The Green Man (14 page)

‘I was
saying earlier, your father could see if he could touch the woman he thought he
saw, or really saw—I’ve never denied that that’s a genuine possibility—or try
to get her to speak to him if she appears again, and the same applies to
Underhill. He seemed to hear his name being spoken tonight I still don’t think
it was Underhill, but your father does. In his place, I’d spend as much time as
possible sitting in that dining-room while it’s not in use and waiting for
Underhill to reappear. He might speak next time. From your point of view,
that’s logical, don’t you agree … Maurice?’

‘Christ,
Lu,’ said Nick before I could answer. (I would have
answered yes.) ‘Dad doesn’t want to sit up in the middle of the night waiting
to see a sodding ghost. That would be asking for trouble for anyone who was
doing it. I tell you, farting about with this type of stuff doesn’t do anybody
any good. Look at the shags who go in for mediums and séances and psychic
phenomena and the rest of it. Raving nuts, the lot of them. And stop being so
interested
in this thing. Dad just feels very low and a bit confused and he’s got
Gramps on his mind.
Leave
it, Lu.’

‘All
right, I will. But you think everybody goes by mood because that’s the way you
work yourself. You’re bloody bright, Nick, but on almost everything except
Lamartine you muddle up what you think with how you feel. I prefer to take what
your father says at face value. But I promise to drop it. I’m off to bed now
anyway. See you both in the morning.’

‘You
mustn’t take too much notice of Lucy,’ said Nick when we were alone. ‘She
misses the old cut-and-thrust of academic discussion up there. I’m no good to
her on that one, and the faculty wives can’t follow two consecutive remarks on
any subject. She’s all right, actually. I know you can’t understand what I see
in her, and I’m not sure I can myself, but I love her. Anyway. How are you
really feeling, Dad?’

I
hesitated. I had not until that moment thought of what I now urgently wanted to
say, any more than I had consciously rehearsed a single word of my diatribe
about death, which, it occurred to me belatedly, I had delivered as if I had
had it by heart. I stopped hesitating. ‘I feel I ought to have done more for
Gramps. I don’t just mean what everybody’s bound to feel, about wishing you’d
been more considerate and nicer and everything. I could have tried to help him
live longer. For instance, perhaps those walks of his were too taxing. I ought
to have thought about that, talked to Jack Maybury and so on.’

‘Look,
to begin with, Gramps wasn’t your patient. And Jack’s a good doctor; he knew
what was best for him. And he was a vigorous old boy; he’d have died a bloody
sight sooner, out of misery, if he’d been cooped up in the house all the time.
Don’t worry about that.’

‘Mm.
Would you like a whisky, or a beer?’

Nick
shook his head. ‘You have one.’

While I
poured, I said, ‘And the stairs here, they’re very steep. I ought to have
tried—’

‘What could
you have done? Put in a lift? And I don’t think climbing stairs gives you
strokes, does it? That’s heart, I thought.’

‘I
don’t know.’ I hesitated again. ‘It made me think of your mother.’

‘Mum?
What’s she got to do with it?’

‘Well,
I … feel responsible for that too, in a way.’

‘Oh,
Dad. The only people responsible were the chap driving the car, and perhaps Mum
herself a bit, for crossing the road without looking properly.’

‘I’ve
always wondered whether she stepped out deliberately.’

‘Oh,
Christ. With Amy holding her hand? She’d never have risked anything happening
to Amy. And why should she? Knock herself off, I mean.’

‘That
bit’s obvious. Thompson letting her down.’ Thompson was the man for whose sake
Margaret had left me, and who had told her, four months before her death, that
he was not after all going to leave his wife and children and set up a home
with her.

‘That’s
Thompson’s headache, if it’s anybody’s, which I don’t believe.’

‘I
ought to have tried to stop her going.’

‘Oh,
balls. How? She was a free agent.’

‘I
ought to have treated her better.’

‘You
treated her well enough for her to stay with you for twenty-two years. This is
a load of crap, Dad. What’s bothering you isn’t that you were in any way
responsible for her death, but that she died. Same with Gramps. Both those
things remind you that you’ll be going the same way yourself one of these days.
I know you’ll hate me taking a leaf out of Lucy’s book, but that is
egotistical. Sorry, Dad.’

‘Okay.
You may be right.’ He was certainly right about the first part of it—the small
but permanent despair, and the illogical feeling of dread, that come from
having spent so many years with a dead woman, talked, met people, gone to
places, eaten, drunk with her, most of all (of course) made love to her, and
had children by her. Even now I woke up three or four mornings a week assuming
that Margaret was still alive.

‘How’s
Amy?’ asked Nick. ‘From the look of her…’

I
stopped listening as I heard, or thought I heard, a rustling noise at ground
level outside the house, near the front door. I jumped up, ran to the window
and looked out. The overhead lights were still on, showing walls, flowerbeds,
road and verges as colourlessly empty as if nobody had ever been near them. The
noise had stopped.

‘What’s
up, Dad?’

‘Nothing.
I thought I heard someone at the front door. Did you hear it?’

‘No.
Are you all right?’ Nick looked warily at me.

‘Of
course.’ It disturbed me that what I might or might not have heard, and
identified, had happened immediately at the mention of Amy. I had no idea why I
made this connection. I tried to think. There’s … been some talk of a burglar
in the district. You were saying.’

‘Did
you see anything?’

‘No. Go
on.’

‘All
right. I was just wondering how Amy feels about Mum’s death these days.’

‘I
suppose at that age you forget a lot quite quickly. You put things behind you.’

‘But
has she? What does she say about it?’

‘We
haven’t gone into any of that.’

‘You
mean you haven’t discussed it with her at all? But surely—’

‘You
try asking a kid of thirteen how she feels about having her mother knocked down
and killed in front of her eyes.’

‘No,
you
try.’ Nick stared at me. ‘Look, Dad, for some reason you’ve got death on
the winkle. That’s all right with me, as long as you keep it as a sort of
hobby. But one can’t afford to let a hobby get out of hand, so that it stops
you paying attention to what’s really important. You must talk to Amy about
this business. I’ll set it up for you if you like. We could all—’

‘No,
Nick. Not yet. I mean give me a chance to think about it first.’

‘Sure.
But I’m going to bring it up again, if that’s all right. Or even if it isn’t
all right, actually.’

‘It is
all right.’

Nick
got up. ‘I’m buggering off now. I’m afraid I haven’t been much use to you
today.’

‘Yes
you have. Thank you for coming down, and for staying.’

‘A
breeze. I’m afraid I’ve spent most of the time telling you what to do and what
not to do.’

‘I
probably need that.’

‘Yes,
you do. Good night, Dad.’

We
kissed and he went. I drank more whisky. The items on my personal agenda seemed
impossibly many and varied. For a time I walked about the room and stared at
each of the sculptures in turn. They suggested nothing to me, and I found I
could not imagine what I had ever seen in any of them, whether as works of art
or as quasi-people. I heard a scratching at the door and let Victor in. He
bounded past me, impelled perhaps by the fragments of some memory of having
been disturbed by Nick’s passing within earshot. I stooped down and began to
stroke him; he strained against my hand, purring like an old-fashioned and not
very distant motor-bike. When I settled in my reading-chair by the bookshelves,
he joined me, and made no objection to my using his back as a desk. The book I
opened on him was the Oxford text of Matthew Arnold’s poems. I tried to read
‘Dover Beach’, which I had often thought an acceptable, if rather prettified,
account of life in general. Tonight I found something too easy in its stoicism,
and that

darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where
ignorant armies clash by night,

supposed such a grim and
realistic contrast to dreams of romance, sounded quite an interesting,
worth-while area to find oneself in. I made a second attempt at the poem, but
this time could not follow its argument for more than a line together.

After a
little more whisky, I put the book and Victor down and walked about the room
again. Father, Joyce, Underhill, Margaret, the wood creature, Amy, Diana: a
novelist would represent all these as somehow related, somehow all parts of
some single puzzle which some one key would somehow unlock. As it were.
One—thousand—two—thousand—three— thousand—four—thousand—five—thousand—six … If
nothing whatever happened before I reached a hundred, or better say two
hundred, or two hundred and fifty would be a nice round number—then Joyce and I
would end up with a good marriage and we would both be all right with Amy. How
the first part of this hope fitted in, or failed to fit in, with the orgy
project—nineteen—thousand—twenty-—thousand— twenty-one—thousand—I had no idea,
and did not want to have one, and I was not much better informed about what the
fulfilment of the second half would feel like. I poured more whisky-thousand—twenty-nine—thousand—thirty…

…
thousand—eighty-seven—thousand—eighty-eight—thousand … I was
slowly but efficiently climbing the stairs up to the apartment. In my right
hand was an empty glass, the one I had been using for some time; the little
finger of my left hand was pressed against the palm, the other four digits
stiffly extended. This meant a total of nearly five hundred thousand, the
equivalent of over four minutes, or, assuming I had passed that total and was
counting back towards the thumb, seven hundred thousand, or, of course, fifteen
hundred thousand (over twenty minutes) or seventeen hundred thousand, or more.
I stopped counting. I was going up to bed, but where had I been?

My
watch said ten to two. I had been downstairs for a period I could not after all
measure, and could not even estimate as between half an hour or less and about
two hours. Altogether, the dining-room was a good bet. I went back, opened its
door and turned on the lights. In my late-night wanderings round the house, I
remembered having seen it plenty of times like this, and must in fact have seen
it more often still: the heavy silk curtains drawn, the tall chairs neatly
grouped in their twos and fours and sixes, most of the tables bare, those by
the window laid for breakfast, the whole place looking as permanently empty as the
exterior view I had had earlier from the upstairs dining-room. However, I felt
certain that this was the first time tonight I had seen what I now saw.

Feeling
certain of that kind of thing is very far, in cases like mine, from being
certain. I went quickly round the tables, examining them, with the
self-directed sleuthing technique I had developed over the years, for traces of
my own occupancy, like disarranged cutlery or a napkin unfolded to serve as a
mat for my glass—I could never be (had so far never been) so drunk as to put it
down on polished wood. Everything was in meticulous order, which proved either
my absence or my assiduity in concealing my presence, and no more. Had I been
here until just now? It seemed probable that I had, but no more probable than
when I had thought it on the stairs. Had anything happened here? Yes; I felt
certain, I almost was certain, that something had. What sort of thing? Something
… unusual, something not only interesting in itself, but opening further
possibilities. Was I ever to know what it had been?

3: The Small Bird

I had my answer the next
morning. The first half-hour of the new day deserved to be forgotten at once. I
had slept well enough for five and a half hours, without dreaming; I never
dream, have not done so since I was a boy and can hardly remember what it was
like. But I woke up with my heart going so irregularly that it seemed to have
forgotten its business and to be treating each pulsation as a new problem that
must be solved on its merits. The pain in my back lost no time in setting up an
accompaniment. As I lay there beside Joyce, who as always made no sound and
moved only in breathing, I reflected that neither heart nor back had drawn
attention to themselves for several hours before I went to bed, and that Jack
Maybury had more than once told me to arrange for plenty of things to be
happening in my environment and then see if I was troubled physically. Well, he
had a sort of case in point. Now, certainly, lying awake in near-darkness, I
was shut up with myself in the smallest possible box.