moonlight?'

I replied that I was no good at dancing—my coldness breaking my heart—and pretended to be impatient to hear why according to her I was considered an enemy.

She said that Paddy's plan had gone wrong. He reckoned that the car which was to kill him could never be identified. But it was identified, and what should have been just another hit-and-run accident threatened to end up in Penminster magistrates' court, where I, to protect myself from the allegation of having lent my car, might have talked.

‘They didn't know how much you could guess or what Paddy might have told you. What they did know was that you were half pagan, half Christian—a freelance witch, as you once called it. Now suppose an outwardly sane, responsible citizen like you got some outstanding authority—anthropologist or historian—to give evidence of the former rites of the witch religion, then the police would gasp but investigate the movements of anyone staying with the Pirrones on the night of the party. And worst of all, the popular papers would have witchcraft right across the front page. Half a joke, of course, but secrecy would be compromised. And there might be an arrest.

‘So anything you say must be discredited. That's where Leyalá comes in. You take your unbelievable nonsense to solid Somerset police. Gargary says with regret that you are mentally unbalanced. All your friends agree that you have been avoiding them and behaving oddly. George Midwinter, Ginny and even I would admit, putting it politely, that you needed a holiday,'—her tone sounded irritable but I deserved it—‘so Mr Hollaston would be encouraged to spend a short period with the headshrinkers at a funny farm to cure his imagination, and when he came out he would find an unsquashable rumour that he killed Paddy himself while of unsound mind. And how's that?'

Chapter Six

July 25

IT'S ALL NOW QUITE clear. At the weekend I called up Lady Pirrone and asked if I might come over and renew my acquaintance with Leyalá. They were both most cordial. Sir Victor opened a bottle of some dark Sicilian wine, still glowing with the past warmth of lava, and asked for my opinion. My opinion is worthless—for who am I to pick and choose among nectars?—but my enthusiasm most Latinly delighted him. I am certain that both of them are entirely innocent. Concha Pirrone is a very pious Catholic, and while she knows that her godfather is a man of mysterious insight and reliable hunches she would never dream that he, as she would put it, had sold his soul to the devil.

The bird recognised me without a doubt, his chuckling in no way inspired by the trouble he had involuntarily caused me but rather by the moment of communion which we had shared. When confidence all round had been established, I asked Sir Victor why he had chosen to live at Penminster.

‘Oh, my wife saw a photograph of it in Country Life and fell in love,' he said. ‘And it suits me as well as another. The house not too big; the garden beautiful, though I miss my cypresses. And it's ideal for weekend visitors if they come from the Mediterranean and want to understand what it is that the English so love about their land. I would have liked to be nearer London, but we use the port less and less and here I am handy to Bristol and Southampton.'

‘Izar promised to send you some cypresses from Granada,' Lady Pirrone interrupted.

‘That's your godfather who gave you Leyalá?' I asked. ‘I think he may be the oldish man, remarkably tough, who was talking to me at your house-warming party.'

‘That sounds like him: But then it was so sad. He was taken ill and had to go to bed.'

I had no idea whether I had seen Uncle Izar or not. But the shot in the dark had produced a marvellous and unexpected lead.

Next day, feeling like a private eye and faintly ashamed of it, I decided to call on Bastard, Broome and Bastard, our local estate agents who handled the sale of the manor. I enjoy old Bastard. He is immensely proud of his surname, which was invented by Charles II and the Earl of Rochester in the course of one of their drunken evenings, when they called for Rochester's baby son, who till then had been hidden under the voluminous skirts of the Duchess of Cleveland's favourite waiting woman, presented him with his surname and, to make up for the insult, the Coat of Arms which faces the visitor behind Bastard's desk.

He never seems busy outside his auctions and got in first with his questions. How was Miss Vernon getting on down the valley? He supposed I saw something of her. He was very well aware that, if I did, nobody would be any the wiser, so his pleasantly dirty mind sensed the opportunities. I headed him off by saying that I believed the Water Board was insisting on charging her a water rate, though she drew it from her own well. That got him fulminating about local government in general, and I was able to mention that Pirrone had told me his rates were outrageous.

‘It takes a wealthy man to be really angry over a few quid,' he said, ‘so I hope he gives them hell.'

‘I'm always surprised that he bought the place.'

‘It was ready to walk into, you see. All redecorated a couple of years ago, and just the job to appeal to a foreigner who doesn't want trouble with builders, surveyors and planning permission.'

I said that Sir Victor was a valuable import and wouldn't like to be called a foreigner.

‘Well, he is, ain't he? But I was thinking of others who showed interest. One old boy got on to it before we had even advertised the place for sale.'

‘The usual Arab?'

‘Not down here in Somerset! No, some kind of Spaniard. I wouldn't be surprised if he recommended it to the Pirrones.'

‘I think he was at the Pirrone party. I wish I could remember his name.'

‘We must have got it somewhere. He told me that he was interested in Dorset Horns and wanted to hear of any prize rams to be sold privately.'

A clerk in the downstairs office easily found the name for him. The enquirer was a Mr Izar Odolaga with the address of a London bank. His visit had been in the last week of January. That left plenty of time for the sale to go through and for the Pirrones to move in before that fatal May 12.

When I escaped from the geniality of old Bastard—he would have been distressed to know in what a mood—I did not go home immediately. I walked away from Penminster through the wearisome sanity of council houses and market gardens and the sewage farm where my stream had entered the culture zone and been put to work, at last taking refuge in the woodland at the foot of the downs after wandering up the valley and passing above Rita's cottage. I did not want to see her. Mourning for my dear, incomprehensible Paddy, I did not want to see anyone. Everything had fallen into place, confirming the slaughter of Paddy by this Izar Odolaga. One had only to start with the reasonable assumption that the Pirrones really did want a country house.

I saw the sequence of events as something like this: Odolaga, visiting Paddy, learns that the manor is for sale. Paddy himself may have suggested the set-up if he had already agreed to the sacrifice—a cold thought which made me shiver. Odolaga then steers his goddaughter towards the house, drawing her attention to a photograph of the place. She inspects it and he assures her that it is ideal and will bring the Pirrones luck. Sir Victor shrugs his shoulders; if she wants the house, it will do.

Once the manor is bought and the house-warming party arranged, Paddy directs the plot: the Pidge, my car, the absolute certainty that I will not be using it and will have an unbreakable alibi if anything goes wrong. Odolaga handles the Pirrone end. Obviously he must be a houseguest at the time of the party and must be able to be absent for a few hours without anyone knowing. How he managed it was unimportant. I could never know on what excuse he locked his bedroom door or was able to choose a room with access to the garden.

Below me, not far away, was my vixen's earth, and I looked to her for comfort—not that I expected to see her at midday, but the scent and signs of her would tell me that she at least was fulfilling herself within our common world. I padded as gently as she over last year's leaves and looked down on the chalk-flecked terrace at the mouth of the earth. The cubs had left, though they should still have been learning to hunt with mother; neither had she herself been home for some time. All this I knew partly by faintness of scent, partly by dust in the tracks, partly by a silence beyond the silence to be detected by the ears. As I went down towards the stream, my eye was caught by the remains of a recent kill among tufts of trampled grass. I thought at first it was a lamb and then saw that the skull was hers. The smallest bones had been scattered and cracked; the larger, which she would have broken, only showed the gnawings of ineffectual teeth. She had died in the open and her hungry cubs had eaten her, a victim serving her purpose to the last. My mind finds some indefinable parallel with Paddy. Him I cannot revenge because I do not understand the meaning or the worth of his sacrifice. But I now know who is responsible for the end of my vixen, dying of the madness which was intended for me.

August 1

The black night of the soul. That is what the Christian mystics called it. Tiger brother would have spoken of the capture of the soul. As so often, saint and shaman both mean the same. It has nothing to do with the Fear. I could bear that. At least I was vividly alive like any terrified creature. Now for over a week I have been dead and empty. I cannot even paint. What I believed to be power turns out to be only obscurity. There is no doubt that what I used to call my picture postcards are of more value.

It is Paddy's sacrifice which depresses me. One can only take it as a lunatic rite of a lunatic cult. My saintly Paddy, keeping his religion to himself yet spreading far and wide his own goodness, can be compared with the pastor of some primitive Christian sect, who also radiates love and righteousness but imagines his God as human and angry: a half-god disapproving the marvellous mechanism of life—the flesh, as the pastor would call it—which may on no account be worshipped through senses made for worship.

All my reverence is challenged. Meg represents joy in the Purpose rather better than any bishop. On the other hand the bishop represents the suffering of man rather better than Meg.

And whose life could Paddy have considered so valuable to Megs and bishops that it ought to be extended? It could not be Izar Odolaga's life. That's certain. Paddy would have recognised evil in him, the abuse of power. Then who? Anyone from a village priest to a microbiologist, each performing miracles in his own way. Of the two the priest seems more likely; his miracles would so easily restore faith and awe. And yet suppose the man behind the electron microscope were on the verge of manipulating the nervous system of the brain to prove and analyse the action of mind at a distance?

What nonsense! Who the hell is worth the sacrifice?

Black night of the soul, yes! I am like Meg when she felt some effect of Leyalá's transmission and could no longer play. All passion spent. Why do I bother with Rita? Love is an inconvenience like any other, almost a curse in itself.

I might as well be a gentle, unworried animal like Concha Pirrone, satisfied within her own fat. Not fair! At least she can pray. I cannot. There have been times when I could repeat the Lord's Prayer, concentrating almost with tears upon the full meaning of the words or such meaning as I chose to put upon them.

There is no unity for me with the Purpose and it is not within the Purpose that there should be. I shall paint my picture postcards and be the jolly artist in the company of genial fools like Bastard and the rest. Such an easy fellow, they'll say, after his little illness. Must have done him good.

Bastard. A reminder. In Penminster last Wednesday I saw his red waistcoat bearing down on me like the unavoidable clown in a circus.

‘I had that sturdy old Spanish fellow in my office the day before yesterday,' he said. ‘I put him on to a ram down Blandford way if he likes to pay the price.'

I had no need to ask where he was staying. That is his second visit to the Pirrones. The first was to murder Paddy. I wonder what this second was for.

‘He asked after you,' Bastard added. ‘I told him that we had not seen so much of you as we liked. Always shut away painting hard, ha, ha! But that now you were back in good form.'

Odolaga would have known that already. He might have suffered some kind of rebound from his devilry with the macaw. Tiger brother used to hint that there were dangers for a shaman if his magic were absorbed by more powerful magic. But there is no necessity for any such mystification. If he exchanges correspondence with his goddaughter and encourages her to amuse him with local gossip he'd have a dozen pages of waffle in her spidery, nunnery writing complete with exclamation marks.

It is tempting to imagine that he could be responsible for my depression, but I do not believe it. I am suffering from disgust and reaction after discovering the cruelty and worthlessness of all this misuse of spiritual energy by Paddy, by Odolaga and by me. I need tiger brother to dance himself unconscious and bring back my soul from its underworld.

How many other religious follies, I wonder, have been resurrected to drift like lost spirits through our western society? I have come upon a whole school of unsuspected practitioners: that quiet saddler in a country town; a Basque farmer; a likely nest of Sicilians more secret than the Mafia; von Pluwig and his superstitious circle who believe without knowing what they believe; the strangers at Paddy's funeral. And on the edge of them there must be others like myself, able to heal and transmit thought with or without the aid of a familiar, who respect the holiness of a gift which needs no barbaric ritual.

August 7

Gargary has been here to ask me if I would care to lend Ginny to Rita for a day or two. Meg and I could send to the zoo for some monkeys, he said, and roast them on a stick. Yes, he could get in a daily woman from Penminster but the presence of a stranger might only get on Rita's nerves and add to her exasperation. She was not bothering to cook for herself, and the cottage seemed to him just a scrapyard of dirty glasses, of books lying wherever she had read them and paper littering the floor around the wastepaper basket.

I asked in alarm if she had called him in and why. No, there was nothing physically wrong with her. She had turned up at the surgery to demand whatever he had that was the opposite of a tranquilliser. It was a curious request and she would not elaborate on it. Surgery hours were over and so, on a sound medical instinct that he might learn more from watching than listening, he had driven her back to her cottage where the signs of withdrawal had disturbed him. She did burst out once, saying that she hated the cottage and its loneliness and longed for term to begin. When he replied that nothing stopped her from returning to Oxford immediately, she said she wasn't going to run away just because she couldn't get on with her work.

It's nearly a week since I saw her. She was sitting on the bank of the stream, where two green terraces form an angle and a soft back, with a writing pad and three books, none of them open, and seemed to have been following some intense flow of thought, since she started when I called to her. She was rather silent and at first I supposed that I had interrupted her at some point where a synthesis of her reading had formed in her mind. Then I wondered if Meg and I could have hurt her by some lack of tact over which women are inclined to brood, while the offender remains blankly ignorant.

Meg took a long look at her before we went on our way. I can read her reaction to depression or neurosis more certainly than her recognition of physical pain, but it is always hard to distinguish between emanations from her and from myself; so I discounted Meg's diagnosis of melancholy, assuming that I myself was saddened by my useless devotion to her and that Meg had caught my sense of inadequacy.