Free The Sending by Geoffrey Household

back to his cage without protest. Let’s have that drink and telephone your wife to drive out and get him.’
    We found Ginny cleaning the living room—or rather playing with Meg. She was delighted and surprised to see the three of us and exclaimed at this gorgeous paintbox of a bird who was chortling away to himself as if amused by his position. I patched up Pirrone’s hand, poured out some whisky for us and asked Ginny if she had anything fit for the other distinguished guest. She could only suggest the first raspberries which she had picked that morning with the dew on them. Leyalá put his foot on the edge of the bowl, deliberately upsetting it. He liked to see the items of what he was offered, not to sink his bill into a mess of crimson porridge. Highly approving he scoffed the lot.
    Meg, fearless and curious as ever, jumped on to the table. She cannot, George tells me, see colour, but she must have been amazed at such a riot of unbelievable greys. The macaw whipped round and Meg did a vertical take-off over that formidable bill with the spring of a mongoose avoiding the strike of a cobra. I never before saw her do that, since she has no enemies. As she was about to close in for the kill I put her in her pocket, where she closed her teeth on my hand instead of macaw’s spine, even so only denting the skin. Leyalá returned to my shoulder where he remained in deep thought and then anointed my back with a remarkable turd of red and white which reminded me of squeezed toothpaste. Evidently I was being reproached all round for well-meaning officiousness.
    I asked Pirrone where the musical name of Leyalá came from. He told me that it was Basque and that the bird had been given to Concha by her godfather, a farmer who owned a slice of mountain not far from the French frontier and was something of a traveller when he was not hidden among his precipices and pastures.
    That led me to the question of how two persons from such remote corners of Europe had met and married. Pirrone revelled in telling me, himself amused by the strangeness of fate. As a young shipping clerk in Port Said he had been formally interned by the British at the outbreak of war and then released to join Intelligence as an interpreter when we invaded Sicily. He had made powerful friends, especially among members of the Mafia whom the Americans had let loose in their homeland, and, after the war, had roared ahead in the export of fruit and fruit juices. Then he and his partners decided it would be worthwhile to own a couple of small ships of their own. Yards were full of orders, but Spain could supply. So he, as the shipping expert and linguist, visited Bilbao and came away with long-lived ships and an incomparable wife.
    â€˜She brought me luck and love with it,’ he added.
    It was not long before Lady Pirrone turned up. I had talked to her at the party on the night of Paddy’s death, but otherwise had only exchanged the odd word when she stepped out of her chauffeured car to shop, sometimes asking my advice.
    She bounded on little girl’s feet at her Leyalá, swamped him with endearments and reproaches in Basque and put him back in his cage with a thrust of the bosom to which she was hugging him. The macaw did not object. The game was up. Her good Victor then burst into his story, gestures of despair accompanying the account of his drive, gestures of relief at sighting Leyalá in the tree, arms thrown open in affection to describe his meeting with me, hand shading his eyes as we spotted the bird on the coping and at last wonder, expressed as artificially as any opera star, when Leyalá planed down to the wizard.
    Concha Pirrone thanked me prettily and asked if I too was a bird lover, by which she meant caged birds. I replied that all of us, human and animal, could understand some of the meanings of the song and chatter of wild birds and added—to avoid any suggestion of reproach—that of course a tropical