The Green Man

THE GREEN MAN

Kingsley Amis

1: The Red-haired Woman

FAREHAM, Herts

THE GREEN MAN

No sooner has one gone over one’s surprise at finding a genuine coaching inn less than 40 miles from London—and 8 from the MI—than one is marvelling at the quality of the equally genuine English fare (the occasional disaster apart!). There has been an inn on this site since the Middle Ages, from which parts of the present building date; after some 190 years of service as a dwelling its original function and something of its original appearance, were restored in 1961. Mr Allington will tell its story to the interested (there is, or was, at least one ghost) and be your candid guide through the longish menu. Try the eel soup (6/-), pheasant pie (15/6), saddle of mutton and caper sauce (17/6), treacle roil (5/6). Wine list short, good (except for white Burgundies), a little expensive. Worthington E. Bass, Whitbread Tankard on draught. Friendly, efficient service. No children’s prices. CI. Su L. Must Book L; F, Sa & Su D. Meals 12.30-3; 7-10.30. Alc main dishes 12/6 to 25/-. Seats 40. Car park. No dogs. B&B from 42/6.Class A App. Bernard Levin; Lord Norwich; John Dankworth; Harry Harrison; Wynford Vaughan-Thomas; Dennis Brogan; Brian W. Aldiss; and many others.

The point about white Burgundies is that I hate them myself. I take whatever my wine supplier will let me have at a good price (which I would never dream of doing with any other drinkable). I enjoyed seeing those glasses of Chablis or Pouilly Fuissé, so closely resembling a blend of cold chalk soup and alum cordial with an additive or two to bring it to the colour of children’s pee, being peered and sniffed at, rolled round the shrinking tongue and forced down somehow by parties of young technology dons from Cambridge or junior television producers and their girls. Minor, harmless compensations of this sort are all too rare in a modern innkeeper’s day.

In fact, most of my trade did come either from London or the twenty-odd miles from Cambridge, with a little more from the nearest Hertfordshire towns. I got the occasional passer-by, of course, but not as many as my colleagues on the A10 to the east of me and the A505 to the north-west. The A595 is a mere sub-artery connecting Stevenage and Royston, and although I put up a sign on it the day I opened, not many transients ever bothered to turn off and try to find the Green Man in preference to using one of the pubs directly beside the main road. All right with me, that. About my only point of agreement with John Fothergill, the buckle-shoed posturer who had the Spread Eagle in Thame when I was a boy and founded a reputation and a book on being nasty to his, guests, is lack of warmth towards the sort of people who use two halves of bitter and two tomato juices as a quadruple ticket to the lavatories and washbasins. The villagers from Fareham itself, and from Sandon and Mill End, each of the two about a mile away, were obviously a different matter. They put back their pints steadily and quietly in the public bar, filling it at week-ends, and had an agreeable short way with dinner-jacketed seekers after rustic atmosphere or the authentic life of the working class.

The locals, with some assistance from the various hearty young men who came in to dine, got through plenty of beer, as much as a couple of dozen tens of bitter a week in the summer. Whatever might be said about its prices, the wine too went quickly enough. Refusing, as I have always done, to offer any but fresh meat, vegetables and fruit, poses a daily transport problem. All this, together with keeping up stocks of salt and metal-polish flowers and toothpicks, takes a good deal of arranging. One way and another, I used to spend a good two or three hours of almost every day out of my house. But this could be less than a hardship to a man with a newish second wife, a teenaged daughter by a first marriage and an ancient and decrepit father (apart from a staff of nine) to be variously coped with.

Last summer, in particular, would have taxed a more hardened and versatile coper than me. As if in the service of some underground anti-hotelier organization, successive guests tried to rape the chambermaid, called for a priest at 3 a.m., wanted a room to take girlie photographs in, were found dead in bed. A party of sociology students from Cambridge, rebuked for exchanging obscenities at protest-meeting volume, poured beer over young David Palmer, my trainee assistant, and then staged a sit-in. After nearly a year of no worse than average conduct, the Spanish kitchen porter went into a heavy bout of Peeping Tom behaviour, notably but not at all exclusively at the grille outside the ladies’ lavatory, attracted the attention of the police and was finally deported. The deep-fat fryer caught fire twice, once during a session of the South Hertfordshire branch of the Wine and Food Society. My wife seemed lethargic, my daughter withdrawn. My father, now in his eightieth year, had another stroke, his third, not serious in itself but not propitious. I felt rather strung up, and was on a bottle of Scotch a day, though this had been standard for twenty years.

One Wednesday about the middle of August reached a new level. In the morning there had been trouble with the repatriated voyeur’s successor, Ramón, who had refused to pile and burn the rubbish on the grounds that he had already had to do the breakfast dishes. Then, while I was picking up the tea, coffee and such at the dry-goods warehouse in Baldock, the ice-maker had broken down. It never performed with much conviction in hot weather, and the temperature most of that week was in the upper seventies. An electrician had to be found and fetched. Three sets of hotel guests with four young children between them, no doubt under orders from anti-hotelier HQ, turned up from nowhere between 5.30 and 5.40. My wife succeeded almost totally in blaming this on me.

Later, having settled my father in front of the open drawing-room window with a weak Scotch-and-water, I came out of our apartment on the upper storey to find somebody standing, back turned to me, near the stairhead. I took this person for a women in an evening dress rather heavy for a humid August evening. There was no function in the banqueting chamber, the only public room on that floor, until the following week, and our apartment was clearly marked as private.

With my best offensive suavity, I said, ‘Can I help you. madam?’

Instantly, but without a sound, the figure turned to face me. I vaguely saw a pale, thin-lipped face, heavy auburn ringlets and some kind of large bluish pendant at the throat. Much more clearly than this, I sensed a surprise and alarm that seemed disproportionate: my arrival on the landing could hardly have been inaudible to one only twenty feet away, and it was obvious enough who I was.

At that moment my father called to me, and without thinking I looked away.

‘Yes, Father?’

‘Oh, Maurice … could you send up an evening paper? The local one will do.’

‘I’ll get Fred to bring one up.’

‘Soon, if you would, Maurice, and if Fred’s free.’

‘Yes, Father.’

This took no more than a dozen seconds, but when they were over the landing was empty. The woman must have decide to cut short her display of heightened sensitivity and pursue her search on the ground floor. No doubt she was more successful there, for I saw nothing of her as I came down the stairs, crossed the few feet of hall and entered the front bar.

This long, low room, with small windows revealing the thickness of its outer wall, and normally cool and dry in summer, was stickily oppressive that evening. Fred Soames, the barman, had the fans going, but as I joined him behind the counter and waited for him to finish serving a round of drinks, I could feel sweat trickling down under my frilled shirt and dinner-jacket. I was uneasy too, and not just in my habitual unlocalized way. I was bothered by something about the appearance or demeanour of the woman I had seen on the landing, something it was now too late to define. Even less reasonably, I felt certain that, when my father called to me, he had changed his mind about what he wanted to say. I could not imagine what his original thought had been, and, again, I would not now be able to find out. His memory in such cases extended over seconds only.

I sent Fred off with the paper, served, in his absence, three medium sherries and (with concealed distaste) a lager and lime, and took a party of early diners through the menu, pushing the rather boring salmon and some incipiently elderly pork a little less gently than the Good Food Guide might have approved. After that, a visit to the kitchen, where David Palmer and the chef had everything under control, including Ramón, who assured me that he was not now desiring to return to Espain. Then, a call at the tiny office under the angle of the main staircase. My wife was listlessly working her way through the bills, but lost some of her listlessness (she never seemed to lose quite all of it) on being told to forget all that crap for now and go up and change. She even gave me a hasty kiss on the ear.

Returning to the bar by way of the still-room, where I swallowed down a very large Scotch put there for me by Fred, I did some more takings-through the menu. The last of the batch was an elderly couple from Baltimore, on their way to Cambridge in search of things historical and breaking their journey at my house to take in a few of the same, or similar. The man, a retired lawyer, had evidently been doing his homework, not a testing task in this instance. Periphrastically but courteously, he inquired after our ghost, or ghosts.

I went into the routine, first piously turning down a drink. The main one was somebody called Dr Thomas Underhill who lived here in the later seventeenth century. He was in holy orders, but he wasn’t the parson of the parish; he was a scholar who for some reason gave up his Cambridge fellowship and bought this place. He’s buried in that little churchyard just up the road, but he nearly didn’t get buried at all. He was so wicked that when he died the sexton wouldn’t dig a grave for him, and the local rector refused to officiate at his funeral. They had to get a sexton from Royston, and a clergyman all the way from Peterhouse in Cambridge. Some of the people round about said that Underhill had killed his wife, whom he used to quarrel with a lot, apparently, and he was also supposed to have brought about the death of a farmer he’d had trouble with over some land deal.

‘Well, the odd thing is that both these people were murdered all right, half torn to pieces, in fact, in the most brutal way, but in both cases the bodies were found in the open, at almost the same spot on the road to the village, although the murders were six years apart, and on both occasions it was established beyond doubt that Underhill was indoors here at the time. The obvious guess is that he hired chaps to do the job for him, but they were never caught, nobody even saw them, and the force used on the victims, they say, was disproportionate for an ordinary commercial killing.

‘Anyway, Underhill, or rather his ghost, turned up quite a few times at a window in what’s now part of the dining-room, peering out and apparently watching something. All the witnesses seem to have been very struck by the expression on his face and his general demeanour, but, according to the story, there was a lot of disagreement about what he actually looked like. One chap said he thought Underhill was behaving as if he were terrified out of his wits. Someone else thought he was showing the detached curiosity of a man of science observing an experiment. It doesn’t sound very consistent, does it? but then…’

‘Could it not be, Mr Allington, could it not be that this … apparition was engaged, if one might so put the matter, in … surveying the actuality of the crimes, or the, the shadow of the actuality of the crimes he had brought to pass, and that the various observers were witnessing successive stages in his reaction to the spectacle of brutal violence, from … clinical disinterest to horror, and it might be, agonized remorse?’

‘An interesting point.’ I did not add that it had occurred, in a less Jamesian form, to almost everybody who had heard this story. ‘But in that case he was standing at the wrong window, facing away from the spot where the murders were done to-wards a patch of woods. Nothing has ever happened there as far as I know, nothing to do with this business anyway.’

‘I see. Then let me turn to another consideration. In the latter part of your strange and fascinating tale, Mr Allington, that concerning the figure of … the revenant, I noticed that you employed the past tense, thereby … implying that these manifestations are also a thing of the past. Is that, would that he correct, sir?’

The old lad’s brain could evidently work a little faster than his organs of speech. ‘Quite correct. Nothing has been seen since I took over the house seven years ago, and the people I bought it from, who’d had it for much longer, had never seen anything either. They had heard that an elderly relative of a predecessor had been frightened by what could have been Underhill’s ghost when he was a boy, but that must have been in Victorian times. No, I’m afraid if there ever was anything, it’s all over now.’

‘Just so. I have read that this house has known at least one ghost, which would seem to … indicate the possibility, at least, of another.’

‘Yes. Nothing was ever actually seen of him at any stage. A few people said they used to hear somebody walking round the outside of the house at night and trying the doors and windows. Of course, every village must have two or three characters who wouldn’t be averse to a bit of burglary at a place of this size if they could find an easy entry.’

‘Did nobody take the obvious course of looking out to see … what there might have been to see?’

‘Apparently not. They said they didn’t like the noise whoever it was made while he was going round. He rustled and crackled as he moved. That’s as much sense as I’ve been able to make of it.’

‘And this … person also no longer visits the scene?’

‘No.’

I spoke a little shortly. I usually enjoyed telling all this, but tonight it seemed silly, fully vouched for by written evidence and yet at the same time a blatant piece of stock-in-trade. My heart was beating irregularly and uncomfortably and I longed for another drink. My clothes were glueing themselves to me in the damp heat, which seemed to be increasing as the evening advanced. I did my best to listen to further inquiries, mainly about the documentary basis for my story. These I checked by saying, untruthfully, that I had nothing of the sort in my own possession, and that all the stuff was in the county archives in Hertford town. The last stages of the conversation were lengthened by my guest’s habit of pausing frequently in search of some even more roundabout way of expressing himself than the one which had first occurred to him. Finally, a party at the other end of the bar reached the menu stage, and to them, after receiving a couple of paragraphs of thanks, I moved away.

By the time I had got the new party off, dashed into the still-room thirsty and out refreshed, done a brief tour of the dining-room in modified orderly-officer style, agreed hypocritically that a sauce vinaigrette for avocado pears had too much salt, been lavish about making this good (the tasted pears would go very nicely into the chef’s salad at tomorrow’s lunch), turned down on the office telephone a request for a double room that night from a drunken Cambridge undergraduate or sociology don and given my wife, downstairs again in a quite good sort of silver dress, a glass of Tio Pepe, it was nine twenty. We were to dine, as usual when no major function was in the book, at ten o’clock in the apartment. I was expecting two private guests, Dr and Mrs Maybury. Jack Maybury was the family doctor and a personal friend, or, more precisely, somebody I could bear to talk to. Among that tiny proportion of humanity more entertaining than very bad television, Jack stood high. Diana Maybury made television seem irrelevant, dull; an enormous feat.

They arrived when I was behind the bar again, being very candid with a London museum curator about the third most expensive claret on the list being the best value for money. Jack, a shock-headed, bony figure in a crumpled suit of biscuit-coloured linen, waved briefly and strode off, as usual, in the direction of the office to tell the local telephone exchange where he was. Diana joined my wife in the small alcove beside the fireplace. Together, they made an impressive, rather erective sight, both of them tall, blonde and full-breasted, but so different in other ways that they might have been chosen for some textbook illustration showing the width of divergence among basically similar physical types, or, more to the purpose, an X-certificate Swedish film that would fall a long way short of sticking to straight sex. Dull would he be of soul that would pass up the chance of taking the pair of them to bed. Their visible differences—Diana’s slim build, light-tawny hair-colour, hazel eyes, tanned skin and nervous demeanour alongside the strength and roundness, the yellow and blue and pale rose, the slow, steady movements of Joyce, my wife—suggested that there were others to be discovered, no less striking. In the past few weeks I had made some progress towards a vital part of this objective: persuading Diana to come to bed with me. Joyce knew nothing about this, nor about the more ambitious plan; but as I watched them exchange a kiss of greeting in the alcove, it was clear to me that they had always shown a subdued sexual feeling towards each other. Or was it not really clear at all, not true, just attractive as a fantasy?

The museum curator, having taken my advice and saved eleven shillings on his claret, not quite unexpectedly ordered a half-bottle of Château d’Yquem (37/6) to go with his sweet course. I bowed approvingly, told Fred to pass the word to the wine-waiter, mixed Diana a gin and bitter lemon, her invariable pre-dinner drink, and carried it over. I tried for her mouth when I kissed her, but got the side of her chin instead. There was a pause after that. Not for the first time, the idea of chatting to these two seemed altogether less attractive than what I had been thinking about a minute before. Jack reappeared while I was still exploring the topic of the heat and humidity. He kissed Joyce as unceremoniously as he had waved to me on arrival, then moved me aside. He was supposed to be a great hammer of his female patients, but, like most men of whom that sort of thing is said, he had on the whole a disinclination for female society.

‘Cheers,’ he said, raising for a short space the glass of Cam-pan and soda Fred would have served him. ‘How’s everybody, then?’

Coming from one’s family doctor, this query went beyond mere phatic communion, and Jack always managed to get a slight air of hostility into it. He was inclined to be snobbish about health, implying that the lack of it sprang from some vulgar shortcoming, to be accepted as distastefully inevitable if not actually deplored. This probably served quite well as a form of pressure on his patients to get better.

‘Oh, all carrying on all right, I think.’

‘How’s your father?’ he asked, probing one of the several weak spots in my defences, and lighting a cigarette without taking his eyes off me.

‘About the same. Very piano.’

‘Very what?’ Jack just might not have heard me against the alcohol-fired roar of other voices in the bar, but more likely he meant to rebuke me for using frivolous diction in a solemn context. ‘What?’

‘Piano. You know. Subdued. Not doing or saying much.’

‘You must realize that’s to be expected at his age and in his condition.’

‘I do, I assure you.’

‘And Amy?’ asked Jack vigilantly, referring to my daughter.

‘Well … she seems to be okay, as far as I can tell. Watches television a lot, plays her pop records, all that kind of thing.’

Jack stared into his drink, not what I would have called a very meaningful move on the part of somebody drinking what he was drinking, and said nothing. Perhaps he felt that what I had said was condemnatory enough without assistance from him.

‘There’s not much for her to do here,’ I went on defensively, ‘and she hasn’t had time to make any real friends round about. Not that she’d have much in common with the village kids, I imagine. And it’s the holidays, of course.’

Still Jack said nothing. He sniffed, not altogether at physical need.

‘Joyce has been a bit sluggish. She’s had a lot of work to do these last weeks. And there’s this weather. In fact it’s been a pretty tiring summer for everybody. I’m going to try and get the three of us away for a few days at the beginning of September.’

‘What about you?’ asked Jack with a touch of contempt.

‘I’m all right.’

‘Are you, by God. You don’t look it. Listen, Maurice, I won’t get a chance later—you ought to see yourself. Your colour’s bad—yes, I know all about your not getting much of a chance to get out, but you ought to be able to manage an hour’s walk in the afternoons. You’re sweating excessively.’

‘Indeed I am.’ I wiped with my handkerchief the saturated hair above my ears. ‘So would you be if you had to charge around this damn place trying to keep your eye on half a dozen things at once, and in this weather too.’

‘I’ve been charging around too, and I’m not in the state you’re in.’

‘You’re ten years younger than I am.’

‘What of it? Maurice, what you have is alcoholic sweating. How many have you put down already this evening?’

‘Just a couple.’

‘Huh. I know your couples. Couple of trebles. You’ll have another half a couple before we go up, and at least a couple and a half after dinner. That’s well over half a bottle, plus three or four glasses of wine and whatever you had at midday. It’s too much.’

‘I’m used to it. I can take it.’

‘You’re used to it, yes. And you’ve got the remains of a first-class constitution. But you can’t take it the way you could in the past. You’re fifty-three. You’ve come to one of those places where the road goes sharply downhill for a bit. It’ll go on going downhill if you carry on as you are. How have you been feeling today?’

‘I’m all right. I told you.’

‘Oh, come on. How have you really been feeling?’

‘Oh … Bloody awful.’

‘You’ve been feeling bloody awful for a couple of months. Because you’ve been drinking too much.’

‘The only time I can be reasonably sure of not feeling bloody awful is a couple of hours or so at the end of a day’s drinking.’

‘You’ll get less sure, believe me. How’s the jactitation?’

‘Better, I think. Yes, definitely better.’

‘And the hallucinations?’

‘About the same.’

What we were referring to was less disagreeable than it may sound. A form of jactitation, taking place round about the moment of falling asleep, is known to almost everybody’s experience: that convulsive straightening of the leg which is often accompanied by a short explanatory dream about stumbling, or missing the bottom stair. In more habitual and pronounced cases, the jerking movement may affect any muscles, including those of the face, and may occur up to a dozen times or more before the subject finally attains sleep, or abandons the quest for it.

At this level of intensity, jactitation is associated with hypnagogic (onset-of-sleep-accompanying) hallucinations. These antecede jactitation, taking place when the subject is more fully awake, or even wide awake, but with the eyes closed. They are not dreams. They might be described as visions of no obvious meaning seen under poor conditions. Their nearest, or least distant, parallel is what happens to people who have spent much of the day with their eyes fixed on a scene that varies only within certain fixed limits, as when travelling by car, and who find, when they close their eyes for the night, that a kind of muted version of what they have been looking at is unrolling itself against the inside of their eyelids; but there are large differences. The hallucinations lack all sense of depth of frame, and there is never much in the way of background, often none. A piece of a wall, a corner of a fireplace, a glimpse of a chair or table is the most that can be made out; one is always indoors, if anywhere. More important, the hallucinatory images are invariably, so to speak, fictitious. Nothing known ever presents itself.

The images are, on the whole, human. Out of the darkness there will appear a face, or a face with neck and shoulders, or part of a face, or something that cannot be precisely described, but resembles a face more closely than anything else, perhaps seeming to move slowly or changing its expression. Also commonly seen are other parts of the body, a buttock and thigh, a whole torso, a solitary foot. In my case, these are often naked, but this may be the product of my own erotic tendencies, not a necessary feature of the experience. The strange distortions and appendages that, much of the time, accompany the recognizable naked forms tend to diminish their erotic quality. I am not myself sexually moved by a breast divided into segments like a peeled orange, or a pair of thighs that converge into a single swollen knee.

From all this, it might be thought that the hypnagogic hallucination is something to be feared. To an extent this is so, but (in my case) the various images, though frequently grotesque or puzzling, have not much power to terrify. And, as against the times when an unremarkable profile suddenly turns full face and glares in lunatic rage, or becomes quite inhuman, there are the rarer times when something beautiful shows itself clearly, in a small flare of soft yellow light, before fading into nothing, into the state of a vanished fiction. What is most unwelcome about these visions is the expectation of the jerks and twitches, the joltings into total wakefulness and the delaying of sleep, which they always portend.

I looked briefly ahead now to this prospect as Jack and I stood talking in the bar, which had begun to fill up with the first guests out of the dining-room and people from the nearer places who had driven over for the later half of the evening. I said to Jack,

‘I suppose you’re going to tell me all that stuff is due to drink’

‘There’s a connection all right.’

‘Last time we talked about this you said there was a connection with epilepsy. You can’t have it both ways.’

‘Why not, if it is both ways? Anyway, the epilepsy thing is a technicality. I can’t tell you you’ll never have an epileptic fit, any more than I can tell you you’ll never break your leg, but I can tell you there’s no sign of it at the moment. Another thing I can tell you, though, is that there’s a bloody sight more than a technical connection between your drinking and your jumps and faces. Stress. It’s all stress.’

‘Alcohol relieves stress.’

‘At first. Look, come off it, Maurice. After twenty years on the bottle you don’t need me to lecture you about vicious circles and descending spirals and what-not. I’m not asking you to cut it out completely. That wouldn’t be a good idea at all. Knock it off a bit. Try keeping away from the hard stuff until the evening. You’d better start that soon if you feel like seeing sixty. But I don’t want you sitting there upstairs like a death’s head at the feast, so forget about it for tonight. Go and throw down another of your specials and then trot round the dining-room apologizing for the bits of dogshit in the steak-and-kidney pudding while I chat up these birds.’

I did approximately as I had been told, finally getting away rather later than expected by reason of a full-length oral review of my cuisine, delivered at the speed of one addressing a large audience of high-grade mental defectives, from my Baltimore guest. After hearing this out, and responding in appropriately rounded periods, I took my departure and went up to the flat.

The sound of an authoritative and rather peevish male voice, speaking with a strong Central European accent, was coming from my daughter’s bedroom. Thirteen-year-old Amy, tall, thin and pale, was sitting bent forward on the edge of her bed with her cheeks in her hands and elbows on knees. Her surroundings expressed her age and station with overdone fidelity: coloured photographs of singers and actors cut from magazines and Scotch-taped to the walls, a miniature lidless gramophone in pastel pink, records and gaudy record-sleeves, the former seldom inside the latter, fragments of clothing, most of them looking too narrow for their purposes, a great many jars and pots and small plastic bottles grouped on the top of the dressing-table round a television set. On the screen of this, a hairy man was saying to a bald man, ‘But the effects of these attacks on the dollar will not of course immediately be apparent. And we must wait to see which will be the remedies adopted.’

‘Darling, what on earth are you watching this for?’ I asked. Amy shrugged her shoulders without otherwise altering her position.

‘What else is there on?’

‘Music on one of them—you know, with all violins and things—and horses on the other.’

‘But you like horses.’

‘Not these ones.’

‘What’s wrong with them?’

‘All in lines.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘All in lines.’

‘I don’t see why you feel you’ve always got to watch something, no matter what it is. You can’t possibly … I wish you’d read a book occasionally.’

‘But you must understand that this in the first place is not a matter for the International Monetary Fund,’ said the hairy man with contempt.

‘Sweetheart, turn that down, will you? I can’t hear a thing … That’s better,’ I said as Amy, her eyes still on the screen, put one long-fingered hand to the remote-control box at her side and reduced the hairy man’s voice to a far-away shout. ‘Now listen: Dr Maybury and his wife are here for dinner tonight. They’ll be coming up here in a minute. Why don’t you slip your nightdress on now and clean your teeth and run in and chat to them for a little while before you go to bed?’

‘No thanks, Daddy.’

‘But you like them. You’re always saying you like them.’

‘No thanks.’

‘Well, come and say good night to Gramps, then.’

‘I have.’

As I stood there for a moment by the bed, wishing I knew how to give my daughter a life, I happened to notice the photograph of her dead mother in its place on the wall beside the window. Why I did so I had no idea, and I thought I had made no movement, but Amy, apparently without having glanced aside, knew what I had seen. She shifted her legs slightly, as if in discomfort. I said suddenly, trying to sound enthusiastic,

‘I know what: I’ve got to go into Baldock again tomorrow morning. What I’ve got to do won’t take more than a few minutes, so you could come in with me and we could have a cup of … You could have a Coke.’

‘Okay, Daddy,’ said Amy in a placatory voice.

‘Now I’ll be back in fifteen minutes to say good night to you and I expect you to be in bed by then. Don’t forget to clean your teeth.’

‘Okay.’

The hairy man having had his hour, it was the recommendation of a shampoo, delivered in the tones of somebody in mid-orgasm, that filled the small room before I had shut the door after me. Amy was not yet a woman, but, even when much younger, she had developed the totally female habit of behaving coolly, or coldly, to a degree that must have a reason, while denying to the death not only the existence of the reason but also the existence of the behaviour. I had not given her the chance just now of doing any denying, but I had not needed to. I was intimidated by the behaviour, and now and then appalled by the reason, while avoiding the question of what it was. Amy and I had never discussed Margaret’s death in a street accident eighteen months previously, nor her leaving me, taking Amy with her, nearly three years before that, nor Margaret herself; beyond necessities, we had barely mentioned her. In the end, I would have to find a way of doing something about that, and the behaviour, and the reason. Perhaps I could make a start on the trip to Baldock in the morning. Perhaps.

I went down the sloping passage and into the dining-room, a broad, rather low-ceilinged affair with a beautiful seventeenth-century heraldic stone fireplace I had uncovered behind Victorian brickwork. Here Magdalena, Ramón’s wife, a tubby little woman of about thirty-five, was laying bowls of chilled vichyssoise round the five places at the oval table. The windows were open, the curtains undrawn, and when I lit the candles their flames swayed slightly without breaking. A breeze from the Chilterns was just managing to reach as far up as here. The air it brought seemed no cooler. When Magdalena, muttering quite amiably to herself, had departed, I walked to the widow at the front of the house, but found little relief.

There was nothing to see, only the empty room reflected in the large square pane. My pieces of statuary stood in their places: a good copy of a Roman terracotta head of an old man on a pedestal beside the door, a pair of Elizabethan youths looking vaguely towards each other from rectangular niches in the far wall, busts of a naval officer and of a military man of the Napoleonic period above the fireplace, and a pretty bronze of a girl, probably French and of the 1890s or just after, on another pedestal in front of the window at my left, placed so as to catch the morning sun. As I stood with my back to the room I could not make out much of her, but from all the others that oddly exact balance between the animate and the inanimate, constantly maintained when they were viewed direct, seemed to have departed. In the glass of the window they looked newly empty of any life. I turned round and faced them: yes, once more human as well as mineral.

With the A595 just too far off for individual vehicles to be heard, and no one, for the moment, moving about in the forecourt, everything seemed quiet until I listened. Then the murmur of voices became audible from downstairs, but, again, none could be distinguished from the rest. I said to myself that if a minute went by without any sort of separate sound emerging, I would go to the cupboard in the bedroom and give myself another drink. I began counting in my head: one—thousand—two—thousand—three—thousand—four—thousand … The thousand business helps one to attain the correct rhythm, and by using it over the years I have reached the point at which I can guarantee an accuracy of within two seconds per timed minute. This is a useful accomplishment in such situations as having to boil eggs without the aid of a watch, but usefulness is not really the end in view.

I had reached thirty-eight thousand in this count, and was preparing to congratulate myself on entering the last third of the course, when I heard a clearly differentiated and half-expected sound from the drawing-room across the passage, a mingled groaning and clearing of the throat. My father, having heard Magdalena’s departure, but not wanting to have it thought that he was acting directly on this signal, had decided that it was time for him to stir himself and come to table. He had deprived me of my drink, but there was a case for saying that that was just as well.

I heard his step, slow and steady, and after a moment the door opened. He said something wearily unfriendly as he found he was being preceded over the threshold by Victor Hugo, who got under his feet even more than most people’s.

Victor was a blue-point Siamese, a neutered tom-cat now in the third year of his age. He entered, as usual, in vague semi-flight, as from something that was probably not a menace, but which it was as well to be on the safe side about. Becoming aware of me, he approached, again as usual, with an air of uncertainty not so much about who I was as about what I was, and of keeping a very open mind on the range of possible answers. Was I potassium nitrate, or next October twelvemonth, or Christianity, or a chess problem—perhaps involving a variation on the Falkbeer counter-gambit? When he reached me, he gave up the problem and toppled on to my feet like an elephant pierced by a bullet in some vital spot. Victor was, among other things, the reason why no dogs were allowed at the Green Man. The effort of categorizing them might have proved too much for him.

My father shut the door firmly behind him and gave a neutral nod in my direction. I rather take after him physically, being quite as tall as he and as little inclined to run to fat, and his dark-red hair-colour, still vivid in places among the white, is mine too. But his large high nose and broad hands, as powerful as a pianist’s, have in me been replaced by something less assertively masculine from my mother’s side.

The neutrality of the nod he had given was a none-too-usual alleviation of the unspecific discontent with which he nowadays looked as if he regarded the world. Here was somebody else whose life I did not understand. The weekday routine, mitigated by a lie-in on Sunday mornings, was a tight one: whatever the weather, off at ten sharp into the village ‘to have a look round’ (though whatever there was to be seen there never varied, at least to a townsman’s eye like mine or his), pick up a packet of ten Piccadilly and The Times (which he would not have delivered to the house) at the corner shop, into the Dainty Tea-rooms for a coffee, a chocolate biscuit and a thorough read-through of the paper and along to the Queen’s Arms at midday precisely, there to drink two Courage light ales, make a start on the crossword puzzle and chat to ‘one or two old buffers’ about topics I had found it hard to define when I, on an occasional slack morning, accompanied him on his round. Back to the Green Man at one fifteen on the dot for a cold lunch in his room, and then an afternoon dozing, finishing, or trying to finish, the crossword, and reading one of the crime-and-detection paperbacks I would have got for him in Royston or Baldock. By six or six thirty—here a little latitude was permitted—he would be in the drawing-room, ready for the first of two drinks before dinner, and ready for conversation too, I suppose, because he never took anything in there with him, not even the crossword. But Joyce and Amy and I all had other things to do than go and talk to him, and he would fall back on sending for the evening paper, as tonight, or on gazing at the wall. Whenever I happened to look in and found him like this, again as tonight, I would feel slightly defeated: I could not force him to read, set him acrostics to solve, demand that he learn Latin or take up mechanical drawing, and he would less soon watch television than, in his own phrase, have a lump of vegetable marrow shoved into his skull instead of a brain.

He looked round the dining-room now with a more directed frown than usual, on the point, conceivably, of establishing just what it was about his environment that he found most disagreeable. His eye fell on the dining-table and moved along it.

‘Guests,’ he said with unlooked-for tolerance.

‘Yes, Jack and Diana Maybury are coming in. In fact, they’ve already—’

‘I know, I know, you told me this morning. Funny sort of rooster, isn’t he? I mean peculiar. All this I’m the most responsible and efficient general practitioner in the whole bloody country and a great friend of everybody’s and that’s all there is about me. I don’t think I like him, Maurice. I wish I could say I did, because he’s been very good to me, I mean as a doctor, I’ve no fault to find with him there. But I don’t think I really like him as a man. Something to do with how he treats that wife of his. There’s no love lost there, you know. Understandable enough. That way of hers of going on as if how bloody marvellous you are considering you’ve got no arms or legs. Well, at my age I more or less expect that style of thing, but she does it with everybody. Oh, very attractive, of course, I can see that. You’re not, uh, by the way…?’

‘No,’ I said, wishing I had a drink. ‘Nothing like that.’

‘I’ve seen the way you look at her. You’re a bad lad, Maurice.’

‘There’s nothing wrong in looking at her.’

‘In your case there is, because you’re a bad lad. Anyway, don’t touch it, if you want my advice. That sort of little bitch would be more trouble than she’s worth. There are other things to a woman than taking her to bed. And that reminds me—I’ve been meaning to have a chat with you about Joyce. She’s not happy, Maurice. Oh, I don’t mean she’s miserable, nothing like that, and she does throw herself into the life of the place— you’re very lucky there. But she’s not really happy. I mean she doesn’t really think you’d have gone as far as marrying her if you hadn’t wanted somebody to be a mother to young Amy. And that side of things isn’t working out as well as it might because you’re leaving it to her to do it instead of helping her to do it and doing it with her. She’s a young woman, Maurice. I know you’ve got a lot to do running the pub, and you’re very conscientious. But you mustn’t hide behind that. Take this morning, now. Some rooster was kicking up a fuss because Magdalena had spilt a few drops of tea into his breakfast marmalade, if you don’t bloody well mind. Joyce dealt with him all right, and then afterwards she said to me…’

He stopped, as his ear, no less quick than mine, caught the sound of the outside door of the apartment opening. Then, hearing expected voices, he got up from the dining-chair where he had settled himself, so as to be on his feet by the time the door opened. ‘Tell you later,’ he mouthed and whispered.

The Mayburys and Joyce came in. I went over to the sideboard to see about the drinks for dinner, and found that Diana had followed me. Jack had started being as tolerant as ever to my father, who he seemed to feel could not reasonably be expected to maintain impeccable physical trim at the age of seventy-nine. Joyce was with them.

‘Well, Maurice,’ stated or queried Diana, managing to turn even that short utterance into a fair sample of her unnaturally precise enunciation. She also implied by her tone that she had effortlessly removed us both to a level far different from the plodding to-and-fro of ordinary converse.

‘Hallo, Diana.’

‘Maurice … do you mind if I ask you a question?’

There, again in small compass, was Diana for you. It was tempting, and would have been near the truth, to answer, ‘Yes, I do, by God, if you really want to know, very much indeed,’ but I found that I was looking at or near the low top of her serpent-green silk dress, where there was a lot more of Diana for you, and merely grunted.

‘Maurice … why do you always look as if you’re trying to escape from something? What makes you feel so trapped?’ She spoke as if helping me count the words.

‘Do I? Trapped? How do you mean? As far as I know I’m not trying to escape from anything.’

‘Then why do you look as if something’s after you all the time?’

‘After me? What could be after me? There’s income tax, and next month’s bills, and old age, and a few things like that, but then we’re all——’

‘What is it you want to get away from?’

Sidestepping another tempting retort, I glanced over her smooth tanned shoulder. Jack and my father were talking at once, with Joyce trying to listen to them both. I said in a lowered voice, ‘I’ll tell you another time. For instance tomorrow afternoon. I’ll be at the corner at half-past three.’

‘Maurice …

‘Yes?’ I said, not altogether, I hoped, through my teeth.

‘Maurice, what makes you so incredibly persistent? What is it you want from me?’

I felt an individual globule of sweat well up out of the skin of my chest. ‘I’m persistent because of what I want from you, and if you don’t know what that is I can soon show you. You will be there tomorrow, won’t you?’

Exactly then, Joyce called, ‘Let’s start, shall we? You must all be starving. I am, anyway.’

Not bothering to conceal her triumph at the way events had brought her the prize of quasi-legitimately leaving my question unanswered, Diana moved off. I uncapped my father’s pint of Worthington White Shield, picked up one of the bottles of Bâtard Montrachet 1961 the wine-waiter had opened half an hour earlier and followed her. In the last five seconds it had become almost overwhelmingly unlikely that she would meet me the following afternoon, because she was now in the uncommonly rewarding position of being able to stand me up without incurring the odium of having actually broken an arrangement. On the other hand, she was very much capable of following this line of argument and so going along to the agreed corner to find me not there, which would shove me back to the wrong side of square one, not to speak of the questions about why I was so changeable and so selfish, and did I think it was because I was so insecure, that I would have to sweat through as part of the shoving. And, being Diana, to have got that far would mean she would know, without having to think about it, that I would have got as far as it, too. So I would have to turn up anyway. But I had been going to do that all along.

By this time I had poured the drinks and taken my place in my walnut Queen Anne carver, which, though I had one or two older things in the house, is much my favourite piece. I had Diana on my right with my father on her other side facing the door, then Jack, and Joyce on my left. As we ate the vichyssoise, my father said,

‘All sorts of people seem to be wandering about the house these days. I mean up on this floor, where they’ve no business to be when there’s no banquet affair going on. Not half an hour ago there was some rooster clumping up and down that passage outside as if he owned the place. I was on the point of getting up and going to see what he thought he was doing when he buggered off. It’s not the first time in the last few days, either. Can’t you put up a notice or something, Maurice?’

‘Outside the main door here there’s a—’

‘No, no, I mean something at the foot of the stairs, to keep them off this floor altogether. The place is turning into a mad-house. Haven’t you come across this sort of thing yourself, Maurice? You must have, surely.’

‘Once or twice.’ I spoke listlessly, my mind and the edge of my vision on Diana. ‘Now you mention it, there was a woman hanging about at the top of the stairs earlier on.’ I realized for the first time that I had not subsequently seen that woman in the bar or the dining-room or anywhere round the house. No doubt she had found the ladies’ lavatory on the ground floor, and left while I was busy standing in for Fred. No doubt. But I half-saw Diana put her spoon down and begin taking stock of my face. I could not stand the prospect of being asked, in those separated syllables, why I was so this, or what had made me so that, or whether I realized that I was so the other. I got up, said I was going to say good night to Amy and went off to do so, ringing for Magdalena on my way out.

Amy’s appearance and posture had changed to the minimum degree consistent with her having been Amy sitting on bed before and being Amy sitting in bed now. On the television screen, a young woman was denouncing an older one who was keeping her back turned throughout, not so much out of inattention or deliberate rudeness as with the mere object of letting the audience see her face at the same time as her accuser’s. For a moment I watched, in the hope of seeing them do a smart about-turn at the end of the speech, and wondering to what extent real life would he affected if there were to grow up a new convention that people always had to be facing the same way before they could speak to each other. Then I went over to Amy.

‘What time does this finish?’

‘Nearly over now.’

‘Mind you put it off the moment it is. Have you cleaned your teeth?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good girlie. Don’t forget we’re going into Baldock in the morning.’

‘No.’

‘Good night, then.’

I bent over to kiss her cheek. At the same time, there came a succession of sounds from the dining-room: a shout or loud cry in my father’s voice, some hurried words from Jack, a sort of bumping crash made by a collision with furniture, a confusion of voices. I told Amy to stay where she was, and ran back to the dining-room.

When I opened the door, Victor rushed past me, his tail swollen with erected hair. Across the room, Jack, with some assistance from Joyce, was dragging my father, who was completely limp, to a near-by armchair. At my father’s place at table there was an overturned dining-chair and some crockery and cutlery on the floor. Some drink had been spilt. Diana, who had been watching the others, turned and looked at me in fear.

‘He started staring and then he stood up and called out and then he just sort of collapsed and hit the table and Jack caught him,’ she said in a jumbled voice: no elocution now.

I went past her. ‘What’s happened?’

Jack was lowering my father into the armchair. When he had done this, he said, ‘Cerebral haemorrhage, I should imagine.’

‘Is he going to die?’

‘Yes, it’s quite possible.’

‘Soon?’

‘Quite possibly.’

‘What can you do about it?’

‘Nothing that’ll prevent him dying if he’s going to.’

I looked at Jack, and he at me. I could not tell what he was thinking. He had his finger against my father’s pulse. My body, I myself, seemed to consist of my face and the front of my torso, down as far as the base of the belly. I knelt by the armchair and heard slow, deep breathing. My father’s eyes were open, with the pupils apparently fixed in the left-hand corners. Apart from this he looked quite normal, even relaxed.

‘Father,’ I said, and thought he stirred slightly. But there was nothing to say next. I wondered what was going on in that brain, what it saw, or fancied it saw: something irrelevant, perhaps, something pleasant, sunshine and fields. Or something not pleasant, something ugly, something bewildering. I imagined a desperate, prolonged effort to understand what was happening, and a discomfort so enormous as to be worse than pain, because lacking the merciful power of pain to extinguish thought, feeling, identity, the sense of time, everything but itself. This idea terrified me, but it also pointed out to me, with irresistible clarity and firmness, what I was to say next.

I leant closer. ‘Father. This is Maurice. Are you awake? Do you know where you are? This is Maurice, Father. Tell me what’s going on where you are. Is there anything to see? Describe how you feel. What are you thinking?’

Behind me, Jack said coldly, ‘He can’t hear you.’

‘Father. Can you hear me? Nod your head if you can.’

In slow, mechanical tones, like a gramophone record played at too low a speed, my father said, ‘Maur—rice,’ then, less distinctly, a few more words that might have been ‘who’ and ‘over by the …‘ Then he died.

I stood up and turned away. Diana looked at me with the fear gone from her face and stance. Before she could say anything I went past her and over to Joyce, who was looking down at the serving table. Here a tray had been placed with five covered plates and some vegetable dishes on it.

‘I couldn’t think what to do,’ said Joyce, ‘so I told Magdalena to leave it all here. Is he dead?’

‘Yes.’

At once she started to cry. We put our arms round each other.

‘He was awfully old and it was very quick and he didn’t suffer.’

‘We don’t know what he suffered,’ I said.

‘He was such a nice old man. I can’t believe he’s just gone for ever.’

‘I’d better go and tell Amy.’

‘Do you want me to come with you?’

‘Not now.’

Amy had turned off the TV set and was sitting on her bed, but not in her previous posture.

‘Gramps has been taken ill,’ I said.

‘Is he dead?’

‘Yes, but it was all over in a second and it didn’t hurt him. He can’t have known anything about it. He was very old, you know, and it might have happened any day. That’s how it is with very old people.’

‘But there was so much I meant to say to him.’

‘What about?’

‘All sorts of things.’ Amy got up and came and put her hands on my shoulders. ‘I’m sorry your father’s dead.’

This made me cry. I sat down on the bed for a few minutes while she held my hand and stroked the back of my neck. When I had finished crying, she sent me off, saying that I was not to worry about her, that she would be all right and would see me in the morning.

In the dining-room, the two women were sitting on the window-seat, Diana with her arm round Joyce’s shoulders. Joyce’s head was lowered and her yellow hair had fallen over her face. Jack handed me a tumbler half-full of whisky with a little water. I drank it all.

‘Amy all right?’ asked Jack. ‘Good. I’ll look in on her in a minute. Now we’ll have to get your father on to his bed. You and I can do it, or I can go and fetch someone from downstairs if you don’t feel up to it.’

‘I can do it. You and I can do it.’

‘Come on, then.’

Jack took my father under the arms and I by the ankles. Diana was there to open the door. By holding him close against his chest, Jack saw to it that my father’s head did not loll much. He went on talking as we moved.

‘I’ll get young Palmer up here as soon as we’ve done this, if you approve, just to put him in the picture. There’s nothing more that needs doing tonight. The district nurse will be in first thing in the morning to lay him out. I’ll be along too, with the death certificate. Someone will have to take that in to the registrar in Baldock and fix things up with the undertakers. Will you do that?’

‘Yes.’ We stood now in the bedroom. ‘What are you looking for?’

‘Blanket.’

‘Bottom drawer there.’

We covered my father up and left him. The rest was soon done. All of us managed to eat a little, Jack rather more.

David Palmer appeared, listened, said and looked how sorry he was and went. I telephoned my son Nick, aged twenty-four, an assistant lecturer in French literature at a university in the Midlands. He told me he would get somebody to look after two-year-old Josephine and come down by car with his wife, Lucy, the next morning, arriving in time for a late lunch. I realized with a shock that there was nobody else to inform: my father’s brother and sister had died without issue, and I had neither. By eleven thirty, a good three-quarters of an hour before the last non-residents would ordinarily have been out of the place, word of the death had spread and everything was quiet. Finally, the Mayburys and Joyce and I stood at the doorway of the apartment.

‘Don’t come down,’ said Jack. ‘Fred’ll let us out. Have a good long sleep—Joyce one of the red bombs, Maurice three of the Belrepose things.’ Speaking neither briskly nor with emotionalism, he added, ‘Well, I’m sorry he’s gone. He was a decent old boy, with plenty of sense. I expect you’ll miss him a lot, Maurice’

This mild show of commiseration and its accompanying glance, which carried sympathy of a depersonalized sort, were Jack’s first non-utilitarian responses to what had happened, nor did he enlarge on them. He said good night in a high monotone, as somebody like Fred might call it across the bar, and led the way towards the stairs. After kissing Joyce and glancing in my direction, but not directly at me, Diana followed, She did not, I was almost touched to see, do any of this with the air of imparting by her silence a message more eloquent than any mere words could have conveyed. The same had been true of her earlier restraint of manner. I felt it was uncharitable of me to wonder how long this uncharacteristic behaviour of hers would last, but wonder I did. Nothing short of physical handicap has ever made anybody turn over a new leaf.

‘Let’s go to bed straight away,’ said Joyce. ‘You must be absolutely whacked.’

I was indeed utterly tired out in body, as if I had been standing all day in the same position, but had no inclination for sleep, or for lying down in the dark waiting to go to sleep. ‘One more Scotch,’ I said.

‘Not a giant one, Maurice. And only one.’ She spoke pleadingly. ‘Don’t sit up drinking. Bring it into the bedroom.’

I did as she said, first looking in on Amy, who was lying asleep quite unemphatically, so to speak, without the parade of concentration or abandonment I have seen in grown women. Would my father’s departure leave much of a hole in her world? I could not imagine any of the things she had said she had meant to say to him: his attitude to her had been one of uncertain geniality, she had behaved to him with something not far from a child’s version of this, a brightness that had been absent-minded and self-regarding at the same time, and they had never, so far as I had noticed, talked together much. But he had been about the place every day of the year and a half since she had come to live here after her mother’s death, and I could see that no sort of hole in a small world could really be a small hole.

‘Was she all right?’ asked Joyce when I carried my whisky into our bedroom, the next along the passage from Amy’s and no broader from window to door, but with more length. Standing in this extra space, she popped one of her red sleeping-pills into her mouth and gulped water.

‘Asleep, anyway. Have you seen the Belreposes?’

‘Here. Three sounds rather a lot, doesn’t it? With you drinking as well, I mean. I suppose Jack knows all about it.’

‘They’re not barbiturates.’

I chased the white tablets down with whisky, watching Joyce as she kicked off her shoes, pulled her dress over her head and hung it up in the wall-cupboard. The small moment in which she stepped away and turned to go down the room was enough for me to take in the fine swell of her breasts under the spotless white brassière, in unimprovable proportion with the breadth of her shoulders and back and the spreading fullness of her rib-cage. She had not taken three paces towards the bed before I had put my glass down on her dressing-table and caught her round her naked waist.

She held me against her with a quick firmness that belonged to somebody comforting somebody. When, as she very soon did, she found that it was not comfort I was after, at least not in the ordinary sense, her body stiffened.

‘Oh, Maurice, not now, surely.’

‘Especially now. Straight away. Come on.’

I had only once before in my life felt such a totally possessing urge to make love to a woman, with the mind sliding into involuntary dormancy and the body starting to set up on its own several stages earlier than usual. That time had been as I was watching a mistress of mine cutting bread in her kitchen while her husband laid the table in the dining-room across the passage, so that my mind and body had had to return to normal working with the minimum of delay. It was not going to be at all like that tonight.

Joyce was quite naked, I only selectively so, when I dragged the quilt aside and pushed her down on the bed. By now she was responding in her long, slow rhythms, breathing deeply at no more than a marginally quickening rate, clasping her powerful limbs round me. I was just about aware of an urgency that had a way of seeming infinitely postponable. It was not really, of course, and at some imperceptible signal, a distant traffic noise or a memory or a new movement from one or the other of us or a thought about tomorrow, I took us both to the point, once and then another time or so. Very quickly after that, the facts of the last hour presented themselves as if until now I had only heard of them through some distant and inarticulate intermediary. My heart seemed to stop for a moment, then lurched into violent motion. I got out of bed at top speed.

‘Are you all right?’ asked Joyce.

‘Fine.’

After standing still for a moment, I finished undressing, put on my pyjamas and went to the bathroom. Then I looked into the drawing-room and saw the evening paper neatly folded on a low table by the place where my father had always sat, into the dining-room and saw the armchair where he had died. The triteness of these images calmed me for the moment. Back in the bedroom, I found that Joyce, usually ready for a chat at this stage, was lying with the bedclothes pulled up over her face. This went to confirm my suspicion that she was feeling ashamed, not of having made love on the night of my father’s death, but of having enjoyed it. However, when I had got into bed she spoke in a wide-awake voice.

‘I suppose it was natural, doing it like that, like an instinct. You know, Nature trying to see to it that life goes on. Funny, though, it didn’t feel like an instinct. More like something you read about. The idea, I mean.’

I had not thought of this side of things until then, and was faintly irritated by her shrewdness, or what might have seemed shrewdness to an outsider. Still, it was very consoling that I was having to deal with Joyce here, not Diana, who would have been thrown into ecstasies of needling speculation.

‘I wasn’t faking it,’ I said. ‘A man can’t fake.’

‘I know, darling. I didn’t mean that. Just how it might sound.’ Her hand came back behind her and caught mine. ‘Do you think you can sleep?’

‘Yes, I think so. Could you just clear one thing up? Won’t take a minute.’

‘What?’

‘Then I can forget about it. Tell me exactly how it happened in there. I shall always sort of wonder about it if I don’t know exactly.’

‘Well, he’d just been saying something about people had the right not to be disturbed in their own private houses, and then he stopped and got up, much more quickly than he usually does, and he was staring.’

‘What at?’

‘I don’t know. Nothing. He was looking towards the door. Then he called out, and Jack asked him what was the matter and was he all right, and then he fell against the table and Jack caught him.’

‘What did he call out?’

‘I don’t know. It wasn’t a word or anything. Then Jack and I, we started moving him and then you came back. He didn’t seem to be in any pain. He just looked very surprised.’

‘Frightened?’

‘Well … a bit, perhaps.’

‘Only a bit?’

‘Well, a lot, actually. He must have been feeling it coming on, you know, the cerebral thing.’

‘Yes. That would frighten you all right. I see.’

‘Don’t worry about it.’ Joyce squeezed my hand. ‘You couldn’t have done anything about it even if you had been there.’

‘No I suppose I couldn’t.’

‘Of course you couldn’t.’

‘I forgot to tell Amy where … that he’s in his room.’

‘She won’t go in there. I’ll see to it in the morning. I’ll have to go to sleep now. These bombs really knock you out.’

We said good night and switched off our bedside lamps. I turned on to my right side, towards where the window was, though nothing could be seen of it. The night was still very warm, but the humidity had fallen off a good deal in the last hour. My pillow seemed hotter than my cheek as soon as the two touched, and formed itself into a series of hard ridges and irregular planes. My heart was beating heavily and moderately fast, as on the threshold of some minor ordeal, like going into the dentist’s surgery or getting up to make a speech. I lay there waiting for it to make one of the trip-and-lurch movements it had made ten minutes earlier and perhaps a couple of dozen times during the day and evening. I had mentioned this phenomenon to Jack, who had said, condescendingly rather than impatiently, but in any case quite emphatically, that it was not significant, that my heart was merely giving itself, every so often, an extra and premature signal to beat, so that the beat after that was delayed, and might seem stronger than normal. All I could say (to myself) was that at times like the present the bloody thing certainly felt significant. After a minute or two of waiting, there came the expected quiver, followed by a pause prolonged enough to make me draw in my breath, and then a small punch against the inside of my chest. I told myself it was all right, it was nerves, it would go off as it always had, I was a hypochondriac, the Belreposes would be taking over any minute, it was natural, it was egotistical. Yes: already calmer, easier, steadier, more comfortable, cooler, slower, quieter, drowsier, vaguer …

What was before my closed eyes was the usual shifting pall of dark purple, dark grey and other dark that was never quite different enough to be given the name of any other colour. It had been there all along, of course, but now I started looking at it, knowing what would happen when I did, but unable not to, because it was simply the next thing. Almost at once a dim orange-yellow light came up. It illuminated something that had the smooth, rounded and tapering qualities of a part of the human body, but without any guide to scale it was impossible to tell whether I was looking at leg or nose, forearm or finger, breast or chin. Soon a greyish male profile, nearly complete, its expression puzzled or brooding, drifted diagonally in front of this and blotted most of it out. The upper lip twitched, grew suddenly in size and began drifting slowly outwards, swelling at a reduced rate until it was like a thick rope of intestine. Another orange light flared up irregularly in the lower part of my field of vision and played on the intestine-like form from underneath, showing it to be veined and glistening. The face had tilted away out of existence. When the orange glow had faded, there was a kind of new start: shivering veils of brown and yellow appeared and vanished quickly, to reveal a gloomy cavern of which the walls and roof were human, but in a distant sense. No component was identifiable, only that unique surface quality, half matt, half sheen, that belongs to naked skin.

These apparitions grew, swirled and evolved for a time I could not measure, perhaps five minutes, probably not more than thirty. Some of them were surprising, but this was always part of their nature, and none, so far, was surprising in a surprising way. They were even beginning to slacken, become constricted and hard to discern. Then a rumpled sheet of brown flesh shook itself convulsively and started to concertina in towards the middle. Longitudinal shreds ‘became distinguishable, turned olive-green in colour and could be seen as the trunk and branches of a young tree, the sort that has many stems growing more or less vertically and parallel. This was a novelty in a hitherto exclusively anthropoid universe, a comparatively soothing one. The tree-shape continued the shaking, twitching motion of the fleshy mass that had given birth to it. Slowly, its limbs and minor appendages coalesced into what— by the lax standards of verisimilitude at present in force—were good approximations to a man’s thighs, genitals and torso up about as far as the breast-bone. Higher than this, there was nothing identifiable for the moment. The various members retained their vegetable individuality, continuing as closely-packed amalgams of bough, twig, stem and leaf. I was trying to remember what drawing or painting this structure resembled when I heard a noise, distant but not unrecognizable: it sounded like the snapping of greenery and minor branches made by a man or large animal moving through dense woods. At the same time, a shift of illumination began to reveal an upper chest, a throat and neck, the point of a wooden chin.

I clapped my fingers over my eyes and rubbed them fiercely: I had no desire to see the face that topped such a body. In a flash, literally in a flash, everything was gone, noise and all. I pretended to myself that I had heard something from outside; but I knew that that snapping sound had come from inside, again in the most literal sense. Just as I was never in any doubt that what I ‘saw’ with my eyes shut was not really there, so I knew that what I had just ‘heard’ was not real either. Tomorrow I might feel appalled at the prospect of a regular, or sporadic, aural addition to these nightly appearances; at the moment I was too tired. When I closed my eyes again, I saw at once that the show was over: all intensity, all potential had departed from the messages of my optic nerves, and the dark curtain before me stirred more feebly with every breath.

I had now come to the outer edge of sleep. As I had known it would, jactitation set in. My right foot, my whole right leg, jerked with a local violence, my head, my mouth and chin, my upper lip, what felt like the whole top half of my body, my left wrist, my left wrist again, moved of their own accord, once or twice with the prelude of a disembodied, watery feeling that advertised their intention, more often quite unexpectedly. I was returned to momentary wakefulness several times by what I assumed to be similar convulsions, though I could not locate them, and once by a triple shaking of the shoulder so like the intervention of one arousing a sleeper that, if I had not quickly remembered disturbances as acute in the past, I might have been alarmed. Finally, images and thoughts and words came from nowhere in particular and were all mingled in some other thing that gradually had less and less to do with me: pretty dress, excuse me you’re wanted on the, you ought to realize, very good soup, if there’s anything I can, long time ago, be all very dusty, not to agree on the way he, moment she was there and the next, water with it, over by the, darling, tree, spoon, window, shoulders, stairs, hot, sorry, man …

2: Dr Thomas Underhill

At ten o’clock the next morning I was in the office finishing the day’s arrangements with David Palmer.

‘What about Ramón?’ I asked.

‘Well, he’s done the vegetable dishes—quite good, really, in parts—and I’ve put him on the coffee-pots. No complaints so far. From him, that is.’

‘Watch him over the chef’s stuff, won’t you? And the ice-cream coupes. Explain to him that they’ve got to look as good as new even though the guests never see them.’

‘I have, Mr Allington.’

‘Well, explain it to him again, using threats if necessary. Tell him he’s to bring them to me personally before lunch. Oh yes —two extra upstairs for that. My son and his wife are driving down. Is that the lot?’

‘Just about. There’s a bath-towel gone, that Birmingham couple, and an ash-tray, Fred says, one of the heavy glass ones.’

‘You know, David, I feel like driving up to Birmingham and finding those people’s bloody house and burgling it to get that towel. It’s the only way we’d ever see it again. Or putting tea-cloths and old dusters in all the bedrooms in future and making them get rid of their fag-ends in empty baked-beans tins. I don’t know why we go on bothering. Well, there’s nothing else to do, I suppose. If that’s all you’ve got I’m off to Baldock.’

‘Right, Mr Allington.’ David’s long, very slightly ridiculous face took on a resolute look. ‘I just want to say, if there’s anything extra or special you want done, I’d be more than happy to do it. You’ve only to say. And all the staff feel the same.’

‘Thank you, David, I can’t think of anything at the moment, but I’ll be sure to let you know if there is.’

David left. I collected the cash for the bank, found and pocketed the list I had made for the drink supplier, put on my check cap and went into the hall. The char, a youngish, rather pretty woman in jeans and tee-shirt, was crossing towards the dining-room, vacuum-cleaner in hand.

‘Cooler today,’ she said, raising her eyebrows briefly, as if alluding to how I looked or was dressed.

‘But tonight it’ll be as hot as ever, you just see.’

She acknowledged this thrust with a diagonal movement of her head, and passed from view. I recognized in her one on whom the lives, or deaths, of others made little impression. Then Amy appeared, looking eager and rather well turned out in a clean candy-striped shirt and skirt.

‘What time are we leaving, Daddy?’

‘Oh, darling.’ I remembered, for the first time that morning. ‘I’m sorry, but I’m afraid it’ll have to be another day.’

‘Oh no. Oh, what a drag. Oh, why?’

‘Well … I fixed it up with you before…’

‘Before Gramps died—I know. But what’s that got to do with it? He wouldn’t have minded me coming. He liked us doing things together.’

‘I know, but there are special things I have to do, like registering the death and going to the undertakers’. You’d hate all that.’

‘I wouldn’t mind. What’s the undertakers’?’

‘The people who’ll be doing the funeral.’

‘I wouldn’t mind. I could sit in the car. I bet you’ll have a coffee anyway. I could look round the shops and meet you at the car.’

‘I’m sorry, Amy.’ And I was, but I could not contemplate getting through the next couple of hours in any company, however relaxing, and I had long ago faced the fact that I was never quite at my ease with Amy. ‘It wouldn’t be the right sort of thing for you. You can come with me tomorrow.’

This only made her angry. ‘Oh, yawn. I don’t want to come tomorrow, I want to come today. You just don’t want me.’

‘Amy, stop shouting.’

‘You don’t care about me. You don’t care what I do. There’s never anything for me to do.’

‘You can help Joyce in the bedrooms, it’s good—’

‘Oh, fantastic. Huge thanks. Dad-oh.’

‘I won’t have you talking like that.’

‘I’ve talked like it now. And I’ll take LSD and reefers and you’ll care then. No, you won’t. You won’t care.’

‘Amy, go up to your room.’

She made a blaring noise, halfway between a yell and a groan, and stamped off. I waited until, quite distinctly through the thickness of the building, I heard her door slam. At once, with impeccable sardonic timing, the vacuum-cleaner started up in the dining-room. I left the house.

It was indeed cooler today. The sun, standing immediately above the patch of woods towards which the ghost of Thomas Underhill was said to gaze, had not yet broken through a thin mist or veil of low cloud. As I walked over to where my Volkswagen was parked in the yard. I told myself that I could soon start to relish the state of being alone (not rid of Amy, just alone for a guaranteed period), only to find, as usual, that being alone meant that I was stuck with myself, with the outside and inside of my body, with my memories and anticipations and present feelings, with that indefinable sphere of being that is the sum of these and yet something beyond them, and with the assorted uneasiness of the whole. Two’s company, which is bad enough in all conscience, but one’s a crowd.

I was putting the Volkswagen into gear when a dull pain of irregular but defined shape switched itself on in my left lower back, a little below the waistline. It stayed in being for perhaps twenty seconds, perfectly steady in intensity, then at once vanished. It had been behaving in this sort of way for about a week now. Was it sharper this morning than when I had first noticed it, did it come on more frequently and stay for longer? I thought perhaps it was and did. It was cancer of the kidney. It was not cancer of the kidney, but that disease whereby the kidney ceases to function and has to be removed by surgery, and then the other kidney carries on perfectly well until it too becomes useless and has to be removed by surgery, and then there is total dependence on a machine. It was not a disease of the kidney, but a mild inflammation set up by too much drinking, easily knocked out by a few doses of Holland’s gin and a reduction in doses of other liquors. It was not an inflammation, or only in the sense that it was one of those meaningless aches and pains that clear up of their own accord and unnoticeably when they are not thought about. Ah, but what was the standard procedure for not thinking about this one, or any one?

The pain came back as I was turning south-west on to the A595, and stayed for a little more than twenty seconds this time, unless that was my imagination. I thought to myself how much more welcome a faculty the imagination would be if we could tell when it was at work and when not. That might make it more efficient, too. My own was certainly unequal to the task of suggesting how I would deal with the situation if my kidney really were under some lethal assault. I had fallen victim to some pretty serious afflictions in my time, but so far they had tended to yield to treatment. The previous summer I had managed to check and even reverse the onset of Huntington’s chorea—a progressive disease of the nervous system ending in total helplessness, and normally incurable—simply by cutting down my intake of Scotch. A year or so earlier, a cancer of the large intestine had begun retreating to dormancy as soon as I stopped eating the local greengages and plums, gave up drinking two bottles of claret a day and curbed my fondness for raw onions, hot pickles and curry. A new, more powerful reading-light had cleared up a severe brain tumour inside a week. All my other lesions, growths, atrophies and rare viral infections had gone the same way. So far.

That was the point. Other people’s hypochondria is always good for a laugh, or rather, whenever one gets as far as beginning to think about it, just fairly good for a grin. Each case of one’s own is hilarious, as soon as that case is past. The trouble with the hypochondriac, considered as a figure of fun, is that he will be wrong about his condition nine hundred and ninety-nine times, and absolutely right the thousandth time, or the thousand-and-first, or the one after that. As soon as I had reached this perception, the pain in my back underlined it elegantly by returning for about half a minute.

I had joined the A507 and was coming into Baldock without noticing anything I had seen on the way or done to keep me on the way. Now that I was about to deal with about the last thing concerning my father that I would ever have to deal with, it was thoughts of him that intervened between me and what I was doing. I parked the Volkswagen in the broad main street of the town and remembered playing cricket with him on the sands at Pevensey Bay in, good God, 1925 or 1926. Once I had been out first ball and he had praised me afterwards for my sportsmanship in accepting this with a good grace. While I waited, then was dealt with, at the registry, I thought about that daily round of his in the village, and wished I had accompanied him on it just once more than I had. By the time I reached the undertakers’, my mind was on his first stroke and his recovery from it, and in the bank I tried to imagine what his mental life had been like afterwards, with sufficient success to send me straight across to the George and Dragon at eleven thirty sharp. I had had just enough attention to spare for what I had been doing to notice how trivial and dull everything about it had been, not momentous at all, not even dramatically unmomentous, registrar and undertaker and bank clerk all pretty well interchangeable.

After three quick double whiskies I felt better: I was drunk, in fact, drunk with that pristine freshness, that semi-mystical elevation of spirit which, every time, seems destined to last for ever. There was nothing worth knowing that I did not know, or rather would not turn out to know when I saw my way to turning my attention to it. Life and death were not problems, just points about which a certain rather limited type of misconception tended to agglutinate. By definition, or something of the kind, every problem was really a non-problem. Nodding my head confidentially to myself about the simple force of this perception, I left the pub and made for where there was a fair case for believing I had left the Volkswagen.

Finding it took some time. Indeed, I was still looking for it when it became clear that I was doing so, not in Baldock, but in the yard of the Green Man, where I saw I must have recently driven the thing. There was a bright dent at the rear offside corner that I was nearly sure I had not seen before. This bothered me to some degree, until I realized that no event that had failed to impede my progress to this place could have been particularly significant. The next moment I was in the hall talking to David Palmer, very lucidly and cogently, but with continuous difficulty in remembering what I had been saying to him ten seconds earlier. He seemed to think that my anxieties or inquiries or reassurances, though interesting and valuable in their own right, were of no very immediate concern. Accompanied for some reason by Fred, he saw me to the foot of the stairs, where I spent a little while making it plain that I did not need, and would not brook, the slightest assistance.

I made it to the landing perfectly well, but only after a great deal of effort, enough, in fact, to get me on the way to coming round. I had not had one of these time-lapse things at such an early hour before, nor after so few drinks immediately beforehand. Well, today was a special day. I was crossing to the apartment door when the woman I had seen the previous evening, almost at this very spot, suddenly came past me—from where, I had no idea—and hurried to the top of the stairs. Without thinking, I called out after her, something quite unmanagerial like, ‘What are you doing here?’ She took no notice, began to descend, and when, after a not very competent pursuit, I reached the stairhead, she had gone.

I got down the stairs as quickly as I could without falling over, rather slowly, that is. David was just approaching the couple of steps that lead down to the dining-room. I spoke his, name, louder than I had meant to, and he turned round abruptly.

‘Yes, Mr Allington? Is anything the matter?’

‘Look, David…’

‘Hallo, Dad,’ said the voice of my son Nick. ‘We got here earlier than—’

‘Just a moment, Nick. David, did you see a woman coming down the stairs just now?’

‘No, I don’t think I—’

‘In a long dress, with reddish kind of hair? Only, God, ten or fifteen seconds before I started speaking to you.’

David considered this for so long that I wanted to scream at him. I had time now to notice whether we were attracting any attention, but I did not use it. Eventually David said, ‘I wasn’t conscious of anybody, but I walked straight across from the bar, and I wasn’t really noticing, I’m sorry.’

‘All right, David, it doesn’t matter. I thought it might have been someone who bounced a cheque on me once, that’s all. It doesn’t matter. Let me know if there are any problems in the dining-room. Hallo, Nick.’ We kissed; David went on his way. ‘Sorry about that, I just thought … Where’s Lucy? Did you have a good journey?’

‘Fine. She’s over in the annexe, having a wash. What’s wrong, Dad?’

‘Nothing. I mean it’s been a bit of a hellish day, as you can imagine, what with all the …‘

‘No, now. You look as if you’ve had a scare or something’

‘Oh no.’ I had had a scare all right. Come to that, I was still having one. I did not know whether to be more frightened at the idea that had come into my mind, or at the fact that it had come there and showed no signs of going away. I tried to let it lie without examining it. ‘To tell you the truth, Nick, I had a few quick drinks in Baldock, which you’ll understand, a bit too quick probably, anyway I very nearly took a bad toss on the stairs just now when I was chasing that bloody woman. Might have been nasty. Bit off-putting. You get the idea.’

Nick, a tall square figure with his mother’s dark hair and eyes, looked at me stolidly. He knew that I had not told him the truth, but was not going to take me up on it. ‘You’d better have another, then,’ he said in the quick tolerant voice he bad first used to me when he was a child of ten. ‘Shall we go up? Lucy knows the way.’

A few minutes later, Lucy joined Nick and Joyce and me in the dining-room. She came and kissed my cheek with an air perfectly suggesting that, while not for a moment abating her dislike and disapproval of me, she was not, in view of the circumstances, going to get at me today unless provoked. I had always wondered what Nick saw in such a dumpy little personage, with her snouty nose, short-cut indeterminate hair, curious shawls and fringed handbags. Nor had he ever tried to enlighten me. Still, I had to admit that they seemed to get on well enough together.

Amy came in and stared at me until I had noticed the dirty sweater and holed jeans she had exchanged for her earlier getup. Then, still staring at intervals, she went over and started being theatrically cordial to Lucy, whom she knew I knew she thought was a snob. I told things to Nick while my mind worked away on its idea like an intelligent animal functioning without human supervision, rounding up facts, sorting through questions and wonderings. It went assiduously on while lunch was served.

Joyce had put up a cold collation: artichoke with a vinaigrette, a Bradenham ham, a tongue the chef had pressed himself, a game pie from the same hand, salads and a cheese board with radishes and spring onions. I missed out the artichoke, a dish I have always tended to despise on biological grounds. I used to say that a man with a weight problem should eat nothing else, since after each meal he would be left with fewer calories in him than he had burnt up in the toil of disentangling from the bloody things what shreds of nourishment they contained. I would speculate that a really small man, one compelled by his size to eat with a frequency distantly comparable to that of the shrew or the mole, would soon die of starvation and/ or exhaustion if locked up in a warehouse full of artichokes, and sooner still if compelled besides to go through the rigmarole of dunking each leaf in vinaigrette. But I did not go into any of this now, partly because Joyce, who liked every edible thing and artichokes particularly, always came back with the accusation that I hated food.

This is true enough. For me, food not only interrupts everything while people eat it and sit about waiting for more of it to be served, but also casts a spell of vacancy before and after. No other sensual activity must take place at a set time to be enjoyed by anybody at all, or comes up so inexorably and so often. Some of the stuff I can stand. Fruit slides down, bread soon goes to nothing, and all pungent swallowables have a value of their own that transcends mere food. As for the rest of it, chewing away at the vile texture of meat, pulling bones out of tasteless mouthfuls of fish or encompassing the sheer nullity of vegetables is not my idea of a treat. At least sex does not demand a simultaneous outflow of talk, and drink needs no mastication.

No drinking to speak of went on at this lunch. While I tried to keep my mind entirely on my objections to food, I covered some ham and tongue with chutney and hot sauce and washed the mixture down with a powerful tumbler of whisky and water. It did not look very powerful, thanks to my use of one of those light-coloured Scotches so handy for the man who wants a stronger potion than he cares to advertise to his company. The onions and radishes got me through a small hunk of fresh Cheddar; I had made a good meal. We went on to coffee, that traditional device for prolonging artificially the conditions and atmosphere of food-consumption. I took a lot of it, not in the hope of sobering up, for coffee is no help there and I was already as sober as I could hope to be, but to render myself reasonably wakeful. I wanted to be in some sort of form for later that afternoon.

As soon as Amy had left the table I made up my mind. There is always the chance, when only two people are talking together, that the one may listen carefully to the other and take seriously what he says. No such risk attaches to gatherings of more than two. So I gave up the idea of taking Nick aside afterwards, poured myself more coffee and, addressing him rather than anyone else, said as casually as I could,

‘You know, I’ve been wondering if there mightn’t have been something … slightly curious going on about the time the old man died. I asked—’

‘Curious in what way?’ asked Lucy sharply, intent on getting this settled before I could switch the conversation irrevocably to football or the prospects for the harvest.

‘I was coming to that, actually. According to Joyce, just before he collapsed he stood up and stared in the direction of the door, only there was nothing there. Then, immediately before he died, he said to me, “Who?” and, “Over by the …“ something. I think what he meant to say was, “Who (was that standing) over by the (door)?” That’s—’

‘I don’t see anything very curious about that,’ said Lucy. ‘He was having a stroke—he might have—’

‘Carry on, Dad,’ said Nick.

‘Yes. That’s the first thing, or the first two things. Then, he’d been talking a few minutes earlier about hearing somebody walking up and down the passage outside here. I can’t think of any actual person that could have been, though it wouldn’t be at all significant on its own, I admit. Then, twice, last night and again an hour or so ago, I saw a woman dressed in a, well, it might have been an eighteenth-century ordinary domestic kind of dress, at the top of these stairs. And I think she vanished, both times. I don’t really know about last night, but today, when she went down the stairs I followed her, and no one had seen her. If she went out by the front door, Nick would have seen her, wouldn’t you, Nick? I’m sorry I spun you that yarn about her, but I was a bit het up at the time. Anyway, did you see anyone like that as you were coming in?’

The relief I had been looking for, that of simply telling somebody about my idea, had destroyed my casual tone, and Nick answered very deliberately.

‘Yes, I couldn’t have helped noticing, and there wasn’t anybody. But so what? Who do you think she was, this woman?’

I found I could not say the word that had been in my mind. ‘Well … you’ve heard this house is supposed to be haunted. I don’t know what it’s sensible to say about things like that, but it does make you think. And then there was Victor…’ I glanced at him sitting in front of the fireplace with his toes tucked in under him like a dish-cover, the picture of a cat to whom nothing out of the way, almost nothing at all, had ever happened. ‘He acted very scared just when my father collapsed. Shot past me out of the room when I came back in. Very scared indeed.’

I could think of nothing more for the moment. All three of my audience looked as if they had been listening for a long time to a recital that, although not in the least strange or unexpected, was embarrassingly difficult to deal with except by straightforward, all-out insult. I felt garrulous, egocentric and very, very silly. In the end, Lucy stirred and said judicially—I remembered that she had taken an upper second in some vaguely philosophical mélange at a ‘new’ university— ‘I take it you’re referring to the possible presence of ghosts.’

To hear the word spoken took all the heart out of me. I could not even summon up a dab of sarcasm about haunted houses and vanishing women in antique dress often being thought to carry some such association. ‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Well, in the first place it isn’t cats that are supposed to be sensitive to paranormal phenomena, it’s dogs. There’s no way of knowing what your father saw, if anything, and you’re making a lot out of what he said, a few disjointed words you may not even have heard correctly. As for the woman you saw, well … Anybody might have wandered up from the hall and down again. Are you sure she couldn’t have gone into one of the rooms on the ground floor, the ladies’ for instance?’

‘No, I’m not. What about the footsteps in the passage?’

‘What about them? You said yourself they wouldn’t he significant on their own.’

‘Mm.’ I drank some coffee.

‘I remember you telling us the story about the ghost who’s supposed to turn up in the dining-room, but that was a man, wasn’t it? Have you ever heard anything about a woman ghost?’

‘No.’

Lucy did not actually say, ‘Your witness,’ but she hardly needed to. Nick looked at me indulgently, Joyce irritably, or with what could have been irritation if she had not recently been reminded that I had lost my father. I searched my brain. This was not altogether easy. Some shift in my metabolism, or perhaps the gill of whisky I had been putting away, had made me slightly drunk. Then, contrary to the odds, something came up. I turned to Lucy again.

‘If there had been a story about a woman ghost, dressed as I described, would you have believed that that was what I’d seen?’

‘Yes,’ she said, confounding me, and showing she knew she had.

‘Are you saying you believe in ghosts?’

‘Yes. In the sense that I believe that people see ghosts. I can’t think how any reasonable person can be in doubt on that score. That’s not the same, of course, as saying that you see a ghost in the same way as you see a real person. Ghosts aren’t there, so you can’t take photographs of them or anything. But people see them all right.’

‘You mean they think they see them,’ said Nick. ‘They imagine it.’

‘Well, not quite, darling. I would suggest that they see ghosts in something of the same sort of way as they have hallucinations or religious visions. We don’t say, for instance, that St Bernadette thought she saw the Virgin Mary, unless we’re trying to accuse her of misrepresenting what happened, or implying that she was mistaken or deceived. Unless we mean something like that we say she saw the Virgin Mary.’

‘Who wasn’t really there. I’d call that a hallucination. Same with ghosts.’

‘There’s a similarity, certainly, but it doesn’t go all the way.’ Lucy felt in her current fringed handbag, a red-and-white striped object that had no doubt come from somewhere in particular, and took out a packet of menthol cigarettes. She lit one of these as she went conscientiously on. ‘Different people see the same ghost, at the same time or at widely differing times. Hallucinations don’t seem to work like that. You can make a man have hallucinations by giving him certain drugs, but you can’t make him have the same hallucination as someone else. People can see the same ghost as someone else without knowing the other person saw it until later, and they don’t see a whole series of all sorts of other things as well, like people with hallucinations. Put a man in a haunted house and he may see a ghost, even if he didn’t know it was haunted. Give a man a psychedelic drug and he’ll have hallucinations. We don’t know why in either case, but it’s pretty certain the explanations don’t coincide.’

‘What do you think, Joyce?’ asked Nick, who had listened to all this attentively enough, but with no sign of feeling that anything more than the validity of a theory was at stake.

‘I don’t know anything about it,’ said Joyce, ‘but I think ghosts are all balls. There can’t be any such things. Maurice has been upset, and that’s made him, you know, a bit imaginative.’

‘That’s roughly what I think,’ said Nick.

Lucy frowned to herself and fiddled with her cigarette packet, as if pursuing her line of thought internally.

I had been all too right about not being taken seriously—by which I suppose I had meant causing some sort of stir. Accusations of madness or shouts of ridicule would have been preferable to these sober, sedative evaluations of my idea. ‘Well, what do I do now?’ I asked.

‘Forget it, Dad,’ said Nick, and Joyce nodded.

Lucy drew in her breath consideringly. ‘If this woman turns up again, see if you can touch her. Try and make her speak. It would be quite something if you could, because there are surprisingly few really well-attested instances of a ghost saying anything. Anyway, chase her and find out whether other people can see her. That’d be worth knowing, from your point of view.’

‘I don’t get the point of all that,’ said Joyce.

‘Well … it might be interesting.’

I found myself feeling slightly angry with Lucy. She alone had given me practical advice, which I had already decided to follow, but I disliked her bigoted reasonableness and her air of having already, though nearly thirty years younger than I, accumulated quite enough information and wisdom to deal with anything life might have in store: deal with it better than I could, too. I said in what I hoped was no more than an interested tone,

‘You seem to know a lot about these things, Lucy. Have you studied them?’

‘Not studied, no,’ she said, to rebuke me for seeming to suggest that she had taken a university course in ghosts. ‘But I have looked at the problem. I was doing a paper on the meaning of unverifiable statements, and it just happened to strike me that saying you’ve seen a ghost is one of a special class of unverifiable statements. I read a few accounts. Some interesting points of correspondence, I thought. This business, for instance, about the temperature dropping or seeming to drop before a manifestation. It’s been claimed that thermometers have registered it, but I’m not convinced. It could be subjective, a concomitant of the person entering the physiological state in which they can see ghosts. Did you feel cold before you saw this woman?’

‘No. Hot. I mean there was no change.’

‘No. My own view is that there aren’t any ghosts around here. At the moment, anyway. But tell me … Maurice,’ said Lucy, giving just a hint of what it cost her to call me by my name, ‘would you say you believe in ghosts?’

‘God, I don’t know.’ Until last night’s events and today’s appearance had taken on their present shape, I would have answered no without thinking about it. But I am not enough of a bloody fool to have bought the Green Man if I had heard any talk of hauntings in living memory. ‘Of course, if any more evidence turns up …

‘Any evidence is how I’d put it. I could be wrong, but according to me you only thought you saw a ghost.’

That was that: the table broke up. Joyce went off to check the bed-linen. I said I would take a short nap and then go and collect fruit and vegetables from a couple of farms in the district. Nick said that in that case, if it was all right, he would ring up John Duerinckx-Williams, the French scholar who had been his supervisor at St Matthew’s, and see if he could arrange that he and Lucy should drive up to Cambridge and have a cup of tea with him, returning about six o’clock. I said that sounded a good idea, and we parted.

It was two fifty. I had a shower, put on clean clothing and otherwise prepared myself for encountering Diana. For some reason I could not then discover, I felt sure she would turn up. I combed my hair carefully, then decided it looked too much like a dark-red wig, and worked on making it seem careless but cared for. By the time I was satisfied it was too late for a nap. Not that I could have managed one of any sort: I was too strung up. With me, this is normally an altogether unpleasant state, but fluctuating within it now was a tinge of amorous expectancy. I looked at my face in the glass. It was all right really: on the pale side, a bit red under the eyes, and that ageing division between chin and jaw at least as perceptible as ever; but physically not unpresentable. What I had against it was its sameness and its continuity, always available with its display of cheap sternness and furtive worry, always a partner to unnecessary and unavoidable questioning. Timing it just right, my heart gave one of its lurches and, following up dependably, the pain in my back, which I had not thought about since the morning, turned itself on. I retaliated immediately by making a face of maniacal relish at myself and marching purposefully out of the room. I am too old a hand to be put off pleasure by even the certain prospect of not enjoying it. What will have been, will have been.

The pain went. I backed the 8-cwt trade truck out of the garage and drove towards the centre of the village. The engine was not loud enough to drown the horrible roaring and rattling noises from a couple of earth-moving machines that were levelling a slope beyond the back gardens of a dotted line of cottages. Here, perhaps in early 1984 if the present rate of progress was maintained, a row of houses was to be built, though I could not imagine what sort of person was going to be forced to live in them. The village itself looked as if it had been uninhabited for some weeks. A mail van coated with dust stood outside the corner shop, its driver more than just possibly in the arms of the postmistress, a middle-aged spinster people said was a funny sort and who certainly had two illegitimate children as well as an authentic bedridden mother. Everywhere else, if not actually dead, they were brooding about their wheat, dimly contemplating the afternoon milking, hoping on the whole that it would be fine for the Saturday cricket match against Sandon, dropping tea-bags into the pot, playing with the baby, asleep. Rural life is a mystery until one realizes that nearly all of it, everywhere in the world, is spent in preparing for and recovering from short but punishing bouts of the tedium inseparable from the tasks of the land, or rather their failure to give the least sense of achievement, as it might be a lifetime spent washing up out of doors. I have never understood why anybody agreed to go on being a rustic after about 1400.

The Mayburys’ house, a genuine-looking stone structure that might have been a converted dames’ school or primitive pickle factory, was at the farther end of the village. I drove past it, along a pot-holed road between bramble hedges, turned off and stopped on a patch of bare sandy soil at the corner of a farm track that led between fields of corn, the place where I had met Diana on two previous and unrewarding occasions. It was three thirty-two.

In the middle distance, beyond the crops, a man hunched up on a tractor was slowly dragging some farming implement across a large area of naked earth. From where I was (and I dare say anyone on the spot with a magnifying-glass would have told the same tale), this activity seemed to leave matters as they had been, apart from the multiple ruts being made in the soil. Probably the fellow was getting nerved up, trying to accustom himself to the idea of performing some actual deed of tillage there the following week.

His machinery was making the only audible sound, apart from the song of a blackbird with nothing better to do. I had barely started to hope I would not have time to think about things when I heard a third sound, turned my head and saw Diana approaching on foot—only five minutes late, quixotically early, in fact, by her standards: a good sign. She was wearing a dark-blue shirt and a tweed skirt, and was carrying a folded newspaper. I wondered slightly about the newspaper. When she reached the truck, I leaned across and opened the door on that side, but she made no move to get in.

‘Well, Maurice,’ she said.

‘Hallo, Diana. Let’s go, shall we?’

‘Maurice, don’t you think it’s rather extraordinary of you to have decided to come along after all this afternoon?’ She said this in full-blooded oral Chick’s Own style, with tiny hyphens of silence between the syllables of the hard words. To say it all while being seen to do so, she had to bend both neck and knees and also rely on my remaining twisted round in my seat and leaning deeply over towards her.

‘We can talk about that when we’re on our way.’

‘But don’t you think so? To be prepared to make advances to somebody else’s wife less than eighteen hours after you’ve seen your father die?’

The lack of hesitancy about the number of hours, evincing previous calculation, had a point to it. I understood now why I had been so sure earlier that she would appear as asked: I had sensed that she would not have been able to resist the chance of such a meaty interrogation-session. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘If you’ll get in I’ll see if I can explain.’

‘I mean, most men who’ve had that happen to them wouldn’t even contemplate that sort of thing. What makes you so different?’

‘I’ll be giving you a full demonstration of it shortly. Come on.’

As if only then making up her mind, she settled herself beside me. I took her in my arms and kissed her forcefully. She remained passive until I put my hand on her breast, when she promptly removed it. Nevertheless, I was sure she was going to yield that afternoon when she was ready to, and this time understood at the same moment why I was sure. By opening her legs to me today of all days, she would be being strangely responsive to my strange need, finding herself strangely in tune with this strange man—in other words, she could represent herself as an interesting person. But before she got on to being strangely responsive, she was going to exact her full toll by making me put up with her questioning patiently enough, and long enough, for it to seem that I agreed she was an interesting person. Seeming, luckily for me, was all that was going to be required, since she needed no real confirmation of her view of herself. True, but why, then, was there any need for me even to do any seeming? Most likely she was just looking forward to the simple pleasure of watching my antics as I battled to master my impatience.

Diana had opened her newspaper—The Guardian, of course —but was evidently not reading it. When, as we approached a corner, an old man sitting in his garden came into view, she hid her face in the middle pages. Good security, and a further good sign, had one been needed, but if she wanted to avoid being seen in my car why had she just now stood by it in the open for a full minute? Other people’s priorities are endlessly odd.

‘Where are you taking me?’ she asked.

‘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.

As I soon found when I lay down with her, it was the top half of that body that most appealed to her. In some important ways, she had sexual and aesthetic right on her side. However attractive a woman’s face may be when she has her clothes on, it is much more so when she is naked; then, sometimes only then, it becomes the most attractive part of her. Throat, shoulders and upper arms, not to speak of breasts, are all individual or at least personal; below the waist, there is a massive lack of detail and a small amount of mere anatomy. I worked on Diana’s principle for some time, with her unqualified and often noisy approval. But eventually there had to come the start of the accelerating swing to anatomy and, in every sense, to lack of detail. Diana’s pleasure abated at once.

At this point I saw (just) that I had a choice. I could perhaps return as far as possible to what she so obviously enjoyed most, while nearly—but not quite—stopping what I had just started on my own account: a sort of sexual equivalent of uninterruptedly performing a piano sonata and at the same time lunching off a plate of sandwiches. Or, without any effort at all, I could forget about her and, more important, forget about myself. That afternoon, I wanted this release even more than usual, but on the other hand I wanted to end up with a satisfied and grateful Diana—if there was any such thing—more yet. So I chose the first alternative, in fact improved on it by metaphorically playing a demanding coda, full of ornamentation and difficult runs in both hands, that went on quite a long time after the disappearance of the last sandwich. (They had been good sandwiches, anyway, as sandwiches go.)

I moved the minimum distance away. Diana peered at me. Her face was flushed and looked swollen round the eyes and mouth.

‘Oh God,’ she said, ‘lovely. There was so much of it. Wish I could remember it all. I don’t know how I felt.’

‘You were beautiful. You are beautiful.’

She smiled and looked away, down at herself. Soon she stopped sprawling and lolling, drew in her chin, crossed her legs and pushed herself up into a half-sitting position. When she looked at me again, her eyes were side, the swollen look had almost faded into her familiar expression of faint anxiety touched with pertness.

‘Maurice,’ she said now, ‘that was ab-so-lute-ly terr-i-fic. I don’t know how … you do it. Was it nice for you? You certainly deserved it to be.’

‘It was splendid.’.

I put my arms round her again and briefly ran over some of the main points treated in depth earlier, but this time in a lofty, impartial spirit, just underlining the essential continuity of how I felt about her attractions. After a few minutes, I said,

‘Diana.’

‘Yes?’

‘Diana, have you ever been to bed with more than one person? At the same time, I mean.’

‘Maurice, really … Well yes, I have, actually. Years ago now. Before I met Jack.’

‘Was it fun? It was two men, I suppose?’

‘Maurice … Yes, it was two men. If you could call them men. I thought I was the one it was going to be all about, but they were only really interested in each other. They went on taking it in turns to be in the middle, and what they wanted me to do wasn’t very nice. I got totally and completely bored and simply left them to it. It was all quite ghastly. But—’

‘I’m sure it was. But it would be quite different if you—’

‘You mean you and Joyce.’

‘Well, yes. She’s always—’

‘Maurice, you’re not to be furious with me, because I know you often are, but I must ask you something. What makes you even think of a thing like that? It’s all so frightfully unnecessary. Could it be that you really are getting old? I want to ask you something else. Can I?’

‘Ask away.’

‘Well … how often do you and Joyce make love? On the average?’

‘I don’t know. Once a week, perhaps. Sometimes not as much.’

‘There you are. You want to sort of spice it all up in a horrid way. You’ve got a lovely young wife who absolutely adores you, but you have to go for me as well, and even then that’s not enough for you. It’s like, you know, boots and transparent macks and typing-up and things.’

‘Sorry, Diana. Forget all about it. I’ve made a mistake. I thought you were the sort of person I could ask that. I’m sorry.

‘What sort of person do you mean?’

‘Well, eager for new experience, new sensations. Somebody who wants to … extend their awareness.’ (Her head was safely on my shoulder, where she could not meet my eyes.) ‘Somebody who’s interested in everything, and also interesting in all kinds of—’

‘Maurice, when did I say I wasn’t interested? I was just jolly fascinated to know why you wanted to do it. Isn’t that what I asked you?’

‘Sorry, yes, it was. Of course. And, you know, it wouldn’t be like the time with the two chaps. I do exactly what you love having done, don’t I?’ (Here I made a short allusion-in-action to some of this.) ‘Don’t I, darling?’

‘Oh yes. Yes, you do.’

‘And Joyce thinks you’re the most stunning creature she’s ever—’

‘Does she? What does she say?’

‘Oh, that she can understand what lesbians are on about when she looks at you, and she’d love to find out if that figure’s real, and all that. And you see, Diana darling, you’d be the complete centre of attraction. After all, Joyce and I are used to each other these days, you know what I mean, but with you we’d both—’

‘Have you mentioned it to her?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Well, don’t until we’ve talked about it again. Maurice…’

‘Yes?’

‘What else does Joyce say about me?’

I produced some more exaggerations or inventions—Joyce certainly admired Diana’s looks, but the amorous part of that admiration, if any, I knew nothing about. What I said was unmemorable enough but effective. Diana began breathing deeply, then squaring and relaxing her shoulders as she did so. I moved in.

A little later, fully dressed and savouring the relief that this brings in any adulterous circumstance, I obeyed Diana’s command to disappear for five minutes and climbed out of the hollow, which I found I had not until then thought of as a place in any full sense. Even the criss-cross pattern of indentations the grass had made on my forearms and knee-caps, noticeable as I put my clothes on, had been no reminder that we had actually been lying on and among grass, and the scene outside, the brambles, the sandy, stony banks and the trees farther off, had been on the edge of non-existence. Now all this, in the duller light from an overcast sky, settled into position. I strolled along the track towards the woods into which it disappeared. The air was thick and sultry, without any breeze. When I had walked a hundred yards, I turned off in the direction of the road, firstly to have a pee, secondly to establish, in an idle, time-filling way, just where I was in relation to my house. I moved up the ridge, skirting the more thickly-grown area, mostly oak and ash with a scattering of holly, hazel and elder, which I took to be the copse that could be seen from the front of the building: I had never wandered up as far as this before.

The going was difficult, with slippery tussocks of grass, patches of crumbling soil and here and there holes in the ground a foot or more deep. As I neared the crest, there appeared the slender chimney-pots of the Green Man, the shallow tiled slopes of the roofs, finally the main body of the house and the outbuildings. The annexe containing the guest bedrooms was hidden by the bulk of the original inn. As I stood there, an inconspicuous figure, no doubt, against the taller hillside behind me, I saw a car approach and turn into the yard (possibly the Cambridge party who had booked by telephone the previous day), and then somebody standing at one of the dining-room windows and looking in my general direction. Whoever it was—one of the waiters, I assumed, in an interval of laying for dinner—could scarcely have seen me, but there was no point in an unnecessary risk. I turned to retrace my steps, then noticed a rough path leading through the wood towards the track. This would take me some dozens of yards out of my way, but would be preferable to the scrambling, stumbling route I had followed a minute before. I started along the path.

Immediately I felt very frightened indeed. At first—if it makes any sense to say so—this did not alarm me. I am well acquainted with causeless fear, with the apparently random onset of all the standard symptoms, from accelerated pulse and breathing to tingling at the nape of the neck and rear part of the scalp, sudden profuse sweating and a strong desire to cry out. Then, as my heart went into a prolonged stumbling tremor, the concomitants of fear, in themselves no more than very disagreeable, seemed to bring fear itself. I halted on the path. For a few more seconds I wondered if I were really about to die, but soon after that I became certain that whatever was going to happen was outside me. What it might be, or where, I could not imagine. Something frightening, yes; something monstrous, so monstrous that the mere fact of it, its coming to pass at all, would be harder to bear than its actual menace to me personally. My head began to tremble uncontrollably. I heard, or thought I heard, a whispering sound like the wind through grasses, saw, had no doubt that I saw, the growth of ivy on a near-by oak ripple and turn its leaves to and fro, as if in the wind, but there was no wind. Just beyond this, I saw a shadow move in a thicket, but I knew there was nobody else in the wood, and there was no sun. This was the place that Underhill’s ghost had been seen watching, and what had terrified him was here. With a sharp snap, one of the fronds of a large fern growing beside the path detached itself from its root, turning over and over like a leaf in a squall as it moved fitfully towards the thicket where the shadow had appeared. I did not wait to see if it was still there, but ran headlong down the path, through the wood and out of it on to the track I had walked up five minutes before, and down it again to where Diana sat smoking a cigarette on the edge of the hollow.

At my approach, she turned her head with a display of grace which faltered when she looked at me. ‘What’s the matter? Why the great gallop? You’re—’

‘Come on,’ I said, panting. I must have shouted it.

‘What’s the matter? Are you ill? What’s the matter?’

‘All right. Got to go. Now—’

Diana did no more than look genuinely alarmed while I got us into the truck, turned it unhandily round and drove as fast as possible down the track to the road. There, I turned away from the village. After about a mile, I found a field of pasture with an open gate and parked just inside. I had got my breath back and had stopped trembling, had been frightened only in retrospect ever since leaving that wood. But that was how I felt still. I opened the dashboard cupboard—yes, there was a half-bottle of Scotch, nearly full. I saw in passing that I had thought to mix a bit of water in for reasons of taste. I drank it all.

I realized that I would have to think of something to say to Diana, who had gone on sitting unnaturally quiet beside me, but my mind was a blank. I began to talk in the hope that words would bring ideas.

‘Sorry about that. I suddenly felt absolutely terrible. I had to get away from that place. I don’t know what it was, I just felt awful.’

‘Ill, you mean?’

‘Not exactly. No, not ill. Just … No, I can’t describe it, I’m afraid. Some sort of neurotic thing, I suppose. Anyway, it’s over now.’

‘Maurice.’ For once she sounded sincerely diffident about what was to follow her operating call-sign.

‘Yes, Diana?’

‘Maurice … tell me one thing frankly. This isn’t a way of letting me know you don’t want to have anything more to do with me in this kind of way, is it?’

‘A what? How could it be that?’

‘Well, you might have decided it made you feel too awful, guilt and so on, and so you piled it on and made it into a sort of dizzy spell as a way of saying it was all too much for you.’ (No diffidence now.) ‘Because I suppose what you really mean is I didn’t do the right things for you or something.’

This, I reflected, from a woman who, three minutes earlier, had been showing every sign of real concern about another person. ‘Of course not. Nothing like that, I assure you.’

‘Because if you think I’m not good enough for you or something it’s better if you say so straight away.’

‘If that’s what you’re afraid of,’ I said furiously, ‘it must be because I’m not good enough for you, whatever I do. Do you imagine I make love like that every day?’

She blinked her eyes and twitched her mouth and shoulders for a short while as evidence of internal conflict. Then she smiled and touched my hand.

‘I’m sorry, Maurice. I suddenly went into the most ghastly panic. I somehow got the idea you didn’t like me at all. The most frightful sense of insecurity. Women get that, you know. Well, some women do, anyway. There was simply nothing I could do about it, honestly.’

I kissed her. ‘I understand,’ I said, and meant it. ‘But up there … you did have a splendid time, didn’t you?’

‘Mm. Splen … did.’ With her hegemony of sensitivity re-established, she must have felt she could afford to be generous. ‘Absolutely splendid.’

‘But nothing to what Joyce and I will do for you, I promise you.’

‘Maurice, you are completely extraordinary. One moment you’re having a dizzy spell and the next you’re keeping up the pressure to make me have an orgy with you. What makes you so incredibly sort of changeable?’

On the drive back, I advanced a theory or two about what made me like that, never ceasing to imply that, whatever it might be, Diana and her attractiveness and fascinatingness had a hand in it up to the collar-bone. I said I would pick her up the next day at the same place and time, made her promise to think over the orgy project (I was pretty sure she had already decided in favour of it, but to say so at this stage might have made her seem interesting almost to a fault), dropped her at the corner and went off to pick up my vegetables and fruit.

This last operation took a bare three-quarters of an hour, and would have taken only half as long but for the slow-motion of both the farmers concerned. The older of the two performed as if I had turned up to buy his daughters instead of his lettuces and tomatoes; the younger, whose top incisor teeth lay horizontally on his lower lip and who smelt a lot, treated me like a Tsarist tax official. Throughout, my sexual elation kept being overlaid by unsought memories of what had happened in the wood and by notions that in thinking about my father as little as possible all day I had behaved badly to him. The pain in my back did what it could on this side of the scales by coming up with some unusually firm and authoritative twinges.

By the time I had driven the truck into the yard at the Green Man and sent for Ramón to come and unload it, it was twenty past six and my thoughts had homed in on drink. I had a large one—one only in the sense that I did not allow my glass to become empty before topping it up to an even higher level than before—while I showered and put on my evening rig-out. Then I looked in on Amy, who was watching a TV inquiry into householders’ insurance and who was, if anything, rather less polysyllabic than usual. My father’s absence made this entire section of the daily routine seem unduly contracted. I had a word with David Palmer and joined Nick, Lucy and Joyce in the bar just after seven, not at all looking forward to a couple of hours of work. We had a drink (I switched to sherry, my standard public potation at this hour), and very soon the first diners had reached the menu-conning stage.

There were no difficulties, none at least that stuck in my mind. By the time I got to the third, or possibly the fourth, party, however, I found I was beginning to encounter the problem I had failed to solve on my return from Baldock earlier that day: continuing to talk constructively without being able to remember, even in outline, what had been said just before. My order-pad was a help here, but not when it was a matter of deciding what to write down on it. The bar became almost empty. Those in search of an earlyish meal had either moved into the dining-room or fled out of the front door at the sight of me. A little later again, I suggested to David that now would be a good time to have a look at the kitchen. I understood him to say that this was of course an excellent idea, but that it might make just as much sense to defer it to a later stage, rather than carry it out so comparatively soon after a previous visit. I wondered just how soon afterwards it was, and whether, while having my look at the kitchen, I had said anything noteworthy, either for its wit or for its insight into the human condition. David’s expression gave no help here. Using his special reliable voice, he said,

‘Mr Allington, why don’t you let me take over now for what’s left of the evening? There’s only a few late bookings tonight, and you must have had a tiring day, and you’ll be handing over to me anyway at ten o’clock. And you agreed with me the other day that I ought to have more solo time.’

‘Thank you, David, but I think I’ll carry on for a bit. Remember we’ve got Professor Burgess booked for nine thirty, and I want to see to him personally, after that soufflé disaster when he was here before.’

As regards coherence, this was probably no great advance on what I had been saying for the last twenty or forty minutes; the point was that I knew what I had said, and even what David had said just earlier. I was back in control, or nearly so, without having done anything to earn it in the way of sleep or abstention, a familiar enough experience. Equally familiar would be the experience of sliding out of control again without having done a great deal to earn that, so I made a brief but violent attack on the cheese, biscuits and stuffed olives Fred had put out on the counter, and resolved to drink no more until I was up in the apartment. David got most of this, and shortly withdrew.

Burgess, a caricature of a savant, arrived soon afterwards with his wife, also a caricature of a savant, though of a more purely learned, perhaps more Germanic, type. They had brought along a couple of friends, less discernibly erudite than themselves. As expected, they all went for the grouse—the first of the year to have hung long enough—accompanied by a couple of bottles of the Château Lafite 1955 I kept under the counter for a few people like old Burgess, and preceded by some of the chef’s admirable kipper pâté. I ushered them into the dining-room myself; the head waiter, alerted in advance, met us at the doorway. The rather low-ceilinged room, a little over half-full, looked pleasantly welcoming with its candles, polished silver, polished oak and dark-blue leather, and was much cooler than the bar had been. The sight and sound of so much eating and talking daunted me a little, but there was a certain amount of drinking going on as well: not enough to satisfy me, but then there never is.

I had got the Burgesses and their friends settled, and was about to make a round of the other tables when I caught sight of a man standing by the window, perhaps looking out through a chink in the curtains, although he seemed to be in a slightly wrong position for doing this. I was pretty sure he had not been there when I came into the room. For a moment, I assumed this person to be a guest concerned about, for instance, the state of the lights of his car. Then, as my innkeeper’s reflexes sent me across the room with officiously helpful tread, I saw that the figure was wearing a short grey wig and a black gown and white bands at the throat. By now I was no more than six feet away. I halted.

‘Dr Underhill?’

It is never true that we speak so entirely without volition as not to realize, even for an instant, that it is we who have spoken. But I had not had the least conscious intention of pronouncing that name.

In leisurely fashion, but without delay, the head turned and the eyes met mine. They were dark-brown eyes with deeply creased lids, thick lower lashes and arching brows. I also saw a pale, indoors complexion scattered with broken veins to what seemed an incongruous degree, a broad forehead, a long, skewed nose and a mouth that, in another’s face, I might have called humorous, with very clearly defined lips. Then, or rather at once, Dr Underhill recognized me. Then he smiled. It was the kind of smile with which a bully might greet an inferior person prepared to join with him in the persecution of some helpless third party. It also held a certain menace, as if any squeamishness in persecution would result in accomplice becoming victim.

I turned to the nearest table, where there sat a party of three youngish London lawyers and their wives, and said loudly, ‘Do you see him? Man in the black … Just here, there…’

Underhill had gone when I looked round. I felt a great weary irritation at the predictability of this. I floundered idiotically on for a bit about his having been there a moment before, and how they must surely have seen him, before I realized that I could not stand up any more. My heart was perfectly steady just then, I was not dizzy or ill, and I have never fainted in my life; it was simply that my legs would not do their job. Somebody—the head waiter—caught me. I heard alarmed voices and scuffling sounds as people got to their feet. Immediately, and from nowhere, David arrived. He put his arm round me, called out a sharp order for my wife and son to he fetched from the bar and steered me into the hall. Here he sat me down in an upright-backed Regency chair by the fireplace and tried to loosen my collar, but I prevented him.

‘It’s all right, David, really. Just … nothing at all.’

Nick said, ‘What’s the matter, Dad?’ and Joyce said, ‘I’ll phone Jack.’

‘No, don’t do that. No need for that. I just came over a bit dizzy. I must have been drinking faster than I realized. I’m all right now.’

‘Where would you like to be, Mr Allington? Can you make it upstairs if we give you a hand?’

‘Please don’t bother, I think I can make it on my own.’ I got up, not all that shakily, and saw that people were watching me from the dining-room and bar door and elsewhere. ‘Could you tell anybody who’s interested that I’ve been under severe strain recently, or some such flap-doodle? Everyone’ll think I was as tight as a tick anyway, but I suppose we might as well preserve the outward forms if we can.’

‘I’m sure very few of them will think that, Mr Allington.’

‘Oh well, what of it? I’ll be off now. Don’t worry, David. If Ramón goes berserk with the meat-cleaver you’d better let me know, but short of that the house is all yours until the morning. Good night.’

None too comfortably, the four of us settled in the drawing-room, so called by my predecessor, though its lack of spaciousness and its pretty unrelieved symmetry made it, for me, a mere parlour or ante-room. I had never much tried to make it more than barely decent, had rather tended to turn it into a dump for the less attractive furniture and a couple of bits of statuary that had started to get on my nerves, a portrait bust of an early-Victorian divine and a female nude in some pale wood, sloppily modernistic in tendency, which I had bought in Cambridge after a heavy lunch at the Garden House and had since been too lazy to get rid of. Only my father had seemed to like the room, or at least had used it regularly. However, we would not be disturbed here.

I told them what I had seen. Nick watched me with great concern, Joyce with concern, Lucy with responsible vigilance, like a member of a team conducting a nationwide survey of drunks who see ghosts. Halfway through, I made Nick fetch me a small Scotch and water. He demurred, but I made him.

Joyce lost her look of concern as I talked. When I had finished, she said, ‘Sounds like D.T.s to me, don’t you think?’ in the interested voice she had used in discussing my father’s chances of surviving the current year, and, once, to suggest that Amy’s remoteness might he due to mental sub-normality.

‘Christ, what an idea,’ said Nick.

‘What’s so terrible about it? I mean, if it’s that you can deal with it. Not like going mad, after all.’

Nick turned to Lucy. ‘Isn’t D.T.s little animals and that type of stuff?’

‘Very often, yes,’ said Lucy dependably. ‘Something completely removed from reality, anyway. A man just standing about smiling hardly counts as that.’

This was a small relief, but I rather wished she had not spoken as if what I had seen was on the same level as one of the waiters wearing a dirty collar. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘what was it, then?’

Nick drew back his lips and shook his head earnestly. ‘You were pissed, Dad. I don’t know whether you realize, but you were really droning away when you were talking to the three of us in the bar just before.’

‘I’m not pissed now.’

‘Well no, but in the meantime you’ve had a shock and that does pull people round. But earlier on you were. Oh, you were making plenty of sense, but I know the way your voice goes, and your eyes.’

‘But I’d come round after that. I was talking to David … Look, Nick, you go down now and ask Professor Burgess. He’ll tell you I was all right. Go on.’

‘Oh, Dad. How can I go and ask him?’

‘Go down and get hold of David and the two of you take some of the regular people aside, David knows who they are, and ask them if they saw somebody standing by the window. I’ve described how he looked, so they’ll be——’

‘Christ, Dad … Let it drop. Take my advice, honestly. All their bloody tongues’ll be flapping as it is. Don’t go and make it worse. You don’t want it going round that the landlord of the Green Man seems to be seeing things. Don’t mind me saying this, just with the four of us, but they all know you’re a boozer. And anyway they wouldn’t remember seeing anyone, not even taken it in. Really, let it go.’

‘Nick, go and get David up here.’

‘No.’ Nick’s face went hard in a way I had known for a dozen years. ‘No use keeping it up, Dad. It’s not on.’

There was silence. Joyce drew her legs up under her and smoothed her hair, not looking at anyone. Lucy clicked her lighter at a menthol cigarette.

‘What do you think?’ I asked her unwillingly.

‘No investigation, of course. We know that’s out. Basically, I agree with Nick. That is, I think you’d been under a certain amount of strain, you had ghosts in your mind, you knew the story about this Underhill character, your judgment was, let’s say, impaired by alcohol, and the lighting in the dining-room is subdued, especially over by the window. There was somebody standing there, I’m quite ready to believe, but a real person, a waiter or one of the customers. As before, you thought you saw a ghost.’

‘But the wig, and the clothes…’

‘You filled them in out of your mind.’

‘But he recognized me, and he smiled at me.’

‘Of course he did. You were his boss, or else his host, and you’d just embarrassed him slightly by calling him by the wrong name.’

‘He’d disappeared. When I—’

‘He’d moved away.’

Another silence, in which I heard Magdalena enter the apartment and go into the dining-room. I very much wanted to tell the three what had happened in the wood, if only to dissent from Lucy’s Q.E.D., but I could think of no innocent reason for having gone there, and anyway I had been under strain, alcohol, etc., then too.

‘So I imagined it,’ I said, finishing my whisky.

‘That’s what I think,’ said Lucy, ‘but it’s only what I think. I could quite easily be proved wrong.’

‘Oh, really? How?’

‘I could be proved wrong tomorrow, in fact any moment, by someone else seeing what you see—though it goes without saying that if nobody else sees what you say you see, that’s no proof you didn’t see it—or if you found out something from a ghost you couldn’t otherwise have known about, then that would be not exactly a proof, but it would weigh with me considerably.’

‘What sort of thing?’

‘Well, supposing you saw a ghost walk through what’s now part of a wall, say, but it was a doorway or something in the past, and afterwards you found evidence of the doorway which you’d never have found unaided. Anything like that—something in a book, or behind a hidden panel there was no other clue to, that sort of thing would certainly weigh with me.’

Joyce said, ‘I must go and see to Magdalena,’ and left the room. Nick was screaming quietly and rocking from side to side.

‘Oh, ballocks, darling,’ he said. ‘What if something does weigh with you? Why don’t you leave him alone and let him forget about it? Sorry, Dad, I know you’re still here. Nobody wants to see ghosts or think they see them or whatever you prefer. Can’t do you any good, even if it is all only in your mind—worse if it’s that, in fact. As I said, Dad, drop it. If there’s nothing in it there’s nothing in it. If there’s something in it, nobody with any sense would want to know.’

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 Rev^d Mr Millinship I saw when I was a young girl. His complection very pale, but scarrd w^th 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.’

Nick stirred and muttered. Lucy, after glancing at me to make sure I felt I had done about enough maundering for the moment, said, ‘The fear of death is based on not wanting to consult fact and logic and common sense.’

‘Oh, in that case I’ll pack it up right away. But it isn’t exactly fear. Not altogether. There’s a bit of anger and hatred, and indignation perhaps, and loathing and revulsion, and grief, I suppose, and despair.’

‘Isn’t there something egotistical about all those feelings?’ Lucy sounded almost sorry for me.

‘Probably,’ I said. ‘But people usually feel bad when they realize they’re on one of the conveyor-belts I was talking about. Which makes it natural, at any rate, to feel something of the same when you realize we’re all on conveyor-belts to those coveyor-belts from the moment we’re born.’

‘It’s all right, Nick, I’m trying to be helpful, really. Natural, yes. But it’s natural to be all sorts of things it’d be better if we weren’t. Being afraid of the dark, for instance; that’s natural. But that’s one we can do something about, by using reason on it. The same with death. To start with, death isn’t a state.’

‘That’s what I don’t like about it.’

‘And it isn’t an event in life. All the pain and anxiety you’ve been talking about can be very horrible, no doubt, but it all takes places in life.’

‘That’s what I don’t like about life. Among other things, let it be said.’

‘I mean you’re not going to be hanging about fully conscious observing death happening to you. That might be very bad and frightening, if we could conceive of such a thing. But we can’t. Death isn’t something we experience.’

‘What we experience up to that point is quite bad enough to satisfy me. The ancient Assyrians believed in immortality without heaven or hell or any form of other world. In their view, the soul stayed by the body for eternity, keeping watch. Keeping watch for not a hell of a lot in particular, I suppose, but anyway there. Some people seem to think that’s a dreadful idea, worse than extinction, but I’d settle for it. Having somewhere to be.’

‘But nothing more than be, apparently. How would you spend the time? I’m sure you’ll have realized there’d be plenty of it.’

‘Oh yes. Well, thinking. All that kind of thing.’

‘I’m going to bed,’ said Joyce. ‘Laundry in the morning. Good night, Nick. Good night, Lucy.’ She kissed them both, then said mechanically to me, ‘Don’t be too late.’

While she departed, I got myself a Scotch and water. Nick was looking compliantly bored. Lucy seemed to be taking a minute or two off, as between one seminar topic and the next. After pouring herself a careful half-cup-and-no-more of coffee, and adding perhaps a minim-of milk, she said,

‘Uh, uh-Maurice, I take it you don’t allow any possibility of survival after death?’

‘Christ no. I’ve never believed in any of that crap, not even when I was a boy. To me, it’s always been a matter of a sleep and a forgetting, beyond all question. The other thing is egotistical, if you like. And so outré, somehow. Fit for madmen only. Why?’

‘Oh, I was just thinking that one of the traditional parts of the case for belief in some sort of hereafter is the existence of ghosts, which usually resemble actual people known when alive, and behave like them too, just as they would if they’d come back from beyond the grave.’

‘But according to you earlier on, ghosts don’t really exist as entities, and seeing one is seeing something that isn’t there.’

‘Yes, I’m not changing my mind. I don’t believe myself that ghosts are there in that sense, but there’s an arguable case that they are. And I have to admit that some ghosts do put on a remarkable show of having momentarily wandered back into our world from some place they went to after they died physically. I don’t mean so much the haunted-room sort of ghost, like the ones here; I’m thinking more of the sort that turn up under the most ordinary circumstances, sometimes by day, and speak to someone, often a person they knew well in life. Like the airman who walked into his friend’s room one afternoon and said halo to him five minutes after he’d been killed in a crash and hours before the friend heard about it. Or the woman who’d been dead for six years who appeared on the doorstep of her sister’s house at her usual time for coming to see her, only the sister had moved in the meantime, and the new occupant recognized the dead woman from a photograph the sister showed him. And even your friend Underhill … There’s one point in what you say happened in the dining-room tonight that takes him out of the category of the ordinary revenant kind of ghost.’

I judged that Lucy was fully capable of going to her grave without ever saying what this point was unless I prompted her, so I prompted her. ‘Namely?’ I said, with that sensation of taking part in Armchair Theatre on TV from which I suffered much more often, indeed continually, when dealing with Diana.

‘The fact, at least you say it’s a fact, that Underhill recognized you. Of course, he might just have mistaken you for someone else, but if he did really recognize you, then there’s an obvious case for saying that he is in some sense or other existing in the twentieth century, having died physically in the seventeenth—existing to the extent of being able to perform at any rate one kind of action, involving intelligence, memory and so on: recognition. There’s no knowing what else he may be able to do. Not at the moment, that is. But, given your views on death, I should say it’s more than ever up to you to try and get in touch with what you believe to be Underhill’s ghost.’

Nick had begun to twist about slightly in his seat. ‘Oh, Lu. Get in touch with a ghost? How do you do that?’

‘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 thatdarkling plainSwept 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.

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: