The Green Man (21 page)

‘That
thing may be worth a bit, we don’t know. I’ll find somebody in Cambridge who’ll
tell us.’

‘Where
are you going to say you got it from?’

‘Leave
that to me.’

As we
were leaving by the churchyard gate, a gust of wind, unexpected on such a still
night, stirred the branches and leaves above our heads. I must have sweated
even more than I had thought, because the air struck chill. At the same moment,
the light of the torch in Diana’s hand dimmed abruptly. We made our way back to
the Volkswagen by almost unassisted moonlight. Down the empty road, the Green
Man was in complete darkness, and there was no sound but that of our own
progress until I opened the back door of the car and stowed the tools. Diana, a
shifting, breathing shape, faintly illuminated at temple, shoulder and elbow,
turned to me.

‘Where
does Joyce imagine you are tonight?’ she asked, with something of her husband’s
accusatory tone.

‘If she
happened to wake up, which she never does, she’d think I was sitting up reading
or drinking or brooding. But listen, I asked her about our little get-together
idea and she was all for it. Any time to suit us.’

Diana reacted
to this, but for a couple of seconds I could not have said how. Then she came
forward, pressed herself against me and began a steady to-and-fro wriggle.

‘Maurice.’

‘Yes?’

‘Maurice,
do you think I might be the most terrible sort of kinky pervert type without
knowing it?’

‘Oh, I
doubt that. No worse than me, anyway.’

‘Because
… the moment you said that about Joyce and us I suddenly started feeling
frightfully randy. I mean as regards straight away, not just for when we have
the get-together. Is that absolutely unspeakable and depraved of me? I wonder
whether it’s anything to do with what we’ve been—’

I had
been about to plead tiredness outwardly, and blame Jack’s pills inwardly, when
I realized that nothing like that was called for. Diana’s interestingness had
started taking more and more interesting forms. In something less than a
quarter of a minute we were kneeling face to face in a patch of shadow.

‘We
can’t really—’

‘No,
let’s just take our—’

‘Okay,
yes, fine.’

In
another quarter of a minute we were at it again. I had about the least sense
possible of another person being there at all; there was a lot of wool and
other material, some cheek, some panting, some movement, some pressure, and
what was I doing. Even that was set at a distance by the lack of everything
else, for a time. Suddenly it all turned very immediate and as much as anybody
could deal with. Diana’s body lifted and seemed enormous, then sank back and
became slender and powerless again.

This
was not an occasion for lingering. I was just going to move away when my heart
gave a prolonged vibration and Diana screamed—no ladylike squeak, either, but a
full-throated yell of fear.

‘There’s
somebody watching us. Look, there, in the …

As
quickly as I could, I disengaged myself and turned, still on one knee. The moon
was less bright than it had been, but I could not have missed any creature or
movement. There was none.

‘It was
… He was standing in the middle of the road, looking at me. Oh God. Ghastly.
Staring at me.’

She had
struggled to a sitting position. I knelt beside her and put my arm round her.

‘There’s
nobody there now,’ I said. ‘It’s all right.’

There
was something awful about him. Something wrong with the shape of him. Not like
proper arms and legs. I only saw him just for a second, but he was sort of
deformed. Not really deformed, though, not the way people are. He was the wrong
shape. Too thick in some places and too thin in others.’

‘What
was he made of?’

‘Made
of?’ she asked in renewed fear. ‘How do you mean?’

‘Sorry,
I … What was he wearing?’

‘Wearing?
I couldn’t see. He was only there for a moment.’

‘What
colour?’

‘You
can’t see colours in this light.’

True,
but no matter: there had been no real need to ask. Diana had justified her
inclusion in tonight’s party; though not quite in the way I had hoped, by
seeing what I saw when I saw it. Another thought struck me. ‘Did he move at
all, make any—?’

‘No. I
told you. He was just standing there, and the next minute he’d gone.’

‘You
mean vanished?’

‘Well …
I didn’t see him go.’

‘He
must have gone pretty bloody quick to be in the middle of the road when you
screamed and nowhere in sight when I looked.’

‘Yes …
I suppose he must. Who could it have been?’

I was
trying to reason, or at least to be relatively rational. The ghost of the green
man, as ghosts were supposed to do, as Underhill’s ghost was apparently
accustomed to do, had appeared in an instant and disappeared in an instant,
called into brief being, it might be, by our activities at its master’s grave,
perhaps by the disturbance or removal of the silver figure, which must in that
case be associated with it in some way, though the one was certainly not the
image of the other. At any rate, while there was plenty of excuse for alarm, I
could see no reason for it. All my instincts confirmed Lucy’s pronouncement
that a mere phantom cannot inflict direct harm on anyone, and that (like those
Underhill had conjured up in the case of the Tyler girl) the most it can
actually do is terrify. And any terror that was not of the kind inspired by a
fly-sized scarlet-and-green bird … No, any such terror could be faced, or
could be fled from; must always be less terrible than a portable, infinitely
adaptable demon living and acting in the mind.

I
pulled myself together. ‘Sorry. Who was it? Some farm boy on his way home from
a drink. They come in pretty odd shapes and sizes round here. Anyway, he
couldn’t possibly have recognized you, so don’t worry about it. It’s … good
God, it’s nearly three o’clock. I’ll take you home.’

Like
Amy earlier, Diana went through the motions of acquiescence while making it
plain that my proffered explanation did not satisfy her. She said almost
nothing on the way back. I parked the car off the road and walked her towards
the house.

‘I’m
very grateful to you for coming along tonight.’

‘Oh …
it’s nothing.’

‘About
the get-together with Joyce—can I telephone you? What would be a good time?’

‘Any
time.’

‘Let’s
make it soon. What about tomorrow?’

‘Isn’t
it your father’s funeral tomorrow?’

‘Yes,
but that’ll be all over by lunch-time.’

‘Maurice
…‘ She rejected the shoddy pseudo-psychological question I had been preparing
myself for. That … just now. It wasn’t a ghost I saw, was it, Maurice?
Because it did vanish, I thought.’

For
this one I was about half prepared. ‘Yes, I was thinking along those lines. I
suppose, well, it could have been, granted there are such things. Rather a
funny place to find a ghost, though, isn’t it? in the middle of a country road.
I just don’t know.’

‘Then …
when you said it must have been a farm chap you were sort of trying to put my
mind at rest, were you?’

‘Yes. Of
course.’

‘Or
your own mind at rest?’

‘That
too.’

‘Maurice
… one of the things I like about you is that you’re completely honest.’ She
kissed me on the cheek. ‘Run along now. Give me a ring about Joyce as soon as
you like.’

She ran
vivaciously off, doubly puffed up, I assumed, at having got me to admit to
needing to put my own mind at rest and at the thought—unconfided to me, which
was odd—that she had ‘demonstrated a fresh superiority by seeing a ghost when I
had not. Did she now think she had really seen a ghost? What would she think if
and when Jack should tell her that I had claimed to be seeing ghosts? Never
mind; I was genuinely tired now, so tired that I staggered as if from drink
(which for once could not be) when I walked from the garage to the house.

I
washed down two more pills with heavily watered Scotch and went straight to
bed, having locked up the casket in the office. I needed what sleep I could
get, with a funeral and an orgy ahead, and, no doubt, something more.

4: The Young Man

‘Death’s an integral part
of life, after all. We settle for it by the mere act of being born. Let’s face
it, Mr Allington, it is possible to take the end of the road a bloody sight too
seriously.’

‘And
you don’t mean because we ought to think of it as the gateway to another mode
of being and part of God’s purpose and so on.’

‘Good
God, no. I don’t mean that at all. Not at all.’

The
Reverend Tom Rodney Sonnenschein, Rector of St James’s, Fareham, sounded quite
shocked. He did not really look shocked, because he had one of those smooth,
middle-aged-boyish faces that seem unfitted, even at moments of warmth or
concern (if any), to express much more than a mild petulance. In the church and
at the graveside, I had supposed him to be showing indignation at the known
godlessness of all those in attendance, or perhaps to be suffering physically;
now, in the bar of the Green Man, it was becoming deducible that he had been
merely bored. I found it odd, and oddly unwelcome too, to meet a clergyman who
was turning out to be, doctrinally speaking, rather to the Left of a hardened
unbeliever like myself; but no doubt he would soon be off to some more
spiritually challenging parish in London, and anyhow I did not proposed to see
the man again after today.

‘Not at
all?’
I asked.

‘You
know, this whole immortality bit’s been pretty well done to death. One’s got to
take the historical angle. Immortality’s just a passing phase. Basically, it
was thought up by the Victorians, especially the early Victorians, as a sort of
guilt thing. They’d created the evils of the Industrial Revolution, they could
sense what kind of ghastly bloody monster capitalism was going to turn out to
be, and the only refuge from hell on earth they could think of was a new life
away from the smoke and the stink and the cries of the starving kids. Whereas
today, of course, now it’s beginning to get through people’s heads at last that
capitalism just won’t do, that the whole bloody thing’s simply not
on,
and
we can set about changing society so as to give everybody a meaningful and
organic existence here on earth, well, we can put immortality back in the
junk-room along with, oh, mutton-chop whiskers and Mr Gladstone and the
Salvation Army and evolution.’

‘Evolution?’

‘Surely,’
stated the rector, simultaneously smiling hard and frowning hard and dilating
his nostrils and blinking rapidly, one for each, perhaps, of his pieces of
junk-room furniture.

‘Oh
well … But what I don’t quite see is why these Victorians of yours were so
keen on the idea of an after-life when they were so eaten up with guilt about
what they’d been doing in this one. They’d have thought they’d be much more
likely to end up in hell than in any sort of—’

‘Oh,
but, my dear, that’s the whole
point,
do you see. They were mad about
hell—it was going to be just like their public school, where they’d had the
only really intense emotional experiences they were capable of. Caning and
flogging and fagging and cold baths and rowing and slip-practice and a terrifying
all-powerful old man always telling you what utter shit you were and how you
were polluting yourself. They were off their heads about it, I promise you. You
don’t imagine it’s a coincidence, do you, that this was the great age of
masochism, chiefly in England but by no means confined to here?’

‘No,’ I
said. ‘An age of masochism couldn’t be a coincidence.’

‘Well,
hardly, could it? The whole thing’s absolutely basic to the capitalist psyche,
love of pain and punishment and misery generally, all the Protestant qualities.
If you wanted to be smart without being
too
superficial, you could say
that the immortality of the soul was invented by Dr Arnold of Rugby— bit unfair
on the old love, but there we are.’

‘Could
you? But isn’t there a lot about it in the Bible? And a lot of stuff about pain
and punishment in the Middle Ages? And hasn’t the Catholic Church always taken
personal immortality very seriously?’

‘Let’s
just take those points in order, shall we? There’s virtually nothing about it
in the Old Testament, which has come to be generally recognized as the more
uncompromising and more unsentimental of the two. Quite frankly, the Jesus of
the Gospels can be a bit of a wet liberal at times, when he’s not taking off into
flights of rather schmaltzy Semitic metaphor. As regards the Middle Ages, their
devils and red-hot pincers and so on represented nothing more than a displaced
enactment of what they wanted their enemies to suffer on earth. The Catholic
Church, well … Simple pie in the sky, isn’t it generally agreed? I mean, you
don’t think it’s an accident, do you, that they invariably give their support
to backward and reactionary if not actually vicious régimes, like in Spain and
Portugal and Ireland and—?’