The Green Man

1: The Red-haired Woman

No sooner has one gone over one’s surprise
at finding a genuine coaching inn less than 40 miles from London—and 8 from the
MI—than one is marvelling at the quality of the equally genuine English fare
(the occasional disaster apart!). There has been an inn on this site since the Middle
Ages, from which parts of the present building date; after some 190 years of
service as a dwelling its original function and something of its original
appearance, were restored in 1961. Mr Allington will tell its story to the
interested (there is, or was, at least one ghost) and be your candid guide
through the longish menu. Try the eel soup (6/-), pheasant pie
(15/6),
saddle
of mutton and caper sauce (17/6), treacle roil
(5/6).
Wine list short,
good (except for white Burgundies), a little expensive. Worthington E. Bass,
Whitbread Tankard on draught. Friendly, efficient service. No children’s
prices.

CI. Su L. Must Book L; F, Sa & Su D.
Meals
12.30-3; 7-10.30.
Alc
main dishes
12/6
to 25/-. Seats 40. Car park. No dogs. B&B  from
42/6.

Class A

App.
Bernard Levin; Lord Norwich; John Dankworth; Harry Harrison;
Wynford Vaughan-Thomas; Dennis Brogan; Brian W. Aldiss; and many others.

The point about white
Burgundies is that I hate them myself. I take whatever my wine supplier will
let me have at a good price (which I would never dream of doing with any other
drinkable). I enjoyed seeing those glasses of Chablis or Pouilly Fuissé, so
closely resembling a blend of cold chalk soup and alum cordial with an additive
or two to bring it to the colour of children’s pee, being peered and sniffed
at, rolled round the shrinking tongue and forced down somehow by parties of young
technology dons from Cambridge or junior television producers and their girls.
Minor, harmless compensations of this sort are all too rare in a modern
innkeeper’s day.

In
fact, most of my trade did come either from London or the twenty-odd miles from
Cambridge, with a little more from the nearest Hertfordshire towns. I got the
occasional passer-by, of course, but not as many as my colleagues on the A10 to
the east of me and the A505 to the north-west. The
A595
is a mere sub-artery
connecting Stevenage and Royston, and although I put up a sign on it the day I
opened, not many transients ever bothered to turn off and try to find the Green
Man in preference to using one of the pubs directly beside the main road. All
right with me, that. About my only point of agreement with John Fothergill, the
buckle-shoed posturer who had the Spread Eagle in Thame when I was a boy and
founded a reputation and a book on being nasty to his, guests, is lack of
warmth towards the sort of people who use two halves of bitter and two tomato
juices as a quadruple ticket to the lavatories and washbasins. The villagers
from Fareham itself, and from Sandon and Mill End, each of the two about a mile
away, were obviously a different matter. They put back their pints steadily and
quietly in the public bar, filling it at week-ends, and had an agreeable short
way with dinner-jacketed seekers after rustic atmosphere or the authentic life
of the working class.

The
locals, with some assistance from the various hearty young men who came in to
dine, got through plenty of beer, as much as a couple of dozen tens of bitter a
week in the summer. Whatever might be said about its prices, the wine too went
quickly enough. Refusing, as I have always done, to offer any but
fresh
meat,
vegetables and fruit, poses a daily transport problem. All this, together with
keeping up stocks of salt and metal-polish flowers and toothpicks, takes a good
deal of arranging. One way and another, I used to spend a good two or three
hours of almost every day out of my house. But this could be less than a
hardship to a man with a newish second wife, a teenaged daughter by a first
marriage and an ancient and decrepit father (apart from a staff of nine) to be
variously coped with.

Last
summer, in particular, would have taxed a more hardened and versatile coper
than me. As if in the service of some underground anti-hotelier organization,
successive guests tried to rape the chambermaid, called for a priest at 3 a.m.,
wanted a room to take girlie photographs in, were found dead in bed. A party of
sociology students from Cambridge, rebuked for exchanging obscenities at
protest-meeting volume, poured beer over young David Palmer, my trainee
assistant, and then staged a sit-in. After nearly a year of no worse than
average conduct, the Spanish kitchen porter went into a heavy bout of Peeping
Tom behaviour, notably but not at all exclusively at the grille outside the
ladies’ lavatory, attracted the attention of the police and was finally
deported. The deep-fat fryer caught fire twice, once during a session of the
South Hertfordshire branch of the Wine and Food Society. My wife seemed lethargic,
my daughter withdrawn. My father, now in his eightieth year, had another
stroke, his third, not serious in itself but not propitious. I felt rather
strung up, and was on a bottle of Scotch a day, though this had been standard
for twenty years.

One
Wednesday about the middle of August reached a new level. In the morning there
had been trouble with the repatriated voyeur’s successor, Ramón, who had
refused to pile and burn the rubbish on the grounds that he had already had to
do the breakfast dishes. Then, while I was picking up the tea, coffee and such
at the dry-goods warehouse in Baldock, the ice-maker had broken down. It never
performed with much conviction in hot weather, and the temperature most of
that week was in the upper seventies. An electrician had to be found and
fetched. Three sets of hotel guests with four young children between them, no
doubt under orders from anti-hotelier HQ, turned up from nowhere between
5.30
and
5.40.
My wife succeeded almost totally in blaming this on me.

Later,
having settled my father in front of the open drawing-room window with a weak
Scotch-and-water, I came out of our apartment on the upper storey to find
somebody standing, back turned to me, near the stairhead. I took this person for
a women in an evening dress rather heavy for a humid August evening. There was
no function in the banqueting chamber, the only public room on that floor,
until the following week, and our apartment was clearly marked as private.

With my
best offensive suavity, I said, ‘Can I help you. madam?’

Instantly,
but without a sound, the figure turned to face me. I vaguely saw a pale,
thin-lipped face, heavy auburn ringlets and some kind of large bluish pendant
at the throat. Much more clearly than this, I sensed a surprise and alarm that
seemed disproportionate: my arrival on the landing could hardly have been
inaudible to one only twenty feet away, and it was obvious enough who I was.

At that
moment my father called to me, and without thinking I looked away.

‘Yes,
Father?’

‘Oh,
Maurice … could you send up an evening paper? The local one will do.’

‘I’ll
get Fred to bring one up.’

‘Soon,
if you would, Maurice, and if Fred’s free.’

‘Yes,
Father.’

This
took no more than a dozen seconds, but when they were over the landing was
empty. The woman must have decide to cut short her display of heightened
sensitivity and pursue her search on the ground floor. No doubt she was more
successful there, for I saw nothing of her as I came down the stairs, crossed
the few feet of hall and entered the front bar.

This
long, low room, with small windows revealing the thickness of its outer wall,
and normally cool and dry in summer, was stickily oppressive that evening.
Fred Soames, the barman, had the fans going, but as I joined him behind the
counter and waited for him to finish serving a round of drinks, I could feel
sweat trickling down under my frilled shirt and dinner-jacket. I was uneasy
too, and not just in my habitual unlocalized way. I was bothered by something
about the appearance or demeanour of the woman I had seen on the landing,
something it was now too late to define. Even less reasonably, I felt certain
that, when my father called to me, he had changed his mind about what he wanted
to say. I could not imagine what his original thought had been, and, again, I
would not now be able to find out. His memory in such cases extended over
seconds only.

I sent
Fred off with the paper, served, in his absence, three medium sherries and
(with concealed distaste) a lager and lime, and took a party of early diners
through the menu, pushing the rather boring salmon and some incipiently
elderly pork a little less gently than the
Good Food Guide
might have approved.
After that, a visit to the kitchen, where David Palmer and the chef had
everything under control, including Ramón, who assured me that he was not now
desiring to return to Espain. Then, a call at the tiny office under the angle
of the main staircase. My wife was listlessly working her way through the
bills, but lost some of her listlessness (she never seemed to lose quite all of
it) on being told to forget all that crap for now and go up and change. She
even gave me a hasty kiss on the ear.

Returning
to the bar by way of the still-room, where I swallowed down a very large
Scotch put there for me by Fred, I did some more takings-through the menu. The
last of the batch was an elderly couple from Baltimore, on their way to Cambridge
in search of things historical and breaking their journey at my house to take
in a few of the same, or similar. The man, a retired lawyer, had evidently been
doing his homework, not a testing task in this instance. Periphrastically but
courteously, he inquired after our ghost, or ghosts.

I went
into the routine, first piously turning down a drink. The main one was somebody
called Dr Thomas Underhill who lived here in the later seventeenth century. He
was in holy orders, but he wasn’t the parson of the parish; he was a scholar
who for some reason gave up his Cambridge fellowship and bought this place.
He’s buried in that little churchyard just up the road, but he nearly didn’t
get buried at all. He was so wicked that when he died the sexton wouldn’t dig a
grave for him, and the local rector refused to officiate at his funeral. They
had to get a sexton from Royston, and a clergyman all the way from Peterhouse
in Cambridge. Some of the people round about said that Underhill had killed his
wife, whom he used to quarrel with a lot, apparently, and he was also supposed
to have brought about the death of a farmer he’d had trouble with over some
land deal.

‘Well,
the odd thing is that both these people were murdered all right, half torn to
pieces, in fact, in the most brutal way, but in both cases the bodies were
found in the open, at almost the same spot on the road to the village, although
the murders were six years apart, and on both occasions it was established
beyond doubt that Underhill was indoors here at the time. The obvious guess is
that he hired chaps to do the job for him, but they were never caught, nobody
even saw them, and the force used on the victims, they say, was
disproportionate for an ordinary commercial killing.

‘Anyway,
Underhill, or rather his ghost, turned up quite a few times at a window in
what’s now part of the dining-room, peering out and apparently watching
something. All the witnesses seem to have been very struck by the expression
on his face and his general demeanour, but, according to the story, there was a
lot of disagreement about what he actually looked like. One chap said he
thought Underhill was behaving as if he were terrified out of his wits. Someone
else thought he was showing the detached curiosity of a man of science
observing an experiment. It doesn’t sound very consistent, does it? but
then…’

‘Could
it not be, Mr Allington, could it not be that this … apparition was engaged,
if one might so put the matter, in … surveying the actuality of the crimes,
or the, the shadow of the actuality of the crimes he had brought to pass, and
that the various observers were witnessing successive stages in his reaction
to the spectacle of brutal violence, from … clinical disinterest to horror,
and it might be, agonized remorse?’