Authors: Kingsley Amis
‘What
do you think?’ I asked her unwillingly.
‘No
investigation, of course. We know that’s out. Basically, I agree with Nick.
That is, I think you’d been under a certain amount of strain, you had ghosts in
your mind, you knew the story about this Underhill character, your judgment
was, let’s say, impaired by alcohol, and the lighting in the dining-room is
subdued, especially over by the window. There was somebody standing there, I’m
quite ready to believe, but a real person, a waiter or one of the customers. As
before, you thought you saw a ghost.’
‘But
the wig, and the clothes…’
‘You
filled them in out of your mind.’
‘But he
recognized me, and he smiled at me.’
‘Of
course he did. You were his boss, or else his host, and you’d just embarrassed
him slightly by calling him by the wrong name.’
‘He’d
disappeared. When I—’
‘He’d
moved away.’
Another
silence, in which I heard Magdalena enter the apartment and go into the
dining-room. I very much wanted to tell the three what had happened in the
wood, if only to dissent from Lucy’s Q.E.D., but I could think of no innocent
reason for having gone there, and anyway I had been under strain, alcohol,
etc., then too.
‘So I
imagined it,’ I said, finishing my whisky.
‘That’s
what I think,’ said Lucy, ‘but it’s only what I
think.
I could quite
easily be proved wrong.’
‘Oh,
really? How?’
‘I
could be proved wrong tomorrow, in fact any moment, by someone else seeing what
you see—though it goes without saying that if nobody else sees what you say
you see, that’s no proof you didn’t see it—or if you found out something from a
ghost you couldn’t otherwise have known about, then that would be not exactly a
proof, but it would weigh with me considerably.’
‘What
sort of thing?’
‘Well,
supposing you saw a ghost walk through what’s now part of a wall, say, but it
was a doorway or something in the past, and afterwards you found evidence of
the doorway which you’d never have found unaided. Anything like that—something
in a book, or behind a hidden panel there was no other clue to, that sort of
thing would certainly weigh with me.’
Joyce
said, ‘I must go and see to Magdalena,’ and left the room. Nick was screaming
quietly and rocking from side to side.
‘Oh, ballocks,
darling,’ he said. ‘What if something does weigh with you? Why don’t you leave
him alone and let him forget about it? Sorry, Dad, I know you’re still here.
Nobody wants to see ghosts or think they see them or whatever you prefer. Can’t
do you any good, even if it is all only in your mind—worse if it’s that, in
fact. As I said, Dad, drop it. If there’s nothing in it there’s nothing in it.
If there’s something in it, nobody with any sense would want to know.’
Putting
her hands on her knees, Lucy gave a pedagogical sigh. ‘Ghosts can’t harm you.
They aren’t
there,
as I explained earlier.’
‘You
could get driven, uh, get pretty disturbed by buggering about with that kind of
thing.’
‘That’s
up to the person. No ghost can drive anybody out of their mind, any more than a
human being can. People go out of their minds because of something about them,
inside them.’
I knew,
without looking, that Nick was making a face at his wife. Neither spoke. I said
I would go and lie down for an hour and then probably reappear for a final
drink or two and some more chat, if anybody wanted any. In the passage outside
I ran into Joyce.
‘Dinner’s
ready,’ she said. ‘I was just coming to—’
‘I
don’t want any, thank you.’
‘You
ought to eat something.’ She sounded unconvinced.
‘I’m
not hungry. I might have a bit of cheese later.’
‘All
right. Where are you off to now?’
‘Going
to have a little nap.’
‘And
then you’ll get up about the time I’m coming to bed and go and talk to Nick and
then sit on your own with the whisky-bottle until about two o’clock and
tomorrow I’ll see you at lunch and after that in the bar in the evening with
everybody else there and so on like today and yesterday and that’s what you and
I are going to do tomorrow.’
This
was a very long speech for Joyce, and was charged with resentment. I decided not
to ask her what of it, and said instead, ‘I know. I’m sorry, darling. This is a
busy time of the year.’
‘Every
time of the year is a busy time. That’s no reason why we should never see each
other.’
I
thought how pretty she looked, leaning against the wall of the passage just
next to one of my hunting prints—prettier even than Diana, her full but finely
proportioned body shown off by her blue silk dress, yellow hair smoothly piled
up to reveal her handsome ears. ‘I know,’ I said.
‘Then
do something about it I’m your business partner and housekeeper and Amy’s
stepmother and that’s it.’
‘Is it?
I make love to you too, don’t I?’
‘Sometimes.
And lots of people make love to their housekeepers.’
‘I
haven’t noticed you being a very active stepmother, I must say.’
‘I
can’t be it on my own. You and Amy have got to join in, and neither of you ever
do.’
‘I
don’t think this is the time, the right day to start—’
‘It’s
the right day of all days. If you’ve got nothing in particular to say to me
the day after your father dies, what would have to happen to make you talk? I
can’t remember the last time we … No,’ she said, catching my wrists as I
stepped forward and tried to embrace her, ‘I don’t count that. That’s not
talking.’
‘Sorry.
Well; when would you like to have a talk?’
‘Talk,
not have a talk, and when’s no good. Hopeless. There’s no time now, anyway. You
go and have your nap.’ She walked past me.
Some
talk was certainly going to be called for, I reflected, not only in order to
get Joyce into bed with Diana and me, but as prelude to that conversation. I
must start working on that first thing in the morning. Meanwhile there was work
(of an unexacting sort) to be done.
I went
into the dining-room, where four covered pots of soup stood on the table, and
moved over to the bookshelves to the left of the fireplace. Here I kept two or
three dozen works on architecture and sculpture, and a hundred or so plain
texts of the standard English and French poets, stopping chronologically well
short of our own day: Mallarmé and Lord de Tabley are my most modern
versifiers. I have no novelists, finding theirs a puny and piffling art, one
that, even at its best, can render truthfully no more than a few minor parts of
the total world it pretends to take as its field of reference. A man has only
to feel some emotion, any emotion, anything differentiated at all, and spend a
minute speculating how this would be rendered in a novel—not just the average
novel, but the work of a Stendhal or a Proust—to grasp the pitiful inadequacy
of all prose fiction to the task it sets itself. By comparison, the humblest
productions of the visual arts are triumphs of portrayal, both of the matter
and of the spirit, while verse—lyric verse, at least—is equidistant from
fiction and life, and is autonomous.
However,
the book I had come to fetch lay in none of the categories mentioned. It was
Joseph Thornton’s massive
Superstitions and Ghostly Tales of the British
Folk,
in the second edition of 1838. I took it down from the shelf, poured
myself a medium-sized Scotch (say a triple bar measure) and went and sat in my
red padded-leather bedroom armchair.
Thornton
devotes nearly three pages to Underhill in his chapter on ‘Magicians and
Conjurors’, but the greater part of the passage concerns Underhill’s alleged
reappearances in supernatural form during the century and a half or so after
his death, together with an account of that other being said to have been heard
making its rustling, crackling progress round the outside of the house after
dark. The treatment of the murders and their aftermath is less full; through
lack of time or sheer absence of surviving evidence, as opposed to just talk,
Thornton failed to establish any tangible link between Underhill and the two
unsolved killings, and had to be content with recording the strength and
persistence of the tradition—among people in Baldock and Royston as well as in
the surrounding hamlets—that the man had acquired the ‘mysterious and evil art’
of striking from a distance at those foolhardy enough to cross him, ‘of causing
his victims to be torn to pieces by hands that were not mortal, so that a
villager would not pass his house, by day no more than by night, for dread that
the nefarious Doctor’s eye would light upon him and find in him a fresh object
of fear or hate.’
With no
clear idea of what I was looking for, I read inattentively through the four or
five long paragraphs, or rather reread them for the dozenth time. Then,
towards the end, I came to a couple of sentences I could not remember even
having seen before:
‘…
Such were the events attending the obsequies of this infamous
creature, for such I hold him to have been at the least, whatever be the truth
of the copious testimonies to his wizardry. His effects, whether by chance or
by malignity, appear to have been dispersed: the greater proportion of his
books and papers suffered destruction at a fire on his premises (for which I
can find no cause adduced) the second day following his death; some small
part, at his own request, was buried with his person; a fragment of a journal
survives in the library of his college, All Saints’ at Cambridge. Of this relic
it should be said, that it is not worth the pain of perusal, save by him whose
curiosity in the manners of that still barbarous age may be sufficient to abate
his natural aversion from the task.’
I
thought I saw something faintly odd about the last part of this. Why should
Thornton, normally keen to infect his readers with his own enthusiasms, to the
extent of (perhaps too often) exhorting them to go and look up his sources for
themselves, have mentioned this bit of journal, together with its location, and
then warned them off taking the trouble to ‘peruse’ it? Well, any mystery here
might easily be cleared up tomorrow. If that Underhill manuscript had been in
the All Saints’ library in the early nineteenth century, there was a good
chance that it was there still. Anyway, I was going to drive to Cambridge in
the morning and find out. I could not have said why I was immediately so
determined to do this.
Between
the pages of the
Superstitions
concerned with Underhill, I used to keep
a few papers relating to him that had ‘come with the house’, chiefly Victorian
local-newspaper cuttings of no great interest, but including a statement made
by a servant at an earlier period. In the past, I had dismissed this too as
dull, and had not looked at it for four or five years, but now I felt it was
important to me. I unfolded the stained, dry single sheet.
‘I,
Grace
Mary Hedger,
chamber maid in the service of
Samuel Roxborugh, Esquire,
being
xlix yrs of age, & a
Christian,
do solemly avouch and declare, that
yesterday evening, the third day of March, Aº D. MDCCLX, at about v o clock, I enterd
the little parlour [then part of what was now the public dining-room] about my
tasks, & there saw a Gentleman standing near the window. His cloathes somwhat
like the cloathes of old Rev
d
Mr
Millinship
I saw when I was
a young girl. His complection very pale, but scarrd w
th
red, his
nose long & turnd to the side, his mouth like a woman’s. He apeard in distress
of mind. When I asked him his pleasure he was there no longer, he did not quit
the chamber, of a sudden he was not there. I was much affrighted & shreikd
& swoond & my mistress came to me. I would not see such a Gentelman
again for an hunderd poun. All this I swear.’
Grace
Mary had added a careful signature and somebody called William Totterdale,
rector of the parish, who had obviously written out the statement, had been a
witness. Between them they had put my mind at ease, on one matter anyhow: the
three accurately expressed facial details were enough on their own, without the
reference to a kind of clerical garb to which the nearest parallel in Grace’s
experience would have been what she remembered having seen an old clergyman
wearing in the 1720s. I drank to her and blessed her for her powers of
observation and recall.
Through
no fault of hers, on the other hand, her service to me was limited. I could not
tell Lucy or anyone else, including myself, that I had not read the affidavit
before. It was possible—I disbelievingly supposed it to be just possible—that
my earlier couple of readings had impressed the facts on some buried part of my
mind, from which something had dredged them up to create an illusion. What that
particular something might have been was in itself mysterious, because any
thought of Underhill’s ghost I had about my mind at the time had also been
pretty deeply buried, but that sort of problem is no problem in an
unphilosophical age in which lack of total disproof is taken as the larger
half of proof.
I had
refolded Grace’s statement and was about to close the book on it and the other
papers, when my eye fell on another passage of Thornton’s I had forgotten, more
precisely on a single phrase in brackets in the middle of his account of the
unseen nocturnal prowler: ‘which some suspect to have been the Doctor’s agent’.
At once I saw what I should have seen earlier, or had seen without knowing what
it was I saw. The witness who had disagreed about the expression on the face of
Underhill’s ghost had not really disagreed at all: they had seen him as he had
been in life at different times, separated perhaps by a matter of seconds. He
had had a look of clinical curiosity as he waited to find out just what sort of
creature he had conjured up out of the wood, and this look had changed to one
of horror when it came into his view on its way to tear his wife or his enemy
to pieces. And this creature, or its phantom, had somehow not been fully laid
to rest at Underhill’s death, had from time to time tried to find its way into
its former controller’s house-—for further instructions? And it had made the
sound of moving branches and twigs and leaves as it walked because that was
what it consisted of. And if I had been able to wait long enough in the copse
that afternoon, I would have seen it too; it, or its phantom.