The Sending (8 page)

Chapter Five

June 25

I COULD NOT KEEP Rita outside my sinister privacy any longer. I went to her with no such intention, only with a learned question. Truth to her is never simple; she is so soaked in the unbelievables of the Dark Ages that she neither accepts nor rejects. My question concerned the Norse shamans. It seemed to me that they understood the full use of the familiar while Saxon and Celt were content with sticking pins into a wax image baptised by the Robin. The baptism, of course, was merely to name and define the target. Transmission of thought was the real weapon.

I found Rita in her study where I stood with my back against book shelves, refusing on some silly excuse to sit down. Quietly she set a high-backed chair in the corner so that my back and right were protected, while she herself sat at my left. She had no need to say anything. My secret, via the observant Ginny, was out.

Her beauty was enhanced by big eyes behind big, clear glasses, which from force of donnish habit she would put on and off. Her air of tall, Hellenic serenity is contradicted by humour and uninhibited speech. She was irresistible, and I told her of my illness, omitting the worst of the humiliations such as my scream of terror.

Till then all she had known of me was that I painted, had been long a widower and that during my eighteen years of service to the Government of India I had spent my leaves with a tribe which had hardly evolved beyond the stage of hunting and food-gathering. Much of that I expanded for her, and added the capture of Leyalá—of which she had heard like everyone else—and my private experiment with the bullocks.

‘And they came to you but were afraid of you?' she asked.

‘Quite rightly.'

‘You should get rid of Meg.'

She and George and Gargary all find something unnatural about Meg which might be affecting me. They are as absurd as the shocked prosecutors of the Wincanton witches.

The grace and gaiety of my familiar are far from unnatural. When she rolls and dances and sits up with forepaws hanging down in the way of a begging dog but infinitely more alert, she takes part in the blessed playfulness of the Purpose. Since her illness she is keener than ever on fun, following me and asking me to play when I have no heart for it. I am like a father overcome by melancholy, whose child cannot understand why play should have become only an imitation when it used to be fast and innocent as between two children. She likes to jump for my cupped hands and be caught, then thrown on to a pile of straw from which to jump again. This was becoming a little too rough and she has invented an alternative. She burrows backwards into the straw until she is invisible. Then my hand has to attack. The black head shoots out with open mouth and she closes her needle teeth on a finger, checking the speed of the jaws so suddenly that there is not a mark on my skin. She can never have enough of this.

I tried to explain to Rita—can she be jealous of Meg?— my theory that the familiar kept the human receptors in good order, and Gargary's suggestion, more entertaining than possible, that as a result I might be vulnerable to the collective fear of a rabbit warren.

‘That would be what your Norse shamans and the sagas called a “sending”,' she said. ‘I always thought it meant a sort of portable ghost.'

It may have done. Because a ghost is seen, it does not necessarily have objective existence. An inversion of time? A mistranslation by the brain of signals from the eye? Tiger brother, always on cautious terms with ghosts, insisted they were spirits of the dead. Well, he naturally would. It is impossible to explain the difference between subjective and objective to hunting man, who considers that matter and spirit are aspects of the same reality, though he wouldn't express it that way. What we call reality is to him only an artificial pigeon-holing of scraps from the unity of life.

I told Rita that it would be easier if I were pestered by a visible ghost. I could not avoid the accompanying terror but I could control it. My sending is the cloud of terror without the ghost, and I can't control it because there is nothing to control.

‘Which will teach you to monkey with black arts!'

‘There aren't any. I monkey with the senses which are common to all animate life. We don't use them only because we can't.'

She said that she longed to be able to help me and that I must forgive her if she questioned me on the facts as she would one of her students who was on to some original idea and could not quite spit it out.

‘Alfgif, have you any religion?' she asked. ‘I mean, beyond describing yourself as Church of England.'

‘I believe in a Purpose which may be called God. I could easily be a Moslem except that I am too much of a pagan for Mohammed. But Christ and St Francis would understand me without, I hope, condemning.'

I should have been at peace in those ancestral days when it was possible to respect the Old Religion, older than Saxon or Celt, without rejecting Christianity. In that middle ground I stand, and I give a profounder meaning to the Legend of St Hubert who, when he came up with the stag he was hunting, had a vision of the Cross between its horns.

‘Then have you tried prayer to dismiss the cloud?'

I had, but it was not answered. How could it be? Fear is a gift of the Purpose, for our preservation. I could not ask that it be taken away from me. If it were, I should cross Penminster High Street without looking at the traffic.

‘Rita, I cannot demand. I can only give praise.'

‘That should be enough to fix the cloud.'

‘It does when I feel so intensely a part of nature that I am on the edge of the mystic vision, but only for the moment.'

‘Is that what you meant when you told me you had cured your precious Meg by painting her?'

‘Yes. The concentration of the craftsman can't be all that far from the trance of the healer. I became a part of Meg and Meg of me, and I sacrificed to the Purpose by offering my mind instead of my body.'

‘You sound like a twelfth-century Cathar. You haven't thought about going around on all fours, have you?'

I replied that I had not only thought about it but done it. It was supposed to be an effective rite before a monkey hunt.

‘You ate monkeys?' she exclaimed in disgust.

‘Certainly we did. And I wanted to see if reception from the monkeys was better on all fours than standing up.'

‘And was it?' she laughed.

‘I don't think so. But I remind you that in addressing the Purpose, we crouch on our knees and a Moslem goes down on all fours.'

‘You'd make an archbishop's hair stand on end, Algif! But if you really feel that painting can heal like the trance of a medicine man, why don't you paint this Fear and give it shape?'

When I had left her, refusing to be accompanied home like a cripple, I climbed up into the wind and space of the open downs, clear of the tender woodland but not of panic. Meditating on the bullock experiment I realised that it had been ‘evil'—a gross misuse of the saving power. I made them afraid. They did not know of what. Heredity warned of the tiger crouched for the charge, the poisoned arrow, the king cobra equally afraid but unable to escape. They tended to mass with lowered heads, demonstrating that whatever killed would be trampled by the herd. Quiet Angus bullocks? Yes, but their instincts were formed when they were wild cattle, as ours when we were still wild men.

It follows that my Fear also is ‘evil'—the opposite of the Purpose—either brought on myself by myself or a sending by some external agency. Tiger brother would have attempted to exorcise it by the symbolism of his diagrams drawn on the ground with rice flour: that magic circle which has come down to us from the Old Religion and decayed into ridiculous hocus pocus. It repels nothing, but tranquillises the mind in the centre and protects it from itself. Alternatively he might have been able to hypnotise me into giving the Fear an imagined form and to disperse it. I can conceive it as a random nebula wandering through the community of nature. If it is condensed, it can be attacked. So my painting will not be a spell protecting me from nothing, but a circle of concentrated mind which confines a something.

I shall not choose trees and their shadows again. That was Meg's environment. Mine is the downland where the ancestral Robins held their feasts and gave thanks for all life and for their land.

June 26

I set up my easel on the green fort where the earliest rampart had been mounded by my Neolithic forefathers whose religion in its deepest sense I share. Nothing was in sight but sheep, a barn and the rolling grass, so that any shape formed by my imagination would be distinct even if indefinite. But in such a landscape there was no inspiration. A rough pencil sketch of wavy lines like a cartographer's aide-mémoire was the truest representation of it. As on that day upon the Purbeck Hills when I had run away from home, the threat of danger was unbearable. I had wished to challenge it, but it won.

June 27

This time Meg was with me. When the Fear climbed up the rampart to haunt me she was disturbed. She sat up, still and slender as the black, burnt stump of a sapling, searching the distance towards which I had been looking—when I was not glancing behind me—to find out what had alarmed that great creature, her companion. I was holding on to myself so tightly that I never saw the dog which came bounding silently up from below and tried to break Meg's back with one clean snap of the jaws. The first I knew of it were its desperate yelps as it tried to shake off the black demon, unwisely mistaken for a rabbit, whose teeth were clenched in its nose and whose body was swinging and flying as carelessly as a child on a mad roundabout, meanwhile wafting over the hill top the fiendish stench of the defending polecat which she had never released before. I jumped to the rescue of all concerned and when Meg saw that I held the whimpering dog firmly by the collar she condescended to let go.

I was cheered by her example. It would be useless to direct a sending of fear at her; the most that could be done against her would be to deprive her of joy. Realising that this was exactly what had been done, I caught the red fury of Meg's mood. Revenge. Not a pretty thought and empty. Revenge against what?

I returned to my easel and wondered how one would paint anger. But who could concentrate on anger when the land was spread out in the sun with long arms of the hills behind its head? For the moment Fear had run off with the dog, its tail between its legs.

June 28

Today was hopeless. Best idea: a something forming from the earth as if the birth of a volcano were interrupting the flow of the downs. But while I was dreaming on the craftsman's bridge between the vision and hard reality, I was interrupted by some damned fool striding through Somerset who sat down and wished to discuss abstract art with me. I told him there was no such thing—the only quick alternative to landing myself in a professorial attempt to define ‘abstract'. After all there is nothing more abstract than a map. If I had known how to use Meg for cursing he would have been a helpless target. I was glad to see that when he was trotting down the rampart at too hearty a speed for his age he tripped, fell flat and went off limping. Perhaps his receptors were in surprisingly good order.

No peace thereafter. I wish to God this thing would finish me if it can. I am afraid of everything but death.

June 29

Rain today. When it cleared I tried again. With the wrack of cloud sailing overhead I saw that I had been blinkered by confining imagination to the earth. It was sky bounded by earth which mattered, not the other way round, and decidedly not a study of sky alone.

Blake. I must remember Blake. But how near blasphemy he was to show Purpose in human form, though I must admit that the priest who tried to show the brotherhood of life in his vestments of horns and tail was little better. One excluded the holiness of the senses; the other the splendour of unlimited mind. Both mixed too much fear with reverence. I am clearer now. Tomorrow I want worship with no fear at all.

June 30

By God, we're off! To paint from the height of the rampart was wrong. The mass comes into the composition somewhere, but whatever represents the self must not be on top of it. The whole land was patterned in pools of dark green and pools of gold as the searchlights of the sun struck it through the clouds. Blake again. But instead of descending, cannot Life travel up the beam to reach the point of light? All very pretty, but we arrive at only an aircraft's view.

No, Robin and his earth must still be one. I shall paint the pools but the shafts of light will be cylinders not triangles. One of them contains the self and the cloud is powerless against it, for it is in a void. Sounds crazy. This note and the dense shading of a preliminary sketch are only to make me analyse what I think I mean. As always I long to offer an act of worship, not to demand.

The painting which exorcised Meg could have been done by Pan if Pan gave up his pipe for the brush. This will be a different form of exorcism. The cloud of Fear cannot be painted, as Rita suggested. It cannot be painted because it has ceased to exist.

July 6

Four days ago it was finished and I am still free. Can this strange and glorious normality last? I must have faith that it will, but be on my guard. Meanwhile I should profit by the new clarity of mind to refine some more traditional, less demanding method of defence.

I cannot give this work of mine a name. If asked what it means I could not answer so easily as for my Holy Well, which is only a picture of a pool with an unseen tenant and means no more.

But this one is a devotional fantasy. I can explain what is beyond and between these curious columns of sunlight. Beyond them is a down in Somerset which never ends and never can.

‘And the columns, Mr Hollaston?'

‘Each column is a Jacob's ladder and those shadows within may be—I am not sure—forms of life neither at the bottom nor the top but safe within the emanation of the Purpose. Do not bother about them! It is an imaginary landscape, and if you like it, you like it.'