‘Of course.’
Quick and decisive as a surgeon he drew two scores from my wrist to my knuckles with a savage twig of hawthorn which he had extracted from his coat. I damned his eyes and very nearly called him a sadistic lunatic.
‘It’s for your own protection. Really it is,’ he said with mild surprise.
My exasperated opinion was that he had an obsession with blue veins. He had neatly nicked one of mine. I asked him how the devil he thought I could explain ripping myself twice in a tidy, modern room without so much as a rusty nail in the wall.
‘You found a poor little pussy crawling around with a broken back, and when you tried to put it out of pain…’
‘I don’t put poor little pussies out of pain! I get someone else to do it.’
‘Then you are very muddled on the subject like many other people.’
But the excuse was good, blast him! When I went over to the pub for breakfast, I used the cat on the Gorms—helping it, not putting it out of pain—and explained that the handkerchief with which I had bound up my hand had slipped while I was asleep. Mrs Gorm said that I should have put my coat over the cat’s head, and did an efficient job on me with adhesive dressings.
She believed in a good breakfast and found in me a guest after her own heart. I could hardly secrete fried eggs in my pocket, but bacon, sausages and a slice of ham were easy. Then, getting up from the table, I remembered that Fosworthy was a vegetarian. That beat me. What did vegetarians have for breakfast? There seemed to be nothing but toast and marmalade which was safe. So I packed a pile of that in a paper napkin and surreptitiously picked half a dozen carrots and a cabbage on my way back through the garden.
When I went into the bedroom, I found that he had had a bath. He looked very different. He would have passed as, say, a devoted preparatory schoolmaster in his early forties if his clothes had not been in ribbons. He actually ate the raw carrots and much of the cabbage, neatly shredding them with a pocket knife—proof enough, I should have thought, that human teeth were never meant for such a diet.
I watched him—stared would be a better word—while he performed his conjuring trick of making a cabbage disappear. I could not make him out at all. He had luminous, grey eyes in a thin face of yellowish tan: a complexion which may have been due as much to rabbit food as to sun. The hollow cheeks and remarkable eyes could look mild and intelligent, as now they did, or crazily energetic under stress.
‘About your movements,’ I said. ‘I have finished my business here and I needn’t stay any longer. I’ll drive you wherever you want to go.’
He hesitated over this, and repeated that it was his duty to protect me. He pointed out that he still had to lay a trail for the dog.
‘Damn the dog! There isn’t any dog,’ I exclaimed. ‘And unless it’s trained it can’t tell him anything for certain. All we have to bother about is somebody sitting in comfort on the edge of the downs with a pair of field glasses. If you really believe that is possible, I’ll try to smuggle you into the car unobserved.’
Since his coat was unwearable, I gave him a high-necked sweater of mine, and we pinned up the biggest of the rents in his trousers. I felt dubious whether he was in any real danger at all. Still, the fact remained that his imagination had been sufficiently stirred to dive through the solidest hedge in the county of Somerset. Presumably Undine’s husband—as good a theory as another—did not believe in affinities and cabbage.
The odd thing was that the husband had not seemed in the least angry. Not out of breath. Perfect composure. Excellent manners. He could have been a soldier or a local squire. The compact body, the clothes, the close-clipped dark moustache, the ease and intimacy of address were those of a man with his roots deep in the countryside.
I paid my bill at The Green Man and drove off up the road, then turned into the cart track as if I meant to pick up my bag at the bungalow and save myself the trouble of walking across the garden with it. I told Fosworthy to leave by the front door and work his way on hands and knees round the bungalow into the shelter of the little ornamental hedge. He could then reach the garden gate, which I would leave open, and crawl through it under cover of the car without anyone seeing him except the Gorms. As they were busy cleaning up the bar and shortsighted anyway, the risk was small.
It worked. I reversed slowly with Fosworthy crawling alongside until trees covered us from any observer in the fields or on the downs. He got in and sat on the floor.
We had travelled a mile or two towards Cheddar when he started fussing again about that improbable dog. I gave way to him and drove back until we came to a bend where there was a field gate, just out of sight of the entrance to the cart track. This was likely to be the point where the other fellow had hit the road and he might well revisit it before investigating the now empty bungalow. At any rate Fosworthy proposed to leave his scent there. I suggested derisively that he should do it on the gate post. He considered this in long silence, as if it might be an important contribution to modern philosophy, but decided to have a roll on the grass verge instead. He then discovered that he had left his coat behind in the bungalow.
I told him to stay where he was, and not for God’s sake to attract the attention of passing motorists by rolling on the ground as if he were having a fit. I drove back, recovered his coat, rolled it up and chucked it into the boot of the car.
When I was approaching the junction with the road, my other visitor of the night appeared on the edge of the cart track and waved me down. He asked if I would be good enough to give him a lift. Wherever he had been, he could not have seen anything—except of course that I had forgotten some possession at the bungalow and gone back to fetch it. The dog only existed in Fosworthy’s dreams.
‘Have you found your friend?’ I asked.
‘No. It’s quite hopeless. Where are you going now?’
Fosworthy was only just round the corner of the road, on the way to Cheddar; so I replied that I was going to Wells.
‘That will do fine,’ he said, sitting down beside me.
I shot out of the cart track and made a thoroughly dangerous U-turn. For all I knew, Fosworthy might have been inspired to lay a trail by strolling after me. His reactions were incalculable.
‘What have you done to your hand?’ my companion asked.
He seemed to me a less sensitive type than Mrs Gorm or myself, so I gave him the putting-out-of-pain story, saying that the noise in the stables which I had mentioned to him turned out to be an injured cat.
‘I see,’ he said. ‘You should have apologised to it.’
‘I can’t speak cat.’
‘Nor can I, or only a very little,’ he laughed. ‘But when you have to kill, if you calm yourself, you calm the animal. We are all the same.’
There was something vaguely reminiscent of Fosworthy in that remark. Otherwise the man appeared pleasant and normal. He chatted easily of sheep-farming on the Mendips and moorland reclamation, and did not tell me his name. I myself let him know that I had been a mining engineer and added:
‘But it’s a hotel I’m after now.’
I meant only to explain my innocent presence at the bungalow; but, thinking over the conversation, I can see that the little word ‘now’ was possibly unfortunate.
When we reached Wells, he asked me to drop him at the police station. I was sufficiently interested to hang around out of sight and see what he did. As soon as he thought I had driven away, he came out of the station. He might have had time to ask at the desk whether, for example, a pair of gloves had been found, but not for any serious report or enquiry. It was a bit of evidence in favour of Fosworthy’s implication that this was a very private affair—if indeed he had ever said anything so definite.
I was back at the gate where I had left him in twenty minutes altogether. He was not there, nor was he behind a hedge or in any of the ditches. He had vanished. I was not as relieved to lose him as common sense insisted I should be. He had aroused a sort of paternal and exasperated affection. Besi
des that, I was fascinated by such individuality in a society which seemed to me to be composed of shades of grey—pleasant and restful enough, but lacking the colour of the decidedly un-welfarish world in which I had been let loose ever since my schooldays.
At any rate it was the society for which I was nostalgic, and I continued the search for my future inn. The Green Man would nearly do, but I was in no hurry. I hoped to find something more to my taste, preferably on or just below the Mendips.
Why there? That question turned out to be so difficult to explain convincingly that I must dig down for the motives which at the time of my pub-hunting were largely unconscious and instinctive.
My mother was Welsh and spoke her language with pride whenever she could find anyone to speak it to—which was seldom, since we lived at Bampton on the edge of Exmoor. My father was an agricultural engineer: in fact, a blacksmith who had moved on from horses to tractors.
She was quietly proud of her ancestry, which she traced back to native princes of Wales—romantically, no doubt—and it was on her stories of the West that I was brought up. I say the West because the bardic legends covered the whole of the Roman-Celtic nation which so long endured on both sides of the Bristol Channel.
How can one explain these acquisitions of childhood which penetrate into a man as a cat’s mouse-catching lessons into her kittens? Put it this way! I had a frontier of the imagination which corresponded to the dim but real frontier of Ambrosius and Arthur. My own true country of choice and spirit ran from the Wansdyke to Land’s End—and this though no one could have been more stolid, ruddy and Saxon than my father at his forge.
When I decided on my new profession, it was the Bristol Channel which tempted me. Devon and Cornwall were too full of holidaymakers for my taste. That may sound odd for an innkeeper, but what I wanted—as much emotionally as financially—was trade all the year round. So for me the answer was a Somerset village, not too low-lying, not too near Bristol, not on the coast. And my personal predilection—here comes in mother again—was for the Mendips and Glastonbury. Mysterious Glastonbury, holy to the Celtic Christians and long before. Avalon, the burial place of Arthur. Ynys Witrin, the island fort of glass which guards the Underworld. In all the explanations of that tradition which I have come across, I have never seen mentioned the simplest of all: that Glastonbury does in fact guard the way to the Underworld. Beyond it, to the traveller coming up from the south, are the hollow Mendips, the silence of death and the unknown waters of the caves.
It was the morning of September 3rd when Fosworthy vanished from the roadside. Some ten days later I was staying at Taunton for the week-end. In the hotel lounge I got into conversation with a man of about my own age, evidently somewhat bored and tired and scientifically restoring his spirits by carefully timed measures of vodka. He was drily amusing and very informative. He lived in a village between Wells and Glastonbury and was a consulting psychiatrist.
As so often happens, he was interested by my mining shop, and I by his account of incredible brain experiments going on in Bristol. We decided to share a table at dinner. Dr Dunton then suggested that he had a much better idea for my lonely evening than a movie, and asked me to come along as his guest to a big annual dance at the County Mental Hospital. When I foolishly hesitated, he said that it would educate me, that I ought to see how the other half lived, and so on.
‘This dance does the influential public the hell of a lot of good and doesn’t do the patients any harm,’ he added. ‘There’s no alcohol served, of course, but you can always slip out to the car park where some of us will be delighted to keep you cheerful. That’s why I am staying the night.’
It did not seem too bad a prospect, especially since I was already in an expansive mood.
‘By the way, do you know if they ever had a local patient called Fosworthy?’ I asked.
‘They didn’t,’ he replied. ‘But I sometimes think they ought to have, if you mean our H. Barnabas Fosworthy. How did you run across him?’
The whole episode, at that distance and after dinner, appeared humorous and unlikely; but his question sobered me up instantly. I wished I had never mentioned Fosworthy. He had been so insistent that it might be unhealthy for me to be connected with him. And, after all, there was some evidence that I should be stupid not to fall in with his wishes.
‘It was just that he wrote me a crazy letter about the origin of tin.’
‘Yes, some daft geological theory would be right up his street,’ said Dunton. ‘His chief interest is in primitive religion. All from books, of course!’
‘What does he do?’
‘Nothing. A bachelor, living on a reasonable income of his own. He’s a funny fellow, much liked and much laughed at. When he first came here, he was always agitating against taking life. But then, very oddly, some of the sporting set began to consider him a sort of local prophet, though they didn’t give up their fun. Our countryside is full of the intelligent half-educated.’
‘It should just about suit me then,’ I said.
‘Oh, I didn’t mean chaps from wide, open spaces! It’s the effect of Glastonbury I’m talking about. There’s such a climate of myth and death about the place. Jung and his collective unconscious is a much safer guide than Freud around here, but don’t tell anyone I said so!’
We took a taxi over to the County Hospital. There were rows of expensive cars outside. Inside, the hall was banked with flowers and gaily decorated. Dunton introduced me to a number of doctors and nurses—many of them foreigners who decidedly knew how to dress for the occasion. It was impossible to distinguish visitors from patients. Well, of course it was. I couldn’t imagine why I should have expected straws in the hair.
I danced a bit, for there was an excellent band, and then visited the car park where I was pressed to choose between champagne in a car belonging to a visiting psychiatrist from the Midlands, and Dunton’s bottle of brandy. It was becoming a really outstanding occasion. I hoped that the following year my new hotel would be able to lay on a special dinner beforehand.
I returned to the hall with Dunton, the registrar and the prosperous headshrinker. While we stood watching the floor, my eye was caught by the lovely slim figure of a girl in a gold-and-white evening frock who was dancing a waltz—the more frenzied modern minuets were carefully avoided—with grace and abandon. When her partner brought her round to us, I was still more interested. She had a small head, with very definite but delicate features, set on a long neck. She was, I recognised, what a river nymph ought to look like, cold, exquisite, of tremulous and uncertain boundaries. One had to examine her closely to see why. Her skin was indeed as transparent as water, and the capillaries showed as a blue mist. At that first sight of her I could not decide whether she fascinated me or not. I never could. I always remained an interested neutral. The effect of that marvellous complexion depended on the light. She could appear slightly grotesque or appealingly and tragically fragile.
‘Is that a patient or a guest?’ I asked.
‘A guest,’ said the Registrar. ‘She lives in Bath, I believe. Do you want to meet her?’
‘Not much. She’s too untouchable.’
Since her frock revealed a good half of delightful high breasts, that was an odd adjective: but I well remember using it. I suppose that instinct really does have some validity in the field of sexual attraction.
‘Myself I find blue willow pattern more attractive to eat off,’ Dunton remarked callously. ‘Still, I can imagine the excitement of following the design wherever it led you.’
‘Oh, God! Excuse me!’ the Registrar exclaimed.
A harmless-looking grey-haired chap, whom I would have put down as a male nurse, had just barged his way on to the dance floor and dropped on his knees before her, babbling. She seemed accustomed to it, or else she was wonderfully tactful by nature. She continued to smile at the poor devil without a trace of embarrassment until he was unobtrusively led away.
The Registrar returned to us, a good deal more troubled tha
n she had been.
‘That hardly ever happens,’ he assured us. ‘A charming patient, too! A quite brilliant paranoiac who spends all his time working out the mathematics of a flat, circular universe!’
Dunton’s mind was still on the girl. He wondered whether she lacked a layer of epidermis or had little skin pigmentation. He said she would have to be damned careful to keep out of the sun.
‘The sun!’ exclaimed the Midlands psychiatrist. ‘What the devil has a woman like that to do with sun and beaches and vulgarity? God! Just think of her naked in candlelight!’
He cleared his throat loudly and medically to cover up his most undisciplined comment. I was somewhat shocked. But, after all, I suppose psychiatrists have to let their hair down sometimes like the rest of us. And I suspected that Fosworthy’s one remaining thought when he arrived exhausted at the bungalow might have been much the same. There could not be two such women.
I was too uneasy to enjoy the rest of the party, for it struck me that where one of Fosworthy’s perturbations was, the other might well turn up. In that case I could imagine Dunton introducing me and cheerfully mentioning before I could stop him that I knew Barnabas Fosworthy. Nor did I want to slip away, since something similar might happen in my absence and I should never know anything about it. Misgivings were not far-fetched. My mysterious visitor with the moustache was the type one would be sure to meet at any social function of importance to the county. I was certain that he was not mysterious to anyone but me.
I was therefore very ready to go when the Midlands mind-healer offered us a lift back to the hotel. He seemed rather glum and disappointed in spite of some pretty affectionate dancing with Fosworthy’s Undine. Dunton, however, was inclined to sing madrigals. At breakfast next morning I found him just as pleasant with a headache as without one. He insisted that I should call on him if I were anywhere near his village in the evening after a day’s pub-hunting. I promised to do so.
The Taunton district had not produced anything I liked. The Green Man was still at the top of my list. Before returning to London, I dropped in to check some details of the existing plumbing. Mr Gorm said he had a telephone message for me which he had been hanging on to in case I turned up. He hunted about for the slip of paper and found it among bottles behind the bar.
The Courtesy of Death Page 2
