The Sending (16 page)

When we were back at my house with drinks in front of us, I abandoned Rita for a moment to fetch Meg in case she wished to join us. I had left her curled up in the studio and asleep. I found that she had been busy in my absence and made herself a nest. That was a trick of hers, when occasionally she was bored with arranging shavings or straw and wanted to try her hand at domesticity. I assumed that she had torn the stuffing out of an armchair and rearranged it on the floor, but closer inspection showed that the fragments were of canvas. She had ripped the Holy Well from its stretcher and nibbled it to pieces. Together with Columns of the Sun, it had been leaning against the wall where I had put them after Molay's visit. Columns had been spared with only a hole in the corner.

I could not look at that debris. I turned away. Meg started to climb up my leg. I put her down. I hope my hand was gentle. I think it was. Only then did it flash into my mind that she could be as innocent as Leyalá. A fine, new example of the familiar trained into a curse! And it was Molay who was responsible, not Odolaga mourning far away in his own valley. He had had Meg in his possession long enough to imprint on her what she had to do.

The Holy Well is gone for ever. It was the only work of mine which all the world could understand. Any stroller through a gallery would have stopped in front of it and wondered how it was that he could feel an unseen, unknown behind the water. Of no other painting can I be so sure. Columns of the Sun is private, and intelligible only to the mystic. Meg is only a woodland scene until the eye picks up the fact that the composition is that of a portrait. Never again, perhaps, can I bring together this world and the world without a shadow. My Presence is not visible like that of great-great-grandfather, but at least I was able to show it as more than an illusion.

When I came down again to Rita, with Meg still sleepy in my pocket, she asked me what the matter was and I told her. Among all her expressions of sorrow and sympathy, there is one which I treasure. She cried:

‘Oh, poor Meg!'

I saw what she meant: that Meg could suffer from the loss of my love as much as I from the destruction of the Holy Well. Typical of my quick, generous Rita! For her as for me love is a force of the Purpose as plainly as gravity, and nothing is less endurable than a brutal end to it.

I assured her that it was not Meg's fault and that I understood what had affected her. Meg confirmed it by climbing to my shoulder and nibbling my ear. It was impossible to go into the details.

When I had driven her home Rita wanted me to stay, still offering comfort and devotion and not wishing me to be alone. I would not stay. Some futile excuse or other.

I called up George. It beat me how Molay could have known that Meg had been left with him, and I asked if anyone had made enquiries about her during my absence.

‘Yes. Several of your friends wanted to know how she was. I suppose they thought she would be pining for you. All Penminster knows her, Alf. And when the butcher came in for a kitten to be spayed he brought along a fine, fresh, bloody sheep kidney as a present for her.'

Well, there it was. Molay had only to send someone into Penminster—perhaps a groom, perhaps a disciple—who could lead the chat in the bar of the Royal George to the subject of unusual pets or the breeding of polecat ferrets, when he would hear of Meg and learn that if he wanted to see her, Mr Hollaston was away and she was an honoured guest at the vet's. I think Molay would have known, without being told, that she was not in a cage but running free.

September 4

I am weary of all this pain and nonsense brought on me because Paddy chose to be discreetly killed by my car, and because I could have discovered the murderer. Yet I cannot reject my inherited receptors and the teachings of the forest, and so recover the enviable sanity of, let's say, some determined European accountant utterly impervious to the witch-doctor employed, as a last resort, by the minister of state whose books need auditing.

Yesterday evening I could not find my satchel, which I always leave on the floor inside the front door. It contains the simpler tools of my trade—pencils, crayons and a large sketch pad—so that I can grab it at a moment's notice if any object in the outside world has caught interest and imagination. I had not missed it, since the last few days have been too full of regrets and inner turmoil for me to consider the sudden vision of a branch, a cloud or a reflection as worth an attempt to record its singularity. So I went over to Ginny's flat to ask her if she remembered where she and Rita had managed to put it. In the studio, she said. How right! That is where I never need it, but where for tidy femininity it should be.

Ginny played the hostess and, as it was teatime, plied me with her scones for which I have been greedy since a boy. Meg, beyond a lick of butter, did not approve, but was eager for crumbled dog biscuits. I have long suspected that Ginny had a secret, special treat for her, but never guessed what it was.

She hoped that the picture which Meg had eaten—thank God she hadn't, or a poisoned Meg would have been added to retribution!—was not valuable. She supposed it wasn't as I had not sold it. She had seen me showing my work to that high and mighty gentleman when she brought coffee into the studio.

‘But Miss Rita was in a rare taking about it,' she told me.

I asked her how she knew. She said that she didn't ought to tell me, but it would do me a power of good. On the evening of the disaster, after I had driven Rita home and left, she had walked up the valley in the dusk and knocked on Ginny's door. She had explained to Ginny what had happened and begged her to keep an eye on me.

‘I thought as how your old trouble might be coming back, Mr Alfgif, but she said no it weren't that, but you might run off into the woods all night, or you might be getting at the whisky and tearing up your pictures all by yourself.'

Ginny had not been able to understand what all the fuss was about. After all if Meg had chewed up a picture I could always paint another. She told Rita that I was doing nothing out of the ordinary, but hadn't eaten anything. Rita insisted that they should sneak round the house and look through the window at me; so they did. The whisky, as expected, was at my side, but I appeared to be lost in thought with Meg on my knee. That was quite true. I was silently cursing my art, my impotence and Molay, but I was a long way from blowing my brains out if that was what Rita feared. Anyway, I threw all my cartridges into the stream, when I used to be half tempted to kill myself at the time of the haunting. After that I could only think of swallowing varnish, which Gargary could probably deal with, or falling on my hunting knife like a despairing Roman, which I was sure to bungle, or electrocuting myself from the wrong side of the fuse box, which might burn down the house.

In fact it must be very rare for any master craftsman, as Molay called me, to kill himself unless drugged or drunk. Every work is succeeded by another, and he clings to life in order to finish it, right up to the last which he has to leave undone.

‘I don't know why you think she ain't good enough for you, Mr Alfgif,' Ginny went on.

I replied that she was too good for me and that Oxford professors, which she would certainly become, did not need a husband hanging around. In fact I should guess that is just what they do need, pace Women's Lib.

‘Besides, what makes you think I'm in love with her?' I added.

Her answer to that was a snort. But from my behaviour it cannot be obvious.

It looks as if Molay might be right and that it was I, not Odolaga, who reduced her to a state halfway between exasperation and lassitude. Poor darling, then she must be as miserably unfulfilled as I. What damned Victorian sentimentalist wasted good paint on some half-draped female leaning against a door and called the crap Love Locked Out? But for her sake the door must stay shut. She returns to her college in a few days. If she comes back at Christmas I must arrange to be away.

After I left Ginny, I walked down through the parkland to search for comfort under the oaks. Unity…unity…but the only unity I want is denied me.

I was glad to fall in with Victor Pirrone enjoying a stroll through the late evening. Any human being would have served to compel my thoughts out of the all-embracing sense of failure and into politeness. But Victor I like more and more, and am at ease with him. He has fallen completely under the enchantment of our valley and can often be found there at weekends walking up the stream. He would, I am sure, prefer to have his Concha with him, but those dainty feet break all the laws of mammalian support.

As we went on together, he said surprisingly that he was glad he had not known the valley when he bought Penminster Manor, or he would have made me an offer for it.

‘But why not?' I asked.

‘Too great a responsibility. At home we should say that it has two owners—you, my dear Alf, and another. So often superstition expresses a genuine reverence. How right the ancients were to give a spring its nymph and a wood its dryad!'

‘And is that still believed in Sicily?'

‘In my own valley I would not like to say it is disbelieved. But the Church has taken the innocence out of it. Once when I was a child I was certain I did see something—so clearly that I asked my mother if I should confess it as a sin. She replied very sensibly that I should not eat so many figs before going to bed.'

I can see why Concha's godfather was so in favour of the marriage. Though her ship-building father may have said that the Pirrones and the Odolagas had nothing in common except that they had no bathrooms and kept sheep, both families recognised alongside their catholicism a religion that was more ancient. Uncle Izar could never have thought that the young Concha herself had any receptors and he was powerless to mature her into anything more than the charming, faithful, shallow woman that she is. The next best thing was to find her a husband whose ability would take her far in life, while not wholly rejecting the influences of Aquelarre. I don't mean anything so crude as the fortuneteller's sell-equities-buy-copper sort of advice, but an occasional and wise manipulation of the future.

The resemblance between Victor and my father, which I thought I had spotted, turns out to be wrong. My father closed his eyes to what he did not want to believe. Victor takes manifestations of mind as a matter of course—an ironical matter of course.

‘And your nymph never turned up again among the olives?' I asked.

‘It wasn't a nymph. It wore a frock coat.'

‘Predicting your future business success.'

‘Predicting, Alf, that I should always be sensitive to illusion. The existence of the inexplicable doesn't worry me at all. I accept all marvels. I was born among them. Take the well-attested stigmata for example! If a monk spends his holy life meditating on the crucifixion, the appearance of the stigmata is no miracle. The miracle would be if they did not appear.'

I objected that he could not call physical stigmata an illusion.

‘No. What we see is fact. But the visions of the monk are illusion—so far as our world is concerned. I don't deny the truer reality of another. You may have heard of my wife's godfather, Izar Odolaga. He calls it the world without shadows. And, once, a physicist talked to me of a very possible anti-matter world. Izar's place at Aquelarre is alive, but he can handle it. I suspect he asks ghosts to dinner. They all speak Basque.'

‘You find it comic?'

‘Not quite. But what's the alternative? If I had Izar as an enemy I'd think every rash was the beginning of leprosy. Fortunately he's a kindly fellow and more likely to turn your leprosy into a rash.'

‘A healer?'

‘And good at it. In old days he'd have been excommunicated, and lucky to get away with that. Yet if he had been a priest, he would have had pilgrims limping up from France and Spain. It seems to be only a question of whether one claims to be assisted by saints or devils.'

I asked which Odolaga claimed.

‘Neither. He claims only to be—' Victor hesitated for the English word, ‘—fey, I believe it is called. By the way, it was he who told me the valley had two owners.'

‘Did he ever see the other one?'

‘Well, if he did, it wouldn't be what you or I would think we saw.'

He must have been quoting Uncle Izar there. It reminded me of how Molay had said that if you feel a Presence you can give it any shape you like. That opened up another line of inquietude. Could an enemy of Odolaga be compelled to give it a shape he didn't like at all? I doubt if the concentration of the master craftsman would be a saving prayer. I can imagine myself painting a mediaeval mouth of hell until I fell into it. Better, I think, to follow tiger brother's prescription and sacrifice to great-great-grandfather, until I saw the spirit of my beloved valley in the elfin shape he gave it.

‘So don't eat too many figs?!' Victor went on. ‘And since we have our own Minerva in ivory and gold, we have no need to look for nymphs. Vae! Our Rita returns to Oxford at the end of this week and leaves us without protection. How lucky is youth in your ancient universities, tutored by goddesses instead of the dark and droning lecturers of Italy! After such an experience one could never lose a respect for scholarship, even though at the time attention was inevitably distracted from mediaeval history.'

Even Victor is inspired by her to choose his words with love. I have not heard such eloquence from him since my capture of Leyalá.

Chapter Nine

September 6

IT WAS MEG WHO roused me when I was half asleep in my chair, my mind wandering through the far forest with tiger brother, disembodied by his dance of worship. Meg was scrabbling at the door trying to get out. I opened it for her and followed her to the front door. When I threw it wide and let in the night, I heard what she had heard.

I could not tell whether it was played on a pipe or on the single string of hunting man. It was a reminder of all the joy we have lost, and thus of infinite melancholy, yet it had the sweetness of bird song—if a bird could have the voice of an animal. The symphony, to which one listens dreaming and reasoning simultaneously, must be the highest product of the human mind, yet a shepherd pipe in the stillness of night or the freshness of dawn is the music which comes nearest to communion with all creation.

Meg looped down past the still sheep under the oaks. They did not notice us, their heads turned towards the woodland which sheltered the piper, or itself piped. She was moving fast and was out of sight in the darkness when she crossed the stream, but I knew that our destinations were the same; even the stems of flowers would have bent towards this song of earth, if it had not been night and petals closed. By both of us the singing was received as a summons. She would have felt no fear at all, only gladness in answering. I felt both, the fear being more in the nature of reverence than the terror transmitted by Leyalá.

Often in life we answer a summons. The receptors of saint and shaman are aware of it, though eyes and ears are unaffected. But this was different. I clearly heard with ears, and knew that once we were under the trees I should also see. That was where fear came in. The legend of Pan and panic of course passed through my mind and was rejected as too simple, too contrived. What I was hearing was the truth behind the myth, whether expressed by man or by my valley itself.

As I entered the trees and began to plunge uphill, the descant of creature or instrument became fainter, not louder, and I guessed where it came from: a small, open glade left by a spreading beech which had fallen and been cut up for firewood. When I reached it I saw Julian Molay sitting on the stump with Meg on his shoulder. All sense of the supernatural vanished. I asked him how on earth he did it.

‘Answer me how on earth you heard it and I will tell you how I did it.'

‘That was how you took Meg away from the vet?'

‘Of course.'

‘And trained her to do all the damage possible!'

‘A small part of all the damage possible. I expected you to kill her.'

‘How could I?'

‘Because in your anger you are without pity. You abused love in order to take revenge.'

I knew exactly what he meant. I denied fiercely that any so-called magic was concerned in the slaughter of Odolaga's black shepherd and his sheep, except perhaps in the hypnosis of that stage property, the eagle owl.

‘I used the skill of the hunter,' I told him, ‘not the skill of the shaman.'

‘Yet from somewhere you have the gift.'

Molay was standing up now, his deep eyes condemning me. He was impressive as a judge handing out a sentence, but neither ex-Colonel Hollaston nor the painter of the Holy Well were in a mood to be impressed.

I said that I had no power at all beyond the concentration of the master craftsman: a prayer as he had called it. I had seen what could be effected through the trance and dancing of the shaman, and by trial and error I had found out a little of the use of the familiar: of the good which I might do by communion with Meg and of the evil which was done to me, and life around me, by Odolaga and his training of Leyalá.

‘What you feel in me is the same as you felt in Freeman, to whom you released Meg' I added. ‘It is a gift from my ancestors and not of my making. My grandfather had it. My great-great-grandfather had it, and we all were named Alfgif.'

‘I thought your name was Alfred,' he said.

‘Alfred means Wise as an Elf. Alfgif is Gift of the Elf.'

‘What has that to do with it?'

‘I am told the elf is my valley. See it in any shape you like! I have never wished it to appear to me. But I too was taught to sing in silence.'

I must assume that I was possessed. Having no better spell, I used the incantation of tiger brother to call a spirit of the ancestors. I had closed my eyes as I rocked to and fro in the trance, so that I could neither see Molay nor any result, but on and on I chanted until I felt the Presence. When I opened my eyes and stood still except for shaking, Meg had left his shoulder and had begun to dance.

‘And now what shape did you give it?' I asked.

‘I saw it in the shape you gave it.'

‘And what was that?'

‘Gentle and laughing and of the earth, Alfgif.'

It was the first time he had used my name. He asked me to tell him exactly what had happened on the slopes of Aquelarre. I gave him the story, from the first sight of Izar Odolaga to the making of the bow and the stampede of the terrified sheep. I fear there must have been some pride in my voice besides regret.

‘You said my Columns of the Sun was an invincible prayer,' I reminded him, ‘and asked if I did not know it. I did not, but I found it was. So it is true that I had no more reason to fear Odolaga. His sending had failed. You must know by now what that was.'

He answered that he did know, that Odolaga in his desolation had confessed all to him.

‘Very well! And then the woman I love fell ill. Her soul was captured, as a shaman would say. Was it surprising that I believed it was another of Odolaga's telepathic tricks and that I set out to warn him that my powers could be as dangerous as his?'

‘You were wrong to blame him.'

‘I know. It was you who first made me see that I myself could be responsible and now I am sure I was. All the same I think justice has been done—if one can set the beauty of my Holy Well against the beauty of his dear familiar.'

Molay lay back on his elbows in that unspoken courtroom of the glade and gestured to me to sit on the stump. He said that at least my motive had been more generous than Odolaga's, that I had acted from love and he only from fear for himself.

‘So now you shall be the judge. Ask whatever questions you like!'

‘Did Odolaga kill Paddy for you?'

‘He did.'

‘So you are the devil!'

‘In the sense of anguished clergy long ago, yes, I am.'

‘Is there no other devil within the Purpose?'

‘I doubt it. But if evil were personified, it would be the antithesis of love. Have you forgotten the cough of the tiger which maddened sixty sheep? Man does not need a devil. He does well enough by himself.'

I said that I found it hard to imagine him as that ancestral Horned God, when we were talking face to face and sharing the same faith.

‘I dress my mind and not my body in the innocence of the horns and tail. I do not believe that my blood or my semen will fertilise a field, but it may be that I myself can still fertilise mankind. If I cannot, if my powers fail through age, then before I infect my people with my weakness it is right to kill me and choose a successor. He is already chosen, but he is still too young for the fullness of wisdom. Nothing mysterious there, my Alfgif! Even in politics a party may decide on its future leader before he is quite fit to lead. Therefore I must live longer and one of us had to die in my place. Paddy chose to do so. I did not wish to accept his sacrifice, but as Grand Master it is my duty.'

I could not see the point of either of them being killed, and asked him to explain if he could.

‘What is the point of a soldier's death?' he asked.

‘His society expects it of him.'

‘Yes. You have answered your own question. And now I will put one to you. Would you die for the sake of the Christian faith?'

‘Probably.'

‘Yet you have little respect for the Church and its creed.'

‘Or for its rites.'

‘There you are wrong, for rites are a shadow of the truth. I summoned you to me by what is remembered as the harp of Orpheus. You called up a Presence as mischievous and sweet as Meg by a rite far older. You had faith that you heard. I had faith that I saw. Reality? We are fools to ask what is reality, when all we touch and see and are is empty space and energy. Within the Purpose there are rites named of earth and rites named of heaven, all intermingled in all religions and culminating in that purest and simplest of rites: the Communion of the Christian with the Purpose.'

‘For you, then, what is the Purpose?' I asked.

‘How often there is more beauty in living things than needed for survival! Consider the peacock's tail and the feathers of the Bird of Paradise! To attract a mate and be recognised, we are told, but that could be achieved by a fraction of the display. Consider the majestic antlers of the stag! A magnificence and nothing but a handicap. The colours of the butterfly—they have a use but not to that extent of glory. Consider the Columns of the Sun and your late Holy Well! What use to your survival or the survival of the race are those? They have only one conceivable value, and that is to the observer. What the Purpose is we cannot know, but observation must be within it. Observe this garden of the earth and understand that when you cease to observe and to love, you exist no more!'

‘Then death is the end.'

‘You miss my meaning, Alfgif. I know nothing of death except that we should not whine for immortality. Take joy in the gift of life! If the object of my life is finished with my death, I rejoice that I have been able to serve. If it is not finished, I rejoice that there is still a use for me.'

He said that was enough of preaching and remained silent. The scent of the earth was stronger than I had ever known it. Meg ran between us, caressing his face with her whiskers and then returning to my feet. I asked him to tell me about Paddy.

‘Paddy was a healer of the animals. A Robin. His coven was formed of all his friends, though few were conscious of it. He was simpler and more saintly and quicker than I. He would have seen that you could never have abused your gift as I believed you had. He said you had the makings of a leader.'

‘A shaman?'

‘A Robin. I like that happy, English name. The healer. The provider of joy.'

‘And of sendings to the innocent,' I added, remembering Odolaga.

‘Forgive him! He acted from foolish fear, and you would not blame the beast which charges when it cannot run. And now for this girl of yours, my strange, chaste sorcerer! It seems you can copy the attack of the carnivore but not the tempest of its mating.'

‘How do you know?'

‘Only a monk could have so much passion and remain celibate. Were you never married?'

‘For two weeks.'

‘What happened?'

‘She died in my arms.'

‘I see. Guilt, But that was not beyond psychiatrists.'

‘I'll have none of them. I am what I am and know more than they.'

‘But your tiger brother—couldn't he cure you?'

‘No. He said that a white larva had made its home in my wretched organ and could not conjure it to leave.'

‘I think you would not let him, Alfgif. You believed in your guilt and clung to it. But now will you let me? I can make you as a Robin of old days, whose maidens would hang wreathes of poppies on the symbol of fertility. Will you be ashamed to dance naked with me?'

I might have been, but those gentle, piercing eyes would not release mine. And there was I naked while he, stripped to the waist only, like tiger brother, raised his arms in a hieratic gesture as if he were throwing over his shoulders the skin and tail of the God.

He began to beat the ground with his feet, always circling round me face to face, and I kept time with him. What ritual I was treading out I could not know, though there were memories of the forest and memories of the eager hunting dance which I had performed for my dinner, but never for myself.

‘Your horns are spread between sky and sky, my Alfgif. You have driven away your rivals and the herd of does awaits you. As a bird dances for its mate, so must you. Tell him, Valley, to dance for grandson Alfgif! Tell him, Meg, to dance with you! As we dance, so must you.'

There was much more, but that is what I remember. He circled me, chanting, and each time he passed a young plant of broom he plucked a green twig from it like a browsing goat. In the trance of beating feet, I was aware only of his hands and eyes; nor was I conscious of the erection, being so long forgotten, until he flung the wreath that he had been twisting as if it were a quoit over a peg.

He told me to dress and have no fear.

‘Mate after mate is yours if you wish, and if you wish only for one she will never leave you. What is her name? I will call her.'

‘Rita. But she cannot receive. She would not hear you.'

‘Better so, Alfgif! In you she will find the future and in her you will find the past. Go now, and tomorrow be with her!'

‘Shall I see you again?'

‘As a passing friend it may be, with the simplicity of Paddy.'

I asked him if he really lived on the Syrian shore, as Paddy had told me.

‘Often enough, because that is where all religions meet and all traditions remain. Among my ancestors were reigning devils, or Grand Masters if you wish: Jacques de Molay, Master of the Temple, burnt for heresy; Plantagenets reverenced by Christian and Pagan alike, and true to both. It may well be that you and I are not the first of our two families who have met and prayed together.'

‘Can I drive you anywhere?' I asked, the question sounding absurdly out of time and place. ‘How are you going?'

‘As I came, Alfgif.'

He shook hands, blessed me and was gone, vanishing with the skill of tiger brother and with only the rustle of his footsteps to show that he was most certainly passing through the trees and not above them.

September 8

I write in Oxford the last entry of this notebook, which started off as an attempt to cure induced dementia and carried on as the record of an expedition along the frontiers between illusion and reality. Since the journey is at an end, my travel diary stops like any other.