The Green Man

‘Oh, very well. There’s only another couple of sentences. Visit, O Lord, we beseech thee, this room, and drive from it all the snares of the enemy: let Thy holy angels dwell herein to preserve us in peace, and may Thy blessing be upon us evermore, through Jesus Christ our Lord, amen. There. I hope you’re quite satisfied?’

‘Perfectly, thank you.’ I assumed that what had just been done would have no effect on the appearances, upstairs, of the red-haired woman, and was content: I had no wish to put an end to that timid, evanescent shade. That’s it, then. I’ll run you back.’

A couple of minutes later, I was about to get into the truck beside the rector when Ramón came up to me.

‘Excuse, Mr. Allington.’

‘What is it?’

‘Mrs Allington like to see you, Mr Allington. In a house.’

‘Whereabouts? Where?’

‘Down estairs. In a office.’

‘Thank you.’

I told the rector I would be back in a minute. Joyce was on the office telephone. She said she had to go now and rang off.

‘Ramón told me you wanted to see me.’

‘I’m sorry, Maurice, but I’m leaving you.’

I looked at her wide, clear blue eyes, but not into them, because, turned in my direction though they were, they were not on me at all. ‘I see. Any particular reason?’

‘I just can’t go on any longer. I can’t go on trying any more. I’m fed up with trying.’

‘Trying to do what? Run your part of the house?’

‘I don’t like doing that, but I could do it if things were different, I wouldn’t mind it at all.’

‘What things?’

‘I’ve tried to love you, but you won’t let me, ever. You just have your own ideas about what to do and when and how, about everything, and they always stay the same, doesn’t matter who you’re dealing with or what they say to you. There’s no use trying to love someone when they’re always doing something else.’

‘These last few days I’ve been having a—’

‘These last few days have been exactly the same as any other few days as far as that’s concerned. More so, I mean with your father and this ghost business and everything, and now Amy, it would have been the time for anyone else but you to sort of be around.’

‘I’ve been around today, but I haven’t seen much of you.’

‘Did you try and find me?—no. And don’t say you’ve got a job to do, because everybody has. If you hadn’t got a job you’d make up things to do. I don’t know what you think about people, which is bad enough, but you certainly go on as if they’re all in the way. Except for just sex, and that’s so that you can get them out of the way for a bit. Or else you just treat them like bottles of whisky—this one’s finished, take it away, bring me another one. It’s only all right for you to do things and you to want things. How could you ask your wife to come to bed with you and your girlfriend? A little experiment, eh? Why not fix it up? Easy enough. It needed two girls and there were two girls, so fine. Why not? You might have had the decency to go to a prostitute or somebody for a thing like that.’

‘You seemed to enjoy it all right.’

‘Yes, I did, it was wonderful, but that was nothing to do with what you’d had in mind. Diana’s coming with me.’

I understood now what Jack had been talking about that morning; he had merely not been told the basic facts—predictably enough. ‘It sounds rather as if you’ve been wasting your time with me all along.’

‘I knew you’d say something like that. That’s how it would strike you: just sex. Just sex is all you know about. But it isn’t just sex with me and her. It’s not a hell of a lot to do with sex at all. It’s being with someone. Who hasn’t always got somewhere more important to be in the next two minutes. Amy won’t miss me much. I couldn’t do enough about being her mother, because you never did anything about making her be my daughter. I’m not going straight away. I’ll stay on until you’ve found someone to help housekeep. We can talk about the divorce in the meantime.’

‘Supposing I made a real effort?’

‘An effort’s no good. And you’d soon forget to make it.’

That was about that. I looked at her eyes again, and her thick yellow hair, not fine, not coarse, simply abundant, with a very slight but firm wave from broad forehead down to strong shoulders. ‘I’m sorry, Joyce.’

‘That’s all right. I’ll always come and see you. Do you think you could possibly go now?’

I went. I heard the key scrape in the lock and a smothered sob from behind the door. It was impossible to think about any of it now, except for one small part which it was impossible not to think about, for a moment at least, the part to do with experiment: ‘a little experiment, eh? Why not?’ Was I really capable of thinking—inclined to think—like that about things, and about people? If so, there might have been more to Underhill’s selection of me as his instrument than the co-presence of Amy in the house: something to do with an affinity. I hated that idea, and tried to suppress it as I walked slowly back to the truck and the rector.

That divine looked at me with more emphatic and specific petulance than usual when I joined him. ‘Nothing of any great gravity, I hope?’

I started the engine and steered out of the car-park. ‘Tom, I can’t say how much I appreciate your taking time to come along here. On a Sunday, too.’

‘What’s so special about Sunday?’

‘Well … aren’t there things like services? Sermons to prepare?’

‘You don’t imagine I’d prepare sermons for a bunch of swedes like I’ve got here, do you? You’ve got to realize the whole sermon thing has gone now, along with antimacassars and button boots.’

‘And evolution.’

‘And evolution, quite so. Anyway, I’ve got Lord Cliff preaching tonight. Not that any of that lot will … Hey, where are we going?’

I had turned uphill instead of down towards the village and the rectory. ‘I’m afraid we’ve got one more call to make.’

‘Oh no. What is it this time?’

‘Exorcism again. In a wood along here.’

‘You positively have to be joking. It’ll take—’

‘What were you saying about Lord Cliff?’

It worked: I saw the corners of his mouth turn up (for once) as he visualized whatever deeply satisfying reaction to his prolonged absence he visualized. When we got to the copse, I handed him a cut-glass vinegar bottle from my kitchen into which I had, without his knowledge, poured half a gill or so of holy water. He accepted this, kitted himself up again and started on the service with what was, for him, a good grace. I walked to and fro, looking for signs of the green man’s embodiment and subsequent disembodiment, and finding them: a fresh scar where the limb of an ash had been torn from the trunk, at a point well above arm’s reach; a scattered heap of bruised leaves from half a dozen kinds of tree and shrub. Such had been the constituents of his form here, in an English wood; he must originally have come to birth, have first been called into being, in some place where the prevailing vegetation consisted of trees with rather uniformly cylindrical trunks and boughs; so at any rate, the lineaments of the now shattered silver figure had seemed to testify. But it, and its power, had proved remarkably adaptable to a radical change of location.

It was very quiet and shady and sunny in the copse. The rector’s voice pursued its slightly irritable, perfunctory course.

‘By the emblems of the eye of the angel, the tooth of the dog, the claw of the lion and the mouth of the fish, I charge thee to depart, enemy of joy, child of perversity, and in the sign of the spirits of the black waters and the white mountain and the wilderness without end, I command thee, in the authority of Christ, to go now to the place of thy choice…’

Suddenly, ten yards off, I saw and heard a shivering among the grasses and bushes, a violent local movement of air too shapeless and multi-directional to be called a whirlwind. At first the disturbance was confined to one spot; then it seemed to spread; no, it was not spreading, it was shifting, at first almost imperceptibly, then at a slow walking pace, then faster, straight for where the rector was standing. I ran past it in a curve and pulled him out of its path. He staggered, almost slipped, steadied himself against the trunk of an oak and glared at me.

‘What the devil is the matter with you, Mr Allington? Have you gone out of your mind? I’ve had just about all I can take…’

While he continued to expostulate, I turned my back on him and saw the disturbance, still accelerating, pass over the place where he had been and out of sight behind a holly-bush. Perhaps, once launched, it was powerless to change direction; perhaps that direction had been a matter of coincidence; perhaps it had no hostile properties; but I was very glad I had acted as I did. I hurried to a position from which I could track its course. By now it had almost reached the edge of the wood.

‘Come here, quick,’ I called.

‘I’ll do no such thing.’

Once out in the open, the phenomenon spread, became diffused, was soon a minute trembling of grass over an area the size of a tennis-court, and then was nothing. I felt the tension ebb away from my muscles, and walked back to the rector, who was still holding on to the oak tree.

‘Sorry about that. But didn’t you see it?’

‘See it? I saw nothing.’

‘Never mind. Anyway, we can pack up now.’

‘But I haven’t finished the service yet.’

‘No doubt, but it’s taken effect already.’

‘What? How do you know?’

I realized that, under the peevishness inseparable from his expressing any emotion, the Rev. Tom was frightened of me, but I could think of no explanation that would not frighten him more, and reasoned anyway that a spot of fear, from whatever source, could not fail to do him good. So I mumbled something about intuition, got him on the move and endured, first his continued protests, then his huffy silence, while we went back the way we had come. Outside the rectory, he said in a conciliatory tone,

‘You’ll give me a bit of notice about the party, won’t you?’

‘Party? Party? Have you gone out of your mind?’ was what I longed to say, ramming it home with Grand-Guignol-style bafflement, and had started on an ape-man frown before relenting, or deciding it would be more fun to have him wake up to the deception by degrees. Anyway, I said I would do as he asked, thanked him for his trouble and drove home.

In the car-park, I saw Nick’s Morris with its boot-cover lifted, and a moment later he appeared carrying two suitcases and closely followed by Lucy.

‘We’re off, Dad. Got to pick up Jo and get her to bed.’

‘Sure. Well … thank you for coming. For your support.’

Nick glanced at his wife and said, ‘Joyce told us. We’re both very sorry. But I never thought she was right for you.’

‘It’s more that I wasn’t right for her.’

‘Well, anyhow … Come up and see us as soon as you can. Get shot of this place for a bit. Give old David a taste of responsibility.’

‘Thanks. I’ll try.’

‘Don’t just try,’ said Lucy. ‘Do it. You know you can. We’d love to see you. The spare room’s really nice now, and Jo sleeps right through till eight most mornings.’

I kissed her for the first time since their wedding, and that had not been a real kiss. Nick and I kissed and the two of them got into the car. Before he drove off, he rolled down his window to say, out of her hearing,

‘I was going to ask you about that ghost business of yours. Is it still, you know …?‘

‘All taken care of. All over. I’ll tell you the full story some day.’

‘Not some day. The next time we meet. So long, Dad—I’ll ring you tonight. Oh: Amy was asking where you were. Said she had something to say to you. And you listen, whatever it is. And you say something to her. Please, Dad.’

I found Amy sitting up in bed, while the TV screen showed a pair of unengaging candlesticks and an octogenarian voice said, ‘They’re very beautiful, aren’t they? I should say late eighteenth century, not English, of course…’

‘Turn it off, Dad, please.’

I turned it off and settled down on the edge of the bed.

‘How are you feeling, Ame?’

‘Fine, thank you. Joyce is going away, isn’t she?’

‘How do you know?’

‘She told me. She came in to see if I wanted anything and we had a chat, and I asked her if we were going to Eastbourne for the week-end before I go back to school like we did last year, and she said you and I might be, but she wouldn’t be with us then. Then she told me. She was upset, but she wasn’t crying or anything.’

‘How extraordinary. Just telling you like that.’

‘Not really. You know how she tells you things without thinking what you’re going to think about them.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘You don’t seem to have much luck with your wives, do you, Dad? Perhaps you don’t give them enough treats. Anyway, I started thinking about what we ought to do. Now I’m thirteen now. I shan’t want to get married until I’m about twenty-one. That’s eight years, at least that, because I might not find the right man straight away. And I can help you all that time. I’m quite good at cooking already, and if you don’t mind me being in the kitchen when we’re not busy I can learn a lot more just by watching. And I can take telephone messages and things like that, and when I’m older I’ll be able to do other things, like seeing to the accounts. I’ll be very useful.’

‘That’s sweet of you, darling,’ I said, and made to embrace her, but she drew back and glared at me.

‘No it isn’t I’m not saying it just to make you feel better. That’s what you do. I’ve been thinking about it very seriously, and making plans. To start with, I think you ought to sell this place, because of Gramps dying and Joyce going away and the man last night. We ought to go somewhere where I can go to a good school and live at home. Cambridge or Eastbourne or somewhere like that would be the sort of place. Don’t you think that’s what we ought to do?’

‘Yes. You’re right we’ve got to get away. Of course, it depends on what hotels and inns and so on are on the market, where we go, I mean.’

‘It’ll all be up to you, that part of it. Then when we think we’ve found a place, we can go and look at schools.’

‘I’ll start making inquiries tomorrow.’

‘If you’ve got time.’

‘No, I’ll have time.’

She reached out to me, and I kissed her and held her. Soon afterwards I left, after having my offer to turn the TV set on rejected: she said she wanted to go on thinking. It was time to go and shower and change for the evening. As I started on this, I reflected that things had sorted themselves out after a fashion. Or some things had. I was feeling tense again, and my heart was beating heavily, moving towards the point where it would begin to flutter and stumble. Also, as had been happening increasingly of late, I noticed how clumsy I was getting, knocking my shoulder against the bathroom door-jamb, barking my knuckles on the shower-taps when I reached for them, slamming the soap down in the holder with unwilled violence, as if I were drunk, which I certainly was not, or as if my powers of co-ordination were progressively deteriorating. That thought wearied me unendurably, and so did the thought that tomorrow was another week, and I must telephone the insurance company about the Volkswagen, and see the solicitor about my father’s will, and fetch the meat, and bank the takings, and make new arrangements about fruit and vegetables, and prepare for another week after that. And Joyce, and selling the house, and looking for another, and finding somebody to go to bed with.

Much sooner than I could have expected (I had not really had any such expectation), I found I had begun to understand the meaning of the young man’s prophecy that I would come to appreciate death and what it had to offer. Death was my only means of getting away for good from this body and all its pseudo-symptoms of disease and fear, from the constant awareness of this body, from this person, with his ruthlessness and sentimentality and ineffective, insincere, impracticable notions of behaving better, from attending to my own thoughts and from counting in thousands to smother them and from my face in the glass. He had said I would never be free of him as long as the world lasted, and I believed him, but when I died I would be free of Maurice Allington for longer than that.

I put on my dinner-jacket, swallowed a strong whisky and went downstairs to begin the evening round.