Authors: Kingsley Amis
‘An
interesting point.’ I did not add that it had occurred, in a less Jamesian
form, to almost everybody who had heard this story. ‘But in that case he was
standing at the wrong window, facing away from the spot where the murders were
done to-wards a patch of woods. Nothing has ever happened there as far as I know,
nothing to do with this business anyway.’
‘I see.
Then let me turn to another consideration. In the latter part of your strange
and fascinating tale, Mr Allington, that concerning the figure of … the
revenant, I noticed that you employed the past tense, thereby … implying that
these manifestations are also a thing of the past. Is that, would that he
correct, sir?’
The old
lad’s brain could evidently work a little faster than his organs of speech. ‘Quite
correct. Nothing has been seen since I took over the house seven years ago, and
the people I bought it from, who’d had it for much longer, had never seen
anything either. They had heard that an elderly relative of a predecessor had
been frightened by what could have been Underhill’s ghost when he was a boy,
but that must have been in Victorian times. No, I’m afraid if there ever was
anything, it’s all over now.’
‘Just
so. I have read that this house has known
at least one
ghost, which
would seem to … indicate the possibility, at least, of another.’
‘Yes.
Nothing was ever actually seen of him at any stage. A few people said they used
to hear somebody walking round the outside of the house at night and trying the
doors and windows. Of course, every village must have two or three characters
who wouldn’t be averse to a bit of burglary at a place of this size if they
could find an easy entry.’
‘Did
nobody take the obvious course of looking out to see … what there might have
been to see?’
‘Apparently
not. They said they didn’t like the noise whoever it was made while he was
going round. He rustled and crackled as he moved. That’s as much sense as I’ve
been able to make of
it.’
‘And
this … person also no longer visits the scene?’
‘No.’
I spoke
a little shortly. I usually enjoyed telling all this, but tonight it seemed
silly, fully vouched for by written evidence and yet at the same time a blatant
piece of stock-in-trade. My heart was beating irregularly and uncomfortably and
I longed for another drink. My clothes were glueing themselves to me in the
damp heat, which seemed to be increasing as the evening advanced. I did my best
to listen to further inquiries, mainly about the documentary basis for my
story. These I checked by saying, untruthfully, that I had nothing of the sort
in my own possession, and that all the stuff was in the county archives in
Hertford town. The last stages of the conversation were lengthened by my
guest’s habit of pausing frequently in search of some even more roundabout way
of expressing himself than the one which had first occurred to him. Finally, a
party at the other end of the bar reached the menu stage, and to them, after
receiving a couple of paragraphs of thanks, I moved away.
By the
time I had got the new party off, dashed into the still-room thirsty and out
refreshed, done a brief tour of the dining-room in modified orderly-officer
style, agreed hypocritically that a
sauce vinaigrette
for avocado pears
had too much salt, been lavish about making this good (the tasted pears would
go very nicely into the chef’s salad at tomorrow’s lunch), turned down on the
office telephone a request for a double room that night from a drunken
Cambridge undergraduate or sociology don and given my wife, downstairs again in
a quite good sort of silver dress, a glass of Tio Pepe, it was nine twenty. We were
to dine, as usual when no major function was in the book, at ten o’clock in the
apartment. I was expecting two private guests, Dr and Mrs Maybury. Jack Maybury
was the family doctor and a personal friend, or, more precisely, somebody I
could bear to talk to. Among that tiny proportion of humanity more entertaining
than very bad television, Jack stood high. Diana Maybury made television seem
irrelevant, dull; an enormous feat.
They
arrived when I was behind the bar again, being very candid with a London museum
curator about the third most expensive claret on the list being the best value
for money. Jack, a shock-headed, bony figure in a crumpled suit of
biscuit-coloured linen, waved briefly and strode off, as usual, in the
direction of the office to tell the local telephone exchange where he was.
Diana joined my wife in the small alcove beside the fireplace. Together, they
made an impressive, rather erective sight, both of them tall, blonde and
full-breasted, but so different in other ways that they might have been chosen
for some textbook illustration showing the width of divergence among basically
similar physical types, or, more to the purpose, an X-certificate Swedish film
that would fall a long way short of sticking to straight sex. Dull would he be
of soul that would pass up the chance of taking the pair of them to bed. Their
visible differences—Diana’s slim build, light-tawny hair-colour, hazel eyes,
tanned skin and nervous demeanour alongside the strength and roundness, the
yellow and blue and pale rose, the slow, steady movements of Joyce, my wife—suggested
that there were others to be discovered, no less striking. In the past few
weeks I had made some progress towards a vital part of this objective: persuading
Diana to come to bed with me. Joyce knew nothing about this, nor about the more
ambitious plan; but as I watched them exchange a kiss of greeting in the
alcove, it was clear to me that they had always shown a subdued sexual feeling
towards each other. Or was it not really clear at all, not true, just
attractive as a fantasy?
The
museum curator, having taken my advice and saved eleven shillings on his
claret, not quite unexpectedly ordered a half-bottle of Château d’Yquem (37/6)
to go with his sweet course. I bowed approvingly, told Fred to pass the word to
the wine-waiter, mixed Diana a gin and bitter lemon, her invariable pre-dinner
drink, and carried it over. I tried for her mouth when I kissed her, but got
the side of her chin instead. There was a pause after that. Not for the first
time, the idea of chatting to these two seemed altogether less attractive than
what I had been thinking about a minute before. Jack reappeared while I was
still exploring the topic of the heat and humidity. He kissed Joyce as
unceremoniously as he had waved to me on arrival, then moved me aside. He was
supposed to be a great hammer of his female patients, but, like most men of
whom that sort of thing is said, he had on the whole a disinclination for
female society.
‘Cheers,’
he said, raising for a short space the glass of Cam-pan and soda Fred would
have served him. ‘How’s everybody, then?’
Coming
from one’s family doctor, this query went beyond mere phatic communion, and
Jack always managed to get a slight air of hostility into it. He was inclined
to be snobbish about health, implying that the lack of it sprang from some
vulgar shortcoming, to be accepted as distastefully inevitable if not actually
deplored. This probably served quite well as a form of pressure on his patients
to get better.
‘Oh,
all carrying on all right, I think.’
‘How’s
your father?’ he asked, probing one of the several weak spots in my defences,
and lighting a cigarette without taking his eyes off me.
‘About
the same. Very piano.’
‘Very
what?’ Jack just might not have heard me against the alcohol-fired roar of
other voices in the bar, but more likely he meant to rebuke me for using
frivolous diction in a solemn context. ‘What?’
‘Piano.
You know. Subdued. Not doing or saying much.’
‘You
must realize that’s to be expected at his age and in his condition.’
‘I do,
I assure you.’
‘And
Amy?’ asked Jack vigilantly, referring to my daughter.
‘Well …
she seems to be okay, as far as I can tell. Watches television a lot, plays her
pop records, all that kind of thing.’
Jack
stared into his drink, not what I would have called a very meaningful move on
the part of somebody drinking what he was drinking, and said nothing. Perhaps
he felt that what I had said was condemnatory enough without assistance from
him.
‘There’s
not much for her to do here,’ I went on defensively, ‘and she hasn’t had time
to make any real friends round about. Not that she’d have much in common with
the village kids, I imagine. And it’s the holidays, of course.’
Still
Jack said nothing. He sniffed, not altogether at physical need.
‘Joyce
has been a bit sluggish. She’s had a lot of work to do these last weeks. And
there’s this weather. In fact it’s been a pretty tiring summer for everybody.
I’m going to try and get the three of us away for a few days at the beginning
of September.’
‘What
about you?’ asked Jack with a touch of contempt.
‘I’m
all right.’
‘Are
you, by God. You don’t look it. Listen, Maurice, I won’t get a chance later—you
ought to see yourself. Your colour’s bad—yes, I know all about your not getting
much of a chance to get out, but you ought to be able to manage an hour’s walk
in the afternoons. You’re sweating excessively.’
‘Indeed
I am.’ I wiped with my handkerchief the saturated hair above my ears. ‘So would
you be if you had to charge around this damn place trying to keep your eye on
half a dozen things at once, and in this weather too.’
‘I’ve
been charging around too, and I’m not in the state you’re in.’
‘You’re
ten years younger than I am.’
‘What
of it? Maurice, what you have is alcoholic sweating. How many have you put down
already this evening?’
‘Just a
couple.’
‘Huh. I
know your couples. Couple of trebles. You’ll have another half a couple before
we go up, and at least a couple and a half after dinner. That’s well over half
a bottle, plus three or four glasses of wine and whatever you had at midday.
It’s too much.’
‘I’m
used to it. I can take it.’
‘You’re
used to it, yes. And you’ve got the remains of a first-class constitution. But
you can’t take it the way you could in the past. You’re fifty-three. You’ve
come to one of those places where the road goes sharply downhill for a bit.
It’ll go on going downhill if you carry on as you are. How have you been
feeling today?’
‘I’m
all right. I told you.’
‘Oh,
come on. How have you really been feeling?’
‘Oh …
Bloody awful.’
‘You’ve
been feeling bloody awful for a couple of months. Because you’ve been drinking
too much.’
‘The
only time I can be reasonably sure of not feeling bloody awful is a couple of
hours or so at the end of a day’s drinking.’
‘You’ll
get less sure, believe me. How’s the jactitation?’
‘Better,
I think. Yes, definitely better.’
‘And
the hallucinations?’
‘About
the same.’
What we
were referring to was less disagreeable than it may sound. A form of
jactitation, taking place round about the moment of falling asleep, is known to
almost everybody’s experience: that convulsive straightening of the leg which
is often accompanied by a short explanatory dream about stumbling, or missing
the bottom stair. In more habitual and pronounced cases, the jerking movement
may affect any muscles, including those of the face, and may occur up to a
dozen times or more before the subject finally attains sleep, or abandons the
quest for it.
At this
level of intensity, jactitation is associated with hypnagogic
(onset-of-sleep-accompanying) hallucinations. These antecede jactitation,
taking place when the subject is more fully awake, or even wide awake, but with
the eyes closed. They are not dreams. They might be described as visions of no
obvious meaning seen under poor conditions. Their nearest, or least distant,
parallel is what happens to people who have spent much of the day with their
eyes fixed on a scene that varies only within certain fixed limits, as when
travelling by car, and who find, when they close their eyes for the night, that
a kind of muted version of what they have been looking at is unrolling itself
against the inside of their eyelids; but there are large differences. The
hallucinations lack all sense of depth of frame, and there is never much in the
way of background, often none. A piece of a wall, a corner of a fireplace, a
glimpse of a chair or table is the most that can be made out; one is always
indoors, if anywhere. More important, the hallucinatory images are invariably,
so to speak, fictitious. Nothing known ever presents itself.
The
images are, on the whole, human. Out of the darkness there will appear a face,
or a face with neck and shoulders, or part of a face, or something that cannot
be precisely described, but resembles a face more closely than anything else,
perhaps seeming to move slowly or changing its expression. Also commonly seen
are other parts of the body, a buttock and thigh, a whole torso, a solitary
foot. In my case, these are often naked, but this may be the product of my own
erotic tendencies, not a necessary feature of the experience. The strange
distortions and appendages that, much of the time, accompany the recognizable
naked forms tend to diminish their erotic quality. I am not myself sexually
moved by a breast divided into segments like a peeled orange, or a pair of
thighs that converge into a single swollen knee.