The Green Man (15 page)

I
embarked on the tedious drills of getting up, all those dozens of actions that
seem to carry no more meaning than a religious ritual performed by one who has
forgotten its significance. Shaving in the bathroom, I discovered a new pimple
at the side of my chin. From time to time, I still suffer one of these
unengaging advertisements of the fact that losing the nicer parts of being
young—whatever they may be—by no means guarantees the loss of the nastier parts.
This particular example, in as flourishing a state as if it had been there for
days, was too cunningly deep-seated for me to be able to nick off its top with
my razor, nor, of course, could I have squeezed it out except at the price of
messing up about a tenth of my face.

‘Instructions
to a pimple,’ I said to myself as I worked on my upper lip. ‘One. Acquire head
as
slowly as possible.
Exception: if can arrange first appearance after six
p.m., reverse this procedure. Prominent head viewed for first time morning
after party, etc., valuable aid nullifying in retrospect subject’s subtle
seduction moves, gay fund of anecdotes, etc. Two. Select site either
where
squeezing painful,
e.g. round eye, cheek near nose, or
where skin too
soft for efficient squeezing,
e.g. between mouth and chin, at side of neck
(if latter, prefer area where shirt-collar will rub). Three. Appear
in
combination,
near existing pustule(s). If none, take as focal point patch
of broken veins, mole, birthmark, anything a-bloody-tall, in fact’ —I was
talking aloud now, though not loudly— ’which will aid the impression that some
major skin disorder is about to break out of its beachhead and overrun every
visible square inch up to the hairline, and be sure to pick a day when the poor
sod’s meeting his girl,’ I finished not so not loudly, after a small
disjunctive voice in my head had asked me whether I knew I had some frightfully
funny sort of
spot
thing on my chin.

Things
failed to pick up much in the kitchen, where I stood drinking coffee, eating a
piece of toast and listening and looking while the chef told and showed me how
badly Ramón had done his cleaning job the previous day. I put David on to that,
on to everything else for the next six or eight hours too, and was off, at any
rate as far as the office. Here I put a call through to John Duerinckx-Williams
in Cambridge. For my present purpose, or indeed for any other I might have
there, he was the only possibility among the dozen or so university people I
knew otherwise than as guests at my house; I would not have asked any of those
I had known as an undergraduate there, back in the mid-1930s, to tell me the
time, let alone to help me with what must seem outlandish inquiries.

Despite
everything the St Matthew’s porter could do, I finally got hold of
Duerinckx-Williams, who said he would see me at eleven o’clock. I was just
about to go and find Joyce and tell her something of my plans for the day, when
I caught sight of the cheap folio notebook in which I, and she and David too,
used to scribble down reminders and messages. The left-hand pages were folded
round against the back cover; on the topmost right-hand page there was some
stuff about meat in David’s hand, then, in my own, information in overwhelming
detail, almost amounting to a
curriculum vitae,
from a London art
dealer who had finally cancelled his booking and rung off abruptly when I told
him we had no TV in the bedrooms. But that had been last week, ten days ago.
Then I started to read something I thought at first I had never seen before,
but soon realized I must have, because I had written it myself, at whatever
hour of whichever night and however drunkenly. It ran:

‘Accent
like west of England with bit of Irish. Voice wrong, artificial. Something
funny about movement, as if behind glass. ?no air displacement. Could not
touch. Did not see hand going through, was like hand still
 in front of h
 between
him and me even tho hand stretched out and he less than foot away.
 Could
not ask
 Still ‘injaynious’ ? =poss[ess]ed of intelligence. No answer
where.
Proof.
Behind head, body about 3” by 1½, silver, arms out, left
hand missing, smiling.
Wanted to’

With
what I might term shallow alcoholic amnesia, a man can be quite easily reminded
of what he has temporarily forgotten. The deeper sort blots out memory beyond
recall. This was the case here: I was prepared to believe that I had conversed
with Thomas Underhill’s ghost last night, but I would never know what it had
been like to do so. I might do better next time; it seemed to me there was
going to be a next time. If so, I must try to clear up some obscurities:
exactly what, for instance, the ‘proof’ of Underhill’s survival after death was
supposed to prove, and also what it might consist of. The idea that he had been
carrying or wearing some kind of giant silver brooch ‘behind his head’ was
unhelpfully bizarre; I recognized that, like most of those whose midnight
selves write notes to their daytime selves, I had thought some vital points too
obvious and memorable to be worth the trouble of recording. At a future
meeting, too, I might establish whether my account of trying to touch what I
had seen and heard was a brilliant attempt to describe the indescribable or a
straightforward result of drunken uncertainty about relative distances. Other
questions could be cleared up at once, such as why I had written on a past
page of the notebook—to conceal my story from others —and why I had
nevertheless propped the book open at that place—not to conceal it from myself:
a reconstruction almost too plausible to be likely.

I
hurried upstairs and met Joyce on the landing. At first, she put on a
not-speaking act, presumably by way of showing me how much she wanted me to
talk to her, but soon abandoned this.

‘What’s
happened?’ she asked, looking me over.

‘Happened?
How do you mean?’

‘You’re
all sort of excited. Charged up.’

It was
true. Ever since receiving my own message, I had been mounting on a spiral of
elation and disquiet, a state I was not used to. I suppose I was equally
unfamiliar with the prospect of setting off to do something of which the end
was unforeseeable. I could not even remember when I had last felt in any way
strung up, as now, for a reason—not a very full or clear reason, certainly, but
one with a sense of adequacy about it.

I
decided to play all this down. ‘Really? I must say I don’t notice it
particularly. Standard awful to bloody awful is how it feels from here.’

‘Oh,
all right. What are you going to Cambridge for?’

‘To
look up some stuff about the house, as I said.’

‘How
can that take all day?’

‘It
might not, as I said. It depends how soon I find what I’m looking for.’

‘You’re
not, you know, meeting anybody there, are you?’

‘I’m
going to see Nick’s old supervisor, yes, but not anybody in the sense you
mean.’

‘Mm.
What’s Nick going to do all the time?’

‘He can
please himself. He’s brought some of his university stuff along. Or he could do
something with Amy.’

‘Why
don’t you take them both with you into Cambridge? There’s a lot more there they
could—’

‘I’d
have to hang about waiting for them, and I told you I might be coming more or
less straight back. Anyway, I’m going on my own.’

‘Oh,
all right. You know Lucy’s off this morning?’

‘She’ll
be here again tomorrow for the funeral. But say goodbye to her for me if you
like.’

‘Do you
want me to do the wages and stamps and things?’

‘Would
you? I must be off.’

I took
a quick and fairly small nip in the still-room and was soon belting up the
A595
in the Volkswagen. It was a genuine hot day, with the humidity down for
once and the sunshine unfiltered by haze. Vehicles flashed and glistened as
they moved, their bare metal seemingly burnished, their paintwork sheened with
oil. They hurtled past me in the opposite direction, swung into and out of
corners ahead, pulled aside to overtake as if with an extra dash, like actors
conscious of appearing against an advantageous background. Even in the deep
shadows of the trees lining the road, individual branches and clusters of
leaves and patches of soil reflected light with an intensity, and yet with a depth
of colour, that I was used to seeing only in Alpes-Maritimes. In the middle
distance, refraction-mirages, illusory strips of still water lying across the
road, constantly came into view and vanished. Beyond Royston, the confluence
of the A10 and the A505 brought heavier traffic, but I kept my average up to
forty-five or better. The outskirts of Cambridge rolled by, with the familiar
thickening of wayside timber and shrub that suggests the approach to a forest
rather than a town. Then this disappeared into the fenland openness of the
place itself, never crowded-looking even at mid-morning in term-time, and the
landmarks were there: the Leys School, Addenbrookes Hospital, Fitzwilliam
Street (where I had had digs when sitting my scholarship in 1933), Peterhouse,
Pembroke and finally, more or less side by side with St Catherine’s on the
corner of Trumpington Street and Silver Street, the long bitten-off rectangle
of St Matthew’s, a flat-fronted Tudor structure not too badly restored at the
end of the eighteenth century.

I found
a parking space only a hundred yards from the main gate. The outer walls bore
chalked or whitewashed slogans here and there: COMMUNALIZE COLLEGE ESTATES,
NUDE LIE-IN GIRTON 2.30 SAT., EXAMS ARE TOTALITARIAN. First one whiskered youth
in an open frugiferous shirt, then another with long hair like oakum, scanned
me closely as they passed, each slowing almost to a stop the better to check me
for bodily signs of fascism, oppression by free speech, passive racial violence
and the like. I survived this, entered and cross the front court (which looked
oppressively clean to my eyes), went through a low archway and ascended to the
square panelled study-sitting-room that overlooked the long slope of the
Fellows’ garden.

Duerinckx-Williams,
thin and dry-looking, with a stoop and paraded short sight although well over
ten years younger than I, got to his feet and smiled at me fixedly. I had met
him perhaps a dozen times on occasions involving Nick.

‘Salut,
vieux—entrez done. Comment ça va?’

‘Oh,
pas trop mal. Et vous? Vous avez bonne mine.’

‘Faut
pas se plaindre.’ Then he turned grave, or graver still. ‘Nick told me of your
loss. May I offer my sympathy?’

‘Thank
you. He was nearly eighty, you know, and hadn’t been well for some time. It was
no great surprise.’

‘Wasn’t
it? In my experience’—he made it sound as if this went back to the time of the
foundation of the college, give or take a century or so—’these things are never
imaginable in advance. But I’m glad to see you’re not unduly bowed down. Now, can
I offer you something? Sherry? Beer? Port? Tea? Whisky? Claret?’

It was
kind and intelligent of him to pretend, as usual, not to understand about
drink, and so allow me to choose what I wanted without embarrassment. I said a
little whisky would be very nice. While he got it for me, and made further show
of incomprehension in pouring out rather more than half a gill, he came up with
some amiabilities about Nick. Then, when we were sitting on either side of the
splendid late-Georgian fireplace, he asked what he could do for me. I told him
only of my interest in the history of my house and particularly in Underhill,
of a reference to his diary in a book I had come across and of my hope that he,
Duerinckx-Williams, would telephone the librarian of All Saints’ and assure him
of my bona fides.

‘Mm.
How urgent is your desire to see this man’s diary?’

‘Not at
all, really,’ I lied. ‘It’s just that I so seldom get the chance of a day off
like this, and I thought I’d take advantage of it. Of course, if it’s going to
be…’

‘No no,
I’ll be happy to do all I can. It’s merely that the librarian may not be there
at this precise instant. At All Saints’ everybody seems to tend not to be there
so much of the time. But I can readily establish that. Would you excuse me a
moment?’

He
telephoned briefly and rejoined me.

‘We’re
in luck, Maurice. He’s not only there but also free of entanglements. Would you
care for some more … of that?’ he asked, pretending now to have forgotten
what I had been drinking.

‘Uh …
no thank you.’

‘In
that case we might be on our way. No no, I assure you it’s no trouble. Three
minutes’ walk at the most. As you know.’

Four
minutes later we had passed through a carved wooden doorway of great age and
were walking down the All Saints’ library, a lofty and narrow room in the shape
of an immense L, with some good Victorian stained glass in the windows at the
angle. There was a characteristic smell, chiefly of dust and ink. The librarian
came to meet us with a demeanour that managed to be haughty and deferential at
the same time, like that of a West End shopwalker. There were introductions and
explanations.

‘Underhill,’
said the librarian, whose name was evidently Ware. ‘Underhill. Yes. Fellow of
the college in the
1650s.
Yes.’ Then he said with great emphasis, ‘Never
heard of him.’

‘Your
manuscript collection is pretty extensive, isn’t it?’ asked Duerinckx-Williams.