The Green Man

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

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

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

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

‘Happened? How do you mean?’

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

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

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

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

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

‘How can that take all day?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Would you? I must be off.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He telephoned briefly and rejoined me.

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

‘Uh … no thank you.’

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

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

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

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

‘Oh, it’s extensive all right,’ said Ware, a little put out at this irrelevant reminder.

‘Then a Fellow’s personal papers, found here and inspected soon after the beginning of the last century, as I understand the case …?‘

Ware relented a little. ‘It’s possible. There’s an autograph catalogue dating from the 1740s, when the libraries first started taking an interest in manuscripts and older stuff generally. We rather led the way there, it seems. Here it is. Or rather its photocopy. Splendid invention. Underhill. Underwood, Aubrey. Several verses upon occasions, with part of Philoctetes, an heroical poem after the manner of Mr Dryden. How dreadful. That wouldn’t be your man, would it? No. Wrong name, for one thing. Nothing by any Underhill. What a pity. I am sorry.’

‘There’s no other collection it might be in?’ I asked.

‘Not relating to the date you gave me, no.’

‘But my author saw it in the 1810s or thereabouts.’

Duerinckx-Williams peered at the thin regular handwriting. ‘In certain circumstances, such as the loss or detachment of the first leaf or leaves, might not the diary have been entered under some general head referring to anonymous writings?’

‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ said Ware, momentarily put out again. ‘It’s possible. Let’s see. Yes, under Anonymous, in fact. Anonymous, a tract discovering the vices of Popery, notably its Mariolatrous practice, by a gentleman, never imprinted. Fascinating, but not your quarry, I think. Anonymous, a quantity of sermons, and prayers, and pious thoughts, by the late rector of St Stephen’s, Little Eversden. No. Anonymous, of sundry matters, by a man of learning. Not over-informative, is it? A possibility, I suppose. Anonymous…’

There were no other possibilities. Ware looked at me with gloomy expectancy.

‘Could I have a look at those sundry matters?’ I asked.

‘All these items are kept in the Hobson Room,’ said Ware forcefully, but without indicating whether I was expected to give a cry of pure animal terror at this disclosure, or burst out laughing to find my quest so comically and decisively thwarted, or what. I turned to Duerinckx-Williams.

‘Which, I believe, is not open to non-Fellows without the written permission of the Master,’ he said, ‘but in the case of Mr Allington, who is an M.A. of my college and for whom I am happy to vouch, perhaps this requirement could be waived.’

‘Of course,’ said Ware, impatient now, and with a key already in his hand. Resuming his shopwalker manner, he added, ‘Would you come this way?’

The Hobson Room turned out to occupy a whole floor of a tower at the opposite angle of the court, approached by a winding stone staircase and possessing small windows on three sides. It was cool, the first cool place I had been in for what seemed like weeks. Most of the available wall-space was filled with deep oak shelves of Edwardian pattern, and two working-tables and chairs of the same period completed the furniture. On the shelves stood ranks of grey cloth folders, presumably containing manuscripts. Ware began to examine the top outer corners of these like somebody looking through a collection of gramophone records. I could not watch him; I stood and tried to read a framed quarto page of some book that hung among others on the stone wall, but failed to take in a word.

‘Here we are,’ said Ware. ‘Complete with fly-leaf, I see. Thomas Underhill, D.D., olim Sodalis Collegii Omnium Sanctorum, Universitatis Cantabrigiensis.’

He had to supply the last part from memory, because I had turned and taken the folder from him. It contained all or part of an octavo notebook shorn of its covers—there were traces of glue and stitching—and, apart from a little foxing, in an excellent state of preservation.

‘An odd sort of anonymity, with the man’s name plastered all over the front,’ said Duerinckx-Williams.

‘Thank you,’ I said. I had seldom wanted anything as much as I wanted the two of them to go away and let me read what I held in my hands.

Duerinckx-Williams sensed this at once. ‘We’ll leave you in peace. If you happen to be free at one thirty or so, I’d be delighted to give you lunch at Matthew’s. Just the ordinary combination-room stuff, but eatable as a rule. But you mustn’t feel bound by that.’

‘Perhaps you’d lock up when you leave and return the key to me in the library,’ said Ware, handing it to me.

‘Yes,’ I said. I had the notebook open on one of the decks and a reading-light switched on. Thank you.’

There was a short pause while they presumably looked at each other or, for all I cared, went through a complicated mime of impotent fury, and then there was the clank of the iron latch.

Underhill had written a good clear hand, and had not used any private shorthand system: abbreviations were few and immediately understandable. He began, on June 17th, 1685 (he had died in 1691), by boasting to himself about how learned he was and listing and briefly describing the books he had read. Evidently he had had a considerable private library. Most of the works and authors mentioned were unknown to me, but I did recognize references to the Neoplatonist philosophers, who had been contemporaries of his at Cambridge, quite possibly acquaintances: Cudworth’s intellectual System, More’s Divine Dialogues and a couple of others. I remembered from somewhere that More had been part of, or on the edge of, a circle that practised magic, including a sinister-sounding Dutch baron. What had he been called? Never mind—an interesting lead, perhaps, to the scholar, but I am no scholar, and my interest in Underhill was not scholarly.

I read on, found more of the same, together with mystical speculations either unintelligible or trite, and began to get bored. Was this all there was going to be? Then I came to the entry for September 8th:

‘My man Gurney, on Instruction, adviz’d me that the Girl-child of Widow Tyler was come to the door, to sell Fruits & Vegetables. When this was done, enquir’d of her, Whether she wou’d take a cup of Chocolate w. mee in my Parlour, the day being so foul? She v. prettily consentg, we talk’d there together about half an hour. Told her of the Wonders I cou’d work, & how I was us’d to reward such as pleas’d me. She listen’d to all, & I warrant beleev’d all. At last, bid her, did she desire a fair Husband & Health, Wealth & Good Fortune all her life long, come to me the night following at ten of the clock, but privily, & to tell none on pain of losing all her Benefits, for did she but breathe a Word I wou’d most infallibly know of it, thro’ my Art. But, says shee, She was afear’d of the Dark of the Night. To wch I reply’d, That she must hold in her hand this Crucifix (givg it to her, a worthless Toy), & she wou’d enpoy the surest Protection, both of our Lord J.C. in Heaven, and of myself on Earth. She ask’d, If I wou’d say a strong Spell for her? My strongest, my Dear (smilg). Then (says she) I will come indeed.

‘Of middle stature, good Carriage, full Bosom. Unlike the Country Folk, her Cheek not ruddy, but a fine rose, her Teeth white, her Hand small, a Lady’s hand. Of fourteen year. I dare aver, Kg Solomon had not a finer Wench.’

After this interview, Underhill had evidently returned to his reading with the same diligence as ever: that afternoon, a Latin work on anemomancy, or divination by means of observing the strength, direction and steadiness of the wind, by a certain Alanus Candidus; after dinner, a life of another man I had never heard of by a third such. I felt that this detachment boded no good to Widow Tyler’s daughter. With dread and fascination I turned on through Underhill’s entry for the next day.

‘Upon her most punctual arrival, gave my Visitor a Potion, compounded of Claret & Brandy-wine, w. certain Additions, after the Prescription of Jacobus Magus in his De Inductione Luxuriae. Set going my Brazier, & threw thereon an artful Succession of Incenses, Powders, & caet. from my store, thus producg most delightfull & lascivious Perfumes & also strange & many-colour’d Smoaks. When all these had sufficiently work’d upon her, caus’d her to beleeve she heard sweet Musick from many Voices, warblg amorous and wanton Airs. Then, conjur’d up Shapes to appear, at first pleasg, as, Shepheards & Shepheardesses, Nymphs, Gallants, Revellers, Catamites, Masquers, Hero’s, Queens of Antiquity, some consortg carnally one w. another. Next, desir’d her to remove her Cloaths.

‘Why, Sir, (says shee) you ask me to commit a Sin. Not so, my Dear, (says I) it is not at all sinful to requite w. a show of your Beauties, those who have labour’d to entertain you, & who so labour yet. See, (indicatg a Grecian Youth & a Maid in concourse) what these two are even now about, & solely to make you Sport. Solely? (asks she, slily). In part, you must allow (says I). Why then, (says she) how can I bee less liberal (a stroak of wit that delighted me). & at once stript herself to her naked Skin. O quae deliciae!

‘Now show’d her Creatures not as attractive, as, Hippogriffs, Apes, Turks, Centaurs, Harpies, Chimaera’s, Caribans, Executioners, Worms, all fightg & murtherg & devourg one another. Fill’d her ears w. cries of wild Beasts, & Thunders, & Groans of the Damn’d. She shreik’d without cease, & entreated mee to have done, & to banish these Sights. Shreik as you will, (says I) there is none to hear, my Servants are abroad, & these are no Sights, see how they are all about you & but for mee wou’d rend you in peeces (not tellg her they were mere Apparitions & cou’d not do any thing save affright her). When as I judg’d, she had reach’d the Pitch of Terror, ravisht her upon the Floor, & shortly thereupon drove her from my Presence, throwg her wretched Cloaths after her, & warng her it were best she spoke no word of what had past, else my Devils wou’d pursue her to the Grave & beyond, & she wou’d come to me again whenever I requir’d it of her, & she was mine.

‘Took a glass of small Ale to quench my thirst, & retir’d to my Chamber, & open’d Johannes à Ponte upon the Venom of Toads & Serpents, but found the matter phantastick beyond credence, & ill set out, & being much fatigu’d, (tho’ in ease of mind) took myself to my Bed.’

The Hobson Room seemed a good deal less cool than at first. I would have to have a drink soon—I had been mad not to bring a flask with me—but I had to put my thoughts in order first, or at least recite them to myself. Not in any order, then:

I did not know whether Underhill had really conjured up apparitions and noises and the rest of it, or even what that meant, but I believed that he and the girl thought he had, and the experience seemed to have been quite frightening enough to seal her mouth permanently, for I had never come across the least suggestion that he had gone in for any kind of sexual adventure. I could not remember the date of Mrs Underhill’s death, but fancied that it had been later than 1685, so that she had presumably been living in the house throughout this period, but without once being mentioned, not even in the entry I had just read. She must have known better than to interfere when she heard the girl’s screams. I understood how Joseph Thornton had been too much of a scholar to conceal the existence and location of Underhill’s diary, but too much of a moralist, or human being, not to warn his readers against it, and not to let it remain as hard to find as when he had managed to find it. Similar motives, the desire to preserve alongside the desire to thrust out of sight, must have worked on whoever had catalogued the diary seventy years before Thornton’s time. And I would have liked to do something about Widow Tyler’s daughter, but she had been dead for two and a half centuries, if not longer.

Ten minutes later, having been out and returned, I was eating a ham sandwich which I had coated with mustard-substitute from a tube, washing the result down with Scotch and bottled soda-water, and going on with the Underhill diary. By the time I was coming to the end of the year 1685, I became aware that the character of this was changing. The reading summaries became briefer, some works receiving no more than the notice that they were or were not useful to some ‘purpose’ kept in mind. At first, it seemed to me that this purpose had to do with the Tyler girl, who, also briefly, was described by Underhill as having ‘return’d to [his] Embraces’ every week or so, and/or with another girl called Ditchfield (I hated his way of ignoring their Christian names), aged twelve, whom he drew into his clutches in the first week of December, no doubt by a similar technique, though he was not very explicit about that. What had clearly been more interesting to Underhill at this stage was this long-term purpose of his, or, as it became in the entries for January 1686, his purposes. Maddeningly, just when I would have welcomed full information on the books he was reading, he started to mention nothing beyond authors and titles, often in a shortened form. I could do nothing with, for instance, ‘Geo^s Verul.: Of spirits, & caet.’ beyond concluding that at any rate Underhill’s preoccupations had remained constant.

Then, at April 29th, 1686, I came to the following:

‘Must cast aside fleshy Delights, & all such Concerns (for the moment.) Have now refin’d my Method, whereby I may cease to take heed to those who trouble mee. The place is fit, (id est, v. dense, horrid, of much Verdure & Timber sufficient.) What I hold een now, w. due words deliver’d, will most assuredly secure me such Power, as never was seen in this Kingdom, not even in it’s Gothick or Saxon age, but only in the rude beginnings of our Folk, before the Ministry of Our Lord J.C., when men worshipt only Trees & Bushes, (in their silly Ignorance, or their Knowledge? Mem. to consider curiously upon this, & in time deliver Judgment.) I thank the chance that deliver’d this Engine to mee, & the Talent that empowers me to have learnt its true Employment.

‘As to my 2nd, & larger, I mean not larger but INFINITELY GREAT purpose, I will say nothing at the present, but this, Hee who knows my mind cannot but know too, & for certain, What is the lastg Repository where I have hid what will enable him to aid this purpose &, in process learn the Secret which will render him Master of Himself, & who is master of himself is master of every thing (vide Car^s Voldemar Prov., Verum Ingenium).’

This almost filled up a right-hand page. When I turned over I found nothing more; the final twenty or thirty leaves of the notebook were blank. I poured more whisky and considered.

Thornton, as I had decided earlier, had not had the experience I had had in the wood above my house, and so had been unable to make anything of the reference to that wood on the last page of the diary. He must then have dismissed Underhill’s first purpose as too nebulous to be worth recording, possibly as empty vaunting or delusion. As regards the second purpose, Thornton had not, again, had the benefit of a conversation with Underhill’s ghost, as I had had, and could not have been expected to realize that this purpose had had to do with some form of survival after death. If Thornton had deduced the nature of the hiding-place referred to in the closing paragraph, he had no doubt been, as I could very well suppose from my reading of his book, too pious a man to contemplate disturbing the remains of a departed soul, even those of an ‘infamous creature’ like Thomas Underhill. I had no such inhibitions; and I was going to open that grave and coffin and see what ‘books and papers’ (as mentioned by Thornton) and other extras were to be found there.

As I sat on the hard scholar’s chair with the diary before me, I felt as elated and unsettled as I had done just before setting off today—more so. I see well enough now that a little more prudence would have been in order, but at the time I was revolted by the thought of prudence. Until Diana came along, I had had nothing to be more than trivially imprudent about for years, and never anything on this scale. There might even be something in—anyway, something interesting about—the supposed secret which was going to render me master of myself. I, of all people, could afford to learn that sort of secret. Not that I had forgotten what had become of the promises Underhill had made to the Tyler girl, and presumably to the Ditchfield girl also. These two, in fact, figured somehow in my motives for going on with the investigation, though I could not then have said how or how importantly.

But, talking of Diana … It was five-and-twenty to three, comfortable time to copy out Underhill’s last page, pack up and lock up here, return the key to Ware in the library, leave a thank-you note for Duerinckx-Williams at St Matthew’s lodge, drive down to Royston, have a furious argument there with the tiny wizened young man who supplied me with my drink and see to it that he would never again try to sell me pre-tax-increase stock at the increased price, go on to Fareham and the appointed corner and pick up Diana at three thirty.

That was just how it went. Diana’s questionings covered some of the same ground as those of the previous afternoon, eventually branching out into the general topic of what it was, or what I thought it was, that made men so different from women, by and large an easier assignment. Then, before we had quite reached the hollow on the hill, she started stripping with creditable speed. Everything was rather different from last time. When she was naked, and I was still stepping out of my trousers, she lay down on her back, stared at me and moved about a good deal on the ground. As soon as I reached her, she made it very clear that what the books used to call fore-play was not needed now; in fact, I had no chance to so much as kiss her until after the main stage of the whole business had been set in vigorous motion. It seemed to go on for hours, with Diana showing incredible energy. Whether this was natural or assumed I did not bother to wonder then, and quite right too. The distinction is in any case a doubtful one: orgasm itself is a reflex, but nothing much that accompanies even orgasm can be called so (let alone what people get up to during other parts of the performance). Nor did I ask myself whether Diana was reaching that point as often as her behaviour claimed, or indeed at all. That is not my way at such times, and even more quite right too. The mystery, the emotional secretiveness, the self-distancing of women, all the luggage of feeling they go about with and expect men to handle for them—these and countless more concrete manifestations start, not from the minor circumstance that women carry and bear and rear children, but from the fact that they do not have erections and do not ejaculate. (And, while we are about it, it is the fact that men do that deprives the passive homosexual’s role of any real depth or credibility.)

Ejaculation, as all good mistresses know, is a great agent of change of mind and mood. As, now, I lay beside Diana, it occurred to me first that she had been demonstrating her un-predictability: nothing but receptiveness yesterday, all positive action today. A moment later, perhaps more charitably, though perhaps not, I decided that yesterday she had been too excited not to behave as she really wanted to, whereas today’s gymnastics were designed to make me admire her sexual prowess: a move from involuntary narcissism, so to speak, into the purposeful kind. What of it, anyway? Both kinds suited me.

I told her more or less how unpredictable she was, and this went down all right. I was ready with further material of the same sort when she said:

‘About your idea that we all ought to go to bed, you and I and Joyce.’

‘Yes?’

‘I’ve been thinking about it.’

‘Good.’

‘Maurice.’

‘Yes?’

‘Maurice, what would you get out of it exactly? I mean, I can see what I’d get out of it, at least I think I can, but where would you come in? No, Maurice, you’re not to be horrid and awful. You know what I mean.’

‘I think so, yes. Well, seeing that it’s so much fun to go to bed with one beautiful girl, it ought to be twice as much fun to go to bed with two, if not more. More than twice as much fun. Worth trying, anyhow.’

‘Mm. You want to watch us at it, kind of thing, too, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I do rather. I’ve never been able to see anything wrong with the idea of watching people at it, provided that’s not all you’re doing, and that won’t apply in my case, of course. And provided, as far as I’m concerned, that neither of the people is a chap, and that’s not going to apply either.’

‘I … see. Would you want me to, well, be nice to Joyce as well as Joyce being nice to me?’

‘You can do whatever you feel like doing.’

‘No, but would you?’

‘Well, yes.’

‘Oh. Maurice … Maurice, isn’t part of this whole thing doing what you’re not meant to do?’

‘I expect so, yes. And as good a reason as any, by God.’

‘You’re not to be cross, but I think that’s a jolly schoolboyish view.

‘Ah, so that’s why it’s got so much appeal.’

‘Well, one thing to be said for a threesome is that Jack wouldn’t approve,’ she said abruptly, so much so that she got to the end of the sentence at about the time she would normally be drawing the first word to a close.

I opened my eyes, on the instinct that tells us that having done so we will be better prepared for whatever may follow, even when the view consists of as little as, in my case, an irreducibly near cheek and part of a nose and chin. There is that,’ I said.

‘I know all doctors screw their patients but he might at least take the trouble to pretend he’s not,’ she went on, sticking for the moment to her new policy of talking at ordinary human-being speed. Then she reverted to the old one. ‘But—that’s— nuh—thing, compared to what I’ve really got against him.’

Silence fell. One of these days I would bury her in an ant-hill up to her neck or feign sleep when she did this to me, but not today. ‘What’s that?’

‘I hate him. I can’t bear him.’

‘You can’t?’ I may have sounded less mildly surprised than I felt. Diana so seldom provoked anything more than the merest flicker of reaction (apart from lust and annoyance in full measure) that I had probably got into a habit of overdoing the eyes and teeth.

‘Of … course I can’t. Sure-ly you must know that. He doesn’t mind me, because he doesn’t mind a single blessed thing one way or the other, but I mind him like mad.’

‘What don’t you like about him?’

‘Oh, everything. I’ve been trying to make up my mind to leave him for simply ages. But, Maurice, don’t you think this is most peculiar?’

‘… Isn’t what most peculiar?’

‘Well. That you’ve known Jack and I for three years or more, and you’ve never noticed the absolutely obvious and simple fact that I can’t stand him. You really do not have, I suppose? I mean, you’re not joking?’

‘No.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes. Yes, I’m quite sure.’

‘Maurice.’ She turned her head, and I saw a tremendous eye looking into one of mine. ‘But that is simply the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever heard. A man like you, whom I’ve always thought was one of the most sensitive and observant characters one could wish to meet, and it’s never struck you that I can’t stand the man I’m married to, and you’re supposed to be so frightfully interested in me.’

I was sure I had never seen or heard anything to suggest that Diana was on anything but—at worst—tolerable terms with Jack, but could not make out whether all this was aimed at justifying her dealing with me or, more likely but just as merely, constituted one more tactical move in her campaign to show me up as coarser in spirit than some other people round the place—herself, for instance. However, before I could devise some ramshackle confession of emotional inferiority, she had shifted a little away from me, as if to enable us to see each other’s faces properly, but with a series of movements that involved her whole body. These continued while I watched her jaw sink and her eyes grow fixed in the doltish look they had taken on the previous afternoon. Arching her back, she said without hyphens,

‘All right, let’s do it. Whenever you like. I’ll do whatever you like.’

I was so excited that it was all over quite soon, but I have never known a woman who did not set a high value on male excitement, and in that short space I was able to produce a compelling pot-pourri of everything that had happened between us before. That is denigrating it a good deal, actually. I cannot imagine ever quite forgetting what it was like, while I can remember anything. And if what set it off was a little impure, in at least two senses, then let it be impure. Alternatively, fuck you. Anybody who feels like saying that a particular sexual act of any ordinary sort, possibly of any sort at all, ought not to have been enjoyable is a monster, large or little.

On the drive back to the corner, Diana was subdued. I wondered whether this was a prelude to her making a bid for a new kind of interestingness by telling me she had changed her mind about the orgy project, but I could not wonder very hard or for long at a time because I was thinking how best to put another proposal to her, one just as tricky in its way. Finally I said,

‘Diana, there’s something else I want to ask you.’

‘What, you and me and David Palmer?’

‘No, quite different. I think I’ve found out about a place where there may be some buried treasure. Would you give me a hand looking for it?’

‘Maurice, how frightfully exciting. What sort of treasure? How did you find out about it?’

‘I came across some old papers to do with the house, just saying where the stuff had been put, nothing about what it consisted of. Of course, there may be nothing in it.’

‘I see. Where is it?’

‘Apparently, uh, it’s in that little graveyard just up the road from the Green Man.’

‘In a grave? In someone’s coffin?’

‘That’s what the papers said, yes.’

‘You’re proposing to dig up a grave and open someone’s coffin?’ She was getting the idea fast.

‘Yes. It’s a very old grave and so on. There won’t be anything in it but bones. And this treasure.’

‘Maurice Allington, have you gone totally and completely out of your mind?’

‘No, I don’t think so. Why?’

‘You can’t be serious. Digging up a grave.’

‘I assure you I am serious. I want that treasure. As I say, there may be nothing there at all, or something quite worthless, but you never know. I asked you to help because I must have somebody to hold the torch and lend a hand generally, and you’re the only person I can ask who won’t be shocked out of their mind.’

That went down very satisfactorily, but she still had a piece of finessing to do. ‘It’s not true, though, is it, about lending a hand? You want company. You’re afraid to do it on your own.’

I nodded with pretended ruefulness. The last bit was not true either: if there was going to be anything out of the ordinary to see in that graveyard, I just wanted somebody else on hand to see it too. But I had not lied when I said that Diana was the only one I could ask. That was something substantial in her favour.

‘Has it got to be at night?’

‘Well, yes, I think so, don’t you? with people passing by on the road all day long, and sterling chaps doing things to the soil. It shouldn’t take more than half an hour or so.’

‘There’s no curse or anything on it, is there?’

‘Oh, good God, no, nothing like that. The fellow was just after a safe place to stow a few things.’

‘Oh, very well, then. I’ll come along. It might be quite fun.’

‘Out of the ordinary, anyway. What about tonight? No point in hanging about. Can you get away?’

‘Of course I can. I do as I please.’

We had reached the corner. I arranged to pick her up at half-past midnight at a spot nearer her house. On the way back home, I stopped at the graveyard and looked Underhill’s grave over with some care. I could foresee no special difficulty later: there was nothing in the way of a stone to lift, and the soil, when I prodded it, seemed to be as light as elsewhere in the area. Whatever the place might feel like in the dark, at five o’clock on a summer afternoon it was solidly un-eerie, giving no impression of age or decay, merely of rankness and dilapidation, heavily overgrown for the most part (though not in Underhill’s corner), and littered with more ice-cream wrappers and beer-cans than fragments of headstone.

I drove to the Green Man, went upstairs and started on a quick drink before bathing and changing. I sat in a nondescript but comfortable armchair beside the fireplace, facing the window in the front wall. This had its curtains drawn, but there was plenty of light from the other Window to my left, where the French girl stood. Amy’s gramophone was playing some farrago of crashes, bumps and yells from her room down the passage. As I listened, or endured hearing it, the noise stopped abruptly. Sipping my Scotch, I waited half-consciously for another record to go on. How quiet it was by contrast; totally quiet, in fact. And that was not just odd, it was impossible. No inn is silent for more than a couple of seconds at a time, except for four or five hours between the last departure to bed and the stirrings of the first servant. I went to the door and opened it; there was no sound whatever. When I turned back to the room, I found that it looked different in some way, different, at any rate, from how it had looked when I entered it five minutes before. It was darker. But how could that be? Sunlight was streaming in as brightly as ever from the side window. Ah: it was the other window that was darker. There was no light at all showing between the curtains and at their edges. That was impossible, too. Feeling for the moment nothing but a great curiosity, I hurried over to those curtains and threw them apart.

Outside, it was night, absolutely dark it seemed at first, as if I had opened my eyes thousands of fathoms under water, at the sea bed. Then I saw it was not really as dark as all that: there was a three-quarter moon low in the sky, and no cloud to speak of. The horizon and the distance were the same as any night, except that a plantation of conifers just below the sky-line was missing. In the middle distance, small fields under cultivation replaced the areas of grassland I had always seen before. And in the foreground, immediately below me, the hedge lining the road had gone, and the telegraph-poles—of course—had gone, and the road itself had dwindled to a rough track. Although nothing moved, it was a living scene, not the equivalent of a still photograph.

I turned back to the dining-room, which was quite unchanged. My five sculptured people looked into space as ever, but for the first time I thought I found something slightly malignant in their impassivity. I crossed to the side window, and looked out on the familiar daytime landscape. As I watched, a light-blue sports car, a TR5 by the look of it, emerged from the direction of the village and moved, accelerating sharply but in complete silence, up the road towards the house. It did not—of course—come into view at the front window.

I stood and thought. There was an obvious case for rushing along to Amy and bringing her here, in the hope of proving to myself and everybody else that I was not seeing things, or rather that what I saw was really there, or at least that I was not insane. But I could not subject that child to the terror of either seeing what I saw, or finding that she and I were seeing differently. And, if I did go down the passage to her room, I was far from sure that I would find her there, or anything there that I knew.

At this point of irresolution, I heard voices below me, male and female, and then an outside door shutting at the front of the house, but it was not the sound of my front door. The woman I had twice seen on the landing came into view carrying a small lantern and set off towards the village—I caught the merest glimpse of her face, but her general outline and her gait left me in no doubt. Very faintly, the man’s voice was again audible from the floor beneath, this time with a different intonation, one of a peculiar monotony, one I could identify, or, if I tried, name a close parallel to. Yes, a parson, a priest, intoning a part of the service that is best got over quickly.

The woman was almost out of my view; I could just see the swaying light of her lantern. Then I picked up a movement on the other side, from the direction of, among other things, what at this stage I need only call the wood. A tall and immensely broad figure came stumping awkwardly along the track, massive legs, apparently of not quite the same length, pounding away with the implacable vigour of machinery, long arms pumping in an imperfectly synchronized rhythm. If it had been human, it would have weighed twenty-five stone at least, but it was not human: it was made up of lumps of timber, some with thickly ribbed bark, some with a thin glistening skin, of bundles of twigs and of ropes and compressed masses of green and dead and rotting leaves. As it drew nearer, laboriously quickening its pace, I saw that its left thigh, the one nearer to me, was encrusted with a plate-like fungus, fragments of which fell off at every stride, and I heard the creaking and rustling of its progress. When it was exactly level with me, it turned its lumpish, knobbled head towards the house, and I shut my eyes, having no more desire to see its face now than when it had appeared to me before, in my hypnagogic vision of two nights ago. At the same moment, a cry of alarm or loathing came from beneath my feet; I knew that Underhill was at that very moment (whenever it was) watching from the window of the dining-room, which was now (my now) closed and empty.

When I opened my eyes again, the creature was beginning to move out of sight at a grotesque, lurching trot. I waited, wondering what I would do if this show simply went on and on, leaving me poised somewhere between Underhill’s time and mine. If I could manage to get myself into the view I could still see by way of the side window, perhaps its sound would come back and I should be all right. But how was I to get there? I had listened, not looked, when I opened the door a moment earlier, but I had no doubt at all now that this room was the only part of the house that had not reverted to what it had been nearly three centuries previously. Through the side window and down the wall seemed the only possible route. I was beginning to be worried by the thought that that version of reality might turn out to be a visual hallucination, but then I heard screaming, not near by, perhaps two hundred yards away, but very clear in the utter silence, and very loud, and accompanied by another sound, also loud, a wailing or an unsteady hooting, like something quite often heard but inappropriate in the context, like a high wind, through trees. I put my fingers in my ears and went on staring at the now deserted nocturnal landscape in front of me. How long could I stand its going on being there?

Then, slightly to left of centre, and almost dazzlingly bright, and instantaneously, a light or flame sprang up, a yellowish green in colour. After a few moments another switched itself on, apparently in the sky and of tremendous size, like a sun, only jigsaw in shape and of a deep blue. There was a longer pause before two more such flared into being almost together, a second yellowish-green one near the first and another, larger blue one on the opposite side of the sky. The former of these, shaped like a fat, slightly jagged pillar, had a thin dark vertical bar running up nearly through the middle of it. I recognized this, at first without being able to name it, then saw that it was part of a telegraph-pole. Further lights appeared at short, irregular intervals, like splotches of molten metal thrown on to a dark photographic plate. Three of them coalesced to give me a view of some yards of sun-lit metalled road. I took my fingers out of my ears. More rapidly than any physical approach would have made possible, the noise of a car grew in volume outside. I heard men’s voices and the sound of a front door being opened and shut—my front door. When there were only a few isolated patches of darkness remaining, the door into the room opened behind me..

I turned sharply. Victor galloped up, threw himself at my feet and fell on to his side. Behind him was Amy. I hurried to her and put my arms round her.

‘What’s happening, Daddy?’

‘Nothing. It’s all right. I was just feeling a bit sad.’

‘Oh. Didn’t you hear the screaming?’

‘The what?’

‘The screaming. Somebody in the street, it sounded like. A long way off, but sounding sort of as if it was near. Didn’t you hear it?’

‘Yes.’ Trying to look and sound calm was such a severe effort that I could hardly speak. ‘But … weren’t you playing your…?’

‘I was between records and it was all quiet.’

‘It wasn’t dark outside, was it?’

‘Dark? No. How could it be?’

‘What sort of person was it who screamed, do you think?’

‘You said you heard them.’

‘Yes,’ I said, picking up my whisky and draining it, ’but I want to hear what you thought.’

‘Oh. Well … it was a lady. She sounded very frightened.’

‘Oh, I don’t think it was that, darling. More like just one of the village girls having a lark.’

‘It didn’t sound like that to me.’

‘Did you hear any other sort of noise?’

‘No. Ooh yes. A sort of … calling-out howling noise, or like someone singing without any words, just going on and on. And going up and down all the time. You heard it, didn’t you?’

‘Oh yes. Just people fooling about.’

Amy said nothing for a moment, then, ‘Would you like to come and watch Pick of the Hits with me? It comes on at five forty.’

‘I don’t think I will, thank you, Ame.’

‘You said you enjoyed it last time.’

‘Did I? Yes, but I’m going to be busy tonight. I’ll have to change and get downstairs as quick as I can.’

‘Okay, Dad.’

‘I’ll look in later.’

‘Okay.’

She went off quite pacifically. For once, I should have preferred an outbreak of temper. Amy was not reconciled, only preoccupied, and not in any comfortable way: she knew I had not told her the truth. But how could I say that there was no need to worry about what she had heard, because it had happened in 1680-something?

Despite this, and despite feeling fairly thoroughly shaken up by what I had witnessed and how, I was much relieved. Few people are tough enough to rest solely on an inner conviction that, in the face of what might be impressive evidence to the contrary, they are not going mad. In celebration, as much as anything else, I drank two brimming tumblers of Scotch and water in two minutes and with no effort. Then I went to have my bath.

Lying torpidly back in the hot water, I felt almost all right. It was certainly true that heart and back had kept themselves to themselves since first thing that morning. Jack Maybury would have had something to say about that, though I could hardly tell him what had formed a substantial part of the day’s distractions from egotistical brooding. I felt sober, or rather, since feeling completely sober had been disagreeable to me for some years, fairly sober. Very nearly completely all right. The green man. The Green Man. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of English pubs and inns bear the name, in reference, I remembered reading somewhere, either to a Jack-in-the-green, a character in traditional May Day revels, or merely to a game-keeper, who would formerly have worn some kind of green suit. Was it possible that my own house, which had been so called from its beginnings in the late fourteenth century, was a different case, that Underhill’s supernatural employee had existed even then? If true, to christen the place after such a creature was an odd way of inviting custom. But an interesting speculation.

I grew more torpid. Staring in an unfocused way towards the junction of wall and ceiling, I saw a small scarlet and green object moving slowly from right to left. First lazily, then as alertly as I could, I tried to decide what it was. A fly of some sort, or a moth. But surely there were none of either coloured like that, not in England. And the thing was not travelling with a fly’s quick darting motion, such that wings and legs disappear into a round or roundish dark blob, nor in the un-steady, fluttering style of a moth. The wings of what I saw— two of them—were beating the air in an easily perceptible slow rhythm, and, not so easy to make out, its legs—two of them— were tucked up underneath the body, and there was a neck, and a head. It was a bird. A bird the size of a fly, or small moth.

I splashed to my feet and looked more closely. The thing was still a bird: I could see the sheen on its plumage and, by straining my eyes, the separate claws of its feet, and I could just hear a tiny beating of wings. I put my hand out to grab it, and it disappeared for a moment, then came into view again, flying out of the back of my hand. I picked up my towel, rolled it into a ball and screamed into it with my eyes shut for perhaps two minutes. When I opened them again, the bird had gone. I whimpered and sobbed into the towel for another two or three minutes, then dried myself with it as quickly as possible, counting in my head, and ran to the bedroom. If I could get dressed before I had reached four hundred and fifty thousand, I would not see the bird again, or not for some time. I kept my eyes shut whenever I could, and got my evening bow tied without once having to open them, but had to look at myself in the glass to do my hair, and caught sight of a small fly circling silently round my head. Although I was absolutely certain it was only a fly, I found I could not stop myself falling on to the bed and screaming and sobbing into my pillow for a time, still counting. I gave myself an extension of a hundred thousand for that period, which was fair, because I had not allowed for it when I set my original figure, and it could not have gone on for less than a minute and a half. I had my dinner-jacket on and was out of the door at the count of four hundred and twenty-seven thousand, so that there was a chance I would not see the bird again for a time.

I had no trouble getting to the landing with one eye shut and the other mostly shut. Here I ran into Magdalena, and sent her off to find Nick, or, failing him, David. Then I went back into the dining-room, mainly by feel, sat down, avoiding the chair that faced the front window, and, kept both eyes shut. After less than a minute, I heard hurrying footsteps and opened my eyes again; I stopped counting, which I had gone on doing with no particular purpose in mind. By now I was breathing normally.

Nick hurried in with Jack Maybury. They both looked concerned, Nick in Nick’s way, Jack professionally, but with no hint of censoriousness. He came close and peered at me.

‘What’s the trouble, Maurice?’

‘I saw something.’

‘Not more ghosts?’ He glanced at Nick and then back at me. ‘I’ve been hearing about your encounters with the spirit world.’

‘Why are you here, Jack?’

‘I dropped in for a drink on the way back to my surgery. Just as well, it appears. Nick, would you ring Diana and tell her I’ll be late?’ He gave the number and Nick went. ‘Now, Maurice, let’s have your story,’ he went on, gently for him.

I told him enough about the green man, and about the woman’s screams, and that Amy had said she had heard them too. I did not mention the other noise we had both heard.

‘So you think Amy shared your experience, or part of it? I see. When was this? I see. But there’s more, is there?’

‘Yes. I saw a bird flying round the bathroom. Very small, it was.’ At this point I began sobbing again. ‘But it was flying like a big bird. Beating its wings slowly. It went away quite soon. I’d had a big drink not long before, because I was so relieved that Amy had heard the screams, that somebody else as well as me had, I mean. I expect that had something to do with it.’

‘Well, possibly, yes, but it’s a much longer-term thing than that. You need a slow build-up normally.’

‘I suppose it was…’

‘It does sound like a little D.T., certainly, whereas your wooden chap on the whole doesn’t much. Have you had that sort of dream before, Maurice?’

‘I told you, it wasn’t a dream. I never dream.’

‘Couldn’t you just have nodded off in your chair? Surely you—’

‘No, I saw it.’

‘All right.’ He started to take my pulse.

‘What will that tell you?’

‘Very little, probably. Still sweating a lot?’

‘Not today.’

‘Had the shakes at all?’

‘No more than usual.’

‘Right. Now, whatever you see in this way can’t harm you. I can understand your being frightened by these things, but try to remember that that’s as much as they can do. Delirium tremens is a warning, not a disaster in itself, and we can deal with it. It’s usually brought on by emotional strain, plus drink, of course, and I’d put all this down to your father’s death. I think these ghosts of yours were a sort of prelude to the business in the bathroom, and your general idea that there are sinister and hostile characters around is very common in these cases. Are you with me?’

‘In the sense that I understand what you mean, yes.’

‘Okay. What you need is some time off. Now, young David’s a very competent lad, and Joyce—’

‘I’m not going inside, Jack.’

‘It’s not inside, for Christ’s sake. It’s a nursing home that deals with all sorts of things, with a very nice—’

‘I’m not going. There’s too much to see to here. I’ve got my father’s funeral tomorrow, for one thing. Later, perhaps. You’ve got to tide me over. Tell me what I …‘ I heard returning footsteps and speeded up. ‘Keep your mouth shut and get me some pills. There are pills, aren’t there?’

Nick came in.

‘Of a sort. All right. But I disagree.’ Jack turned to Nick. ‘Okay?’

‘Yes. Sorry, it was engaged all the time.’

‘Yes, I know. Well, the verdict on your father is that he’s been hitting the bottle a bit too hard. So he’s going to cut it down, with medical help.’

‘Cut it down, hell,’ I said. ‘I shan’t want another drink for the next fifty years.’

‘No, Maurice. That’s the surest way to, uh, run into trouble. You’re to cut down your intake by half in the first instance, and I mean half, not more. Take things as easy as you can. Lean on young David. And talk to Nick and Joyce about this. That’s medical advice. Well, I’m not going to be as late as I thought. Nick, if you like to pop round in about half an hour there’s some stuff for him I’d like you to pick up, if you would. Ring me any time you like, Maurice. This’ll pass off in a couple of days, provided you do as I say. Goodbye now.’

‘I’ll see you out, Jack,’ said Nick.

‘Oh, there’s no … All right. Thanks.’

As soon as they had gone, I shut my eyes. Just a precaution: I was already feeling better, or less bad. Except under the immediate threat of death, life can never be only one thing. Bird or no bird, I was going to pick up Diana later and find out what Underhill had had buried with him. The doing of that would probably be frightening, but so much the better. I would not be able to be frightened of seeing the bird while I was frightened of what might happen in the graveyard.

Nick came back and pulled up a low chair next to mine.

‘He didn’t drop in by chance, Nick, did he?’

‘No. I asked him to. Just as well, as he said.’

‘What did you ask him a minute ago?’

‘Whether he thought you were going off your head. He said some things did point that way, but on the whole he thought not.’

‘Well, that’s cheering, I must say.’

‘What’s wrong, Dad? I mean really wrong.’

‘Nothing. Hitting the bottle. You heard all that. Jack’s a terrible puritan about drink. It’s his way of—’

‘Balls. With the greatest disrespect along with a lot of respect, balls. You’ve decided not to tell me. And you think that’s pretty marvellous of you. Heroic sensitive Maurice Allington keeps his mouth shut as to what’s weighing on his heroic sensitive soul. But it isn’t like that. You’re just too lazy and arrogant and equal to everything (you think) to take the trouble to notice people like your son, and your wife, and deem them bloody well worthy of being let into the great secret of how you feel and what you think about everything, in fact what you’re like. Sorry, Dad, it wasn’t the time to say it, I know, but there’s nothing good about being self-sufficient except over things that don’t matter or when you’ve got to be because there just isn’t anybody else around, but that isn’t so in your case—it’s bad that you don’t depend on other people, especially the ones that depend on you. I can see you’re feeling rotten, but if anything really crappy happened and it could have been prevented by you telling someone like me, or Joyce, what was going on beforehand, then you’d only have yourself to blame, or rather I’d blame myself too for not going on at you about it. Which I’ll stop doing now, but I’ll go on with it when you’re feeling better. Sorry, Dad. Forget it for now.’ He put out his hand and I gripped it. ‘You just say how you want things to be this evening, and I’ll see to it that’s how they are.’

I stated some vague preferences about everything being normal, and about perhaps a look at television. Without giving any reason, Nick said that he would move the (family, non-Amy) set from the drawing-room, where it spent nine-tenths of its time, and plug it into its sockets here in the dining-room. He did all that, and shortly afterwards went off to pick up my pills at Jack’s, leaving me watching, rather in Amy style, a programme about rehousing schemes in (I think) Salford.

As soon as Nick had gone, I picked up a hammer, a chisel and some sort of steel bar from the tool-box in the utilities cupboard, collected a couple of torches from their drawer in the office, went outside to the hut where the very idle and disagreeable old man (all I could get) whom I paid to do the gardening spent his time drinking tea and, no doubt, pulling his wire, found a spade showing no signs of recent use and stowed all these implements in the back of the Volkswagen. Doing this cheered me, and also helped me considerably to shove beneath the surface of my mind any question of what the hell I thought I was doing. It must have been at about this point, in fact, that I became finally committed to following the Underhill thing through, in the sense that afterwards I never once considered turning back until it was too late.

Another distraction, of course, was the problem of how to introduce to Joyce the topic of the orgy project. I was determined to talk her into this with the least possible delay, without at the same time having any idea at all about how to start, or how to go on either. If other things had been normal, to get, or seem, very drunk might have looked like an obvious preliminary, but getting so would not do now, seeming so would quite probably not fool Joyce, who knew me well, at least in such areas as this, and neither was likely to make the right impression, whatever that might be. I turned it all over in my mind while, accompanied by David, I made a sketchy round of bar, kitchen and dining-room, but could think of no solution. This did not worry me, perhaps because before I started I had opened Jack’s package and swallowed two parti-coloured transparent cylinders containing some sort of coarse brown powder and very roughly resembling dolls’ egg-timers. I would have to trust to the inspiration of the moment, in other words put my head down and charge full tilt.

The moment came shortly before nine o’clock, after I had had a desultory chat with Amy in her room and come upon Joyce and Nick in the dining-room. No sooner had I mixed myself a water and Scotch—ten to one—and given Joyce a glass of Tio Pepe than Nick said, staring at me rather, that he felt like going down to the bar for a bit and would see us at dinner.

Joyce asked me how I was and I soon satisfied her curiosity, which had not seemed to be of the burning sort in the first place. Then I said,

‘I ran into Diana this afternoon, on my way back from Cambridge.’

‘Ran into her?’

‘She was just coming out of the post office as I went by, so I stopped and gave her a lift. She had a shopping-bag or so.’

‘And?’

‘Well, it was all rather curious. Would you say she got tight at all? I don’t mean on my scale, but at all?’

‘No.’

‘No, neither would I, but she did seem a bit tight this afternoon. Or something, from the way she went on. Anyway, she started saying how marvellously attractive she thought you were, wonderful colouring, terrific figure and everything, so much so that it began to dawn on me that she wasn’t just paying compliments, she had something particular in mind. So, after a bit it all began to come out.’

‘Go on.’

‘She went into a great kind of thing about how dull life was in Fareham, for people like her and you and me, and of course I agreed with that, and how we ought to do something about it, get some excitement from somewhere. Such as where? Well, what was wrong with the idea of the three of us having a little romp together?’ Joyce said nothing, so I went on, ‘She meant all going to bed. I thought she was joking at first, but evidently not. I said I wasn’t sure I could satisfy two ladies all by myself, and she said I needn’t worry, that wouldn’t be necessary.

‘What did she mean?’

‘Well, I suppose she meant, in fact I’m sure she meant you and she could have fun together between times. It would be all sort of mixed.’

‘I see. What did you say?’

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

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

‘That’s what she said.’

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

‘Why didn’t you mention it to me?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘All right.’

‘What?’

‘Let’s do it, then.’

‘Are you sure?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Don’t you feel scared, Maurice?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Is that all?’ asked Diana.

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

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

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

‘Well, that’s it,’ I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I don’t call that treasure.’

‘That thing may be worth a bit, we don’t know. I’ll find somebody in Cambridge who’ll tell us.’

‘Where are you going to say you got it from?’

‘Leave that to me.’

As we were leaving by the churchyard gate, a gust of wind, unexpected on such a still night, stirred the branches and leaves above our heads. I must have sweated even more than I had thought, because the air struck chill. At the same moment, the light of the torch in Diana’s hand dimmed abruptly. We made our way back to the Volkswagen by almost unassisted moonlight. Down the empty road, the Green Man was in complete darkness, and there was no sound but that of our own progress until I opened the back door of the car and stowed the tools. Diana, a shifting, breathing shape, faintly illuminated at temple, shoulder and elbow, turned to me.

‘Where does Joyce imagine you are tonight?’ she asked, with something of her husband’s accusatory tone.

‘If she happened to wake up, which she never does, she’d think I was sitting up reading or drinking or brooding. But listen, I asked her about our little get-together idea and she was all for it. Any time to suit us.’

Diana reacted to this, but for a couple of seconds I could not have said how. Then she came forward, pressed herself against me and began a steady to-and-fro wriggle.

‘Maurice.’

‘Yes?’

‘Maurice, do you think I might be the most terrible sort of kinky pervert type without knowing it?’

‘Oh, I doubt that. No worse than me, anyway.’

‘Because … the moment you said that about Joyce and us I suddenly started feeling frightfully randy. I mean as regards straight away, not just for when we have the get-together. Is that absolutely unspeakable and depraved of me? I wonder whether it’s anything to do with what we’ve been—’

I had been about to plead tiredness outwardly, and blame Jack’s pills inwardly, when I realized that nothing like that was called for. Diana’s interestingness had started taking more and more interesting forms. In something less than a quarter of a minute we were kneeling face to face in a patch of shadow.

‘We can’t really—’

‘No, let’s just take our—’

‘Okay, yes, fine.’

In another quarter of a minute we were at it again. I had about the least sense possible of another person being there at all; there was a lot of wool and other material, some cheek, some panting, some movement, some pressure, and what was I doing. Even that was set at a distance by the lack of everything else, for a time. Suddenly it all turned very immediate and as much as anybody could deal with. Diana’s body lifted and seemed enormous, then sank back and became slender and powerless again.

This was not an occasion for lingering. I was just going to move away when my heart gave a prolonged vibration and Diana screamed—no ladylike squeak, either, but a full-throated yell of fear.

‘There’s somebody watching us. Look, there, in the …

As quickly as I could, I disengaged myself and turned, still on one knee. The moon was less bright than it had been, but I could not have missed any creature or movement. There was none.

‘It was … He was standing in the middle of the road, looking at me. Oh God. Ghastly. Staring at me.’

She had struggled to a sitting position. I knelt beside her and put my arm round her.

‘There’s nobody there now,’ I said. ‘It’s all right.’

There was something awful about him. Something wrong with the shape of him. Not like proper arms and legs. I only saw him just for a second, but he was sort of deformed. Not really deformed, though, not the way people are. He was the wrong shape. Too thick in some places and too thin in others.’

‘What was he made of?’

‘Made of?’ she asked in renewed fear. ‘How do you mean?’

‘Sorry, I … What was he wearing?’

‘Wearing? I couldn’t see. He was only there for a moment.’

‘What colour?’

‘You can’t see colours in this light.’

True, but no matter: there had been no real need to ask. Diana had justified her inclusion in tonight’s party; though not quite in the way I had hoped, by seeing what I saw when I saw it. Another thought struck me. ‘Did he move at all, make any—?’

‘No. I told you. He was just standing there, and the next minute he’d gone.’

‘You mean vanished?’

‘Well … I didn’t see him go.’

‘He must have gone pretty bloody quick to be in the middle of the road when you screamed and nowhere in sight when I looked.’

‘Yes … I suppose he must. Who could it have been?’

I was trying to reason, or at least to be relatively rational. The ghost of the green man, as ghosts were supposed to do, as Underhill’s ghost was apparently accustomed to do, had appeared in an instant and disappeared in an instant, called into brief being, it might be, by our activities at its master’s grave, perhaps by the disturbance or removal of the silver figure, which must in that case be associated with it in some way, though the one was certainly not the image of the other. At any rate, while there was plenty of excuse for alarm, I could see no reason for it. All my instincts confirmed Lucy’s pronouncement that a mere phantom cannot inflict direct harm on anyone, and that (like those Underhill had conjured up in the case of the Tyler girl) the most it can actually do is terrify. And any terror that was not of the kind inspired by a fly-sized scarlet-and-green bird … No, any such terror could be faced, or could be fled from; must always be less terrible than a portable, infinitely adaptable demon living and acting in the mind.

I pulled myself together. ‘Sorry. Who was it? Some farm boy on his way home from a drink. They come in pretty odd shapes and sizes round here. Anyway, he couldn’t possibly have recognized you, so don’t worry about it. It’s … good God, it’s nearly three o’clock. I’ll take you home.’

Like Amy earlier, Diana went through the motions of acquiescence while making it plain that my proffered explanation did not satisfy her. She said almost nothing on the way back. I parked the car off the road and walked her towards the house.

‘I’m very grateful to you for coming along tonight.’

‘Oh … it’s nothing.’

‘About the get-together with Joyce—can I telephone you? What would be a good time?’

‘Any time.’

‘Let’s make it soon. What about tomorrow?’

‘Isn’t it your father’s funeral tomorrow?’

‘Yes, but that’ll be all over by lunch-time.’

‘Maurice …‘ She rejected the shoddy pseudo-psychological question I had been preparing myself for. That … just now. It wasn’t a ghost I saw, was it, Maurice? Because it did vanish, I thought.’

For this one I was about half prepared. ‘Yes, I was thinking along those lines. I suppose, well, it could have been, granted there are such things. Rather a funny place to find a ghost, though, isn’t it? in the middle of a country road. I just don’t know.’

‘Then … when you said it must have been a farm chap you were sort of trying to put my mind at rest, were you?’

‘Yes. Of course.’

‘Or your own mind at rest?’

‘That too.’

‘Maurice … one of the things I like about you is that you’re completely honest.’ She kissed me on the cheek. ‘Run along now. Give me a ring about Joyce as soon as you like.’

She ran vivaciously off, doubly puffed up, I assumed, at having got me to admit to needing to put my own mind at rest and at the thought—unconfided to me, which was odd—that she had ‘demonstrated a fresh superiority by seeing a ghost when I had not. Did she now think she had really seen a ghost? What would she think if and when Jack should tell her that I had claimed to be seeing ghosts? Never mind; I was genuinely tired now, so tired that I staggered as if from drink (which for once could not be) when I walked from the garage to the house.

I washed down two more pills with heavily watered Scotch and went straight to bed, having locked up the casket in the office. I needed what sleep I could get, with a funeral and an orgy ahead, and, no doubt, something more.

4: The Young Man

‘Death’s an integral part of life, after all. We settle for it by the mere act of being born. Let’s face it, Mr Allington, it is possible to take the end of the road a bloody sight too seriously.’

‘And you don’t mean because we ought to think of it as the gateway to another mode of being and part of God’s purpose and so on.’

‘Good God, no. I don’t mean that at all. Not at all.’

The Reverend Tom Rodney Sonnenschein, Rector of St James’s, Fareham, sounded quite shocked. He did not really look shocked, because he had one of those smooth, middle-aged-boyish faces that seem unfitted, even at moments of warmth or concern (if any), to express much more than a mild petulance. In the church and at the graveside, I had supposed him to be showing indignation at the known godlessness of all those in attendance, or perhaps to be suffering physically; now, in the bar of the Green Man, it was becoming deducible that he had been merely bored. I found it odd, and oddly unwelcome too, to meet a clergyman who was turning out to be, doctrinally speaking, rather to the Left of a hardened unbeliever like myself; but no doubt he would soon be off to some more spiritually challenging parish in London, and anyhow I did not proposed to see the man again after today.

‘Not at all?’ I asked.

‘You know, this whole immortality bit’s been pretty well done to death. One’s got to take the historical angle. Immortality’s just a passing phase. Basically, it was thought up by the Victorians, especially the early Victorians, as a sort of guilt thing. They’d created the evils of the Industrial Revolution, they could sense what kind of ghastly bloody monster capitalism was going to turn out to be, and the only refuge from hell on earth they could think of was a new life away from the smoke and the stink and the cries of the starving kids. Whereas today, of course, now it’s beginning to get through people’s heads at last that capitalism just won’t do, that the whole bloody thing’s simply not on, and we can set about changing society so as to give everybody a meaningful and organic existence here on earth, well, we can put immortality back in the junk-room along with, oh, mutton-chop whiskers and Mr Gladstone and the Salvation Army and evolution.’

‘Evolution?’

‘Surely,’ stated the rector, simultaneously smiling hard and frowning hard and dilating his nostrils and blinking rapidly, one for each, perhaps, of his pieces of junk-room furniture.

‘Oh well … But what I don’t quite see is why these Victorians of yours were so keen on the idea of an after-life when they were so eaten up with guilt about what they’d been doing in this one. They’d have thought they’d be much more likely to end up in hell than in any sort of—’

‘Oh, but, my dear, that’s the whole point, do you see. They were mad about hell—it was going to be just like their public school, where they’d had the only really intense emotional experiences they were capable of. Caning and flogging and fagging and cold baths and rowing and slip-practice and a terrifying all-powerful old man always telling you what utter shit you were and how you were polluting yourself. They were off their heads about it, I promise you. You don’t imagine it’s a coincidence, do you, that this was the great age of masochism, chiefly in England but by no means confined to here?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘An age of masochism couldn’t be a coincidence.’

‘Well, hardly, could it? The whole thing’s absolutely basic to the capitalist psyche, love of pain and punishment and misery generally, all the Protestant qualities. If you wanted to be smart without being too superficial, you could say that the immortality of the soul was invented by Dr Arnold of Rugby— bit unfair on the old love, but there we are.’

‘Could you? But isn’t there a lot about it in the Bible? And a lot of stuff about pain and punishment in the Middle Ages? And hasn’t the Catholic Church always taken personal immortality very seriously?’

‘Let’s just take those points in order, shall we? There’s virtually nothing about it in the Old Testament, which has come to be generally recognized as the more uncompromising and more unsentimental of the two. Quite frankly, the Jesus of the Gospels can be a bit of a wet liberal at times, when he’s not taking off into flights of rather schmaltzy Semitic metaphor. As regards the Middle Ages, their devils and red-hot pincers and so on represented nothing more than a displaced enactment of what they wanted their enemies to suffer on earth. The Catholic Church, well … Simple pie in the sky, isn’t it generally agreed? I mean, you don’t think it’s an accident, do you, that they invariably give their support to backward and reactionary if not actually vicious régimes, like in Spain and Portugal and Ireland and—?’

‘Yes, I know the ones you mean. Well, I don’t know what I think. But you’ve certainly given me a most interesting exposition, Rector.’

‘Which I might advise you, Mr Allington, to think over at some more favourable time. It’s never pleasant to have one’s unquestioning beliefs put in their historical context, as I know from experience, I can assure you.’

‘What would you say if I were to tell you that I had evidence seeming to show that an individual had actually survived death in some form or other?’

‘I’d say you were off your …‘ On the Rev. Tom’s unworn face, the inbuilt look of petulance gave momentary place to a kind of wariness; over the last few days, I had seen something like it on most of the faces I knew well. ‘Uh, you’re talking about ghosts and so on, are you?’

‘Yes. Specifically, a ghost that gave me information, accurate information, that I couldn’t otherwise have known.’

‘Mm. I see. Well, off the top of the head I’d say that was a matter for your medical adviser rather than someone in my position. Uh, where is Jack? I don’t see him—’

‘He’s gone off to a patient. You mean I must be mad if that’s what I think has happened?’

‘Mm—no. But we are talking about, let’s say non-normal states of consciousness, aren’t we, by definition?’

‘Because by definition people don’t survive death. Of course.’

‘I say, do you think you could possibly get me another drink? I mustn’t get too pissed because I’m going to a rather exciting barbecue tonight in Newnham garden, but I think perhaps just one more shot, if I may.’

‘What are you drinking?’

‘Bacardi and Pernod.’ He got a tacit ‘you fool’ into the intonation.

‘Anything in it?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Tomato juice or Coca-Cola or—’

‘Good God, no. Just ice.’

I passed the order to Fred, who closed his eyes for a moment or two before setting about it. He was having a deservedly unstrenuous time for once, the house being shut until the evening and the present party confined to Diana, David, three or four neighbours and my own family group, plus the rector, now staring into his glass and rotating it furiously before he risked a sip.

‘Is that all right?’

‘Sure. You mentioned God’s purpose just now,’ he said, showing a power of recall I disliked having to attribute to him. ‘Interesting point, in its way. I’m going to tell you that there’s more fantasy-building about God’s purpose, in the sense of people letting their unconscious drives come out into the open in a socially accepted way, than in any other belief area, except martyrdom, of course, which is more blatantly sexual. God’s purpose. Huh. I’m no more qualified than the next man to tell you what that is, or even if there is such a thing, which a lot of the younger people in the Church today would put a big bloody question-mark to. The trend undoubtedly is for a committed God to go the same way as the immortality of the soul, with a twenty- or perhaps a twenty-five-year consciousness-lag. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must go and have a word with those two smashing-looking dollies over there. It’s been a most—’

‘I’ll come with you.’

By chance (presumably), Joyce and Diana had put on virtually identical outfits for the funeral: black barathea suit, white broderie anglaise shirt, black fish-net stockings, black straw hat. This made them look more than ever like sisters, even fraternal twins. While the rector dismantled Christianity for my benefit, or just as likely for his own, I had been observing them as they sat and talked together on the window-seat, and wondering if one or the other of them had brought up the impending orgy. It occurred to me now that I had forgotten to tell Diana that I had told Joyce that the idea had come from Diana in the first place, but I had hardly begun to move over to them, the rector slouching surlily at my side, before I saw that all was well. Well and to spare: their shoulders and knees were touching, each was slightly flushed in the face, and, in their different fashions, each gave me a glance of complicity, Joyce’s straight and serious, Diana’s with a little pretended shock and shame round the edges.

‘Mr Sonnenschein has been explaining to me about God’s purpose,’ I said.

The rector gave a quick wriggle of one hip and the opposite shoulder. He said deprecatingly, ‘Oh well, you know, that sort of thing’s bound to come up from time to time in my field.’

‘What is God’s purpose?’ asked Joyce, using the interested, far from unfriendly, wholly reasonable tone that I had learnt to recognize as a warning.

‘Well, I suppose one might start to answer that by saying what it isn’t. For instance, it’s nothing to do with getting hot and bothered about the state of one’s soul, or the resurrection of the body, or the community of saints, or sin and repentance, or doing one’s duty in that state of life into which it has pleased—’

I had been looking forward to an exhaustive list of what God’s purpose was not; Joyce, however, cut in. ‘But what is His purpose?’

‘I should say, I would say that what … God wants us to do’ —there were sneer-marks round the last phrase—’is to fight injustice and oppression wherever they are, whether they’re in Greece or Rhodesia or America or Ulster or Mozambique-and-Angola or Spain or—’

‘But that’s all politics. What about religion?’

‘To me, this is … religion, in the truest sense. Of course, I may be wrong about the whole thing. It isn’t up to me to tell people what to think or how they ought to—’

‘But you’re a parson,’ said Joyce, still reasonably. ‘You’re paid to tell people what to think.’

‘To me, I’m sorry, but that’s a rather outmoded—’

‘Mr Sonnenschein,’ put in Diana, chopping it up so sharply that it sounded a bit like one of those three-monosyllable Oriental names.

The rector waited quite a creditable length of time before saying, ‘Yes, Mrs Maybury?’

‘Mr Sonnenschein … Would you mind frightfully if I were to ask you a rather impertinent question?’

‘No. No, of course not. It’s a—’

‘What- … ‘s-the-point of somebody like you being a parson when you say you don’t care about things like duty and people’s souls and sin? Isn’t that just exactly what parsons are supposed to care about?’

‘Well, it’s true that the traditional—’

‘I mean, of course I agree with you about Greece and all these places, it’s absolutely ghastly, but everybody knows that already. You must simply not take offence, please not, but lots of us would say it’s not up to you in your position to start sounding like, well …‘

‘One of those chaps on television doing a lecture on the problems of today and freedom and democracy,’ said Joyce, even more reasonably than before.

‘We don’t need you for that, you see. Mr Sonnenschein …‘

‘… Yes, Mrs Maybury?’

‘Mr Sonnenschein, don’t you perhaps think that when everybody’s so tremendously, you know, ahead of everything and knowing it all and everything, then it’s a bit up to you to be jolly crusty and jolly full of hell-fire and sin and damnation and jolly hard on everybody, instead of, you know…?’

‘Not really minding anything like everybody else,’ said Joyce. She drained her sherry, looking at me over the top of the glass.

‘But surely one must tell the truth as one sees it, otherwise one—’

‘Oh, do you really think so? Don’t you think that’s just about the riskiest thing one can possibly do?’

‘You can only think you know it, probably,’ finished Joyce. ‘Yes. Well. There we are. I must go and see the major,’ said the man of God, so rapidly and decisively and so immediately before his actual departure that seeing the major (even though there was a retired one actually present) might have been a Sonnenschein family euphemism for excretion.

I turned back to the two girls. I had never seen them behave in concert like this before. ‘Well, that was a marvellous seeing-off, and no mistake. I wish I’d said all that. Can I get you both a drink?’

As I spoke, they looked at each other in a brief thought-exchanging way, then at me without much warmth. Diana, wide-eyed, leaned forward.

‘Maurice, why did you bring that ghastly little dog-collared drip over here like that?’

‘I didn’t bring him over; he insisted on coming to chat the two of you up, and I thought it would be less painful if I—’

‘Couldn’t you have stopped him?’ asked Joyce.

‘I suppose I could have, yes, if I’d realized it was so important.’

‘Surely, Maurice, you could see we were having a chat.’

‘Sorry. Anyway, talking of having a chat …‘

‘You mean about us and you going to bed together,’ said Joyce, not dropping her voice much, and speaking as if we had turned to a less stimulating and sufficiently familiar topic.

‘Ssshh … Yes. Well, what do you—?’

‘We thought four o’clock this afternoon would be a good time,’ said Diana.

‘Splendid. We might—’

‘Where?’ asked Joyce.

‘I thought we could use number eight in the annexe. No booking there until Monday. I’ll mention it to David and hell see we’re not disturbed.’

‘What will you say to him?’

‘Leave that to me.’

Mention it to David I did, in the same fashion as several times before when about to entertain a lady in my house, though without asking him, as several times before, to have a bottle of champagne and an ice-bucket and glasses ready in the room, an omission made less out of economy than inability to think what to say about the number of glasses required. This brief exchange came just after an unenjoyable luncheon in the main dining-room. The rector was in attendance, fully recovered from his drubbing at the hands of the girls, in fact quite exuberant, making an untentative verbal pass at Nick over coffee (as Nick told me later) and going off last and adequately pissed with three glasses of my Taylor 1955 inside him. I wished him ill for his Newnham garden barbecue. When he had finally departed, I went to the office, locked myself in, turned off the telephone and tried to think about my father.

It was a case of trying, more than succeeding, because it had been so hard to connect anything about his burial with anything about him, or because I had four o’clock on my mind (though it did not feel like that), or because the recently living take so long to start seeming really dead, or because of something to do with Jack’s pills. Cold and unmeaningful phrases circled in my brain: he had gone off easy, he had given me life, he had been a good age, he was at peace, he had done his best for me, he had seen his son and grandson settled, he must have known it would come (as if that were a comfort). And he had gone to a better place, he was dead in the body but not in the spirit—not easy to find more of the same to add, nor even to try to find a meaning in anything of the sort, not nowadays. It sounded as if, it felt as if, for every imaginable wrong reason, that fool of a rector had been right. And yet I had meant what I had said to him about evidence of survival in Underhill’s case. A different case, then, a far-off one, concerning a man who was not a man at all, only a name and words and bones and perhaps, no, certainly, an apparition. Immortality seemed either too exotic or too crude a concept to be fitted into somebody one had known for so long in the flesh. It might be possible to work on this from the other end, so to speak—try to make Underhill more real to myself, more of a person, more of a presence, however remote, in the same kind of way as my father was a presence.

I unlocked a drawer in the desk and, from under a pile of bank statements and cleared cheques, pulled out the casket containing the silver figure and the manuscript. I had been too tired to examine these the previous night, and had had no time, nor much inclination, so far that day. Now I was eager to do so. I took the figure to the window and turned it over in the strong sunlight there. Except round the neck and crotch, it was not much corroded, but other parts of it appeared to have been worn smooth. Both trunk and limbs were roughly cylindrical, with little representation of waist, elbow or knee, and the surviving hand, although disproportionately large, showed no knuckles or finger-joints. In the same fashion, the head did not taper appreciably towards the chin, the top of the skull was almost flat and the features were to a large extent matters of token; only the mouth, set in a wide straight grin that revealed a dozen or more teeth of roughly equal size, had been treated in any detail. I was certain the thing had not come from anywhere in western Europe, and felt strongly that east was the wrong direction to consider. Africa, possibly, though very unlikely, I thought, in view of Underhill’s date, if nothing else. The New World, the pre-Columbian cultures—yes: I had seen just that kind of joyful, greedy ferocity on the faces of Aztec sculptures. There would have been plenty of time—a century and a half, in fact—for such an object to make its way from conquered Mexico to the England of Underhill’s day, however hard it might be to imagine a plausible route; the capture of a Spanish treasure-ship was one obvious and not too unlikely piece of guesswork. But from whatever source and by whatever way it had reached Fareham, it was by far the most disagreeable work of human hands I have ever seen, as I had been aware the moment I looked at it closely. It was also unpleasant to the touch, being hardly less cold, or clammy, than when I had first handled it, twelve hours or so previously, and not being appreciably warmed now by several minutes’ contact with my fingers; no doubt the result of some impurity in the metal. All in all, it seemed just what Underhill would have chosen, probably from a collection of such images of man’s beastliness, to have buried with him and to serve as proof of his survival.

I put the figure down on the desk and picked up the journal, which turned out at the first glance to be written on the same kind of paper as the notebook I had inspected in the Hobson Room at All Saints’; it had perhaps lain originally between the same covers. The writing on these sheets had faded very markedly, to a kind of washed-out mid-brown, but was still quite readable. It was a thin sheaf of papers, no more than fourteen or fifteen in all, and the first dozen carried nothing but agonizingly vague injunctions to the unearther of the manuscript; stuff like

‘Bee not impacient: all things shall be deliver’d to thee in time. Put thyself under my Will, & thou shalt see a great Wonder. Prepare; abstain from all spirituous Liquors & Cordials (here at least I had already started to do my best to cooperate), takg only such Wine & small Beer as may conduce to health. Bethink thee, that altho’ Philosophy be amiable in herself, her Aspect is upon occasion full strange & stern …‘

And so on. The only entry that stood out in any way from this kind of thing, inset from the margin as though to differentiate it, to mark it perhaps as a note from Underhill to himself (a type of communication I have shown I understand) rather than a memorandum to me, ran as follows:

‘The name, Fareham village. Cf. Fareham Haven in Southhamptonshire. No knowledge of this. Quasi, far Home, sc. distant habitation, or, fair Home. Or, from the Saxon & Gothick, feor, sc. fear. So, feorhame, quasi, the Place of Fear.’

Whatever the rightness or wrongness of Underhill’s etymology, I found this making a kind of sense, the same kind as my conjecture about the derivation of the name of my house. But such theorizing belonged to an impossibly vast and remote field of thought; I put it by and went dispiritedly on through the journal. On its last leaf were half a dozen lines of writing, in a tumbling, scribbled hand barely recognizable as Underhill’s.

‘My time is nearer than I had thought. Dismiss thy Servants at once; send all from home save thine own Family. Go not abroad thyself; see no one & keep thy chamber, that I may find thee alone when I come to thee. Have our small Freind of Silver by thee AT ALL TIMES—or everything will be in vain, Now, fare well, until I shall return.’

There was only one of these instructions that it would not be difficult to obey, but that one was evidently the most important. Unhesitatingly, unreasoningly and with revulsion, I picked up the figure and placed it in my left side coat pocket, where it made an ugly bulge. That was that; what now? Preparatory to gathering the papers together, I turned the last one over and laid it on top of the others, noticing as I did so that it bore a couple of lines of writing. They were in the firm, unhurried hand of the earlier pages, and read:

‘I will wait upon thee in my Parlour at twelve of the clock, the night following thy Discovery. See thou art alone.’

What made me stare and rise to my feet and start trembling was not the content of this message, but the quality of the ink: dark blue or black, not faded at all, as if it had been put on paper that day. But how could that be?

A powerful but (again) unreasoning sense of urgency came upon me. I must find Lucy at once. I had heard her say that she was going to spend the afternoon … how? Where? Yes— reading, sunbathing, in the garden. I snatched up the paper and rushed from the office, across the hall, out of the front door and along to the south-east corner of the house. Lucy, with Nick near her, was sitting on an outdoors chair in the middle of the lawn. Slipping clumsily about on the thick dry grass, and with the silver figure bumping against my hip, I ran over to her.

‘Lucy, look at this. The ink.’

‘What is it?’

‘Look at the colour of the ink. New, fresh. Isn’t it?’

‘I don’t see—’

‘No no, the other side, that one. That’s fresh ink, isn’t it?’

She hesitated, finally saying, ‘It doesn’t look fresh to me,’ and handing the paper back.

Of course she was right. The writing on both sides was brown and faded. No amount of hurrying, presumably, would have made any difference. He had caused it to fade, or, more likely, he had caused it to look unfaded a minute ago. I noticed that Lucy was wearing a navy-blue bathing-dress with the shoulder-straps pulled down, and had a brightly-jacketed book on her lap, and was looking slightly dazed with sun. Nick took the paper from me, glanced at it, then started to read it. He was just wearing trunks and sandals.

‘No, it doesn’t,’ I said, ‘now I look at it again. I don’t know what made me … It must have been the light. It’s not very good in the office. The light. Unless you have the light on.’

‘What’s all this about, Dad?’ asked Nick.

‘Well, it’s … part of a letter or something, I suppose. I found it.’

‘Where?’

‘Oh, I was turning out an old cupboard and this had got sort of shoved underneath a lot of stuff.’

‘How could it have been written in fresh ink, then?’

‘I don’t know. I just thought it looked like that.’

‘What does it mean, this friend of silver thing, and this discovery?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve no idea.’

‘Well, why all the excitement? You were—’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

A car I recognized was turning in at the main entrance to the house, a green Mini-Cooper belonging to the Mayburys. For a moment I thought I was going to have Jack on my hands, with more pills and unwelcome advice; then I saw Diana in the driving-seat, and remembered.

‘Never mind, Nick,’ I said, recovering the paper. ‘Sorry to have bothered you. Forget it.’

I went back to the house, put the papers together, half dropping them in my impatience, and locked them up again. By the time I re-emerged from the office, Diana was coming in by the front door and Joyce descending the stairs into the hall. Both had changed their clothes since lunch—Diana into a tan shirt and green trousers, Joyce into a short red dress of some faintly glossy material—and both were groomed and earringed and necklaced as if for a garden party. When, with precision no rehearsal could have improved, we had converged in mid-floor, neither girl made any move to kiss the other as they usually did on meeting, an odd omission in the circumstances. Joyce seemed as tranquil as ever, if not more so, Diana nervous or nervy, her eyes widened and blinking a lot. There was a brief silence.

‘Well,’ I said bluffly, ‘no point in hanging about here, is there? Let’s go. I’ll lead the way.’

I did so. We crossed the empty sunlit yard to the annexe and went upstairs and along a passage hung with my second-best prints. Number eight was at the end; I unlocked it and bolted the door after us. The bed was turned down, but without any personal belongings to be seen the room looked official and public—I remembered waking up in that same bed one afternoon the previous summer and thinking that it felt like lying about in a model room at a department store. I drew the curtains. Outside there was sun and sky and the tops of trees, everything quite motionless. I was feeling not so much excited as grateful, even slightly incredulous, that nothing had come up to prevent our getting this far.

The two girls looked communicatively at each other and then at me in the same way as they had done in the bar before lunch, preparatory to accusing me of interrupting their chat. I smiled at each of them while I tried to sort out priorities in my mind.

‘What do you want us to do?’ asked Diana, with just a hint of impatience in her voice and demeanour.

‘Let’s all take everything off for a start,’ I said.

A woman can always beat a man to the state of nudity if she puts her mind to it, and here were two women evidently doing so. Despite earrings and necklaces, Joyce and Diana were embracing naked beside the bed while I was still working urgently on my second shoe. By the time I was ready to join them, they had thrown the covers back and were lying side by side in an even closer embrace. I climbed in behind Diana and started kissing her shoulders and available ear and the back of her neck, none of which seemed to make much special difference to anybody. I found it difficult to slide my arm round under her arm, because Joyce’s arm was thereabouts too, and impossible to touch more than the outer side of Diana’s breast, because Joyce’s breast was against the remainder of it. When I tried the same sort of thing at a lower level, I came across the top of Joyce’s thigh. After that, I tried to alter the girls’ positions with a view to setting up one of the triads of lovemaking Joyce had mentioned the previous evening in her unvarnished way. That meant her thigh would positively have to shift, but it stayed where it was. To get Diana on to her back was not even worth attempting, with her inner thigh between both of Joyce’s. It is never easy to move people about bodily unless they co-operate a bit, and neither of these was doing so at all.

What were they doing? Kissing repeatedly, in fact almost continuously, pressing themselves against each other, breathing deeply, though not particularly fast. What more? I had a totally obstructed view from where I was, but both Joyce’s hands were in sight, one behind Diana’s head, the other at the small of her back, and anyway their embrace had been so tight from the beginning that neither could have been caressing the other in any way; they would have had to draw a little apart for that, which would have afforded me an opportunity, but I doubted very much whether either of them had bothered to think of much a point. I told myself I was not going to give up, said so aloud, said a lot more things, managing to stay just this side of whining and abuse, moved round the bed to behind Joyce, and got no change there either.

There it was, then. I stood and looked at them while they went on exactly as before, neither speeding up nor slowing down, like people unable to foresee ever doing anything else, even of the same general sort. How well I could remember that feeling! Just then Diana’s hazel eye opened, moved across the drawn curtains and me and more of the curtains without the least self-consciousness in paying the same attention to me as to the curtains, and shut again. The thought of two women making love can be an exciting one, but let me tell you that, when they are as totally absorbed in each other as these two were, the actuality is sedative. Indeed, for the moment I felt calmer than at any time during the past few days. I blew them a kiss, rejecting the idea of kissing each of them on the shoulder or somewhere as more trouble and no more likely to be noticed, picked up my clothes at leisure and carried them into the bathroom.

When I emerged dressed, Joyce was holding Diana’s head against her bosom, but everything else was unchanged. I found the DO NOT DISTURB notice hanging on a hook on the door and left it on the outside doorknob. When I arrived back in the main building, it was deserted. I went into the office and stood there for a time without being able to think of anything I wanted to do or would ever want to do. Then I went upstairs to the dining-room and stood looking at the titles of my books, wondering what the hell had ever possessed me to buy any of them. Poetry, any poetry, seemed then as poignant and meaningful as a completed crossword puzzle or Holy Writ. Books or architecture or sculpture were books on mindless lumber, large or small. I could not imagine feeling differently about these matters. I turned my back and reviewed my own pieces of statuary. There was lumber all right, and in the round. I would chuck them all out the following morning.

The house was quiet, apart from the affected chattering of Amy’s TV set, which was bringing her news and views of today’s sport, perhaps even highlights there from, before getting to grips with space monsters or the yelling of pop idols and their idolaters. The curtains were drawn back; the sunlight from outside seemed unusually harsh and yet almost without colour. Through the side window I could see and hear a tractor, with some red-and-green painted piece of farm equipment in tow, approaching from the village, surrounded by a thin cloud of the dust and small soil that had drifted across the road, together with plenty of smoke. It passed out of view below my line of sight. As it did so, the noise it made, while still growing louder, started slowly descending in pitch. No doubt the driver was planning to halt directly outside my house and tinker with his engine while he raised more noise and smoke. But something odd was happening simultaneously to the television voice from along the passage: it too was falling in pitch, and it was slowing down in the same ratio. This sort of thing could happen with a gramophone whose motor had been switched off, and with a tape-recorder; I did not think it could happen with a TV set. I stood still and attended to the action of my heart while tractor and voice, in exact step with each other, disappeared below the threshold of audibility and a total silence supervened. I walked slowly to the front window.

The tractor and its tow had come to rest just about where I had predicted, almost immediately opposite me. The driver, however, had not dismounted, nor had he made any other significant move. He had one hand on the wheel and the other was passing a coloured handkerchief across his forehead, or rather had stopped in the act of doing so. Round him and the vehicles there hung stationary veils of smoke and dust, with individual motes shining minutely and steadily in the sun. I went to the side window. Down to the left, forty or fifty yards away across the grass, a couple of waxworks cast their shadows, the seated one with a hand stuck out in the direction of something, probably a cup of tea, that the standing one was offering it, and were Lucy and Nick. This time, the view from both windows had the exact quality of a very good photograph, frozen hard but also full of potential motion. This time was going to be different from last time in other ways too, because I was not going to stay here and just watch whatever it was I had been intended to watch.

I hurried over to the door and opened it and was about to make off down the passage when something made me halt abruptly—a subliminal sound-effect or air-movement. I put my hand forward and the finger-tips touched an invisible barrier, hard and totally smooth, like plate-glass but without any trace of reflection. It filled the doorway. Uncertain what to do next, I turned aside, looked up and saw that somebody was sitting in the armchair on the far side of the fireplace. This person, a young man with silky fair hair and a pale face, could not (of course) have come into the room without my knowing it.

‘Very good,’ said the young man heartily. He was watching me with a faint down-turned smile. ‘A lot of people, you know, would have gone walking straight into that thing. Shows you’ve got good reflexes and all that. Now, if you’d like to sit down there, we can have a bit of a talk. Nothing too serious, I assure you.’

At the outset I had let out a girlish shriek of alarm. The alarm was sincere enough, but it immediately passed, to be replaced by an intensification of the charged-up feeling I had had the previous morning before setting off for Cambridge: nervous energy with nervousness but without nerves. Perhaps my visitor had brought this about. I came forward and seated myself in the opposite chair, looking him over. He was, or appeared to be, about twenty-eight years old, with a squarish, clean-shaven, humorous, not very trustworthy face, unabundant eyebrows and eyelashes, and good teeth. He wore a dark suit of conventional cut, silver-grey shirt, black knitted silk tie, dark-grey socks and black shoes, well polished. His speech was very fully modulated, like that of a man interested in discourse, and his accent educated, without affectations. Altogether he seemed prosperous, assured and in good physical shape, apart from his pallor.

‘Are you a messenger?’ I asked.

‘No. I decided to come, uh … in person.’

‘I see. Can I offer you a drink?’

‘Yes, thank you, I’m fully corporeal. I was going to warn you against making the mistake of supposing that I come from inside your mind, but you’ve saved me that trouble. I’ll join you in a little Scotch, if I may.’

I got out the glasses. ‘I suppose I couldn’t get into the passage because all molecular motion outside this room has stopped?’

‘Correct. We’re not subject to ordinary time in here. Makes us pretty safe from interruption.’

‘And all radiation has likewise ceased, outside?’

‘Of course. You must have noticed the way the sound packed up.’

‘Yes, I did. But in that case, why hasn’t the light packed up too, outside? And in here as well, for that matter? If all wavelengths are affected, I can’t see how the sun can get to us, any more than the sound of the tractor can. Everything would be dark.’

‘Excellent, Maurice.’ The young man laughed in what was clearly meant to be a relaxed, jovial. way, but I thought I could hear vexation in it. ‘Do you know, you’re almost the first non-scientist to spot that one? I’d forgotten you were such a man of education. Well, I thought things in general would just look better if I arranged them like this.’

‘You’re probably right,’ I said, holding up glass and water-jug and starting to pour. ‘Is this a test of some sort?’

‘Thank you, that’s fine … No, it isn’t a test. How could it be? What do you suppose would happen to you if you passed a test I’d set for you? Or failed it? You of all people know I don’t work that way.’

I moved back with the drinks and held one out. The hand that came up and took it, and the wrist and lower forearm that disappeared into the silver-grey shirt-cuff, were by no means complete, so that the fingers clicked against the glass, and at the same time I caught a whiff of that worst odour in the world, which I had not smelt since accompanying a party of Free French through the Falaise Gap in 1944. In a moment it was gone, and fingers, hand and everything else were as they had been before.

‘That was unnecessary,’ I said, sitting down again.

‘Don’t you believe it, old boy. Puts things on the right footing between us. This isn’t just a social call, you know. Cheers.’

I did not drink. ‘What is it, then?’

‘More than one thing, of course. Anyway, I like to make these trips every so often, as you’re well aware.’

‘Keeping in touch?’

‘Don’t fool about with me, Maurice,’ said the young man, with his downward smile. His eyes were a very light brown, almost the colour of his hair and his thin eyebrows. ‘You know I know everything everybody thinks.’

‘So you haven’t come because you’re particularly interested in me.’

‘No. But slightly because you’re particularly interested in me. In all my aspects. You’d agree, wouldn’t you?’

‘I’d have thought only in the one you demonstrated to me a moment ago,’ I said, drinking now.

‘I’ll be the judge of that. Whether you like it or not, and whether you’re aware of it or not, being interested in one means being interested in them all. You’re in quite a common situation, actually.’

‘Then why pick on me? What have I done?’

‘Done?’ He laughed, altogether genially this time. ‘You’re a human being, aren’t you?…Born into this world, and so forth. And what’s so terrible about my popping in to see you like this? Worse troubles at sea, you know. No, I picked on you, as you rather ungraciously put it, partly because you’re, uh …‘ He paused and rotated the ice in his drink, then went on as if starting a new sentence, in the way he had. ‘A good security risk.’

‘Drunk and seeing ghosts and half off my head. Yes.’

‘And not what anybody in their senses would take for a saint or a mystic or anything. That’s it. I have to be careful, you see.’

‘Careful? You make the rules, don’t you? You can do anything you like.’

‘Oh, you don’t understand, my dear fellow. As one might expect. It’s precisely because I make the rules that I can’t do anything I like. But let’s leave that for now. I want to talk for a moment, if I may, about this chap Underhill. Things have been getting a bit out of hand there. I want you to be very careful with him, Maurice. Very careful indeed.’

‘Steer clear of him, you mean?’

‘Certainly not,’ he said, with emphasis and, it seemed, in complete earnest. ‘Quite the contrary. He’s a dangerous man, old Underhill. Well, in a mild way. A minor threat to security. If he’s left to himself, it’ll be just that much more difficult to keep going the general impression that human life ends with the grave. A very basic rule of mine says I have to maintain that impression. Almost as basic as the one about everything having to seem as if it comes about by chance.’

‘I see that one, but you must admit that impression about the grave is comparatively recent.’

‘Nonsense. You only know what people said they believed. There’s never been any real difficulty from that direction. Now then, I want you to stand up to Underhill and, uh … Put paid to him.’

‘How?’

‘I can’t tell you that, I’m afraid. Sorry to be a bore, but I’ll have to leave the whole thing to you. I hope you make it.’

‘Surely you know? Whether I will or not?’

The young man sighed, swallowed audibly and smoothed his fair hair. ‘No. I don’t know. I only wish I did. People think I have foreknowledge, which is a useful thing for them to think in a way, but the whole idea’s nonsense logically unless you rule out free will, and I can’t do that. They were just trying to make me out to be grander than I could possibly be, for very nice motives a lot of the time.’

‘No doubt. Anyway, I don’t much care for doing what you want. Your record doesn’t impress me.’

‘I dare say it doesn’t, in your sense of impress. But all sorts of chaps have noticed that I can be very hard on those who don’t behave as I feel they should. That ought to weigh with you.’

‘It doesn’t much, when I think of how hard you can be on people who couldn’t possibly have done anything to offend you.’

‘I know, children and such. But do stop talking like a sort of anti-parson, old man. It’s nothing to do with offending or punishing or any of that father-figure stuff; it’s purely and simply the run of the play. No malice in the world. Well, I think you’ll take notice of what I’ve said when you turn it over in your mind afterwards.’

I could hear my watch ticking in the silence, and thought interestedly to myself that it was the only one on the planet still going. ‘The run of the play can’t be going all that well for you if you have to keep taking these trips of yours.’

‘The play is all right, thank you. In fact, I’ve been able to cut the trips down a good deal in the last hundred or two hundred years. It’s still patchy, mind you. Nothing for nearly three months, and now today, besides you, in fact at this very moment, if I can use the expression, I’m dropping in on a woman in California who’s got the wrong idea about something. Just —how shall I put it?—saving myself a bit of sweat. Oh, and don’t waste your time trying to get in touch with her, because she won’t remember anything about it.’

‘Shall I remember?’

‘I don’t see why not. I’ve been assuming so, but it’s really up to you. We can leave it until just before I go, can’t we? See how you feel.’

‘Thanks. Would you like another of those?’

‘Well, yes, I think perhaps just one more, don’t you? Marvellous.’

I said from the drinks cupboard, ‘But you must be able to save yourself sweat without having to turn up in the flesh like this. Distance and time and so on are no object with you, after all.’

‘Distance agreed. Time’s another matter. Oh, there’s a lot in what you say. The truth is, I enjoy my trips for their own sake. Self-indulgent of me, which is why I try to limit their number. But they are fun.’

‘What sort of fun?’

He sighed again and clicked his tongue. ‘It’s difficult without denaturing the whole thing. Still. You’re a chess-player, Maurice, or you were in your undergraduate days. You remember, I mean you must remember wishing you could be down on the board among the pieces, just for two or three moves, to get the feel of it, without at the same time stopping running the game. That’s about as near as I can get.’

‘The whole thing’s a game, is it?’ I had returned with the drinks.

‘In the sense that it’s not a particularly, uh … edifying or significant business, it is, yes. In other ways it’s not unlike an art, an art and a work of art rolled into one. I know you think that’s rather frivolous. It isn’t really. It’s entirely a matter of how it’s all grown up,’ said the young man, lowering his voice and staring into his whisky. ‘Between ourselves, Maurice, I think I took some fairly disputable decisions right at the start, not having foreknowledge. Honestly, this foreknowledge business is too absurd. As if I could carry on at all if I had that! Well, then I was stuck with those decisions and their results in practice. And I couldn’t go back on them; one thing nobody’s ever credited me with is the power of undoing what I’ve done, of abolishing historical fact and so on. I often wish I could— well, occasionally I do. It’s not that I want to be cruel, not that so much as finding that’s what I seem to be turning out to be. Not an easy situation, you know. I just realized that I was there, or here, or wherever you please, and on my own, and with these powers. I must say I wonder how you’d have managed.’ He sounded slightly cross. ‘You can’t imagine what it’s like to be faced with a set of choices that are irrevocable and also unique.’

‘Well, you’re supposed to be brighter than I am, though one would hardly think so, judging by results. But I had no idea you hadn’t always been … wherever you are. And whatever that means.’

‘It means everywhere, if we’re going to go into it, as you know perfectly well, though not everywhere equally all the time, of course. As for my always having been around, I have. But there have been developments. You could put a date to the point at which I found out I was around, so to speak. Quite a while ago, that was. It was at the same stage, in fact it was the same thing, as my discovery of what I was and what I could do.’

‘All that part of it, the doing, must be pretty satisfying.’

‘Oh yes, very, in a way. But it does go on rather. An awful lot of it’s not much more than duty, these days.. And I keep thinking of things it’s too late to do. And things I oughtn’t to do, but which have a certain appeal. Sweeping changes. Can you imagine the temptation of altering all the physical laws, or working with something that isn’t matter, or simply introducing new rules? Even minor things like cosmic collisions, or plonking a living dinosaur—just one—down in Piccadilly Circus? Not easy to resist.’

‘What about making life a little less hard on people?’

‘No prospect of that, I’m afraid. Much too tricky from the security point of view. I daren’t take the chance of coming that far out into the open. Some of your chaps have found out quite enough already. Your friend Milton, for instance.’ The young man nodded over at my bookshelves. ‘He caught on to the idea of the work of art and the game and the rules and so forth. Just as well it never quite dawned on him who Satan was, or rather who he was a piece of.. I’d have had to step in there, if it had.’

I looked at him, noticing again how pale he was..

‘Well….’ He turned his mouth down. ‘A little heart attack, perhaps. Paralytic stroke. That kind of thing.’

‘You must have plenty of less crude methods than that up your sleeve.’

‘Well … There’s such a lot that’s ruled out if you’ve got free will, you see. It makes life difficult for everybody, I know, but you can’t do without it. And it isn’t as if there weren’t still a very great deal that isn’t ruled out in the least. I must be off; I’ve been self-indulgent enough. But let me give you one piece of advice. Use the Church where appropriate. Oh, I don’t mean go and listen to that posturing idiot Sonnenschein making me out to be a sort of suburban Mao Tse-tung. But remember that he’s a priest of the Church, and as such he has certain techniques at his disposal. You’ll see what I mean when the time comes. Just, remember you’re getting this from someone who, whatever you think his shortcomings may be, does indisputably know more than you do. Now, in return for putting up with me, and for the whisky, you can ask me one question. Want a moment to consider?’

‘No. Is there an after-life?’

He frowned and cleared his throat. ‘I suppose there’s nothing else you could call it, really. It’s nothing like here or anything you’ve ever imagined and I can’t describe it to you. But you’ll never be free of me, while this lot lasts.’

‘Isn’t it going to last for ever?’

‘That’s a further question, but never mind. The answer is that I don’t know. I’ll have to see. I mean that. Do you know, it’s about the only absolutely fascinating, first-class, full-sized problem I’ve never started to go into? Anyway, you’ll find out. Do you want to remember what we’ve been saying, and everything?’

‘Yes.’

‘All right.’ The young man, moving like a young man, got to his feet. ‘Thank you, Maurice, I really have enjoyed it. Well meet again.

‘I’m sure we will.’

‘When I’m in my … executive capacity. Yes. You’ll come to see the point of that part of me in the end, you know. Everybody does. Some more than others, of course.’

‘Which sort am I?’

‘Oh, the sort that’s more inclined to appreciate me, obviously. You think about it, and you’ll find I’m right. Ah.’ He felt in a waistcoat pocket of the conservatively tailored suit, and brought out a small bright object, which he handed to me. ‘A little keepsake.’

It was a slender and very beautiful silver crucifix of (I would have guessed) late Italian Renaissance workmanship, but as new as if it had been fashioned an hour before.

He nodded in confirmation. ‘Nice, isn’t it? Though I say so myself. I wish I could find a way of making it genuinely difficult for somebody in my position to run up stuff like that.’

‘Is it you? I mean the …‘

‘Oh yes. A piece of me.’

‘That was coming out into the open, wasn’t it?’

‘Mm. I must have been bored, I suppose. I thought, why not? Then I thought I was heading straight for disaster. I needn’t have worried, need I? He hasn’t made much difference to anything, as you see.’

‘But you were telling me just now that the Church was important.’

‘Well, in a way. It can’t help being. After all, it was me He was a piece of. Goodbye, Maurice.’

The crucifix jerked and spun in my hand, twisted itself away before I could close my fist on it, fell non-perpendicularly to the floor and twirled off towards a corner. As I scrambled in pursuit I heard his genial, sincerely amused laugh, and then, just after the flash of silver had disappeared into a crack between wainscot and floor, a deep ascending grumble which presently resolved and separated itself into the sounds of tractor and TV set rising towards normal pitch. I was at the front window long before they had reached it, in time to see the unique sight of reality moving from slow motion to ordinary motion, dust particles and wisps of smoke accelerating, a man engaged in coming to life, his arm circling at an increasing rate as he returned the handkerchief to his pocket. Then everything was as it should have been.

I left the window, but with nowhere in particular to go. My heart beat twice in a fraction of a second, stopped while I plunged forward and grasped the back of a dining-chair, then gave such a slam inside me that I bent in the middle and at the knees and nearly pulled the chair over. The pain in my back came while I was in the act of moving my hand to the spot, and began steadily expanding and contracting in a new way. I felt sweat spring out on the palms of my hands and my chest and face, and my breathing quickened. All the fear I had escaped during the young man’s visit was upon me now, or its symptoms were. I found the whisky-bottle, drank a little, prevented myself from drinking more and washed down three pills with water. I realized there were two things that had to be done at once.

At the doorway I could not control a momentary hesitation, but then was out and hurrying down the passage. I found Amy, with Victor diagonally across her lap, looking at a cricket scoreboard on the screen.

‘Darling, what time is it?’

She said without moving, Twenty past four.’

‘Please look at your watch. No, show it to me.’

The small clock-face she wore at her wrist said four twenty-two. I looked at my own watch: four forty-six. A huge reason for fear departed, and left me feeling much as before. I started clumsily shifting the hands of my watch.

Still looking at the screen, Amy said conversationally, ‘So I tell lies about the time now.’

‘But you didn’t tell a lie. It was—’

‘You thought I had. You wouldn’t believe me when I told you. You had to see for yourself.’

‘Well, you hadn’t looked at your watch.’

‘Just before you came in I had.’

‘Sorry, darling, but I didn’t know that, and I wanted to make sure.’

‘Okay, Dad..’

‘Sorry.’

‘I don’t suppose you want to watch Pirate Planet with me, do you?’ she asked in the same tone as before. ‘It comes on at five five.’

‘I’ll see. I’ve got a lot to do, but I’ll try.’

‘Okay.’

Next, I went to the office and collected the still-active torch of the two Diana and I had used in the early hours of that day, fetched from the utilities room the same hammer and chisel as before, plus a jemmy, and returned to the dining-room. It took me only a few minutes to get a fair-sized section of the carpet up, but the floor-boards were of solid timber, and in the excellent repair my predecessor had put them in. I made a good deal of noise, did some damage and sweated copiously getting the first one up. There was nothing but whorls of dust and streaks of cobwebby material on the laths and plaster beneath it, or as far as my weakening light would reach between the joists. On the assumption that the crucifix had gone on behaving supernaturally after disappearing, it might be anywhere in the area generally beneath me, if indeed it had not passed altogether beyond my reach. But I could see no alternative to going on as I had started.

Time went unprofitably by. I was working on my fourth floor-board when Nick and Lucy arrived.

‘Hallo, Dad, what’s going on?’

‘Just …‘ I looked up at them, and was aware of how much like a husband and wife they seemed. ‘I dropped something down a crack in the floor. Rather a valuable thing. I thought I’d see if I could find it.’

‘What sort of thing?’ Nick sounded sceptical.

‘Well, it’s a kind of heirloom. Something Gramps gave me.’

‘Can’t you, I mean, which crack did it go down? You seem to be—’

‘No, it rolled, you see. I don’t know.’

Nick glanced at Lucy. ‘Are you sure you’re all right, Dad?’

‘Fine. Bit hot.’

‘This isn’t part of all the ghost stuff and everything that’s been going on, is it? I wish you’d say if it is.’

‘No, honestly. Just this—’

‘Because you know you can tell us and it’ll be all right,’ said Lucy. ‘We won’t think you’re mentally disturbed, or tell anyone else if you don’t want us to. It’ll be all right.’

‘No, really,’ I said, thinking that her use of the plural stretched the facts a little. ‘Don’t worry; if I can’t find it soon I’ll pack up.’

When I turned back to my work, I was aware of a brief silent conference going on above my head, and ending with their departure. At the end of another five minutes or so, I had the fourth floor-board out. Nothing again; or perhaps something, an odd bulge in a joist, a small object leaning against it at arm’s length. My extended fingers touched metal.

What I held in my hand a moment later was just recognizable as the crucifix the young man had given me: speckled, worn and stained almost black in places. In its present state it testified to no sort of miracle; an impartial mind would merely add it to the endless list of mildly surprising discoveries in old houses. I dismissed it from consideration, but was still overwhelmed with what felt like rage and disappointment. These and allied emotions went on showing through while I put all the energy I could into the task of relaying floor and carpet. As soon as this was done, they returned in full.

I left the tools and the torch where I had dropped them, and walked round the room trying to master myself, which meant, or must be prefaced by, discovering what it was that oppressed me. As if in answer, my visitor’s empty glass, standing on the low table between the armchairs, presented itself to my eye. I snatched it up and saw the marks of a human hand on its surface and of a human mouth at its rim. Well, what of it? Was I to take it to a spiritualist medium, a forensic scientist or the curator of the Vatican museum? I threw it hard into the back of the fireplace, breathing fast and starting to cry. Yes, it was disappointment all right, with him for his coldness and his lightness, with myself for my failure to have brought forward any question or accusation of the least significance, and also with the triviality of the ultimate secrets I had supposedly learned. And there was fear besides. I had always thought that personal extinction was the ultimate horror, but, having taken in those few dry hints about an after-life, that pronouncement that I would never escape from him, I now knew better.

An overwhelming desire to get out of the house took hold of me and helped me to stop crying. There were more things to be done before I could leave. A quick shower and a change of underclothes took off the sweat and grime of my exertions with the floor-boards. When I had dressed I went in search of Lucy, and by good luck found her alone in the great bedroom, brushing her short head of hair with surprising energy.

‘Lucy, I’m going out now and won’t be back till late. Will you tell the others? I’ll talk to David before I go.’

‘By all means.’

‘And there’s something else I’d like you to do for me. I want everybody in bed and preferably asleep by midnight. Well, I know you can’t put them to sleep, but Joyce is never any problem, and if you could try to get Nick off in good time, that would be a great help to me.’

‘I’ll do everything I can, of course. Uh, Maurice, is this something to do with your ghosts, or is it, you know, somebody you want to see privately?’

She made this allusion to my amorous activities (I had not known that—or not bothered before now to wonder whether— she knew about them) with commendable tact of manner. ‘It’s my ghosts,’ I said.

‘I see. Would you like me as a witness?’

‘Thank you for offering, Lucy, but I’m sure he won’t come if there’s anyone else apart from me about. You believe I saw him before really, don’t you?’

‘I still think you thought you saw him, but I may be wrong. Did you find that thing you were looking for under the floor?’

‘Yes.’

‘Was it any good?’

‘No.’

‘Like the writing on that piece of paper?’

This was an inspired guess or feat of deduction. ‘Very much like that.’

‘Well, let me know what happens tonight, if anything does.’

‘I will. Thanks, Lucy.’

The last thing was getting hold of David and asking him to see to it that the few expected outside diners and drinkers were similarly off the premises by midnight. The resident guests could not actually be sent to their rooms, but they were unlikely to feel like prolonged carousing in the bar the night after a funeral so close by. I supposed, at least, that talking to David would be the last thing, until I almost literally ran into Joyce and Diana in the car-park.

They had their jewellery and their garden-party look on again, and were unfeignedly sorry to see me. I thought at first that they were (as they might well be) nervous of possible embarrassment, then I thought that they were simply resentful at the intrusion of any third party, and then I saw that they were even more simply annoyed because I had turned up.

‘Hallo,’ I said brightly. At that moment I could not devise any other utterance that seemed absolutely free of irony and/or obscenity.

They exchanged their now familiar glance of consultation, and Joyce said, ‘We thought we’d go and have a drink in the village.’

‘Good idea. I’m going out myself. Don’t wait up for me.’

‘Do you want me to leave you something to eat?’

‘No thanks. See you, then.’

While they got slowly into the Mini-Cooper, I got quickly into the Volkswagen, reflecting on Diana’s silence during the last exchange. I had never before known her to be content with less than about a two-thirds share of any conversation, however brief. And her whole demeanour over those dozen seconds had been docile, almost subservient. Whatever had happened between those two had had plenty of time to happen, I decided when I looked at my watch and found that the time was exactly eight o’clock.

My spirits, which had been improving a little, fell again sharply when I contemplated the four hours that had somehow to be filled in. I still had no idea where I was making for, and the mere action of driving at speed towards no destination had the effect of emphasizing to me my anxiety to escape, which soon started to make me feel as if I were being pursued by some malignant person or thing. Only as if; I was perfectly clear in my mind that nobody and nothing was pursuing me; but I have never known a powerful illusion of this kind to be appreciably weakened by being recognized as an illusion. I had touched eighty on the A595, and missed a head-on collision with a petrol tanker by a few seconds, before it occurred to me that no speed is great enough to permit a man to escape from himself. I found the banality of this idea soothing, and was able to drive less furiously thereafter.

I stopped at the George on the outskirts of Royston, ate some tongue sandwiches, drank a pint and a half of bitter, took a pill, bought a quarter-bottle of White Horse and drove on. In Cambridge I went into a cinema, and sat through forty minutes of a wide-screen Western (in which, apart from much talk and even more dead silence, one man shot at another and missed) before deciding that I felt too tense and jittery to continue. On bad days, sitting in a cinema can give me a curiously strong foretaste of dying, out of some fortuitous combination of the darkness, the felt presence of unseen strangers, the vast, unnaturally-coloured, ever-changing images, the voices that are not quite like voices. I walked the streets for a while, counting my footsteps and telling myself that something interesting was going to happen between three hundred and three hundred and fifty, and that this would show everybody that Allington was a good judge, whose predictions could be relied on. By the three hundred and forties nothing remotely interesting had turned up, not even a passable woman, so I settled for the stand of paperbacked novels I could see through the window of a supermarket. The place was still open; I went in and bought something I had never heard of by a writer whose first book, a satire on provincial life, I remembered had been commended at the time. In the little cocktail bar of the University Arms, I got through about forty minutes’ worth of this too, before going out and dropping it into a rubbish basket on the way back to my car. To the endemic unreality of all fiction, the author had added contributions of his own: an inability to leave even the most utilitarian sentence unadorned by some verbal frill or knob or curlicue, recalling those savage cultures whose sacred objects and buildings are decorated in every square inch; a rooted habit of proceeding by way of violent and perfunctory transitions from one slackly observed scene to the next; and an unvaried method of characterization whereby, having portrayed a person as one sort of cliché, he presently revealed him as a predictable different sort of cliché. Oh well, what had I expected? The thing was a novel.

On the road again, and in the dark this time, I very soon felt panic settling upon me. I had reason (of a sort) to feel afraid of encountering Underhill; this was nothing to do with that, a pure, unmotivated, objectless fear that, in my boyhood, had sent me running out of the house and across the common that it faced until I could literally not run any more, and, later, had caused me to read the entire contents of a newspaper aloud to myself as fast as possible while I tapped first one foot and then the other as fast as possible. This is a poor frame of mind in which to drive a car among traffic moving at between thirty miles an hour and sixty-five or more on a not particularly wide road. Each time, as I pulled out to overtake in the face of a column of oncoming headlights or at the approach to a blind corner, rational fear seemed as if it would drive out irrational fear for ever, to recede unnoticed and unremembered as soon as the danger was past.

The accident took place on a bend of the A595 about three miles south of Royston and four from home. I caught up with a largish car, a Humber Hawk or something similar, which was ambling along at about forty, and started to pass it a couple of hundred yards from the start of the bend, not an outstandingly dangerous manoeuvre provided the Hawk maintained its original speed. No doubt spurred by an idiot resentment at being overtaken by a car half the size of his, its driver accelerated instead. As, more or less side by side, the two vehicles began curving round to the left, an immense articulated lorry, chains of red lights outlining its extra wide load, appeared from the other direction. I had not the m.p.h. to pass the Hawk, and could not predict what it might do; so, trusting to my memory of a road I had travelled four times a week for seven years, I swung to the right across the front of the lorry and into the wide grass verge I hoped very much was there. It was there, but rougher and more sloping than I had thought. These features slowed me down, at any rate, and I was not going very fast when I drove into the brickwork of a culvert (as I learned later) and hit my head on something.

‘Are you all right, mate?’ asked a voice.

‘Yes, thank you..’

‘Well, you bloody well oughtn’t to be. You daft or something? Double-banking on a bend like that? Pissed, I suppose, like ‘em all.’

‘No.’

‘Flat pissed, you must be, if you aren’t off your rocker. Yeah, he’s okay. No call to be, but he is, so he says.’

Another voice spoke then, but I never remembered to what effect. I know only that, after some lapse of time, I was standing in front of my house while a car—a Humber Hawk, perhaps—receded into the distance. I felt like a man on the moon, almost weightless, or as if on the point of disembodiment, like myself after a heavy night and a heavy lunch, like a child, observant without expectation, curious and disinterested.

It was eight minutes to midnight. Just nice time, I said to myself. Indoors, everything was quiet and in darkness. Splendid. I went to the bar and fetched a tumbler, a siphon of soda and a bottle of Glen Grant, took a weak drink and a pill, and settled down in the public dining-room to wait the remaining two minutes. I sat at a corner table in the part where Underhill’s parlour had been, with just the one heavily shaded light in front of me turned on, out of consideration to him. I was almost directly facing the window at which he was accustomed to make his appearances, with the hall door diagonally opposite. The night was warm, but not humid.

Very faintly, I heard the church clock in the village begin striking midnight. I could not remember whether, with clocks that do not strike the quarters, the first note or the last signified the hour. Nothing happened, at any rate, while the clock was striking. And nothing happened after it had finished, either. I waited. The clock must be fast. But my own watch said two and a bit minutes after twelve.

By ten past I had decided that I had got the whole thing wrong, I had misunderstood Underhill’s message, it had not been a message at all, I had been mistaken about the freshness of the ink, he had just been seeing if I could be fooled into keeping this appointment, he had been joking. But I was not going to give him up yet. I sat there, unable to find any way of helping the time to pass. Through my mind went thoughts of Joyce, and Amy, and Diana, and my father, and Margaret, and the young man, and death, and ghosts, and drink, and Joyce again, and Amy again. In my current (perhaps precarious, but remarkably durable) state of detachment, all these topics struck me as very interesting but of no personal moment whatever, like, say, the New England whaling industry in the nineteenth century being considered by an intelligent and imaginative Grimsby trawlerman of our own time.

I went on not looking at my watch for much longer than I would have thought was possible. Then I did. It was three minutes to one. Fine. To wait an hour was as much as politeness and sanity demanded. I poured a short weak drink and sipped it deliberately. As faintly as before, but, it seemed to me, more distinctly, the church clock sounded, and I got up to go.

‘Stay. I am come as I said I would,’ said somebody, somebody standing in the shadows of the corner directly opposite the door.

‘You’re late, Dr Underhill.’

‘Not so, I’ve been most punctual. Now to the purpose. Have you our silver friend about you?’

I had not thought of this for hours, but when I felt in my pocket the thing was there. ‘Yes.’

There was a sort of sigh from the corner. ‘That’s well. Be so good as to place it on the table before you.’

I did as I was told. ‘There. What now?’

‘Now I’ll entertain you.’

‘Before you do, may I ask a question?’

‘Assuredly.’

‘When did you write that note asking me to meet you tonight?’

‘This morning, by your reckoning, the morning of the day just past. But yours was the hand that writ, mine merely the hand that guided yours.’

‘I don’t remember that.’

‘Not to remember is your quality, Mr Allington.’

‘Is that why you chose me to … assist you, or whatever it is you want me to do?’

‘How have I chosen you, when it is you that have each time come in search of me? But now, pray you, have done for the moment. There are many marvels in store.’

I had time to admire the justice of my own description of the voice—sounding as if artificially produced, with a kind of Gloucester-cum-Cork accent—before Underhill’s show began. The room was suddenly and brightly illuminated, only it was not the room any more, but a cave, or a cave-mouth. A group of naked women flashed into apparent existence, in mid-performance of some sort of slow, writhing, vaguely Oriental ballet. Their voluptuousness was extreme, and also theoretical, like the fantasy-drawings of a prurient but talented schoolboy: enormous breasts, nipples that in proportion were even more enormous, tiny waists, spreading hips and buttocks, sexual organs displaced forwards into the V of the crotch, as in Indian sculpture. There was monotonous music and a strong scent of roses. I would have grinned at all this, had it not been for something two-dimensional about the dancers and their movements that gave me the uncomfortable sensation of watching them through an invisible telescope. And I did not feel happy about the pair of red eyes, apparently belonging to some small creature like a snake or a rat, that were watching me from farther back in the cave.

The music grew louder, the smell of roses became insufferable and a troop of naked black men, of physical endowment so immense as to outdo the proportions of the women, leaped among them with loud yells. An orgy soon developed, cast and directed with a crudity that again might have made me want to laugh, but by now I had noticed the pallid, glistening coils of fungus that clung to the walls and roof of rock, and the second, larger pair of red eyes in the darkness of the cave, also fixed on mine. By their size and position, these might have belonged to a being about the size of a tall man. They did not move or blink.

With a rippling, sticky jerk, as if what I saw were being magic-lanterned on to a thick sheet of gelatin, the orgy scene gave place to an encounter between two black girls and what I supposed was a white adolescent boy, though he was equipped on the same scale as his black predecessors and had long fair hair like a woman’s. This was even less to my taste than what had gone before, but before it disappeared in its turn the girls’ faces struck me as not resembling, even in colour, those of any black people I had ever seen—they were much more like the handiwork of someone who knew them only from descriptions. Behind the music, which had become lumpishly repetitive, a man’s voice, not Underhill’s, was calling, too faintly for any words to be distinguishable, though seemingly familiar.

The new manifestation was two white girls making love, and went on for only a few seconds: an outstandingly abortive attempt to entertain me. When I looked again at the cave-mouth background, which had remained constant throughout, it was empty. I hoped very much that I had made some grimace or gesture by which Underhill had been able to read my discomfort; I did not want to think that he had seen it in my mind—still less that, just before, he had come across a buried memory of the afternoon and misread it as desire. By now the music, abandoning, so to speak, any attempt at rhyme and reason, had degenerated into an irregularly pulsating noise, and the smell was of decaying roses. But the two pairs of eyes were fixed on me as before.

It was from hereabouts that the next development came. There was a stirring of some sort, and two obscure shapes started to emerge, moving with the foreshortened effect I had noticed earlier, so that the sideways component of their progress was unnaturally emphasized. As they moved, the illumination died down, but enough remained for me to be able to make out a sort of quadruped about the size of a small pig, and secondly a biped creature with the same kind of skin. It was of the rough general shape of a man, but it was not a man, nor any kind of ape or monkey.. I could not name what it and its companion were. The flesh of both looked soft and loose, and was indeed becoming softer and looser, was beginning to disintegrate and at the same time form itself anew. Limbs, if they could any longer be called limbs, dwindled and disappeared while fresh appendages came bulging, bursting, twisting out of the main trunk, which itself continuously changed shape in both cases. At one moment the two entities were united by a swelling rope of what could have been living matter, at the next the larger of the two started to divide about its longer axis. Either the whole sight was a reproduction, by another intelligence, of the hypnagogic hallucinations I was subject to, or I was imposing it on top of whatever illusions were now being directed at me, this while fully awake and with my eyes open. I felt my equanimity wearing thin.

The accompanying noise, though as before destitute of pitch or any rhythm, still retained the capacity to vary in volume. In the quieter moments I could just make out Underhill’s voice, speaking in a monotone—the liturgical monotone I had heard coming from this part of the house during my night-vision of the previous afternoon. I looked down at the table in front of me. The silver figure had gone.

This was much worse than anything that had happened so far. It was time to make a move. When I got to my feet, immediate and complete darkness descended, and at the same moment the noise changed to the beating of many wings and a shrill, cawing clamour, and the smell changed to that of an aviary or hen-house, though intolerably intensified. After a few seconds, the air round my head was full of tiny scarlet-green birds, scores of them, evidently phosphorescent, for they were as bright as if the sun had been shining on them, and yet there was no external source of light. Clacking their tiny beaks, they wheeled and plunged and dived at my face, striking me head-on in the cheekbone, at the point of the chin, over the eye, though I felt nothing, and then vanishing, winking out like a snuffed flame, though their number did not grow less. I closed my eyes, and they were there as before, put my hands over my closed eyes, and they were there, stuck my fingers in my ears, and the cawing and clacking went on. I had no breath to scream; from moment to moment I stove to work out where the door was, but each time one of them flew into my face I had to stop and start again. With my orientation hopelessly lost, I heard, through it all, Underhill laughing, and instantly found myself standing next to the ripped-up area of floor in my dining-room upstairs, putting the crucifix in my pocket (an action I had at once forgotten). The next instant I was back among the birds, but with my hand still, or again, holding the crucifix. With the birds redoubling their attacks and positively shrieking, I threw it where Underhill’s voice had seemed to come from, and heard it strike wall or floor.

Slowly and steadily, what was happening to me changed. The birds began to confine themselves to the middle and left-hand side of my vision, and were growing oddly flattened, though they flew at me as before, while their noises progressively deteriorated in quality, with the precise effect of a wireless receiver being detuned a little at a time. Now the birds were gathered in a narrow and narrowing sector to my left, becoming wafer-like, as though the screen on which they were projected were being turned away from me towards the end-on position, and I could hear only a faint and undifferentiated roaring. Soon I was looking at a vertical line of flecked scarlet-and-green light, which faded to nothing in the silence. I was standing alone in the middle of the room, in darkness but for the moon through the windows.

I realized that I must have turned off my table-lamp at some earlier point, and started to move to the switches by the door. On the way, my eye was caught by a gleam of metal on the floor in the corner where Underhill had first appeared. I picked up, not the crucifix, but the silver figure, and at once heard, from outside, a faint but familiar and dreadful rustling sound off to the right, and Amy’s voice calling me from the opposite direction.

I ran out into the hall, to the front door, not stopping to turn on any lights, but my fingers knew the bolts, and I was out of the house almost immediately. Amy was about a hundred yards away down the road, wearing white pyjamas and carrying something in her arms: I assumed it was Victor. As she walked slowly towards the village, she was looking about her— in search of me? From the other side, that bizarre, rough-hewn, malformed shape was approaching, stiffly and clumsily, but steadily, with reserves in hand, and I remembered how I had seen its phantom quicken up as it drew near the house, and with what eventual result. This, however, was the reality, not the phantom, and I knew now, had known before I reached the front door, what Underhill’s second purpose had been—not merely to survive death, nor to subdue a living person to his will, but to reach from beyond the grave to bring about what I would see enacted within a minute, unless I could prevent it.

The creature was jolting along at this stage in a version of a brisk walk, crackling as it moved, It looked larger than before, but also less compact, perhaps even yet not having achieved its final form. Evidently it had so far not seen me. I had lost three or four seconds already: I started forward and ran at top speed towards Amy along the grass verge, as silently as I could, but she heard me before I was within twenty yards of her, and began to turn. I shouted to her not to look round—in vain: she saw me, and then the green man, and her face went stretched and rigid. I reached her.

‘What’s that, Daddy?’

‘It’s somebody bad. Now you put Victor down and run into the village as fast as you can and just shout and shout till people come.’

‘What will you do?’

‘Don’t worry about me,’ I said, with a rustling, creaking jog-trot behind me. ‘Off you go at once. Run.’

I faced about. The thing was coming up fast now, its legs driving powerfully and arms crooked, still accelerating. If it were left to itself, Amy would never reach the village. I stood in its path and marked out a place in the left groin that seemed made only of twigs and creepers, so perhaps vulnerable to a fist.. I saw its face now for the first time, an almost flat surface of smooth dusty bark like the trunk of a Scotch pine, with irregular eye-sockets in which a fungoid luminescence glimmered, and a wide grinning mouth that showed more than a dozen teeth made of jagged stumps of rotting wood: I had seen a version of that face before. Then the green man was upon me, its dissimilar arms held out before it, and that cry as of wind through foliage issuing from its mouth, exultant as much as menacing. Before I could close with it, it swung a forearm without breaking its stride and dealt me a blow across the chest that flung me to the ground a couple of yards off. I was not knocked out, but for the moment all strength had left me.

Amy had retreated a little way, then stopped and turned, and between her and the pounding bulk of the creature stood Victor in a posture of defiance, his back arched and tail swollen. A kick from a wooden foot smashed into him, with a snapping of twigs or bones, and he went skidding, a lifeless bundle, across the road and into the ditch. Then Amy turned again and ran, ran in earnest, in long-legged strides, but even when she reached her best speed, she was not gaining on the green man. By now I was aware of what I still held in my hand, and saw what it was I must do, and pushed myself to my feet and ran in my turn down the road towards the graveyard. Ahead of me, the pursuit continued; from where I was I could not judge the distance between the one and the other, and did not try, but drew back my arm and hurled the silver figure over the graveyard wall. I heard it touch ground, and immediately that misshapen being came lurching to a halt, did more than halt, was bowed down, was borne backwards by some immense force, step by step, shaking and flailing, while portions of it detached themselves and came whirling towards me, around me and over my head, leaf, twig, bough, stump, so that I crouched down and crossed my arms over my face, ducking instinctively as a stout length of wood swished past, and again when a thorny tendril scored my wrist, eyes screwed up and ears filled with a drawn-out, diminishing howl of inhuman pain and rage.

Silence fell, broken only by some heavy vehicle speeding towards London on the A595. I got up slowly, walked a few paces, then ran on towards the village calling Amy’s name. She was stretched out at the edge of the road with blood on her forehead, one knee and one hand. I carried her back to the house, laid her on her bed and telephoned Jack Maybury.

5: A Movement in the Grass

‘Physically, there’s nothing to worry about,’ said Jack just after midday. ‘That’s a perfectly healthy sleep she’s in now. No evidence of concussion. No fever. And those cuts and bruises are quite minor. Psychologically, well, I doubt if there’s much grounds for anxiety there either, not immediately anyway, though I must admit I’m a bit out of my depth with sleepwalking. Are you sure it was sleepwalking?’

I turned from the window of Amy’s bedroom. ‘I don’t know. I just assumed it was.’ I had decided it was, as the most flexible rough version of what had really happened. ‘The front door woke me up, I saw her passing the window, so I went and—’

‘So you said. What exactly happened when you got to her?’

‘I called out to her, which was probably a mistake, only I didn’t think, and she gave this great start and half turned round, and tripped.’

‘And hit her head on the road hard enough to knock her out, but … I just wouldn’t have thought a bang that caused such a comparatively minor contusion would be enough to knock a healthy person out. Still. Why were you in the public dining-room instead of your own place up here?’

‘I go there sometimes. Less chance of being interrupted.’

‘Yeah. Just as well you did, this time. Right, well I’ll look in again this evening. Keep her in bed meanwhile. Light lunch. We’ll see how it goes. There’s a very good kids’ headshrinker bloke at the hospital I can get hold of tomorrow. Personally, I doubt whether she was sleepwalking at all.’

‘What do you think she was doing?’

‘Pretending to sleepwalk. She’d read about it.’

‘What would be the point of that?’

‘Oh, to get herself a bit of attention from someone,’ said Jack, with a full dose of his censorious look. ‘Anyway, I’ll be off now. How are you?’ he added grudgingly.

‘Fine. A bit tired.’

‘Get some rest this afternoon. No more little birds?’

‘No. Would you like a drink?’

‘No thanks.’

As he started to leave, I asked without premeditation, ‘How’s Diana?’

Jack stopped leaving. ‘How is she? She’s all right. Why?’

‘No reason.’

‘I’ll just say this much, Maurice. I like things the way they are. I don’t like turmoil or upsets or letting one part of your life interfere with the other. I’m not against people enjoying themselves in any way they happen to fancy, provided they don’t start behaving like bloody kids. Okay?’

‘I’m for that too,’ I said, wondering what Diana could have said to him, but, as a mere ex-lover of hers since yesterday, not wondering very hard.

‘Good. See you tonight.’

Then he did go. Very soon afterwards. Amy opened her eyes in the manner of someone waking up with tremendous reluctance after a tremendously deep sleep. She smiled at me, then felt the taped bandage on her forehead and traced its outline. We hugged each other.

‘Have I been sleepwalking, Dad?’

‘Well … you might have been. All sorts of people do.’

‘I had a funny dream, Dad,’ she went on immediately. ‘You were in it.’

This was the first time that day she had spoken more than a couple of words. ‘What happened?’

‘Well, I dreamt I was lying in bed here, and you were calling to me. You told me to get up and come downstairs, so I did. I took Victor with me, because he was here. You didn’t tell me to, but I thought you wouldn’t mind. Then when I got downstairs, you said I was to go outside into the road. I still couldn’t see you, but that was what you said. So I went outside, but you weren’t there, so I started looking for you.’

‘Go on.’

‘I’m trying to, but it gets harder to remember after that. You gave me a fright, but you didn’t mean to. You came up and told me I was to put Victor down and run into the village, so I did. I started to, anyway. Then I really forget what happened. But I do sort of remember that you were being very brave, Dad. Was there a man chasing me?’

‘I don’t know. You were dreaming.’

‘I don’t think I was. I wasn’t, was I?’

She was looking hard at me. ‘No,’ I said. ‘It was real.’

‘Well done, Dad,’ she said, and took my hand.

‘What for?’

‘Not pretending. And being brave. What happened to the man?’

‘He ran away. He won’t be back.’

‘What happened to Victor? The man killed him, didn’t he?’

‘Yes. But it was over in a moment.’

‘He was brave too. It wasn’t really you telling me to get up and come downstairs, was it? Then what was it really?’

‘I think that part of it must have been a sort of dream. You imagined it. No, not quite that. There was a spell on the house, so that people saw things and heard things when there wasn’t anybody there.’

‘You mean like that screaming the other day?’

‘That was part of it. But it’s all over now, I promise you.’

‘Okay, Dad. I mean I believe you. I’m all right. Where’s Victor? He’s not just still lying there, is he?’

‘No. I’ve got him safe. I’m going off to bury him in a minute.’

‘Good idea. Come and see me again when you’ve got time.’

‘Would you like me to get Joyce or Magdalena to sit with you?’

‘No, I’ll be all right. Could you pass me that magazine about Jonathan Swift there on my dressing-table?’

‘Jonathan Swift? Oh, I see.’

The front page of the publication carried a colour photograph of a young man (or so I assumed him to be) who had yet to undergo his first haircut or shave; it had been deliberately worsened in quality by a no doubt advanced fuzzing process, and had evidently been taken from some sunken chamber or hole in the ground at its subject’s feet. I handed the thing to Amy, who immediately opened it and started reading.

‘What would you like for lunch?’

‘Hamburger and baked beans and chips and tomato sauce and tinned cherries and cream and a Coke … uh, please, Dad.’

‘Won’t that be too much for you? Dr Maybury said you were to just have something light.’

‘Oh, Dad. I’m so hungry. I’ll eat it slowly.’

‘All right, then, I’ll fix it.’

I went downstairs in search of David and found him in the front bar, an all-too-popular rendezvous on Sunday mornings. It was full of middle-aged men in Caribbean shirts drinking pints of bitter, and less straightforwardly middle-aged women in floral trouser-suits drinking Pimm’s. They were all talking as if from one side of a busy street to the other, but quietened down and stared into their drinks when they saw me, out of respect for the bereaved, or the insane. David was in the middle of taking an order from a party of six that included a pair of identically dressed identical twin queers, and looked as though he had had trouble getting that far. He greeted me apprehensively, no doubt hoping, with some justification, that I was not about to ask him to do anything along the lines of preparing a room for Count and Countess Dracula, and cheered up a good deal when I did no more than tell him Amy’s wishes and say I would be resuming charge at 6 p.m. (I had determined to finish everything by then.)

With this out of the way, Nick and Lucy not yet emerged and Joyce nowhere to be seen, I picked up the hammer and chisel I had used on my dining-room floor and dropped them in the passenger’s seat of the trade truck. Then I fetched Victor from the gardening hut, where he had lain wrapped in sacking since I stowed him there before breakfast. I also took a shovel and a scythe. The least unsatisfactory plan I could think of was to drive up as close as possible to the graveyard gate, unload and then re-park the truck at an inconspicuous distance. In the event, nobody saw me; at this time everyone was in the pub or the kitchen.

First, Victor. I soon found him a pleasant, secluded spot near the wall, out of sight from where Underhill lay, and in that soil it was not difficult to open a trench eighteen inches deep or so. In he went, and I shovelled the earth back into place, thinking how much I would miss his total lack of dignity and of ill nature. A couple of days earlier, I should probably have considered taking his body to the vet, in the hope of establishing something about the force that had killed him, something objectively factual that would support my story. But by now I had given up all such notions: I had seen what I had seen, and there would never be a way of convincing anyone else that I had. I smoothed the earth flat with my hands.

The second task was a far more formidable affair. I had some idea of direction, but very little of distance, and I spent over an hour and a half, and had cleared something like twenty square yards of ground, before I found the silver figure in a tuft of couch-grass; I suppose even then I was lucky. Laying it on a triangular piece of somebody’s headstone, I went at it with the hammer and chisel and, aided by the softness of the metal, quickly had it in half a dozen not easily recognizable pieces, which I buried in different parts of the graveyard. Having done this I felt a lot safer, but by no means safe. More effort was going to be necessary before that state could be attained.

I was just about to move on to the next job when a thought struck me. I went over to where Underhill was buried, dropped the tools and pissed on his grave.

‘You bastard,’ I said. ‘You tried to pretend you hadn’t chosen me, out of all the people who’ve lived in that house since you. You just waited until Amy was the age you liked, and then you set to work to arouse my curiosity. And in your present form you couldn’t do to her what you did to those other poor kids, so you tried to kill her instead. For fun. Very scientific. Some purpose.’

Again without being seen, I returned to the truck and drove through the village, which under the bright sunshine had a look of spurious significance, as if its inhabitants were known to be the wisest and happiest in England. I drew up outside the rectory, a small but beautiful Queen Anne house across the road from the church. Its garden was overgrown and littered with rubbish, including a number of framed pictures, mostly of country scenes, which had presumably come with the house. Music was rampaging away inside it. I tugged at the rusty iron bell-pull and an electronic chime sounded from within. After about a minute, a rather better-kempt version of Jonathan Swift opened the door. He looked at me while he chewed something.

‘Is the rector at home?’ I asked.

‘Who are you?’

‘One of his parishioners.’

‘His what?’

‘Parishioners. People who live in his parish. Round here. Is he at home?’

‘I’ll see.’

He turned away, but the advancing shape of the Reverend Tom Rodney, clad in a turquoise tee-shirt and skin-tight black denim trousers, was now to be seen over his shoulder.

‘What is it, Cliff? Oh … Mr Allington. Do you want to see me?’

‘Well yes, I was hoping to. If you’ve got a minute.’

‘Uh … of course. Do come in. I’m afraid everything’s in a bit of a mess. Oh, Mr Allington, this is Lord Cliff Oswestry.’

‘Ch-do,’ said Lord Cliff.

‘Hi there, man,’ I said, not sure whether he had adopted the title for some trade reason, or had acquired it willy-nilly.

Judging by his manner so far, I favoured the second of these.

‘I haven’t had a chance to clear up all the crap,’ said the rector. ‘We got back about three this morning, and I just made morning service with a big low on. Oh, Cliff dear, could you turn it down a bit? I’m afraid Cliff and I are sort of hooked on Benjie again. He does get to one, doesn’t he?’

By now we were in a sort of drawing-room with black wallpaper on three walls and gold on the fourth, a squat bamboo screen enclosing nothing in particular and a lot of suède-topped stools. I could not see much crap, apart from some broken crockery that looked as if it had been hurled rather than dropped, and an object resembling an aerial sculpture that had made a forced landing. An invisible singer with a bad head-cold was doing his best to reach some unreasonably high notes among a lot of orchestral fuss. Very soon this faded to a murmur, presumably by the agency of Lord Cliff, of whom I saw no more.

‘Well, what’s the trouble?’ asked the rector, almost like a real rector. This kind of thing must be an example of the dead weight of tradition he was constantly on guard against, sometimes, as now, with inadequate vigilance.

‘No trouble,’ I said, squirming about on my stool in search of some tolerable position. ‘There are two things I’d like to bring up. The first is that the seventh centenary of the founding of my house, the Green Man, comes round next month, as you probably know.’

‘Oh yes, somebody was telling me about it the other day.’

The somebody must have been the Father of Lies himself, since I had just made up the centenary idea. In the same improvisatory vein, I went on, ‘Anyway, I was thinking of throwing a rather special party to mark the occasion. It’s been a very good summer for me, financially that is, and if this weather keeps up I could put on quite a show in the garden there. I get quite a lot of, well, prominent people at my house from time to time, show business, television, fashion, even the odd politician, and I thought I’d just invite the lot. You never know who might turn up. Anyway, I was wondering if you’d like to come along. Plus any chums you might care to invite, of course.’

People’s eyes do not actually glisten unless they are weeping, but the rector put up a convincing simulacrum of it without recourse to tears. ‘Could I bring my bishop? The old sweetie would adore it so.’

‘You can bring the Moderator of the Free Church of Scotland if you like.’

‘Oh, how super.’ His eyes stopped glistening. ‘What was the other thing?’

‘Oh yes. I expect you’ve heard that my house is haunted. Well, it’s been getting quite troublesome recently. I’d like you to perform a service of exorcism to get rid of the spirits, or whatever they are.’

‘You’ve got to be joking.’

‘I’m perfectly serious.’

‘Oh, come on. You mean you’ve actually been seeing ghosts? Really.’

‘Yes, really. Otherwise I shouldn’t have bothered you.’

‘You don’t suppose a lot of religious mumbo-jumbo could have the slightest effect, do you? On anything?’

‘I don’t know. I’d like to give it a trial. It would be a great favour to me if you’d just run through the service, Rector.’

I was fully prepared to go on and tell him in the plainest terms that no exorcism meant no invitation to the party, but he was ahead of me. No doubt the course of his career had trained him to recognize a quid pro quo as soon as he set eyes on one, or rather overtrained him, because he would never get any kind of quo from me. With the irritation which his face was so well constructed to express, he asked, ‘When?’

‘Now. I can drive you there in three minutes.’

‘Oh, honestly,’ he said, but without heat, and was busy in calculation for a moment. My bet is that he had spotted the annoyance-potential to Lord Cliff of going off with me on such an eccentric errand. ‘Oh, very well, but I think it’s shaking to find a person of your education falling prey to gross superstition like this.’ But he got off his stool nimbly enough.

‘You’d better put on your regalia for this do, I think.’

‘Oh, for …‘ Lord Cliff (on my reading) entered his thoughts again, and he cheered up a little. ‘Might as well do the thing properly while one’s about it, I suppose. Amuse yourself. Have some fruit. Back in a trice.’

There was a bunch of bananas on a table-top of an untrimmed chunk of slate, I ate a couple and told myself I was having lunch. But, in my experience, even a lunch as light as that needs washing down. I went to a likely-looking (also very nasty-looking) cupboard I had spotted on first entering the room. Apart from what might have been sticks of incense and what almost certainly were marijuana cigarettes, it contained gin, vermouth, Campari, white port, a variety of horrible drinks from the eastern Mediterranean, a siphon of soda and no glasses. I rejected the idea of mixing myself a dry Martini in a near-by ash-tray, and took a swig from the gin-bottle. Warm neat gin is nobody’s nectar, but I managed to get some down without coughing much. I chased it with soda-water, taking this perforce from the nozzle of the siphon, a different kind of feat, then swallowed a pill. As I did so, it crossed my mind that, if Underhill had been able to manufacture a hundred scarlet-and-green birds, he could certainly have manufactured one. It was true that he had produced something like my hypnagogic visions, which I had had for years, since long before moving into his house, but his version of these had been a passable copy, a counterfeit, whereas (I realized for the first time) the birds had been exact replicas of the original one I had seen in the bathroom—how like him to have tested a weapon before using it in earnest. Well, when I had had time to forget just how much the solitary bird had frightened me, there was going to be a case for going back on the bottle: the half-bottle, at least.

Time went by. There was a large book-case full of books across the room, but I left them quite alone, knowing how angry they would all make me. I had begun to contemplate pretty steadily another assault on the drinks cupboard when the Rev. Tom returned, in clerical rig-out and carrying a suit-case covered with what looked like white corduroy. He seemed in top form now, toned up by whatever had taken place while he was changing. ‘Shall we go?’ he asked me, twitching his eyebrows and shoulders. I agreed that we should.

At past three o’clock on a Sunday, the public dining-room was empty. We went in by way of the kitchen without being observed, and I at once locked the door to the hall. In quite a businesslike fashion, the rector put his suitcase on a serving-table, took out his vestments or whatever one calls them, plus some other odds and ends, accoutred himself with them and produced a book.

‘A bit of luck I happened to have this,’ he said. ‘It’s not the sort of thing one’s asked to produce every day.’

‘Good. You can start as soon as you’re ready.’

‘All right. I still think this is a lot of balls, but anyway. Oh no,’ he added after finding his place in the book.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘One’s meant to have holy water for this business.’

‘Haven’t you got any?’

‘What would I be doing with a whole lot of holy water? You don’t imagine I keep it round the place like gin, do you? Wait a minute—it tells one here how to make it. You have to … Look, you don’t want me to go through all that, surely to God. It’ll take—’

‘If it says holy water, you use holy water. Get on with it. What do you have to do?’

‘Oh, hell. Okay. I’ll need some water and some salt.’

I fetched a jugful from the kitchen and poured some salt on to a plate from a cellar on one of the dining-tables.

‘Evidently one has to sort of cleanse the stuff for some reason.’ He pointed his first two fingers at the salt and read, ‘I render thee immaculate, creature of Earth, by the living God, by the holy God,’—here he made the sign of the cross— ’that thou mayest be purified of all evil influences in the name of Adonai, who is the lord of angels and of men…’

I went to the window. It occurred to me to have another look for the crucifix, which I had vainly tried to find round about dawn, but I was sufficiently sure that, having fulfilled its purpose, it had been taken back by its giver. Instead, I waited. After a minute or two a very faint voice spoke to me, so faint that it could not have been heard more than a few feet away.

‘What are you about? Would you destroy me?’

Cautiously, my eyes on the rector, I nodded my head.

‘I’ll put you in the way to acquire great riches, you shall take any woman on earth to be your paramour, you shall have all the glory war affords, or peace too, so you but cease.’

I shook my head.

‘I exorcize all influence and seeds of evil,’ read the rector. ‘I lay upon them the spell of Christ’s holy Church that they may be bound fast with chains and cast into the outer darkness, until the day of their repentance and restoration, that they trouble not the servants of God …‘

When the tiny voice returned, there was fear as well as pleading in it. ‘I shall be nothing, for I am denied repentance for ever. I shall be a senseless clod to all eternity. Can one man do this to another? Would you play God, Mr Allington? But God at least would have mercy upon one who has offended Him.’

I shook my head again, wishing I could tell him just how wrong he was on that last point.

‘I’ll teach you peace of mind.’

Now there was an offer. I turned my back on the rector and stared out of the window, biting my lips furiously. I imagined myself not noticing myself for the rest of my life, losing myself, not vainly struggling to lose myself, in poetry and sculptore and my job and other people, not womanizing, not drinking. Then I thought of the Tyler girl and the Ditchfield girl and Amy and whoever might be next: deprived of the green man, Underhill would surely devise some other way of harming the young and helpless. It was convincing, it was my clear duty; but I have often wondered since whether what made up my mind for me was not the unacceptability of the offer as such, whether we are not all so firmly attached, in all senses, to what we are that any radical change, however unarguably for the better, is bound to seem a kind of self-destruction. I shook my head.

Across the room, the rector sprinkled water on the floor and continued, ‘In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, by the token of the life poured out in the broken body and blood of Jesus Christ, and by the seven gold candlesticks, and by one like unto the Son of Man, standing in the midst of the candlesticks, and under the sign and symbol of His holy, bloodstained and triumphant cross, I exorcize thee…’

At that point I heard, no less faintly than before but with complete distinctness, a single, drawn-out, diminishing scream of abandoned terror and despair. It did not quite die away, but was cut off abruptly. I shivered.

The rector looked up. ‘Sorry, did you say something?’

‘No. Please get it over.’

‘Are you all right?’

‘Of course I’m all right,’ I said savagely. I had had enough of this query in the last few days. ‘How much more to go now?’