The Green Man Page 8

  I realized that I would have to think of something to say to Diana, who had gone on sitting unnaturally quiet beside me, but my mind was a blank. I began to talk in the hope that words would bring ideas.

  ‘Sorry about that. I suddenly felt absolutely terrible. I had to get away from that place. I don’t know what it was, I just felt awful.’

  ‘Ill, you mean?’

  ‘Not exactly. No, not ill. Just … No, I can’t describe it, I’m afraid. Some sort of neurotic thing, I suppose. Anyway, it’s over now.’

  ‘Maurice.’ For once she sounded sincerely diffident about what was to follow her operating call-sign.

  ‘Yes, Diana?’

  ‘Maurice … tell me one thing frankly. This isn’t a way of letting me know you don’t want to have anything more to do with me in this kind of way, is it?’

  ‘A what? How could it be that?’

  ‘Well, you might have decided it made you feel too awful, guilt and so on, and so you piled it on and made it into a sort of dizzy spell as a way of saying it was all too much for you.’ (No diffidence now.) ‘Because I suppose what you really mean is I didn’t do the right things for you or something.’

  This, I reflected, from a woman who, three minutes earlier, had been showing every sign of real concern about another person. ‘Of course not. Nothing like that, I assure you.’

  ‘Because if you think I’m not good enough for you or something it’s better if you say so straight away.’

  ‘If that’s what you’re afraid of,’ I said furiously, ‘it must be because I’m not good enough for you, whatever I do. Do you imagine I make love like that every day?’

  She blinked her eyes and twitched her mouth and shoulders for a short while as evidence of internal conflict. Then she smiled and touched my hand.

  ‘I’m sorry, Maurice. I suddenly went into the most ghastly panic. I somehow got the idea you didn’t like me at all. The most frightful sense of insecurity. Women get that, you know. Well, some women do, anyway. There was simply nothing I could do about it, honestly.’

  I kissed her. ‘I understand,’ I said, and meant it. ‘But up there … you did have a splendid time, didn’t you?’

  ‘Mm. Splen … did.’ With her hegemony of sensitivity re-established, she must have felt she could afford to be generous. ‘Absolutely splendid.’

  ‘But nothing to what Joyce and I will do for you, I promise you.’

  ‘Maurice, you are completely extraordinary. One moment you’re having a dizzy spell and the next you’re keeping up the pressure to make me have an orgy with you. What makes you so incredibly sort of changeable?’

  On the drive back, I advanced a theory or two about what made me like that, never ceasing to imply that, whatever it might be, Diana and her attractiveness and fascinatingness had a hand in it up to the collar-bone. I said I would pick her up the next day at the same place and time, made her promise to think over the orgy project (I was pretty sure she had already decided in favour of it, but to say so at this stage might have made her seem interesting almost to a fault), dropped her at the corner and went off to pick up my vegetables and fruit.

  This last operation took a bare three-quarters of an hour, and would have taken only half as long but for the slow-motion of both the farmers concerned. The older of the two performed as if I had turned up to buy his daughters instead of his lettuces and tomatoes; the younger, whose top incisor teeth lay horizontally on his lower lip and who smelt a lot, treated me like a Tsarist tax official. Throughout, my sexual elation kept being overlaid by unsought memories of what had happened in the wood and by notions that in thinking about my father as little as possible all day I had behaved badly to him. The pain in my back did what it could on this side of the scales by coming up with some unusually firm and authoritative twinges.

  By the time I had driven the truck into the yard at the Green Man and sent for Ramón to come and unload it, it was twenty past six and my thoughts had homed in on drink. I had a large one—one only in the sense that I did not allow my glass to become empty before topping it up to an even higher level than before—while I showered and put on my evening rig-out. Then I looked in on Amy, who was watching a TV inquiry into householders’ insurance and who was, if anything, rather less polysyllabic than usual. My father’s absence made this entire section of the daily routine seem unduly contracted. I had a word with David Palmer and joined Nick, Lucy and Joyce in the bar just after seven, not at all looking forward to a couple of hours of work. We had a drink (I switched to sherry, my standard public potation at this hour), and very soon the first diners had reached the menu-conning stage.

  There were no difficulties, none at least that stuck in my mind. By the time I got to the third, or possibly the fourth, party, however, I found I was beginning to encounter the problem I had failed to solve on my return from Baldock earlier that day: continuing to talk constructively without being able to remember, even in outline, what had been said just before. My order-pad was a help here, but not when it was a matter of deciding what to write down on it. The bar became almost empty. Those in search of an earlyish meal had either moved into the dining-room or fled out of the front door at the sight of me. A little later again, I suggested to David that now would be a good time to have a look at the kitchen. I understood him to say that this was of course an excellent idea, but that it might make just as much sense to defer it to a later stage, rather than carry it out so comparatively soon after a previous visit. I wondered just how soon afterwards it was, and whether, while having my look at the kitchen, I had said anything noteworthy, either for its wit or for its insight into the human condition. David’s expression gave no help here. Using his special reliable voice, he said,

  ‘Mr Allington, why don’t you let me take over now for what’s left of the evening? There’s only a few late bookings tonight, and you must have had a tiring day, and you’ll be handing over to me anyway at ten o’clock. And you agreed with me the other day that I ought to have more solo time.’

  ‘Thank you, David, but I think I’ll carry on for a bit. Remember we’ve got Professor Burgess booked for nine thirty, and I want to see to him personally, after that soufflé disaster when he was here before.’

  As regards coherence, this was probably no great advance on what I had been saying for the last twenty or forty minutes; the point was that I knew what I had said, and even what David had said just earlier. I was back in control, or nearly so, without having done anything to earn it in the way of sleep or abstention, a familiar enough experience. Equally familiar would be the experience of sliding out of control again without having done a great deal to earn that, so I made a brief but violent attack on the cheese, biscuits and stuffed olives Fred had put out on the counter, and resolved to drink no more until I was up in the apartment. David got most of this, and shortly withdrew.

  Burgess, a caricature of a savant, arrived soon afterwards with his wife, also a caricature of a savant, though of a more purely learned, perhaps more Germanic, type. They had brought along a couple of friends, less discernibly erudite than themselves. As expected, they all went for the grouse—the first of the year to have hung long enough—accompanied by a couple of bottles of the Château Lafite 1955 I kept under the counter for a few people like old Burgess, and preceded by some of the chef’s admirable kipper pâté. I ushered them into the dining-room myself; the head waiter, alerted in advance, met us at the doorway. The rather low-ceilinged room, a little over half-full, looked pleasantly welcoming with its candles, polished silver, polished oak and dark-blue leather, and was much cooler than the bar had been. The sight and sound of so much eating and talking daunted me a little, but there was a certain amount of drinking going on as well: not enough to satisfy me, but then there never is.

  I had got the Burgesses and their friends settled, and was about to make a round of the other tables when I caught sight of a man standing by the window, perhaps looking out through a chink in the curtains, although he seemed to be in a slightly wr
ong position for doing this. I was pretty sure he had not been there when I came into the room. For a moment, I assumed this person to be a guest concerned about, for instance, the state of the lights of his car. Then, as my innkeeper’s reflexes sent me across the room with officiously helpful tread, I saw that the figure was wearing a short grey wig and a black gown and white bands at the throat. By now I was no more than six feet away. I halted.

  ‘Dr Underhill?’

  It is never true that we speak so entirely without volition as not to realize, even for an instant, that it is we who have spoken. But I had not had the least conscious intention of pronouncing that name.

  In leisurely fashion, but without delay, the head turned and the eyes met mine. They were dark-brown eyes with deeply creased lids, thick lower lashes and arching brows. I also saw a pale, indoors complexion scattered with broken veins to what seemed an incongruous degree, a broad forehead, a long, skewed nose and a mouth that, in another’s face, I might have called humorous, with very clearly defined lips. Then, or rather at once, Dr Underhill recognized me. Then he smiled. It was the kind of smile with which a bully might greet an inferior person prepared to join with him in the persecution of some helpless third party. It also held a certain menace, as if any squeamishness in persecution would result in accomplice becoming victim.

  I turned to the nearest table, where there sat a party of three youngish London lawyers and their wives, and said loudly, ‘Do you see him? Man in the black … Just here, there…’

  Underhill had gone when I looked round. I felt a great weary irritation at the predictability of this. I floundered idiotically on for a bit about his having been there a moment before, and how they must surely have seen him, before I realized that I could not stand up any more. My heart was perfectly steady just then, I was not dizzy or ill, and I have never fainted in my life; it was simply that my legs would not do their job. Somebody—the head waiter—caught me. I heard alarmed voices and scuffling sounds as people got to their feet. Immediately, and from nowhere, David arrived. He put his arm round me, called out a sharp order for my wife and son to he fetched from the bar and steered me into the hall. Here he sat me down in an upright-backed Regency chair by the fireplace and tried to loosen my collar, but I prevented him.

  ‘It’s all right, David, really. Just … nothing at all.’

  Nick said, ‘What’s the matter, Dad?’ and Joyce said, ‘I’ll phone Jack.’

  ‘No, don’t do that. No need for that. I just came over a bit dizzy. I must have been drinking faster than I realized. I’m all right now.’

  ‘Where would you like to be, Mr Allington? Can you make it upstairs if we give you a hand?’

  ‘Please don’t bother, I think I can make it on my own.’ I got up, not all that shakily, and saw that people were watching me from the dining-room and bar door and elsewhere. ‘Could you tell anybody who’s interested that I’ve been under severe strain recently, or some such flap-doodle? Everyone’ll think I was as tight as a tick anyway, but I suppose we might as well preserve the outward forms if we can.’

  ‘I’m sure very few of them will think that, Mr Allington.’

  ‘Oh well, what of it? I’ll be off now. Don’t worry, David. If Ramón goes berserk with the meat-cleaver you’d better let me know, but short of that the house is all yours until the morning. Good night.’

  None too comfortably, the four of us settled in the drawing-room, so called by my predecessor, though its lack of spaciousness and its pretty unrelieved symmetry made it, for me, a mere parlour or ante-room. I had never much tried to make it more than barely decent, had rather tended to turn it into a dump for the less attractive furniture and a couple of bits of statuary that had started to get on my nerves, a portrait bust of an early-Victorian divine and a female nude in some pale wood, sloppily modernistic in tendency, which I had bought in Cambridge after a heavy lunch at the Garden House and had since been too lazy to get rid of. Only my father had seemed to like the room, or at least had used it regularly. However, we would not be disturbed here.

  I told them what I had seen. Nick watched me with great concern, Joyce with concern, Lucy with responsible vigilance, like a member of a team conducting a nationwide survey of drunks who see ghosts. Halfway through, I made Nick fetch me a small Scotch and water. He demurred, but I made him.

  Joyce lost her look of concern as I talked. When I had finished, she said, ‘Sounds like D.T.s to me, don’t you think?’ in the interested voice she had used in discussing my father’s chances of surviving the current year, and, once, to suggest that Amy’s remoteness might he due to mental sub-normality.

  ‘Christ, what an idea,’ said Nick.

  ‘What’s so terrible about it? I mean, if it’s that you can deal with it. Not like going mad, after all.’

  Nick turned to Lucy. ‘Isn’t D.T.s little animals and that type of stuff?’

  ‘Very often, yes,’ said Lucy dependably. ‘Something completely removed from reality, anyway. A man just standing about smiling hardly counts as that.’

  This was a small relief, but I rather wished she had not spoken as if what I had seen was on the same level as one of the waiters wearing a dirty collar. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘what was it, then?’

  Nick drew back his lips and shook his head earnestly. ‘You were pissed, Dad. I don’t know whether you realize, but you were really droning away when you were talking to the three of us in the bar just before.’

  ‘I’m not pissed now.’

  ‘Well no, but in the meantime you’ve had a shock and that does pull people round. But earlier on you were. Oh, you were making plenty of sense, but I know the way your voice goes, and your eyes.’

  ‘But I’d come round after that. I was talking to David … Look, Nick, you go down now and ask Professor Burgess. He’ll tell you I was all right. Go on.’

  ‘Oh, Dad. How can I go and ask him?’

  ‘Go down and get hold of David and the two of you take some of the regular people aside, David knows who they are, and ask them if they saw somebody standing by the window. I’ve described how he looked, so they’ll be——’

  ‘Christ, Dad … Let it drop. Take my advice, honestly. All their bloody tongues’ll be flapping as it is. Don’t go and make it worse. You don’t want it going round that the landlord of the Green Man seems to be seeing things. Don’t mind me saying this, just with the four of us, but they all know you’re a boozer. And anyway they wouldn’t remember seeing anyone, not even taken it in. Really, let it go.’

  ‘Nick, go and get David up here.’

  ‘No.’ Nick’s face went hard in a way I had known for a dozen years. ‘No use keeping it up, Dad. It’s not on.’

  There was silence. Joyce drew her legs up under her and smoothed her hair, not looking at anyone. Lucy clicked her lighter at a menthol cigarette.

  ‘What do you think?’ I asked her unwillingly.

  ‘No investigation, of course. We know that’s out. Basically, I agree with Nick. That is, I think you’d been under a certain amount of strain, you had ghosts in your mind, you knew the story about this Underhill character, your judgment was, let’s say, impaired by alcohol, and the lighting in the dining-room is subdued, especially over by the window. There was somebody standing there, I’m quite ready to believe, but a real person, a waiter or one of the customers. As before, you thought you saw a ghost.’

  ‘But the wig, and the clothes…’

  ‘You filled them in out of your mind.’

  ‘But he recognized me, and he smiled at me.’

  ‘Of course he did. You were his boss, or else his host, and you’d just embarrassed him slightly by calling him by the wrong name.’

  ‘He’d disappeared. When I—’

  ‘He’d moved away.’

  Another silence, in which I heard Magdalena enter the apartment and go into the dining-room. I very much wanted to tell the three what had happened in the wood, if only to dissent from Lucy’s Q.E.D., but I could think of no innocent reason f
or having gone there, and anyway I had been under strain, alcohol, etc., then too.

  ‘So I imagined it,’ I said, finishing my whisky.

  ‘That’s what I think,’ said Lucy, ‘but it’s only what I think. I could quite easily be proved wrong.’

  ‘Oh, really? How?’

  ‘I could be proved wrong tomorrow, in fact any moment, by someone else seeing what you see—though it goes without saying that if nobody else sees what you say you see, that’s no proof you didn’t see it—or if you found out something from a ghost you couldn’t otherwise have known about, then that would be not exactly a proof, but it would weigh with me considerably.’

  ‘What sort of thing?’

  ‘Well, supposing you saw a ghost walk through what’s now part of a wall, say, but it was a doorway or something in the past, and afterwards you found evidence of the doorway which you’d never have found unaided. Anything like that—something in a book, or behind a hidden panel there was no other clue to, that sort of thing would certainly weigh with me.’

  Joyce said, ‘I must go and see to Magdalena,’ and left the room. Nick was screaming quietly and rocking from side to side.

  ‘Oh, ballocks, darling,’ he said. ‘What if something does weigh with you? Why don’t you leave him alone and let him forget about it? Sorry, Dad, I know you’re still here. Nobody wants to see ghosts or think they see them or whatever you prefer. Can’t do you any good, even if it is all only in your mind—worse if it’s that, in fact. As I said, Dad, drop it. If there’s nothing in it there’s nothing in it. If there’s something in it, nobody with any sense would want to know.’