If I sees Mr Yarrow, would he be so very kind as to call on Mr Smith at 34 Petunia Avenue, Hammersmith.
I did not know a Mr Smith who could conceivably want to see me. Was the message really for me? Yes, Gorm said, but the caller had not known my name. He had just asked for the gentleman who had been staying in the bungalow.
‘So very kind as to’—that was Fosworthy all right. Added proof was that I had never had the time or the occasion to introduce myself. I was relieved to hear that he was all in one piece, though persuading himself that it was necessary to take refuge in the wilds of Hammersmith under an alias. I had felt guilty—when I thought about it at all—at having let him down through no fault of my own.
The following afternoon I drove out to Hammersmith. 34 Petunia Avenue was a small boarding house, self-consciously bright, with a Room and Breakfast notice in the window. The proprietress answered the bell herself, and I asked for Mr Smith.
‘Oh, we are so glad that somebody has called to see him,’ she cried. ‘He hardly ever goes out, you know, and we were getting a little worried about him.’
I assured her that there was nothing to worry about, that when Mr Smith was not in London he lived all alone in the country and perhaps had got set in his ways.
I knocked on his door. When he opened it, his face lit up with relief and gratitude. I cannot think of a time when anyone seemed so pleased to see me. It reinforced my affection for him.
He was no longer agitated. In fact he looked very quiet and miserable. He was thinner than ever, and his cheeks alarmingly hollow. I said I was afraid he had been allowing his imagination to get out of hand.
‘Bless me, no!’ he replied. ‘But I have had nothing much to eat since I last saw you. I had just enough to pay for my first week here, and then no money at all.’
I reckoned—having been flat broke in my time—that I could have carried on for a couple of weeks on boarding-house breakfasts without showing signs of starvation; but then I remembered his diet.
‘They are most obliging in falling in with my wishes,’ he told me. ‘They give me two dainty rolls and a plate of lettuce every morning, but of course it is not enough.’
I offered to go out at once and buy some nut cutlets or whatever he fancied, if he knew of a shop in the neighbourhood where I could get them.
‘I cannot understand why it should be thought that there is something recondite about vegetarianism,’ he said with a flash of spirit. ‘A brown loaf and a pot of honey would do excellently.’
‘And some milk?’
‘I have an aversion to London milk. Or, to be fair, the small jug I am given with my breakfast is somewhat tasteless. A bottle of stout—if I might trespass so far upon your astonishing kindness.’
I was back in ten minutes with his order. He got outside the whole loaf and three-quarters of a pound of honey. Then he put down a pint of stout with hearty enjoyment. If anyone had asked me, I should have replied automatically that vegetarians did not touch alcohol—probably with some vague thought of pious Hindus.
I was so occupied by the situation in which he had managed to land himself that only now did I have a chance to tell him what had happened when I drove back to the bungalow to recover his coat.
‘I guessed something of the sort,’ he said, ‘and ventured to beg a lift from a passing truck which took me to Reading. I must admit I find hitch-hiking, as I believe it is called, an unwarranted intrusion upon strangers, but they do not seem to mind. From Reading I walked most of the way to Hammersmith and took this room. Then my circumstances became almost desperate, so I risked that telephone call. There was no one else to help and advise me.’
‘But don’t you have friends in London?’ I asked.
‘Very few. And they would not understand.’
I could not see why he was short of cash. I explained—trying not to be patronising—that he could draw a cheque or transfer money to an account in Hammersmith.
‘I should have to give an address,’ he said, ‘and I cannot trust my bank manager not to reveal it. Since I vanished from home without warning, there could be quite innocent enquiries about me apart from the others.’
‘Does this bank manager know your investments?’
‘Yes, of course. I am afraid my life is an open book.’
That was a remarkable statement, if there ever was one.
‘But if you really are in danger, why don’t you go to the police?’
‘It would involve so much. And I could not be a traitor merely because of disagreement with my associates.’
This was utterly sincere: an essential part of his simplicity. I replied that the person or persons from whom he was hiding seemed to be poor judges of character.
‘I am bad at explaining. I get too emotional, you see. I can understand that they mistrust me and are very anxious to ensure my silence. I am in love and cannot help it. I fear I run into strange capers, as Shakespeare said.’
‘I seem to remember that you want to run away with her.’
‘To be with her.’
‘How many times have you met this girl of yours?’
‘Twice.’
If it had just been Fosworthy and the higher mathematician, I should have decided that Undine had a pathological effect on confirmed bachelors in their early forties. But I also remembered the reaction of the psychiatrist. At first sight of her he had sounded ready to leave home, family and profession. And there were Dr Dunton and I, the one finding her as unattractive as if she were painted with woad and the other merely curious.
‘And that’s enough to convince you that some secret or other is worthless?’ I asked.
‘I see you have a gift for distinguishing essentials, my dear Yarrow! An individual cannot be destroyed. Therefore dissolution is a mere inconvenience, though frightening if there is no preparation or apology. But since I have come to know perfection, the life of the flesh appears to me to be of greater value than I suspected. I may have mentioned my doubt that blue veins carry on into the next world.’
‘So long as you believe you see them, it doesn’t seem to me to matter very much,’ I said.
He retorted that solipsism—which seemed to be a textbook term for what I had said—was the resort of the intellectually lazy, and continued to lecture me. As soon as he gave me a chance by drawing breath for the next paragraph, I returned to his practical problem and offered a simple solution.
‘You open an account in Hammersmith or where you wish. I guarantee the initial overdraft, putting up some cover if the Manager wants it. Then you write to the companies whose shares you hold, instructing them to send your dividend warrants to the bank. I don’t see how that can go wrong. It gives you a breather before anyone can trace you.’
‘You would really do this for me?’ he asked.
‘Well, I don’t mind. And meanwhile I’ll pay your bill for the last week and calm down the landlady.’
His private income, he told me, was around £2,000 a year. On that he kept up a considerable library, a comfortable cottage and a cook-housekeeper who came in every morning, served lunch, left his supper in the larder and cleared off home. He had written to her from Reading that he had been called away. He hoped that would prevent her getting anxious about him.
It was about time he sweetened his housekeeper again, so I offered to post, at the other end of London, a cheerful card from him.
‘When you fell into the bungalow that night, how long had you been on the run?’ I asked.
‘Not long. Since about eight o’clock.’
‘Good Lord! I thought it was days.’
‘I never had much of a lead, you see.’
‘You mean, you just kept running with the other chap close behind?’
‘Yes. There was no time to hide or think or anything.’
‘But since eight!’ I exclaimed. ‘It isn’t dark till after nine. You must have passed people and houses and you must have crossed roads, both of you running like hell. It isn’t credible!’
&n
bsp; ‘I cannot explain any more,’ he said very formally, with the old-fashioned little bow he used. ‘I ask you to accept that, until after dark, we were in a place where there were no strangers.’
‘That reminds me. I still have your coat in the car. I’ll fetch it before I forget.’
One chucks things into the boot and then ceases to notice them. I was sure that his coat was there along with an old wind-breaker, a bit of ground sheet for kneeling on, some oily rags and a torn seat cover. I turned the whole lot out twice. The coat was not there.
I did not mention it to him for fear of arousing all sorts of fantasies which would merely muddle me. I just said that the coat, after all, must be in my flat.
But I knew it wasn’t. My misgivings returned. What about that dance where I had reasonably feared that the dark-moustached country gentleman might turn up? Possibly he had—and then it would have been easy for him to find out how Dunton and I had arrived and where we were staying the night. Plenty of time for a quick examination of my car in the hotel garage. It may not have been locked. The boot certainly was not.
I could not tell how far Fosworthy imagined dogs and dangers, nor make any sense of Undine’s connection with metaphysical animism, whatever that was. It was clear, however, that the man who had chased him to my door now knew that I had taken him in; so it would be assumed that I had asked for explanations, found them of interest to me and concealed his presence—deliberately and for some good reason concealed his presence. We all expect other people to have rational motives, though we know very well that our own acts are half of them due to impulse.
A couple of days later I took Fosworthy along to the bank where I had fixed up the account. He looked very much better. I never knew a man recover so quickly from strain or worry. The next time I called to see him he had gone, leaving no address. Not out of my life. I was sure of that. Sooner or later there would be an appeal to sign his girl’s passport application or some other top secret absurdity. Address: The Meads. Parent’s Nationality: Extramundane. Hair: Long. To hell with it!
I was uneasy about my connection with him and his affairs, but not at all alarmed. If I did some day have to answer police or private enquiries as to what I thought I was up to, my straight explanation would be that I liked him, that I believed I had rescued him and that I felt obscurely responsible. I attached no importance whatever to the mystery which he was suspected of betraying. As likely as not, it would turn out to be a Faery Flag made in Birmingham or a fake Roman bowl which he and his friends had decided was the Holy Grail. On a miniature scale that corner of Somerset was as flush as Southern California with little nests and covens of earnest believers in almost anything.
Shortly afterwards my agents sent me particulars—which were completely misleading—of an inn at Ax-bridge. One look at it from the outside was enough. So I had a free afternoon on my hands with the weather set fine.
Lunching meditatively alone, I considered Fosworthy’s possible movements. He had been on the run from eight, but, if I understood him, had only taken to the open when it was night—say, about ten. Then the place he started from ‘where there were no strangers’ could not be more than twelve miles from The Green Man. Half that was a more likely distance, for he must have been dodging about and changing direction according to the obstacles he came across. Thus his probable starting point was somewhere on the top of the Mendips above Westbury.
I drove up through the Cheddar Gorge—which struck me as being the most coarse and shameless commercialisation of natural beauty in these islands—and then east across the plateau. I knew the roads well already. There were three big, lonely inns, none of them unfortunately in the market, and otherwise nothing but large, windswept farms. It was sparsely inhabited country, but the roads were never far from each other and there was a fair sprinkling of traffic. Fosworthy could easily have found or summoned help in daylight.
For close exploration one needed to be on foot or on a horse. However, I drove idly back and forth across the likely area, searching for a hint of what could have happened. Twice I saw a man on a big grey gelding at some distance from me. When I stopped at a cross-roads with an extensive view and was leaning on a dry-stone wall studying the inch Ordnance Map, he cantered up to me.
‘Are you trying to find anyone in particular?’ he asked.
I hesitated and very probably looked guilty. I ought to have come out boldly with the name of a farm.
‘Not exactly,’ I replied. ‘I was just thinking that if three inns could make money tucked away up here, there might be room for a fourth.’
‘You wouldn’t stand a hope of getting a building licence,’ he said.
‘No, I’m sure I shouldn’t. But it does no harm to speculate.’
The word annoyed him.
‘You people don’t care what you do to us all so long as you can make money.’
The remark was half-suspicious, half-contemptuous. It was also unjust, for if I had ever had a passion for money I could have made plenty of it. I should have liked to mention some of the things which he and his fellow farmers were doing to the country for money. But I saw no point in arguing, so I nodded a good afternoon and cleared off.
As I drove down into Wells, I remembered that Dr Dunton lived only a couple of miles on, along the Glastonbury road, and decided to call on him. It was well after six, so he ought be home from his consulting room.
His eighteenth-century house was immaculate and very satisfying to the eye. Around it was an area of hospitable untidiness. A generously built woman with splendid eyes was washing a dog on the front steps. Four ponies in various stages of undress were being attended by four girls between seven and thirteen. An older boy lay on an uncut lawn, listening to pops on a transistor set and detaching himself pointedly from the feminine obsession with animals.
I introduced myself and apologised for so casual a visit. Mrs Dunton couldn’t care less. I felt that she loved any newcomer so long as he or she could take the family as it was. Dunton had kept his private life completely separate from his profession and avoided any nonsense of competing with Joneses. I suppose that if he had practised at home he could not have lived in so delightfully free and easy a way.
‘He told me about you,’ Mrs Dunton said. ‘He’s round the back somewhere. Pat will show you. And supper is at seven and of course you’ll stay for it.’
Pat, with a pair of plaits which were gloriously clean and golden and a pair of jodhpurs crusted with mud and horsehair, led me round the house and handed me over to her father. He was in a deck chair, a tray of drinks and a book at his side, and he greeted me, like the rest of them, as if I were his next-door neighbour. I told him where I had been in the course of the day, and after a drink and some casual conversation asked:
‘Do you remember saying that this country was full of the intelligent half-educated?’
‘I don’t. But after dinner it’s quite likely.’
‘Have you ever run across the idea of apologising to anything you kill before you kill it?’
‘I’m a psychiatrist, not a surgeon,’ he said.
Vaguely and incompetently I tried to explain what I meant.
‘Now, which of these coons have you been talking to?’ he asked. ‘Aviston-Tresco?’
‘Who’s he?’
‘Our most fashionable vet. And a damned good one.’
‘What does he look like?’
‘Very much the country gentleman. Well-dressed, compact, with a short, dark moustache. I’d put him down as a major in a cavalry regiment, if there were any cavalry regiments.’
‘Has he anything to do with the transparent woman?’
‘Not so far as I know. But I tell you who is a close friend of his—that queer fish Barnabas Fosworthy who gave you his unasked opinion on the origin of tin.’
‘Is there anyone among your vet’s associates who farms on the top of the Mendips and rides a big, grey gelding?’
‘Yes. Why?’
‘Nothing. He was keeping me un
der observation this afternoon, and at last rode up to see what I was doing. I mentioned sites for pubs.’
Dunton began to interrogate me in the pleasantest possible way. Where had I been looking for my inns, and since when? What places had I inspected? I answered with a frankness which must have convinced him of my sincerity; but he was a modest man and distrusted his own judgment.
‘I’m going to be indiscreet,’ he said at last. ‘Isn’t your pub-hunting cover for something else?’
‘Good God, no! Why do you think so?’
‘Because you have asked a number of connected questions.’
‘Just curiosity,’ I replied—which was true enough so far as it went. ‘An innkeeper is like a priest. He wants to know all about the parish before he accepts the living.’
‘Neat!’ he smiled. ‘But if you ever feel like telling me all the truth, remember that psychiatrists keep just as many secrets as landlords and priests.’
This was too good a chance to miss. I told him that an impulsive act of mine, which seemed charitable at the time, had involved me with a bunch of believers in something odd, and I wanted to know what they did believe.
‘I’ve had a patient among them and got some of it out of her,’ he said. ‘All life is one and interchanges communication. Death is a mere break in continuity, but it may be momentarily inconvenient or painful. So, if you hand it out, you should express regret. That somehow creates unity with the victim and wipes the slate clean. My patient was obsessed by hunting. In her Rorschach tests she saw antlers, tusks, foxes, heads of imaginary animals. Always death and relics of death.
‘Well, such a creed is attractive to anyone who loves killing birds and beasts. It has some affinity to the sorrow which big-game hunters tell us they feel when they have destroyed a very fine animal. I feel it myself when my daughters send for me to squash a large, very perceptive spider. There’s a moment of fellowship with the creature. The funny thing is that this belief is also a comfort to people who hate killing—like this Fosworthy who won’t and Tom Aviston-Tresco who has to.’
The Courtesy of Death Page 3
