The Sending (6 page)

All day I worked, still when she was still, filling sheet after sheet when she was active, concentrating on her till the sketches seemed to become a composite of what I needed, and I could begin to give life to a sinuosity of black among the dapplings of the ground. Today my portrait—if it is a portrait and not a fantasy—is finished. I fear no one would recognise Meg for what she is. That is a minor point, for I believe I have achieved again what Julian Molay so admired. Among the living things which cannot move there is a living thing which can, defying gravity and of too soft a texture to be either stump or root. But both forms of life are one.

Put it this way. If the communal life of the tree could be so distilled that its spirit was visible and mobile, that would be what I have painted. Or put it another way around. Suppose I were to paint a bee (which I can't), it would be a pretty, photographic bee; but suppose I could so paint a bee that you saw or felt in it the spirit of the whole hive, which is the true reality—then that would be akin to my imitation of Meg.

The astonishing thing is that she has become the old Meg. Apparently I have cured her. The trance of painting must be close to the trance of the shaman. My own mind has flowed into her like the milk of a girl burnt at the stake for feeding her familiar at the breast. What am I am to make of that? Is the intense, passionate concentration of the artist akin to what Bill Freeman called prayer? And if it is, what wart on Meg's spirit have I killed? Speculation is all adrift. I have always been certain that Meg was not receiving the waves of my depression; but it could be that her receptors, which must be keener and more vulnerable than my own, reacted to the haunting in a different way. If so, what agency is attacking us both?

Yesterday I had a conversation with George Midwinter while he was riding down the valley on his afternoon off. He came upon me out in the open, playing with Meg who had stuck her back down a rabbit hole and was challenging me to fight her. Between Meg and the relentless presence of my unseen companion I was completely absorbed and did not even hear George till he dismounted. Seeing Meg at her best, he was pleased with himself for having boldly declared that there was nothing wrong with her. He confessed that all the same he had been worried, since animals do not go off their food and mope for no reason.

‘You're not looking too good yourself,' he added. ‘Why not come to Salisbury races with me next week and bring Meg?'

Kindly meant, but there is no peace for me in crowds, where I cannot satisfy myself that there is no threat behind me since some person always is. So I objected that I could not risk Meg being crushed in my pocket.

‘Underneath her is a good place to park our winnings. God help the pickpocket! Better than fish hooks,' he said.

‘But I never do win.'

‘Paddy Gadsden took him once, you know. I wanted to see if Meg could pick winners. He laughed at me and said that of course she couldn't, but we went.'

George told me that they had stuck steadily to a good place on the paddock rails where Meg could get a close view of the horses. She could tell which was slightly off form, but was no wiser than Paddy alone or any experienced professional punter. With so many runners in the pink of condition and so many races won by only a length or two, she was useless at picking winners.

‘I did work out one way of using her,' George said, ‘but it very rarely comes up. Suppose there were an odds-on favourite and Paddy or you or someone who could interpret Meg's reactions didn't recommend it, then one might be able to make a bit backing the field.'

‘What did Paddy think of that?'

‘Not much. He said he knew the winner more often than not. And when I asked him why he didn't bet, he replied that he would never use his gift to make money. I pointed out that, damn it, he didn't give his services as a horse psychiatrist for nothing, and he replied that they were services like my own and on a different plane to gaining money for money's sake.'

George had then objected that he couldn't see anything immoral in backing one's luck, and on his own admission pestered Paddy with questions about good and bad luck as if he had been a gipsy. Paddy told him that luck was in the mind. If you mixed beer and water there was no reason why the two liquids should not remain separate, each in its own half of the glass, but the odds against that happening were tremendous. If anything could make them do so, it would be the interference of mind. He added a curious remark which George remembered exactly: ‘One can be a director of a brewery but have no practice in pulling a pint.'

I wish he were alive to help me. However, I might never have told him of the haunting, for I thought of him only as very congenial company, always understanding what I was getting at and approving or illuminating my speculations with solid example. But George, who often consulted him and naturally kept very quiet about it, well knew a St Francis side of him which partly escaped me.

Ginny tells me that Rita has twice come round to see me and complains that I am never in. I don't know why she cannot telephone first. If she did, this nervous beast, banished by itself from the herd, could clean itself up and emerge from its chosen den of the day, always useless wherever it is.

I summoned up such remains of courtesy as are left to me and drove round by car to call on her. I am weary of walking and hiding in my once dear valley.

She greeted me with a cheerfulness which I could see was put on. When she had given me a glass of her college sherry—these harems of learning keep up the better traditions of Oxford monasticism—she said mercilessly, made angry, I like to believe, by affection: ‘You look about seventy. What's the matter, Alfgif?'

I replied that it was old age creeping up.

‘You should see a doctor. And I don't mean Gargary.'

‘He's good enough. He assured me that there was nothing wrong with me.'

‘When?'

‘A few days before you went moon-bathing and heard a chap twist his ankle.'

‘Ginny is very worried about you.'

So that was it—the pair of them being motherly! I thought I had completely deceived Ginny. I asked what she had said.

‘'Allus cooin' to that dratted, bothersome animal, me dear,' Rita said, imitating Ginny's accent, ‘and no time for the rest of us.'

‘I don't coo to her out loud.'

‘She didn't say you did. I hear Meg has been ill.'

‘Yes. But I cured her.'

‘How, Alfgif?'

‘By painting her.'

An impulsive answer, but I wanted to see what she would say to it.

‘You mean you cured yourself of imagining that she was ill?'

As so often she had offered a comment right off the expected line, and I had to stop and think about it before replying.

‘Will you accept that Midwinter agreed that she was ill? That's proof of reality.'

‘Of course. Why are you worrying about what is reality and what isn't?'

‘It's how philosophers earn their living.'

‘But you aren't a philosopher. You're a mystic.'

‘Two aspects of the same search. Both seek truth, the philosopher by logic, the mystic by experience.'

‘But what is the importance of Meg?'

‘I don't yet know.'

And I don't, beyond her possible usefulness in diagnosis. On the other hand Paddy could do his horse-healing without her presence. Meg, as I see it, was for keeping his receptors in training—tuning him in as George put it.

What do I mean by that? It's hard enough to satisfy my own curiosity, let alone Rita's. The man must become one with the animal, think as it does, dance as it does—for all have the habit of dancing with joy. He then reverts to his own primitive nature and recaptures communion. Odd that von Pluwig should have used that word!

So when I painted Meg I became half Meg and could affect her illness, which seems to have been psychosomatic.

It occurs to me now that I could have given Rita quite a simple example of this wild and complex theory. Take the lonely old lady or bachelor devoted to a dog. Over the years the owner begins vaguely to resemble the dog, and the dog the owner. People say the dog is becoming quite human; but it is equally true to say that the human being is recapturing the knowledge of his far ancestors: what it is like to be a dog.

In order to half answer Rita's question and steer her away from whatever she and Ginny might be imagining, I told her how von Pluwig had appeared out of the blue because he had learned that I possessed Paddy's Meg.

‘Haven't you wondered who told him?' she asked.

‘The news probably went around among horsemen.'

‘But you have had no visits from English horsemen.'

‘No. After all they have had a month to make enquiries and discover that I know nothing about horses. Von Pluwig probably hit the idea of tracing the person who had taken over Paddy's Meg and hoped for the best.'

‘Wincanton!' she exclaimed.

‘Wincanton is cattle, not horses. And if he had had a friend there he'd have said so.'

‘I wasn't thinking of von Pluwig,' she said. ‘I was thinking back to 1664 and your great-great-grandfather.'

‘What on earth do you know about him?'

‘Only what Bill Freeman told me.'

She explained that she had had an annoying wart on her forefinger. It might have come, she said, from turning over pages of vellum manuscript, and Ginny had advised her to consult Bill Freeman. She had gone to him purely for the sake of a footnote on the persistence of tradition, but to her amazement the wart had nearly gone.

I waited for more, momentarily disconcerted to learn that she and Ginny were on such good terms and conspiring to nursemaid an aging artist who chose to live alone and even now was as capable of looking after himself as ever he was.

‘I didn't connect your family with 1664,' she said, ‘or Bill Freeman either.'

I replied stuffily that my great-great-grandfather was not alive then.

‘No, but his great-great-grandfather was, stretching it a bit, when the Wincanton witches were condemned in 1664. Only ten miles from here, Alfgif.'

I remembered that the landlord's wife at the inn where I stayed below the Purbeck Hills told me that she came from Poyntington—just over the Dorset border and again less than ten miles from here—and that her grandfather ‘were a funny man' and kept bantam cock on his shoulder. I asked Rita if she was suggesting that von Pluwig, over in Germany, knew that some remnants of witchcraft were still alive in our district.

‘No. I don't suppose he has ever heard of the Wincanton witches. It's just a chain of thought, Alfgif. Who kept track of Paddy's Meg and why? And why should it be presumed that because you had her you too were a—what is it you used to call him?'

‘A horse psychiatrist.'

‘Wouldn't he once have been called a witch?'

‘Last time we met you said that I was one.'

‘I didn't. I said that once upon a time you would have been burn on suspicion. And now tell me what the matter is?'

‘I told you. Meg was ill.'

‘And before she was ill?'

‘Tigers in the jungle.'

A half truth, not a snub. But she could not persist with her questioning. Tigers? I maintain that this terror is of the same nature: a warning that I must run or hide. But a tiger would kill me or turn aside, and either way I should have peace.

Chapter Four

June 19

I HAVE GREAT DIFFICULTY in reading. When I open a book I cannot concentrate; too often I must look round to see what is waiting for me behind my chair. But I did my best, in spite of interruptions, to follow the record of the trial of the Wincanton witches, especially after discovering that they confessed to being instructed and comforted by a Man in Black to whom they gave the name of Robin.

The prosecution was founded on sound legal evidence of the facts, but the court never attempted to identify Robin. Of course it did not. It assumed that he was the Devil, who could hardly be put in the dock. The witches did not deny it (loyalty or genuine belief?) and sometimes called him Satan.

They sound like some isolated and fading little tribe whose shamans have been killed or civilised, who cannot recover the rites, let alone their meaning, and flutter around like lost hens.

All that is left of the Robin, the chief of the coven, the beast-man, the incarnation of the Purpose and its joy, is my grandfather's uncanny eye at an auction of livestock together with my great-great-grandfather's power of healing. This gene which activates the human receptors and skips a generation—what is it up to now? Well, somehow, it was detected in me through my beliefs or my words by the saintly Paddy and by my blood brother. An anthropologist or administrator or explorer would not be capable of sensing the aspects of truth behind the antics of a shaman; a hereditary Robin would be.

Apparently I am a witch—a freelance witch, one might say, with few powers and only the vaguest training in the theology of animism, but possibly with the makings of a Robin. I see that in scribbling my speculations some days ago I came to the tentative conclusion that action at a distance is powered by the dance and self-hypnosis. The latter, I suppose, in more evolved religions is the ecstasy of prayer. That is beyond my reach. I have difficulty in importuning the Purpose. Since I believe in the holiness of the senses, any ecstasy of mine would be praise not prayer: the Te Deum not the Miserere. A Robin may come steaming from the Pit, horned and clawed as the prosecution believed, but can still praise the Purpose.

This written confession of faith has momentarily lifted the Fear. Praise even in adversity like poor old Job? What else has lifted it? The approach of the vixen and my own identity with her, with the oaks and the radiance of moonlight. That was in fact a passing moment of the mystic vision which, I suspect, is the resting state of animals from the butterfly to the tiger, easily to be entered by primitive man and only with long and deep meditation by the civilised.

The Wincanton trials are short of hints and tips on the use of the tame familiar. Our local witches do not seem to have had any. They used animals much as the Roman augurs, setting the scene, calling on the god and foretelling the future by the first beast or bird which turned up. I have watched tiger brother go through a similar ceremony to predict the success or failure of a hunt when he could have done it on his own without any fortune-telling at all—just as Paddy, according to George, could pick winners.

Meg and her like become very important in other trials outside Somerset. The familiar may be supplied by the Robin or bought or just found and tamed. It might occasionally be used for healing but far more often for cursing and petty stuff at that: bewitching the next door neighbour's pig, stealing some much needed butter, hastening the end of some farmer down the road who was obviously dying of natural causes. All self-advertisement. If an old woman with an eccentric taste in pets could make her district thoroughly afraid of her, she was sure in her utter poverty of gifts and respect. My tiger brother was sometimes no better. His power to send and receive telepathically was beyond doubt, but he was not above hocus pocus if he didn't get his proper share of what food was going.

I wish he had used a familiar; but since he believed that he could send his soul to commune with beasts in the wild he had no need of one at home. In spite of all this reading I am still unable to answer Rita's question: what is the importance of Meg?

June 21

Yesterday I was forced to take some interest in my fellows. I was walking up the track—once my way to the outer world and now become my protection against it—when I saw Victor Pirrone's Lancia parked near the junction to the main road. Since he was hardly more than an acquaintance and had never been in the house, I assumed that he had winced at the prospect of mud on his flashy bodywork and was walking down on some business, though I couldn't imagine how I had missed him.

So I turned back, driving myself not to be discourteous, and then spotted him wandering along the line of great beeches which form my upper boundary and swinging a large, empty parrot cage in his hand. He explained that he had been out searching for his wife's macaw, which had escaped and taken to the air, and had caught a glimpse of it at the top of a beech while he was driving along the road.

‘I hate that bird,' he said, ‘and I wouldn't be surprised if it knows it.'

His frankness and exasperation made me think the better of him. For once he seemed to be as human as he was handsome. I asked him to come down to the house for a much needed drink and than we would search for the parrot together.

On the way I remarked that it was a pity Paddy Gadsden was no longer with us, that he could certainly have called down a tame parrot, for wild birds would let him approach and hop on his palm.

‘What was he doing when he was killed?' Pirrone asked.

‘God knows!'

‘An intelligent man, our superintendent of police!' he went on. ‘Of course he questioned me about all our house guests that night, but none of them had ever heard of Gadsden. I told him that to my mind there was only one question which mattered; what was Gadsden doing on the lane at midnight? If he had an answer to that, it was ten to one that he'd know who stole your car and killed him.'

I said that none of us in Penminster could even make a guess.

‘Gathering herbs by moonlight?' he suggested.

‘You've learned that much about him?'

‘Yes. Afterwards. But in life I only knew him as a master craftsman. He repaired a vanity bag belonging to Concha. Ostrich skin and silver it was, and the handle had torn out. A Bond Street job I thought, and then someone told me that Bond Street would probably send it to Gadsden anyway. I wish I'd known he was a sort of St Francis as well.'

‘Especially with horses.'

‘Not the kind of thing one expects in this tidy country. But I knew a priest in Sicily who could make goats dance. He shared his bedroom with one and smelt like it.'

‘A priest? Didn't that start some rumours in the parish?'

‘Good God, no! It was a young billy goat, not a nanny.'

I said that I had not meant that at all.

‘Oh, I see what you're after. No, he was a man of great piety, outstanding piety. So there could be no question of black arts.'

I remembered how Rita had said that Sir Victor was a marvellous source of footnotes, and asked him if there was much of that superstition about in Sicily.

‘And any other you can think of! But the Church Triumphant takes witches' curses as all in the day's work.'

That was interesting. He had at once connected the familiar with cursing.

‘And protects?'

‘Or pretends to. I never heard that cursing had any effect. I'm told that in the thirties a conference of rabbis put a terrifying packet of Old Testament curses on Hitler, and look where it got them!'

Yes, useless. By all I have read of African witch doctors they can so upset the mental balance of any offender or enemy that he wanders off and dies in the bush, yet they are unable to affect the civilised white colonist or confident black politician. That squares with my beliefs. Urban man is immune because he has lost the receptors or they have become vestigial through disuse, and so his mind can no longer receive the message. I know nothing about Sicilian peasants, but suspect that spiritually they are still in the Middle Ages. Pagan rites and Christian rites—but the latter are firmly believed to be more powerful.

I meant to ask Pirrone about this, but we had just come out on to the lawn in front of the house when he shouted:

‘There's that bloody bird!' and began to call: ‘Leyalá! Leyalá!'

Leyalá ignored him. The macaw was standing on the coping directly beneath the apex of the pediment. The façade of old red brick with six windows on each of the three stories—built in the late seventeenth century by some country architect doing his best with a new fashion—was too near a perfect square, so he had added a heavy pediment of grey stone matching the sills and surrounds of the windows. Any sort of frieze or decoration within the pediment would have made it still heavier, squashing the honest simplicity of the house, but my eye had always demanded some slender figure or urn or shield. That was now provided by the macaw. The metallic blues, yellows and reds of him, catching the sun, pointed the whole cubical, very earthbound house to heaven.

I longed to be able to paint him there, yet the composition would be meaningless when one could not show that the inserted miniature of colour was vividly alive and glorying in its position. The macaw knew very well that he was beautiful—I don't mean consciously, though I wouldn't deny it—and was as vain as a cat taking stock of itself.

I told Sir Victor to stay where he was and walked across the lawn, devoutly thanking Leyalá for his gift: a silent act of worship towards the Purpose displaying itself in an individual. I think I also lifted my arms towards him in the hieratic gesture, but cannot be sure of the exact movement with which my body intensified the concentration of my mind. Leyalá took off from the coping, planed down without a flutter of wings or tail and settled on my shoulder. When I consider it now I am amazed; at the time it seemed inevitable.

The bloody bird, as Sir Victor had called him, lived up to his name and ripped Pirrone's hand open when he tried to grab him. I suggested that Leyalá had probably had enough liberty to know whether he enjoyed it or not, and would sit quietly on my shoulder.

‘He can't travel loose in your car,' I said, ‘and he isn't going back to his cage without protest. Let's have that drink and telephone your wife to drive out and get him.'

We found Ginny cleaning the living room—or rather playing with Meg. She was delighted and surprised to see the three of us and exclaimed at this gorgeous paintbox of a bird who was chortling away to himself as if amused by his position. I patched up Pirrone's hand, poured out some whisky for us and asked Ginny if she had anything fit for the other distinguished guest. She could only suggest the first raspberries which she had picked that morning with the dew on them. Leyalá put his foot on the edge of the bowl, deliberately upsetting it. He liked to see the items of what he was offered, not to sink his bill into a mess of crimson porridge. Highly approving he scoffed the lot.

Meg, fearless and curious as ever, jumped on to the table. She cannot, George tells me, see colour, but she must have been amazed at such a riot of unbelievable greys. The macaw whipped round and Meg did a vertical take-off over that formidable bill with the spring of a mongoose avoiding the strike of a cobra. I never before saw her do that, since she has no enemies. As she was about to close in for the kill I put her in her pocket, where she closed her teeth on my hand instead of macaw's spine, even so only denting the skin. Leyalá returned to my shoulder where he remained in deep thought and then anointed my back with a remarkable turd of red and white which reminded me of squeezed toothpaste. Evidently I was being reproached all round for well-meaning officiousness.

I asked Pirrone where the musical name of Leyalá came from. He told me that it was Basque and that the bird had been given to Concha by her godfather, a farmer who owned a slice of mountain not far from the French frontier and was something of a traveller when he was not hidden among his precipices and pastures.

That led me to the question of how two persons from such remote corners of Europe had met and married. Pirrone revelled in telling me, himself amused by the strangeness of fate. As a young shipping clerk in Port Said he had been formally interned by the British at the outbreak of war and then released to join Intelligence as an interpreter when we invaded Sicily. He had made powerful friends, especially among members of the Mafia whom the Americans had let loose in their homeland, and, after the war, had roared ahead in the export of fruit and fruit juices. Then he and his partners decided it would be worthwhile to own a couple of small ships of their own. Yards were full of orders, but Spain could supply. So he, as the shipping expert and linguist, visited Bilbao and came away with long-lived ships and an incomparable wife.

‘She brought me luck and love with it,' he added.

It was not long before Lady Pirrone turned up. I had talked to her at the party on the night of Paddy's death, but otherwise had only exchanged the odd word when she stepped out of her chauffeured car to shop, sometimes asking my advice.

She bounded on little girl's feet at her Leyalá, swamped him with endearments and reproaches in Basque and put him back in his cage with a thrust of the bosom to which she was hugging him. The macaw did not object. The game was up. Her good Victor then burst into his story, gestures of despair accompanying the account of his drive, gestures of relief at sighting Leyalá in the tree, arms thrown open in affection to describe his meeting with me, hand shading his eyes as we spotted the bird on the coping and at last wonder, expressed as artificially as any opera star, when Leyalá planed down to the wizard.

Concha Pirrone thanked me prettily and asked if I too was a bird lover, by which she meant caged birds. I replied that all of us, human and animal, could understand some of the meanings of the song and chatter of wild birds and added—to avoid any suggestion of reproach—that of course a tropical splendour like Leyalá had to be caged, specially fed and kept warm.