The Green Man (11 page)

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 wrong 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.