The Goose Girl and Other Stories (47 page)

I'm putting all this down to show that I'm a normal woman, because the value of my evidence, for what follows, depends on my normality.
And I'm normal enough for anything, and sensible too. If I were writing an autobiography I could say a lot more to prove this, but for the present I'm only interested in the case of Torquil Malone. A bad man, but attractive.

He is a man of importance in the island, though he does nothing much, in a local way, to sustain his importance except spend a lot of money. But he is, or has been famous—relatively famous, by our standards at least—and that we respect. There is no one else here with a name that is known, or used to be, in London and New York and Los Angeles: not even our absentee laird who comes for six or seven weeks in the year, to shoot a diminishing number of grouse, catch a few sea-trout—I catch more—and take six or eight stags from the little stony forest that rises to the north-east and gives Morissey its romantic aspect; the rest of it is low-lying, gentle, and fertile. We have taller, bigger neighbours that are worth less on the rent-roll, and our nine hundred and sixty-three inhabitants give me enough to do, but leave me time, in summer, for as much fishing as I want.

When I first came, the older men and women were shy and reluctant to expose their ailments to a woman doctor; but in Germany I had acquired a sort of regimental, man-to-man approach, and though I have a good figure and long legs I am not aggressively attractive—not too insistently feminine—so gradually I won their confidence, and now, I fancy, they are almost unaware of my sex. Perhaps I have gone too far in suppressing or denying it. There is something inherent in my profession that makes it difficult for an ordinary man to speak directly to the woman hiding behind a Bachelor of Medicine—though often enough the woman wants to get out in front—and I, by the manner I have acquired, have probably made it more difficult. When I think of marrying again, as doubtless I shall, I'll have to take the lead and firmly conduct my young man to the bed-end. But I'm in no hurry, though sometimes I wish my little orphan had a small brother to play with. She seems happy enough at the village school, but she is very self-centred, like so many female children—and what, after all, has she got to do with the story I should be telling? Here I am chattering of myself, and my own affairs, when I should be telling what I know of Torquil Malone.

According to my day-book it was on May 23rd, just before lunch, that Isobel telephoned and asked me to come and see him. He had been drinking more heavily than usual—than his usual habit during the last six months or so—and now he had become violent. He had thrown a whisky-bottle through a window, and gone out with his gun. It didn't promise to be an agreeable interview, so I went immediately,
without giving myself time to think about it. He lived three miles from the village, beside the loch.

Isobel was waiting for me at the roadside, looking self-important rather than distressed, as she should have been. She is a stupid woman, but very pretty. A minimum of intelligence, no nerves, and a lovely face and figure: a lucky mixture, I suppose, and perhaps I'm jealous.

‘He's all right now,' she said. ‘I mean he hasn't shot himself, and that's what I thought he was going to do after I heard the crash and saw him coming out with a gun. But I kept my head and didn't say anything to annoy him.'

‘What did you say?'

‘I just asked if there'd been an accident.'

I left my car on the road, and we walked up together. Their house was a re-built farmhouse with the farm buildings added to it, making three sides of a square with a paved court and a sun-dial where the midden had been. An attractive house, and very expensively furnished.

I found Torquil in his work-room, with a broken window to show where the bottle had gone. He was quiet and melancholy, full of self-pity, and—as I thought at first—gently raving.

‘It isn't drink,' he said. ‘Drink's been the salve and lenitive. Drink's kept me sane: drink and Isobel. No, the plain, undeniable fact—and you won't believe it—is that I'm haunted. Haunted by a fetch.'

‘Is that what you were shooting at?'

‘Yes.'

‘Did you hit it?'

‘Do you know what a fetch is?'

‘No,' I said.

‘I'll show you what this one is.'

He went to a shelf—two of his walls were lined with books to the ceiling—and taking down one of a set, showed me the picture of a pretty, dove-coloured bird with a black head, called a Sociable Plover.

‘That's it,' he said.

‘You've been drinking a lot, Torquil, haven't you?'

‘Who wouldn't, who's persecuted as I have been?'

‘But what is a fetch? Does it just mean a bird?'

He went into a long rigmarole of explanation—or lack of explanation—of magic and witchcraft, and I watched him a little anxiously, knowing that only an hour or so before he had suddenly become violent. His voice was low and monotonous, and his eyes were uneasy, turning to the window and back again. He had deteriorated a lot in a
few months—and I, perhaps, was a factor in that—but in a dissolute way, that was now a coarse dissolution, he was still extraordinarily handsome; and I though of the uniformed photograph of him, in Isobel's room, that showed a head of brutal vigour and Roman formality: a severe and sculptured beauty. Now the lines were looser, the eyes duller, and the skin unhealthy: there was a little reddish patch, inflamed and pustular, on one side of the neck. But he was still a man to look at—as a man—with admiration, and his figure, though a belly pouted, showed the breadth and squareness of a soldier and an athlete. He was very sorry for himself, and his voice remained low and miserable.

‘So you see what it is,' he said. ‘Sometimes it's called a wraith, or apparition. It's the person himself, or herself, but not in his or her proper shape. No, never! It could be an animal, or something without apparent life. And it's sent—a “sending” is another name for it—by the person it is, or an agent who's taken control of him, for the single purpose of driving the intended victim to madness and death. It's the blackest magic that the adept knows.'

‘How do you know about it?'

‘There's not much,' he said, ‘with which I haven't a surface acquaintance—or better.'

That was his natural, sometimes insufferable arrogance cropping out; and I was glad to hear it. If he retained some thing of his arrogance, he probably had the willingness to be cured, and could be persuaded to re-assert his sanity.

‘Do you know,' I asked, ‘who's likely to have sent the fetch? Can you think of anyone who hates you enough to want to drive you mad?'

‘Forty,' he said. ‘Forty at least. I haven't lived an easy life.'

Arrogance again. But his eyes, alert and frightened, turning to the window. He told me how often, how persistently, the bird had pestered him, and something of the death-wish it implanted and fostered in him. We went out to look for it, but could not find it. He had not hit it when he shot at it: that he knew.

I told him the best thing he could do was to go away for a couple of months. Leave Morissey and the bird—in which I didn't believe—and live for a while in London, Edinburgh, Paris or Dublin. Or take a long voyage in a cargo-ship. ‘And stop drinking so much,' I said.

His lunch was brought in on a tray, and I went to eat with Isobel and the children. Two little girls, six and four, with pretty faces and futile minds. Their mother's children. If Torquil was suffering from melancholia, I thought, it was partly the fault of Isobel and her brood.

I had three or four patients to see in the afternoon, but I thought not so much of them as of Torquil. I knew too much of him for a detached, impartial, scientific view, but not enough for a whole and human understanding. I knew something of his background, and the reason for his arrogance; but not much of the life he had lived, except what he had told me, and part of that was mere boasting.

He came, as I did, from Inverdoon: a town large enough for gossip to be various, and small enough to ensure some accuracy in gossip. His father had been a Warrant Officer in the Navy, a man of twenty or twenty-five years service when, in the autumn of 1914, at the very beginning of the first Great War, his ship was torpedoed and he came to hospital in Inverdoon. With some thirty other early casualties he lay in a ward in the Royal Infirmary, and he and his fellow-patients—when to be wounded was still a distinction—were cossetted and comforted by many visitors. His most persistent visitor was a Miss M . . ., a lady no longer in her first youth, who was the fifth of five daughters of the Professor of Biblical History, a shabby and eccentric old man. Miss M . . . fell headlong in love with the robust and handsome sailor, and when he was discharged, unfit for further service, she married him in secret and brazenly brought him back to Inverdoon. Their marriage scandalised University circles and the Old Town, and shocked them more when Mr Malone set up as a bookmaker—Turf Accountant, he called himself—in Spitalgate, midway between Queen's College and the Cathedral, and soon prospered.

This I know because we lived next door; where my father was a butcher, not well-to-do, and the increasing wealth of Mr Malone was our endless source of envy and speculation.

Torquil was his only son, and when I came to Morissey—three or four years after Torquil and Isobel had bought their house and settled there—I quickly found that he hated, more than most things, to be reminded of his parentage and upbringing. To begin with, he openly resented my presence, because I knew too much about him and reminded him, every time he saw me, of what I knew. Then, for a while, he ignored me.

He had left home as soon as he left school, when he was seventeen, and gone abroad. For several years we heard nothing of him, but suddenly he jumped into fame with a first novel that became a best-seller and attracted a lot of serious attention when it became known that the author was only twenty-one and had already seen more of the world than most people do in a long life. From Inverdoon he had gone to Calcutta, as clerk in a shipping firm—that was true—but then the narrative, as it grew more various, became less dependable. He
had, it seemed, been a journalist for some time, a reporter working in Shanghai and possibly Vancouver. It was commonly said that he had lived a wild life; and detail was filled in according to imagination. How he had acquired the book-learning and found the leisure to write
John Gaffikin
was a mystery for which two solutions were offered. There were those who said he had retired to a monastery—generally unidentified—for six months; but others, perhaps more plausibly, told of a rich woman who, having engaged him as her private secretary, gave him time to write and the freedom of her library: being impressed by his budding genius. Whatever the truth of it,
John Gaffikin
gave evidence of a more than academic knowledge of life, and made a small fortune for Torquil. In 1940, when he went into the Army, he showed again his remarkable aptitude for success, and was quickly promoted. So much I knew, and a little more . . . .

I did my work, and went home to supper. I read to Fiona, my little orphan, for an hour, and put her to bed. I settled down to my own book, and then the bell rang; and when I went to the door, there was Torquil.

I took him into my small sitting-room—furnished so cheaply, in such bare sufficiency, compared with the opulence of his house—and I saw with relief that he was sober; or in that settled, meridian state of drink that, for a drunkard, may be near sobriety.

He said at once, ‘I've come to tell you how grateful I am for your advice. I've talked things over with Isobel—though she knows nothing of what I told you. She wouldn't understand—and I've decided to go away. I'm going tomorrow. To London first, and then, if I can find a slow cargo-boat, to South America. I've never been to South America. Perhaps I'll go up the Amazon.'

‘Shall I give you a drink?' I asked. ‘A small one? There's only brandy.'

‘A small one for me and a big one for you,' he said. ‘You've earned more than that today.'

He smiled as if he were wholly at his ease, and to be easy was his natural habit. But that was his way—he had the faculty of contradicting himself, and though he was often arrogant and brutally egotistic, he could suddenly show gentleness and a sort of innocence. He was usually, though not always, very gentle with Isobel: kind to her, and amused by stupidities that, if they had been treated with cold tolerance, would have got more than they deserved. In his utter absorption in fishing he was innocence itself—there's a fragment of my own portrait, I suppose—and to find him lying in a ditch with his field-glasses pointed to a flock of field-fares was to find not only
innocence but humility; for in spite of his interest in birds, and the hours he spent watching them, he never learnt much about them, and admitted his ignorance.

But his arrogance could be embarrassing, and I was completely puzzled by his regular church-going till I discovered that he believed, quite firmly, in a family relationship with God. God, being an author too, was the chief of his clan: it was as simple as that. Of his own books he never spoke, nor encouraged others to speak; and that was pride again. They were there to be accepted, like islands in the sea, about whose creation one doesn't ask. And it's true that his novels are very good indeed, especially the early ones. The later ones don't gallop as they did, and haven't their freshness, their juice. But they're good—and he, though I can't tell how I know it, he, I'm sure, is intrinsically bad.

He talked for a while about his intended voyage, and then, with a change of tone, said, ‘I've wasted, utterly wasted, the last six months. My life's been null and void. Boredom and blank despair: that's all I've felt. I can't even believe in myself and the worth of my own work—and that's like the fall of Lucifer, isn't it?'