The Green Man Read online

  This mild show of commiseration and its accompanying glance, which carried sympathy of a depersonalized sort, were Jack’s first non-utilitarian responses to what had happened, nor did he enlarge on them. He said good night in a high monotone, as somebody like Fred might call it across the bar, and led the way towards the stairs. After kissing Joyce and glancing in my direction, but not directly at me, Diana followed, She did not, I was almost touched to see, do any of this with the air of imparting by her silence a message more eloquent than any mere words could have conveyed. The same had been true of her earlier restraint of manner. I felt it was uncharitable of me to wonder how long this uncharacteristic behaviour of hers would last, but wonder I did. Nothing short of physical handicap has ever made anybody turn over a new leaf.

  ‘Let’s go to bed straight away,’ said Joyce. ‘You must be absolutely whacked.’

  I was indeed utterly tired out in body, as if I had been standing all day in the same position, but had no inclination for sleep, or for lying down in the dark waiting to go to sleep. ‘One more Scotch,’ I said.

  ‘Not a giant one, Maurice. And only one.’ She spoke pleadingly. ‘Don’t sit up drinking. Bring it into the bedroom.’

  I did as she said, first looking in on Amy, who was lying asleep quite unemphatically, so to speak, without the parade of concentration or abandonment I have seen in grown women. Would my father’s departure leave much of a hole in her world? I could not imagine any of the things she had said she had meant to say to him: his attitude to her had been one of uncertain geniality, she had behaved to him with something not far from a child’s version of this, a brightness that had been absent-minded and self-regarding at the same time, and they had never, so far as I had noticed, talked together much. But he had been about the place every day of the year and a half since she had come to live here after her mother’s death, and I could see that no sort of hole in a small world could really be a small hole.

  ‘Was she all right?’ asked Joyce when I carried my whisky into our bedroom, the next along the passage from Amy’s and no broader from window to door, but with more length. Standing in this extra space, she popped one of her red sleeping-pills into her mouth and gulped water.

  ‘Asleep, anyway. Have you seen the Belreposes?’

  ‘Here. Three sounds rather a lot, doesn’t it? With you drinking as well, I mean. I suppose Jack knows all about it.’

  ‘They’re not barbiturates.’

  I chased the white tablets down with whisky, watching Joyce as she kicked off her shoes, pulled her dress over her head and hung it up in the wall-cupboard. The small moment in which she stepped away and turned to go down the room was enough for me to take in the fine swell of her breasts under the spotless white brassière, in unimprovable proportion with the breadth of her shoulders and back and the spreading fullness of her rib-cage. She had not taken three paces towards the bed before I had put my glass down on her dressing-table and caught her round her naked waist.

  She held me against her with a quick firmness that belonged to somebody comforting somebody. When, as she very soon did, she found that it was not comfort I was after, at least not in the ordinary sense, her body stiffened.

  ‘Oh, Maurice, not now, surely.’

  ‘Especially now. Straight away. Come on.’

  I had only once before in my life felt such a totally possessing urge to make love to a woman, with the mind sliding into involuntary dormancy and the body starting to set up on its own several stages earlier than usual. That time had been as I was watching a mistress of mine cutting bread in her kitchen while her husband laid the table in the dining-room across the passage, so that my mind and body had had to return to normal working with the minimum of delay. It was not going to be at all like that tonight.

  Joyce was quite naked, I only selectively so, when I dragged the quilt aside and pushed her down on the bed. By now she was responding in her long, slow rhythms, breathing deeply at no more than a marginally quickening rate, clasping her powerful limbs round me. I was just about aware of an urgency that had a way of seeming infinitely postponable. It was not really, of course, and at some imperceptible signal, a distant traffic noise or a memory or a new movement from one or the other of us or a thought about tomorrow, I took us both to the point, once and then another time or so. Very quickly after that, the facts of the last hour presented themselves as if until now I had only heard of them through some distant and inarticulate intermediary. My heart seemed to stop for a moment, then lurched into violent motion. I got out of bed at top speed.

  ‘Are you all right?’ asked Joyce.

  ‘Fine.’

  After standing still for a moment, I finished undressing, put on my pyjamas and went to the bathroom. Then I looked into the drawing-room and saw the evening paper neatly folded on a low table by the place where my father had always sat, into the dining-room and saw the armchair where he had died. The triteness of these images calmed me for the moment. Back in the bedroom, I found that Joyce, usually ready for a chat at this stage, was lying with the bedclothes pulled up over her face. This went to confirm my suspicion that she was feeling ashamed, not of having made love on the night of my father’s death, but of having enjoyed it. However, when I had got into bed she spoke in a wide-awake voice.

  ‘I suppose it was natural, doing it like that, like an instinct. You know, Nature trying to see to it that life goes on. Funny, though, it didn’t feel like an instinct. More like something you read about. The idea, I mean.’

  I had not thought of this side of things until then, and was faintly irritated by her shrewdness, or what might have seemed shrewdness to an outsider. Still, it was very consoling that I was having to deal with Joyce here, not Diana, who would have been thrown into ecstasies of needling speculation.

  ‘I wasn’t faking it,’ I said. ‘A man can’t fake.’

  ‘I know, darling. I didn’t mean that. Just how it might sound.’ Her hand came back behind her and caught mine. ‘Do you think you can sleep?’

  ‘Yes, I think so. Could you just clear one thing up? Won’t take a minute.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Then I can forget about it. Tell me exactly how it happened in there. I shall always sort of wonder about it if I don’t know exactly.’

  ‘Well, he’d just been saying something about people had the right not to be disturbed in their own private houses, and then he stopped and got up, much more quickly than he usually does, and he was staring.’

  ‘What at?’

  ‘I don’t know. Nothing. He was looking towards the door. Then he called out, and Jack asked him what was the matter and was he all right, and then he fell against the table and Jack caught him.’

  ‘What did he call out?’

  ‘I don’t know. It wasn’t a word or anything. Then Jack and I, we started moving him and then you came back. He didn’t seem to be in any pain. He just looked very surprised.’

  ‘Frightened?’

  ‘Well … a bit, perhaps.’

  ‘Only a bit?’

  ‘Well, a lot, actually. He must have been feeling it coming on, you know, the cerebral thing.’

  ‘Yes. That would frighten you all right. I see.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it.’ Joyce squeezed my hand. ‘You couldn’t have done anything about it even if you had been there.’

  ‘No I suppose I couldn’t.’

  ‘Of course you couldn’t.’

  ‘I forgot to tell Amy where … that he’s in his room.’

  ‘She won’t go in there. I’ll see to it in the morning. I’ll have to go to sleep now. These bombs really knock you out.’

  We said good night and switched off our bedside lamps. I turned on to my right side, towards where the window was, though nothing could be seen of it. The night was still very warm, but the humidity had fallen off a good deal in the last hour. My pillow seemed hotter than my cheek as soon as the two touched, and formed itself into a series of hard ridges and irregular planes. My heart was beat
ing heavily and moderately fast, as on the threshold of some minor ordeal, like going into the dentist’s surgery or getting up to make a speech. I lay there waiting for it to make one of the trip-and-lurch movements it had made ten minutes earlier and perhaps a couple of dozen times during the day and evening. I had mentioned this phenomenon to Jack, who had said, condescendingly rather than impatiently, but in any case quite emphatically, that it was not significant, that my heart was merely giving itself, every so often, an extra and premature signal to beat, so that the beat after that was delayed, and might seem stronger than normal. All I could say (to myself) was that at times like the present the bloody thing certainly felt significant. After a minute or two of waiting, there came the expected quiver, followed by a pause prolonged enough to make me draw in my breath, and then a small punch against the inside of my chest. I told myself it was all right, it was nerves, it would go off as it always had, I was a hypochondriac, the Belreposes would be taking over any minute, it was natural, it was egotistical. Yes: already calmer, easier, steadier, more comfortable, cooler, slower, quieter, drowsier, vaguer …

  What was before my closed eyes was the usual shifting pall of dark purple, dark grey and other dark that was never quite different enough to be given the name of any other colour. It had been there all along, of course, but now I started looking at it, knowing what would happen when I did, but unable not to, because it was simply the next thing. Almost at once a dim orange-yellow light came up. It illuminated something that had the smooth, rounded and tapering qualities of a part of the human body, but without any guide to scale it was impossible to tell whether I was looking at leg or nose, forearm or finger, breast or chin. Soon a greyish male profile, nearly complete, its expression puzzled or brooding, drifted diagonally in front of this and blotted most of it out. The upper lip twitched, grew suddenly in size and began drifting slowly outwards, swelling at a reduced rate until it was like a thick rope of intestine. Another orange light flared up irregularly in the lower part of my field of vision and played on the intestine-like form from underneath, showing it to be veined and glistening. The face had tilted away out of existence. When the orange glow had faded, there was a kind of new start: shivering veils of brown and yellow appeared and vanished quickly, to reveal a gloomy cavern of which the walls and roof were human, but in a distant sense. No component was identifiable, only that unique surface quality, half matt, half sheen, that belongs to naked skin.

  These apparitions grew, swirled and evolved for a time I could not measure, perhaps five minutes, probably not more than thirty. Some of them were surprising, but this was always part of their nature, and none, so far, was surprising in a surprising way. They were even beginning to slacken, become constricted and hard to discern. Then a rumpled sheet of brown flesh shook itself convulsively and started to concertina in towards the middle. Longitudinal shreds ‘became distinguishable, turned olive-green in colour and could be seen as the trunk and branches of a young tree, the sort that has many stems growing more or less vertically and parallel. This was a novelty in a hitherto exclusively anthropoid universe, a comparatively soothing one. The tree-shape continued the shaking, twitching motion of the fleshy mass that had given birth to it. Slowly, its limbs and minor appendages coalesced into what— by the lax standards of verisimilitude at present in force—were good approximations to a man’s thighs, genitals and torso up about as far as the breast-bone. Higher than this, there was nothing identifiable for the moment. The various members retained their vegetable individuality, continuing as closely-packed amalgams of bough, twig, stem and leaf. I was trying to remember what drawing or painting this structure resembled when I heard a noise, distant but not unrecognizable: it sounded like the snapping of greenery and minor branches made by a man or large animal moving through dense woods. At the same time, a shift of illumination began to reveal an upper chest, a throat and neck, the point of a wooden chin.

  I clapped my fingers over my eyes and rubbed them fiercely: I had no desire to see the face that topped such a body. In a flash, literally in a flash, everything was gone, noise and all. I pretended to myself that I had heard something from outside; but I knew that that snapping sound had come from inside, again in the most literal sense. Just as I was never in any doubt that what I ‘saw’ with my eyes shut was not really there, so I knew that what I had just ‘heard’ was not real either. Tomorrow I might feel appalled at the prospect of a regular, or sporadic, aural addition to these nightly appearances; at the moment I was too tired. When I closed my eyes again, I saw at once that the show was over: all intensity, all potential had departed from the messages of my optic nerves, and the dark curtain before me stirred more feebly with every breath.

  I had now come to the outer edge of sleep. As I had known it would, jactitation set in. My right foot, my whole right leg, jerked with a local violence, my head, my mouth and chin, my upper lip, what felt like the whole top half of my body, my left wrist, my left wrist again, moved of their own accord, once or twice with the prelude of a disembodied, watery feeling that advertised their intention, more often quite unexpectedly. I was returned to momentary wakefulness several times by what I assumed to be similar convulsions, though I could not locate them, and once by a triple shaking of the shoulder so like the intervention of one arousing a sleeper that, if I had not quickly remembered disturbances as acute in the past, I might have been alarmed. Finally, images and thoughts and words came from nowhere in particular and were all mingled in some other thing that gradually had less and less to do with me: pretty dress, excuse me you’re wanted on the, you ought to realize, very good soup, if there’s anything I can, long time ago, be all very dusty, not to agree on the way he, moment she was there and the next, water with it, over by the, darling, tree, spoon, window, shoulders, stairs, hot, sorry, man …

  2: Dr Thomas Underhill

  At ten o’clock the next morning I was in the office finishing the day’s arrangements with David Palmer.

  ‘What about Ramón?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, he’s done the vegetable dishes—quite good, really, in parts—and I’ve put him on the coffee-pots. No complaints so far. From him, that is.’

  ‘Watch him over the chef’s stuff, won’t you? And the ice-cream coupes. Explain to him that they’ve got to look as good as new even though the guests never see them.’

  ‘I have, Mr Allington.’

  ‘Well, explain it to him again, using threats if necessary. Tell him he’s to bring them to me personally before lunch. Oh yes —two extra upstairs for that. My son and his wife are driving down. Is that the lot?’

  ‘Just about. There’s a bath-towel gone, that Birmingham couple, and an ash-tray, Fred says, one of the heavy glass ones.’

  ‘You know, David, I feel like driving up to Birmingham and finding those people’s bloody house and burgling it to get that towel. It’s the only way we’d ever see it again. Or putting tea-cloths and old dusters in all the bedrooms in future and making them get rid of their fag-ends in empty baked-beans tins. I don’t know why we go on bothering. Well, there’s nothing else to do, I suppose. If that’s all you’ve got I’m off to Baldock.’

  ‘Right, Mr Allington.’ David’s long, very slightly ridiculous face took on a resolute look. ‘I just want to say, if there’s anything extra or special you want done, I’d be more than happy to do it. You’ve only to say. And all the staff feel the same.’

  ‘Thank you, David, I can’t think of anything at the moment, but I’ll be sure to let you know if there is.’

  David left. I collected the cash for the bank, found and pocketed the list I had made for the drink supplier, put on my check cap and went into the hall. The char, a youngish, rather pretty woman in jeans and tee-shirt, was crossing towards the dining-room, vacuum-cleaner in hand.

  ‘Cooler today,’ she said, raising her eyebrows briefly, as if alluding to how I looked or was dressed.

  ‘But tonight it’ll be as hot as ever, you just see.’

  She acknowledged
this thrust with a diagonal movement of her head, and passed from view. I recognized in her one on whom the lives, or deaths, of others made little impression. Then Amy appeared, looking eager and rather well turned out in a clean candy-striped shirt and skirt.

  ‘What time are we leaving, Daddy?’

  ‘Oh, darling.’ I remembered, for the first time that morning. ‘I’m sorry, but I’m afraid it’ll have to be another day.’

  ‘Oh no. Oh, what a drag. Oh, why?’

  ‘Well … I fixed it up with you before…’

  ‘Before Gramps died—I know. But what’s that got to do with it? He wouldn’t have minded me coming. He liked us doing things together.’

  ‘I know, but there are special things I have to do, like registering the death and going to the undertakers’. You’d hate all that.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind. What’s the undertakers’?’

  ‘The people who’ll be doing the funeral.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind. I could sit in the car. I bet you’ll have a coffee anyway. I could look round the shops and meet you at the car.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Amy.’ And I was, but I could not contemplate getting through the next couple of hours in any company, however relaxing, and I had long ago faced the fact that I was never quite at my ease with Amy. ‘It wouldn’t be the right sort of thing for you. You can come with me tomorrow.’

  This only made her angry. ‘Oh, yawn. I don’t want to come tomorrow, I want to come today. You just don’t want me.’

  ‘Amy, stop shouting.’

  ‘You don’t care about me. You don’t care what I do. There’s never anything for me to do.’

  ‘You can help Joyce in the bedrooms, it’s good—’

  ‘Oh, fantastic. Huge thanks. Dad-oh.’

  ‘I won’t have you talking like that.’

  ‘I’ve talked like it now. And I’ll take LSD and reefers and you’ll care then. No, you won’t. You won’t care.’