The Green Man (26 page)

‘Hallo,’
I said brightly. At that moment I could not devise any other utterance that
seemed absolutely free of irony and/or obscenity.

They
exchanged their now familiar glance of consultation, and Joyce said, ‘We
thought we’d go and have a drink in the village.’

‘Good
idea. I’m going out myself. Don’t wait up for me.’

‘Do you
want me to leave you something to eat?’

‘No
thanks. See you, then.’

While
they got slowly into the Mini-Cooper, I got quickly into the Volkswagen,
reflecting on Diana’s silence during the last exchange. I had never before
known her to be content with less than about a two-thirds share of any
conversation, however brief. And her whole demeanour over those dozen seconds
had been docile, almost subservient. Whatever had happened between those two
had had plenty of time to happen, I decided when I looked at my watch and found
that the time was exactly eight o’clock.

My
spirits, which had been improving a little, fell again sharply when I
contemplated the four hours that had somehow to be filled in. I still had no
idea where I was making for, and the mere action of driving at speed towards no
destination had the effect of emphasizing to me my anxiety to escape, which
soon started to make me feel as if I were being pursued by some malignant
person or thing. Only as if; I was perfectly clear in my mind that nobody and
nothing was pursuing me; but I have never known a powerful illusion of this
kind to be appreciably weakened by being recognized as an illusion. I had
touched eighty on the
A595,
and missed a head-on collision with a petrol
tanker by a few seconds, before it occurred to me that no speed is great enough
to permit a man to escape from himself. I found the banality of this idea
soothing, and was able to drive less furiously thereafter.

I
stopped at the George on the outskirts of Royston, ate some tongue sandwiches,
drank a pint and a half of bitter, took a pill, bought a quarter-bottle of
White Horse and drove on. In Cambridge I went into a cinema, and sat through
forty minutes of a wide-screen Western (in which, apart from much talk and
even more dead silence, one man shot at another and missed) before deciding
that I felt too tense and jittery to continue. On bad days, sitting in a
cinema can give me a curiously strong foretaste of dying, out of some
fortuitous combination of the darkness, the felt presence of unseen strangers,
the vast, unnaturally-coloured, ever-changing images, the voices that are not quite
like voices. I walked the streets for a while, counting my footsteps and
telling myself that something interesting was going to happen between three
hundred and three hundred and fifty, and that this would show everybody that
Allington was a good judge, whose predictions could be relied on. By the three
hundred and forties nothing remotely interesting had turned up, not even a
passable woman, so I settled for the stand of paperbacked novels I could see
through the window of a supermarket. The place was still open; I went in and
bought something I had never heard of by a writer whose first book, a satire on
provincial life, I remembered had been commended at the time. In the little
cocktail bar of the University Arms, I got through about forty minutes’ worth
of this too, before going out and dropping it into a rubbish basket on the way
back to my car. To the endemic unreality of all fiction, the author had added
contributions of his own: an inability to leave even the most utilitarian
sentence unadorned by some verbal frill or knob or curlicue, recalling those
savage cultures whose sacred objects and buildings are decorated in every
square inch; a rooted habit of proceeding by way of violent and perfunctory
transitions from one slackly observed scene to the next; and an unvaried method
of characterization whereby, having portrayed a person as one sort of cliché,
he presently revealed him as a predictable different sort of cliché. Oh well,
what had I expected? The thing was a novel.

On the
road again, and in the dark this time, I very soon felt panic settling upon me.
I had reason (of a sort) to feel afraid of encountering Underhill; this was
nothing to do with that, a pure, unmotivated, objectless fear that, in my
boyhood, had sent me running out of the house and across the common that it
faced until I could literally not run any more, and, later, had caused me to
read the entire contents of a newspaper aloud to myself as fast as possible
while I tapped first one foot and then the other as fast as possible. This is a
poor frame of mind in which to drive a car among traffic moving at between
thirty miles an hour and sixty-five or more on a not particularly wide road.
Each time, as I pulled out to overtake in the face of a column of oncoming
headlights or at the approach to a blind corner, rational fear seemed as if it
would drive out irrational fear for ever, to recede unnoticed and unremembered
as soon as the danger was past.

The
accident took place on a bend of the
A595
about three miles south of
Royston and four from home. I caught up with a largish car, a Humber Hawk or
something similar, which was ambling along at about forty, and started to pass
it a couple of hundred yards from the start of the bend, not an outstandingly
dangerous manoeuvre provided the Hawk maintained its original speed. No doubt
spurred by an idiot resentment at being overtaken by a car half the size of
his, its driver accelerated instead. As, more or less side by side, the two
vehicles began curving round to the left, an immense articulated lorry, chains
of red lights outlining its extra wide load, appeared from the other direction.
I had not the m.p.h. to pass the Hawk, and could not predict what it might do;
so, trusting to my memory of a road I had travelled four times a week for seven
years, I swung to the right across the front of the lorry and into the wide
grass verge I hoped very much was there. It was there, but rougher and more
sloping than I had thought. These features slowed me down, at any rate, and I
was not going very fast when I drove into the brickwork of a culvert (as I
learned later) and hit my head on something.

‘Are
you all right, mate?’ asked a voice.

‘Yes,
thank you..’

‘Well,
you bloody well oughtn’t to be. You daft or something? Double-banking on a
bend like that? Pissed, I suppose, like ‘em all.’

‘No.’

‘Flat
pissed, you must be, if you aren’t off your rocker. Yeah, he’s okay. No call to
be, but he is, so he says.’

Another
voice spoke then, but I never remembered to what effect. I know only that,
after some lapse of time, I was standing in front of my house while a car—a
Humber Hawk, perhaps—receded into the distance. I felt like a man on the moon,
almost weightless, or as if on the point of disembodiment, like myself after a
heavy night and a heavy lunch, like a child, observant without expectation,
curious and disinterested.

It was
eight minutes to midnight. Just nice time, I said to myself. Indoors,
everything was quiet and in darkness. Splendid. I went to the bar and fetched a
tumbler, a siphon of soda and a bottle of Glen Grant, took a weak drink and a
pill, and settled down in the public dining-room to wait the remaining two
minutes. I sat at a corner table in the part where Underhill’s parlour had
been, with just the one heavily shaded light in front of me turned on, out of
consideration to him. I was almost directly facing the window at which he was
accustomed to make his appearances, with the hall door diagonally opposite.
The night was warm, but not humid.

Very
faintly, I heard the church clock in the village begin striking midnight. I
could not remember whether, with clocks that do not strike the quarters, the
first note or the last signified the hour. Nothing happened, at any rate,
while the clock was striking. And nothing happened after it had finished,
either. I waited. The clock must be fast. But my own watch said two and a bit
minutes after twelve.

By ten
past I had decided that I had got the whole thing wrong, I had misunderstood
Underhill’s message, it had not been a message at all, I had been mistaken
about the freshness of the ink, he had just been seeing if I could be fooled
into keeping this appointment, he had been joking. But I was not going to give
him up yet. I sat there, unable to find any way of helping the time to pass.
Through my mind went thoughts of Joyce, and Amy, and Diana, and my father, and
Margaret, and the young man, and death, and ghosts, and drink, and Joyce again,
and Amy again. In my current (perhaps precarious, but remarkably durable)
state of detachment, all these topics struck me as very interesting but of no
personal moment whatever, like, say, the New England whaling industry in the
nineteenth century being considered by an intelligent and imaginative Grimsby
trawlerman of our own time.

I went
on not looking at my watch for much longer than I would have thought was
possible. Then I did. It was three minutes to one. Fine. To wait an hour was as
much as politeness and sanity demanded. I poured a short weak drink and sipped
it deliberately. As faintly as before, but, it seemed to me, more distinctly,
the church clock sounded, and I got up to go.

‘Stay.
I am come as I said I would,’ said somebody, somebody standing in the shadows
of the corner directly opposite the door.

‘You’re
late, Dr Underhill.’

‘Not
so, I’ve been most punctual. Now to the purpose. Have you our silver friend
about you?’

I had
not thought of this for hours, but when I felt in my pocket the thing was
there. ‘Yes.’

There
was a sort of sigh from the corner. ‘That’s well. Be so good as to place it on
the table before you.’

I did
as I was told. ‘There. What now?’

‘Now
I’ll entertain you.’

‘Before
you do, may I ask a question?’

‘Assuredly.’

‘When
did you write that note asking me to meet you tonight?’

‘This
morning, by your reckoning, the morning of the day just past. But yours was the
hand that writ, mine merely the hand that guided yours.’

‘I
don’t remember that.’

‘Not to
remember is your quality, Mr Allington.’

‘Is
that why you chose me to … assist you, or whatever it is you want me to do?’

‘How
have I chosen you, when it is you that have each time come in search of me? But
now, pray you, have done for the moment. There are many marvels in store.’

I had
time to admire the justice of my own description of the voice—sounding as if
artificially produced, with a kind of Gloucester-cum-Cork accent—before
Underhill’s show began. The room was suddenly and brightly illuminated, only it
was not the room any more, but a cave, or a cave-mouth. A group of naked women
flashed into apparent existence, in mid-performance of some sort of slow,
writhing, vaguely Oriental ballet. Their voluptuousness was extreme, and also
theoretical, like the fantasy-drawings of a prurient but talented schoolboy: enormous
breasts, nipples that in proportion were even more enormous, tiny waists,
spreading hips and buttocks, sexual organs displaced forwards into the V of the
crotch, as in Indian sculpture. There was monotonous music and a strong scent
of roses. I would have grinned at all this, had it not been for something
two-dimensional about the dancers and their movements that gave me the
uncomfortable sensation of watching them through an invisible telescope. And I
did not feel happy about the pair of red eyes, apparently belonging to some
small creature like a snake or a rat, that were watching me from farther back
in the cave.

The
music grew louder, the smell of roses became insufferable and a troop of naked
black men, of physical endowment so immense as to outdo the proportions of the
women, leaped among them with loud yells. An orgy soon developed, cast and
directed with a crudity that again might have made me want to laugh, but by now
I had noticed the pallid, glistening coils of fungus that clung to the walls
and roof of rock, and the second, larger pair of red eyes in the darkness of the
cave, also fixed on mine. By their size and position, these might have belonged
to a being about the size of a tall man. They did not move or blink.

With a
rippling, sticky jerk, as if what I saw were being magic-lanterned on to a
thick sheet of gelatin, the orgy scene gave place to an encounter between two
black girls and what I supposed was a white adolescent boy, though he was
equipped on the same scale as his black predecessors and had long fair hair
like a woman’s. This was even less to my taste than what had gone before, but
before it disappeared in its turn the girls’ faces struck me as not resembling,
even in colour, those of any black people I had ever seen—they were much more
like the handiwork of someone who knew them only from descriptions. Behind the
music, which had become lumpishly repetitive, a man’s voice, not Underhill’s,
was calling, too faintly for any words to be distinguishable, though seemingly
familiar.

The new
manifestation was two white girls making love, and went on for only a few
seconds: an outstandingly abortive attempt to entertain me. When I looked again
at the cave-mouth background, which had remained constant throughout, it was
empty. I hoped very much that I had made some grimace or gesture by which
Underhill had been able to read my discomfort; I did not want to think that he
had seen it in my mind—still less that, just before, he had come across a
buried memory of the afternoon and misread it as desire. By now the music,
abandoning, so to speak, any attempt at rhyme and reason, had degenerated into
an irregularly pulsating noise, and the smell was of decaying roses. But the
two pairs of eyes were fixed on me as before.