The Green Man (20 page)

‘I see.
What did you say?’

‘I said
I thought she had something, but naturally I couldn’t commit myself until I’d
talked to you about it. Oh, there was one other thing she said. We needn’t
worry about the Jack side of it, because it turns out she hates him.’

Joyce
looked at me for the first time since we had started talking. ‘Diana hates
Jack?’

‘That’s
what she said.’

‘You
mean she had to tell you?’ (At this point it was I who said nothing.) The first
time we met them Diana couldn’t bear Jack, and she’s gone on not being able to
bear him ever since. How funny you’ve never noticed.’

‘Why
didn’t you mention it to me?’

‘I
thought it was so obvious it wasn’t worth mentioning.’

‘That’s
not how things work. In the ordinary way you’d have been bound to bring it up
some time, just casually. Why have you been keeping it to yourself for so long?’

‘Pretty
good deduction,’ said Joyce, apparently with genuine mild admiration, though I
was on the alert about appearances, at any rate for the moment. ‘I haven’t
mentioned it because I was waiting to see if you’d ever notice it on your own,
and you haven’t. That’s typical, both bits, I mean you not noticing and you
seeing straight away that I’d not mentioned it on purpose. That’s how you are.
You sort of observe all the time, and do it bloody well, often, and yet you
don’t see. Do you see what I mean?’

‘Yes,
and you may be right,’ I said, trying not to sound impatient. ‘But let’s get
back to Diana’s idea. She seemed to think we could—’

‘She
meant that you’d, well, do her, for instance, and then she and I would work
each other over for a bit, until you were ready again, and then you’d do me
from behind, I don’t mean, you know, just
from
behind while she sort of
did the front of me, and then she and I would go on together again until perhaps
you could do the same thing again only the other way round, or else you and I
could divide her up and take different bits of her, and then you and she could
take different bits of me, and so on. Is that the kind of thing?’

‘Roughly,
yes.’ Listening to Joyce’s outline had been not altogether unlike having the
plot of
Romeo and Juliet
summarized by a plasterer’s mate. At the same
time I was swallowing hard with the effort not to want to laugh. ‘Of course,
we’d find plenty of—’

‘All
right.’

‘What?’

‘Let’s
do it, then.’

‘Are
you sure?’

‘Yes.
We might just as well. Why shouldn’t we? You fix it up with Diana and let me
know. Now I must go and find Magdalena. There’s the chef’s
gazpacho
tonight,
and then lamb cutlets Reform. Ought to be damn good.’.

With
Victor in a loose ball on my lap, I sat and tried, not very hard, to watch
Friday
Playhouse,
one of those two-character efforts which nevertheless seem
marred by the excessive size of the cast. I was puzzled by the sensation that
Joyce had let the situation down in some way: having wished beforehand for
nothing better than her ready acceptance of the orgy project, I was now wishing
she had put up objections for me to beat or wheedle out of the way. There was
material here for a mental discussion about sex and power, but I shelved this.
Perhaps it was Joyce’s reaction that had—against all the odds —made me feel
less than totally triumphant about the replacement of orgy project by orgy
prospect, or perhaps it was just Jack’s pills. If the latter, then there was a
problem looming.

Dinner
came and went; so did further television, culminating, or ending, in a
discussion about God that made God seem comparatively immediate and to be
reckoned with, as if God’s sphere of influence might reach out to within a few
light-years of the Solar System any millennium now, or traces of God’s
activities had been proved to extend as late as the beginning of the Devonian
Age. Joyce went silently off to bed before it was over. Nick sat on for a while
over a journal of French studies, then told me I was to wake him at any time if
I felt like some company, and retired in his turn.

It was
exactly midnight. I washed down two more pills with the puny draught I must
habituate myself to, and left the apartment, picking up a lightweight raincoat on
the way. This —camouflage, not protection from the weather—I put on and
buttoned up to the chin before hurrying downstairs and out at the side door. In
the open, there was plenty of movement to and fro, and plenty of standing
about, too; as I waited in the shadows for a clear moment, I congratulated
myself on having allowed plenty of time. At last a man half-lifted a girl into
a car I considered he was much too young to own, and drove off, leaving the
car-park empty of people. I scuttled across to the Volkswagen and got away
without being seen, feeling light-headed in a more literal sense than I would
have imagined possible, had I ever considered the matter: the parts of my brain
usually reserved for thinking seemed to have been invaded by some gas, of low
atomic weight but not otherwise tricky to handle—helium, perhaps, rather than
hydrogen.

To use
up spare minutes, I drove round the village a couple of times. It was deserted
and showed hardly a light. Diana was waiting at the place we had agreed; I picked
her up with most of the swift efficiency of somebody on TV mounting a robbery
or an assassination. This parallel obviously occurred to her too, and for the
next few minutes she interrogated me about the sense of adventure, and whether
its appeal to men rather than women did or did not go to show that men were
really frightfully school-boyish at heart, in all sorts … of ways. I probably
said it did.

We
reached the graveyard. I parked the car off the road in the deep shade of a
pair of elms; there was a thin but clear moon. Diana stood and waited, hands in
the pockets of her rather schoolmistressy cardigan, while I collected the tools
out of the back.

‘Don’t
you feel scared, Maurice?’

‘Not at
the moment, no. Why should I?’

‘But
you told me you knew you were going to be, and that’s why you insisted on me
coming along.’

‘Oh
yes. I was really thinking about when we actually start. Take this, would you?
Keep the light pointed away from the road.’

We
moved off through the thick grass, halting and standing still for a quarter of
a minute or so while the headlights of a car, no doubt full of drunken diners
from the Green Man, swept towards and across us, or near us. The corroded iron
gate of the graveyard leaned open. We entered, the torch Diana held making odd
bits of greenery, at our feet or at head height, flare up like a mild and
miniature firework display. One after the other, we stumbled over minor
obstructions.

‘Careful,’
I said. ‘Round here by the wall. A bit more to your left. Yes, that’s it,
there.’

‘So here
we are … Maurice, don’t you feel a frightful sense that one’s about to do
something one really wasn’t meant to do? Oh, I know this Christianity thing’s
pretty well on its last legs these days, but surely there’s a kind of basic
thing about not interfering with last resting-places and all that, you know,
superstition and primitive fear and the rest of it. Do you honestly think it’s
worth it?’

‘That
remains to be seen. Hold the torch steady. The next part is going to be totally
boring.’

I was
understating it. Even a dry, sandy soil yields very slowly to the spade, and it
must have been an hour at least before, soaked with sweat and unsteady on my
feet, I had uncovered most of the top of the long oaken box I was after. Diana
had behaved very creditably in the interval, taking time and trouble to wedge
the torch into a crevice in the wall, initiating no discussions, hurrying to
shield the light whenever a car approached on the road, falling asleep once for
ten or fifteen minutes. She was awake when I finished digging and held the
torch again—the reserve one, the battery of the first having given out—while I
got going with the hammer and chisel. I had the latter muffled with sacking,
but the noise was still considerable in the silence. However, that silence was otherwise
unbroken by now, we were a hundred and fifty yards at least from the nearest
houses, which were all in darkness, and a dozen taps and some creaking while I
levered away were as much as was unavoidable.

When I
opened the coffin, there was an odour of dry earth and of what I can only
describe as powerful clean sheets; nothing in the least disagreeable. I took
the torch from Diana, who bent closer while I ran its beam up and down.
Underhill was totally and securely wrapped in linen, rather flattened about the
abdomen and below, with the sharpness of bone showing through at knees and
feet. At first I saw nothing but all this, then caught a gleam of dull metal at
the end by the head. My fingers closed on something and I pulled it out and
shone the torch on to it. What I held was a rough leaden casket, rectangular,
about the size of a box of fifty cigarettes or a little thicker through. There
was a lid, but the metal of this had been crudely fused with that of the casket
itself, the whole forming a serviceable damp-proof container. I shook it and it
rattled in a muffled, impeded way. I thought I knew what was rattling and what
was impeding.

‘Is
that all?’ asked Diana.

I shone
the torch up and down and across. ‘This was all I expected there to be here.
I’ll unwrap him if you like, but I don’t—’

‘No.
Never mind. Let’s get the lid on again.’

This
too took a long time, and so did shovelling the earth back into an
approximation of where it had been. It would obviously be years before the
signs of interference ceased to be noticeable, but I could not imagine the
Fareham constable, a chubby young man who spent as much time as was relevant at
Newmarket races and the rest of the time talking about these and such matters,
in the role of inquirer into the possible despoliation of some old bugger’s
grave from way back.

‘Well,
that’s it,’ I said.

‘Aren’t
you going to open that thing you found?’

I
considered. As I moved the earth and roughly levelled it off, I had been
thinking of almost nothing beyond the prospect of opening the casket, but had
visualized total seclusion. On the other hand, after something like two hours
of unstinted and largely silent co-operation, Diana was entitled to some
return, or at least would be expecting it. Fair enough. And yet, if I really
was right about the thing that had rattled … But the possibility of
antagonizing Diana at this stage…

I found
the hammer and the chisel. ‘Yes. Why not?’

In a
couple of minutes I had made enough impression along the line of the original
lid to prise the soft metal out of the way. I up-ended the casket and a small
object fell into the palm of my hand. It was intensely cold, so much colder
than the lead of its container that I nearly dropped it. Diana shone the torch.
There it was, just as described; a silver figure about three inches tall and
half that from one extended hand to where the other had been, with a smile of
sorts on its face. I am no judge of silver, but I knew that the thing was much
more than three hundred years old.

‘What
an ugly little creature,’ said Diana. ‘What is it? Do you think it’s valuable?
It’s only silver, isn’t it?’

I
hardly heard her. Here was Underhill’s proof. If I had thought to show what I
had found this morning in my office notebook, to Nick or anyone else, before
starting on tonight’s expedition, I would now have had something to show the
world—something, but not a proof, perhaps a case of extrasensory perception,
perhaps just a curious coincidence, an interesting story, an oddity. It was a
proof only for me, and even I could not have said how much it really proved.
Not yet, at least; but I felt a kind of hope I had never felt before.

‘Maurice?
Is it a charm or something? What do you think it is?’

‘I
don’t know. I must try to find out. Hold on a minute.’

The
expected sheets of paper could be seen inside the casket. I drew them out and
unfolded them. They too were cold to the touch, but whether owing to true cold
or to damp I did not know or care. The handwriting, the first words were
enough, but for a few moments I read mechanically on.

‘AVE, O
MI AMICE SAPIENTISSIME. As thou see’est, thou hast understood mee aright. Count
thyself the most fortunate of mankind, for shortly the veritable Secret of Life
shall be reveal’d to thee. But mark curiously what follows, & thou shalt
possess what is more durable than Riches, more to be envy’d than a Crown…’

‘What
does it say? Anything about this charm thing?’

‘Not
that I can see. Most of it’s in Latin. Legal stuff, probably. I’ll have a go
at sorting it out some time.’

Well, I
had been right about the papers too, but there was nothing supernatural in
that. I folded them up again, slipped then and the silver figure back where
they had been and managed to fit the casket into the side pocket of my
dinner-jacket. Then I started picking up the tools.

‘Is
that the lot? Not much of a show, was it?’

‘Oh, we
did find something, didn’t we? Not too bad.’

‘I
don’t call that treasure.’