The Green Man

by Kingsley Amis

  Putting her hands on her knees, Lucy gave a pedagogical sigh. ‘Ghosts can’t harm you. They aren’t there, as I explained earlier.’

  ‘You could get driven, uh, get pretty disturbed by buggering about with that kind of thing.’

  ‘That’s up to the person. No ghost can drive anybody out of their mind, any more than a human being can. People go out of their minds because of something about them, inside them.’

  I knew, without looking, that Nick was making a face at his wife. Neither spoke. I said I would go and lie down for an hour and then probably reappear for a final drink or two and some more chat, if anybody wanted any. In the passage outside I ran into Joyce.

  ‘Dinner’s ready,’ she said. ‘I was just coming to—’

  ‘I don’t want any, thank you.’

  ‘You ought to eat something.’ She sounded unconvinced.

  ‘I’m not hungry. I might have a bit of cheese later.’

  ‘All right. Where are you off to now?’

  ‘Going to have a little nap.’

  ‘And then you’ll get up about the time I’m coming to bed and go and talk to Nick and then sit on your own with the whisky-bottle until about two o’clock and tomorrow I’ll see you at lunch and after that in the bar in the evening with everybody else there and so on like today and yesterday and that’s what you and I are going to do tomorrow.’

  This was a very long speech for Joyce, and was charged with resentment. I decided not to ask her what of it, and said instead, ‘I know. I’m sorry, darling. This is a busy time of the year.’

  ‘Every time of the year is a busy time. That’s no reason why we should never see each other.’

  I thought how pretty she looked, leaning against the wall of the passage just next to one of my hunting prints—prettier even than Diana, her full but finely proportioned body shown off by her blue silk dress, yellow hair smoothly piled up to reveal her handsome ears. ‘I know,’ I said.

  ‘Then do something about it I’m your business partner and housekeeper and Amy’s stepmother and that’s it.’

  ‘Is it? I make love to you too, don’t I?’

  ‘Sometimes. And lots of people make love to their housekeepers.’

  ‘I haven’t noticed you being a very active stepmother, I must say.’

  ‘I can’t be it on my own. You and Amy have got to join in, and neither of you ever do.’

  ‘I don’t think this is the time, the right day to start—’

  ‘It’s the right day of all days. If you’ve got nothing in particular to say to me the day after your father dies, what would have to happen to make you talk? I can’t remember the last time we … No,’ she said, catching my wrists as I stepped forward and tried to embrace her, ‘I don’t count that. That’s not talking.’

  ‘Sorry. Well; when would you like to have a talk?’

  ‘Talk, not have a talk, and when’s no good. Hopeless. There’s no time now, anyway. You go and have your nap.’ She walked past me.

  Some talk was certainly going to be called for, I reflected, not only in order to get Joyce into bed with Diana and me, but as prelude to that conversation. I must start working on that first thing in the morning. Meanwhile there was work (of an unexacting sort) to be done.

  I went into the dining-room, where four covered pots of soup stood on the table, and moved over to the bookshelves to the left of the fireplace. Here I kept two or three dozen works on architecture and sculpture, and a hundred or so plain texts of the standard English and French poets, stopping chronologically well short of our own day: Mallarmé and Lord de Tabley are my most modern versifiers. I have no novelists, finding theirs a puny and piffling art, one that, even at its best, can render truthfully no more than a few minor parts of the total world it pretends to take as its field of reference. A man has only to feel some emotion, any emotion, anything differentiated at all, and spend a minute speculating how this would be rendered in a novel—not just the average novel, but the work of a Stendhal or a Proust—to grasp the pitiful inadequacy of all prose fiction to the task it sets itself. By comparison, the humblest productions of the visual arts are triumphs of portrayal, both of the matter and of the spirit, while verse—lyric verse, at least—is equidistant from fiction and life, and is autonomous.

  However, the book I had come to fetch lay in none of the categories mentioned. It was Joseph Thornton’s massive Superstitions and Ghostly Tales of the British Folk, in the second edition of 1838. I took it down from the shelf, poured myself a medium-sized Scotch (say a triple bar measure) and went and sat in my red padded-leather bedroom armchair.

  Thornton devotes nearly three pages to Underhill in his chapter on ‘Magicians and Conjurors’, but the greater part of the passage concerns Underhill’s alleged reappearances in supernatural form during the century and a half or so after his death, together with an account of that other being said to have been heard making its rustling, crackling progress round the outside of the house after dark. The treatment of the murders and their aftermath is less full; through lack of time or sheer absence of surviving evidence, as opposed to just talk, Thornton failed to establish any tangible link between Underhill and the two unsolved killings, and had to be content with recording the strength and persistence of the tradition—among people in Baldock and Royston as well as in the surrounding hamlets—that the man had acquired the ‘mysterious and evil art’ of striking from a distance at those foolhardy enough to cross him, ‘of causing his victims to be torn to pieces by hands that were not mortal, so that a villager would not pass his house, by day no more than by night, for dread that the nefarious Doctor’s eye would light upon him and find in him a fresh object of fear or hate.’

  With no clear idea of what I was looking for, I read inattentively through the four or five long paragraphs, or rather reread them for the dozenth time. Then, towards the end, I came to a couple of sentences I could not remember even having seen before:

  ‘… Such were the events attending the obsequies of this infamous creature, for such I hold him to have been at the least, whatever be the truth of the copious testimonies to his wizardry. His effects, whether by chance or by malignity, appear to have been dispersed: the greater proportion of his books and papers suffered destruction at a fire on his premises (for which I can find no cause adduced) the second day following his death; some small part, at his own request, was buried with his person; a fragment of a journal survives in the library of his college, All Saints’ at Cambridge. Of this relic it should be said, that it is not worth the pain of perusal, save by him whose curiosity in the manners of that still barbarous age may be sufficient to abate his natural aversion from the task.’

  I thought I saw something faintly odd about the last part of this. Why should Thornton, normally keen to infect his readers with his own enthusiasms, to the extent of (perhaps too often) exhorting them to go and look up his sources for themselves, have mentioned this bit of journal, together with its location, and then warned them off taking the trouble to ‘peruse’ it? Well, any mystery here might easily be cleared up tomorrow. If that Underhill manuscript had been in the All Saints’ library in the early nineteenth century, there was a good chance that it was there still. Anyway, I was going to drive to Cambridge in the morning and find out. I could not have said why I was immediately so determined to do this.

  Between the pages of the Superstitions concerned with Underhill, I used to keep a few papers relating to him that had ‘come with the house’, chiefly Victorian local-newspaper cuttings of no great interest, but including a statement made by a servant at an earlier period. In the past, I had dismissed this too as dull, and had not looked at it for four or five years, but now I felt it was important to me. I unfolded the stained, dry single sheet.

  ‘I, Grace Mary Hedger, chamber maid in the service of Samuel Roxborugh, Esquire, being xlix yrs of age, & a Christian, do solemly avouch and declare, that yesterday evening, the third day of March, Aº D. MDCCLX, at about v o clock, I enterd the little parlour
[then part of what was now the public dining-room] about my tasks, & there saw a Gentleman standing near the window. His cloathes somwhat like the cloathes of old Revd Mr Millinship I saw when I was a young girl. His complection very pale, but scarrd wth red, his nose long & turnd to the side, his mouth like a woman’s. He apeard in distress of mind. When I asked him his pleasure he was there no longer, he did not quit the chamber, of a sudden he was not there. I was much affrighted & shreikd & swoond & my mistress came to me. I would not see such a Gentelman again for an hunderd poun. All this I swear.’

  Grace Mary had added a careful signature and somebody called William Totterdale, rector of the parish, who had obviously written out the statement, had been a witness. Between them they had put my mind at ease, on one matter anyhow: the three accurately expressed facial details were enough on their own, without the reference to a kind of clerical garb to which the nearest parallel in Grace’s experience would have been what she remembered having seen an old clergyman wearing in the 1720s. I drank to her and blessed her for her powers of observation and recall.

  Through no fault of hers, on the other hand, her service to me was limited. I could not tell Lucy or anyone else, including myself, that I had not read the affidavit before. It was possible—I disbelievingly supposed it to be just possible—that my earlier couple of readings had impressed the facts on some buried part of my mind, from which something had dredged them up to create an illusion. What that particular something might have been was in itself mysterious, because any thought of Underhill’s ghost I had about my mind at the time had also been pretty deeply buried, but that sort of problem is no problem in an unphilosophical age in which lack of total disproof is taken as the larger half of proof.

  I had refolded Grace’s statement and was about to close the book on it and the other papers, when my eye fell on another passage of Thornton’s I had forgotten, more precisely on a single phrase in brackets in the middle of his account of the unseen nocturnal prowler: ‘which some suspect to have been the Doctor’s agent’. At once I saw what I should have seen earlier, or had seen without knowing what it was I saw. The witness who had disagreed about the expression on the face of Underhill’s ghost had not really disagreed at all: they had seen him as he had been in life at different times, separated perhaps by a matter of seconds. He had had a look of clinical curiosity as he waited to find out just what sort of creature he had conjured up out of the wood, and this look had changed to one of horror when it came into his view on its way to tear his wife or his enemy to pieces. And this creature, or its phantom, had somehow not been fully laid to rest at Underhill’s death, had from time to time tried to find its way into its former controller’s house-—for further instructions? And it had made the sound of moving branches and twigs and leaves as it walked because that was what it consisted of. And if I had been able to wait long enough in the copse that afternoon, I would have seen it too; it, or its phantom.

  The whole left half of my body, including arm and leg, shook emphatically to and fro four times. My immediate thought was that I had now started to experience jactitation while fully conscious, and this filled me with fear, until I realized that I had merely shivered from fear, the double fear I had already felt at lunch-time, fear both of what had come into my mind and of the fact that it had done so and was going to stay there. I did not know anybody well enough, I could not imagine anybody knowing anybody well enough, to be able to tell him or her a tale like this. Perhaps I would have found this a less unlikely concept if I had not recently passed from being a notorious drunk to being a notorious drunk who had begun to see things, but I doubt it. Anyway, I was going to have to deal with this myself, without any clear idea of what this was or what dealing with it would entail. Thought was going to be necessary: that much could be glimpsed. I tried to do some thinking now, and got to the point of perceiving that the reason why Thornton had found no clear link, almost no link at all, between Underhill and the wood creature was that he had never visited the copse (or, if he had, whatever conditions had been operating six hours ago had been absent then). That was the farthest I could go for the moment. I felt I had had enough of my own company for a bit, whatever the disadvantages of swelling the number. I went to the bathroom, washed briefly, threw some after-shave lotion round my face to vie the fumes of whisky and set off down to the bar.

  I was back up again in half an hour, after chatting with a couple of businessmen from Stevenage and a young farmer from round about who was rich enough to be doing his farming on purpose, so to speak. As I remounted the stairs, I found I had forgotten every word of the conversation, not by way of the instant-amnesia process I had had the benefit of twice earlier, but owing to that alcohol-fuelled unmemorability that does something to make middle age less intolerable, however coarsely tuned it may become with use. On the landing I was ready for an appearance of the woman with auburn hair, presumably Underhill’s wife, and a tractable spectre by local standards; but she was not to be seen. Then, finally, just at the apartment door, I had a moment of simple selfish joy at the memory of what had happened in the hollow by the wood, and in that moment experienced a genuine hallucination, wonderfully and purely tactile, of Diana’s naked flesh against my own. It has never surprised me that some men should try to beat Don Juan’s traditional total, only that more do not. Seduction is the unique sensual act; other pleasures, including sex per se, are mere activities, durative and repetitive. Each particular seduction is a final and unchangeable thing, a part of history, like a century before lunch or a winning try (few of which carry the bonus of orgasm). And a sculpture can become nothing but a stale grotesque, a poem lose all its edge, but nothing of the sort can happen to what you got up to that night with the princess or the barmaid.

  In the dining-room, the three of them were sitting over coffee. No drink had been so much as poured. While they struggled with the silence that had arisen at my entry, I got myself a glass of claret and started on some bread and a piece of Cheddar. In an under-rehearsed way, Nick said casually that, since he happened to have brought a bit of work with him and nothing was going on at the university, he would—if convenient, and only if—welcome the chance of a couple of days off from young Josephine, who was teething again, and stay on for the funeral. Lucy would return for this occasion, if that was all right, but meanwhile intended to go back home the following morning. I said that that and everything else would be all right.

  Outside, I could hear men and women coming out of my house, standing about and chattering, getting into their cars and driving away, a series of sounds that always filled me with momentary animation and sadness and unconsidered envy. In the room, tonight as every night, the old Roman, the Elizabethan boys, the French officers and the French girl looked better than by day, more assimilated into the rest of the environment, though no less to be felt as presences. The humidity seemed to have increased again; at any rate, there was sweat on my forehead and at the roots of my hair.

  Joyce said, ‘Isn’t it incredible to think that last night Gramps was just as much alive as any of us?’ She was never one to be put off a disturbing remark merely by its obviousness.

  ‘I suppose it is,’ I said. ‘But it’s not the sort of thing anybody spends much time trying to take in, even in a situation like this, where you’d imagine none of us would be able to get our minds off it. That’s what’s really incredible. And I honestly can’t see why everybody who isn’t a child, everybody who’s theoretically old enough to have understood what death means, doesn’t spend all his time thinking about it. It’s a pretty arresting thought, not being anything, not being anywhere, and yet the world still being here. Simply having everything stopping for ever, not just for millions of years. And getting to the point where that’s all there is in front of you. I can imagine anyone finding themselves thoroughly wrapped up in that prospect, especially since it’s where we’re going to get to sooner or later, and perhaps sooner. Of course, it’s not really true to say that that’s all that’s going to be
in front of you. There are all sorts of other things thrown in, like waiting to see the doctor, and fixing up to have a test, and waiting for the test, and waiting for the result of the test, and fixing up another test, and waiting for that, and waiting for that result, and going in for a period of observation, and being kept in, and waiting for the operation, and waiting for the anaesthetist, and waiting to hear what they found, and waiting for the second operation, and waiting to hear how that went, and being told they can unfortunately do nothing radically curative but naturally all measures will be taken to prolong life and alleviate suffering, and that’s where you start. A long way to go from there before you get to the first lot of things that are turning up for the last time, like your birthday and going away and going out to dinner, and then the rest of those things, like going out anywhere and going downstairs and getting into bed and waking up and lying down and shutting your eyes and beginning to feel drowsy. And that’s where you start, too.’

  ‘It doesn’t happen like that to everybody by any means,’ said Joyce.

  ‘No, I quite agree for some people it’s much worse. And I’m leaving out things like pain. But for most of us it’s either what I’ve said or it’s like what happened to my father. With reasonable care and a hell of a lot of luck you might last another ten years, or five years, or two years, or six months, but then of course again on the other hand as I’m sure you’ll appreciate trying to be completely objective about the matter you might not. So in future, if there is any, every birthday is going to have a lot of things about it that make it feel like your last one, and the same with every evening out, and after four of your five years or five of your six months the same with most things, up to and including getting into bed and waking up and the rest of it. So whichever way it turns out, like my father or like the other lot, it’s going to be difficult to feel you’ve won, and I don’t know which is worse, but I do know there’s enough about either of them to make you wish you could switch to the other for a bit. And it’s knowing that every day it’s more and more likely that one or the other of them will start tomorrow morning that makes the whole business so riveting.’