Chapter Six

July 25

IT’S ALL NOW QUITE clear. At the weekend I called up Lady Pirrone and asked if I might come over and renew my acquaintance with Leyalá. They were both most cordial. Sir Victor opened a bottle of some dark Sicilian wine, still glowing with the past warmth of lava, and asked for my opinion. My opinion is worthless—for who am I to pick and choose among nectars?—but my enthusiasm most Latinly delighted him. I am certain that both of them are entirely innocent. Concha Pirrone is a very pious Catholic, and while she knows that her godfather is a man of mysterious insight and reliable hunches she would never dream that he, as she would put it, had sold his soul to the devil.

The bird recognised me without a doubt, his chuckling in no way inspired by the trouble he had involuntarily caused me but rather by the moment of communion which we had shared. When confidence all round had been established, I asked Sir Victor why he had chosen to live at Penminster.

‘Oh, my wife saw a photograph of it in Country Life and fell in love,’ he said. ‘And it suits me as well as another. The house not too big; the garden beautiful, though I miss my cypresses. And it’s ideal for weekend visitors if they come from the Mediterranean and want to understand what it is that the English so love about their land. I would have liked to be nearer London, but we use the port less and less and here I am handy to Bristol and Southampton.’

‘Izar promised to send you some cypresses from Granada,’ Lady Pirrone interrupted.

‘That’s your godfather who gave you Leyalá?’ I asked. ‘I think he may be the oldish man, remarkably tough, who was talking to me at your house-warming party.’

‘That sounds like him: But then it was so sad. He was taken ill and had to go to bed.’

I had no idea whether I had seen Uncle Izar or not. But the shot in the dark had produced a marvellous and unexpected lead.

Next day, feeling like a private eye and faintly ashamed of it, I decided to call on Bastard, Broome and Bastard, our local estate agents who handled the sale of the manor. I enjoy old Bastard. He is immensely proud of his surname, which was invented by Charles II and the Earl of Rochester in the course of one of their drunken evenings, when they called for Rochester’s baby son, who till then had been hidden under the voluminous skirts of the Duchess of Cleveland’s favourite waiting woman, presented him with his surname and, to make up for the insult, the Coat of Arms which faces the visitor behind Bastard’s desk.

He never seems busy outside his auctions and got in first with his questions. How was Miss Vernon getting on down the valley? He supposed I saw something of her. He was very well aware that, if I did, nobody would be any the wiser, so his pleasantly dirty mind sensed the opportunities. I headed him off by saying that I believed the Water Board was insisting on charging her a water rate, though she drew it from her own well. That got him fulminating about local government in general, and I was able to mention that Pirrone had told me his rates were outrageous.

‘It takes a wealthy man to be really angry over a few quid,’ he said, ‘so I hope he gives them hell.’

‘I’m always surprised that he bought the place.’

‘It was ready to walk into, you see. All redecorated a couple of years ago, and just the job to appeal to a foreigner who doesn’t want trouble with builders, surveyors and planning permission.’

I said that Sir Victor was a valuable import and wouldn’t like to be called a foreigner.

‘Well, he is, ain’t he? But I was thinking of others who showed interest. One old boy got on to it before we had even advertised the place for sale.’

‘The usual Arab?’

‘Not down here in Somerset! No, some kind of Spaniard. I wouldn’t be surprised if he recommended it to the Pirrones.’

‘I think he was at the Pirrone party. I wish I could remember his name.’

‘We must have got it somewhere. He told me that he was interested in Dorset Horns and wanted to hear of any prize rams to be sold privately.’

A clerk in the downstairs office easily found the name for him. The enquirer was a Mr Izar Odolaga with the address of a London bank. His visit had been in the last week of January. That left plenty of time for the sale to go through and for the Pirrones to move in before that fatal May 12.

When I escaped from the geniality of old Bastard—he would have been distressed to know in what a mood—I did not go home immediately. I walked away from Penminster through the wearisome sanity of council houses and market gardens and the sewage farm where my stream had entered the culture zone and been put to work, at last taking refuge in the woodland at the foot of the downs after wandering up the valley and passing above Rita’s cottage. I did not want to see her. Mourning for my dear, incomprehensible Paddy, I did not want to see anyone. Everything had fallen into place, confirming the slaughter of Paddy by this Izar Odolaga. One had only to start with the reasonable assumption that the Pirrones really did want a country house.

I saw the sequence of events as something like this: Odolaga, visiting Paddy, learns that the manor is for sale. Paddy himself may have suggested the set-up if he had already agreed to the sacrifice—a cold thought which made me shiver. Odolaga then steers his goddaughter towards the house, drawing her attention to a photograph of the place. She inspects it and he assures her that it is ideal and will bring the Pirrones luck. Sir Victor shrugs his shoulders; if she wants the house, it will do.

Once the manor is bought and the house-warming party arranged, Paddy directs the plot: the Pidge, my car, the absolute certainty that I will not be using it and will have an unbreakable alibi if anything goes wrong. Odolaga handles the Pirrone end. Obviously he must be a houseguest at the time of the party and must be able to be absent for a few hours without anyone knowing. How he managed it was unimportant. I could never know on what excuse he locked his bedroom door or was able to choose a room with access to the garden.

Below me, not far away, was my vixen’s earth, and I looked to her for comfort—not that I expected to see her at midday, but the scent and signs of her would tell me that she at least was fulfilling herself within our common world. I padded as gently as she over last year’s leaves and looked down on the chalk-flecked terrace at the mouth of the earth. The cubs had left, though they should still have been learning to hunt with mother; neither had she herself been home for some time. All this I knew partly by faintness of scent, partly by dust in the tracks, partly by a silence beyond the silence to be detected by the ears. As I went down towards the stream, my eye was caught by the remains of a recent kill among tufts of trampled grass. I thought at first it was a lamb and then saw that the skull was hers. The smallest bones had been scattered and cracked; the larger, which she would have broken, only showed the gnawings of ineffectual teeth. She had died in the open and her hungry cubs had eaten her, a victim serving her purpose to the last. My mind finds some indefinable parallel with Paddy. Him I cannot revenge because I do not understand the meaning or the worth of his sacrifice. But I now know who is responsible for the end of my vixen, dying of the madness which was intended for me.

August 1

The black night of the soul. That is what the Christian mystics called it. Tiger brother would have spoken of the capture of the soul. As so often, saint and shaman both mean the same. It has nothing to do with the Fear. I could bear that. At least I was vividly alive like any terrified creature. Now for over a week I have been dead and empty. I cannot even paint. What I believed to be power turns out to be only obscurity. There is no doubt that what I used to call my picture postcards are of more value.

It is Paddy’s sacrifice which depresses me. One can only take it as a lunatic rite of a lunatic cult. My saintly Paddy, keeping his religion to himself yet spreading far and wide his own goodness, can be compared with the pastor of some primitive Christian sect, who also radiates love and righteousness but imagines his God as human and angry: a half-god disapproving the marvellous mechanism of life—the flesh, as the pastor would call it—which may on no account be worshipped through senses made for worship.

All my reverence is challenged. Meg represents joy in the Purpose rather better than any bishop. On the other hand the bishop represents the suffering of man rather better than Meg.

And whose life could Paddy have considered so valuable to Megs and bishops that it ought to be extended? It could not be Izar Odolaga’s life. That’s certain. Paddy would have recognised evil in him, the abuse of power. Then who? Anyone from a village priest to a microbiologist, each performing miracles in his own way. Of the two the priest seems more likely; his miracles would so easily restore faith and awe. And yet suppose the man behind the electron microscope were on the verge of manipulating the nervous system of the brain to prove and analyse the action of mind at a distance?

What nonsense! Who the hell is worth the sacrifice?

Black night of the soul, yes! I am like Meg when she felt some effect of Leyalá’s transmission and could no longer play. All passion spent. Why do I bother with Rita? Love is an inconvenience like any other, almost a curse in itself.

I might as well be a gentle, unworried animal like Concha Pirrone, satisfied within her own fat. Not fair! At least she can pray. I cannot. There have been times when I could repeat the Lord’s Prayer, concentrating almost with tears upon the full meaning of the words or such meaning as I chose to put upon them.

There is no unity for me with the Purpose and it is not within the Purpose that there should be. I shall paint my picture postcards and be the jolly artist in the company of genial fools like Bastard and the rest. Such an easy fellow, they’ll say, after his little illness. Must have done him good.

Bastard. A reminder. In Penminster last Wednesday I saw his red waistcoat bearing down on me like the unavoidable clown in a circus.

‘I had that sturdy old Spanish fellow in my office the day before yesterday,’ he said. ‘I put him on to a ram down Blandford way if he likes to pay the price.’

I had no need to ask where he was staying. That is his second visit to the Pirrones. The first was to murder Paddy. I wonder what this second was for.

‘He asked after you,’ Bastard added. ‘I told him that we had not seen so much of you as we liked. Always shut away painting hard, ha, ha! But that now you were back in good form.’

Odolaga would have known that already. He might have suffered some kind of rebound from his devilry with the macaw. Tiger brother used to hint that there were dangers for a shaman if his magic were absorbed by more powerful magic. But there is no necessity for any such mystification. If he exchanges correspondence with his goddaughter and encourages her to amuse him with local gossip he’d have a dozen pages of waffle in her spidery, nunnery writing complete with exclamation marks.

It is tempting to imagine that he could be responsible for my depression, but I do not believe it. I am suffering from disgust and reaction after discovering the cruelty and worthlessness of all this misuse of spiritual energy by Paddy, by Odolaga and by me. I need tiger brother to dance himself unconscious and bring back my soul from its underworld.

How many other religious follies, I wonder, have been resurrected to drift like lost spirits through our western society? I have come upon a whole school of unsuspected practitioners: that quiet saddler in a country town; a Basque farmer; a likely nest of Sicilians more secret than the Mafia; von Pluwig and his superstitious circle who believe without knowing what they believe; the strangers at Paddy’s funeral. And on the edge of them there must be others like myself, able to heal and transmit thought with or without the aid of a familiar, who respect the holiness of a gift which needs no barbaric ritual.

August 7

Gargary has been here to ask me if I would care to lend Ginny to Rita for a day or two. Meg and I could send to the zoo for some monkeys, he said, and roast them on a stick. Yes, he could get in a daily woman from Penminster but the presence of a stranger might only get on Rita’s nerves and add to her exasperation. She was not bothering to cook for herself, and the cottage seemed to him just a scrapyard of dirty glasses, of books lying wherever she had read them and paper littering the floor around the wastepaper basket.

I asked in alarm if she had called him in and why. No, there was nothing physically wrong with her. She had turned up at the surgery to demand whatever he had that was the opposite of a tranquilliser. It was a curious request and she would not elaborate on it. Surgery hours were over and so, on a sound medical instinct that he might learn more from watching than listening, he had driven her back to her cottage where the signs of withdrawal had disturbed him. She did burst out once, saying that she hated the cottage and its loneliness and longed for term to begin. When he replied that nothing stopped her from returning to Oxford immediately, she said she wasn’t going to run away just because she couldn’t get on with her work.

It’s nearly a week since I saw her. She was sitting on the bank of the stream, where two green terraces form an angle and a soft back, with a writing pad and three books, none of them open, and seemed to have been following some intense flow of thought, since she started when I called to her. She was rather silent and at first I supposed that I had interrupted her at some point where a synthesis of her reading had formed in her mind. Then I wondered if Meg and I could have hurt her by some lack of tact over which women are inclined to brood, while the offender remains blankly ignorant.

Meg took a long look at her before we went on our way. I can read her reaction to depression or neurosis more certainly than her recognition of physical pain, but it is always hard to distinguish between emanations from her and from myself; so I discounted Meg’s diagnosis of melancholy, assuming that I myself was saddened by my useless devotion to her and that Meg had caught my sense of inadequacy.

I went over to the cottage with Ginny, pretending that it was just a friendly call. When Ginny saw Rita’s eyes and the general mess—how different from the scented day when I had lunched there!—she exclaimed that she was going to stay and clean up until dear Miss Vernon could get somebody else, and meanwhile she was sure that Mr Alfgif wouldn’t mind. She played her part brilliantly, shooing me away and filling the place with her calm and sweetness.

Only a fortnight ago I boasted to Rita that I had won; and she, seeing more clearly than I the dangers of this primeval cult into which I have blundered, answered: if you have won. I suspect that I have not, though Rita should be as invulnerable to a curse as any politician. She is a highly civilised, urban woman with none of the hunting receptors. I myself can be persecuted by a competent shaman. She, I should have thought, could not. And yet…and yet over and over again in the witch trials of England and in the present practice of African witch-doctors one comes across the sending of this singular apathy which ends in death.

How perfect an object for retribution, if that is what Odolaga wants! But can he know how important she is to me? I must find out what really brought him here again. Concha Pirrone, who entertains no suspicions, may be able to give me a lead. She said that she wanted to meet the famous Meg again and be shown my funny, square English house and its garden.

August 10

I asked her to tea. When the chauffeur opened the door of the car for her she waddled imposingly out, looking like an overfed Spanish princess in mourning, and greeted me with just the proper convent-trained graciousness. She became almost flirtatious as I took her across the lawn into hidden corners where old Walter, whose taste is for miniature effects, had imposed discipline. Her visit wasn’t very correct, was it? Giggle, giggle. But she was sure that Victor wouldn’t mind if—giggle, giggle—Miss Vernon did not. She looked up at me with her head on one side waiting for crumbs. I replied that Miss Vernon’s interests ran to six hundred pages with footnotes, and added ‘unfortunately’ to avoid the impression that I found Rita tedious—too gross a lie to be believed.

On so English a day, with wind lazily moving clouds in the upper atmosphere and the air motionless over the ground, tea in the garden was traditional, but I doubted if I had a chair that would hold her. The tough, ancestral canvas of my father’s deckchairs was showing signs of age and she could not possibly fit between the iron arms of the white-painted garden seats. There was no Ginny to solve the problem, so I had embellished the curved stone bench in the bower of the too straggly rose garden with gay cushions and laid the tea table opposite with Meg in attendance.

Too straggly! How could I have written that? I find in myself a neat desire to clean it up and commit a lady-like water colour. To hell with this passivity! All my home and its valley used to be my garden. Have the forests of tiger brother, so rich with life, clean gone from my blood? And who painted the Holy Well and the Columns of the Sun?

Meg, after investigating the delicate feet (being born an Odolaga, Concha had no fear of her), decided that the rest was too ponderous and humped away with a slice of cake from which she extracted the almonds and currants, leaving the remainder for the birds. Undoubtedly bait, not charity.

I did not have to introduce the subject of Uncle Izar. Prattling sweetly about empty incidents of an empty week she did it herself, telling me that Victor had brought him down from London for the night and they had had such fun. They had been talking after dinner about hypnotism and things—Odolaga of course leading the conversation warily towards the ‘things’—and Victor had said it was all nonsense and got up to open another bottle, which he always did when people talked about what he did not want to understand. And then Uncle Izar said he would show him, and he hypnotised poor Leyalá who gave a squawk and fell off his perch. She told him he was very naughty and he was to put her lovely back at once, so he waved his hands and Leyalá got right way up and didn’t seem to know what had happened to him.

So far I had two interesting revelations: the debriefing of Leyalá and the fact that she was sure to have gossiped about the suspected idyll between the two lonely neighbours far apart from each other but joined together by the clear water and the woods.

She told me that Uncle Izar could heal. Yes, really! She remembered that when she was a little girl she had fallen down and cut her cheek open and he had stopped the bleeding. Well, somebody had to know how to cure up there in the valleys where until recently, if medical attention were needed, patient or doctor had to ride or walk.

This gave me an opening. I dared not ask for Odolaga’s address in case he heard I had done so and guessed why, so I asked what sort of country was that of her mother’s family.

‘Oh, it’s so hard to explain,’ she said. ‘It’s between two main roads to France and though it’s in Spain it’s easier to reach from France. Terrible, fierce country but so very green and beautiful.’

‘And doesn’t Victor believe that Mr Odolaga can heal?’ I asked.

Her artless babble of a reply was so packed with information that I must try to remember her own words and put them down for future reference.

‘He says he doesn’t. He says he has had enough of that sort of thing from ignorant peasants in Sicily, but Uncle Izar is quite different. He’s wonderful. When Victor first came to Bilbao he fell off the dry dock and had concussion and afterwards a sort of stroke and couldn’t move his fingers on one hand. The doctors said it would be very long before he was well. So my mother sent for Izar—he’s her first cousin, you see—and in a week Victor could hold a pen again and write.

‘Well, we were both so fond of each other already, but my father wouldn’t hear of me marrying a Sicilian. He thought Sicilians were horrible people, all bandits and gangsters. But Izar kept on insisting that Victor was the right man for me and he went to Sicily himself to meet the family. And when he came back he said that they too had a mountain estate and we had a lot in common with them. My father declared that he couldn’t see that the Odolagas and the Pirrones had anything in common except that they had no bathrooms and kept sheep. But my mother and Izar got their own way and we were married.’

It’s sticking out a mile what the Pirrones and Odolagas had in common. And I have more understanding of Victor. In spite of the best proof of faith healing he could possibly want, he won’t face it. He may resemble my father, who had not inherited the Alfgif faculties, showed no interest, wouldn’t let himself believe and brought me up with no information beyond the most prosaic family history. Like him, Victor avoids the inexplicable. He knows a lot—I remember Rita saying that he was a rich source of footnotes—but dismisses it all as peasant superstition. I wonder if it has occurred to him to question his astonishing luck in material matters.

Myself I know nothing of luck, nor, I think, did tiger brother, though naturally he took credit for any stroke of luck that came the way of the clan. The conversation between Paddy and George Midwinter at the races is the only intimation I have that luck can be influenced. After saying that he would never use his gift to make money, Paddy added that if anything could make two liquids in the same glass remain separate when mixed it would be the interference of mind. He also made the odd remark that one could be director of a brewery without knowing how to pull a pint. Did that mean that he was aware of certain specialities of Robins but he himself did not or could not practice them? However that may be, he could bring luck to his friends without pulling any mysterious pints, as he brought to me when he sent round Molay, that stately Levantine customer of his who bought and did not buy the Holy Well. I wonder what his relations with Paddy were. At the time I had no reason for my present curiosity.

I parted from Concha Pirrone on affectionate terms. I like the woman and her gentle face. It is no fault of hers that her godfather is a murderer and as vicious a witch as ever deserved hanging. I could forgive him for what he did to me. I would at least listen to his dogma of why Paddy had to die. But his attack on Rita cries out for action and revenge.

Revenge. I don’t really mean that. Revenge is pointless. What I do mean is: Stop it or else! But what ‘or else’? A miserable Robin I should make! I do not know enough to protect her. I merely guess at the realities of a tradition which Paddy and great great grandfather preserved. I’d give this Uncle Izar a sending of all the imps in hell if I could call them up—assuming of course that the illusion would frighten him.

Frighten him. There’s the germ of an idea. I can remember tiger brother laughing with some embarrassment when I once accused him of descending to conjuring tricks. He replied that the power had left him, and it was understood between us—without coarsely referring to it in so many words—that his dependent clans must not be tempted to present him with second-rate cuts of monkey because he was giving a second-rate service. Conjuring tricks, yes. A betrayal but pardonable. When a priest, as must sometimes happen, finds that his faith is overwhelmed by flat and empty reasoning he does not black out the altar and take a cut in salary. Routine supports him till meaning returns to prayer.

Odolaga is probably afraid of me as rather more than an awkward witness in court. There is the behaviour and failure of Leyalá to be considered. There is Paddy’s gift of his familiar. There is the rumour of esoteric knowledge picked up by me in India. If any sinister and unaccountable disaster were to strike him, his guilty conscience could very well jump at the so-called occult for an explanation rather than a tiger brother fraud.

Malevolence, I am sure, can be carried by the adept to the target through direct transmission or by way of the familiar. It may or may not have been the cause of that fool spraining his ankle when he distracted me as I was near to painting the Columns of the Sun. But there are simpler methods that I have learned from hunting man. If by close observation the shaman works out beforehand the probable course of his human prey he can set a trap—perhaps material, perhaps subjective, but always inscrutable—and afterwards can publicise his triumph as due to the excellent intelligence reports he is continually receiving from the ancestral spirits.

However, no shaman could preserve his secrets on the open downs of Wessex. More opportunities are offered by the country where Odolaga lives. Concha described it as terrible and fierce but beautiful, and Sir Victor had said something of precipices and pastures. All I had in the house was a copy of The Song of Roland in Norman French and modern French which Rita lent me—an 800-year-old authority—but the minstrel could not have gone far wrong on the general topography:

 

High are the mountains, high and huge and shadowed,

The valleys deep, their waters running fast.

 

That impulsive translation misses the melancholy refrain of the Norman French but tells of country where I should be at home, allowing for more clothes than the loin cloth I wore among the Birhors—so long as the forests are still there. ‘Tenebrus’ must refer, I think, to trees as well as the north face of gorges. There may be language trouble, but so near the frontier French should carry me through. The real difficulty will be to keep the close presence of a stranger hidden from Odolaga.