The Green Man (9 page)

‘Well,
I’m afraid there’s nothing in the love-nest line available, but it’s a warm
day and there hasn’t been any rain for nearly a fortnight, so I thought we
could manage very nicely out of doors. There’s an ideal spot less than a mile
from here.’

‘Well
known to you from previous use for the same general purpose, no doubt.’

‘That’s
it.’

‘Maurice,
will you be frightfully annoyed if I ask you something?’

‘Oh, I
shouldn’t think so. Try me and see what happens.’

‘Maurice,
what is it that makes you such a tremendous womanizer?’

‘But I’m
not. I was fairly active in my youth, but that’s a long time ago.’

‘You
are
a tre … men … dous womanizer. Everybody in the village knows that no
attractive female who comes to your house is safe from you.’

‘How
often do you think an unattached one of those comes wandering in?’

‘They
don’t have to be unattached, do they? What about the wife of that Dutch
tulip-grower in the spring?’

‘Soil
expert. That was different. He passed out in the dining-room, David put him to
bed, and she said she didn’t feel sleepy and it was a beautiful night. What
could I do?’

‘But
what’s at the back of it all, Maurice? What makes you so determined to make
love to me, for instance?’

‘Sex, I
should imagine.’

I knew
this would be nowhere near good enough for Diana in her present mood, indeed in
the only mood I had ever seen her in in the three years I had known her.
Glumly, I tried to run up in my mind a spontaneous-sounding remake of the
standard full answer—reproductive urge, power thing, proving one’s masculinity
(to be introduced one moment and decisively rejected the next), restlessness,
curiosity, man-polygamous-woman-monagamous (to be frankly described as old hat
but at the same time not dismissible out of hand) and the rest of it, the whole
mixture heftily spiked with pornographic flattery. However, I had barely
started on this grim chore when Diana herself let me off that particular hook
by attending to our route.

‘Where
are we going? You’re taking us back to the village.’

‘Just
round the edge of the village. We cross the main road in a minute and go up
behind the hill, a bit beyond where the new houses are going up.’

‘But
that’s almost opposite the Green Man.’

‘Not
really. And you can’t be seen from there.’

‘Pretty
close all the same.’ A farm lorry came into view ahead and
The Guardian
went
up again. From within it she continued, ‘Is that part of it, Maurice? Part of
the thrill for you? Flaunting it?’

‘There’ll
be no flaunting if I have any say in the matter, and as I said no one can see
you anyway.’

‘Still…’
She lowered the paper. ‘Do you know another thing that’s been puzzling me
dreadfully?’

‘What?’

‘Why
you haven’t done anything about me until practically the other day. You and I
have known each other jolly nearly since Jack and I moved to Fareham, and you
just treat me as a friend, and then you suddenly start making these colossal
passes at me. All I’m asking is, why … the change?’

This
was her least dispiriting query so far, at any rate in the sense that I could
think of no answer, either then or later. Almost at random, I said, ‘I suppose
I’ve realized I’m nearly an old man. I haven’t got all the time in the world
any longer.’

‘That’s
complete and utter rubbish, Maurice, and you know it, darling. You haven’t got
a paunch and you’ve got all your hair and I can’t think how you do it when you
drink so much but you look about forty-four or five at the outside, so don’t be
so silly.’

She had
more or less had to say something on these lines, since to declare a fondness,
whether sneaking or flagrant, for budding old-age pensioners would have made
her seem to herself one of the wrong sorts of interesting person. But it was
nice to hear it said just the same.

We duly
crossed the main road beside the dilapidated and overgrown churchyard where
Thomas Underhill was buried, and climbed a twisting lane where a hazy afternoon
sun came down diagonally through a straggle of poplars. Just beyond the crest I
drove the truck into a turning so narrow that the hedges brushed the doors on
either side. Two minutes later I took us off this into a space almost enclosed
by a high bank, a rough semicircle of brambles and a sudden rise in the ground
between us and the main road. I stopped the engine.

‘Is
this it?’

‘It’s
nearly it. There’s a splendid little hollow in the ground by those bushes that you
can’t even see from here.’

‘Is it
safe?’

‘I’ve
never seen anyone up this way. The track peters out in those woods.’

I
started kissing her again before she could speculate on the reasons for this or
whatever other facts might strike her. The only really good point about the
raised hem-line is that a man can put his hand on a girl’s thigh a long way
from the knee without being said to be putting it up her skirt. I took full
advantage of this. Diana responded to it and such moves as enthusiastically as
anybody setting out to display a contrast with earlier, unresponsive behaviour.
But quite soon, using a moment when my mouth was not on hers, she said,
sounding as if she really wanted to know,

‘Maurice,
don’t you think it’s important to get some things straight?’

I could
not imagine any such things, or any things, but said, perhaps a bit dully,
‘Don’t let’s bother about that kind of stuff for now.’

‘Oh,
but Maurice, we have to bother, surely. We must.’

In a
sense I felt this too, or had done so and would again, but this was not enough
to call me back from where I was. What did that was the knowledge, dim but
powerful, that she had not yet had her say—her ask, rather—that nothing would
make her throw away her present seller’s-market advantage and postpone having
it until significantly later, and that therefore she had better have it now,
not when I had got her on her back. Playing up to her, however revolting in
retrospect, would probably shorten the say, or at least cut down the intervals
between the various sections of it. Well, worth a try.

‘You’re
right, of course,’ I said, releasing her, gripping her hand and staring
responsibly past her at the bushes. ‘We’re two grown-up people. We can’t just
sail into a thing like this with our eyes shut.’

‘Maurice.’

‘Yes?’
I spoke gruffly, to show how tortured I was feeling.

‘Maurice,
why have you suddenly changed? One moment you’re seducing me as hard as you can
go, and the next you back off and say we ought to worry about what we’re doing.
You’re not having second thoughts, are you?’

‘No,’ I
said rather quickly, ‘certainly not, but you said something about getting our
ideas straight, and that reminded me of, well …‘

‘But
you are absolutely sure you really care?’ Her tone was edged with suspicion,
and I realized what a mistake it would be to suppose that those who habitually
talk insincerely, or for effect, or balls, are no good at spotting others who
try the same line. When she went on, ‘That sort of thing sounds so funny,
coming from you.’ I took her point at once: all the balls-talking that
afternoon was going to be done by her.

‘Well,
I …‘ I muttered, and did something in the air with my free hand, ‘I was just …‘

‘Maurice,’
she said, at her ease again and giving me a wide-eyed hazel stare, ‘isn’t it
wrong to put one’s own pleasure before everything else, before other people’s
happiness?’

‘Perhaps.
I don’t know.’

‘Wouldn’t
you say that one of the most absolutely typical things about the way everybody
goes on nowadays is this thing of making up your own rules?’

‘There’s
a lot of truth in that.’

‘And
what bothers me is can it ever be right. After all, you wouldn’t take the line
that we’re just animals, would you?’

‘No.’

‘Maurice
… don’t you think sexual attraction is the most peculiar and unpredictable
and sim—ply
mad
thing in the world?’

At
this, I cheered up a little. Either Diana was semi-consciously groping for the
sixty-four-cent question, the ultimate bit of balls which I would pass the test
by letting her get away with, or she was just running out of material. ‘I’ve
never understood it,’ I said humbly.

‘But
isn’t it true that if people don’t pay attention to what their instincts tell
them then they get jolly closed up and cut off from everything and perfectly
awful in every way?’

I was
feeling by now as if I had not paid attention to what my instincts told me for
weeks, and perhaps never would again, but just then, to emphasize her
proposition about its being a bad thing to be perfectly awful, she leaned
earnestly forward, and I caught sight of the bare flesh between the base of the
mound of her left breast and the lip of the brassière-cup. My concentration
slipped; I had it back on full within a couple of seconds, but in that interval
I found I had said something like, ‘Yes, well let’s go and show we’re not that
sort,’ and had started to open the door on my side.

She
caught my wrist, pursing her lips and frowning. Even before she spoke I could
see that, after mounting a series of short but cumulatively valuable ladders, I
had just gone sliding down a major snake. But, as in the substantial form of
the game, so too in the version Diana and I were playing, there are certain
parts of the board where a single throw can restore everything lost on the
previous turn, and more.

‘Maurice.’

‘Yes?’

‘Maurice
… perhaps if two people really want each other it’s sort of all right in a
way. Do you really want me?’

‘Yes,
Diana, I really want you. I mean it.’

She
stared at me again. Perhaps she thought I did mean it—and, good God, any man
who had not only put up with all this without screaming, but was ready for more
if need be, must really want her in some fairly ample sense. Perhaps I had
merely produced the necessary formula with the necessary show of conviction,
nothing more than a piece of sexual good manners. Perhaps, whatever the
difference might be between really wanting someone and wanting someone, I had
meant it. Anyway, the last snake was behind me now, or so it seemed to me then.

‘Let’s
make love to one another, my darling,’ said Diana.

The new
problem was to prevent her from making too many remarks in this style until the
stage of no remarks was reached. I got out of the truck, went round and helped
her down.

‘In a
summer season,’ she said, actually looking up at the sky, ‘when soft was the
sun …

‘Well,
we can’t say we haven’t been lucky with the weather,’ I babbled, pulling her
along beside me. One more really corking cock-crinkler like that one and I
would be done for. The forecast said rain later, but they’re hopeless, aren’t
they? Just a lot of guesswork. Here we are.’

I
preceded her into the hollow and swung her down the three- or four-foot drop.
The place was as clean as when I had reconnoitred it the previous day, without
even any evidence of courting couples. Probably Fareham couples could not find
the energy to court, slipping bemusedly into marriage as they might into debt
or senile dementia.

‘Maurice,
I’m sure it’ll all be marvellously beautiful, with the—’

I cut
this one off by kissing her. While I was doing so, I finished unbuttoning her
shirt and unclipped her brassière. Her bosom was firm under my hand, almost
hard. The discovery had the effect of making me begin to draw her with me
towards the ground. She freed herself and stepped away.

‘I want
to be naked,’ she said. ‘For us, I must be naked.’

She
took off her shirt and this once I overlooked her literary style. If she had,
after all, wanted me to think she was an interesting person, not just seem to
think so, she was going a much better way about it now than at any earlier
time. Her breasts turned out to be high as well as full and firm, and heavily
pointed, but a few moments later I could see how small-made, how long in leg
and body she really was. In the short time it had taken her to strip, her face
had changed, losing only now its quick directed glance and tenseness of jaw, becoming
heavy-eyed, slack-mouthed, dull with excitement. Slowly, her shoulders drawn
back and her stomach in, she sat down on a patch of short turf, and seemed to
catch sight of me.

‘You
too,’ she said.

This
struck me as a novel and not particularly good idea. A man undressing lacks
dignity; more than that, a man undressed in the open feels vulnerable, and
with good reason. From an outsider’s point of view, a naked woman out of doors
is either a sun-worshipper or a rape victim; a man in the same state is either
a sexual criminal or a plain lunatic. But I obliged just the same, finding the
air pleasantly warm. Diana sat and waited, not looking at me, gently and
rhythmically pressing the inward surfaces of her upper arms against the sides
of her bosom. It was clear that she had had to be naked not for us, let alone
for me, but for her. Here, though, was something in her that was really in her,
for narcissists, by definition, do not care whether other people find them
interesting or not. There was a paradox here, involving the way Diana went on
when she was fully dressed, but I had no time for that now: I agreed too
heartily with her about the importance of her body.