The Courtesy of Death (3 page)

‘I see,’ he said. ‘You should have apologised to it.’

‘I can’t speak cat.’

‘Nor can I, or only a very little,’ he laughed. ‘But when you have to kill, if you calm yourself, you calm the animal. We are all the same.’

There was something vaguely reminiscent of Fosworthy in that remark. Otherwise the man appeared pleasant and normal. He chatted easily of sheep-farming on the Mendips and moorland reclamation,
and did not tell me his name. I myself let him know that I had been a mining engineer and added:

‘But it’s a hotel I’m after now.’

I meant only to explain my innocent presence at the bungalow; but, thinking over the conversation, I can see that the little word ‘now’ was possibly unfortunate.

When we reached Wells, he asked me to drop him at the police station. I was sufficiently interested to hang around out of sight and see what he did. As soon as he thought I had driven away, he
came out of the station. He might have had time to ask at the desk whether, for example, a pair of gloves had been found, but not for any serious report or enquiry. It was a bit of evidence in
favour of Fosworthy’s implication that this was a very private affair—if indeed he had ever said anything so definite.

I was back at the gate where I had left him in twenty minutes altogether. He was not there, nor was he behind a hedge or in any of the ditches. He had vanished. I was not as relieved to lose him
as common sense insisted I should be. He had aroused a sort of paternal and exasperated affection. Besides that, I was fascinated by such individuality in a society which seemed to me to be
composed of shades of grey—pleasant and restful enough, but lacking the colour of the decidedly un-welfarish world in which I had been let loose ever since my schooldays.

At any rate it was the society for which I was nostalgic, and I continued the search for my future inn. The Green Man would nearly do, but I was in no hurry. I hoped to find something more to my
taste, preferably on or just below the Mendips.

Why there? That question turned out to be so difficult to explain convincingly that I must dig down for the motives which at the time of my pub-hunting were largely unconscious and
instinctive.

My mother was Welsh and spoke her language with pride whenever she could find anyone to speak it to—which was seldom, since we lived at Bampton on the edge of Exmoor. My father was an
agricultural engineer: in fact, a blacksmith who had moved on from horses to tractors.

She was quietly proud of her ancestry, which she traced back to native princes of Wales—romantically, no doubt—and it was on her stories of the West that I was brought up. I say the
West because the bardic legends covered the whole of the Roman-Celtic nation which so long endured on both sides of the Bristol Channel.

How can one explain these acquisitions of childhood which penetrate into a man as a cat’s mouse-catching lessons into her kittens? Put it this way! I had a frontier of the imagination
which corresponded to the dim but real frontier of Ambrosius and Arthur. My own true country of choice and spirit ran from the Wansdyke to Land’s End—and this though no one could have
been more stolid, ruddy and Saxon than my father at his forge.

When I decided on my new profession, it was the Bristol Channel which tempted me. Devon and Cornwall were too full of holidaymakers for my taste. That may sound odd for an innkeeper, but what I
wanted—as much emotionally as financially—was trade all the year round. So for me the answer was a Somerset village, not too low-lying, not too near Bristol, not on the coast. And my
personal predilection—here comes in mother again—was for the Mendips and Glastonbury. Mysterious Glastonbury, holy to the Celtic Christians and long before. Avalon, the burial place of
Arthur. Ynys Witrin, the island fort of glass which guards the Underworld. In all the explanations of that tradition which I have come across, I have never seen mentioned the simplest of all: that
Glastonbury does in fact guard the way to the Underworld. Beyond it, to the traveller coming up from the south, are the hollow Mendips, the silence of death and the unknown waters of the caves.

It was the morning of September 3rd when Fosworthy vanished from the roadside. Some ten days later I was staying at Taunton for the week-end. In the hotel lounge I got into conversation with a
man of about my own age, evidently somewhat bored and tired and scientifically restoring his spirits by carefully timed measures of vodka. He was drily amusing and very informative. He lived in a
village between Wells and Glastonbury and was a consulting psychiatrist.

As so often happens, he was interested by my mining shop, and I by his account of incredible brain experiments going on in Bristol. We decided to share a table at dinner. Dr Dunton then
suggested that he had a much better idea for my lonely evening than a movie, and asked me to come along as his guest to a big annual dance at the County Mental Hospital. When I foolishly hesitated,
he said that it would educate me, that I ought to see how the other half lived, and so on.

‘This dance does the influential public the hell of a lot of good and doesn’t do the patients any harm,’ he added. ‘There’s no alcohol served, of course, but you
can always slip out to the car park where some of us will be delighted to keep you cheerful. That’s why I am staying the night.’

It did not seem too bad a prospect, especially since I was already in an expansive mood.

‘By the way, do you know if they ever had a local patient called Fosworthy?’ I asked.

‘They didn’t,’ he replied. ‘But I sometimes think they ought to have, if you mean our H. Barnabas Fosworthy. How did you run across him?’

The whole episode, at that distance and after dinner, appeared humorous and unlikely; but his question sobered me up instantly. I wished I had never mentioned Fosworthy. He had been so insistent
that it might be unhealthy for me to be connected with him. And, after all, there was some evidence that I should be stupid not to fall in with his wishes.

‘It was just that he wrote me a crazy letter about the origin of tin.’

‘Yes, some daft geological theory would be right up his street,’ said Dunton. ‘His chief interest is in primitive religion. All from books, of course!’

‘What does he do?’

‘Nothing. A bachelor, living on a reasonable income of his own. He’s a funny fellow, much liked and much laughed at. When he first came here, he was always agitating against taking
life. But then, very oddly, some of the sporting set began to consider him a sort of local prophet, though they didn’t give up their fun. Our countryside is full of the intelligent
half-educated.’

‘It should just about suit me then,’ I said.

‘Oh, I didn’t mean chaps from wide, open spaces! It’s the effect of Glastonbury I’m talking about. There’s such a climate of myth and death about the place. Jung
and his collective unconscious is a much safer guide than Freud around here, but don’t tell anyone I said so!’

We took a taxi over to the County Hospital. There were rows of expensive cars outside. Inside, the hall was banked with flowers and gaily decorated. Dunton introduced me to a number of doctors
and nurses—many of them foreigners who decidedly knew how to dress for the occasion. It was impossible to distinguish visitors from patients. Well, of course it was. I couldn’t imagine
why I should have expected straws in the hair.

I danced a bit, for there was an excellent band, and then visited the car park where I was pressed to choose between champagne in a car belonging to a visiting psychiatrist from the Midlands,
and Dunton’s bottle of brandy. It was becoming a really outstanding occasion. I hoped that the following year my new hotel would be able to lay on a special dinner beforehand.

I returned to the hall with Dunton, the registrar and the prosperous headshrinker. While we stood watching the floor, my eye was caught by the lovely slim figure of a girl in a gold-and-white
evening frock who was dancing a waltz—the more frenzied modern minuets were carefully avoided—with grace and abandon. When her partner brought her round to us, I was still more
interested. She had a small head, with very definite but delicate features, set on a long neck. She was, I recognised, what a river nymph ought to look like, cold, exquisite, of tremulous and
uncertain boundaries. One had to examine her closely to see why. Her skin was indeed as transparent as water, and the capillaries showed as a blue mist. At that first sight of her I could not
decide whether she fascinated me or not. I never could. I always remained an interested neutral. The effect of that marvellous complexion depended on the light. She could appear slightly grotesque
or appealingly and tragically fragile.

‘Is that a patient or a guest?’ I asked.

‘A guest,’ said the Registrar. ‘She lives in Bath, I believe. Do you want to meet her?’

‘Not much. She’s too untouchable.’

Since her frock revealed a good half of delightful high breasts, that was an odd adjective: but I well remember using it. I suppose that instinct really does have some validity in the field of
sexual attraction.

‘Myself I find blue willow pattern more attractive to eat off,’ Dunton remarked callously. ‘Still, I can imagine the excitement of following the design wherever it led
you.’

‘Oh, God! Excuse me!’ the Registrar exclaimed.

A harmless-looking grey-haired chap, whom I would have put down as a male nurse, had just barged his way on to the dance floor and dropped on his knees before her, babbling. She seemed
accustomed to it, or else she was wonderfully tactful by nature. She continued to smile at the poor devil without a trace of embarrassment until he was unobtrusively led away.

The Registrar returned to us, a good deal more troubled than she had been.

‘That hardly ever happens,’ he assured us. ‘A charming patient, too! A quite brilliant paranoiac who spends all his time working out the mathematics of a flat, circular
universe!’

Dunton’s mind was still on the girl. He wondered whether she lacked a layer of epidermis or had little skin pigmentation. He said she would have to be damned careful to keep out of the
sun.

‘The sun!’ exclaimed the Midlands psychiatrist. ‘What the devil has a woman like that to do with sun and beaches and vulgarity? God! Just think of her naked in
candlelight!’

He cleared his throat loudly and medically to cover up his most undisciplined comment. I was somewhat shocked. But, after all, I suppose psychiatrists have to let their hair down sometimes like
the rest of us. And I suspected that Fosworthy’s one remaining thought when he arrived exhausted at the bungalow might have been much the same. There could not be two such women.

I was too uneasy to enjoy the rest of the party, for it struck me that where one of Fosworthy’s perturbations was, the other might well turn up. In that case I could imagine Dunton
introducing me and cheerfully mentioning before I could stop him that I knew Barnabas Fosworthy. Nor did I want to slip away, since something similar might happen in my absence and I should never
know anything about it. Misgivings were not far-fetched. My mysterious visitor with the moustache was the type one would be sure to meet at any social function of importance to the county. I was
certain that he was not mysterious to anyone but me.

I was therefore very ready to go when the Midlands mind-healer offered us a lift back to the hotel. He seemed rather glum and disappointed in spite of some pretty affectionate dancing with
Fosworthy’s Undine. Dunton, however, was inclined to sing madrigals. At breakfast next morning I found him just as pleasant with a headache as without one. He insisted that I should call on
him if I were anywhere near his village in the evening after a day’s pub-hunting. I promised to do so.

The Taunton district had not produced anything I liked. The Green Man was still at the top of my list. Before returning to London, I dropped in to check some details of the existing plumbing. Mr
Gorm said he had a telephone message for me which he had been hanging on to in case I turned up. He hunted about for the slip of paper and found it among bottles behind the bar.

I did not know a Mr Smith who could conceivably want to see me. Was the message really for me? Yes, Gorm said, but the caller had not known my name. He had just asked for the gentleman who had
been staying in the bungalow.

‘So very kind as to’—that was Fosworthy all right. Added proof was that I had never had the time or the occasion to introduce myself. I was relieved to hear that he was all in
one piece, though persuading himself that it was necessary to take refuge in the wilds of Hammersmith under an alias. I had felt guilty—when I thought about it at all—at having let him
down through no fault of my own.

The following afternoon I drove out to Hammersmith. 34 Petunia Avenue was a small boarding house, self-consciously bright, with a Room and Breakfast notice in the window. The proprietress
answered the bell herself, and I asked for Mr Smith.

‘Oh, we are so glad that somebody has called to see him,’ she cried. ‘He hardly ever goes out, you know, and we were getting a little worried about him.’

I assured her that there was nothing to worry about, that when Mr Smith was not in London he lived all alone in the country and perhaps had got set in his ways.

I knocked on his door. When he opened it, his face lit up with relief and gratitude. I cannot think of a time when anyone seemed so pleased to see me. It reinforced my affection for him.

He was no longer agitated. In fact he looked very quiet and miserable. He was thinner than ever, and his cheeks alarmingly hollow. I said I was afraid he had been allowing his imagination to get
out of hand.

‘Bless me, no!’ he replied. ‘But I have had nothing much to eat since I last saw you. I had just enough to pay for my first week here, and then no money at all.’

I reckoned—having been flat broke in my time—that I could have carried on for a couple of weeks on boarding-house breakfasts without showing signs of starvation; but then I
remembered his diet.