Authors: Kingsley Amis
I put
the figure down on the desk and picked up the journal, which turned out at the
first glance to be written on the same kind of paper as the notebook I had
inspected in the Hobson Room at All Saints’; it had perhaps lain originally
between the same covers. The writing on these sheets had faded very markedly,
to a kind of washed-out mid-brown, but was still quite readable. It was a thin
sheaf of papers, no more than fourteen or fifteen in all, and the first dozen
carried nothing but agonizingly vague injunctions to the unearther of the
manuscript; stuff like
‘Bee
not impacient: all things shall be deliver’d to thee in time. Put thyself under
my Will, & thou shalt see a great Wonder. Prepare; abstain from all
spirituous Liquors & Cordials (here at least I had already started to do
my best to cooperate), takg only such Wine & small Beer as may conduce to
health. Bethink thee, that altho’ Philosophy be amiable in herself, her Aspect
is upon occasion full strange & stern …‘
And so
on. The only entry that stood out in any way from this kind of thing, inset
from the margin as though to differentiate it, to mark it perhaps as a note
from Underhill to himself (a type of communication I have shown I understand)
rather than a memorandum to me, ran as follows:
‘The
name, Fareham village. Cf. Fareham Haven in Southhamptonshire. No knowledge of
this. Quasi, far Home, sc. distant habitation, or, fair Home. Or, from the
Saxon & Gothick, feor, sc. fear. So, feorhame, quasi, the Place of Fear.’
Whatever
the rightness or wrongness of Underhill’s etymology, I found this making a
kind of sense, the same kind as my conjecture about the derivation of the name
of my house. But such theorizing belonged to an impossibly vast and remote
field of thought; I put it by and went dispiritedly on through the journal. On
its last leaf were half a dozen lines of writing, in a tumbling, scribbled hand
barely recognizable as Underhill’s.
‘My
time is nearer than I had thought. Dismiss thy Servants at once; send all from
home save thine own Family. Go not abroad thyself; see no one & keep thy chamber,
that I may find thee alone when I come to thee. Have our small Freind of Silver
by thee AT ALL TIMES—or everything will be in vain, Now, fare well, until I
shall return.’
There
was only one of these instructions that it would not be difficult to obey, but
that one was evidently the most important. Unhesitatingly, unreasoningly and
with revulsion, I picked up the figure and placed it in my left side coat
pocket, where it made an ugly bulge. That was that; what now? Preparatory to
gathering the papers together, I turned the last one over and laid it on top of
the others, noticing as I did so that it bore a couple of lines of writing.
They were in the firm, unhurried hand of the earlier pages, and read:
‘I will
wait upon thee in my Parlour at twelve of the clock, the night following thy
Discovery. See thou art alone.’
What
made me stare and rise to my feet and start trembling was not the content of
this message, but the quality of the ink: dark blue or black, not faded at all,
as if it had been put on paper that day. But how could that be?
A
powerful but (again) unreasoning sense of urgency came upon me. I must find
Lucy at once. I had heard her say that she was going to spend the afternoon …
how? Where? Yes— reading, sunbathing, in the garden. I snatched up the paper
and rushed from the office, across the hall, out of the front door and along to
the south-east corner of the house. Lucy, with Nick near her, was sitting on an
outdoors chair in the middle of the lawn. Slipping clumsily about on the thick
dry grass, and with the silver figure bumping against my hip, I ran over to
her.
‘Lucy,
look at this. The ink.’
‘What
is it?’
‘Look
at the colour of the ink. New, fresh. Isn’t it?’
‘I
don’t see—’
‘No no,
the other side, that one. That’s fresh ink, isn’t it?’
She
hesitated, finally saying, ‘It doesn’t look fresh to me,’ and handing the paper
back.
Of course
she was right. The writing on both sides was brown and faded. No amount of
hurrying, presumably, would have made any difference. He had caused it to fade,
or, more likely, he had caused it to look unfaded a minute ago. I noticed that
Lucy was wearing a navy-blue bathing-dress with the shoulder-straps pulled
down, and had a brightly-jacketed book on her lap, and was looking slightly
dazed with sun. Nick took the paper from me, glanced at it, then started to
read it. He was just wearing trunks and sandals.
‘No, it
doesn’t,’ I said, ‘now I look at it again. I don’t know what made me … It
must have been the light. It’s not very good in the office. The light. Unless
you have the light on.’
‘What’s
all this about, Dad?’ asked Nick.
‘Well,
it’s … part of a letter or something, I suppose. I found it.’
‘Where?’
‘Oh, I
was turning out an old cupboard and this had got sort of shoved underneath a
lot of stuff.’
‘How
could it have been written in fresh ink, then?’
‘I
don’t know. I just thought it looked like that.’
‘What
does it mean, this friend of silver thing, and this discovery?’
‘I
don’t know. I’ve no idea.’
‘Well,
why all the excitement? You were—’
‘It
doesn’t matter.’
A car I
recognized was turning in at the main entrance to the house, a green Mini-Cooper
belonging to the Mayburys. For a moment I thought I was going to have Jack on
my hands, with more pills and unwelcome advice; then I saw Diana in the
driving-seat, and remembered.
‘Never
mind, Nick,’ I said, recovering the paper. ‘Sorry to have bothered you. Forget
it.’
I went
back to the house, put the papers together, half dropping them in my
impatience, and locked them up again. By the time I re-emerged from the office,
Diana was coming in by the front door and Joyce descending the stairs into the
hall. Both had changed their clothes since lunch—Diana into a tan shirt and
green trousers, Joyce into a short red dress of some faintly glossy
material—and both were groomed and earringed and necklaced as if for a garden
party. When, with precision no rehearsal could have improved, we had converged
in mid-floor, neither girl made any move to kiss the other as they usually did
on meeting, an odd omission in the circumstances. Joyce seemed as tranquil as
ever, if not more so, Diana nervous or nervy, her eyes widened and blinking a
lot. There was a brief silence.
‘Well,’
I said bluffly, ‘no point in hanging about here, is there? Let’s go. I’ll lead
the way.’
I did
so. We crossed the empty sunlit yard to the annexe and went upstairs and along
a passage hung with my second-best prints. Number eight was at the end; I
unlocked it and bolted the door after us. The bed was turned down, but without
any personal belongings to be seen the room looked official and public—I
remembered waking up in that same bed one afternoon the previous summer and
thinking that it felt like lying about in a model room at a department store. I
drew the curtains. Outside there was sun and sky and the tops of trees,
everything quite motionless. I was feeling not so much excited as grateful, even
slightly incredulous, that nothing had come up to prevent our getting this far.
The two
girls looked communicatively at each other and then at me in the same way as
they had done in the bar before lunch, preparatory to accusing me of
interrupting their chat. I smiled at each of them while I tried to sort out
priorities in my mind.
‘What
do you want us to do?’ asked Diana, with just a hint of impatience in her voice
and demeanour.
‘Let’s
all take everything off for a start,’ I said.
A woman
can always beat a man to the state of nudity if she puts her mind to it, and
here were two women evidently doing so. Despite earrings and necklaces, Joyce
and Diana were embracing naked beside the bed while I was still working
urgently on my second shoe. By the time I was ready to join them, they had
thrown the covers back and were lying side by side in an even closer embrace. I
climbed in behind Diana and started kissing her shoulders and available ear and
the back of her neck, none of which seemed to make much special difference to
anybody. I found it difficult to slide my arm round under her arm, because
Joyce’s arm was thereabouts too, and impossible to touch more than the outer
side of Diana’s breast, because Joyce’s breast was against the remainder of it.
When I tried the same sort of thing at a lower level, I came across the top of
Joyce’s thigh. After that, I tried to alter the girls’ positions with a view to
setting up one of the triads of lovemaking Joyce had mentioned the previous
evening in her unvarnished way. That meant her thigh would positively have to
shift, but it stayed where it was. To get Diana on to her back was not even
worth attempting, with her inner thigh between both of Joyce’s. It is never
easy to move people about bodily unless they co-operate a bit, and neither of
these was doing so at all.
What
were they doing? Kissing repeatedly, in fact almost continuously, pressing
themselves against each other, breathing deeply, though not particularly fast.
What more? I had a totally obstructed view from where I was, but both Joyce’s
hands were in sight, one behind Diana’s head, the other at the small of her
back, and anyway their embrace had been so tight from the beginning that
neither could have been caressing the other in any way; they would have had to
draw a little apart for that, which would have afforded me an opportunity, but
I doubted very much whether either of them had bothered to think of much a
point. I told myself I was not going to give up, said so aloud, said a lot more
things, managing to stay just this side of whining and abuse, moved round the
bed to behind Joyce, and got no change there either.
There
it was, then. I stood and looked at them while they went on exactly as before,
neither speeding up nor slowing down, like people unable to foresee ever doing
anything else, even of the same general sort. How well I could remember that
feeling! Just then Diana’s hazel eye opened, moved across the drawn curtains
and me and more of the curtains without the least self-consciousness in paying
the same attention to me as to the curtains, and shut again. The thought of two
women making love can be an exciting one, but let me tell you that, when they
are as totally absorbed in each other as these two were, the actuality is
sedative. Indeed, for the moment I felt calmer than at any time during the past
few days. I blew them a kiss, rejecting the idea of kissing each of them on the
shoulder or somewhere as more trouble and no more likely to be noticed, picked
up my clothes at leisure and carried them into the bathroom.
When I
emerged dressed, Joyce was holding Diana’s head against her bosom, but
everything else was unchanged. I found the DO NOT DISTURB notice hanging on a
hook on the door and left it on the outside doorknob. When I arrived back in
the main building, it was deserted. I went into the office and stood there for
a time without being able to think of anything I wanted to do or would ever
want to do. Then I went upstairs to the dining-room and stood looking at the
titles of my books, wondering what the hell had ever possessed me to buy any of
them. Poetry, any poetry, seemed then as poignant and meaningful as a
completed crossword puzzle or Holy Writ. Books or architecture or sculpture
were books on mindless lumber, large or small. I could not imagine feeling
differently about these matters. I turned my back and reviewed my own pieces of
statuary. There was lumber all right, and in the round. I would chuck them all
out the following morning.
The
house was quiet, apart from the affected chattering of Amy’s TV set, which was
bringing her news and views of today’s sport, perhaps even highlights there from,
before getting to grips with space monsters or the yelling of pop idols and
their idolaters. The curtains were drawn back; the sunlight from outside seemed
unusually harsh and yet almost without colour. Through the side window I could
see and hear a tractor, with some red-and-green painted piece of farm equipment
in tow, approaching from the village, surrounded by a thin cloud of the dust
and small soil that had drifted across the road, together with plenty of smoke.
It passed out of view below my line of sight. As it did so, the noise it made,
while still growing louder, started slowly descending in pitch. No doubt the
driver was planning to halt directly outside my house and tinker with his
engine while he raised more noise and smoke. But something odd was happening
simultaneously to the television voice from along the passage: it too was
falling in pitch, and it was slowing down in the same ratio. This sort of thing
could happen with a gramophone whose motor had been switched
off,
and
with a tape-recorder; I did not think it could happen with a TV set. I stood
still and attended to the action of my heart while tractor and voice, in exact
step with each other, disappeared below the threshold of audibility and a total
silence supervened. I walked slowly to the front window.
The
tractor and its tow had come to rest just about where I had predicted, almost
immediately opposite me. The driver, however, had not dismounted, nor had he
made any other significant move. He had one hand on the wheel and the other was
passing a coloured handkerchief across his forehead, or rather had stopped in
the act of doing so. Round him and the vehicles there hung stationary veils of
smoke and dust, with individual motes shining minutely and steadily in the sun.
I went to the side window. Down to the left, forty or fifty yards away across
the grass, a couple of waxworks cast their shadows, the seated one with a hand
stuck out in the direction of something, probably a cup of tea, that the
standing one was offering it, and were Lucy and Nick. This time, the view from
both windows had the exact quality of a very good photograph, frozen hard but
also full of potential motion. This time was going to be different from last
time in other ways too, because I was not going to stay here and just watch
whatever it was I had been intended to watch.