The Green Man

by Kingsley Amis

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘That’s what I don’t like about it.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘I was saying earlier, your father could see if he could touch the woman he thought he saw, or really saw—I’ve never denied that that’s a genuine possibility—or try to get her to speak to him if she appears again, and the same applies to Underhill. He seemed to hear his name being spoken tonight I still don’t think it was Underhill, but your father does. In his place, I’d spend as much time as possible sitting in that dining-room while it’s not in use and waiting for Underhill to reappear. He might speak next time. From your point of view, that’s logical, don’t you agree … Maurice?’

  ‘Christ, Lu,’ said Nick before I could answer. (I would have answered yes.) ‘Dad doesn’t want to sit up in the middle of the night waiting to see a sodding ghost. That would be asking for trouble for anyone who was doing it. I tell you, farting about with this type of stuff doesn’t do anybody any good. Look at the shags who go in for mediums and séances and psychic phenomena and the rest of it. Raving nuts, the lot of them. And stop being so interested in this thing. Dad just feels very low and a bit confused and he’s got Gramps on his mind. Leave it, Lu.’

  ‘All right, I will. But you think everybody goes by mood because that’s the way you work yourself. You’re bloody bright, Nick, but on almost everything except Lamartine you muddle up what you think with how you feel. I prefer to take what your father says at face value. But I promise to drop it. I’m off to bed now anyway. See you both in the morning.’

  ‘You mustn’t take too much notice of Lucy,’ said Nick when we were alone. ‘She misses the old cut-and-thrust of academic discussion up there. I’m no good to her on that one, and the faculty wives can’t follow two consecutive remarks on any subject. She’s all right, actually. I know you can’t understand what I see in her, and I’m not sure I can myself, but I love her. Anyway. How are you really feeling, Dad?’

  I hesitated. I had not until that moment thought of what I now urgently wanted to say, any more than I had consciously rehearsed a single word of my diatribe about death, which, it occurred to me belatedly, I had delivered as if I had had it by heart. I stopped hesitating. ‘I feel I ought to have done more for Gramps. I don’t just mean what everybody’s bound to feel, about wishing you’d been more considerate and nicer and everything. I could have tried to help him live longer. For instance, perhaps those walks of his were too taxing. I ought to have thought about that, t
alked to Jack Maybury and so on.’

  ‘Look, to begin with, Gramps wasn’t your patient. And Jack’s a good doctor; he knew what was best for him. And he was a vigorous old boy; he’d have died a bloody sight sooner, out of misery, if he’d been cooped up in the house all the time. Don’t worry about that.’

  ‘Mm. Would you like a whisky, or a beer?’

  Nick shook his head. ‘You have one.’

  While I poured, I said, ‘And the stairs here, they’re very steep. I ought to have tried—’

  ‘What could you have done? Put in a lift? And I don’t think climbing stairs gives you strokes, does it? That’s heart, I thought.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I hesitated again. ‘It made me think of your mother.’

  ‘Mum? What’s she got to do with it?’

  ‘Well, I … feel responsible for that too, in a way.’

  ‘Oh, Dad. The only people responsible were the chap driving the car, and perhaps Mum herself a bit, for crossing the road without looking properly.’

  ‘I’ve always wondered whether she stepped out deliberately.’

  ‘Oh, Christ. With Amy holding her hand? She’d never have risked anything happening to Amy. And why should she? Knock herself off, I mean.’

  ‘That bit’s obvious. Thompson letting her down.’ Thompson was the man for whose sake Margaret had left me, and who had told her, four months before her death, that he was not after all going to leave his wife and children and set up a home with her.

  ‘That’s Thompson’s headache, if it’s anybody’s, which I don’t believe.’

  ‘I ought to have tried to stop her going.’

  ‘Oh, balls. How? She was a free agent.’

  ‘I ought to have treated her better.’

  ‘You treated her well enough for her to stay with you for twenty-two years. This is a load of crap, Dad. What’s bothering you isn’t that you were in any way responsible for her death, but that she died. Same with Gramps. Both those things remind you that you’ll be going the same way yourself one of these days. I know you’ll hate me taking a leaf out of Lucy’s book, but that is egotistical. Sorry, Dad.’

  ‘Okay. You may be right.’ He was certainly right about the first part of it—the small but permanent despair, and the illogical feeling of dread, that come from having spent so many years with a dead woman, talked, met people, gone to places, eaten, drunk with her, most of all (of course) made love to her, and had children by her. Even now I woke up three or four mornings a week assuming that Margaret was still alive.

  ‘How’s Amy?’ asked Nick. ‘From the look of her…’

  I stopped listening as I heard, or thought I heard, a rustling noise at ground level outside the house, near the front door. I jumped up, ran to the window and looked out. The overhead lights were still on, showing walls, flowerbeds, road and verges as colourlessly empty as if nobody had ever been near them. The noise had stopped.

  ‘What’s up, Dad?’

  ‘Nothing. I thought I heard someone at the front door. Did you hear it?’

  ‘No. Are you all right?’ Nick looked warily at me.

  ‘Of course.’ It disturbed me that what I might or might not have heard, and identified, had happened immediately at the mention of Amy. I had no idea why I made this connection. I tried to think. There’s … been some talk of a burglar in the district. You were saying.’

  ‘Did you see anything?’

  ‘No. Go on.’

  ‘All right. I was just wondering how Amy feels about Mum’s death these days.’

  ‘I suppose at that age you forget a lot quite quickly. You put things behind you.’

  ‘But has she? What does she say about it?’

  ‘We haven’t gone into any of that.’

  ‘You mean you haven’t discussed it with her at all? But surely—’

  ‘You try asking a kid of thirteen how she feels about having her mother knocked down and killed in front of her eyes.’

  ‘No, you try.’ Nick stared at me. ‘Look, Dad, for some reason you’ve got death on the winkle. That’s all right with me, as long as you keep it as a sort of hobby. But one can’t afford to let a hobby get out of hand, so that it stops you paying attention to what’s really important. You must talk to Amy about this business. I’ll set it up for you if you like. We could all—’

  ‘No, Nick. Not yet. I mean give me a chance to think about it first.’

  ‘Sure. But I’m going to bring it up again, if that’s all right. Or even if it isn’t all right, actually.’

  ‘It is all right.’

  Nick got up. ‘I’m buggering off now. I’m afraid I haven’t been much use to you today.’

  ‘Yes you have. Thank you for coming down, and for staying.’

  ‘A breeze. I’m afraid I’ve spent most of the time telling you what to do and what not to do.’

  ‘I probably need that.’

  ‘Yes, you do. Good night, Dad.’

  We kissed and he went. I drank more whisky. The items on my personal agenda seemed impossibly many and varied. For a time I walked about the room and stared at each of the sculptures in turn. They suggested nothing to me, and I found I could not imagine what I had ever seen in any of them, whether as works of art or as quasi-people. I heard a scratching at the door and let Victor in. He bounded past me, impelled perhaps by the fragments of some memory of having been disturbed by Nick’s passing within earshot. I stooped down and began to stroke him; he strained against my hand, purring like an old-fashioned and not very distant motor-bike. When I settled in my reading-chair by the bookshelves, he joined me, and made no objection to my using his back as a desk. The book I opened on him was the Oxford text of Matthew Arnold’s poems. I tried to read ‘Dover Beach’, which I had often thought an acceptable, if rather prettified, account of life in general. Tonight I found something too easy in its stoicism, and thatdarkling plainSwept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,Where ignorant armies clash by night,

  supposed such a grim and realistic contrast to dreams of romance, sounded quite an interesting, worth-while area to find oneself in. I made a second attempt at the poem, but this time could not follow its argument for more than a line together.

  After a little more whisky, I put the book and Victor down and walked about the room again. Father, Joyce, Underhill, Margaret, the wood creature, Amy, Diana: a novelist would represent all these as somehow related, somehow all parts of some single puzzle which some one key would somehow unlock. As it were. One—thousand—two—thousand—three— thousand—four—thousand—five—thousand—six … If nothing whatever happened before I reached a hundred, or better say two hundred, or two hundred and fifty would be a nice round number—then Joyce and I would end up with a good marriage and we would both be all right with Amy. How the first part of this hope fitted in, or failed to fit in, with the orgy project—nineteen—thousand—twenty-—thousand— twenty-one—thousand—I had no idea, and did not want to have one, and I was not much better informed about what the fulfilment of the second half would feel like. I poured more whisky-thousand—twenty-nine—thousand—thirty…

  … thousand—eighty-seven—thousand—eighty-eight—thousand … I was slowly but efficiently climbing the stairs up to the apartment. In my right hand was an empty glass, the one I had been using for some time; the little finger of my left hand was pressed against the palm, the other four digits stiffly extended. This meant a total of nearly five hundred thousand, the equivalent of over four minutes, or, assuming I had passed that total and was counting back towards the thumb, seven hundred thousand, or, of course, fifteen hundred thousand (over twenty minutes) or seventeen hundred thousand, or more. I stopped counting. I was going up to bed, but where had I been?

  My watch said ten to two. I had been downstairs for a period I could not after all measure, and could not even estimate as between half an hour or less and about two hours. Altogether, the dining-room was a good bet. I went back, opened its door and turned on the lights. In my late-night wan
derings round the house, I remembered having seen it plenty of times like this, and must in fact have seen it more often still: the heavy silk curtains drawn, the tall chairs neatly grouped in their twos and fours and sixes, most of the tables bare, those by the window laid for breakfast, the whole place looking as permanently empty as the exterior view I had had earlier from the upstairs dining-room. However, I felt certain that this was the first time tonight I had seen what I now saw.

  Feeling certain of that kind of thing is very far, in cases like mine, from being certain. I went quickly round the tables, examining them, with the self-directed sleuthing technique I had developed over the years, for traces of my own occupancy, like disarranged cutlery or a napkin unfolded to serve as a mat for my glass—I could never be (had so far never been) so drunk as to put it down on polished wood. Everything was in meticulous order, which proved either my absence or my assiduity in concealing my presence, and no more. Had I been here until just now? It seemed probable that I had, but no more probable than when I had thought it on the stairs. Had anything happened here? Yes; I felt certain, I almost was certain, that something had. What sort of thing? Something … unusual, something not only interesting in itself, but opening further possibilities. Was I ever to know what it had been?

  3: The Small Bird

  I had my answer the next morning. The first half-hour of the new day deserved to be forgotten at once. I had slept well enough for five and a half hours, without dreaming; I never dream, have not done so since I was a boy and can hardly remember what it was like. But I woke up with my heart going so irregularly that it seemed to have forgotten its business and to be treating each pulsation as a new problem that must be solved on its merits. The pain in my back lost no time in setting up an accompaniment. As I lay there beside Joyce, who as always made no sound and moved only in breathing, I reflected that neither heart nor back had drawn attention to themselves for several hours before I went to bed, and that Jack Maybury had more than once told me to arrange for plenty of things to be happening in my environment and then see if I was troubled physically. Well, he had a sort of case in point. Now, certainly, lying awake in near-darkness, I was shut up with myself in the smallest possible box.