The Green Man (3 page)

From
all this, it might be thought that the hypnagogic hallucination is something to
be feared. To an extent this is so, but (in my case) the various images, though
frequently grotesque or puzzling, have not much power to terrify. And, as
against the times when an unremarkable profile suddenly turns full face and
glares in lunatic rage, or becomes quite inhuman, there are the rarer times
when something beautiful shows itself clearly, in a small flare of soft yellow
light, before fading into nothing, into the state of a vanished fiction. What
is most unwelcome about these visions is the expectation of the jerks and
twitches, the joltings into total wakefulness and the delaying of sleep, which
they always portend.

I
looked briefly ahead now to this prospect as Jack and I stood talking in the
bar, which had begun to fill up with the first guests out of the dining-room
and people from the nearer places who had driven over for the later half of the
evening. I said to Jack,

‘I
suppose you’re going to tell me all that stuff is due to drink’

‘There’s
a connection all right.’

‘Last
time we talked about this you said there was a connection with epilepsy. You
can’t have it both ways.’

‘Why
not, if it is both ways? Anyway, the epilepsy thing is a technicality. I can’t
tell you you’ll never have an epileptic fit, any more than I can tell you
you’ll never break your leg, but I can tell you there’s no sign of it at the
moment. Another thing I can tell you, though, is that there’s a bloody sight
more than a technical connection between your drinking and your jumps and
faces. Stress. It’s all stress.’

‘Alcohol
relieves stress.’

‘At
first. Look, come off it, Maurice. After twenty years on the bottle you don’t
need me to lecture you about vicious circles and descending spirals and
what-not. I’m not asking you to cut it out completely. That wouldn’t be a good
idea at all. Knock it off a bit. Try keeping away from the hard stuff until the
evening. You’d better start that soon if you feel like seeing sixty. But I
don’t want you sitting there upstairs like a death’s head at the feast, so
forget about it for tonight. Go and throw down another of your specials and
then trot round the dining-room apologizing for the bits of dogshit in the
steak-and-kidney pudding while I chat up these birds.’

I did
approximately as I had been told, finally getting away rather later than
expected by reason of a full-length oral review of my cuisine, delivered at
the speed of one addressing a large audience of high-grade mental defectives,
from my Baltimore guest. After hearing this out, and responding in appropriately
rounded periods, I took my departure and went up to the flat.

The
sound of an authoritative and rather peevish male voice, speaking with a strong
Central European accent, was coming from my daughter’s bedroom.
Thirteen-year-old Amy, tall, thin and pale, was sitting bent forward on the
edge of her bed with her cheeks in her hands and elbows on knees. Her
surroundings expressed her age and station with overdone fidelity: coloured
photographs of singers and actors cut from magazines and Scotch-taped to the
walls, a miniature lidless gramophone in pastel pink, records and gaudy
record-sleeves, the former seldom inside the latter, fragments of clothing,
most of them looking too narrow for their purposes, a great many jars and pots
and small plastic bottles grouped on the top of the dressing-table round a
television set. On the screen of this, a hairy man was saying to a bald man,
‘But the effects of these attacks on the dollar will not of course immediately
be apparent. And we must wait to see which will be the remedies adopted.’

‘Darling,
what on earth are you watching this for?’ I asked. Amy shrugged her shoulders
without otherwise altering her position.

‘What
else is there on?’

‘Music
on one of them—you know, with all violins and things—and horses on the other.’

‘But
you like horses.’

‘Not
these ones.’

‘What’s
wrong with them?’

‘All in
lines.’

‘How do
you mean?’

‘All in
lines.’

‘I
don’t see why you feel you’ve always got to watch something, no matter what it
is. You can’t possibly … I wish you’d read a book occasionally.’

‘But
you must understand that this in the first place is not a matter for the
International Monetary Fund,’ said the hairy man with contempt.

‘Sweetheart,
turn that down, will you? I can’t hear a thing … That’s better,’ I said as
Amy, her eyes still on the screen, put one long-fingered hand to the remote-control
box at her side and reduced the hairy man’s voice to a far-away shout. ‘Now
listen: Dr Maybury and his wife are here for dinner tonight. They’ll be coming
up here in a minute. Why don’t you slip your nightdress on now and clean your
teeth and run in and chat to them for a little while before you go to bed?’

‘No
thanks, Daddy.’

‘But
you like them. You’re always saying you like them.’

‘No
thanks.’

‘Well,
come and say good night to Gramps, then.’

‘I
have.’

As I
stood there for a moment by the bed, wishing I knew how to give my daughter a
life, I happened to notice the photograph of her dead mother in its place on
the wall beside the window. Why I did so I had no idea, and I thought I had
made no movement, but Amy, apparently without having glanced aside, knew what I
had seen. She shifted her legs slightly, as if in discomfort. I said suddenly,
trying to sound enthusiastic,

‘I know
what: I’ve got to go into Baldock again tomorrow morning. What I’ve got to do
won’t take more than a few minutes, so you could come in with me and we could
have a cup of … You could have a Coke.’

‘Okay,
Daddy,’ said Amy in a placatory voice.

‘Now
I’ll be back in fifteen minutes to say good night to you and I expect you to be
in bed by then. Don’t forget to clean your teeth.’

‘Okay.’

The
hairy man having had his hour, it was the recommendation of a shampoo,
delivered in the tones of somebody in mid-orgasm, that filled the small room
before I had shut the door after me. Amy was not yet a woman, but, even when
much younger, she had developed the totally female habit of behaving coolly,
or coldly, to a degree that must have a reason, while denying to the death not
only the existence of the reason but also the existence of the behaviour. I had
not given her the chance just now of doing any denying, but I had not needed
to. I was intimidated by the behaviour, and now and then appalled by the
reason, while avoiding the question of what it was. Amy and I had never
discussed Margaret’s death in a street accident eighteen months previously, nor
her leaving me, taking Amy with her, nearly three years before that, nor
Margaret herself; beyond necessities, we had barely mentioned her. In the end,
I would have to find a way of doing something about that, and the behaviour,
and the reason. Perhaps I could make a start on the trip to Baldock in the
morning. Perhaps.

I went
down the sloping passage and into the dining-room, a broad, rather
low-ceilinged affair with a beautiful seventeenth-century heraldic stone
fireplace I had uncovered behind Victorian brickwork. Here Magdalena, Ramón’s
wife, a tubby little woman of about thirty-five, was laying bowls of chilled
vichyssoise
round the five places at the oval table. The windows were open, the
curtains undrawn, and when I lit the candles their flames swayed slightly
without breaking. A breeze from the Chilterns was just managing to reach as far
up as here. The air it brought seemed no cooler. When Magdalena, muttering
quite amiably to herself, had departed, I walked to the widow at the front of
the house, but found little relief.

There
was nothing to see, only the empty room reflected in the large square pane. My
pieces of statuary stood in their places: a good copy of a Roman terracotta
head of an old man on a pedestal beside the door, a pair of Elizabethan youths
looking vaguely towards each other from rectangular niches in the far wall,
busts of a naval officer and of a military man of the Napoleonic period above
the fireplace, and a pretty bronze of a girl, probably French and of the 1890s
or just after, on another pedestal in front of the window at my left, placed so
as to catch the morning sun. As I stood with my back to the room I could not
make out much of her, but from all the others that oddly exact balance between
the animate and the inanimate, constantly maintained when they were viewed
direct, seemed to have departed. In the glass of the window they looked newly
empty of any life. I turned round and faced them: yes, once more human as well
as mineral.

With
the A595 just too far off for individual vehicles to be heard, and no one, for
the moment, moving about in the forecourt, everything seemed quiet until I
listened. Then the murmur of voices became audible from downstairs, but,
again, none could be distinguished from the rest. I said to myself that if a
minute went by without any sort of separate sound emerging, I would go to the
cupboard in the bedroom and give myself another drink. I began counting in my
head: one—thousand—two—thousand—three—thousand—four—thousand … The thousand
business helps one to attain the correct rhythm, and by using it over the years
I have reached the point at which I can guarantee an accuracy of within two
seconds per timed minute. This is a useful accomplishment in such situations
as having to boil eggs without the aid of a watch, but usefulness is not really
the end in view.

I had
reached thirty-eight thousand in this count, and was preparing to congratulate
myself on entering the last third of the course, when I heard a clearly
differentiated and half-expected sound from the drawing-room across the
passage, a mingled groaning and clearing of the throat. My father, having heard
Magdalena’s departure, but not wanting to have it thought that he was acting
directly on this signal, had decided that it was time for him to stir himself
and come to table. He had deprived me of my drink, but there was a case for
saying that that was just as well.

I heard
his step, slow and steady, and after a moment the door opened. He said
something wearily unfriendly as he found he was being preceded over the
threshold by Victor Hugo, who got under his feet even more than most people’s.

Victor
was a blue-point Siamese, a neutered tom-cat now in the third year of his age.
He entered, as usual, in vague semi-flight, as from something that was probably
not a menace, but which it was as well to be on the safe side about. Becoming
aware of me, he approached, again as usual, with an air of uncertainty not so
much about who I was as about what I was, and of keeping a very open mind on
the range of possible answers. Was I potassium nitrate, or next October twelvemonth,
or Christianity, or a chess problem—perhaps involving a variation on the
Falkbeer counter-gambit? When he reached me, he gave up the problem and toppled
on to my feet like an elephant pierced by a bullet in some vital spot. Victor
was, among other things, the reason why no dogs were allowed at the Green Man.
The effort of categorizing them might have proved too much for him.

My
father shut the door firmly behind him and gave a neutral nod in my direction.
I rather take after him physically, being quite as tall as he and as little
inclined to run to fat, and his dark-red hair-colour, still vivid in places
among the white, is mine too. But his large high nose and broad hands, as
powerful as a pianist’s, have in me been replaced by something less assertively
masculine from my mother’s side.

The
neutrality of the nod he had given was a none-too-usual alleviation of the
unspecific discontent with which he nowadays looked as if he regarded the
world. Here was somebody else whose life I did not understand. The weekday routine,
mitigated by a lie-in on Sunday mornings, was a tight one: whatever the
weather, off at ten sharp into the village ‘to have a look round’ (though
whatever there was to be seen there never varied, at least to a townsman’s eye
like mine or his), pick up a packet of ten Piccadilly and
The Times
(which
he would not have delivered to the house) at the corner shop, into the Dainty
Tea-rooms for a coffee, a chocolate biscuit and a thorough read-through of the
paper and along to the Queen’s Arms at midday precisely, there to drink two
Courage light ales, make a start on the crossword puzzle and chat to ‘one or
two old buffers’ about topics I had found it hard to define when I, on an
occasional slack morning, accompanied him on his round. Back to the Green Man
at one fifteen on the dot for a cold lunch in his room, and then an afternoon
dozing, finishing, or trying to finish, the crossword, and reading one of the
crime-and-detection paperbacks I would have got for him in Royston or Baldock.
By six or six thirty—here a little latitude was permitted—he would be in the
drawing-room, ready for the first of two drinks before dinner, and ready for
conversation too, I suppose, because he never took anything in there with him,
not even the crossword. But Joyce and Amy and I all had other things to do than
go and talk to him, and he would fall back on sending for the evening paper, as
tonight, or on gazing at the wall. Whenever I happened to look in and found him
like this, again as tonight, I would feel slightly defeated: I could not force
him to read, set him acrostics to solve, demand that he learn Latin or take up
mechanical drawing, and he would less soon watch television than, in his own
phrase, have a lump of vegetable marrow shoved into his skull instead of a
brain.