The Green Man

by Kingsley Amis

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

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

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

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

  ‘About the same. Very piano.’

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

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

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

  ‘I do, I assure you.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘I’m all right.’

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

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

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

  ‘You’re ten years younger than I am.’

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

  ‘Just a couple.’

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

  ‘I’m used to it. I can take it.’

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

  ‘I’m all right. I told you.’

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

  ‘Oh … Bloody awful.’

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

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

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

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

  ‘And the hallucinations?’

  ‘About the same.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘There’s a connection all right.’

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

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

  ‘Alcohol relieves stress.’

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

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

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

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

  ‘What else is there on?’

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

  ‘But you like horses.’

  ‘Not these ones.’

  ‘What’s wrong with them?’

  ‘All in lines.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘All in lines.’

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

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

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

  ‘No thanks, Daddy.’

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

  ‘No thanks.’

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

  ‘I have.’

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

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

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

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

  ‘Okay.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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