The Courtesy of Death

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I
had never thought of the bungalow as lonely. It was separated from The Green Man by only thirty yards of straggling roses and lawn and all the
showy annuals which you find in a pub garden. Its other side faced a cart track beyond which was an abandoned yard, grass and nettles growing through the paving, where former stables and a
half-roofless coach house formed an L-shaped block.

I was sitting up doing accounts in the kitchen, because the light was better. In the other room the lamp was so placed that you could only see to read or write in bed. It was after twelve, and a
man coming down from the hills would not have seen another lit curtain for miles.

I don’t think he knocked. He probably leant on the back-door and its latch at the same time, and both opened. His clothes were torn and he was plastered with dried mud. His hair was
hanging over his eyes and matted with filth. Because it was fair and lank it looked all the more dishevelled and pathetic, like the forelock of a dun horse which has pitched on its head in the mud
and got to its feet, without dignity or sense of direction but still game.

About his eyes there was nothing at all pathetic. Within the tangle they reflected the light or, perhaps, projected it. As he rose, very wobbly, from the kitchen floor, I had the impression of a
desperate string of muscles carrying about a brain which could no longer give a sensible order but wouldn’t stop issuing them. He reminded me of a very busy man with a bad attack of
malaria.

I shut the door and eased him into a chair. I then saw that skin as well as clothes had been ripped. He was oozing blood from long, shallow scratches; it was that rather than mud which had
matted his hair. He stretched out his arm on the kitchen table and rested his head on it. When he looked up at me from that angle, his eyes were even more disturbing. I thought he muttered:

‘I want a woman.’

A normal enough remark in private among friends. But as an explanation to a complete stranger of one’s arrival it was a danger signal. My immediate reaction was to wonder if he would stay
quiet while I went over to the pub to telephone a doctor or the police. Only a journey of thirty yards which was never taken. Later on, I was often to think of that.

When he repeated himself in a higher voice, it was clear that he had actually said:

‘I want my woman.’

The ‘my’ made a difference that any barman would recognise. If a customer mumbled after his second whisky ‘I want a woman’ you would give him a likely address and get rid
of him; but if he said ‘I want my woman’ you would expect the matrimonial confidences which cartoonists insist are frequent—though in fact, due to this country’s licensing
hours, a barman is seldom long enough alone with one customer.

‘Who has taken her?’ I asked, hoping that he would reveal enough of his trouble for me to begin to decide what I ought to do.

‘Nobody.’

‘How did you get here?’

‘I don’t know exactly.’

‘Are you sure she exists? As a person, I mean.’

That was hurrying it a little; but one cannot be expected to have the patience of a psychiatrist. However, he gave to my remark a second or two of whatever he could manage in the way of
connected thought.

‘I think she must,’ he said. ‘If she did not, what would I have done it for?’

‘Done what?’

‘Run here. To you.’

‘But she is where you came from,’ I answered very positively, afraid that he might have convinced himself that she was, for example, in my bedroom.

‘She is? Why do you think so?’

‘You couldn’t know where you did come from unless she was there,’ I said, entering far too boldly and irrevocably into his world of obsession. ‘So I don’t suppose
anything has happened to her.’

‘Happened to her? Of course it hasn’t! Not to her!’ he exclaimed in a voice which was suddenly shrill and clear.

The upward jerk of his head disturbed his balance—his physical balance, I mean—and I just caught him as he toppled over on to the floor. That eased for the moment the question of
what I ought to do. Some elementary first-aid was urgent.

I brought him round with whisky and warm milk, which was all I had in the bungalow since I took my meals over at The Green Man. Then I helped him to undress, sponged and disinfected the
scratches and put him in my bed with all the blankets I could find on top of him—a precaution though he showed no sign of shock, only of exhaustion and some inner excitement. He was thin, but
sinewy as a bird’s leg. I remember noticing his very openwork undervest, a complicated cat’s cradle of woven string. It suggested that he had brought it through the advertisement
columns of some health magazine.

I hung up his tweed suit to await next morning a clothes brush and a sewing machine, turned out the bedroom light and returned to the kitchen to draw breath. My visitor had dropped off to sleep,
and there was no urgent need to make a nuisance of myself to hard-working police and ambulance men unless he became violent. Once off the subject of his woman he showed no sign of aberration,
thanking me with odd formality for my assistance and curling up like a child.

Like a child, too, he offered no further explanation of himself, handing over to me his inert body with complete trust that I would do something about it. I suppose that it was primarily this
simplicity which made me feel so responsible for him. He was neither short of money nor suspiciously rich. He had a few pounds in a neat wallet. His name, marked on his clothes with such care that
he was either a rather prim bachelor or had a fussy wife, was H. B. Fosworthy.

Ought I to send for a doctor? Well, there was nothing more that a doctor could do for him beyond shoving a needle into him for luck. As an ex-mining engineer I know temporary exhaustion when I
see it. I would have liked to wake up Mrs Gorm and get some eggs or whatever she had in the larder. I decided to do so if Mr H. B. Fosworthy could not sleep. Otherwise there was no point in
disturbing him till he woke up and started to demand breakfast.

I poured myself a night-cap and tried to make some sense of my lunatic or criminal or deserted husband or whatever the hell he was. I was about to unpack a Lilo and turn in on the kitchen floor
when there was a confident knock on the back-door. I said to myself that it was obviously the police and opened up.

The man who entered was very English and certainly not a policeman. At least I unhesitatingly assumed he wasn’t, though aware that my knowledge of plainclothes detectives was entirely
drawn from TV and the cinema. He had a manner which nicely combined courtesy with the assurance that everyone else was as reasonable as himself.

‘I hope you will excuse me calling so late,’ he said, ‘but I saw your light on.’

That meant of course that he had either come along the cart track or down from the hills. It was a little suspicious. If he had a clear right to look for my visitor, one would have expected him
to follow the road and call with his enquiries at the front of The Green Man. So I pretended to misunderstand him.

‘I’m afraid the pub has shut down for the night. And they haven’t any rooms anyway. Just this bungalow at the bottom of the garden.’

‘Oh, I didn’t want a room. The fact is: I am looking for somebody. And when I saw your light I thought that perhaps I might ask.’

‘Man or woman?’

‘A man. It’s rather a sad case. He gets off by himself sometimes, and that leads to embarrassment. We don’t want to put him under any restraint.’

Still playing for time and hoping to avoid direct questioning, I said that I had been led to believe that mental hospitals in these days could nearly always cure.

‘Well, yes,’ he admitted. ‘But when it is just extreme eccentricity, one hesitates. … You haven’t seen him then?’

‘I thought I heard a noise in the stables some time back,’ I said, with the idea of protecting myself in case this were a genuine enquiry.

‘Do you think anyone would mind if I had a look round?’

‘Well, I don’t. And everyone else is asleep.’

‘I’ll do that then,’ he said.

‘Do you want any help?’

‘No, don’t bother! I’ve disturbed you enough already. Very many thanks.’

I saw the beam of a powerful electric torch thoroughly searching the deserted buildings. Curious to see where he went when he had finished, I slipped out of the bungalow’s front door into
the pub garden. From behind the hedge I watched him hesitate about calling on me again, then climb a gate and disappear across the fields.

It reinforced my guess that he had come that way. I wondered why he had firmly refused help, why he was looking for his eccentric friend on foot instead of proceeding by car from village to
village and police station to police station. If he had arrived openly, called first at the pub and then walked across the garden to the bungalow with Gorm, I should at once and thankfully have
handed over Mr H. B. Fosworthy. As it was, I felt that morning would be soon enough for decision. The man in my bed was certainly peculiar, to put it charitably, but I now had a worrying
presentiment that he was also very much afraid. I doubt if I had spotted it earlier.

I had no friends or connections locally. Not many anywhere in England, if it came to that. My practical experience as a mining engineer was extensive, but my qualifications were not. So when I
made a small killing in Canadian tin—owing to the generosity of a grateful Board in financing my purchase of shares—I decided to give up a profession in which I could never reach the
top and to start a new life in my own country while I was still young enough to be enterprising. I intended to buy an inn and a garage, near a main road but not on it, and develop the pair
together. Mine was not a high ambition, but I was confident that I could pull it off. I’m a good mechanic myself and can spot in five minutes whether an employee knows his job. As for
catering and comfort, I have lived for fifteen years in camps and hotels and can smell what a customer likes and what he doesn’t.