The Green Man Page 6

  ‘If there had been a story about a woman ghost, dressed as I described, would you have believed that that was what I’d seen?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, confounding me, and showing she knew she had.

  ‘Are you saying you believe in ghosts?’

  ‘Yes. In the sense that I believe that people see ghosts. I can’t think how any reasonable person can be in doubt on that score. That’s not the same, of course, as saying that you see a ghost in the same way as you see a real person. Ghosts aren’t there, so you can’t take photographs of them or anything. But people see them all right.’

  ‘You mean they think they see them,’ said Nick. ‘They imagine it.’

  ‘Well, not quite, darling. I would suggest that they see ghosts in something of the same sort of way as they have hallucinations or religious visions. We don’t say, for instance, that St Bernadette thought she saw the Virgin Mary, unless we’re trying to accuse her of misrepresenting what happened, or implying that she was mistaken or deceived. Unless we mean something like that we say she saw the Virgin Mary.’

  ‘Who wasn’t really there. I’d call that a hallucination. Same with ghosts.’

  ‘There’s a similarity, certainly, but it doesn’t go all the way.’ Lucy felt in her current fringed handbag, a red-and-white striped object that had no doubt come from somewhere in particular, and took out a packet of menthol cigarettes. She lit one of these as she went conscientiously on. ‘Different people see the same ghost, at the same time or at widely differing times. Hallucinations don’t seem to work like that. You can make a man have hallucinations by giving him certain drugs, but you can’t make him have the same hallucination as someone else. People can see the same ghost as someone else without knowing the other person saw it until later, and they don’t see a whole series of all sorts of other things as well, like people with hallucinations. Put a man in a haunted house and he may see a ghost, even if he didn’t know it was haunted. Give a man a psychedelic drug and he’ll have hallucinations. We don’t know why in either case, but it’s pretty certain the explanations don’t coincide.’

  ‘What do you think, Joyce?’ asked Nick, who had listened to all this attentively enough, but with no sign of feeling that anything more than the validity of a theory was at stake.

  ‘I don’t know anything about it,’ said Joyce, ‘but I think ghosts are all balls. There can’t be any such things. Maurice has been upset, and that’s made him, you know, a bit imaginative.’

  ‘That’s roughly what I think,’ said Nick.

  Lucy frowned to herself and fiddled with her cigarette packet, as if pursuing her line of thought internally.

  I had been all too right about not being taken seriously—by which I suppose I had meant causing some sort of stir. Accusations of madness or shouts of ridicule would have been preferable to these sober, sedative evaluations of my idea. ‘Well, what do I do now?’ I asked.

  ‘Forget it, Dad,’ said Nick, and Joyce nodded.

  Lucy drew in her breath consideringly. ‘If this woman turns up again, see if you can touch her. Try and make her speak. It would be quite something if you could, because there are surprisingly few really well-attested instances of a ghost saying anything. Anyway, chase her and find out whether other people can see her. That’d be worth knowing, from your point of view.’

  ‘I don’t get the point of all that,’ said Joyce.

  ‘Well … it might be interesting.’

  I found myself feeling slightly angry with Lucy. She alone had given me practical advice, which I had already decided to follow, but I disliked her bigoted reasonableness and her air of having already, though nearly thirty years younger than I, accumulated quite enough information and wisdom to deal with anything life might have in store: deal with it better than I could, too. I said in what I hoped was no more than an interested tone,

  ‘You seem to know a lot about these things, Lucy. Have you studied them?’

  ‘Not studied, no,’ she said, to rebuke me for seeming to suggest that she had taken a university course in ghosts. ‘But I have looked at the problem. I was doing a paper on the meaning of unverifiable statements, and it just happened to strike me that saying you’ve seen a ghost is one of a special class of unverifiable statements. I read a few accounts. Some interesting points of correspondence, I thought. This business, for instance, about the temperature dropping or seeming to drop before a manifestation. It’s been claimed that thermometers have registered it, but I’m not convinced. It could be subjective, a concomitant of the person entering the physiological state in which they can see ghosts. Did you feel cold before you saw this woman?’

  ‘No. Hot. I mean there was no change.’

  ‘No. My own view is that there aren’t any ghosts around here. At the moment, anyway. But tell me … Maurice,’ said Lucy, giving just a hint of what it cost her to call me by my name, ‘would you say you believe in ghosts?’

  ‘God, I don’t know.’ Until last night’s events and today’s appearance had taken on their present shape, I would have answered no without thinking about it. But I am not enough of a bloody fool to have bought the Green Man if I had heard any talk of hauntings in living memory. ‘Of course, if any more evidence turns up …

  ‘Any evidence is how I’d put it. I could be wrong, but according to me you only thought you saw a ghost.’

  That was that: the table broke up. Joyce went off to check the bed-linen. I said I would take a short nap and then go and collect fruit and vegetables from a couple of farms in the district. Nick said that in that case, if it was all right, he would ring up John Duerinckx-Williams, the French scholar who had been his supervisor at St Matthew’s, and see if he could arrange that he and Lucy should drive up to Cambridge and have a cup of tea with him, returning about six o’clock. I said that sounded a good idea, and we parted.

  It was two fifty. I had a shower, put on clean clothing and otherwise prepared myself for encountering Diana. For some reason I could not then discover, I felt sure she would turn up. I combed my hair carefully, then decided it looked too much like a dark-red wig, and worked on making it seem careless but cared for. By the time I was satisfied it was too late for a nap. Not that I could have managed one of any sort: I was too strung up. With me, this is normally an altogether unpleasant state, but fluctuating within it now was a tinge of amorous expectancy. I looked at my face in the glass. It was all right really: on the pale side, a bit red under the eyes, and that ageing division between chin and jaw at least as perceptible as ever; but physically not unpresentable. What I had against it was its sameness and its continuity, always available with its display of cheap sternness and furtive worry, always a partner to unnecessary and unavoidable questioning. Timing it just right, my heart gave one of its lurches and, following up dependably, the pain in my back, which I had not thought about since the morning, turned itself on. I retaliated immediately by making a face of maniacal relish at myself and marching purposefully out of the room. I am too old a hand to be put off pleasure by even the certain prospect of not enjoying it. What will have been, will have been.

  The pain went. I backed the 8-cwt trade truck out of the garage and drove towards the centre of the village. The engine was not loud enough to drown the horrible roaring and rattling noises from a couple of earth-moving machines that were levelling a slope beyond the back gardens of a dotted line of cottages. Here, perhaps in early 1984 if the present rate of progress was maintained, a row of houses was to be built, though I could not imagine what sort of person was going to be forced to live in them. The village itself looked as if it had been uninhabited for some weeks. A mail van coated with dust stood outside the corner shop, its driver more than just possibly in the arms of the postmistress, a middle-aged spinster people said was a funny sort and who certainly had two illegitimate children as well as an authentic bedridden mother. Everywhere else, if not actually dead, they were brooding about their wheat, dimly contemplating the afternoon milking, hoping on the whole that it would be
fine for the Saturday cricket match against Sandon, dropping tea-bags into the pot, playing with the baby, asleep. Rural life is a mystery until one realizes that nearly all of it, everywhere in the world, is spent in preparing for and recovering from short but punishing bouts of the tedium inseparable from the tasks of the land, or rather their failure to give the least sense of achievement, as it might be a lifetime spent washing up out of doors. I have never understood why anybody agreed to go on being a rustic after about 1400.

  The Mayburys’ house, a genuine-looking stone structure that might have been a converted dames’ school or primitive pickle factory, was at the farther end of the village. I drove past it, along a pot-holed road between bramble hedges, turned off and stopped on a patch of bare sandy soil at the corner of a farm track that led between fields of corn, the place where I had met Diana on two previous and unrewarding occasions. It was three thirty-two.

  In the middle distance, beyond the crops, a man hunched up on a tractor was slowly dragging some farming implement across a large area of naked earth. From where I was (and I dare say anyone on the spot with a magnifying-glass would have told the same tale), this activity seemed to leave matters as they had been, apart from the multiple ruts being made in the soil. Probably the fellow was getting nerved up, trying to accustom himself to the idea of performing some actual deed of tillage there the following week.

  His machinery was making the only audible sound, apart from the song of a blackbird with nothing better to do. I had barely started to hope I would not have time to think about things when I heard a third sound, turned my head and saw Diana approaching on foot—only five minutes late, quixotically early, in fact, by her standards: a good sign. She was wearing a dark-blue shirt and a tweed skirt, and was carrying a folded newspaper. I wondered slightly about the newspaper. When she reached the truck, I leaned across and opened the door on that side, but she made no move to get in.

  ‘Well, Maurice,’ she said.

  ‘Hallo, Diana. Let’s go, shall we?’

  ‘Maurice, don’t you think it’s rather extraordinary of you to have decided to come along after all this afternoon?’ She said this in full-blooded oral Chick’s Own style, with tiny hyphens of silence between the syllables of the hard words. To say it all while being seen to do so, she had to bend both neck and knees and also rely on my remaining twisted round in my seat and leaning deeply over towards her.

  ‘We can talk about that when we’re on our way.’

  ‘But don’t you think so? To be prepared to make advances to somebody else’s wife less than eighteen hours after you’ve seen your father die?’

  The lack of hesitancy about the number of hours, evincing previous calculation, had a point to it. I understood now why I had been so sure earlier that she would appear as asked: I had sensed that she would not have been able to resist the chance of such a meaty interrogation-session. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘If you’ll get in I’ll see if I can explain.’

  ‘I mean, most men who’ve had that happen to them wouldn’t even contemplate that sort of thing. What makes you so different?’

  ‘I’ll be giving you a full demonstration of it shortly. Come on.’

  As if only then making up her mind, she settled herself beside me. I took her in my arms and kissed her forcefully. She remained passive until I put my hand on her breast, when she promptly removed it. Nevertheless, I was sure she was going to yield that afternoon when she was ready to, and this time understood at the same moment why I was sure. By opening her legs to me today of all days, she would be being strangely responsive to my strange need, finding herself strangely in tune with this strange man—in other words, she could represent herself as an interesting person. But before she got on to being strangely responsive, she was going to exact her full toll by making me put up with her questioning patiently enough, and long enough, for it to seem that I agreed she was an interesting person. Seeming, luckily for me, was all that was going to be required, since she needed no real confirmation of her view of herself. True, but why, then, was there any need for me even to do any seeming? Most likely she was just looking forward to the simple pleasure of watching my antics as I battled to master my impatience.

  Diana had opened her newspaper—The Guardian, of course —but was evidently not reading it. When, as we approached a corner, an old man sitting in his garden came into view, she hid her face in the middle pages. Good security, and a further good sign, had one been needed, but if she wanted to avoid being seen in my car why had she just now stood by it in the open for a full minute? Other people’s priorities are endlessly odd.

  ‘Where are you taking me?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, I’m afraid there’s nothing in the love-nest line available, but it’s a warm day and there hasn’t been any rain for nearly a fortnight, so I thought we could manage very nicely out of doors. There’s an ideal spot less than a mile from here.’

  ‘Well known to you from previous use for the same general purpose, no doubt.’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Maurice, will you be frightfully annoyed if I ask you something?’

  ‘Oh, I shouldn’t think so. Try me and see what happens.’

  ‘Maurice, what is it that makes you such a tremendous womanizer?’

  ‘But I’m not. I was fairly active in my youth, but that’s a long time ago.’

  ‘You are a tre … men … dous womanizer. Everybody in the village knows that no attractive female who comes to your house is safe from you.’

  ‘How often do you think an unattached one of those comes wandering in?’

  ‘They don’t have to be unattached, do they? What about the wife of that Dutch tulip-grower in the spring?’

  ‘Soil expert. That was different. He passed out in the dining-room, David put him to bed, and she said she didn’t feel sleepy and it was a beautiful night. What could I do?’

  ‘But what’s at the back of it all, Maurice? What makes you so determined to make love to me, for instance?’

  ‘Sex, I should imagine.’

  I knew this would be nowhere near good enough for Diana in her present mood, indeed in the only mood I had ever seen her in in the three years I had known her. Glumly, I tried to run up in my mind a spontaneous-sounding remake of the standard full answer—reproductive urge, power thing, proving one’s masculinity (to be introduced one moment and decisively rejected the next), restlessness, curiosity, man-polygamous-woman-monagamous (to be frankly described as old hat but at the same time not dismissible out of hand) and the rest of it, the whole mixture heftily spiked with pornographic flattery. However, I had barely started on this grim chore when Diana herself let me off that particular hook by attending to our route.

  ‘Where are we going? You’re taking us back to the village.’

  ‘Just round the edge of the village. We cross the main road in a minute and go up behind the hill, a bit beyond where the new houses are going up.’

  ‘But that’s almost opposite the Green Man.’

  ‘Not really. And you can’t be seen from there.’

  ‘Pretty close all the same.’ A farm lorry came into view ahead and The Guardian went up again. From within it she continued, ‘Is that part of it, Maurice? Part of the thrill for you? Flaunting it?’

  ‘There’ll be no flaunting if I have any say in the matter, and as I said no one can see you anyway.’

  ‘Still…’ She lowered the paper. ‘Do you know another thing that’s been puzzling me dreadfully?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why you haven’t done anything about me until practically the other day. You and I have known each other jolly nearly since Jack and I moved to Fareham, and you just treat me as a friend, and then you suddenly start making these colossal passes at me. All I’m asking is, why … the change?’

  This was her least dispiriting query so far, at any rate in the sense that I could think of no answer, either then or later. Almost at random, I said, ‘I suppose I’ve realized I’m nearly an old m
an. I haven’t got all the time in the world any longer.’

  ‘That’s complete and utter rubbish, Maurice, and you know it, darling. You haven’t got a paunch and you’ve got all your hair and I can’t think how you do it when you drink so much but you look about forty-four or five at the outside, so don’t be so silly.’

  She had more or less had to say something on these lines, since to declare a fondness, whether sneaking or flagrant, for budding old-age pensioners would have made her seem to herself one of the wrong sorts of interesting person. But it was nice to hear it said just the same.

  We duly crossed the main road beside the dilapidated and overgrown churchyard where Thomas Underhill was buried, and climbed a twisting lane where a hazy afternoon sun came down diagonally through a straggle of poplars. Just beyond the crest I drove the truck into a turning so narrow that the hedges brushed the doors on either side. Two minutes later I took us off this into a space almost enclosed by a high bank, a rough semicircle of brambles and a sudden rise in the ground between us and the main road. I stopped the engine.

  ‘Is this it?’

  ‘It’s nearly it. There’s a splendid little hollow in the ground by those bushes that you can’t even see from here.’

  ‘Is it safe?’

  ‘I’ve never seen anyone up this way. The track peters out in those woods.’

  I started kissing her again before she could speculate on the reasons for this or whatever other facts might strike her. The only really good point about the raised hem-line is that a man can put his hand on a girl’s thigh a long way from the knee without being said to be putting it up her skirt. I took full advantage of this. Diana responded to it and such moves as enthusiastically as anybody setting out to display a contrast with earlier, unresponsive behaviour. But quite soon, using a moment when my mouth was not on hers, she said, sounding as if she really wanted to know,

  ‘Maurice, don’t you think it’s important to get some things straight?’

  I could not imagine any such things, or any things, but said, perhaps a bit dully, ‘Don’t let’s bother about that kind of stuff for now.’