The Sending Read online

  He then asked who knew that I had been invited to the Pirrone party. I told him that everybody knew, but he was plainly dissatisfied with that. However, it was true. Temporary staff for house and garden had been taken on. Penminster buzzed with rumours of this dinner and dance for county magnates, financiers from the City and their offspring—hoping, I think, for TV stars and famous drunks featured in the gossip columns. Invitations had gone out a month before, and we—the local folk who were in no way distinguished but couldn’t be left out—had freely discussed what we might expect and what we thought of Sir Victor Pirrone.

  Some of that I told the superintendent, led on by his pleasant manner. Then the iron hand came out of the glove.

  ‘Mr Hollaston, to whom did you lend your car?’

  I exclaimed that anyone would tell him I had no conceivable motive to murder Paddy Gadsden, who was very dear to me.

  ‘I am not suggesting for a moment that you knew for what your car would be used. I require to know to whom you lent it.’

  I gave him my word of honour that I had not lent it to anybody and added that I always left it outside the front door.

  ‘With the keys in it?’

  Well, yes, they were. It saved trouble, and the car was perfectly safe up the remote drive to the house and just below my open bedroom window. He accepted that, probably ascribing such casual behaviour to the supposed Bohemian carelessness of an artist, and asked me to give him in strict confidence my opinion of Sir Victor Pirrone. I replied that I hardly knew the man, that he had moved into the Manor House at the end of March and that police enquiries would be far more revealing than anything I could say. After that he left me alone.

  Naturally we think we know a lot about the Pirrones. Strangers cannot settle in a little country town without becoming the subject of pub-biography, detailed and wildly inaccurate. Pirrone so far is neither liked nor disliked. He is imposingly handsome for a man in his early sixties, generous, cordial and a host out of the Arabian Nights, but one somehow feels that it might all be put on in the morning like a monogrammed shirt. He is Sicilian by birth, and it is said that he made his money in the export of fruit—then from fruit to shipping, to finance, to British naturalisation and eventually to a knighthood, changing his Christian name from Vittorio to Victor. Rita tells me that a more interesting side of him shows in his hobby: the social history of his island. Apparently he is a source of fascinating footnotes on the six peoples who dominated Sicily and the remnants of their customs, folklore and architecture.

  Lady Pirrone I like very much on short acquaintance. She lets everyone know that she is not Italian but Spanish, and not Spanish but Basque. She rolls in fat and has not much in her still-pretty head beyond good manners inserted by a convent and excellent English by a governess. I gather that English governesses were common in the wealthy steel and shipping circles of Bilbao. She is inclined to disown industry, claiming descent from a very ancient family of Basque chieftains who, until her grandfather came down to the coast and took to ship-building, had never amounted to anything outside their own remote valley in the heart of the western Pyrenees—evidently a deep-rooted family much like my own, which may be why I find her congenial.

  So much for Pirrone’s party and my alibi. I can’t be haunted by guilt. Even the subconscious has some common sense. And Meg insists that I am healthy. She’d know if there were anything badly wrong. I could detect it.

  Could I? Well then, more analysis—of Meg this time as well as myself. Unlike Paddy’s niece, it was not necessary for Meg to wait for probate of the will. I took her over at once. She moped for a few days and once was found looping down the High Street to Paddy’s workshop. They sent for me to pick her up. No one else wanted to. She was in a chattering temper and had already bitten through the paw of an inquisitive terrier. Dogs which know her will sometimes join in her dancing, stabbing games. Cats, who set more store by dignity, always ignore her.

  Both of us quickly accepted the position and I was permitted to take the place of Paddy. I had every outside pocket in my working coats enlarged to form a den for her, and she turned out to be a comfortable, undemanding companion whether I was painting in the studio or out of doors so long as she was instantly given liberty whenever she wanted it.

  I wrote that Meg can see nothing wrong with me. I have begun to surmise—and more than surmise—that, through her, illness can be detected, on condition of course that one is in frequent contact with her. To begin with, such contact was unplanned and as involuntary as sticking a hand in a trouser pocket; but instead of jingling coins the hand sank into the furry roll and caressed it. I have very sensitive fingers. Like the blind I can identify textures and the nature of uneven substances without seeing them. Oddly enough this may be a useful gift to a painter. Sometimes I find that I have reproduced what I feel, thus giving another dimension to what I see.

  So I quickly became familiar with Meg’s bodily expression of her moods: wrigglings, stiffness, heart beat, the tiny ears alert or relaxed, the tail stiffened to grip a ground that was not there, or used as a toy or, like a cat, as a coverlet in sleep. When that small, shrewd head was out in the open and savouring the world from the safety of the dark pocket, I began to distinguish thoughts and emotions much as a psychologist can acquire valuable information from the unconscious gestures of hands, eyes, head and mouth. Meg’s reactions to human and other animals were at first like an unknown script, until the language of soft fur and snake ribs, of the whole graceful mechanism that drove the killer teeth, became to some extent decipherable.

  My first clue to the script was accidental. Old Walter, who keeps my garden productive, is a rabbit fancier. He was showing me two of his prize white does alongside each other in their cages. Both were pregnant and near their time, and both to my eyes were exactly alike. Meg showed no interest in one, but quite evidently considered the other abnormal, perhaps sick and easily to be caught. I asked Walter if she were off her food or if there were anything wrong with her. No, she was in the pink of health. Two days later she had a messy miscarriage and died.

  Shortly afterwards Walter himself went down with flu, which turned to pneumonia. He had hardly ever had a day’s illness and when the district nurse was in his cottage, packing him up for hospital, he was convinced, with the hell of a temperature and slightly delirious, that she was laying him out for his funeral. I was standing by and tried to comfort him by telling him nobody died of pneumonia in these days except the very old.

  To my surprise he muttered gloomily: ‘Ah, but let’s see what Miss Meg thinks.’

  I woke up Meg who stuck out her head and chattered. She didn’t like the scent of the fever. That was all I could feel; but it seemed a splendid opportunity to raise morale.

  ‘She says you’ll be easy tomorrow,’ I replied.

  Well, of course the antibiotics worked and he was. He is up and about now and, I know, embroidering the story. Meg has always aroused curiosity in everyone who meets her, and some of the older farm hands ask after her health with marked respect, whispering about me as they did about Paddy. The vicar, who has the usual vicarish habit of leaping in with exaggerated Christian cheerfulness where angels fear to tread, has started to greet me with: ‘And how’s our familiar this morning?’ A jest, but not so far from truth. And do I in fact receive from Meg not only with my fingers but with another sense?

  I finished writing at that point. Meg was nowhere. I had been too occupied to keep an eye on her. And I had to move. The shadow had found me. Found me? No. Whatever it is, it cannot find me or lose me since it is within me.

  I bolted for the open, just as earlier I had bolted for the trees. I might have gone on running till I reached the heather and the still water of the mere if it had not been for Meg. Meg must not be left behind and lost. That was the only thought concrete enough to block the nebulous, overwhelming instinct to run. Love versus instinct. It might be fair—though so doubtful, so very dist
ant a parallel—to consider the doe who stands by her fawn quivering with terror, useless little horns lowered, while the leopard, felt but still unseen, gathers for the charge. It’s a platitude that love can overcome fear, but that is not a lot of use in my case, for it does not prevent fear. Love’s only business is to preserve the race, not the individual.

  However, I was just able to come to a stop and call. On a fallen branch at the edge of the copse I saw Meg sitting up, herself like a lively, straight shoot growing from the dead, and she came bobbing down the hill, up my leg and into her pocket. Perfectly calm and friendly. Whatever wants to eat me does not eat polecats.

  Through communion with Meg confidence partly returned. When at a crossroads of lanes I passed a small white pub with a notice of Bed and Breakfast in the bar window I turned back and went in. Naturally they were fascinated by Meg, assuming that she was a ferret and that I was training her; I could hardly be poaching rabbits since I wasn’t the type and carried neither net nor gun. When I explained that she was just a pet, all they wanted to know was whether she was clean about the house. Spotless. Polecats, like cats, must be clean with very little maternal tuition. In Meg’s case, Paddy would have acted as a mother in the first few weeks of her life with him.

  The landlord was a townsman; he had been a barman in a Bournemouth hotel and had not needed much persuasion when a chance came to set himself up in the peace of the country. The persuasion, I am sure, was due to his wife who was sturdy, deep Dorset, hailing from Poyntington, not far across the county border from Penminster. She seemed to take to us and told me that my friend—as she rightly called Meg—reminded her of her grandfather who possessed a black bantam cock which followed him everywhere and used to sit on his shoulder. My Indian owl would do that in our common bungalow but seldom followed me.

  When I asked her what his neighbours used to say about that, she just replied: ‘’E were a funny man,’ looking as if she could say more but wanted a lead from me. I must have chosen the wrong one, telling her about Meg and her habits in the hope that she would open up about the companionship, if any, of a bantam cock. She did not seem overinterested and returned to the bar.

  Alcohol helps—so much that I see danger there and must be careful. I ate well and slept well, but woke up sweating with panic. I am trying to blame it on a slight hangover, but that explanation, I know, is ridiculous. The open is no good; cover is no good; even the sanity and fragrance of a little pub in utter quiet between pasture and the heathlands of Poole Harbour is no good. I might just as well go home.

  Chapter Two

  June 4

  I HAVE AT LAST made myself call on Dr Gargary. I had refused to consider it before I ran away, being almost as afraid of his tough, hearty manner as of my suffering. I knew him only as a Penminster worthy and occasional companion, for I had never needed his services. Consequently I underrated his intelligence. I am prejudiced against the artificiality of the professional manner, whether of doctors, lawyers or priests. Unfair. I never minded the proud bearing and military panache of my Indian officers.

  I ran into him at the school sports day and on a desperate impulse told him that I needed his advice and that it was not a matter he could deal with in the surgery. He at once asked me round to his house for a drink. There I told him as much as I thought fit, trying to play down the irresistible terror. I did not expect much skill in psychiatry from a general practitioner in a country district. Again wrong. While the specialist can concentrate on the cases where the ever-changing theories are applicable, the country doctor—in tune with the seasons and the reluctance of his patients (so unlike townsmen) to waste time on medicine men unless in serious trouble—has to keep a more open mind.

  ‘My dear man,’ he said, ‘let’s get another fear out of the way first! You are not going mad, whatever mad means. Fear of a fear is fairly common. Call them Fear One and Fear Two! Get at the cause of Fear Two and Fear One vanishes. How’s Meg?’

  I replied that she was fine and added without thinking that she couldn’t see anything wrong with me.

  ‘Well, we can’t take her as gospel,’ he said.

  That left me staring at him in surprise.

  ‘I knew Paddy and Meg intimately,’ he explained. ‘Meg’s diagnosis could give a lead, but she is far better with animals. Ask the vet! Did Paddy ever talk about it to you?’

  He never did, at least not in detail. He did say that he paid serious attention to what Meg had to tell him. I knew more or less what he meant: that there was always a reason for Meg’s likes, dislikes and reactions. A musician, for example, can spot when a concert pianist plays the wrong note; the rest of us can’t. Well, Meg is an expert in the music of personality. Paddy told me little or nothing of his ability to diagnose through Meg. I found out for myself that it was conceivably possible.

  Gargary asked if I had always had a close relationship with animals. I told him about my brown mongoose—not all that different from Meg—and my cheetah kitten and the old zebu bull who used to walk on to my verandah to share my breakfast. There was nothing odd about that since, being sacred, he was permitted to swipe anything he wanted from any market stall or any table, but he would rest his great ugly head on my shoulder which impressed people, especially if it was evening and my Scops owl was occupying my other shoulder.

  ‘You are interested in the religions of India?’ he asked, skating round the edges of my problem. ‘Meditation, Gurus, transmigration, all that?’

  ‘Mildly interested, yes. But much more in primitive religion which is not particularly Indian.’

  Painting started it. A British mess would have found my hobby—as it then was—eccentric. The writing of poetry, if kept reasonably private, is permissible; but taking one’s leave in hill jungles with an easel and paints instead of a gun would put a question mark over, say, one’s choice of a mule track to support a flank attack. Indian officers, however, saw no inconsistency. To worship aspects of Shiva as well as Kali was perfectly acceptable.

  But that is by the way. Year after year I used to stay with an old friend very loosely administering the Birhors, lost in the hills of the north-east Deccan and barely out of the Stone Age. As soon as I had learned enough of their language I began to understand all that the human animal abandoned when it turned from hunting and food-gathering to agriculture. Both he and I often accompanied the tribe on hunting expeditions, eating and sleeping as they did. When I tried to sketch them I found that my quick drawings were so vividly alive that they had a quite remarkable resemblance to palaeolithic art. As for him, he was so much at home that when he was dying—a bear broke the net and got him—he gave orders that he was to be buried as a clansman. The tribe obeyed, honouring his spirit with the long incantations of the shaman and touchingly laying in the grave, besides food and drink, a packet of his cigarettes, his official hat, a spear, his gun and two hundred cartridges.

  After his death the shaman begged me to return to them whenever I could, saying that he would know when to expect me and himself would meet me on the track. That proved to be true. The receptors of his mind—at any rate between brothers—were as efficient as the now useless and mildewed radio. And brothers we were, for I had gladly submitted to the ceremony of exchanging blood with him. The gains were many, for I could appreciate the meaning of his rites and dogmas, and express it, for myself alone, in words. Some beliefs were absurd; for example, since his totem was the tiger so was mine, and therefore I could not marry the daughter of a tiger. Others were not absurd, but incapable of proof. He assured me that I could receive thoughts emanating from a tiger. They may have appeared in nightmarish daydreams but I could not recognise them. When once I told Paddy of all this, he accepted to my surprise that the shaman, my tiger brother, possibly could. I prefer the word shaman to witch-doctor. It has the connotation of a priest caring for parishioners rather than the tatty and terrifying antics of rattling gourds, tusk teeth and painted body.

  �
��Are you yourself religious?’ Gargary asked.

  ‘Profoundly—in the sense that I believe in a Purpose and that all life is one. Benedicite omnia opera!’

  ‘Then have you any theory yourself about your neurosis? You said that the follower had no form but it was present. Is it present now?’

  ‘It is waiting for me when I go out.’

  ‘Shall I ask it to come in?’

  I am ashamed to record that I broke down there. I can see now what he was after: to find out how objective it was in my imagination. It was hardly Harley Street treatment, I am sure, to knock down all my defences with seven words instead of an hour a week for six months.

  ‘Would you like to tell me your own theory?’ he asked when I had recovered. ‘A man with your enquiring mind must have one, however bizarre.’

  Yes, I do have one and I tried to explain it to him. It’s not at all bizarre. Animals know when they are in danger; they also know when they are not. A full-fed tiger can walk past a herd, which will quietly continue to graze. I told him that he could watch the same instinct at work on the Long Down at the head of my valley if he hid on the edge of the gorse and had the luck to see one of our foxes pass through the feeding rabbits, who were aware that it had other business and was not hungry.

  Now, when we were only hunted and hunters—in Europe a mere three hundred generations ago—we shared this sixth sense which told us when we were in danger and when we were not; so it is not surprising that in some of us it has never been suppressed. Big-game shikaris all agree that it exists and that they have turned aside, without any conscious reason, when they were walking on into certain death.