‘Amy, go up to your room.’
She made a blaring noise, halfway between a yell and a groan, and stamped off. I waited until, quite distinctly through the thickness of the building, I heard her door slam. At once, with impeccable sardonic timing, the vacuum-cleaner started up in the dining-room. I left the house.
It was indeed cooler today. The sun, standing immediately above the patch of woods towards which the ghost of Thomas Underhill was said to gaze, had not yet broken through a thin mist or veil of low cloud. As I walked over to where my Volkswagen was parked in the yard. I told myself that I could soon start to relish the state of being alone (not rid of Amy, just alone for a guaranteed period), only to find, as usual, that being alone meant that I was stuck with myself, with the outside and inside of my body, with my memories and anticipations and present feelings, with that indefinable sphere of being that is the sum of these and yet something beyond them, and with the assorted uneasiness of the whole. Two’s company, which is bad enough in all conscience, but one’s a crowd.
I was putting the Volkswagen into gear when a dull pain of irregular but defined shape switched itself on in my left lower back, a little below the waistline. It stayed in being for perhaps twenty seconds, perfectly steady in intensity, then at once vanished. It had been behaving in this sort of way for about a week now. Was it sharper this morning than when I had first noticed it, did it come on more frequently and stay for longer? I thought perhaps it was and did. It was cancer of the kidney. It was not cancer of the kidney, but that disease whereby the kidney ceases to function and has to be removed by surgery, and then the other kidney carries on perfectly well until it too becomes useless and has to be removed by surgery, and then there is total dependence on a machine. It was not a disease of the kidney, but a mild inflammation set up by too much drinking, easily knocked out by a few doses of Holland’s gin and a reduction in doses of other liquors. It was not an inflammation, or only in the sense that it was one of those meaningless aches and pains that clear up of their own accord and unnoticeably when they are not thought about. Ah, but what was the standard procedure for not thinking about this one, or any one?
The pain came back as I was turning south-west on to the A595, and stayed for a little more than twenty seconds this time, unless that was my imagination. I thought to myself how much more welcome a faculty the imagination would be if we could tell when it was at work and when not. That might make it more efficient, too. My own was certainly unequal to the task of suggesting how I would deal with the situation if my kidney really were under some lethal assault. I had fallen victim to some pretty serious afflictions in my time, but so far they had tended to yield to treatment. The previous summer I had managed to check and even reverse the onset of Huntington’s chorea—a progressive disease of the nervous system ending in total helplessness, and normally incurable—simply by cutting down my intake of Scotch. A year or so earlier, a cancer of the large intestine had begun retreating to dormancy as soon as I stopped eating the local greengages and plums, gave up drinking two bottles of claret a day and curbed my fondness for raw onions, hot pickles and curry. A new, more powerful reading-light had cleared up a severe brain tumour inside a week. All my other lesions, growths, atrophies and rare viral infections had gone the same way. So far.
That was the point. Other people’s hypochondria is always good for a laugh, or rather, whenever one gets as far as beginning to think about it, just fairly good for a grin. Each case of one’s own is hilarious, as soon as that case is past. The trouble with the hypochondriac, considered as a figure of fun, is that he will be wrong about his condition nine hundred and ninety-nine times, and absolutely right the thousandth time, or the thousand-and-first, or the one after that. As soon as I had reached this perception, the pain in my back underlined it elegantly by returning for about half a minute.
I had joined the A507 and was coming into Baldock without noticing anything I had seen on the way or done to keep me on the way. Now that I was about to deal with about the last thing concerning my father that I would ever have to deal with, it was thoughts of him that intervened between me and what I was doing. I parked the Volkswagen in the broad main street of the town and remembered playing cricket with him on the sands at Pevensey Bay in, good God, 1925 or 1926. Once I had been out first ball and he had praised me afterwards for my sportsmanship in accepting this with a good grace. While I waited, then was dealt with, at the registry, I thought about that daily round of his in the village, and wished I had accompanied him on it just once more than I had. By the time I reached the undertakers’, my mind was on his first stroke and his recovery from it, and in the bank I tried to imagine what his mental life had been like afterwards, with sufficient success to send me straight across to the George and Dragon at eleven thirty sharp. I had had just enough attention to spare for what I had been doing to notice how trivial and dull everything about it had been, not momentous at all, not even dramatically unmomentous, registrar and undertaker and bank clerk all pretty well interchangeable.
After three quick double whiskies I felt better: I was drunk, in fact, drunk with that pristine freshness, that semi-mystical elevation of spirit which, every time, seems destined to last for ever. There was nothing worth knowing that I did not know, or rather would not turn out to know when I saw my way to turning my attention to it. Life and death were not problems, just points about which a certain rather limited type of misconception tended to agglutinate. By definition, or something of the kind, every problem was really a non-problem. Nodding my head confidentially to myself about the simple force of this perception, I left the pub and made for where there was a fair case for believing I had left the Volkswagen.
Finding it took some time. Indeed, I was still looking for it when it became clear that I was doing so, not in Baldock, but in the yard of the Green Man, where I saw I must have recently driven the thing. There was a bright dent at the rear offside corner that I was nearly sure I had not seen before. This bothered me to some degree, until I realized that no event that had failed to impede my progress to this place could have been particularly significant. The next moment I was in the hall talking to David Palmer, very lucidly and cogently, but with continuous difficulty in remembering what I had been saying to him ten seconds earlier. He seemed to think that my anxieties or inquiries or reassurances, though interesting and valuable in their own right, were of no very immediate concern. Accompanied for some reason by Fred, he saw me to the foot of the stairs, where I spent a little while making it plain that I did not need, and would not brook, the slightest assistance.
I made it to the landing perfectly well, but only after a great deal of effort, enough, in fact, to get me on the way to coming round. I had not had one of these time-lapse things at such an early hour before, nor after so few drinks immediately beforehand. Well, today was a special day. I was crossing to the apartment door when the woman I had seen the previous evening, almost at this very spot, suddenly came past me—from where, I had no idea—and hurried to the top of the stairs. Without thinking, I called out after her, something quite unmanagerial like, ‘What are you doing here?’ She took no notice, began to descend, and when, after a not very competent pursuit, I reached the stairhead, she had gone.
I got down the stairs as quickly as I could without falling over, rather slowly, that is. David was just approaching the couple of steps that lead down to the dining-room. I spoke his, name, louder than I had meant to, and he turned round abruptly.
‘Yes, Mr Allington? Is anything the matter?’
‘Look, David…’
‘Hallo, Dad,’ said the voice of my son Nick. ‘We got here earlier than—’
‘Just a moment, Nick. David, did you see a woman coming down the stairs just now?’
‘No, I don’t think I—’
‘In a long dress, with reddish kind of hair? Only, God, ten or fifteen seconds before I started speaking to you.’
David considered this for so long that I wanted to scream at
him. I had time now to notice whether we were attracting any attention, but I did not use it. Eventually David said, ‘I wasn’t conscious of anybody, but I walked straight across from the bar, and I wasn’t really noticing, I’m sorry.’
‘All right, David, it doesn’t matter. I thought it might have been someone who bounced a cheque on me once, that’s all. It doesn’t matter. Let me know if there are any problems in the dining-room. Hallo, Nick.’ We kissed; David went on his way. ‘Sorry about that, I just thought … Where’s Lucy? Did you have a good journey?’
‘Fine. She’s over in the annexe, having a wash. What’s wrong, Dad?’
‘Nothing. I mean it’s been a bit of a hellish day, as you can imagine, what with all the …‘
‘No, now. You look as if you’ve had a scare or something’
‘Oh no.’ I had had a scare all right. Come to that, I was still having one. I did not know whether to be more frightened at the idea that had come into my mind, or at the fact that it had come there and showed no signs of going away. I tried to let it lie without examining it. ‘To tell you the truth, Nick, I had a few quick drinks in Baldock, which you’ll understand, a bit too quick probably, anyway I very nearly took a bad toss on the stairs just now when I was chasing that bloody woman. Might have been nasty. Bit off-putting. You get the idea.’
Nick, a tall square figure with his mother’s dark hair and eyes, looked at me stolidly. He knew that I had not told him the truth, but was not going to take me up on it. ‘You’d better have another, then,’ he said in the quick tolerant voice he bad first used to me when he was a child of ten. ‘Shall we go up? Lucy knows the way.’
A few minutes later, Lucy joined Nick and Joyce and me in the dining-room. She came and kissed my cheek with an air perfectly suggesting that, while not for a moment abating her dislike and disapproval of me, she was not, in view of the circumstances, going to get at me today unless provoked. I had always wondered what Nick saw in such a dumpy little personage, with her snouty nose, short-cut indeterminate hair, curious shawls and fringed handbags. Nor had he ever tried to enlighten me. Still, I had to admit that they seemed to get on well enough together.
Amy came in and stared at me until I had noticed the dirty sweater and holed jeans she had exchanged for her earlier getup. Then, still staring at intervals, she went over and started being theatrically cordial to Lucy, whom she knew I knew she thought was a snob. I told things to Nick while my mind worked away on its idea like an intelligent animal functioning without human supervision, rounding up facts, sorting through questions and wonderings. It went assiduously on while lunch was served.
Joyce had put up a cold collation: artichoke with a vinaigrette, a Bradenham ham, a tongue the chef had pressed himself, a game pie from the same hand, salads and a cheese board with radishes and spring onions. I missed out the artichoke, a dish I have always tended to despise on biological grounds. I used to say that a man with a weight problem should eat nothing else, since after each meal he would be left with fewer calories in him than he had burnt up in the toil of disentangling from the bloody things what shreds of nourishment they contained. I would speculate that a really small man, one compelled by his size to eat with a frequency distantly comparable to that of the shrew or the mole, would soon die of starvation and/ or exhaustion if locked up in a warehouse full of artichokes, and sooner still if compelled besides to go through the rigmarole of dunking each leaf in vinaigrette. But I did not go into any of this now, partly because Joyce, who liked every edible thing and artichokes particularly, always came back with the accusation that I hated food.
This is true enough. For me, food not only interrupts everything while people eat it and sit about waiting for more of it to be served, but also casts a spell of vacancy before and after. No other sensual activity must take place at a set time to be enjoyed by anybody at all, or comes up so inexorably and so often. Some of the stuff I can stand. Fruit slides down, bread soon goes to nothing, and all pungent swallowables have a value of their own that transcends mere food. As for the rest of it, chewing away at the vile texture of meat, pulling bones out of tasteless mouthfuls of fish or encompassing the sheer nullity of vegetables is not my idea of a treat. At least sex does not demand a simultaneous outflow of talk, and drink needs no mastication.
No drinking to speak of went on at this lunch. While I tried to keep my mind entirely on my objections to food, I covered some ham and tongue with chutney and hot sauce and washed the mixture down with a powerful tumbler of whisky and water. It did not look very powerful, thanks to my use of one of those light-coloured Scotches so handy for the man who wants a stronger potion than he cares to advertise to his company. The onions and radishes got me through a small hunk of fresh Cheddar; I had made a good meal. We went on to coffee, that traditional device for prolonging artificially the conditions and atmosphere of food-consumption. I took a lot of it, not in the hope of sobering up, for coffee is no help there and I was already as sober as I could hope to be, but to render myself reasonably wakeful. I wanted to be in some sort of form for later that afternoon.
As soon as Amy had left the table I made up my mind. There is always the chance, when only two people are talking together, that the one may listen carefully to the other and take seriously what he says. No such risk attaches to gatherings of more than two. So I gave up the idea of taking Nick aside afterwards, poured myself more coffee and, addressing him rather than anyone else, said as casually as I could,
‘You know, I’ve been wondering if there mightn’t have been something … slightly curious going on about the time the old man died. I asked—’
‘Curious in what way?’ asked Lucy sharply, intent on getting this settled before I could switch the conversation irrevocably to football or the prospects for the harvest.
‘I was coming to that, actually. According to Joyce, just before he collapsed he stood up and stared in the direction of the door, only there was nothing there. Then, immediately before he died, he said to me, “Who?” and, “Over by the …“ something. I think what he meant to say was, “Who (was that standing) over by the (door)?” That’s—’
‘I don’t see anything very curious about that,’ said Lucy. ‘He was having a stroke—he might have—’
‘Carry on, Dad,’ said Nick.
‘Yes. That’s the first thing, or the first two things. Then, he’d been talking a few minutes earlier about hearing somebody walking up and down the passage outside here. I can’t think of any actual person that could have been, though it wouldn’t be at all significant on its own, I admit. Then, twice, last night and again an hour or so ago, I saw a woman dressed in a, well, it might have been an eighteenth-century ordinary domestic kind of dress, at the top of these stairs. And I think she vanished, both times. I don’t really know about last night, but today, when she went down the stairs I followed her, and no one had seen her. If she went out by the front door, Nick would have seen her, wouldn’t you, Nick? I’m sorry I spun you that yarn about her, but I was a bit het up at the time. Anyway, did you see anyone like that as you were coming in?’
The relief I had been looking for, that of simply telling somebody about my idea, had destroyed my casual tone, and Nick answered very deliberately.
‘Yes, I couldn’t have helped noticing, and there wasn’t anybody. But so what? Who do you think she was, this woman?’
I found I could not say the word that had been in my mind. ‘Well … you’ve heard this house is supposed to be haunted. I don’t know what it’s sensible to say about things like that, but it does make you think. And then there was Victor…’ I glanced at him sitting in front of the fireplace with his toes tucked in under him like a dish-cover, the picture of a cat to whom nothing out of the way, almost nothing at all, had ever happened. ‘He acted very scared just when my father collapsed. Shot past me out of the room when I came back in. Very scared indeed.’
I could think of nothing more for the moment. All three of my audience looked as if they had been listenin
g for a long time to a recital that, although not in the least strange or unexpected, was embarrassingly difficult to deal with except by straightforward, all-out insult. I felt garrulous, egocentric and very, very silly. In the end, Lucy stirred and said judicially—I remembered that she had taken an upper second in some vaguely philosophical mélange at a ‘new’ university— ‘I take it you’re referring to the possible presence of ghosts.’
To hear the word spoken took all the heart out of me. I could not even summon up a dab of sarcasm about haunted houses and vanishing women in antique dress often being thought to carry some such association. ‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Well, in the first place it isn’t cats that are supposed to be sensitive to paranormal phenomena, it’s dogs. There’s no way of knowing what your father saw, if anything, and you’re making a lot out of what he said, a few disjointed words you may not even have heard correctly. As for the woman you saw, well … Anybody might have wandered up from the hall and down again. Are you sure she couldn’t have gone into one of the rooms on the ground floor, the ladies’ for instance?’
‘No, I’m not. What about the footsteps in the passage?’
‘What about them? You said yourself they wouldn’t he significant on their own.’
‘Mm.’ I drank some coffee.
‘I remember you telling us the story about the ghost who’s supposed to turn up in the dining-room, but that was a man, wasn’t it? Have you ever heard anything about a woman ghost?’
‘No.’
Lucy did not actually say, ‘Your witness,’ but she hardly needed to. Nick looked at me indulgently, Joyce irritably, or with what could have been irritation if she had not recently been reminded that I had lost my father. I searched my brain. This was not altogether easy. Some shift in my metabolism, or perhaps the gill of whisky I had been putting away, had made me slightly drunk. Then, contrary to the odds, something came up. I turned to Lucy again.
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