The Green Man (10 page)

As I
soon found when I lay down with her, it was the top half of that body that most
appealed to her. In some important ways, she had sexual and aesthetic right on
her side. However attractive a woman’s face may be when she has her clothes on,
it is much more so when she is naked; then, sometimes only then, it becomes the
most attractive part of her. Throat, shoulders and upper arms, not to speak of
breasts, are all individual or at least personal; below the waist, there is a
massive lack of detail and a small amount of mere anatomy. I worked on Diana’s
principle for some time, with her unqualified and often noisy approval. But
eventually there had to come the start of the accelerating swing to anatomy
and, in every sense, to lack of detail. Diana’s pleasure abated at once.

At this
point I saw (just) that I had a choice. I could perhaps return as far as
possible to what she so obviously enjoyed most, while nearly—but not
quite—stopping what I had just started on my own account: a sort of sexual
equivalent of uninterruptedly performing a piano sonata and at the same time
lunching off a plate of sandwiches. Or, without any effort at all, I could
forget about her and, more important, forget about myself. That afternoon, I
wanted this release even more than usual, but on the other hand I wanted to end
up with a satisfied and grateful Diana—if there was any such thing—more yet.
So I chose the first alternative, in fact improved on it by metaphorically
playing a demanding coda, full of ornamentation and difficult runs in both hands,
that went on quite a long time after the disappearance of the last sandwich.
(They had been good sandwiches, anyway, as sandwiches go.)

I moved
the minimum distance away. Diana peered at me. Her face was flushed and looked
swollen round the eyes and mouth.

‘Oh
God,’ she said, ‘lovely. There was so much of it. Wish I could remember it all.
I don’t know how I felt.’

‘You
were beautiful. You are beautiful.’

She
smiled and looked away, down at herself. Soon she stopped sprawling and
lolling, drew in her chin, crossed her legs and pushed herself up into a half-sitting
position. When she looked at me again, her eyes were side, the swollen look had
almost faded into her familiar expression of faint anxiety touched with
pertness.

‘Maurice,’
she said now, ‘that was ab-so-lute-ly terr-i-fic. I don’t know
how
…
you do it. Was it nice for you? You certainly deserved it to be.’

‘It was
splendid.’.

I put
my arms round her again and briefly ran over some of the main points treated in
depth earlier, but this time in a lofty, impartial spirit, just underlining the
essential continuity of how I felt about her attractions. After a few minutes,
I said,

‘Diana.’

‘Yes?’

‘Diana,
have you ever been to bed with more than one person? At the same time, I mean.’

‘Maurice,
really … Well yes, I have, actually. Years ago now. Before I met Jack.’

‘Was it
fun? It was two men, I suppose?’

‘Maurice
…
Yes, it was two men. If
you could call them men. I thought I was the one it was going to be all about,
but they were only really interested in each other. They went on taking it in
turns to be in the middle, and what they wanted me to do wasn’t very nice. I
got totally and completely bored and simply left them to it. It was all quite
ghastly. But—’

‘I’m
sure it was. But it would be quite different if you—’

‘You
mean you and Joyce.’

‘Well,
yes. She’s always—’

‘Maurice,
you’re not to be furious with me, because I know you often are, but I must ask
you something. What makes you even think of a thing like that? It’s all so
frightfully unnecessary. Could it be that you really are getting old? I want to
ask you something else. Can I?’

‘Ask
away.’

‘Well …
how often do you and Joyce make love? On the average?’

‘I
don’t know. Once a week, perhaps. Sometimes not as much.’

‘There
you are. You want to sort of spice it all up in a horrid way. You’ve got a
lovely young wife who absolutely adores you, but you have to go for me as well,
and even then that’s not enough for you. It’s like, you know, boots and transparent
macks and typing-up and things.’

‘Sorry,
Diana. Forget all about it. I’ve made a mistake. I thought you were the sort of
person I could ask that. I’m sorry.

‘What
sort of person do you mean?’

‘Well,
eager for new experience, new sensations. Somebody who wants to … extend
their awareness.’ (Her head was safely on my shoulder, where she could not meet
my eyes.) ‘Somebody who’s interested in everything, and also interesting in
all kinds of—’

‘Maurice,
when did I say I wasn’t interested? I was just jolly fascinated to know why you
wanted to do it. Isn’t that what I asked you?’

‘Sorry,
yes, it was. Of course. And, you know, it wouldn’t be like the time with the
two chaps. I do exactly what you love having done, don’t I?’ (Here I made a
short allusion-in-action to some of this.) ‘Don’t I, darling?’

‘Oh
yes. Yes, you do.’

‘And
Joyce thinks you’re the most stunning creature she’s ever—’

‘Does
she? What does she say?’

‘Oh,
that she can understand what lesbians are on about when she looks at you, and
she’d love to find out if that figure’s real, and all that. And you see, Diana
darling, you’d be the complete centre of attraction. After all, Joyce and I are
used to each other these days, you know what I mean, but with you we’d both—’

‘Have
you mentioned it to her?’

‘Not
yet.’

‘Well,
don’t until we’ve talked about it again. Maurice…’

‘Yes?’

‘What
else does Joyce say about me?’

I
produced some more exaggerations or inventions—Joyce certainly admired Diana’s
looks, but the amorous part of that admiration, if any, I knew nothing about.
What I said was unmemorable enough but effective. Diana began breathing deeply,
then squaring and relaxing her shoulders as she did so. I moved in.

A
little later, fully dressed and savouring the relief that this brings in any
adulterous circumstance, I obeyed Diana’s command to disappear for five
minutes and climbed out of the hollow, which I found I had not until then
thought of as a place in any full sense. Even the criss-cross pattern of
indentations the grass had made on my forearms and knee-caps, noticeable as I
put my clothes on, had been no reminder that we had actually been lying on and
among grass, and the scene outside, the brambles, the sandy, stony banks and
the trees farther off, had been on the edge of non-existence. Now all this, in
the duller light from an overcast sky, settled into position. I strolled along
the track towards the woods into which it disappeared. The air was thick and
sultry, without any breeze. When I had walked a hundred yards, I turned off in
the direction of the road, firstly to have a pee, secondly to establish, in an
idle, time-filling way, just where I was in relation to my house. I moved up
the ridge, skirting the more thickly-grown area, mostly oak and ash with a
scattering of holly, hazel and elder, which I took to be the copse that could
be seen from the front of the building: I had never wandered up as far as this
before.

The
going was difficult, with slippery tussocks of grass, patches of crumbling soil
and here and there holes in the ground a foot or more deep. As I neared the
crest, there appeared the slender chimney-pots of the Green Man, the shallow
tiled slopes of the roofs, finally the main body of the house and the
outbuildings. The annexe containing the guest bedrooms was hidden by the bulk
of the original inn. As I stood there, an inconspicuous figure, no doubt,
against the taller hillside behind me, I saw a car approach and turn into the
yard (possibly the Cambridge party who had booked by telephone the previous
day), and then somebody standing at one of the dining-room windows and looking
in my general direction. Whoever it was—one of the waiters, I assumed, in an
interval of laying for dinner—could scarcely have seen me, but there was no
point in an unnecessary risk. I turned to retrace my steps, then noticed a
rough path leading through the wood towards the track. This would take me some
dozens of yards out of my way, but would be preferable to the scrambling,
stumbling route I had followed a minute before. I started along the path.

Immediately
I felt very frightened indeed. At first—if it makes any sense to say so—this
did not alarm me. I am well acquainted with causeless fear, with the apparently
random onset of all the standard symptoms, from accelerated pulse and breathing
to tingling at the nape of the neck and rear part of the scalp, sudden profuse
sweating and a strong desire to cry out. Then, as my heart went into a
prolonged stumbling tremor, the concomitants of fear, in themselves no more
than very disagreeable, seemed to bring fear itself. I halted on the path. For
a few more seconds I wondered if I were really about to die, but soon after
that I became certain that whatever was going to happen was outside me. What it
might be, or where, I could not imagine. Something frightening, yes; something
monstrous, so monstrous that the mere fact of it, its coming to pass at all,
would be harder to bear than its actual menace to me personally. My head began
to tremble uncontrollably. I heard, or thought I heard, a whispering sound like
the wind through grasses, saw, had no doubt that I saw, the growth of ivy on a
near-by oak ripple and turn its leaves to and fro, as if in the wind, but there
was no wind. Just beyond this, I saw a shadow move in a thicket, but I knew
there was nobody else in the wood, and there was no sun. This was the place
that Underhill’s ghost had been seen watching, and what had terrified him was
here. With a sharp snap, one of the fronds of a large fern growing beside the
path detached itself from its root, turning over and over like a leaf in a
squall as it moved fitfully towards the thicket where the shadow had appeared.
I did not wait to see if it was still there, but ran headlong down the path,
through the wood and out of it on to the track I had walked up five minutes
before, and down it again to where Diana sat smoking a cigarette on the edge of
the hollow.

At my
approach, she turned her head with a display of grace which faltered when she
looked at me. ‘What’s the matter? Why the great gallop? You’re—’

‘Come
on,’ I said, panting. I must have shouted it.

‘What’s
the matter? Are you ill? What’s the matter?’

‘All
right. Got to go. Now—’

Diana
did no more than look genuinely alarmed while I got us into the truck, turned
it unhandily round and drove as fast as possible down the track to the road.
There, I turned away from the village. After about a mile, I found a field of
pasture with an open gate and parked just inside. I had got my breath back and
had stopped trembling, had been frightened only in retrospect ever since
leaving that wood. But that was how I felt still. I opened the dashboard
cupboard—yes, there was a half-bottle of Scotch, nearly full. I saw in passing
that I had thought to mix a bit of water in for reasons of taste. I drank it
all.

I
realized that I would have to think of something to say to Diana, who had gone
on sitting unnaturally quiet beside me, but my mind was a blank. I began to
talk in the hope that words would bring ideas.

‘Sorry
about that. I suddenly felt absolutely terrible. I had to get away from that
place. I don’t know what it was, I just felt awful.’

‘Ill,
you mean?’

‘Not
exactly. No, not ill. Just … No, I can’t describe it, I’m afraid. Some sort
of neurotic thing, I suppose. Anyway, it’s over now.’

‘Maurice.’
For once she sounded sincerely diffident about what was to follow her operating
call-sign.

‘Yes,
Diana?’

‘Maurice
… tell me one thing frankly. This isn’t a way of letting me know you don’t
want to have anything more to do with me in this kind of way, is it?’

‘A
what? How could it be that?’

‘Well,
you might have decided it made you feel too awful, guilt and so on, and so you
piled it on and made it into a sort of dizzy spell as a way of saying it was
all too much for you.’ (No diffidence now.) ‘Because I suppose what you really
mean is I didn’t do the right things for you or something.’

This, I
reflected, from a woman who, three minutes earlier, had been showing every sign
of real concern about another person. ‘Of course not. Nothing like that, I
assure you.’

‘Because
if you think I’m not good enough for you or something it’s better if you say
so straight away.’

‘If
that’s what you’re afraid of,’ I said furiously, ‘it must be because I’m not
good enough for you, whatever I do. Do you imagine I make love like that every
day?’

She
blinked her eyes and twitched her mouth and shoulders for a short while as
evidence of internal conflict. Then she smiled and touched my hand.

‘I’m
sorry, Maurice. I suddenly went into the most ghastly panic. I somehow got the
idea you didn’t like me at all. The most frightful sense of insecurity. Women
get that, you know. Well, some women do, anyway. There was simply nothing I
could do about it, honestly.’