The Goose Girl and Other Stories (51 page)

‘In Scotland, too,' he said, ‘you used to believe. Aren't there stories of haunted men who shot at a fetch with a silver bullet, and a hundred miles away he who sent the fetch was found dead with the bullet in his heart?'

‘There may be,' I said, ‘but I don't suppose Torquil loaded a silver bullet this morning.'

‘You saw him this morning?'

‘Yes, and he had a gun under his arm. To go fishing.'

‘He'll have seen the bird again!'

‘Or thought he did. But now, Paddy, I'm nearly asleep—'

‘Then we'll meet tomorrow?'

‘I can do all I have to do by eleven o'clock, I think . . . .'

We met, precisely at eleven, and went down to the loch. There was a light breeze and a broken sky. It was a good fishing day, and in spite of what I had heard the night before, my spirits rose. I had been tired-out by talk—helped, perhaps, by drink—and slept like a child. I had gone to see the boy with a broken wrist, a woman who had some trouble with her bladder, an old man with unseasonable lumbago; and to comfort people who had very little wrong with them, I had made up several bottles of medicine. I had done my work, I wasn't Torquil's keeper, and the loch was in perfect condition with a new hatch of olives on the water, and the terns and black-headed gulls hawking busily. In full consciousness of happiness we made up our casts, and within forty minutes had three twelve-ounce trout in the boat. We fished farther out, Paddy at the oars, and settled down to a long drift towards Rowan Island and the tiny holms beside it: always my favourite ground. Paddy made the day memorable by casting over a rising fish, hooking it the third time, and after a brilliant, running and jumping, reel-screaming little battle, landing a
short, thick-shouldered, deep-chested two-pounder: a lovely fish with roseate spots and a belly like buttercups.

Paddy insisted on drinking to his success, and handed me a flask. I don't drink while I'm fishing, and don't like the idea of it; but for his sake—he was a good fisherman, very deft and quick, with a wonderful eye—I took a sip and passed it back. We were drifting by the stern, and the view beyond Rowan Island was growing wider. At that moment I caught sight of a boat which I recognised at once as Torquil's. He was about three-quarters of a mile away, and as I said to Paddy, ‘There's Torquil, away down there to leeward,' he stood up, and with a curious gesture pointed to the sky.

Against the light wind we heard the faint puff of a gunshot; but before hearing it we had seen Torquil, standing in the boat, take a pace or two backwards and, most awkwardly, point again to something invisible. His gun—we could not really see it—must have been almost perpendicular, and from his ungainly, ill-balanced stance he toppled to the side and fell over. We saw the rocking of the empty boat, and a moment later we heard, a mere pout of noise against the wind, the second shot. And ‘Row, row, oh row!' I cried.

Paddy took to the oars—Torquil used an out-board motor, but I had nothing so expensive—and pulled as hard as he could, the sweat starting on his face like dew in the morning. But we had a long way to go—more than three-quarters of a mile—and when we got there, nothing was to be seen but the empty boat, with Torquil's rod and net in it, and water on the bottom-boards that had come in over the side when Torquil fell out. It was drifting very peacefully, with the small waves lapping against it.

‘How deep is it here?' asked Paddy.

‘It's the deepest part of the loch. About eighteen feet. And he always wore heavy rubber boots.'

We rowed to windward again, to the place where, so far as we could judge, Torquil had fallen; and took cross-bearings on it. We peered down into the water, but it was deep and dark, and we could see nothing.

‘It wasn't suicide,' I said. ‘I saw him clearly. He was shooting at the bird, and lost his balance.'

‘Yes,' said Paddy, ‘he swung too far back and tipped over. I saw that too. But where's the bird?'

For five or ten minutes, with solemn perseverance and, half-consciously, a desperate wish to explain and justify Torquil's death, we rowed up and down and round in circles, looking for a dead bird in which Paddy firmly believed, and I still feared to believe. But we
found nothing, and presently, returning to Torquil's boat, baled her out and with mine in tow started the engine. Sadly, speechless and bewildered, we motored home.

Paddy came with me to tell Isobel, but when she went into hysterics he covered his face and left us; and I had to deal with her. She wept in the very abyss of grief, and I, most unprofessionally, cried in her arms. For if she was grief-stricken, I was struck down by fear and remorse. But before giving way to my womanhood I had sent Paddy for my bag—my professional equipment and strength—and now it was Isobel's turn for sleeping-pills. I put her to bed; and Paddy gave me his flask. I was distraught, not only by the sudden death of a neighbour—oh, more than a neighbour—but by superstitious fear of a sort which, for most of my life, I have stubbornly and persistently denied, but which, I suppose, is native to some dark rivulet in my veins. I drugged Isobel to sleep, and then could not think what to do but cry on Paddy's shoulder; and it was he who took charge.

He had already told Simmers, the village constable, what had happened, and told him he must drag for the body. He had given him cross-references of where to drag, and before midnight (there is little darkness here in June) poor Torquil's body was brought to the surface. His two sidepockets were stuffed full of cartridges, and he still held his gun, the fingers of his right hand clenched on the small of the butt. His rubber boots were full of water, and he had a big flask of whisky in his hip-pocket. He carried weight enough to sink him quickly, and I hope he did not suffer much.

On the following day I saw nothing of Paddy till the evening; but all my patients—and I went back to practice like a runaway looking for sanctuary—all, every one of them, said to me, ‘And isn't it like a judgment that the weather changed as soon as they found the body?'

The statement, if not the inference, was true. After midnight the light southerly wind blew up to a southerly gale, that roared in the summer air as loud and fierce as a winter storm. Paddy, as he told me in the evening, spent the whole day searching the lee shore for what the gale might bring to land; and found what he was looking for. He found the body of a bird which he could not identify, but which, he knew, was not a bird common to our shores.

There would be no legal enquiry into Torquil's death: of that we had already made sure. A simple accident had been the cause of death, and Paddy and I were witnesses to that. So the next morning we went to Torquil's house to discuss the funeral—to comfort Isobel if we could—and in some convenient interval to have a look at Torquil's bird books and identify the pretty body that Paddy had found. I, when
I saw it, remembered the picture Torquil had once shown me; but said nothing. In his superficial examination Paddy had discovered no injury to the bird.

Isobel was still in bed, but mournful in a calmer way. Her life, she said, had come to an end, but we spoke of the children—Paddy was very good in this respect—and insisted that her duty to them was now enlarged. We persuaded her to get up for lunch, and while she was dressing we went to Torquil's work-room and looked at his bird books.

We found, in Witherby's
Handbook,
the description of a Sociable Plover, and had no difficulty in identifying it with the bird that Paddy had found. There were two or three pages describing its field-characters, food, display and so forth, and in the paragraph headed
Distribution Abroad
we saw that the statement ‘Breeds in S.E. Russia (Astrakhan and Samara Govts. to 56 N. in Perm. Govt.)' was heavily underlined; and on the outer margin, again in heavy pencil, the notation: ‘O dear God!'

Our knowledge of geography, I am sorry to say, was inadequate. We couldn't see the meaning of this. Not till we found an atlas and saw that the province of Astrakhan covered much of the lower Volga. Then Paddy said, ‘Of course that's it! But we must have positive confirmation.'

It was he who packed and sent the bird to some ornithological society from which, with great promptitude, we got the report: ‘This is a young adult male Sociable Plover in perfect plumage. It is well nourished. Contents of stomach . . . (omitted). Cause of death uncertain, but minute perforation of skull in neighbourhood of hind-brain suggests it was hit by single pellet, not larger than No. 6. Pellet not lodged in brain. Its discovery in Morissey is of greatest interest because previously no specimen had been reported from Scotland except a single bird in Orkney (3 Nov. 1926). Its measurements are larger than the accepted normal maximum—wing 218 mm., tail 94, bill from feathers 36—and this, of course, adds to the importance of your discovery.'

Paddy Ryan stayed his full three weeks, and fished with great success. In his last few days, when the sea-trout began to run, he took from our little fast-flowing river seven fish weighing 22 lb., of which the biggest was 6½ and went off well pleased with himself. But I had no heart to fish.

I have reported what I saw and what I was told, but I have no explanation to offer. Torquil lies like a dark shadow on my memory,
but thank heaven I have no time to brood over shadows. I am too busy with other people and their ailments to worry overmuch about my own affairs; and, as I have said before, I don't really resent the fact that some of the elements of life are insoluble in reason.

Paddy Ryan went to the London School of Tropical Medicine for a year's course before returning to the New Hebrides, and promised to come back to Morissey. He wrote several times, both to Isobel and me, and shortly before Christmas Isobel rang me up one morning and asked me to lunch.

I went, and after her usual gossip—but she was, I must admit, more sensible and balanced than she used to be when Torquil ruled her life and thought—she said, ‘Paddy asked me to give you his love and show you this cutting from
The Times.
I can't see what it signifies, but perhaps you will.'

It was a small paragraph—one of those minor items of news that you find in no other paper, and that make
The Times
so fascinating—and it read: ‘Reports of unrest in the Lower Volga basin, briefly mentioned some months ago, are apparently confirmed by an announcement in
Pravda
that full investigation has now been made into the counter-revolutionary demonstration that took place in June in the neighbourhood of Krasny Yar. The demonstration, it is alleged, was entirely the work of foreign agents, who have now made full confession. Apart from them, there was only one fatal casualty, a youth of Polish origin.'

In the margin Paddy had written, ‘Do you think he was killed by a silver bullet?'—and Isobel demanded, ‘Now what on earth does he mean by that?'

‘I don't know,' I said. ‘I really don't know.'

‘I usually see a joke,' said Isobel, ‘but I can't see that. But perhaps it isn't a joke?'

‘No, I don't think it is.'

I found it difficult to keep my voice level and unaffected, but with a great effort to seem casual, I asked her, ‘Does Paddy write to you regularly?'

‘Every week,' she said, ‘and sometimes oftener. He is a darling, isn't he?'

‘Yes,' I said, ‘a darling.' And I felt my heart contract, my bowels shrivel within me.

¹
‘Möder Dy'—the Ninth Wave.

¹
Peerie—little.

This electronic edition published in July 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader

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Copyright © Eric Linklater

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ISBN: 9781448205288
eISBN: 9781448204847

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