The Green Man (19 page)

I
splashed to my feet and looked more closely. The thing was still a bird: I
could see the sheen on its plumage and, by straining my eyes, the separate
claws of its feet, and I could just hear a tiny beating of wings. I put my hand
out to grab it, and it disappeared for a moment, then came into view again,
flying out of the back of my hand. I picked up my towel, rolled it into a ball
and screamed into it with my eyes shut for perhaps two minutes. When I opened
them again, the bird had gone. I whimpered and sobbed into the towel for
another two or three minutes, then dried myself with it as quickly as possible,
counting in my head, and ran to the bedroom. If I could get dressed before I
had reached four hundred and fifty thousand, I would not see the bird again,
or not for some time. I kept my eyes shut whenever I could, and got my evening
bow tied without once having to open them, but had to look at myself in the
glass to do my hair, and caught sight of a small fly circling silently round my
head. Although I was absolutely certain it was only a fly, I found I could not
stop myself falling on to the bed and screaming and sobbing into my pillow for
a time, still counting. I gave myself an extension of a hundred thousand for
that period, which was fair, because I had not allowed for it when I set my
original figure, and it could not have gone on for less than a minute and a
half. I had my dinner-jacket on and was out of the door at the count of four
hundred and twenty-seven thousand, so that there was a chance I would not see
the bird again for a time.

I had
no trouble getting to the landing with one eye shut and the other mostly shut.
Here I ran into Magdalena, and sent her off to find Nick, or, failing him,
David. Then I went back into the dining-room, mainly by feel, sat down,
avoiding the chair that faced the front window, and, kept both eyes shut. After
less than a minute, I heard hurrying footsteps and opened my eyes again; I
stopped counting, which I had gone on doing with no particular purpose in mind.
By now I was breathing normally.

Nick hurried
in with Jack Maybury. They both looked concerned, Nick in Nick’s way, Jack
professionally, but with no hint of censoriousness. He came close and peered at
me.

‘What’s
the trouble, Maurice?’

‘I saw
something.’

‘Not
more ghosts?’ He glanced at Nick and then back at me. ‘I’ve been hearing about
your encounters with the spirit world.’

‘Why
are you here, Jack?’

‘I
dropped in for a drink on the way back to my surgery. Just as well, it appears.
Nick, would you ring Diana and tell her I’ll be late?’ He gave the number and
Nick went. ‘Now, Maurice, let’s have your story,’ he went on, gently for him.

I told
him enough about the green man, and about the woman’s screams, and that Amy had
said she had heard them too. I did not mention the other noise we had both heard.

‘So you
think Amy shared your experience, or part of it? I see. When was this? I see.
But there’s more, is there?’

‘Yes. I
saw a bird flying round the bathroom. Very small, it was.’ At this point I
began sobbing again. ‘But it was flying like a big bird. Beating its wings
slowly. It went away quite soon. I’d had a big drink not long before, because I
was so relieved that Amy had heard the screams, that somebody else as well as
me had, I mean. I expect that had something to do with it.’

‘Well,
possibly, yes, but it’s a much longer-term thing than that. You need a slow
build-up normally.’

‘I
suppose it was…’

‘It
does sound like a little D.T., certainly, whereas your wooden chap on the whole
doesn’t much. Have you had that sort of dream before, Maurice?’

‘I told
you, it wasn’t a dream. I never dream.’

‘Couldn’t
you just have nodded off in your chair? Surely you—’

‘No, I
saw it.’

‘All
right.’ He started to take my pulse.

‘What
will that tell you?’

‘Very
little, probably. Still sweating a lot?’

‘Not
today.’

‘Had
the shakes at all?’

‘No
more than usual.’

‘Right.
Now, whatever you see in this way can’t harm you. I can understand your being
frightened by these things, but try to remember that that’s as much as they can
do. Delirium tremens is a warning, not a disaster in itself, and we can deal
with it. It’s usually brought on by emotional strain, plus drink, of course,
and I’d put all this down to your father’s death. I think these ghosts of yours
were a sort of prelude to the business in the bathroom, and your general idea
that there are sinister and hostile characters around is very common in these
cases. Are you with me?’

‘In the
sense that I understand what you mean, yes.’

‘Okay.
What you need is some time off. Now, young David’s a very competent lad, and
Joyce—’

‘I’m
not going inside, Jack.’

‘It’s
not
inside,
for Christ’s sake. It’s a nursing home that deals with all
sorts of things, with a very nice—’

‘I’m
not going. There’s too much to see to here. I’ve got my father’s funeral
tomorrow, for one thing. Later, perhaps. You’ve got to tide me over. Tell me
what I …‘ I heard returning footsteps and speeded up. ‘Keep your mouth shut
and get me some pills. There are pills, aren’t there?’

Nick
came in.

‘Of a
sort. All right. But I disagree.’ Jack turned to Nick. ‘Okay?’

‘Yes.
Sorry, it was engaged all the time.’

‘Yes, I
know. Well, the verdict on your father is that he’s been hitting the bottle a
bit too hard. So he’s going to cut it down, with medical help.’

‘Cut it
down, hell,’ I said. ‘I shan’t want another drink for the next fifty years.’

‘No,
Maurice. That’s the surest way to, uh, run into trouble. You’re to cut down
your intake by half in the first instance, and I mean half, not more. Take
things as easy as you can. Lean on young David. And talk to Nick and Joyce
about this. That’s medical advice. Well, I’m not going to be as late as I
thought. Nick, if you like to pop round in about half an hour there’s some
stuff for him I’d like you to pick up, if you would. Ring me any time you like,
Maurice. This’ll pass off in a couple of days, provided you do as I say.
Goodbye now.’

‘I’ll
see you out, Jack,’ said Nick.

‘Oh,
there’s no … All right. Thanks.’

As soon
as they had gone, I shut my eyes. Just a precaution: I was already feeling
better, or less bad. Except under the immediate threat of death, life can never
be only one thing. Bird or no bird, I was going to pick up Diana later and find
out what Underhill had had buried with him. The doing of that would probably be
frightening, but so much the better. I would not be able to be frightened of
seeing the bird while I was frightened of what might happen in the graveyard.

Nick
came back and pulled up a low chair next to mine.

‘He
didn’t drop in by chance, Nick, did he?’

‘No. I
asked him to. Just as well, as he said.’

‘What
did you ask him a minute ago?’

‘Whether
he thought you were going off your head. He said some things did point that
way, but on the whole he thought not.’

‘Well,
that’s cheering, I must say.’

‘What’s
wrong, Dad? I mean really wrong.’

‘Nothing.
Hitting the bottle. You heard all that. Jack’s a terrible puritan about drink.
It’s his way of—’

‘Balls.
With the greatest disrespect along with a lot of respect, balls. You’ve
decided not to tell me. And you think that’s pretty marvellous of you. Heroic sensitive
Maurice Allington keeps his mouth shut as to what’s weighing on his heroic
sensitive soul. But it isn’t like that. You’re just too lazy and arrogant and
equal to everything (you think) to take the trouble to notice people like your
son, and your wife, and deem them bloody well worthy of being let into the
great secret of how you feel and what you think about everything, in fact what
you’re like. Sorry, Dad, it wasn’t the time to say it, I know, but there’s
nothing good about being self-sufficient except over things that don’t matter
or when you’ve got to be because there just isn’t anybody else around, but that
isn’t so in your case—it’s bad that
you
don’t depend on other people,
especially the ones that depend on you. I can see you’re feeling rotten, but if
anything really crappy happened and it could have been prevented by you telling
someone like me, or Joyce, what was going on beforehand, then you’d only have
yourself to blame, or rather I’d blame myself too for not going on at you about
it. Which I’ll stop doing now, but I’ll go on with it when you’re feeling
better. Sorry, Dad. Forget it for now.’ He put out his hand and I gripped it.
‘You just say how you want things to be this evening, and I’ll see to it that’s
how they are.’

I
stated some vague preferences about everything being normal, and about perhaps
a look at television. Without giving any reason, Nick said that he would move
the (family, non-Amy) set from the drawing-room, where it spent nine-tenths of
its time, and plug it into its sockets here in the dining-room. He did all
that, and shortly afterwards went off to pick up my pills at Jack’s, leaving me
watching, rather in Amy style, a programme about rehousing schemes in (I think)
Salford.

As soon
as Nick had gone, I picked up a hammer, a chisel and some sort of steel bar
from the tool-box in the utilities cupboard, collected a couple of torches from
their drawer in the office, went outside to the hut where the very idle and
disagreeable old man (all I could get) whom I paid to do the gardening spent
his time drinking tea and, no doubt, pulling his wire, found a spade showing no
signs of recent use and stowed all these implements in the back of the
Volkswagen. Doing this cheered me, and also helped me considerably to shove
beneath the surface of my mind any question of what the hell I thought I was
doing. It must have been at about this point, in fact, that I became finally
committed to following the Underhill thing through, in the sense that
afterwards I never once considered turning back until it was too late.

Another
distraction, of course, was the problem of how to introduce to Joyce the topic
of the orgy project. I was determined to talk her into this with the least
possible delay, without at the same time having any idea at all about how to
start, or how to go on either. If other things had been normal, to get, or
seem, very drunk might have looked like an obvious preliminary, but getting so
would not do now, seeming so would quite probably not fool Joyce, who knew me
well, at least in such areas as this, and neither was likely to make the right
impression, whatever that might be. I turned it all over in my mind while,
accompanied by David, I made a sketchy round of bar, kitchen and dining-room,
but could think of no solution. This did not worry me, perhaps because before I
started I had opened Jack’s package and swallowed two parti-coloured transparent
cylinders containing some sort of coarse brown powder and very roughly
resembling dolls’ egg-timers. I would have to trust to the inspiration of the
moment, in other words put my head down and charge full tilt.

The
moment came shortly before nine o’clock, after I had had a desultory chat with
Amy in her room and come upon Joyce and Nick in the dining-room. No sooner had
I mixed myself a water and Scotch—ten to one—and given Joyce a glass of Tio
Pepe than Nick said, staring at me rather, that he felt like going down to the
bar for a bit and would see us at dinner.

Joyce
asked me how I was and I soon satisfied her curiosity, which had not seemed to
be of the burning sort in the first place. Then I said,

‘I ran
into Diana this afternoon, on my way back from Cambridge.’

‘Ran
into her?’

‘She
was just coming out of the post office as I went by, so I stopped and gave her
a lift. She had a shopping-bag or so.’

‘And?’

‘Well,
it was all rather curious. Would you say she got tight at all? I don’t mean on
my scale, but at all?’

‘No.’

‘No,
neither would I, but she did seem a bit tight this afternoon. Or something,
from the way she went on. Anyway, she started saying how marvellously
attractive she thought you were, wonderful colouring, terrific figure and
everything, so much so that it began to dawn on me that she wasn’t just paying
compliments, she had something particular in mind. So, after a bit it all began
to come out.’

‘Go
on.’

‘She
went into a great kind of thing about how dull life was in Fareham, for people
like her and you and me, and of course I agreed with that, and how we ought to
do something about it, get some excitement from somewhere. Such as where? Well,
what was wrong with the idea of the three of us having a little romp together?’
Joyce said nothing, so I went on, ‘She meant all going to bed. I thought she
was joking at first, but evidently not. I said I wasn’t sure I could satisfy two
ladies all by myself, and she said I needn’t worry, that wouldn’t be necessary.

‘What
did she mean?’

‘Well,
I suppose she meant, in fact I’m sure she meant you and she could have fun
together between times. It would be all sort of mixed.’