The Courtesy of Death Read Free Page B

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.
    ‘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