The Courtesy of Death (2 page)

That was what had brought me to The Green Man. My agents told me it was on the market. I was having a look at the bar takings which were not very big, the available space which could easily be
converted into eight bedrooms and baths, and the garage—which did not exist but could well be made from the coach house and stables provided one metalled the hundred yards of cart track.

Being a stranger, therefore, I had nowhere to go for advice and no judgment to rely on but my own. I would have been happier if this emergency had hit me in some camp on the edge of the tundra
where one hopes for the visitor who never arrives, rather than in a tame but unfamiliar English hamlet. For the moment it seemed best to continue to lie low and say nothing. So I locked all the
doors and windows and went to sleep.

There wasn’t a sound out of Fosworthy. About seven I looked in on him. He was wide awake, lying on his back and watching the ceiling so intently that I followed his eyes to see if there
were a mosquito or a leak or something.

He thanked me in precise language, but very warmly, and assured me that there was nothing wrong with him except that he was stiff.

‘I’d better tell you at once that someone was looking for you,’ I said. ‘A close relation, I think.’

‘Not a relation. Dear me, no! A former colleague would be approximately correct.’

‘He seemed to be sure you weren’t far away.’

‘Yes. If my impetus had not carried me half-way over the wire, he would have caught me. He even got a hand on my shoe.’

‘What wire?’ I asked, with some vague mental image of concentration camps or Berlin walls.

‘Two fields up there. On the edge of the downs.’

Then I knew what he was talking about, for I had noticed the formidable hedge and heard from Mrs Gorm why it was there.

Opinions for and against field sports ran strong and very deep in that countryside. The farmer who owned the land between The Green Man and the western slopes of the Mendips objected to
fox-hunting. His boundary fence reflected his determination to keep a heartless world out rather than to keep his cattle in. It was a high, double hawthorn hedge, well trimmed and ditched, with two
quite unnecessary strands of barbed wire down the middle.

I could understand Fosworthy’s condition on arrival. If his ‘impetus’ had carried him into the hedge—presumably head first—he must have been in it for long minutes
trapped and writhing while a more cautious arm felt for him. And all this when he was exhausted after a cross-country run!

‘You got through it?’ I asked, amazed that he wasn’t still helplessly stuck.

‘Yes. And then I saw your light and forced myself to run again.’

The pursuer had never attempted the hedge, for his clothes were not torn. I suppose he trotted along it looking for some break. When he found that there was no way out, he retraced his steps to
the upper gate or gap through which they had stumbled, followed the boundary round to the road and at last came down the cart track in search of the lit window which he, too, had noticed.

‘Look here!’ I said. ‘Shouldn’t you be having treatment of some sort?’

‘I don’t think so. The scratches are all very shallow, and I never suffer from infections.’

I gave up that line. In any case the innuendoes of the other man were probably lies. Fosworthy did not seem at all unbalanced in broad daylight.

‘You’re on the run? Some trouble with the police?’

‘I’m a vegetarian,’ he said.

‘What has that got to do with it?’

‘Quite a lot. But it doesn’t matter. I just mentioned the fact to show you that I do not take life if I can help it.’

‘I didn’t mean I thought you were a murderer,’ I assured him. ‘I was just wondering about the law—or, well, politics.’

‘Nothing to do with either,’ he replied. ‘They both avoid essentials.’

‘For example?’

‘Metaphysical animism. What is your religion?’

‘Well, I put myself down on a form as Church of England.’

‘We are not considering the purely sectarian,’ he rebuked me. ‘You are a Christian then?’

‘Naturally.’

‘It’s not particularly natural. But it’s a good start. I think I had better be going now.’

Suppressing yaps of pain, he hauled himself out of the bed and sat on the edge of it.

‘Where to?’

‘I have to see her again. Affinity is surely undeniable. Loving her as I do, she must be ready to love me. Then we could go far away.’

‘Hadn’t you better tell me a little more?’

‘Definition is so often destructive,’ he replied. ‘It may help you to know that to myself I call her Undine.’

I couldn’t care less what he called her. But he produced this sentimental nonsense with so serious an air that it was up to me to show interest. So I asked why.

‘She has blue veins.’

‘Don’t we all?’

‘My good sir, I was not referring to the back of your hand! I meant that her skin is so pellucid that she might, to my eyes and if I may put it so, be the nymph of an enchanted lake. That
perfection is indeed the reason why I find myself in your care, for I have recently become convinced—’ he looked at me as if I were an intelligent schoolboy about to be enriched by an
eager master ‘—entirely convinced that when our bodies are ethereal we may not distinguish the extremes of physical beauty.’

I replied politely that no doubt he was right.

‘What do
you
believe happens to you when you dissolve?’ he asked.

That was the first time I heard this word which was to become so detestable.

‘Well, it’s a bit difficult to know, isn’t it?’

‘Then if you suffer from all the absurd anxieties of mankind, I think you had better get out of here,’ he replied with sudden, disturbing return to everyday life. ‘He’ll
borrow a dog and be back with it this morning. The dog will track me here, but so long as this bungalow is locked up and I lay a trail, he will assume I hesitated at the door and went off again.
The dog cannot tell him that I entered under your charitable roof. That ensures that you will be unmolested. I fear that I have been instrumental in working my friends into a sad state of
excitement in which they are quite likely to commit acts of violence that afterwards they would regret.’

I told him patiently that I was a simple, uncomplicated engineer, and that at least he owed it to me to put things clearly.

‘All I’ve got so far,’ I said, ‘is that you are frightened but that it wouldn’t be important if you hadn’t fallen in love with a girl one can see
through.’

‘Though crudely objective, that is about it,’ he admitted.

‘But forgive me if I say it seems inadequate.’

‘Love and death? Inadequate?’

‘I’ll see about getting you some breakfast,’ I said, giving up.

‘I don’t want to involve anybody else.’

‘You won’t. I’ll manage without giving your presence away.’

‘And how about this?’ he asked, turning back the sheets. ‘My word, what a mess!’

In my far too hasty Good Samaritan act I had not foreseen the state of sheets and pillow-case. Or rather I had not thought it important. I never suspected that in the morning there would be any
reason for secrecy. The linen was nowhere soaked, but of course spotted by far more blood than could be explained by a shaving cut.

He went into a huddle with himself, quite unembarrassed by silent thought, and at last emerged to ask me what I had done with his clothes. When I replied that they were in the cupboard, he
hopped inside to have a look.

‘Thank you,’ he said, peering round the open door like a tame crow, eyes bright with his own incomprehensible cleverness. ‘Would you care to give me your hand?’

‘Of course.’

Quick and decisive as a surgeon he drew two scores from my wrist to my knuckles with a savage twig of hawthorn which he had extracted from his coat. I damned his eyes and very nearly called him
a sadistic lunatic.

‘It’s for your own protection. Really it is,’ he said with mild surprise.

My exasperated opinion was that he had an obsession with blue veins. He had neatly nicked one of mine. I asked him how the devil he thought I could explain ripping myself twice in a tidy, modern
room without so much as a rusty nail in the wall.

‘You found a poor little pussy crawling around with a broken back, and when you tried to put it out of pain…’

‘I don’t put poor little pussies out of pain! I get someone else to do it.’

‘Then you are very muddled on the subject like many other people.’

But the excuse was good, blast him! When I went over to the pub for breakfast, I used the cat on the Gorms—helping it, not putting it out of pain—and explained that the handkerchief
with which I had bound up my hand had slipped while I was asleep. Mrs Gorm said that I should have put my coat over the cat’s head, and did an efficient job on me with adhesive dressings.

She believed in a good breakfast and found in me a guest after her own heart. I could hardly secrete fried eggs in my pocket, but bacon, sausages and a slice of ham were easy. Then, getting up
from the table, I remembered that Fosworthy was a vegetarian. That beat me. What did vegetarians have for breakfast? There seemed to be nothing but toast and marmalade which was safe. So I packed a
pile of that in a paper napkin and surreptitiously picked half a dozen carrots and a cabbage on my way back through the garden.

When I went into the bedroom, I found that he had had a bath. He looked very different. He would have passed as, say, a devoted preparatory schoolmaster in his early forties if his clothes had
not been in ribbons. He actually ate the raw carrots and much of the cabbage, neatly shredding them with a pocket knife—proof enough, I should have thought, that human teeth were never meant
for such a diet.

I watched him—stared would be a better word—while he performed his conjuring trick of making a cabbage disappear. I could not make him out at all. He had luminous, grey eyes in a
thin face of yellowish tan: a complexion which may have been due as much to rabbit food as to sun. The hollow cheeks and remarkable eyes could look mild and intelligent, as now they did, or crazily
energetic under stress.

‘About your movements,’ I said. ‘I have finished my business here and I needn’t stay any longer. I’ll drive you wherever you want to go.’

He hesitated over this, and repeated that it was his duty to protect me. He pointed out that he still had to lay a trail for the dog.

‘Damn the dog! There isn’t any dog,’ I exclaimed. ‘And unless it’s trained it can’t tell him anything for certain. All we have to bother about is somebody
sitting in comfort on the edge of the downs with a pair of field glasses. If you really believe that is possible, I’ll try to smuggle you into the car unobserved.’

Since his coat was unwearable, I gave him a high-necked sweater of mine, and we pinned up the biggest of the rents in his trousers. I felt dubious whether he was in any real danger at all.
Still, the fact remained that his imagination had been sufficiently stirred to dive through the solidest hedge in the county of Somerset. Presumably Undine’s husband—as good a theory as
another—did not believe in affinities and cabbage.

The odd thing was that the husband had not seemed in the least angry. Not out of breath. Perfect composure. Excellent manners. He could have been a soldier or a local squire. The compact body,
the clothes, the close-clipped dark moustache, the ease and intimacy of address were those of a man with his roots deep in the countryside.

I paid my bill at The Green Man and drove off up the road, then turned into the cart track as if I meant to pick up my bag at the bungalow and save myself the trouble of walking across the
garden with it. I told Fosworthy to leave by the front door and work his way on hands and knees round the bungalow into the shelter of the little ornamental hedge. He could then reach the garden
gate, which I would leave open, and crawl through it under cover of the car without anyone seeing him except the Gorms. As they were busy cleaning up the bar and shortsighted anyway, the risk was
small.

It worked. I reversed slowly with Fosworthy crawling alongside until trees covered us from any observer in the fields or on the downs. He got in and sat on the floor.

We had travelled a mile or two towards Cheddar when he started fussing again about that improbable dog. I gave way to him and drove back until we came to a bend where there was a field gate,
just out of sight of the entrance to the cart track. This was likely to be the point where the other fellow had hit the road and he might well revisit it before investigating the now empty
bungalow. At any rate Fosworthy proposed to leave his scent there. I suggested derisively that he should do it on the gate post. He considered this in long silence, as if it might be an important
contribution to modern philosophy, but decided to have a roll on the grass verge instead. He then discovered that he had left his coat behind in the bungalow.

I told him to stay where he was, and not for God’s sake to attract the attention of passing motorists by rolling on the ground as if he were having a fit. I drove back, recovered his coat,
rolled it up and chucked it into the boot of the car.

When I was approaching the junction with the road, my other visitor of the night appeared on the edge of the cart track and waved me down. He asked if I would be good enough to give him a lift.
Wherever he had been, he could not have seen anything—except of course that I had forgotten some possession at the bungalow and gone back to fetch it. The dog only existed in
Fosworthy’s dreams.

‘Have you found your friend?’ I asked.

‘No. It’s quite hopeless. Where are you going now?’

Fosworthy was only just round the corner of the road, on the way to Cheddar; so I replied that I was going to Wells.

‘That will do fine,’ he said, sitting down beside me.

I shot out of the cart track and made a thoroughly dangerous U-turn. For all I knew, Fosworthy might have been inspired to lay a trail by strolling after me. His reactions were incalculable.

‘What have you done to your hand?’ my companion asked.

He seemed to me a less sensitive type than Mrs Gorm or myself, so I gave him the putting-out-of-pain story, saying that the noise in the stables which I had mentioned to him turned out to be an
injured cat.