‘You mean that if one were shooting pheasants,’ I asked incredulously, ‘it would be just: Bang, Bang! Sorry, Sorry!?’
‘I don’t know that they would go so far as that,’ he laughed. ‘But I think it potentially dangerous to have no normal respect for death; so I wondered if you were not investigating officially.’
I assured him again that I was not.
‘Anyway it’s all nonsense,’ Dunton went on. ‘This life is exciting, varied and to some lucky people beautiful, and we psychologists make it seem a lot more difficult than it is. As to the next life—if it exists—we don’t know a damned thing about it. Have you ever read Teilhard de Chardin?’
‘I’m afraid I haven’t heard of him.’
‘Well, as a Jesuit he was surer of immortality than you or I can be. But the main purpose of life, he thought, was to love, enjoy and seek knowledge. And if a man gave it all he’d got he couldn’t go very far wrong.’
‘So if one of these people fell crazily and romantically in love, it might show up this continuity stuff as a bit doubtful?’
‘At any rate he would find it hard to accept death as a mere momentary inconvenience when it parted him from what he loved,’ Dunton answered.
That very simply explained Fosworthy for me, though not why his friends should have taken his back-sliding so hard.
‘The trouble is that most of them are unmarried or without children and basically lonely,’ Dunton added. ‘Suppose I hadn’t the luck to have all this bouncing, exasperating, dear life around me, then I might sublimate the death wish in dozens of odd ways. But that doesn’t explain the attraction of this nonsense for Tom Aviston-Tresco who has led a most satisfying, full life ever since his wife ran away from him. I suppose that all the killing he must do has given him a neurosis, and he forgets all his healing.’
The Duntons were going into Glastonbury to see a travelling circus and pressed me very warmly to join them; but I did not want to outstay my welcome. I shared their quick meal and pretended that I had business at The Green Man and had reserved a room there.
As soon as I was on the road, I decided that I might as well stay at the inn anyway instead of pointlessly dashing back to London. Although the Gorms did not normally take guests, they were happy to see that the prospective purchaser was still on the hook. And indeed I was. I often day-dream of The Green Man and find myself drawing on the back of an envelope the alterations which I would have made.
About nine o’clock the man I had seen on the grey gelding came into the bar. He recognised me, handsomely asked me to forgive his rudeness in the afternoon and insisted on buying me a drink. He took a polite interest in my plans—patronising, but not more so than was acceptable from someone who knew every inch of his country—and asked me why I particularly wanted the Mendips. I told him that I wished to avoid both the sprawling suburbs of Bristol and the coast. As I have said, I am clumsy at explaining intuitive reasons. I may have sounded as if I were almost contemptuously sparring with him.
‘These hills must once have been a kind of sprawl themselves,’ he said.
I saw what he meant. One was seldom out of sight of the settlements and cemeteries of Neolithic and Bronze Ages breaking the smooth continuity of the grass.
I wondered how their ships got there, and ordered another round of drinks.
‘Up the Bristol Channel with the prevailing south-westerlies behind them,’ he replied, ‘but a lot of them must have come to grief on Hartland. It was easier when men could simply walk from France, following the game.’
‘Not much of a sprawl then,’ I said for something to say. ‘Just a skin tent here and there on the Glassy Hill.’
‘I believe the pundits won’t have Glassy Hill any more,’ he remarked. ‘Glastonbury means the town of Glasteing.’
‘Then why is it called Ynys Witrin in British?’
‘I didn’t know it was. What does it mean?’
‘The Island of Glass. And all the legends insist that it was a hill as well. It marked the way to the world underground.’
‘To wealth, too?’ he asked, looking straight at me with a sort of challenge which I could not then understand.
‘Not unless you obeyed the conditions. Like Orpheus and so forth.’
‘Where do you get all this from?’
‘Out of the collective unconscious,’ I replied, trying a bit of Dunton on him.
I describe this pointless conversation, because it was plain to me later why he had introduced the subject of early inhabitants. However, collective unconscious shut him up, possibly because he did not know what I was talking about—nor did I—but more probably because he did know and shied away from the term.
Very gradually he changed the subject to the question of my future hotel.
‘I think I can give you a good tip,’ he said, ‘which will make up for being short with you this afternoon. If you were to call on the Manager of the Somerset and Dorset Bank in Glastonbury, he could put you in touch with someone who is thinking of selling. The inn is not on the market yet.’
Soon afterwards he left. When the bar closed, I asked Gorm who he was.
‘Mr Alan Jedder,’ he replied. ‘Farms five hundred acres up top. You can see his place from the Twelve Barrows.’
I had been nowhere near the Twelve Barrows when he rode up to me; but earlier in the afternoon I had been prying about among the tracks and earthworks of his country. So I was right in my guess. He had been keeping me under observation.
‘Does he come here often?’
‘Haven’t seen him for donkey’s years.’
Gorm did not know a lot about him except that he was a bachelor, had served in the Navy and belonged to one of the wealthy families of Bristol industrialists.
The bank Jedder had mentioned was Fosworthy’s. I doubted if the Manager had any pub to offer me. The intention was to feel for my financial resources. Since Fosworthy was not dead—the postcards to his housekeeper proved that—he must have found somebody to lend him money.
When I had gone to bed, questions began to answer themselves. How had Jedder known where to find me? Well, he could have telephoned Aviston-Tresco who told him to try The Green Man on the off chance that I might be there. How had he known in the afternoon that I was the man with whom Fosworthy might have shared his secret? Car number, probably.
Till then I had done no thinking about the missing coat, content to be vaguely aware that there was something illogical about it. Of course! The answer struggled up into consciousness and competed with sleep. The coat ought not to have been taken away. In that case I should never have had reason to suspect that my connection with Fosworthy was known. Then why wasn’t it left in the boot? Possible answer: because I could produce it in a court of law. If that was correct, Fosworthy had really been in danger. As a corollary—whatever danger threatened him now threatened me.
In the morning I decided to visit the bank and play it their way. It would be suspicious if I took no action on a hot tip from a knowledgeable acquaintance; also I wanted to get to the bottom of the business. There was a smell of panic in all these hasty arrangements of theirs.
I allowed time for Jedder to telephone—in case he had not got in touch with the Manager overnight—and turned up at the bank at midday. I was shown into the Manager’s office at once. My first impression was of a wispy, pepper-and-salt man with pop eyes. They were as prominent as Persian eyes, but a watery blue instead of deep brown. He was fussily dressed for the manager of a small provincial branch and already in his early fifties, which suggested that his ability was not very marked. A more charitable judgment would be that he enjoyed country life and had no ambition. Like myself, in fact. Still, I could not help feeling that he was vague and ineffective.
With a wet cordiality he discoursed on hotel finance in general and asked me what district I preferred. He knew damned well what district I preferred. I answered curtly that I wanted Glastonbury and the Mendips.
‘If you should change your mind, there wil
l shortly be an executor’s sale of a very profitable free house the other side of Bath,’ he said.
That was a long way from his area, so I asked him how he knew about the sale and how sure he was of it.
He was embarrassed and murmured a lot of verbiage, meant to be imposing, on the subject of the grape-vine between managers. When I pressed him for details of his profitable free house, I was surer than ever that it was a clumsy invention to find out whether I should be tempted and what my resources were. I fear I was deliberately cruel to him as he wriggled in his chair and fiddled with papers.
Dropping his vague proposal as soon as he reasonably could, he told me he knew of a building site near Wookey. A licence had recently fallen in and he believed that the local Bench would transfer it to a respectable hotel proprietor.
‘The site belongs to a Mr H. B. Fosworthy,’ he said, his pale forehead beginning to glisten with sweat. ‘Perhaps you know him?’
‘I do not,’ I replied. ‘But I remember the name. Hadn’t he escaped from a private nursing home or something?’
And I told him how a complete stranger had called at night when I was staying at The Green Man and asked me if I had seen his patient.
I thought that would fix him, and it did. He was out of his depth, uncomfortably dominated by me, and looked as if he would like to creep under his desk. I was exasperated by the silly little man, and left the bank snorting at the incompetence of these anti-Fosworthians. It was only when I had driven half-way back to London that I remembered that Aviston-Tresco had never asked for Fosworthy by name. If he, too, remembered that he hadn’t, I had given myself away. I thoroughly deserved it for bullying instead of meekly listening.
Three days passed—of a dullness that only an exile in London can know. You go to a show or two. You eat in restaurants. You try to get in touch with old friends who are always out or abroad or ask you to lunch the following week. You are eager to talk to anyone who will talk to you.
I had more or less dismissed Fosworthy and his affairs from my mind, deciding that all this agitation was to be expected from a bunch of religious nuts. It was possible that mysterious Avalon or the inexplicable holiness of Glastonbury might have something to do with it, but my best theory was that they had discovered uranium in the old Roman lead mines of the Mendips, that they were too impractical—including the bank manager—to have the faintest notion what to do and that muddled pacifist convictions compelled them to keep quiet. It was an improbable guess, since the hills must have been thoroughly and semi-officially prospected during the uranium boom, but it did account for the facts. They were afraid of me as a mining engineer, not as a future innkeeper.
On the fourth evening I left my depressing furnished flat to go out and buy myself a lonely meal. While I was strolling to the bus stop, I came face to face with Aviston-Tresco. He hailed me very cordially as if I had been an old friend. His manner did not seem forced. The strange circumstances of our only meeting naturally created a sort of intimacy. We did not—officially—know each other’s names. So he introduced himself, and so did I.
I guessed of course that his appearance in my district was no accident, but I was in a mood to hear what he had to say. Whatever his quarrel with Fosworthy, he was presentable and intelligent. Dunton had described him as brilliant in his profession and leading a full life. I think I had the idea of getting the truth out of him as one reasonable and discreet man to another. He gave me the impression that he, too, was very ready to talk.
‘Would you care to come along to my club and have a drink?’ he invited.
I accepted gladly. He told me that his van was parked in the next street, and we walked to it. I thought it odd that he did not use a car to come up to town, but supposed that he had bought some heavy article and was taking it home. He got in first and opened the near door. A whiff of disinfectants, straw and sheep came out. I sat down on a worn, comfortable bucket seat and was painfully pricked by a broken spring or a sliver of metal.
At my exclamation Aviston-Tresco turned round, looked me straight in the eyes with a most kindly expression—not at all the spontaneous consternation that one would expect—and said:
‘I am so sorry this had to happen.’
Right or wrong, memory of the apology instantly connected me to the emergency station. I leapt out of that van and ran round a couple of corners, vanishing into a near-by public lavatory which I had several times found useful. It seemed very unlikely that a really damaging quantity of any drug could be injected by a casual, deep puncture, but a culture of God knows what nastiness could. I vividly remembered two cases of fulminating blood-poisoning in a rain-forest camp, caused by mere scratches. Shutting the door behind me, I pulled out my pocket knife and cut a gash two inches long and half an inch deep across the point of entry—which, since there was no mirror, I could only distinguish by touch.
A broken spring. No doubt there was one. And no doubt some other sharpness, now removed, had been ingeniously attached to it. Whatever was intended to happen to me as a result of sitting down heavily and incautiously in a vet’s working van would have been accepted by me and everyone else as a regrettable accident.
It wasn’t going to happen to me if I could possibly help it. I shot out of the lavatory, waved down a passing car and asked to be taken to the nearest doctor. I probably looked pale and I certainly looked agitated. The long-haired young fellow who was driving did not hesitate. He was not the sort of person who refuses to be involved in unpleasantness. It’s conceivable that his own activities were not always legal. At any rate he was a fortunate choice.
I tried to keep my backside well away from him, but he noticed the stain spreading on my trouser leg.
‘Sit on that, cock!’ he said, folding up a bit of waste. ‘We’ll be there in five minutes. Not to worry!’
He drove me fast into the shabbier part of Westbourne Grove and rang a doctor’s bell. As soon as the door opened, he cleared off discreetly with a cheerful wave.
The doctor was a youngish man and none too cordial. He was, I think, in the middle of his dinner and his surgery was closed. However, he opened the place up promptly enough when he realised that I was in need of first aid, and I was glad to see that it appeared the last word in hygiene and equipment.
‘This is very urgent,’ I told him. ‘I want you to treat me as if I were in danger of anthrax or any other plague you can think of common to animals and men.’
‘Let me mix you a little something first,’ he said.
I snapped at him that I did not need a tranquilliser and was perfectly sane.
‘Imagine I’m a wounded gangster,’ I said, ‘and hurry!’
I pulled down my pants, increasing his alarm, and showed him what I had done to myself.
‘I ripped that open with a pocket knife. It ought to prove to you that I believe the risk to be serious. I want deep disinfecting and whatever antibiotic you think I should have.’
‘We can probably get along with anti-tetanus to start with,’ he said, still doubting me.
‘Don’t need it! I’m a mining engineer and up to date with my injections. You say it, I’ve had it.’
‘How about bubonic plague?’ he asked with a half smile—to find out, I think, whether my reaction would be hysterical or not.
‘It could be. But if it was I should think it’s washed out. I made that gash within two minutes of the puncture.’
He had me face downwards on the operating table at once.
‘Girls on the Underground and so forth,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard of such things. But the damage one can do without a syringe is pretty limited if dealt with immediately. And you did, and I’m going to. This will hurt.’
He was right. And the slow injection he gave me afterwards felt like half a pint of liquid.
When I was reclining on side and elbow, very shaky but ‘comfortable’ as they call it, he said:
‘I gather you think this was attempted murder. Shall I call the police for you?’
I gave
it some consideration. I could not offer the police any motive or any proof that the prick was not an accident. Aviston-Tresco, a respectable, much esteemed professional man, could show me up as panicking like a hen just because he might once have seemed a little sinister when he called on me in the middle of the night. As for the seat spring or nail or whatever it was, I had no doubt that it was still innocently projecting and that inspection would reveal nothing whatever on its tip.
‘I can’t prove a thing,’ I said.
‘You mentioned diseases common to animals and man. I think that between us we have avoided any risk of anthrax and psittacosis. But hadn’t you better have a course of injections for rabies?’
I replied that I did not believe there was a chance of it. For one thing, an English vet would never have seen a case; for another, there would be headlines, enquiries and quarantines all over the country. And what was the use of giving me a disease which would appear three weeks later?
Assuming that I had not imagined the whole thing, Aviston-Tresco wanted me out of the way because he was at last dead sure that I had learned something I shouldn’t from Fosworthy. Speed was therefore essential. Within a few days anthrax—a wild guess—or some virulent form of septicaemia—more likely—would get me down and finish me promptly. If I never suspected that he had tried to kill me, he could sit tight. If I did come to suspect the car seat and did from my hospital bed accuse him, he was still safe. He could quite openly accept the babblings of high fever with horror and even admit that his far from sterile van might be responsible.
Having stitched up and plastered my backside, this now most friendly young doctor told me to come back for more injections the following day. That turned out to be impossible, and for some time I could only hope that his ministrations had done the trick. Although I was very fully occupied, there were slack hours when imagination was inclined to get out of hand and I would wonder what my temperature was.
The Courtesy of Death Page 4