It seemed an eternity before I heard her voice.
'Hallo!'
'Ginger!'
'Oh, it's you. What happened?'
'You're all right?'
'Of course I'm all right. Why shouldn't I be?'
Waves of relief swept over me.
There was nothing wrong with Ginger; the familiar challenge of her manner did me a world of good. How could I ever have believed that a lot of mumbo jumbo could hurt so normal a creature as Ginger?
'I just thought you might have had bad dreams or something,' I said rather lamely.
'Well, I didn't. I expected to have, but all that happened was that I kept waking up and wondering if I felt anything peculiar happening to me. I really felt almost indignant because nothing did happen to me.'
I laughed.
'But go on – tell me,' said Ginger. 'What's it all about?'
'Nothing much out of the ordinary. Sybil lay on a purple couch and went into a trance.'
Ginger gave a spurt of laughter.
'Did she? How wonderful! Was it a black velvet one and did she have nothing on?'
'Sybil is no Madame de Montespan. And it wasn't a black mass. Actually Sybil wore quite a lot of clothes, peacock blue, and lots of embroidered symbols.'
'Sounds most appropriate and Sybil-like. What did Bella do?'
'That really was rather beastly. She killed a white cock and then they dipped your glove in the blood.'
'Oo – nasty… what else?'
'Lots of things,' I said.
I thought that I was doing quite well. I went on:
'Thyrza gave me the whole bag of tricks. Summoned up a spirit – Macandal was, I think, the name. And there were coloured lights and chanting. The whole thing would have been quite impressive to some people – scared 'em out of their wits.'
'But it didn't scare you?'
'Bella did scare me a bit,' I said. 'She had a very nasty-looking knife, and I thought she might lose her head and add me to the cock as a second victim.'
Ginger persisted:
'Nothing else frightened you?'
'I'm not influenced by that sort of thing.'
'Then why did you sound so thankful to hear I was all right?'
'Well, because -' I stopped.
'All right,' said Ginger obligingly. 'You needn't answer that one. And you needn't go out of your way to play down the whole thing. Something about it impressed you.'
'Only, I think, because they – Thyrza, I mean – seemed so calmly confident of the result.'
'Confident that what you've been telling me about could actually kill a person?'
Ginger's voice was incredulous.
'It's daft,' I agreed.
'Wasn't Bella confident, too?'
I considered. I said:
'I think Bella was just enjoying herself killing cocks and working herself up into a kind of orgy of ill wishing. To hear her moaning out 'The Blood… he blood' was really something.'
'I wish I'd heard it,' said Ginger regretfully.
'I wish you had,' I said. 'Frankly, the whole thing was quite a performance.'
'You're all right now, aren't you?' said Ginger.
'What do you mean – all right?'
'You weren't when you rang me up, but you are now.'
She was quite correct in her assumption. The sound of her cheerful normal voice had done wonders for me. Secretly, though, I took off my hat to Thyrza Grey. Bogus though the whole business might have been, it had infected my mind with doubt and apprehension. But nothing mattered now, Ginger was all right. She hadn't had so much as a bad dream.
'And what do we do next?' demanded Ginger. 'Have I got to stay put for another week or so?'
'If I want to collect a hundred pounds from Mr Bradley, yes.'
'You'll do that if it's the last thing you ever do. Are you staying on with Rhoda?'
'For a bit. Then I'll move on to Bournemouth. You're to ring me every day, mind, or I'll ring you – that's better. I'm ringing from the vicarage now.'
'How's Mrs Dane Calthrop?'
'In great form. I told her all about it, by the way.'
'I thought you would. Well, good-bye for now. Life is going to be very boring for the next week or two. I've brought some work with me to do – and a good many of the books that one always means to read but never has the time to.'
'What does your gallery think?'
'That I'm on a cruise.'
'Don't you wish you were?'
'Not really,' said Ginger… Her voice was a little odd.
'No suspicious characters approached you?'
'Only what you might expect. The milkman, the man to read the gas meter, a woman asking me what patent medicines and cosmetics I used, someone asking me to sign a petition to abolish nuclear bombs and a woman who wanted a subscription for the blind. Oh, and the various flat porters, of course. Very helpful. One of them mended a fuse for me.'
'Seems harmless enough,' I commented.
'What were you expecting?'
'I don't really know.'
I had wished, I suppose, for something overt that I could tackle.
But the victims of the Pale Horse died of their own free will… no, the word free was not the one to use. Seeds of physical weakness in them were developed by a process that I did not understand.
Ginger rebuffed a weak suggestion of mine about a false gas meter man.
'He had genuine credentials,' she said. 'I asked for them! He was only the man who gets up on a ladder inside the bathroom and reads off the figures and writes them down. He's far too grand to touch pipes or gas jets. And I can assure you he hasn't arranged an escape of gas in my bedroom.'
No, the Pale Horse did not deal with accidental gas escapes – nothing so concrete!
'Oh! I had one other visitor,' said Ginger. 'Your friend Dr Corrigan. He's nice.'
'I suppose Lejeune sent him.'
'He seemed to think he ought to rally to a namesake. Up the Corrigans!'
I rang off, much relieved in mind.
I got back to find Rhoda busy on the lawn with one of her dogs. She was anointing it with some unguent.
'The vet's just gone,' she said. 'He says it's ringworm. It's frightfully catching, I believe. I don't want the children getting it – or the other dogs.'
'Or even adult human beings,' I suggested.
'Oh, it's usually children who get it. Thank goodness they're away at school all day – keep quiet, Sheila. Don't wriggle.
'This stuff makes the hair fall out,' she went on. 'It leaves bald spots for a bit but it grows again.'
I nodded, offered to help, was refused, for which I was thankful, and wandered off again.
The curse of the country, I have always thought, is that there are seldom more than three directions in which you can go for a walk. In Much Deeping, you could either take the Garsington road, or the road to Long Cottenham,
