The Sending

by Geoffrey Household

  I said that none of us in Penminster could even make a guess.

  ‘Gathering herbs by moonlight?’ he suggested.

  ‘You’ve learned that much about him?’

  ‘Yes. Afterwards. But in life I only knew him as a master craftsman. He repaired a vanity bag belonging to Concha. Ostrich skin and silver it was, and the handle had torn out. A Bond Street job I thought, and then someone told me that Bond Street would probably send it to Gadsden anyway. I wish I’d known he was a sort of St Francis as well.’

  ‘Especially with horses.’

  ‘Not the kind of thing one expects in this tidy country. But I knew a priest in Sicily who could make goats dance. He shared his bedroom with one and smelt like it.’

  ‘A priest? Didn’t that start some rumours in the parish?’

  ‘Good God, no! It was a young billy goat, not a nanny.’

  I said that I had not meant that at all.

  ‘Oh, I see what you’re after. No, he was a man of great piety, outstanding piety. So there could be no question of black arts.’

  I remembered how Rita had said that Sir Victor was a marvellous source of footnotes, and asked him if there was much of that superstition about in Sicily.

  ‘And any other you can think of! But the Church Triumphant takes witches’ curses as all in the day’s work.’

  That was interesting. He had at once connected the familiar with cursing.

  ‘And protects?’

  ‘Or pretends to. I never heard that cursing had any effect. I’m told that in the thirties a conference of rabbis put a terrifying packet of Old Testament curses on Hitler, and look where it got them!’

  Yes, useless. By all I have read of African witch doctors they can so upset the mental balance of any offender or enemy that he wanders off and dies in the bush, yet they are unable to affect the civilised white colonist or confident black politician. That squares with my beliefs. Urban man is immune because he has lost the receptors or they have become vestigial through disuse, and so his mind can no longer receive the message. I know nothing about Sicilian peasants, but suspect that spiritually they are still in the Middle Ages. Pagan rites and Christian rites—but the latter are firmly believed to be more powerful.

  I meant to ask Pirrone about this, but we had just come out on to the lawn in front of the house when he shouted:

  ‘There’s that bloody bird!’ and began to call: ‘Leyalá! Leyalá!’

  Leyalá ignored him. The macaw was standing on the coping directly beneath the apex of the pediment. The façade of old red brick with six windows on each of the three stories—built in the late seventeenth century by some country architect doing his best with a new fashion—was too near a perfect square, so he had added a heavy pediment of grey stone matching the sills and surrounds of the windows. Any sort of frieze or decoration within the pediment would have made it still heavier, squashing the honest simplicity of the house, but my eye had always demanded some slender figure or urn or shield. That was now provided by the macaw. The metallic blues, yellows and reds of him, catching the sun, pointed the whole cubical, very earthbound house to heaven.

  I longed to be able to paint him there, yet the composition would be meaningless when one could not show that the inserted miniature of colour was vividly alive and glorying in its position. The macaw knew very well that he was beautiful—I don’t mean consciously, though I wouldn’t deny it—and was as vain as a cat taking stock of itself.

  I told Sir Victor to stay where he was and walked across the lawn, devoutly thanking Leyalá for his gift: a silent act of worship towards the Purpose displaying itself in an individual. I think I also lifted my arms towards him in the hieratic gesture, but cannot be sure of the exact movement with which my body intensified the concentration of my mind. Leyalá took off from the coping, planed down without a flutter of wings or tail and settled on my shoulder. When I consider it now I am amazed; at the time it seemed inevitable.

  The bloody bird, as Sir Victor had called him, lived up to his name and ripped Pirrone’s hand open when he tried to grab him. I suggested that Leyalá had probably had enough liberty to know whether he enjoyed it or not, and would sit quietly on my shoulder.

  ‘He can’t travel loose in your car,’ I said, ‘and he isn’t going back to his cage without protest. Let’s have that drink and telephone your wife to drive out and get him.’

  We found Ginny cleaning the living room—or rather playing with Meg. She was delighted and surprised to see the three of us and exclaimed at this gorgeous paintbox of a bird who was chortling away to himself as if amused by his position. I patched up Pirrone’s hand, poured out some whisky for us and asked Ginny if she had anything fit for the other distinguished guest. She could only suggest the first raspberries which she had picked that morning with the dew on them. Leyalá put his foot on the edge of the bowl, deliberately upsetting it. He liked to see the items of what he was offered, not to sink his bill into a mess of crimson porridge. Highly approving he scoffed the lot.

  Meg, fearless and curious as ever, jumped on to the table. She cannot, George tells me, see colour, but she must have been amazed at such a riot of unbelievable greys. The macaw whipped round and Meg did a vertical take-off over that formidable bill with the spring of a mongoose avoiding the strike of a cobra. I never before saw her do that, since she has no enemies. As she was about to close in for the kill I put her in her pocket, where she closed her teeth on my hand instead of macaw’s spine, even so only denting the skin. Leyalá returned to my shoulder where he remained in deep thought and then anointed my back with a remarkable turd of red and white which reminded me of squeezed toothpaste. Evidently I was being reproached all round for well-meaning officiousness.

  I asked Pirrone where the musical name of Leyalá came from. He told me that it was Basque and that the bird had been given to Concha by her godfather, a farmer who owned a slice of mountain not far from the French frontier and was something of a traveller when he was not hidden among his precipices and pastures.

  That led me to the question of how two persons from such remote corners of Europe had met and married. Pirrone revelled in telling me, himself amused by the strangeness of fate. As a young shipping clerk in Port Said he had been formally interned by the British at the outbreak of war and then released to join Intelligence as an interpreter when we invaded Sicily. He had made powerful friends, especially among members of the Mafia whom the Americans had let loose in their homeland, and, after the war, had roared ahead in the export of fruit and fruit juices. Then he and his partners decided it would be worthwhile to own a couple of small ships of their own. Yards were full of orders, but Spain could supply. So he, as the shipping expert and linguist, visited Bilbao and came away with long-lived ships and an incomparable wife.

  ‘She brought me luck and love with it,’ he added.

  It was not long before Lady Pirrone turned up. I had talked to her at the party on the night of Paddy’s death, but otherwise had only exchanged the odd word when she stepped out of her chauffeured car to shop, sometimes asking my advice.

  She bounded on little girl’s feet at her Leyalá, swamped him with endearments and reproaches in Basque and put him back in his cage with a thrust of the bosom to which she was hugging him. The macaw did not object. The game was up. Her good Victor then burst into his story, gestures of despair accompanying the account of his drive, gestures of relief at sighting Leyalá in the tree, arms thrown open in affection to describe his meeting with me, hand shading his eyes as we spotted the bird on the coping and at last wonder, expressed as artificially as any opera star, when Leyalá planed down to the wizard.

  Concha Pirrone thanked me prettily and asked if I too was a bird lover, by which she meant caged birds. I replied that all of us, human and animal, could understand some of the meanings of the song and chatter of wild birds and added—to avoid any suggestion of reproach—that of course a t
ropical splendour like Leyalá had to be caged, specially fed and kept warm.

  ‘But no doubt he was getting on fine in this weather. How did he escape?’

  ‘I often let him loose in my boudoir,’ she said, ‘but I always see that the window is shut. And it was shut and I was dreamy and opened it. So silly! I don’t know what came over me.’

  She explained that she had not had Leyalá very long, but often knew what he was thinking. Her dear godfather had assured her that the bird would take care of her if she would take care of him. Leyalá was just like a grandchild. At that point Sir Victor, embarrassed by the way his Concha was making a gushing fool of herself, got up to go. Both of them warmly invited me to come and see whenever I liked.

  Everyone has heard such sentimental silliness from any Lady Pirrone drooling over her Pekinese, her cat or her budgerigar. But I am obsessed by the parallel of the witch trials. She is given a familiar by her Robin, told to take care of it and it will take care of her, and she claims to know what it is thinking. How well it fits! But I am sure that neither of them is a member of a coven, if covens still exist. Sir Victor is a hard-headed businessman believing in nothing much but his own ability and technical progress, and she, I think, would be less gushing about her relationship with Leyalá or more mysterious.

  However, she is really in close communion with her pet. She is unaccountably dreamy and opens the window, though she is well aware that Leyalá is in the room. Order from the bird? Nothing supernatural about that if her primitive receptors were open for business. I can receive simple requests from Meg without seeing her eyes or touching her. But how was the familiar used for cursing? I am certain that Paddy never cursed anyone in all his life.

  Communication from animal to man is, for me, proved. But what about man to animal? My vixen does not count, for she was partly attracted by food. Sheep dogs do not count, for they obey signals and are trained till they know the game by heart. Leyalá is dubious evidence. He may have just known that I was a friend, which certainly implies some transference of thought, though not hypnosis at a distance or any detailed command.

  Tiger brother in some curious way involved an animal spirit in his healing; but so far as I know he never attempted—with one exception—to influence an individual live creature. The witches, according to their confessions, did. They claimed in court—a sane, seventeenth-century court, proceeding with legally acceptable standards of evidence—to be able to curse through the familiar without ever explaining and possibly not understanding what the familiar had to do with it. If the Fear will give me an interval when it is controllable—it was in abeyance during most of the Leyalá incident—I am going to try out my powers in the tradition of a witch.

  Among the little paradises of my home is a bullock’s paradise: forty acres of emerald grass starting at the wide mouth of a dry valley in the downs where the land changes from short turf only a hand’s breadth deep over the chalk to meadows filled by the silt of some prehistoric flood. This rich beef ground was acquired by great-great-grandfather and sold by me to William Hutchins, who has just bought a fine bunch of Angus steers for fattening, strangers to the place and still nervous. Now let us suppose that I was an old wise woman whom Hutchins had turned out of her cottage—he’s a good farmer but just the blinkered type of go-getter who wouldn’t have hesitated—and suppose I had a bitter grudge against him, then I would make one of his lovely beasts break its leg. Without going so far as that, let us see if it can be done.

  June 23

  It can. Around four o’clock yesterday afternoon when the sun was at its hottest, a score of beasts were grazing or gathered on the beaten earth under the shade of a big sycamore. I was some fifty yards from them downwind and completely hidden by the hedge. The thorn was thick in its third year from laying and the ditch on the far side was deep. To stop any cattle getting down in the ditch and eating hedge or trying to force a way through, Hutchins had fenced it with three strands of barbed wire to a height of some four feet.

  At that distance my glasses showed the colour of the ear tags and some of the numbers. I chose a powerful little beast from the group in the shade with a proud and gentle curly forelock, Red Tag 43, and put the glasses back in their case.

  Tiger brother taught me how to surrender to trance. Even in that mild form without the accompanying dance I dislike it. Very different is the holiness of self-hypnosis produced without intention and akin to the mystic vision of unity. However, I used the tiger brother technique, willing the bullock to leave the group and come towards me. Willing is the wrong word; it implies master and servant. It would be truer to say that I surrendered or tried to surrender to the oneness of me and the bullock.

  It blew through its nostrils, but that was all. I then took Meg from my pocket, and she at once climbed to the top of my head to see what I was stalking with such intentness. I raised both hands so that my finger tips were in her fur and again transmitted to the bullock. It left the group, slowly and doubtfully walking towards me. Then it began to trot with head lowered, charged the wire, broke it and subsided into the ditch. The rest of the herd straggled after it as if I were the stockman bringing hay, but with a difference in bearing. Their heads were lowered and they appeared more ready to repel than to receive. The unknown beyond the hedge was a danger, not a friend.

  I was appalled at what I had done, for the bullock was rushing up and down the ditch unable to find the gap in the wire that it had made and might well break a leg in good earnest. I could not force a way through the hedge so I showed myself and followed it, quietly talking. That calmed it down. It did not connect me at all with the summons which its receptors had answered; I had become a well-meaning, everyday human being. With the aid of a long stick and an occasional poke through the hedge I guided it back and out through the gap in the wire.

  I can draw some tentative conclusions from the experiment. As an analogy it may be helpful to think of the familiar as a transformer station, one of the little red brick huts one sees outside villages to reduce the voltage, though it is not voltage which needs transforming. The bullock can hardly receive me on the human wavelength, but can receive when it is modified by Meg.

  A second conclusion is most curious and unexpected. It was Red Tag 39, not the intended 43, which came to me. This indicates that even at close range the target cannot be identified with certainty when it is nameless or not conscious of any name. The simplest form of witch’s curse may therefore be in the nature of a broadcast.

  The aggression of the beast I can only explain by the assumption that it felt the signal received was ‘evil’, which I may perhaps define as deliberate abuse of love. There is a faint parallel with my own bouts of terror, but I cannot believe that I, like the bullock, am being ‘cursed’.

  June 24

  This evening Gargary dropped in on a casual visit to see how I was. He told me that he had been refreshing his memory of Jung but could not really understand him and was left wondering if such a thing as perfect mental health existed. If it did, he thought, it would exclude so much on the borderline that little individuality would remain; so nobody—meaning me—should be worried at divergence from the norm. Should accept it with pride, I suppose! Very questionable advice for the insane. But sane I am, though a haunted, hunted beast.

  I guessed that he had not just called to comfort me with Jung and wondered who had been talking to him about me. It turned out to be Sir Victor who had treated him to the macaw story while Gargary was attending to a small boil which spoilt the beauty of his undeniably noble Italian forehead.

  ‘How did you do it?’ he asked.

  ‘A silent call,’ I replied, ‘like the dog whistle that human ears cannot hear.’

  He reminded me of myself questioning tiger brother. If I pressed him too hard he became incoherent and frantic, having no words to explain what intuitively he knew. But an amateur such as I am knows so little; he can only accept. It may be that the
ancestral Robins also found difficulty in defining and, like the court, fell back on Satan for explanations.

  ‘But not carried by sound waves?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And conscious?’

  ‘If you mean: do I have a repeatable technique, again no.’

  ‘I thought not. But surely the collective unconscious doesn’t include animals?’

  ‘What else are we? Didn’t you do a course of biology?’

  ‘You make no allowance for the human brain, Alf.’

  ‘I certainly do. It has to be switched off.’

  ‘Not concentrated and directed as in hypnosis?’

  I avoided the question and asked him what doctors thought about hypnosis.

  ‘A fact and a useful aid,’ he answered, ‘but medical science cannot come near describing the mechanism. It’s obviously connected with telepathy, yet it’s the fashion to deny there is such a thing though any general practitioner can give a dozen instances of it.’

  He asked me if my anxiety neurosis was wearing off. I told him that there seemed to be more lucid intervals but that when I was haunted it was worse than ever.

  ‘You are sure that it can have nothing to do with Paddy’s Meg?’

  ‘You asked me that before. Nothing. Meg gives me joy when I’m capable of having any. And it’s her close companionship which helps in—well, whatever I did to the macaw.’

  I did not mention the bullock or my ancestry or witch trials. He was honestly trying to feel his way without any medical signposts, and I did not want to provoke a reaction of disbelief which would interrupt his line of thought.

  ‘Don’t take this seriously,’ he said, ‘but it occurs to me that if you can send a signal by your dog whistle which isn’t, you should also be able to receive.’