The Sending (4 page)

‘Old Jimmy Farrar's cat.'

‘Ah, yes. I told him to come back when I had the lab report. Skin tumour. Not malignant as yet, but could be. I ought to operate, but it's the hell of a big patch to heal without a skin graft. Stay here while I see him!'

‘Won't he mind?'

‘Not a bit. He believes in—well, what you might call old-fashioned remedies. This will seem absurd to you, but he will think I called you and Meg in.'

Jimmy Farrar used to be a hedger and thatcher, a freelance worker highly esteemed. He still does a bit of hedging for a friend, but is too old to climb on roofs any more. He lives all alone with his cat, his garden and a few chickens in a cottage kept as clean as when his wife was alive. A model man like his model hedges, clipped clean and laid straight for those who come after.

George explained to him that the cat might last a little while but that it was too dangerous to excise so large a growth.

‘So it's nowt but an ugly wart?' Jimmy asked.

‘Well, you could call it that.'

‘Will I try Bill Freeman?'

‘If you like, Jim. No harm in it.'

Old Farrar turned to me and asked straight out what we—we!—thought.

‘For God's sake, Mr Farrar, I don't know!'

‘Have a shot!' George said.

‘Meg doesn't like the look of it. Or it may be that I myself don't like the look of it, and she catches it from me. I haven't had her long enough to know.'

‘But would you 'ave a word with Bill Freeman for me?'

That was an eye-opener. I know Bill Freeman of course. Without a doubt he can cure warts. He doesn't need any word from me. What else am I supposed to have inherited besides Meg?

I should like to tell George Midwinter sometime about the Fear, though it would be useless. He would appreciate what I mean by the sixth sense rather better than Gargary and understand my theory that it is out of control; but he too would recommend drugs. My God, I wish I could put a tail between my legs and run into the safe twilight green of tall bracken!

But I have tried taking cover where I cannot be seen and tried wide open space where I can see for miles. I have tried everything, even an attempt at insane courage. I loaded my gun. Remembering Gargary and my shameful breakdown, I asked It aloud to come in. Nothing came. But the Fear redoubled. It was behind my chair. It was outside the window. It was wherever I could not see it without turning my head. I nearly committed the ultimate crime of aiming the gun at myself. I remembered in time that It would like that. Where It goes wrong is that I can formulate and define death whereas an animal, I take, it, cannot. To the animal death is a terrible, amorphous danger which the genes must avoid. I reproduce for myself the panic but can still ask questions.

Questions. What keeps me alive is a spirit of research; into the Fear; into the oddities of my past; into my relationship with Meg, which has nothing to do with the Fear and is sometimes an antidote. Gargary was barking up the wrong tree there. Another antidote, quite inexplicably, is this notebook.

Vaguely I know why Paddy left Meg to me, instead of to George who knew so much more than I about her. But surely there must have been among his friends some sensitive horseman at home or abroad who could have made better use of her? A surprising number of them turned up at his funeral as a result of the prompt announcement of his death by the executors. Nobody in Penminster knew who they were. Our police superintendent, who had a number of interviews with them after the accident, told me that one was a partner in a very respectable firm of London solicitors specialising in multi-national company business. It was he who informed me that Paddy had expressly mentioned a wish that I should take over Meg. I had done so anyway and was rather afraid that I should be asked to give her up.

The only reason may be that Paddy knew that Meg and I were close friends and so she would be sure of her dinner and a snug pocket; but I believe he was also saying to me that she might suggest ideas which my experience with the Birhors laid me wide open to receive. I am still incompetent at taking what I call Meg's thermometer readings—or not so much at taking them as at understanding what they mean.

I am very much alone with her. I cannot be social. The effort is too great when I am haunted. Haunted? I have not used that word before. It is the right one, for it is not essential to see a ghost when one can feel so vividly its presence. I do not believe in ghosts as spirits of the dead. I do believe in them as inexplicable phenomena which produce a shuddering fear in all animals including myself. Assuming that my sixth sense is out of control, it is unnecessary to postulate such an entity; but the effect is identical.

Yes, I am guilty of deserting my friends. Last night was full moon, and my vixen is feeding cubs and must be hungry. We have a distant and cautious regard for each other. The hunt has never caught her. I suspect that after a couple of winters in which to observe her outstanding character, the Master and his huntsmen do not try too hard. She can be trusted to give them a long run before hounds lose her, and her cubs inherit the gift. I would not go so far as the half-wits who declare the fox enjoys being hunted—God knows I do not!—but I can imagine that when the terror is over she might feel a certain pride. Is there comfort in that for me?

Her earth is in a stand of larch, deep in the woodland across the stream. I never go there. I pretend I do not know where it is. I wait for her to come to me and I leave Meg at home to avoid the complication of possible antagonism between the pair.

Last night the moon shadows of the oaks which have guarded my house for four hundred years gave each tree a personality, a collective consciousness like that of a hive of bees. I belonged to them rather than they to me. Each separate column of sap and leaves and future buds stood in its pool of moonlight, life with purpose but without movement. Past the oaks, whose shadows I neither sought nor avoided, I came out on to the open silver along the stream. I alone moved through the stillness, hardly breaking it or disturbing the sleeping sheep, and sat down on a slight ridge where the vixen knows she may find me and, if not out hunting, would see me as a pinnacle of black among the grey boulders of the sheep. I had brought a still warm rabbit for her and, in case the cubs were not yet ready to tear and eat, a fat pork belly to swell out the milk.

I remained for half an hour perhaps, motionless as if all time had stopped except for the busy cilia of roots searching underground. At last she came, a slim shadow trotting down from the covert and leaping the stream, only visible as fox when she crept, belly to ground, towards the supper I had spread out five yards from me.

All this time the Fear had been absent. Since the night was pure radiation there was nothing to which it could attach itself. I had ceased to exist as a man; I was a molecule of the unity of earth and light. But when the vixen looked at me, slinking the last steps towards the strip of fat pork, I became the fascinated and humanly affectionate observer. The terror returned in force. I did not move head or body—had enough self-control for that—but the vixen jumped round, hair along the spine erect, and bolted. That was the end of me. I screamed and ran for the house, every oak now holding menace instead of peace.

What am I to make of it? Yet, looking back, it is so simple. An animal does not need speech or any cry to communicate its fear to another. There is no reason at all to give this vile thing a life of its own, to assume that it creates or actually is an aura of supernatural, diabolical fear into which the vixen had entered. My own fear was quite strong enough to be picked up by the receptors of her brain. It is curious that Meg should be unaffected by it. If ever she is affected, that will break me.

When I returned to the house the telephone was ringing. I picked it up. Rita Vernon was at the other end.

‘Did you hear something scream?' she asked.

‘No. The vixen probably.'

She said sharply that I knew very well that vixens did not call and mate in June and that she was sure it was murder or something horrible. I replied, trying to keep my voice steady and ironical, that we were not living in London.

‘The country isn't altogether innocent either.'

‘Where were you when you heard it?'

‘Out in the garden moon-bathing. The sound came from somewhere up the valley. Close to you. You must have heard it.'

‘I had the telly on.'

‘That's something new for you. What were you watching?'

‘Some damned thing of potted violence about detectives.'

A fairly safe guess, but I thought it wisest to add that I had gone to sleep.

‘Why haven't you been to see me for so long?'

‘I was away for a few days, and busy painting ever since.'

‘How's Meg?'

‘In great form.'

‘I heard she had torn out a claw.'

‘Not so serious.'

‘Can I come over?'

‘What? Now?'

There is no road between us, only a footpath running up the valley along the course of the stream. I did not want to see her and have to pretend heartily that all was well. I had my back against the wall while I was telephoning, but I was not safe. I said that if rape or murder was going on down in the valley she had better wait till morning before taking the path.

‘You could meet me half way. Your vixen won't be jealous.'

I had no possible reply to that. She suspected that I was in some trouble and I should only make matters worse by evasive artificialities. So I put Meg in my pocket and set out. Anything was better than my haunted house.

It was an act of considerable courage to commit herself to the night, though Rita knew our valley as intimately as I. The noise torn from my wretched throat had been human and male and could not have been shrieked by any other animal. What she feared or guessed I dared not think.

She was wearing a white skirt, so I saw a long way off her lower half flitting along the dark edge of the woodland like a cone of mist, and called to her. When she came up she described what she had heard and asked me what on earth it could have been. I suggested that one of our local naturalists, out watching owls or nightjars, had twisted his ankle. She told me not to put on a show of raising morale.

Rita, I know, is strangely fond of me but often exasperated. She is a historian, a don at Somerville, and a glorious animal as well, quick in mind and body, fair and lightly golden. I try never to let her suspect how much I love her. She is nearly twenty years younger than I. The gap in age—and the other thing—insists that our relationship must be that of brother and sister. I remember so gladly our first meeting. I was in the process of getting rid of the farmland, and she boldly called on me—tall, intent and delightfully commanding as one who knew her own mind and could open it to a stranger—asking me to exclude the last, lone cottage at the bottom of the valley and sell it to her. Without hesitation I did. It was pleasant to think of grass and water flowing down from me to this Aspasia.

When the Oxford term is over she retires there among her books. Sometimes she tells me about her research and asks my advice. She won't take my ‘I don't know' for an answer and says that I am part of the land and aware by instinct of what my far ancestors would have thought. She insists that history is not about events but about what people thought— baron or yeoman or serf—and that the original sources have a value beyond the happenings which the author describes; they reveal the sort of mind he had and thus the sort of mind his contemporaries had. When I consider the masters of my craft I understand what she means. To know the man one must appreciate not only what he painted but what he wanted to paint and couldn't—couldn't because his vision was limited by the thought of his time.

Suppose my Holy Well exists in five hundred years (I'll guarantee the colours won't fade) the painter who studies it will see what I was trying to do and will observe that I failed because I lived in an age drowned in too sudden a flood of material knowledge. So my mysticism will seem a reasonable and perhaps lovely shot at what to him is proved and established fact.

But this is by the way. I am avoiding what was painful: the keeping of my secret from Rita.

‘You aren't ill, Alfgif, are you?' she asked.

‘Meg says I am not.'

I let her loose. She started to climb Rita's long leg—a desirable ladder—and was gently removed.

‘And what do you say?'

‘I may be pregnant with a painting.'

‘You are not worried by your own perception?'

‘There's nothing mysterious about me at all.'

‘Isn't there? Your family has lived here since Plantagenet days. Instead of coming home you stay on in India. And when you do come home you decide to be a painter and not a landowner.'

I pointed out that we had owned the land for only three hundred years. Before that we were tenants of the Bishopric of Salisbury. She told me not to interrupt.

‘You have a fey relationship with animals,' she went on. ‘You go about with Paddy's familiar, and Paddy as everyone knows was a sort of faith healer for horses.'

‘He wasn't a faith healer. He didn't glide round with a pious expression laying on hands. He just knew a lot about horses and what makes them tick.'

‘And took good care not to be mysterious. So do you.'

Meg, ecstatic with the moonlight, was dancing, mostly in leaps and circles and arching her caterpillar body, but sometimes taking a turn or two on her hind legs.

‘She looks as if she were dancing with someone,' Rita said.

‘I don't know whom she dances with.'

‘Would you expect to? Three hundred years ago, dear tenant of the Bishop of Salisbury, you'd have been burnt at the stake and Paddy too.'

Witchcraft, yes. Some of our old farmers and farm hands would nod and wink without mentioning the word, but knowing very well that ancient medical and other knowledge is not wholly lost. Example: old Bill Freeman who can undoubtedly cure warts.