The Goose Girl and Other Stories (50 page)

She protested and contradicted, of course; and so would I if I had had the strength of mind to be truthful. I should have told them that his recovery began when he got rid of the rug, and it was my suggestion that made him give it away; but I let that pass. It was a lavish dinner, and I had drunk enough to be charitable for a moment.

But not for long. Jamaica, I thought! While I stayed in Morissey, through the cold, rain-swept, miserable last months of winter, he and Isobel would be revelling on hot white sands, in a bright blue sea, under a sky of golden glory, because he had been clever about investments. When he made a lot of money, in the late '30s, it was possible to save something of what you earned, and he had been clever enough to multiply his savings on the Stock Exchange. That's what I resented: his cleverness. I resented it more than his presumptive wickedness. Oh, I'm in no position to judge him! Only to record what I know of him, and what happened.

He and Isobel came back at the beginning of April, looking to
us, still white and drawn by winter, indecently healthy. They were bright-eyed, sunburnt, deft and lively of speech and body: full of anecdotes, full of a newly won vitality. And we who had sustained a northern winter, and done our work in winter, were lack-lustre, pale of skin, and unhealthy of aspect. I liked him less and less, and saw very little of him until the second half of May, when, as usual in the beneficence of returning summer, my practice diminished, and I was able to spend two or three days a week fishing. Then, inevitably, we met on this or that favourite shore of the loch, ate our sandwiches together, and talked of fish and flies; or bewailed the difficulty nowadays of getting good gut and debated the best knots for nylon.

That he was now completely cured, I had no doubt whatever; and because I am not the sort of person who is everlastingly worried by what can't be explained, I no longer thought much about the mystery of a psychical obsession—a re-iterated or double obsession—that could be explained very simply in terms of witchcraft, but otherwise not at all. One day, indeed, when we had finished our lunch and the loch was so glassily calm that it was useless to think of fishing, we sat for an hour and watched the terns hawking flies, and listened to the creak of the lapwings' flight; and on a sudden impulse I asked, ‘You haven't seen the Sociable Plover again, have you?'

‘No,' he said, and looked at me with an expression of great gravity and resolution that was, perhaps, a little forced. ‘I keep a good look-out, and so far there's been no sign of it. But if it does come back, I know what to do. It won't get the better of me again.'

I was surprised to hear his reply come so quick and serious. I had expected, I think, a throw-away, half-laughing disclaimer of any interest in so remote a matter; but so far from being remote, it lay on the very surface of his consciousness, and as if I had been wakened by some inexplicable noise at night, I felt, for a moment, the tense and hollow sensation of uncharted fear. Not fear for him, but an absurd fear that I too might be touched by supernatural things. I said nothing, however, except—in a voice of bluff scepticism—'I don't suppose you'll see any more of that bird.' And then: ‘There's a fish rising off the point there. I'm going to put a fly over it.'

When I got home I found a telegram from Paddy Ryan asking, ‘Can I be assured of friendly welcome and simple accommodation if I arrive June 15 for three weeks.' I went to Mrs Malcolm, in the village, who takes summer boarders ‘just to oblige my friends', as she is careful to explain; and having persuaded her, quite easily, to put him up, replied to a London address, ‘Both await you.'

It was on the morning of the 15th that I saw Torquil with a gun on his arm. I had had to deal with a boy who had fallen and broken his wrist, and on my way back, on a little rise of the road that overlooks his house, I saw him going down to the loch. He was carrying a rod in his right hand, and in the crook of his left arm a shot-gun. I could see it quite clearly.

I didn't stop. I felt that if I got out, and followed him to ask his reason, I should embarrass both of us as deeply as if I were to turn a corner and discover him in some gross indecency. I drove on; and have never ceased to blame myself.

Five

God alone—Who has made all—knows the intricacies of the human condition: the true state of us who are bound to history, in debt to the future, tied to our genitals, and lashed like a tiller in a storm to the impossible destiny of our salvation. I believe in my salvation, though I have been guilty of evil deeds. For also I have done good work that has served God's purpose, and my books have fortified many men and revived their appetite for life. That is my justification, and faith is my passport.

Mystery envelops us, but I have peace again. I drink a little, and sometimes more than a little; but only for the contentment and joy of drinking. Not for six months have I drunk for the cloudy comfort of drunkenness and the death of the mind in drink. I have gone back to work, and since we came home from Jamaica I have been working with my old, forgotten zest and with full confidence of the worth of what I write. This is the best of my novels, no doubt of that, and nearly finished now. Only two more chapters, and then I shall have done.

My eyes are wide open again, as they were in youth, and in the early morning I watch, in the birth of day, the birth of a new world. A new world every morning, and the scent of meadowsweet; and in the evening a rain-goose crying to the twilight. The great circle of the sky is our tent, and we, the nomads of inscrutable destiny, have rich pasture for the flocks and herds of our multifarious thoughts that graze on time and circumstance.

But I am wary in my happiness, my weapons are at hand. I shall not yield again to the maleficence of their witchcraft, and if their fetch returns—if from the summer sky that accursed bird drops down with muttering wings to tempt and call me to annihilation and betrayal of my good life—a gun will answer it. No parley with it, no hesitation, but true aim, a shot. . . .

Six

My first sight of Paddy Ryan was, I admit, disappointing. I had been looking forward, with a growing eagerness that I knew to be ridiculous, to seeing him again, and the first effect of seeing him through the eyes, not through imagination, was to deflate—oh, not entirely, but enough to feel its lessened pressure—the gay balloon of my anticipation. I had forgotten that he was so comically ugly, or perhaps his ugliness had been modified and held in check by uniform, and now was released and amplified by his own choice of clothes. He wore a green and yellow tweed suit of a pattern that only a really big man could have carried, and a very small cap perched ludicrously above his deeply tanned face and great blond moustache. But he waved to me from the steamer with exuberant friendliness, and when he came down the gangway I was almost, if not wholly, comforted against my disappointment by the gleaming vitality of his eyes. I had forgotten they were so bright a blue: the very colour of speedwell.

We talked and laughed all the way home: talked incessantly, of Berlin and his new ocean-parish in the south seas, and of old friends whom I could scarcely remember, and, of course, of fishing. He had brought a whole battery of rods, and a bag full of reels and fly-boxes. We had fly-boxes open all over the tea-table, and whenever he stopped talking of Germany or the New Hebrides it was to ask if a Blue Zulu or a Black Pennell would be better, and what was the proper size to use? But when my little orphan came home from school—she is growing into a big orphan now—Paddy was kindness itself to her, and she took to him at once. I found him exhausting, to begin with, and it was with a feeling of drawing breath again that I drove him to Mrs Malcolm's, and left him there. But he was to come back to dinner.

I had gone to some trouble to give him, on his first night in Morissey, a really good dinner—to show him that we, in the Western Isles, knew as well as others how to live, and could enjoy a proper table—and Paddy Ryan won my entire forgiveness for the vulgarity of his suit, his comical face, and his unresting tongue by his appreciation of all I put before him. There was trout, and duckling, and a cheese souffle. I was showing-off, and gave him two wines, white and red. There were flowers in the room, and I had a new frock—and Paddy, bless his heart, took notice of them all. I was almost in love with him when we took our coffee to the fire and settled down to talk of Bethsabe and Uriah the Hittite: of Torquil in Berlin.

I had been wondering how to start, when Paddy exclaimed, ‘But tell me about Malone! Is he still here, and can I go and see him? I'll be discreet, I promise that. I won't say a word of what I know
about him. Or, to be strict and accurate, of what I've heard. For some of the stories would be true enough, but others, it may be, were far-fetched. There was a lot of gossip, and I know it all. But I'll be very discreet.'

‘About what, in particular, must you be discreet?'

‘He was a man for the women—but he wasn't the only one, of course. And he had a job that brought him in contact with the Germans and the Russians too; and some thought he did a brilliant job, but others said he knew too much and went too far. That could have been jealousy, in some cases, for he was well thought-of by those high up, and everyone agreed that he was quite fearless. But there's one story I heard, and if it's true, then on that occasion he did go too far. Too far to be forgiven by any mortal judge, though what God's mercy can stretch to, none of us knows.'

‘Why do you think the story true?'

‘It was told me by a man I trust. A man who, though he hadn't legal proof in his hands—no action was taken against Malone—was in a position to form a just opinion of what had happened.'

‘And that was—?'

‘The old story, all over again, of King David and Bethsabe and the good soldier she was married to. Only he wasn't a soldier this time; he was an engineer. He and his wife were Poles, and she—I've seen her photograph—was a tearing beauty. The sort you see once in a lifetime. Well, Malone got them out of the Russian zone, and fell in love with her. He had a flat of his own, and he knew how to look after himself. Those who had been there said he lived in sinful luxury—on the very edge of the ruins of Berlin!—in a sort of whore's paradise, if you'll forgive me, of white silk curtains, and white rugs on the floor—'

‘White rugs?'

‘Or so they said, but that may have been exaggeration. They may have been piling it on a bit, with a memory of something they'd seen on a film. But whatever the furniture may have been, the girl was always there; and by and by her husband disappeared. The story was that he had made his peace with the Russians—thanks to Malone!—and gone back to Poland, to a good job there; for they needed engineers badly. And she, in the meantime, was happy enough in her whore's paradise; and who can blame her, after what she'd gone through?'

‘Do you think she was enticed by the white rugs on the floor?'

‘They're an attraction for some women; or so I've heard. But let that go, for I don't know if the rugs were fiction or fact. But what's true enough is that after five or six months she and Malone fell out.
It wasn't an open quarrel to begin with, but the sort of quarrel that smoulders for a while and then leaps up like a dull wood-fire that you help to a blaze by pouring paraffin on it. Well, there were two British officers there when the flames came out, and what she said, in the roar and heat of her anger, was that Malone, so far from finding her husband a good, comfortable job in Lodz or Poznan or somewhere like that, had sold him to the Russians, and they had sent him to a new hydro-electric construction camp down in the most godless, desolate country about the bottom end, or ends, of the Volga, where it runs into the Caspian Sea.'

‘Is that true?'

‘I don't know, but the man who told me isn't a liar by choice. And there's worse to follow. For the girl herself and her young son—did I tell you she had a child?'

‘No.'

‘But yes, there was a boy, about five or six years old—he'll be sixteen or more by now, if he's still alive—and he, they say, took after his mother, and looked like a cross between an angel and a Spanish gipsy. Well, a day or two later they both vanished, and were never seen again.'

‘What happened to them?'

‘The man who told me most of this—the man who ought to know—believes they went the same way as the husband. That, to oblige Malone, the Russians took charge of them, and because the Russians have a crazy idea of the proper pattern of life—sometimes it looks like logic, and sometimes like farce—they were probably sent down to the swamps and wilderness about the mouths of the Volga to join Uriah the Hittite.'

‘Torquil can't have done that!'

‘He was in the gravest sort of danger if the girl was out of control, and talking against him, and if what she was saying was true.' ‘Can it have been?'

‘The man who told me thought so and Malone, who'd been highly regarded till then, was removed to a quieter sector, and a month or two later went back to civil life. At his own request, of course.'

I had a bottle of whisky, which I hadn't intended to open, but we both fell into a sort of stricken silence from which there seemed to be no release; and to open a little wicket-gate of escape from the awful consciousness of what Ryan had been saying, whisky seemed the only thing. I gave him a Highlander's dram, and myself as much; and then I told him—not about the polar bearskin; of that, for some dark reason, I had no wish to speak—but the full story of Torquil's haunting by the
Sociable Plover, and Torquil's belief that it was something he called a ‘fetch'.

That opened another sluice-gate, for in the south seas Paddy Ryan had dabbled enthusiastically in the magic and witchcraft practised in Melanesia, and with an Irishman's propensity to accept the supernatural—‘to win freedom from the bondage of mundane causality by subscribing to a supra-rational volition,' as someone has put it—he had wholly accepted the possibility of magical ‘possession', and was quite prepared to believe in the reality of fetches and sendings. He told several tales to substantiate his belief, and perhaps they were true. But I, by then, was tired-out and half asleep.