The Green Man (29 page)

Time
went by. There was a large book-case full of books across the room, but I left
them quite alone, knowing how angry they would all make me. I had begun to
contemplate pretty steadily another assault on the drinks cupboard when the
Rev. Tom returned, in clerical rig-out and carrying a suit-case covered with
what looked like white corduroy. He seemed in top form now, toned up by
whatever had taken place while he was changing. ‘Shall we go?’ he asked me,
twitching his eyebrows and shoulders. I agreed that we should.

At past
three o’clock on a Sunday, the public dining-room was empty. We went in by way
of the kitchen without being observed, and I at once locked the door to the
hall. In quite a businesslike fashion, the rector put his suitcase on a
serving-table, took out his vestments or whatever one calls them, plus some
other odds and ends, accoutred himself with them and produced a book.

‘A bit
of luck I happened to have this,’ he said. ‘It’s not the sort of thing one’s
asked to produce every day.’

‘Good.
You can start as soon as you’re ready.’

‘All
right. I still think this is a lot of balls, but anyway. Oh
no
,’
he
added after finding his place in the book.

‘What’s
the matter?’

‘One’s
meant to have holy water for this business.’

‘Haven’t
you got any?’

‘What
would I be doing with a whole lot of holy water? You don’t imagine I keep it
round the place like gin, do you? Wait a minute—it tells one here how to make
it. You have to … Look, you don’t want me to go through all that, surely to
God. It’ll take—’

‘If it
says holy water, you use holy water. Get on with it. What do you have to do?’

‘Oh,
hell.
Okay. I’ll need some water and some salt.’

I
fetched a jugful from the kitchen and poured some salt on to a plate from a
cellar on one of the dining-tables.

‘Evidently
one has to sort of cleanse the stuff for some reason.’ He pointed his first two
fingers at the salt and read, ‘I render thee immaculate, creature of Earth, by
the living God, by the holy God,’—here he made the sign of the cross— ’that thou
mayest be purified of all evil influences in the name of Adonai, who is the
lord of angels and of men…’

I went
to the window. It occurred to me to have another look for the crucifix, which I
had vainly tried to find round about dawn, but I was sufficiently sure that,
having fulfilled its purpose, it had been taken back by its giver. Instead, I
waited. After a minute or two a very faint voice spoke to me, so faint that it
could not have been heard more than a few feet away.

‘What
are you about? Would you destroy me?’

Cautiously,
my eyes on the rector, I nodded my head.

‘I’ll
put you in the way to acquire great riches, you shall take any woman on earth
to be your paramour, you shall have all the glory war affords, or peace too, so
you but cease.’

I shook
my head.

‘I
exorcize all influence and seeds of evil,’ read the rector. ‘I lay upon them
the spell of Christ’s holy Church that they may be bound fast with chains and
cast into the outer darkness, until the day of their repentance and
restoration, that they trouble not the servants of God …‘

When
the tiny voice returned, there was fear as well as pleading in it. ‘I shall be
nothing, for I am denied repentance for ever. I shall be a senseless clod to
all eternity. Can one man do this to another? Would you play God, Mr Allington?
But God at least would have mercy upon one who has offended Him.’

I shook
my head again, wishing I could tell him just how wrong he was on that last
point.

‘I’ll
teach you peace of mind.’

Now
there was an offer. I turned my back on the rector and stared out of the
window, biting my lips furiously. I imagined myself not noticing myself for the
rest of my life, losing myself, not vainly struggling to lose myself, in
poetry and sculptore and my job and other people, not womanizing, not drinking.
Then I thought of the Tyler girl and the Ditchfield girl and Amy and whoever
might be next: deprived of the green man, Underhill would surely devise some
other way of harming the young and helpless. It was convincing, it was my
clear duty; but I have often wondered since whether what made up my mind for me
was not the unacceptability of the offer as such, whether we are not all so
firmly attached, in all senses, to what we are that any radical change, however
unarguably for the better, is bound to seem a kind of self-destruction. I shook
my head.

Across
the room, the rector sprinkled water on the floor and continued, ‘In the name
of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, by the token of the life
poured out in the broken body and blood of Jesus Christ, and by the seven gold
candlesticks, and by one like unto the Son of Man, standing in the midst of the
candlesticks, and under the sign and symbol of His holy, bloodstained and
triumphant cross, I exorcize thee…’

At that
point I heard, no less faintly than before but with complete distinctness, a
single, drawn-out, diminishing scream of abandoned terror and despair. It did
not quite die away, but was cut off abruptly. I shivered.

The
rector looked up. ‘Sorry, did you say something?’

‘No. Please
get it over.’

‘Are
you all right?’

‘Of
course I’m all right,’ I said savagely. I had had enough of this query in the
last few days. ‘How much more to go now?’

‘Oh,
very well. There’s only another couple of sentences. Visit, O Lord, we beseech
thee, this room, and drive from it all the snares of the enemy: let Thy holy
angels dwell herein to preserve us in peace, and may Thy blessing be upon us
evermore, through Jesus Christ our Lord, amen. There. I hope you’re quite
satisfied?’

‘Perfectly,
thank you.’ I assumed that what had just been done would have no effect on the
appearances, upstairs, of the red-haired woman, and was content: I had no wish
to put an end to that timid, evanescent shade. That’s it, then. I’ll run you back.’

A
couple of minutes later, I was about to get into the truck beside the rector
when Ramón came up to me.

‘Excuse,
Mr. Allington.’

‘What
is it?’

‘Mrs
Allington like to see you, Mr Allington. In a house.’

‘Whereabouts?
Where?’

‘Down
estairs. In a office.’

‘Thank
you.’

I told
the rector I would be back in a minute. Joyce was on the office telephone. She
said she had to go now and rang off.

‘Ramón
told me you wanted to see me.’

‘I’m
sorry, Maurice, but I’m leaving you.’

I
looked at her wide, clear blue eyes, but not into them, because, turned in my
direction though they were, they were not on me at all. ‘I see. Any particular
reason?’

‘I just
can’t go on any longer. I can’t go on trying any more. I’m fed up with trying.’

‘Trying
to do what? Run your part of the house?’

‘I
don’t like doing that, but I could do it if things were different, I wouldn’t
mind it at all.’

‘What
things?’

‘I’ve
tried to love you, but you won’t let me, ever. You just have your own ideas
about what to do and when and how, about everything, and they always stay the
same, doesn’t matter who you’re dealing with or what they say to you. There’s
no use trying to love someone when they’re always doing something else.’

‘These
last few days I’ve been having a—’

‘These
last few days have been exactly the same as any other few days as far as that’s
concerned. More so, I mean with your father and this ghost business and
everything, and now Amy, it would have been the time for anyone else but you to
sort of be around.’

‘I’ve
been around today, but I haven’t seen much of you.’

‘Did
you try and find me?—no. And don’t say you’ve got a job to do, because
everybody has. If you hadn’t got a job you’d make up things to do. I don’t know
what you think about people, which is bad enough, but you certainly go on as if
they’re all in the way. Except for just sex, and that’s so that you can get
them out of the way for a bit. Or else you just treat them like bottles of
whisky—this one’s finished, take it away, bring me another one. It’s only all
right for you to do things and you to want things. How could you ask your wife
to come to bed with you and your girlfriend? A little experiment, eh? Why not
fix it up? Easy enough. It needed two girls and there were two girls, so fine.
Why not? You might have had the decency to go to a prostitute or somebody for a
thing like that.’

‘You
seemed to enjoy it all right.’

‘Yes, I
did, it was wonderful, but that was nothing to do with what you’d had in mind.
Diana’s coming with me.’

I
understood now what Jack had been talking about that morning; he had merely not
been told the basic facts—predictably enough. ‘It sounds rather as if you’ve
been wasting your time with me
all
along.’

‘I knew
you’d say something like that. That’s how it would strike you: just sex. Just
sex is all you know about. But it isn’t just sex with me and her. It’s not a
hell of a lot to do with sex at all. It’s being with someone. Who hasn’t always
got somewhere more important to be in the next two minutes. Amy won’t miss me
much. I couldn’t do enough about being her mother, because you never did
anything about making her be my daughter. I’m not going straight away. I’ll
stay on until you’ve found someone to help housekeep. We can talk about the
divorce in the meantime.’

‘Supposing
I made a real effort?’

‘An
effort’s no good. And you’d soon forget to make it.’

That
was about that. I looked at her eyes again, and her thick yellow hair, not
fine, not coarse, simply abundant, with a very slight but firm wave from broad
forehead down to strong shoulders. ‘I’m sorry, Joyce.’

‘That’s
all right. I’ll always come and see you. Do you think you could possibly go
now?’

I went.
I heard the key scrape in the lock and a smothered sob from behind the door. It
was impossible to think about any of it now, except for one small part which it
was impossible not to think about, for a moment at least, the part to do with
experiment: ‘a little experiment, eh? Why not?’ Was I really capable of
thinking—inclined to think—like that about things, and about people? If so,
there might have been more to Underhill’s selection of me as his instrument
than the co-presence of Amy in the house: something to do with an affinity. I
hated that idea, and tried to suppress it as I walked slowly back to the truck
and the rector.

That
divine looked at me with more emphatic and specific petulance than usual when I
joined him. ‘Nothing of any great gravity, I hope?’

I
started the engine and steered out of the car-park. ‘Tom, I can’t say how much
I appreciate your taking time to come along here. On a Sunday, too.’

‘What’s
so special about Sunday?’

‘Well …
aren’t there things like services? Sermons to prepare?’

‘You
don’t imagine I’d prepare
sermons
for a bunch of swedes like I’ve got
here, do you? You’ve got to realize the whole sermon thing has gone now, along
with antimacassars and button boots.’

‘And
evolution.’

‘And
evolution, quite so. Anyway, I’ve got Lord Cliff preaching tonight. Not that
any of that lot will … Hey, where are we going?’

I had
turned uphill instead of down towards the village and the rectory. ‘I’m afraid
we’ve got one more call to make.’

‘Oh
no.
What is it this time?’

‘Exorcism
again. In a wood along here.’

‘You
positively
have
to be joking. It’ll take—’

‘What
were you saying about Lord Cliff?’

It
worked: I saw the corners of his mouth turn up (for once) as he visualized
whatever deeply satisfying reaction to his prolonged absence he visualized.
When we got to the copse, I handed him a cut-glass vinegar bottle from my
kitchen into which I had, without his knowledge, poured half a gill or so of
holy water. He accepted this, kitted himself up again and started on the
service with what was, for him, a good grace. I walked to and fro, looking for
signs of the green man’s embodiment and subsequent disembodiment, and finding
them: a fresh scar where the limb of an ash had been torn from the trunk, at a
point well above arm’s reach; a scattered heap of bruised leaves from half a
dozen kinds of tree and shrub. Such had been the constituents of his form here,
in an English wood; he must originally have come to birth, have first been
called into being, in some place where the prevailing vegetation consisted of
trees with rather uniformly cylindrical trunks and boughs; so at any rate, the
lineaments of the now shattered silver figure had seemed to testify. But it,
and its power, had proved remarkably adaptable to a radical change of location.

It was
very quiet and shady and sunny in the copse. The rector’s voice pursued its
slightly irritable, perfunctory course.