What Dread Hand? (15 page)

‘I likewise bows,’ said Dorinda, automatically. She added: ‘I say Rufus, talking about glass, don’t look now but someone’s peering in through the window. And who do you think it is? It’s your Dop.’

‘My what?’ he said, manoeuvring for a view.

‘Your Döppelganger, you fool! Peering in.’

His own face! His own eyes, looking back at him through the glass, staring back at him through the glass. He went a leaden grey; sweat, cold and clammy broke out across his forehead. He stammered: ‘My God! It’s myself. It’s me.’

That’s so improbable that don’t you think it
must
be only Dan, in his falsie?’

‘Dan?’

‘Well, I know you’re not alike, but you
are
cousins, there would be this family thing. And for good measure, he’s got a policeman handcuffed to him.’

‘A policeman? Handcuffs?’

‘Well, no: now I look again, no handcuffs. But a flattie all the same.’

‘Why should you think he’s a policeman?’

‘Oh, but it’s Superintendent Brown,’ said Dorinda. ‘I know him well.’ She ran to the door. ‘Come in, come and buy some pictures! Number 27 still unsold, I simply can’t think why—two for the price of one,
I
call it. Late Evening—or Early Morning, we’re not too sure which. But we
are
sure where. You can just see a little bit of a church. The same one appears in a picture of Van Gogh’s. But it isn’t in Provence at all. It’s up north, in Auvers.’

‘Yes, it’s Auvers,’ said the Superintendent, ‘in the Ile de France. We’ve just come from there.’ To Rufus he said: ‘They remember you well.’ He put on an excruciating French accent. ‘Ze Eengleeshman wiz ze rred beard, altogezzer
à
la Van Gogh.’ Though one wouldn’t say, he added—judging by the self-portraits, that Van Gogh had had a
large
red beard…

‘He always looks to me,’ said Dorinda, ‘more as if he were in the process of growing one.’

They invited him down to the station for questioning and he accepted without fuss. What was the use? And anyway, now that they were on to him, they would soon find Jimmy—deep in the lake at Halberd where he had sunk the body, after bringing him home that evening from the Shorn Lamb… Bringing him back from the Shorn Lamb, boldly walking out in the part of his own Döppelganger. He had shown up first at the art school and then for a moment at the Rose and Crown opposite, to make sure there were one or two red beards there: people remembered red beards without necessarily putting a face to them, and no one would ever be certain in that Saturday crush, that one had not belonged to
him.
And if he had been safely at the Rose and Crown—then the Döppelganger could only be Dan, dressed up for the part: (Dan, who, in fact, would certainly, after his final dismissal by Dorinda, be driving sadly home all alone, and have no alibi.) It had been lucky that Dorinda should have seen them from the window—he had hoped for that; but even if she hadn’t, it wouldn’t have mattered. Someone in the Shorn Lamb would have remembered the Döppelganger, coming in for Jimmy. You could always rely upon people remembering, when they’d seen a man with a large red beard.

Always. On the platform in the Tube that day, for instance. You shaved off your own beard, you went there in a false one, pushed Uncle Tom under his train and, in the ensuing pandemonium, shuffled off the beard and, clean-shaven and therefore unnoticed, slipped away. And it was the red beard they all remembered. Again at Folkestone and Dieppe. It hadn’t taken much to discover, just by listening in the Rose and Crown, which day it was that one of the art school red-beards was planning his own channel crossing, painter’s clobber and all. The police find your passport has been stamped on that day, chaps mill forward in their hundreds to testify that they remember—again in the busy Saturday crowd—a painter with a large red beard. On the early boat—that’s the point; on the early boat. You yourself (having disposed of Uncle Tom) travel, clean-shaven and therefore unremarked, by the later boat. Complete with what Dorinda would call your falsie, you show up at a garage in Dieppe where you’re known and allow yourself to be trace-able all the way down to Aries, in Provence. Leave some stuff there—and bat back north to the Ile de France. Van Gogh painted there also, and you want Van Gogh country; but now you have established yourself with him in his Provençal days: who is ever going to look for you up north? Half way through the time, when your new beard is not too long to prevent your wearing—just for a few hours—the false one, you show yourself again at Aries; and at the end, of course, you go there again, with a real full-grown beard now. But—it had all been a bit academic really; for where you went, what you did between your arrival, fully bearded, at Aries and the time you returned there, fully bearded, to pick up your things and go home—who in fact is ever going to question that?

Answer, he thought ruefully: Mrs. Dorinda Jones, apparently, is going to question that. ‘Go and ask the people in the villages where he was painting,’ says Dorinda to Dan. ‘He won’t say where he was,’ says Dan, ‘he had a tent and just wandered.’ ‘Take a look at his pictures, then, you dope,’ says Dorinda. ‘Van Gogh left a record of that countryside: try to spot landmarks in the pictures.’ So Dan gets out his wretched little camera and clicks away at the canvases hung all round the drawing-room at Halberd, and he and Dorinda pore over the results. And Dan talks round Scotland Yard and, policemen in attendance—to see that he’s up to no tricks himself, perhaps, but anyway to identify places and cross-question witnesses—off they go. And there you are.

Vaguely evil and dangerous, his father had said, describing the Döppelganger to the little boy. ‘A Döppelganger is—well, a sort of other self. But evil and dangerous.’ He had summoned up his Döppelganger, thought Rufus, summoned up—if you liked to put it that way—his other self; and, evil and dangerous, that other self had beaten him, hands down.

He was not unprepared. They couldn’t hang you nowadays, but for him, a painter, to spend the long years cut off from all beauty, from sunlight on corn, from great fields of cabbages, silvery blue, from white clouds boiling up against a cobalt sky—no thank you! ‘Dorinda,’ he said, staring, braggadocio, into her strained, white face, ‘do keep Number 27—a wedding present from me.’ And for the final time he bowed to her and under cover of the bow and the flourish, slipped the little tablet into his mouth. ‘You can cage up my Döppelganger,’ he said to the Superintendent, before he died, ‘but not me as well. That would be a bit too much what Mrs. Jones would call—two for the price of one.’

(Sin-eaters flourished in Wales, especially along the English border, up to the end of the seventeenth century; but, though less common, they continued long after that, possibly up to as little as a hundred years ago.)

The night was dark but the wind that rustled the stunted branches of the scrub oak in the hanging forest was balmy and warm; it was not against the cold that the rider hugged his jacket so close about him, slipping down from the saddle, walking forward, reluctant and slow, towards that ruined place. It had been a small cottage once, cosy and warm; but the years of desertion had let in the wild rain among the stones that formed its simple walls, softening the clay that bound them, tumbling-in the blue-grey slates of the roof, opening wider the wide chimney to the heaped and mountainous twigs of the jackdaws’ nests, almost as long abandoned as the place itself…

Yet, where nowadays not even the jackdaws built, there came from the unglassed window a glimmer of light, and at the sound of the pony’s hooves, unshod, on the grass outside, someone came to the door and a woman’s voice called—though faintly: ‘Who’s there?’

He stopped, shivering, clutching across his breast the edges of his coat as though the close-woven wool of his own mountain sheep might hold some magic to keep his body from harm; and, without preamble or greeting, called back in their native Welsh: ‘I come for the sin-eater.’

‘Then you may go back,’ she said. ‘He cannot come.’

‘Not come?’ There was sickness abroad, many were dead, the sin-eaters were being kept busy. He grew anxious, urgent, coming closer, the pony’s single rein looped over his arm. ‘He must come! I’ve been searching three days, I can get nobody else. The sin-eater from Tregarron himself is sick, the one at Cilycwm died yesterday…’

‘I did not know,’ she said; and in her voice there seemed the faint echo of a new despair.

He was hardly surprised. ‘Living so isolated here—’

She interrupted bitterly. ‘All sin-eaters live isolated. Our men take your sins upon them, and for that you cast them out.’

He shrugged. Who would wish to associate with such as they?—men pre-doomed for all eternity, heavy with the load of other men’s transgressions. ‘We pay. And there is—a good meal.’

A good meal—the worse the sinner, the better the banquet. They spread out the food upon the dead man’s bosom, and from there you ate the meal and with it the dead man’s sins. And the dead, made innocent again, went directly to glory; and you were paid and kicked out to live a pariah, till they had need of you again. ‘At any rate,’ said the woman, turning back into the doorway, ‘my man is sick, he can’t come.’

He dared not go back without a sin-eater. ‘I can get no one else. The time is passing, my master must be buried tomorrow, the mistress is distraught lest he go to the grave with his sins still upon him.’ He insisted: ‘Is he so very sick? There is nobody else.’

In the ivy of the ruined outbuildings, tumbled now almost into the ground, an owl called, eerily hooting; all about them dried brown leaves of the scrub oak rustled and whispered, driven by the warm night wind. The woman stopped in the doorway. She repeated: ‘Nobody else?’

‘Who else could I get now? They must bury him tomorrow.’

She considered a long time. She said at last: ‘Where are you from?’

‘Only from Cwrt y Cadno. Not too far.’

‘How do you know what’s too far?’ she said. She looked past him at the rough little, stout mountain pony. ‘If—I say
if
—he comes, he must ride the horse.’

He gave a rough laugh. ‘What?—I walk, while a sin-eater rides my horse?’ But if the man were too weak to walk… ‘Very well—let him ride.’

‘Both ways?’ she said. ‘You will bring him back again?’

‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘Both ways.’ Once the man had done his work, they could see about that. There was a heap of stones close by and he went and sat down upon it, gingerly, hugging his jacket about him—no need, however great, should drive him closer to that chill, grey place where the light glimmered, faint as a moonstone, cobweb covered, through the hole of the window. ‘Go and tell him. And let him make haste. I can’t wait all night.’

‘I’ll tell him.’ But once again she turned back. ‘Both ways?’

‘Both ways, both ways,’ he promised impatiently. He added—for suppose the man were truly too sick to come, suppose he were to die upon the road—‘What ails him?’

‘He is hungry,’ said the woman, and went into the cottage.

The glimmer came from rushlights, made from the reeds that grew by the river’s edge—the green skin peeled back, the pith dipped in melted mutton fat, forming a sort of wick. Through its feeble flickering you could discern a second door-way, leading to an inner room. From this room there came now a boy—a boy or a man; from the gaunt, gangling height, the foolish, gentle face, you might never be quite sure—even the hair, a wild thatch almost to shoulder length, was of ashen pallor, so bleached as to seem the white hair of old age. She glanced towards the inner room, questioning.

He shrugged hopelessly. A thin arm was crook’d across the flat belly, his face was streaked with tears. ‘Mother—it’s terrible to have not enough to eat. My father lies there sick, moaning, and all I can think of is that I’m hungry.’

She took his hand in hers—the poor, thin hand, fingers noded and brittle-looking as the twigs from the long-abandoned jackdaws’ nests. ‘You shall eat,’ she said.

‘Eat, Mother?’ There had been no meal in that house for many days.

She gestured with her head to the dim figure sitting outside on the heap of stones. ‘He has come for the sin-eater.’

‘But my father—’

She looked into his face: a strange look, intent, compassionate, yet fiercely resolute. ‘Ianto,’ she said,
‘you
must go with the man.’

‘I?’ He was terrified, panic-stricken, freeing himself from her grasp, to beat the air in front of him with meaningless gestures like a child deprived of its toy. ‘I couldn’t, I couldn’t! To eat a dead man’s sins…’

She fought, head back, to get possession of his flailing hands. ‘Hush, now, hush! Listen! You are hungry—’

‘To eat from a dead man’s breast! The food would choke me.’

‘Ianto, they pay you also, they will give you money.’

But he only struggled and whimpered, rearing away from her, oblivious to reason. ‘I’d rather starve—I’d rather starve…’

They were all starving. The husband had been ill for many weeks; she dared not leave him long enough to go forth and try to earn or beg—or steal—in the far away villages: the nearest town was twenty miles or more. The boy was too witless to send; and with increasing weakness, she had lost gradually even the will to try. ‘If not for yourself, Ianto, for all of us. For him.’

The poor, vague eyes, unfocused, came at last to rest, looking wretchedly back into hers. ‘If he has no food—will he die?’

She turned away her head from the innocent gaze. She knew that his father must die, whether he ate or no. But she said: ‘Yes.’

‘Then—if just for this once… And they will pay me…?’ But he broke down again, sobbing and trembling. ‘To eat from the breast of a corpse…! To take the sins!’

‘But Ianto—this is what I am trying to say to you.’ She caught his hands again, urgently whispering. ‘To take the sins, you must eat from the body. But if you don’t eat the food there, if you bring it away—’

‘Not eat?’

‘Eat nothing there, Ianto. Not one scrap, not one crumb! Say the prayers. Tell the people to let you alone with the body while you eat. But don’t eat. Bring the food away with you.’

‘And so in that way I shall not eat the sins?’ But still the poor, feeble intellect staggered at the thought of the ordeal to be endured. ‘To see a dead man…! To say the prayers, to wail and scream…! To be left alone with him!’ He implored: ‘Mother! Must I go?’