The Sending

by Geoffrey Household

  We discovered no trace of our ancestors—I expect they had lived at Penminster and merely cleared the land—so we sat on the first slope of the downs with the bright green of the cattle paradise at our feet and beyond it the whole length of the valley in its hard, full maturity with darkening leaves clustered over seed. The oaks of the parkland drooped above the close-cropped turf, each far enough from its neighbour to preserve individuality, yet each like ourselves, drawing peace and security from the fellowship.

  ‘They draw security from you,’ she said, when I had mentioned something of the sort.

  ‘Or I from them. Unless it is a sapling which I myself have planted, I never feel that I own a tree. It owns me.’

  ‘You could only feel that here, not in your Indian jungle.’

  She was right. There the feeling is quite different. Individuality is swamped. Everything, animal and vegetable, is one, demanding space but dependent on the unity.

  ‘Could you respond to a fern as you do to Meg?’ she asked, smiling at me.

  ‘Not unless I see the fern without a shadow as well as the fern.’

  ‘And which am I? The Rita without a shadow or Rita?’

  I said that she was always both.

  ‘But suppose Rita was tired of staying behind the Holy Well?’

  I laughed that off, unwilling to give it meaning, and said that I would let her out by painting her mirror image on the back of the canvas.

  One complex of regrets having been forcibly suppressed, another had the time to take over. The sheep under the oaks, now massed, now scattered, reminded me of Odolaga’s flock: his in the peace of the great upland, grazing on grasses rougher than mine and rippled by wind: these in a rich, man-made, English peace. But as I looked down the stream to the wooded hillside where my vixen had lived and horribly died, conscience relaxed. Whether I was right or wrong in holding Odolaga responsible for Rita’s melancholy, he had deserved what I sent him.

  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 i
nsisted 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?’