The Goose Girl and Other Stories (46 page)

But why can't I now? Since the war—since 1947, when I came back to civil life—I have written three others, of the same pattern, of the same family, and written better than I did before. With what result? A dribbling diminuendo of critical appreciation—but I don't give twopence for the critics—and a cascade of falling sales. 1940 was my best year, and that brought me royalties on 60,000 copies in Britain, 85,000 in America, and £15,000 for film rights. But last year I sold 2,300 copies here, and none abroad, of the best book I have written yet. Well, what in hell am I to do?

They talk—it's all talk and criticism now: no writing is regarded, except the first flatulent puffs of adolescence—they talk of the decline and decay, the sickness of the novel; but what's sick and decadent is the general public, too fatly fed and aghast in spirit to think, feel, act and choose for itself; and on the fringe of the multitude there's an etiolated frippery of homosexuals, and fellow-travellers with the homos, a swim of pop-eyed gudgeon living on the refuse and detritus that's carried by the Seine out of the sewers of French intellect into the dead water of the English Channel.

How can I write—how, how?—when no one reads? My last novel was my very best—and sold 2,300 copies. Now I'm in the seventh volume of the saga, and caught by the heels in apathy. The Romantic Revival is my background now, or should be; and how can I write of a flare of hope—even such foolish hope—in a gloom of accidie and no hope at all? Six other volumes I have planned, to make my tale complete, and I know that I shall never do it. But what else can I do?

Drink a little, and delude myself... I drank a little—not much: less than half a bottle of gin—and wrote two pages that I tore up
before lunch came in. I have my lunch brought in on a tray, because Isobel eats with the children and a domestic table is more than I can bear. I still have an appetite—gin helps, perhaps—and that day it was cold roast beef, beetroot and boiled potatoes, a slice of apple tart. With a pint of beer. I slept for an hour in my big chair, before the fire, and woke to a sound of scratching on a window-pane. The wind had gone down, there was no more than a light breeze blowing, and in the quiet of a late-spring afternoon the plick-plack and urgent scraping of its beak on the glass had almost the compulsion of troopers at the door in the quiet before dawn. I woke and saw the bird against a background of glinting water, tall blue hill, and shining sky. The Sociable Plover on the window-ledge.

Its eye caught mine as mine turned towards it. Caught and held them. I was not properly awake, and perhaps that made me submissible to hypnosis. For I was, I think, hypnotised. The bird itself seemed to grow bigger against the lighted frame of water and bright sky, and the black circle (with a glint of red in it) of its unwinking, gleaming eye expanded till it was like one of those old, convex, sombre mirrors, in which I saw myself, infinitely diminished, and stretched upon a rack for inquisition.

I shall not say what the inquisition revealed. Some of it, I suppose, was true—if truth can keep its complexion ten years after the event?—but more, I think, was the hysteria that confession under torment must also elicit. Indecently, in response to that indecent imperative, I resurrected and exposed a dead, forgotten past. I lay in a quivering fear—for how long I do not know—and returned to normal consciousness in a cold sweat of exhaustion. The bird was still there, on the window-ledge, but now of natural size again; and its round and glittering eye seemed mildly inquisitive, innocently perplexed.

I went to the cupboard, and got a drink; and my teeth chattered against the glass. I sat on a hard chair and fought my defeated nerves for self-control. Suave and elegant, the Sociable Plover watched me, but now with no animosity in its gaze. I took a little more whisky, and the shining peace of the late afternoon began to assuage and mollify my remembered fear. The Plover, as though contented and at home, walked mincingly up and down the ledge. I could see more of his delicate and gaily brilliant colouring. His throat caught a golden light, and the white eyebrow under his luminous blue-black cap was a streak of bland irony. His back and wing-covers were dove-hued, and the dark of his belly shaded into russet. He was very beautiful.

I got up and went to the window, pretending now that my fright had been nothing but a nightmare; and hoping (with a shiver) to make a
friend of my Plover. But he flew away, with a slow wing-beat and a creak in his wings, like a lapwing when it turns in the air to display its skill.

The next morning was fine, and the wind, that had died away at dark, now blew gently from the south, or south-south-west. Isobel made me some sandwiches, I put up my rod, and pulled out my boat. It was a perfect fishing-day—the temperature of the air about four degrees warmer than the water, with a good new hatch of fly, the terns hawking and showing where they were—and by one o'clock I had caught seven fine trout, the best of the basket just under two pounds. I went ashore on Rowan Island—three rowans, growing under a big rock, give it its name—to eat my sandwiches and drink my beer; and for a little while I was content. What were books, critics, and a besotted populace compared with this?

The loch was a dimpled blue—light-dimpled, pale corn-flower-blue—and the sharp hills of the outer islands rose beyond the contours of our own land like the ruined battlements of gigantic Gothic castles. Cirrus clouds drifted on the idle sky, and somewhere a rain-goose was hooting with sweet melancholy. A redshank on a half-green pebble nodded and said ‘Chip-chip', a swan lifted vainglorious wings, bent its proud head, and swam past me with an elegant assumption of indifference.—Why should I care for popular esteem, I thought? What's the worm in my soul that torments my soul to look for fame? Why can't I stand up straight—straight in arrogant assurance of myself—and put my heel upon it? And having crushed it, enjoy all this with the full-throated appetite of innocence?—But innocence died long ago, I can't remember when. And that's part of the answer.

Then I saw the Sociable Plover. It stood in the water's edge—water half an inch deep, just covering its feet—and delicately picked its way. It paid no attention to me, but I grew most uncomfortably aware of it. I watched it for a few minutes and then, stuffing a remnant sandwich and an empty bottle into my fishing-bag, returned to my boat. I pushed off, and presently, with the island between us, began to fish again. I saw a rising fish, some twenty yards away, and with a thrust of the oars moved towards it. I cast within a foot of the rippling circle it had made—threw again—and there, hovering above my tail fly, was the Plover.

Savagely I cast at the bird—and missed by a rod's length, so quick was its movement. It began to circle me, with slow deliberate wing-beats, but side-slipping sometimes with sudden speed. I tried to ignore it, and with all the willpower I could summon, concentrated on fishing. I saw a black gnat on the water, and changed my top fly for
a Pennell; but my fingers trembled and I had difficulty in tying the knot. It occurred to me—with a shock of occurrence: the shock of an idea flung like a pebble into my mind—that there was only one way to escape the bird's malignant eye and the persecution of its scrutiny; and without realising what I was doing I put down my rod and leaning over the side looked through a green transparency to the moss-carpet six or seven feet below. There, on the bottom, in the shadow of the boat—but then the shadow of the bird fell on the water, and I knew, with a sickened release from it, that the thought, the nascent intention, wasn't mine, but came from without. A pebble flung into my mind to unnerve and kill—and as quickly as I could I started the outboard motor, and at full throttle (the noise was comforting) headed for home.

Next morning, when I went down to work, the bird was on the window-ledge. I drew the curtains against it, and turned on the light. I had written a page or two the night before, and I settled to revision. But it was no good. Plick-plack, plick-plack on the glass, and then a scraping noise as if it were stropping its beak. I had to face it, and pulling back the curtains I looked it full in the eye from a distance of two or three feet.

Bold at first—pleased with myself for being bold—I drove my thought and enmity against it like a phalanx, like a pointed horde of imperatives bidding it to go and never trouble me again. But the phalanx split and dissolved, and the obsidian eye (with a glow of fire or garnet in it) came shining through, shining into my mind where gradually it lighted a growing belief that by yielding to its invitation, its command, I would find the happiness that had long eluded me. Down to the shore, it said, and out to the clear green water where the floor is carpeted with moss, and there's peace for ever in that quietness far below the air of a world that's poisoned by hatred, frustration, and fear. Down to the deep green peace . . . .

I felt conviction spreading through my thinking parts, faith welling from an unknown spring, and I turned to the door with the slow obedience of a sleep-walker—and in the long hall of our reconstructed farmhouse—the hall that once had been a cow-byre or pen for calves—I met Isobel. She, in a little cloud of literary confusion—but sun-lit, as in all her clouds—exclaimed, ‘Oh, darling, you must help me. I was coming to ask you, is
Pride and Prejudice
by Jane Eyre or Charlotte Brontë, and do you think it's a good book to recommend to the Women's Institute for next winter's reading? I've got to go to a meeting tonight, and several of us have promised to suggest twelve really good books, that everyone should know, and I can't think of anything but
Vanity Fair
and
Gone with the Wind
and the new one by that French girl which isn't suitable at all.'

I sat down and began to laugh—or did I cry? Both, I think.

‘Torquil, what is the matter? You haven't been drinking already, have you?'

‘Not a drop. But you have saved my life.'

I pulled her down beside me, and fondled her. To that she always responded, and as she was subject to me, so was I to her. Her mind was only half-furnished, but her body—and indeed her spirit—gave me continual delight. There were days when I avoided talk with her, but few nights when I did not go thankfully to bed.

Now in the long dark hall—the roof was low and the windows narrow—we sat enfolded, my head to her shoulder, and from her warmth and comfort I slowly drew sanity again to fill the gulf of madness that the abominable bird had dug. I held her close, talked nonsense that gradually became deliberate nonsense to please and make her laugh—and then, suddenly confident that with Isobel beside me the bird would have no power, I said, ‘Come to my room and I'll tell you the books to recommend, and who wrote them; it's important to remember that.' But when we went in, the bird had gone.

It came again in the late afternoon, and next morning. I took to wandering, and from room to room carried a pen, a blotting-pad, and a sheaf of paper. In the drawing-room, spare bedrooms, a closet that I called my office and never used, I sat on unfamiliar chairs, the pad on my knee, and tried to think of Everard Gaffikin, a tall camp-follower of the Romantic Revival, and his disillusionment in France by the September massacres. To write of disillusion should have been easy, but the will to write had died, and in truth all I was trying to do was to keep my mind off that infernal Plover, its eyes off me.

The days became a hideously tormented, endless and ludicrous game of hide-and-seek. Rooms have windows, and from one to another the bird pursued me—sometimes anticipated me—scraped on the frosted panes of a water-closet if I sat too long. I dared not go out, though day after day brought good fishing weather, and every morning I woke in fear of daylight. Twice I found the Plover at the window of my dressing-room when I went in to shave; twice again I tried to out-stare him, and called for Isobel to come and help me when I felt my mind dissolving and his intention filling the void. Isobel—God bless her kind and silly heart—thought I had been drinking too much, and as she believed an author must drink a great deal to be an author, was neither perplexed nor unduly disturbed. She probably felt proud to think that an author's wife must share his unhappiness.

My spirit broke before hers showed any bruise; and when, after ten or eleven days of persecution, the bird came yet again to my work-room window, I took a half-empty bottle of whisky, and threw it with all my strength against the glass.

The Plover, unhurt, flew off; and then at last I overcame a curious, superstitious reluctance. I unstrapped my gun-case and took out one of the good pair I had bought with money that
John Gaffikin
made. I had not used them for three or four years, for I gave up shooting when I became more interested in watching birds than killing them; and they were smeared with vaseline. I cleaned one roughly with a handkerchief, put stock to barrel, and found a few cartridges . . . .

Two

My name is Anne McQueen. I am a doctor, of the ordinary general sort—M.B., Ch.B., University of Inverdoon, 1947—and I live in Morissey because I am too sensible to be ambitious, because I have always loved the Western Isles, and in a rather unwomanly fashion I am very fond of fishing.

I took a good degree at Inverdoon, and the Gold Medal for Midwifery. My fellow-students said I owed the award to inside knowledge, because I was pregnant at the time. I had got married, in my third year, to a young man in the Royal Air Force. He was killed while flying on the Air Lift to Berlin, after the Russians had closed the roads, and in consequence of that, and, I suppose, of an old-fashioned sense of duty, I volunteered, after graduation, for service under the Allied Military Government in Germany. I didn't want to think that young men could serve abroad—and suffer and die abroad—while their girl-friends took their money and their kisses and did nothing, except roll in bed, to earn them.

So my mother took charge of the baby, and I had two years in Germany—about six months in Berlin—and then came home and did a course at the Rotunda—for midwifery really interested me—and two hospital spells, of six months each, in Manchester and Birmingham. Nothing I saw of industrial England inclined me to spend my life there, so I went home and looked for a job in the Highlands or Islands. I jumped at the chance of Morissey, and perhaps because no one else thought it worth applying for, I got it. And for five years I've loved every moment of my life and work here. Well, not quite, but most of it.