Hearing Secret Harmonies

1

DUCK, FLYING IN FROM THE SOUTH, ignored four or five ponderous explosions over at the quarry. The limestone cliff, dominant oblong foreground structure, lateral storeyed platforms, all coral-pink in evening sunlight, projected towards the higher ground on misty mornings a fading mirage of Babylonian terraces suspended in haze above the mere; the palace, with its hanging gardens, distantly outlined behind a group of rather woodenly posed young Medes (possibly young Persians) in Mr Deacon’s Boyhood of Cyrus, the picture’s recession equally nebulous in the shadows of the Walpole-Wilsons’ hall. Within this hollow bed of the stream the whole range of the quarry was out of sight, except for where the just visible peak of an escarpment of spoil shelved up to the horizon’s mountainous coagulations of floating cottonwool, a density of white cloud perforated here and there by slowly opening and closing loopholes of the palest blue light. It was a warm windy afternoon. Midday thunder had not brought back rain. Echoes of the blasting, counterfeiting a return of the storm, stirred faintly smouldering wartime embers; in conjunction with the duck, recalling an argument between General Bobrowski and General Philidor about shooting wildfowl. The angular formation taken by the birds (mimed by Pole and Frenchman with ferocious gestures) was now neatly exhibited, as the flight spiralled down deliberately, almost vertically, settling among reeds and waterlilies at the far end of the pool. Two columns of smoke rose above a line of blue-black trees thickly concentrated together beyond the dusty water, scrawling slate-coloured diagonals across the ceiling of powdered grit, inert and translucent, that swam above the screened workings. Metallic odours, like those of a laboratory, drifted down from a westerly direction, overlaying a nearer-by scent of fox.

‘Here’s one,’ said Isobel. ‘At least he’s considering the matter.’

After the dredging of crevices lower down the brook, expectation was almost at an end. The single crayfish emerging from under the stones was at once followed by two more. Luck had come at last. The three crayfish, swart miniature lobsters of macabrely knowing demeanour, hung about doubtfully in a basin of mud below the surface. The decision was taken by the crayfish second to enter. He led the way with fussy self-importance, the other two bustling along behind. The three of them clawed a hold on to opposite sides of the outer edge of the iron rim supporting the trap’s circle of wire-netting submerged at the water’s edge, all at the same moment hurrying across the expanse of mesh towards a morsel of flyblown meat fastened at the centre.

‘Do you want to hold the string, Fiona?’ asked Isobel. ‘Wait a second. A fourth has appeared.’

‘Give it to me.’

The dark young man spoke with authority. Presented under the name of Scorpio Murtlock, he was by definition established as bossing the other three. As Fiona made no attempt, either as woman or niece, to assert prior right, Isobel handed him the lengths of twine from which the trap dangled. His status, known on arrival, required observation to take in fully. The age was hard to estimate. He could be younger than Barnabas Henderson, the other young man, thought to be in his later twenties. Fiona herself was twenty-one, so far as I could remember. The girl introduced as Rusty (no surname attached) looked a battered nineteen. I felt relieved that crayfish, as such, had not proved illusory, a mere crazy fancy, recognizable from the start as typical of those figments of a superannuated imagination older people used to put forward when one was oneself young. Four crayfish had undeniably presented themselves, whether caught or not hardly mattered. In any case the occasion had been elevated, by what had been said earlier, to a level above that of a simple sporting event. This higher meaning had to be taken into consideration too.

‘The trap must be hauled up gently, or they walk off again,’ said Isobel. ‘The frustration of the Old Man and the Sea is nothing to it.’

Murtlock, still holding the strings, gathered round him the three-quarter-length bluish robe he wore, a kind of smock or kaftan, not too well adapted to country pursuits. He went down on one knee by the bank. Sweeping out of his eyes handfuls of uncared-for black hair, he leant forward at a steep angle to inspect the crustaceans below, somehow conveying the posture of a priest engaged in the devotions of a recondite creed. He was small in stature, but impressive. The shining amulet, embossed with a hieroglyph, that hung round his throat from a necklace of beads, splashed into the water. He allowed it to remain for a second below the surface, while he gazed fixedly into the depths. Then, having waited for the fourth crayfish to become radically committed to the decomposing snack, he carefully lifted the circle of wire, outward and upward as instructed, from where it rested among pebbles and weed under the projecting lip of the bank.

‘The bucket, Barnabas — the gloves, one of you.’

The order was sternly given, like all Murtlock’s biddings.

Barnabas Henderson fumbled with the bucket. Fiona held out the gardening gloves. Rusty, grinning to herself uneasily, writhed her body about in undulating motions and hummed. Murtlock snatched a glove. Fitting on the fingers adroitly, without setting down the trap, by now dripping over his vestment-like smock, he picked a crayfish off the wire, dropping the four of them one by one into a pail already prepared quarter-full with water. His gestures were deft, ritualistic. He was totally in charge.

This gift of authority, ability to handle people, was the characteristic attributed by hearsay. At first the outward trappings, suggesting no more than a contemporary romantic vagabondage, had put that reputation in doubt. Now one saw the truth of some at least of what had been reported of him; that the vagabond style could include ability to control companions — notably Fiona — as well as crayfish and horses; the last skill demonstrated when they had arrived earlier that day in a small horse-drawn caravan. Murtlock’s rather run-of-the-mill outlandishness certainly comprised something perceptibly priestly about it. That was over and above the genuflexion at the water’s edge. There was an essentially un-sacerdotal side, one that suggested behaviour dubious, if not actively criminal. That aspect, too, was allied to a kind of fanaticism. Such distinguishing features, more or less, were to be expected after stories about him. A novice in a monastery of robber monks might offer not too exaggerated a definition. His eyes, pale, cold, unblinking, could not be denied a certain degree of magnetism.

Barnabas Henderson was another matter. He was similarly dressed in a blue robe, somewhat more ultramarine in shade, a coin-like object hanging from his neck too, hair in ringlets to the shoulder, with the addition of a Chinese magician’s moustache. His spectacles, large and square, were in yellow plastic. The combination of moustache and spectacles created an effect not unlike those one-piece cardboard contraptions to be bought in toyshops, moustache and spectacles held together by a false nose. That was unfair. Henderson was not a badlooking young man, if lacking Murtlock’s venturesome bearing, as well as his tactile competence. Henderson’s garments, no less eclectically chosen, were newer, a trifle cleaner, less convincingly part of himself. The genre was carried off pretty well by Murtlock, justly heralded as handsome. Henderson’s milder features remained a trifle apologetic, his personality, in contrast, not by nature suited to the apparent intent. He was alleged to have abandoned a promising career as an art-dealer to follow this less circumscribed way of life. Perhaps that was a wrong identification, the new life desirable because additionally circumscribed, rather than less so. There could be little doubt that Henderson owned the caravan, painted yellow, its woodwork dilapidated, but drawn by a sound pair of greys. Probably Henderson was paying for the whole jaunt.

The girls, too, were dressed predominantly in blue. Rusty, whose air was that of a young prostitute, had a thick crop of dark red hair and deep liquid eyes. These were her good points. She was tall, sallow-skinned, hands large and coarse, her collar-bones projecting. Having maintained total silence since arrival, except for intermittent humming, she could be assessed only by looks, which certainly suggested extensive sexual experience.

Fiona, daughter of Isobel’s sister Susan and Roddy Cutts, was a pretty girl (‘Fiona has a touch of glamour,’ her first cousin, Jeremy Warminster, had said), small, fair-skinned, baby-faced, with her father’s sandy hair. Otherwise she more resembled her mother, without the high spirits (an asset throughout her husband’s now closed political career) brought out in Susan by any gathering that showed signs of developing into a party. Susan Cutts’s occasional bouts of melancholy seemed latterly to have descended on her daughter in the form of an innate lugubriousness, which had taken the place of Fiona’s earlier tomboy streak.

The upper halves of both girls were sheathed in T-shirts, inscribed with the single word HARMONY. Rusty wore jeans, Fiona a long skirt that swept the ground. Dragging its flounces across the damp grass, she looked like a mediaeval lady from the rubric of an illuminated Book of Hours, a remote princess engaged in some now obsolete pastime. The appearance seemed to demand the addition of a wimple and pointed cap. This antique air of Fiona’s could have played a part in typecasting Murtlock as a reprobate boy-monk. Equally viewed as whimsical figures in a Tennysonian-type Middle Age, the rôles of Rusty and Henderson were indeterminate; Rusty perhaps a recreant knight’s runaway mistress disguised as a page; Henderson, an unsuccessful troubadour, who had mislaid his lute. This fanciful imagery was not entirely disavowed by the single word motto each girl bore on her breast, a lettered humour that could well have featured in the rubric of a mediaeval manuscript, inscribed on banner or shield of a small figure in the margin. The feet of all four were bare, and — another mediaeval touch — long unwashed.

Fiona (whose birth commemorated her parents’ reconciliation after Roddy Cutts’s misadventure with the cipherine during war service in Persia) had given a fair amount of trouble since her earliest years. This was in contrast with her two elder brothers: Jonathan, married, several children, rising rapidly in a celebrated firm of fine arts auctioneers; Sebastian, still unmarried, much addicted to girlfriends, though no less ambitious than his brother, ‘in computers’. Both the Cutts sons were tireless conversationalists in their father’s manner, uncheckable, informative, sagacious, on the subject of their respective jobs. Fiona, who had run away from several schools (been required to leave at least one), had strengthened her status as a difficult subject by catching typhoid abroad when aged fourteen or fifteen, greatly alarming everyone by her state. Abandonment of boisterous forms of rebellion, in favour of melancholic opposition, dated from the unhappy incident with the electrician, handsome and good-natured, but married and not particularly young. Since then nothing had gone at all well. Fiona’s educational dislodgements had not impaired education sufficiently to prevent her from getting a living on the outskirts of ‘glossy’ journalism.

No one seemed to know where exactly Fiona had run across Scorpio Murtlock, nor the precise nature of this most recent association. It was assumed — anyway by her parents — to include cohabitation. Her uncle, Isobel’s brother, Hugo Tolland, cast doubts on that. Hugo’s opinions on that sort of subject were often less than reliable, a taste for exaggeration marring the accuracy that is always more interesting than fantasy. In this case, Hugo coming down on the side of scepticism — on grounds that, if Murtlock liked sex at all, he preferred his own — the view had to be taken into consideration. How Murtlock lived seemed as unknowable as his sexual proclivities. The Cutts parents, Roddy and Susan, always very ‘good’ about their daughter’s vagaries, continued to be so, accepting the Murtlock regime with accustomed resignation.

The member of the family best equipped to speak with anything like authority of Fiona, and her friends, was Isobel’s unmarried sister, Blanche Tolland, who had, in fact, rung up to ask if we were prepared to harbour a small caravan in our field for one night, its destination unspecified. The easygoing unambitious nature that had caused Blanche, in early days, to be regarded — not wholly without reason — as rather dotty, had latterly given her a certain status in dealing with a generation considerably younger than her own; Blanche’s unemphatic personality providing a diplomatic contact, an agency through which dealings could be negotiated by either side without prejudice or loss of face. This good nature, allied to a deep-seated taste for taking trouble in often uncomfortable circumstances, led to employment in an animal sanctuary, a job that had occupied Blanche for a long time by now.

‘Blanchie meets the animals on their own terms,’ said her sister, Norah, also unmarried. ‘The young people too. She really runs a sanctuary for both.’

‘Do you mean the young people think of Blanchie as an animal, or as another young person?’ asked her brother.

‘Which do you suppose, Hugo?’ said Norah sharply. ‘It’s true they might easily mistake you for an ape.’

Hugo, rather a sad figure after the death of his partner, Sam, could still arouse the mood in Norah that had caused her to observe he would ‘never find a place for himself in the contemporary world’. Working harder than ever in the antique shop, now he was on his own, Hugo’s career could be regarded, in general, as no less contemporary than anyone else’s. Sam (said to have begun life as a seaman) had remained surnameless (like Rusty) to the end, so far as most of the family were concerned. It was during this exchange in Norah’s Battersea flat that I first heard the name of Scorpio Murtlock.

‘Blanchie says Fiona’s turned over a new leaf under the influence of this new young man, Scorp Murtlock. Sober, honest, and an early riser, not to mention meditations. No hint of a drug. It’s a kind of cult. Religious almost. Harmony’s the great thing. They have a special greeting they give one another. I can’t remember the exact words. Quite impressive. They don’t wash much, but then none of the Cutts family ever did much washing.’

‘How did he come to be christened Scorp?’ I asked.

‘Short for Scorpio, his Zodiac sign.’

‘What’s he like?’

‘Blanche says attractive, but spooky.’

At this point Hugo showed unexpected knowledge.

‘I didn’t know Fiona’s latest was Scorpio Murtlock. I’ve never met him, but I used to hear about him several years ago, when he was working in the antique business. Two fellow antique dealers told me they had engaged a very charming young assistant.’

Norah was not prepared for Hugo to take over entirely in the Murtlock field.

‘Blanchie says he has a creepy side too.’

‘You can be creepy and attractive. There are different forms of creepiness, just as there are different forms of attractiveness.’

‘The antique dealers are presumably queers?’

‘Even so, that’s hardly the point. Murtlock made himself immensely useful in the business — which ranges from garden furniture to vintage cars — so useful that the owners suddenly found they were being relegated to a back place themselves. Murtlock was slowly but surely elbowing them out.’

‘Did their passion remain unsatisfied?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Unlike you, Hugo, not to be sure about that sort of thing.’

‘One of them implied he’d brought off something. That was not the rather nervy one. The nervy one complained he had begun to feel like a man bewitched. Those were his own words. The unnervy one agreed after a while that there was something uncomfortable about Murtlock. They were wondering how best to solve their problem, when Murtlock himself gave notice. He’d found someone more profitable to work over. His new patron — a man of some age, even older than oneself, if that can be imagined — was apparently more interested in what Blanchie calls Murtlock’s spooky side than in his sex appeal. They met during some business deal.’

‘Murtlock doesn’t sound a particularly desirable friend for Fiona.’

‘Blanche says he makes her behave herself.’

‘Even so.’

‘Susan and Roddy are thankful for small mercies.’

‘Taking exercise, meditation, no alcohol, sound quite large ones.’

‘They sound to me like the good old Simple Life,’ said Hugo. ‘Still it’s a relief one won’t catch one’s foot in a hypodermic when next at Blanchie’s cottage.’

‘You always talk about your nephews and nieces in the way Aunt Molly used to talk about you,’ said Norah.

Hugo was not at all discomposed by the comparison.

‘And you, Norah dear — and you. Think how Aunt Molly used to go on about you and Eleanor Walpole-Wilson. As a matter of fact, I quite agree I’ve turned into Aunt Molly. I’d noticed it myself. Old age might have transformed one into something much worse. Everybody liked her. I flatter myself I’m much what she’d have been had she remained unmarried.’

‘I shall begin to howl, Hugo, if you talk like that about poor Eleanor.’

The Norah Tolland/Eleanor Walpole-Wilson manage had not been revived after the war, their ways dividing, though they remained friends. Norah, never so fulfilled as during her years as driver in one of the women’s services, had taken a job with a small car-hire firm, where she continued to wear a peaked cap and khaki uniform. Later she became one of the directors of the business, which considerably enlarged itself in scope, Norah always remaining available to drive, especially if a long continental trip were promised. Eleanor Walpole-Wilson, for her part, securing a seat on the Urban District Council, became immersed in local politics. Of late years she had embarked on a close relationship with a Swedish woman-doctor. Staying with this friend in Stockholm, Eleanor had been taken ill and died, bequeathing to Norah, with a small legacy, a pair of short-tempered pugs. Sensing mention of their former distress, this couple now began to rush about the flat, snuffling and barking.

‘Oh, shut up, pugs,’ said Norah.

The commendation accorded to Scorpio Murtlock — that he could keep Fiona in order — limited in compass, was not to be lightly regarded, if valid. It was reiterated by Blanche, when she rang up about the caravan party. Never very capable of painting word pictures, she was unable to add much additional information about Murtlock, nor did she know anything, beyond her name, of the girl Rusty. Barnabas Henderson, on the other hand, possessed certain conventional aspects, notably a father killed in the war, who had left enough money for his son to buy a partnership in a small picture-dealing business; a commercial venture abandoned to follow Murtlock into the wilderness.

Blanche’s assurance of comparatively austere behaviour — what Hugo called the good old Simple Life — had been to some extent borne out, on the arrival of Fiona and her friends, by refusal of all offers of food and drink. Provided with a bivouac under some trees, on the side of the field away from the house, they at once set about various minor tasks relative to settling in caravan and horses, behaviour that seemed to confirm the ascription of a severe standard of living. When, early in the afternoon, Isobel and I went to see how they were getting on, they had come to the end of these dispositions. Earlier negotiations about siting the caravan had been carried out with Fiona, Murtlock standing in silence with folded arms. Now he showed more sign of emerging as the strong personality he had been billed.

‘Is there anything you’d all like to do?’

Fiona had been addressed. Murtlock took it upon himself to answer.

‘Too late in the year to leap the fires.’

He spoke thoughtfully, without any touch of jocularity. This was evidently the line Blanche had denominated as spooky. Since we had agreed to put up the caravan, there was no reason, if kept within bounds, why Beltane should not be celebrated, or whatever it was he had in mind.

‘We could make a bonfire.’

‘Too near the solstice.’

‘Something else then?’

‘A sacrifice.’

‘What sort?’

‘One in Harmony.’

‘Like Fiona’s shirt?’

‘Yes.’

He did not laugh. He did not even smile. This affirmative somehow inhibited further comment in a frivolous tone, imposing acquiescence in not treating things lightly, even Fiona’s shirt. At the same time I was uncertain whether he was not simply teasing. On the face of it teasing seemed much more likely than all this assumed gravity. Nevertheless uncertainty remained, ambivalence of manner leaving one guessing. No doubt that was intended, after all a fairly well recognized method of establishing one sort of supremacy. The expressed aim — that things should be in Harmony — could not in itself be regarded as objectionable. It supported the contention that Fiona’s latest set of friends held to stringent moral values of one sort or another. How best to achieve an act of Harmony was another matter.

‘Harmony is not easy to define.’

‘Harmony is Power — Power is Harmony.’

‘That’s how you see it?’

‘That’s how it is.’

He smiled. When Murtlock smiled the charm was revealed. He was a boy again, making a joke, not a fanatical young mystic. At the same time he was a boy with whom it was better to remain on one’s guard.

‘How are we going to bring off an act of Harmony on a Saturday afternoon?’

‘Through the Elements.’

‘What elements?’

‘Fire, Air, Earth, Water.’

The question had been a foolish one. He smiled again. We discussed various possibilities, none of them very sparkling. The other three were silent throughout all this. Murtlock seemed to have transformed them into mere shadows of himself.

‘Is there water near here? I think so. There is the feel of water.’

‘A largish pond within walking distance.’

‘We could make a water sacrifice.’

‘Drown somebody?’

He did not answer.

‘We could go crayfishing,’ said Isobel.

Since demands made by improvisation at a moment’s notice of the necessary tackle for this sport were relatively onerous, the proposal marked out Isobel, too, as not entirely uninfluenced by Murtlock’s spell.

‘The crayfish are in the pond?’

‘In the pools of the brook that runs out of it.’

He considered.

‘It can’t be exactly described as a blood sport,’ I added.

I don’t know why inserting that lame qualification seemed required, except that prejudice against blood sports could easily accord with an outlook to be inferred from people dressed in their particular style. If asked to rationalize the comment, that would have been my pretext. Aggressive activities against crayfish might be, by definition, excluded from an afternoon’s programme devoted to Harmony. Who could tell? Harmony was also Power, he said. Power would be exercised over crayfish, if caught, but possibly the wrong sort of Power. He pretended to be puzzled.

‘You mean that without blood there is no vehicle for the spirit?’

‘I mean that you might not like killing.’

‘I do not kill, if not killed.’

He seemed glad to have an opportunity to make that statement, gnomic to say the least. It sounded like a favourite apophthegm of a luminary of the cult to which they all belonged, the familiar ring of Shortcuts to the Infinite, Wisdom of the East, Analects of the Sages. For some reason the pronouncement seemed also one recently brought to notice. Had I read it not long before in print? The Murtlock standpoint, his domination over Fiona and the others, was becoming a little clearer in a certain sense, if remaining obscure in many others.

‘I don’t think we’ll be killed. Deaths crayfishing are comparatively rare.’

‘You spoke not of death, but of killing.’

‘The latter is surely apt to lead to the former?’

‘There is killing — death is an illusion.’

This was no help so far as deciding how the afternoon was to be spent.

‘The point is whether or not you would consider the killing of crayfish to be in Harmony?’

Once more his smile made me feel that it was I, rather than he, who was being silly.

‘Not all killing is opposed to Harmony.’

‘Let’s kill crayfish then.’

The odd thing was that he managed never to be exactly discourteous, nor even embarrassing, when he talked in this way. It was always close to a joke, though a joke not quite brought to birth. At least you did not laugh. You accepted on its own merits what he said, unintelligible or the reverse. I wondered — had not some forty years stretched between us — whether, as a contemporary, I should have been friends with Scorpio Murtlock. Indications were at best doubtful. That negative surmise was uninfluenced by his manner of talking, mystic and imperative, still less the style of dress. Both might have been acceptable at that age in a contemporary. In any case fashions of one generation, moral or physical, are scarcely at all assessable in terms of another. They cannot be properly equated. So far as they could be equated, the obstacles set up against getting on with Murtlock were in themselves negligible.

The objection to him, if objection there were, was the sense that he brought of something ominous. He would have been ominous — perhaps more ominous — in a City suit, the ominous side of him positively mitigated by a blue robe. His accents, liturgical, enigmatic, were also consciously rough, uncultivated. The roughness was imitated by Fiona and Henderson, when they remembered to do so. Rusty never uttered. No doubt Murtlock’s chief attraction was owed to this ominousness, something more sexually persuasive than good looks, spectacular trappings, even sententious observations. Certainly Fiona was showing an altogether uncharacteristic docility in allowing, without any sign of dispute or passive disapproval, someone else to make all the going. It might be assumed that she and Rusty were ‘in love’ with Murtlock. Probably Henderson shared that passion. Murtlock himself showed no sign of being emotionally drawn to any of them. In the light of what had been reported, it would have been surprising had he done so.

‘What do we need?’

He spoke this time in a tone of practical enquiry.

‘A circle of wire mesh kept together by a piece of iron. Something like the rim of an old saucepan or fryingpan does well.’

‘The circle, figure of perfection — iron, abhorred by demons.’

‘Those aspects may help too.’

‘They will.’

‘Then a piece of preferably rotting meat.’

‘Nothing far different from a sacrifice for a summoning.’

‘In this case summoning crayfish.’

‘Crayfish our sacrifice, rather.’

The requirements took a little time to get into order. A morsel of doubtful freshness was found among bones set aside for stock. The four of them joined in these preparations usefully, shaping the wire-netting, measuring out cords, fixing the tainted bait. When the trap was assembled Murtlock swung it gently through the air. Even in undertaking this trial of weight, which showed grasp of the sport, there was something of the swaying of a priest’s censer.

‘And now?’

‘The crayfish beds, such as they are, lie about a quarter of a mile away.’

The brook flowed through fields of poorish pasture, tangled with undergrowth as they sloped down more steeply to the line of the stream. Once the trap was slung among its stones Murtlock seemed satisfied. If the others were bored, they did not dare show it during the long period when there was no sign of a catch. Conversation altogether flagged. Murtlock himself possessed to a marked degree that characteristic — perhaps owing something to hypnotic powers — which attaches to certain individuals; an ability to impose on others present the duty of gratifying his own whims. It seemed to matter that Murtlock should get what he wanted — in this case crayfish — while, if the others were bored, that was their affair. No particular obligation was laid on oneself to prevent it. When at last the circle of iron showed signs of possessing the supposedly magical properties he had attributed, four crayfish caught, this modest final success, obviously pleasing to Murtlock, was for some reason exceptionally pleasing to oneself too. By then afternoon was turning to evening. Again he took the initiative.

‘We’ll go back now. There are things to do at the caravan. Barnabas must water the horses.’

‘Sure you won’t dine?’

‘Yes.’

‘I can easily run up something,’ said Isobel.

‘The day is one of limited fast.’

Fiona had not explained that when the dinner invitation had been issued some hours earlier.

‘Nothing else you want?’

‘No.’

‘A bottle of wine?’

Then I remembered that they abstained from alcohol.

‘No — have you a candle?’

‘We can lend you an electric torch.’

‘Only for a simple fire ritual.’

‘Come back to the house. We’ll look for candles.’

‘Barnabas can fetch it, if needed. It may not be.’

‘Don’t start a forest fire, will you?’

He smiled at that.

‘Only the suffusion of a few laurel leaves.’

‘As you see, laurel is available.’

‘Pine-cones?’

‘There are one or two conifers up the road to the right.’

‘We’ll go back then. Take the bucket, Barnabas. The gloves are on the ground, Fiona. Rusty, carry the trap — no, Rusty will carry it.’

None of them was allowed to forget for a moment that he or she was under orders. When the crayfishing paraphernalia had been brought together we climbed the banks that enclosed this length of the stream. After crossing the fields the path led through trees, the ground underfoot thick with wild garlic. At one point, above this Soho restaurant smell, the fox’s scent briefly reasserted itself. Here Murtlock stopped. Gazing towards a gap between the branches of two tall oaks, he put up a hand to shade his eyes. The others imitated his attitude. In his company they seemed to have little or no volition of their own. Murtlock’s control was absolute. The oak boughs formed a frame for one of the blue patches of sky set among clouds, now here and there flecked with pink. Against this irregular quadrilateral of light, over the meadows lying in the direction of Gauntlett’s farm a hawk hovered; then, likely to have marked down a prey, swooped off towards the pond. Murtlock lowered his arm. The others copied him.

‘The bird of Horus.’

‘Certainly.’

‘Do you often see hawks round here?’

He asked the question impatiently, almost angrily.

‘This particular one is always hanging about. He was near the house yesterday, and the day before. He’s a well-known local personality. Perhaps a retired kestrel from a ‘Thirties poem.’

The allusion might be obscure to one of his age. So much the better. Obscurity could be met with obscurity. A second later, either on the hawk’s account, or from some other disturbing factor in their vicinity — the quarry end of the pond — the duck flew out again. Rising at an angle acute as their former descent, the flight took on at once the disciplined wedge-shaped configuration used in all duck transit, leader at apex, main body following behind in semblance of a fan. Mounting higher, still higher, soaring over copper and green beechwoods, the birds achieved considerable altitude before a newly communicated command wheeled them off again in a fresh direction. Adjusting again to pattern, they receded into creamy cavernous billows of distant cloud, beyond which the evening sun drooped. Into this opaque glow of fire they disappeared. To the initiated, I reflected — to ancient soothsayers — the sight would have been vaticinatory.

‘What message do the birds foretell?’

Even allowing for that sort of thing being in his line, Murtlock’s question, put just at the moment when the thought was in my own mind, brought a slight sense of shock. He uttered the words softly, as if now gratified at being able to accept my train of thought as coherent, in contrast with earlier demur on the subject of death and killing. Even with intimates that sort of implied knowledge of what is going on in one’s head, recognition of unspoken thoughts passing through the mind — in its way common enough — can be a little disconcerting, much more so to be thought-read by this strange young man. The ducks’ coalescence into the muffled crimsons of sunset had been dramatic enough to invoke reflection on mysterious things, and such a subject as ornithomancy was evidently of the realm to which he aspired. The process was perhaps comparable with the intercommunication practised by the birds themselves, their unanimous change of direction, well ordered regrouping, rapid new advance, disciplined as troops drilling on the square; more appositely, aircraft obeying a radioed command.

This well disciplined aspect of duck behaviour must have been partly what entranced the generals, when with such fervour both of them had demonstrated the triangular formation. The evening came back vividly. Duties of the day over — I had been conducting officer with a group of Allied military attaches — we had been sitting in the bar of the little Normandy auberge where we were billeted. Bobrowski had almost upset his beer in demonstrating the precise shape of the flight. Philidor was calmer. Some years after the war — he was in exile, of course, from his own country — Bobrowski had been knocked down by a taxi, and killed. Oddly enough Philidor, too, had died in a car accident — so a Frenchman at their Embassy said — having by then attained quite high rank. Perhaps such deaths were appropriate to men of action, better than a slow decline. Aware that a more than usually acute consciousness of human mortality had descended, I wondered for a moment whether Murtlock was responsible for that sensation. It was not impossible.

‘I was thinking of the Roman augurs too.’

‘They also scrutinized the entrails of animals for prophecy.’

He added that with a certain relish.

‘Sometimes — as the Bard remarks — the sad augurs mocked their own presage.’

One had to fight back. Murtlock made no comment. I hoped the quotation had floored him. The rest of the walk back to where the caravan was parked took place in silence and without incident. At the caravan our ways would divide, if the four of them were not to enter the house. Separation was delayed by the appearance of Mr Gauntlett advancing towards us.

‘Good afternoon, Mr Gauntlett.’

Mr Gauntlett, wearing a cowslip in his buttonhole, greeted us. He showed no sign whatever of thinking our guests at all unusually dressed, nodding to them in a friendly manner, without the least curiosity as to why the males should be wearing blue robes.

‘Happen you’ve seen my old bitch, Daisy, this way, Mr Jenkins? Been gone these forty-eight hours, and I don’t know where she’s to.’

‘We haven’t, Mr Gauntlett.’

A farmer, now retired as close on eighty, Mr Gauntlett lived in an ancient tumbledown farmhouse not far away, where — widower, childless, sole survivor of a large family — he ‘did for himself’, a life that seemed to suit him, unless rheumatics caused trouble. His house, associated by local legend with a seventeenth-century murder, was said to be haunted. Mr Gauntlett himself, though he possessed a keen sense of the past, and liked to discuss such subjects as whether the Romans brought the chestnut to Britain, always asserted that the ghosts had never inconvenienced him. This taste for history could account for a habit of allowing himself archaisms of speech, regional turns of phrase, otherwise going out of circulation. In not at all disregarding the importance of style in facing life — even consciously histrionic style — Mr Gauntlett a little resembled General Conyers. They both shared the same air of distinction, firmness, good looks that resisted age, but above all this sense of style. Mr. Gauntlett had once told me that during service (in the first war) with the Yeomanry, he had found himself riding through the Khyber Pass, a background of vast mountains, bare rocks, fierce tribesmen, that seemed for some reason not at all out of accord with his own mild manner.

‘Maybe Daisy’s littered in the woods round here, as she did three years gone. Then she came home again, and made a great fuss, for to bring me to a dingle down by the water, where she’d had her pups. The dogs round about knew of it. They’d been barking all night for nigh on a week to drive foxes and the like away, but I haven’t heard ‘em barking o’ nights this time.’

‘We’ll keep an eye out for Daisy, Mr Gauntlett. Tell her to go home if we find her, report to you if we run across a nest of her pups. We’ve all been crayfishing.’

I said that defensively, speaking as if everyone under thirty always wore blue robes for that sport. I felt a little diminished by being caught with such a crew by Mr Gauntlett.

‘Ah?’

‘We landed four.’

Mr Gauntlett laughed.

‘Many a year since I went out after crayfish. Used to as a boy. Good eating they make. Well, I must go on to be looking for the old girl.’

He was already moving off when Murtlock addressed him.

‘Seek the spinney by the ruined mill.’

He spoke in an odd toneless voice. Mr Gauntlett, rare with him, showed surprise. He looked more closely at Murtlock, evidently struck not so much by eccentricity of dress as knowledge of the neighbourhood.

‘Ah?’

‘Go now.’

Murtlock gave one of his smiles. Immediately after speaking those two short sentences a subtle change in him had taken place. It was as if he had fallen into — then emerged from — an almost instantaneous trance. Mr Gauntlett was greatly pleased with this advice.

‘I’ll be off to the spinney, instead of the way I was going. That’s just where Daisy might be. And my thanks to you, if I find her.’

‘If you find her, make an offering.’

‘Ah?’

‘It would be well to burn laurel and alder in a chafing dish.’

Mr Gauntlett laughed heartily. The suggestion seemed not to surprise him so much as might be expected.

‘I’ll put something extra in the plate at church on Sunday. That’s quite right. It’s what I ought to do.’

‘Appease the shades of your dwelling.’

Mr Gauntlett laughed again. I do not know whether he took that as an allusion to his haunted house, or even if such were indeed Murtlock’s meaning. Whatever intended, he certainly conveyed the impression that he was familiar with the neighbourhood. Perhaps he had already made enquiries about haunted houses round about, the spinney by the old mill entering into some piece of information given. Murtlock would have been capable of that. Mr Gauntlett turned again to continue his search for Daisy. Then, suddenly thinking of another matter, he paused a moment.

‘Is there more news of the quarry and The Fingers, Mr Jenkins?’

‘They’re still hoping to develop in that direction,’ said Isobel.

‘Ah?’

‘We mustn’t take our eye off them.’

‘No, for sure, that’s true.’

Mr Gauntlett repeated his farewells, and set off again, this time in the direction of the old mill.

‘How on earth did you know about Daisy being at the spinney?’

‘The words came.’

Murtlock spoke this time almost modestly. He seemed to attach no great importance to the advice given, in fact almost to have forgotten the fact that he had given it. He was clearly thinking now of quite other matters. This was where we should leave them. Henderson had set down the bucket containing the crayfish. Rusty was sitting on the grass beside the trap. When Fiona handed over the gardening gloves she allowed a faint gesture in the direction of humdrum usage to escape her.

‘Thanks for letting us put up the caravan.’

She looked at Murtlock quickly to make sure this was not too cringing a surrender, too despicable a retreat down the road of conventionality. He nodded with indifference. There was apparently no harm in conceding that amount in the circumstances. Henderson, blinking through the yellow specs, simpered faintly under his Fu Manchu moustache. Rusty, rising from the ground, scratched under her armpit thoughtfully.

‘Why not take the crayfish as hors d’oeuvres for supper — or would they be too substantial for your limited fast?’

Fiona glanced at Murtlock. Again he nodded.

‘All right.’

‘They have to be gutted.’

Murtlock seemed pleased at the thought of that.

‘Fiona can do the gutting. That will be good for you, Fiona.’

She agreed humbly.

‘You’ll be able to prophesy from the entrails,’ I said.

No one laughed.

‘Bring the bucket back before you leave in the morning,’ said Isobel. ‘I expect we shall see you in any case before you go, Fiona?’

The matter was once more referred to Murtlock for a ruling. He shook his head. The answer was negative. We should not see them the following day.

‘No.’

Murtlock gruffly expanded Fiona’s reply.

‘We take the road at first light.’

‘Early as that?’

‘Our journey is long.’

‘Where are you making for?’

Instead of mentioning a town or village he gave the name of a prehistoric monument, a Stone Age site, not specially famous, though likely to be known to people interested in those things. Aware vaguely that such spots were the object of pilgrimage on the part of cults of the kind to which Fiona and her friends appeared to belong, I was not greatly surprised by the answer. I supposed the caravan did about twenty miles a day, but was not at all sure of that. If so, the group of megaliths would take several days to reach.

‘We were there some years ago, coming home from that part of the world. Are you planning to park near the Stones?’

It was a characteristic ‘long barrow’, set on the edge of a valley, two uprights supporting a capstone, entrance to a chambered tomb. The place had been thoroughly excavated.

‘As near as sanctity allows.’

Murtlock answered curtly.

‘Sanctity was being disturbed a good deal by tourists when we were there.’

A look of anger passed over his face, either at the comment, or thought of the tourists. He was quite formidable when he looked angry.

‘If you’re interested in archaeological sites, we’ve a minor one just over the hill from here. You probably know about it. The Devil’s Fingers — The Fingers, as Mr Gauntlett calls it.’

If he knew something of Mr Gauntlett’s house being haunted, he might well have heard of The Devil’s Fingers. The name seemed new to him. He became at once more attentive.

‘It’s worth a visit, if you like that sort of thing. Only a short detour from the road you’ll probably be taking in any case.’

‘A prehistoric grave?’

‘No doubt once, though that’s been disputed.’

‘What remains?’

‘Two worn pillars about five foot high, and the same distance apart.’

‘No portal?’

‘Only the supports survive, if that’s what they are.’

‘The Threshold.’

‘If a tomb, the burial chamber has long disappeared through ploughing. The general consensus of archaeological opinion accepts the place as a neolithic grave. There have been dissentient theories — boundary stones in the Dark Ages, and so on. They don’t amount to much. Local patriotism naturally makes one want the place to be as ancient as possible. The lintel probably went for building purposes in one of the farms round about. The uprights may have been too hard to extract. In any case there’s usually a superstition that you can’t draw such stones from the earth. Even if you do, they walk back again.’

‘Why the name?’

‘One Midsummer night, long ago, a girl and her lover were lying naked on the grass. The sight of the girl’s body tempted the Devil. He put out his hand towards her. Owing to the night also being the Vigil of St John, the couple invoked the Saint, and just managed to escape. When the Devil tried to withdraw his hand, two of his fingers got caught in the outcrop of rock you find in these quarrying areas. There they remain in a petrified condition.’

Murtlock was silent. He seemed suddenly excited.

‘Any other legends about the place?’

‘The couple are sometimes seen dancing there. They were saved from the Devil, but purge their sin by eternal association with its scene.’

‘They dance naked?’

‘I presume.’

‘On Midsummer Night?’

‘I don’t know whether only on the anniversary, or all the year round. In rather another spirit, rickety children used to be passed between the Stones to effect a cure.’

That was one of Mr Gauntlett’s stories.

‘Is the stag-mask dance known to have been performed there?’

‘I’ve never heard that. In fact I’ve never heard of the stag-mask dance.’

Murtlock was certainly well up in these things.

‘Do the Stones bleed if a dagger is thrust in them at the Solstices?’

‘I’ve never heard that either. There’s the usual tale that at certain times — when the cock crows at midnight, I think the Stones go down to the brook below to drink.’

Murtlock made no comment.

‘Covetous people have sometimes taken that opportunity for seeking treasure in the empty sockets, and been crushed on the unexpected return of the Stones. The Stones’ drinking habits are threatened. They will have to remain thirsty, unless the efforts of various people are successful. One of the quarries is trying to extend in that direction. They want to fill up the stream. Local opposition is being rallied. Where else will the Stones be able to quench their thirst? That was what the old farmer who talked to us was referring to.’

This time Murtiock showed no interest. The threat to The Devil’s Fingers might have been judged something to shock anyone who had spoken of the sanctity of another prehistoric site, but he seemed altogether unmoved. At least he enquired no further as to the conservation problem as presented to him. He did, however, ask how the place could be reached, showing close attention when Isobel explained. He discarded all his elaborately mystical façade while listening to instructions of that sort.

‘Is it a secluded spot?’

‘About half-a-dozen fields from the road.’

‘On high ground?’

‘I’d guess about five or six hundred feet.’

‘Surrounded by grass?’

‘Plough, when we were last there, but the farmer may have gone back to grass.’

‘Trees?’

‘The Stones stand in an elder thicket on the top of a ridge. It’s one of those characteristic settings. The land the other side slopes down to the stream.’

Murtlock thought for a moment or two. His face was pallid now. He seemed quite agitated at what he had been told. This physical reaction on his part suggested in him something more than the mere calculating ambition implied by Hugo’s story. Forces perhaps stronger than himself dominating him, made it possible for him also to dominate by the strength of his own feelings. He turned abruptly on the others, standing passively by while his interrogation was taking place.

‘Tomorrow we’ll go first to The Devil’s Fingers. We’ll reach there by dawn.’

They concurred.

‘You’ll find it of interest.’

He made an odd gesture, indicative of impatience, amazement, contempt, at the inadequacy of such a comment in the context. Then his more mundane half-amused air returned.

‘Barnabas will leave the bucket by the kitchen door when we set out in the morning.’

‘That would be kind.’

‘Don’t forget, Barnabas.’

Henderson’s lip trembled slightly. He muttered that it would be done.

‘Then we’ll bid you goodbye,’ said Isobel.

Fiona, assuming the expression of one taking medicine, allowed herself to be kissed. Henderson rather uneasily offered a hand, keeping an eye on Murtlock in case he was doing wrong. Rusty gave a grin, and a sort of wave. Murtlock himself raised his right hand. The gesture was not far short of benediction. There was a feeling in the air that, to be wholly correct, Isobel and I should have intoned some already acquired formula to convey that gratitude as to the caravan’s visit was something owed only by ourselves. There was a short pause while this antiphon remained unvoiced. Then, since nothing further seemed forthcoming on either side, each party turned away from the other. The four visitors moved towards the caravan, there to perform whatever rites or duties, propitiatory or culinary, might lie before them. We returned to the house.

‘I agree with whoever it was thought the dark young man creepy,’ said Isobel.

‘Just a bit.’

Departure the following morning must have taken place as early as announced. No one heard them go. A candle had apparently proved superfluous, because Henderson never arrived to demand one. His own responsibilities, material and moral, must have turned out too onerous for him to have remembered about the bucket. It was found, not by the kitchen door, but on its side in the grass among the tracks of the caravan. The crayfish were gone. Traces of a glutinous substance, later rather a business to clean out, adhered to the bucket’s sides, which gave off an incenselike smell. Isobel thought there was a suggestion of camphor. A few charred laurel leaves also remained in an empty tomato juice tin. Whatever the scents left behind, they were agreed to possess no narcotic connotations. This visit, well defined in the mind at the time, did not make any very lasting impression, Fiona and her companions manifesting themselves as no more than transient representatives of a form of life bound, sooner or later, to move into closer view. Their orientation might be worth attention, according to mood; meanwhile other things took precedence.