Authors: Kingsley Amis
The
whole left half of my body, including arm and leg, shook emphatically to and
fro four times. My immediate thought was that I had now started to experience
jactitation while fully conscious, and this filled me with fear, until I realized
that I had merely shivered from fear, the double fear I had already felt at
lunch-time, fear both of what had come into my mind and of the fact that it had
done so and was going to stay there. I did not know anybody well enough, I
could not imagine anybody knowing anybody well enough, to be able to tell him
or her a tale like this. Perhaps I would have found this a less unlikely
concept if I had not recently passed from being a notorious drunk to being a
notorious drunk who had begun to see things, but I doubt it. Anyway, I was
going to have to deal with this myself, without any clear idea of what this was
or what dealing with it would entail. Thought was going to be necessary: that
much could be glimpsed. I tried to do some thinking now, and got to the point
of perceiving that the reason why Thornton had found no clear link, almost no
link at all, between Underhill and the wood creature was that he had never
visited the copse (or, if he had, whatever conditions had been operating six
hours ago had been absent then). That was the farthest I could go for the
moment. I felt I had had enough of my own company for a bit, whatever the
disadvantages of swelling the number. I went to the bathroom, washed briefly,
threw some after-shave lotion round my face to vie the fumes of whisky and set
off down to the bar.
I was
back up again in half an hour, after chatting with a couple of businessmen from
Stevenage and a young farmer from round about who was rich enough to be doing
his farming on purpose, so to speak. As I remounted the stairs, I found I had
forgotten every word of the conversation, not by way of the instant-amnesia
process I had had the benefit of twice earlier, but owing to that alcohol-fuelled
unmemorability that does something to make middle age less intolerable, however
coarsely tuned it may become with use. On the landing I was ready for an
appearance of the woman with auburn hair, presumably Underhill’s wife, and a
tractable spectre by local standards; but she was not to be seen. Then,
finally, just at the apartment door, I had a moment of simple selfish joy at
the memory of what had happened in the hollow by the wood, and in that moment
experienced a genuine hallucination, wonderfully and purely tactile, of Diana’s
naked flesh against my own. It has never surprised me that some men should try
to beat Don Juan’s traditional total, only that more do not. Seduction is the
unique sensual act; other pleasures, including sex
per se,
are mere
activities, durative and repetitive. Each particular seduction is a final and
unchangeable thing, a part of history, like a century before lunch or a winning
try (few of which carry the bonus of orgasm). And a sculpture can become
nothing but a stale grotesque, a poem lose all its edge, but nothing of the
sort can happen to what you got up to that night with the princess or the
barmaid.
In the
dining-room, the three of them were sitting over coffee. No drink had been so
much as poured. While they struggled with the silence that had arisen at my
entry, I got myself a glass of claret and started on some bread and a piece of
Cheddar. In an under-rehearsed way, Nick said casually that, since he happened
to have brought a bit of work with him and nothing was going on at the
university, he would—if convenient, and only if—welcome the chance of a couple
of days off from young Josephine, who was teething again, and stay on for the
funeral. Lucy would return for this occasion, if that was all right, but
meanwhile intended to go back home the following morning. I said that that and
everything else would be all right.
Outside,
I could hear men and women coming out of my house, standing about and
chattering, getting into their cars and driving away, a series of sounds that
always filled me with momentary animation and sadness and unconsidered envy. In
the room, tonight as every night, the old Roman, the Elizabethan boys, the
French officers and the French girl looked better than by day, more assimilated
into the rest of the environment, though no less to be felt as presences. The
humidity seemed to have increased again; at any rate, there was sweat on my
forehead and at the roots of my hair.
Joyce
said, ‘Isn’t it incredible to think that last night Gramps was just as much
alive as any of us?’ She was never one to be put off a disturbing remark merely
by its obviousness.
‘I
suppose it is,’ I said. ‘But it’s not the sort of thing anybody spends much
time trying to take in, even in a situation like this, where you’d imagine none
of us would be able to get our minds off it. That’s what’s really incredible.
And I honestly can’t see why everybody who isn’t a child, everybody who’s
theoretically old enough to have understood what death means, doesn’t spend all
his time thinking about it. It’s a pretty arresting thought, not being
anything, not being anywhere, and yet the world still being here. Simply having
everything stopping for ever, not just for millions of years. And getting to
the point where that’s all there is in front of you. I can imagine anyone
finding themselves thoroughly wrapped up in that prospect, especially since
it’s where we’re going to get to sooner or later, and perhaps sooner. Of
course, it’s not really true to say that that’s all that’s going to be in front
of you. There are all sorts of other things thrown in, like waiting to see the
doctor, and fixing up to have a test, and waiting for the test, and waiting for
the result of the test, and fixing up another test, and waiting for that, and
waiting for that result, and going in for a period of observation, and being
kept in, and waiting for the operation, and waiting for the anaesthetist, and
waiting to hear what they found, and waiting for the second operation, and
waiting to hear how that went, and being told they can unfortunately do nothing
radically curative but naturally all measures will be taken to prolong life and
alleviate suffering, and that’s where you
start.
A long way to go from
there before you get to the first lot of things that are turning up for the
last time, like your birthday and going away and going out to dinner, and then
the rest of those things, like going out anywhere and going downstairs and
getting into bed and waking up and lying down and shutting your eyes and
beginning to feel drowsy. And that’s where you start, too.’
‘It
doesn’t happen like that to everybody by any means,’ said Joyce.
‘No, I
quite agree for some people it’s much worse. And I’m leaving out things like
pain. But for most of us it’s either what I’ve said or it’s like what happened
to my father. With reasonable care and a hell of a lot of luck you might last
another ten years, or five years, or two years, or six months, but then of
course again on the other hand as I’m sure you’ll appreciate trying to be
completely objective about the matter you might not. So in future, if there is
any, every birthday is going to have a lot of things about it that make it feel
like your last one, and the same with every evening out, and after four of your
five years or five of your six months the same with most things, up to and
including getting into bed and waking up and the rest of it. So whichever way
it turns out, like my father or like the other lot, it’s going to be difficult
to feel you’ve won, and I don’t know which is worse, but I do know there’s
enough about either of them to make you wish you could switch to the other for
a bit. And it’s knowing that every day it’s more and more likely that one or
the other of them will start tomorrow morning that makes the whole business so
riveting.’
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?’