Authors: Kingsley Amis
These
apparitions grew, swirled and evolved for a time I could not measure, perhaps
five minutes, probably not more than thirty. Some of them were surprising, but
this was always part of their nature, and none, so far, was surprising in a
surprising way. They were even beginning to slacken, become constricted and
hard to discern. Then a rumpled sheet of brown flesh shook itself convulsively
and started to concertina in towards the middle. Longitudinal shreds ‘became
distinguishable, turned olive-green in colour and could be seen as the trunk
and branches of a young tree, the sort that has many stems growing more or less
vertically and parallel. This was a novelty in a hitherto exclusively
anthropoid universe, a comparatively soothing one. The tree-shape continued
the shaking, twitching motion of the fleshy mass that had given birth to it.
Slowly, its limbs and minor appendages coalesced into what— by the lax
standards of verisimilitude at present in force—were good approximations to a
man’s thighs, genitals and torso up about as far as the breast-bone. Higher
than this, there was nothing identifiable for the moment. The various members
retained their vegetable individuality, continuing as closely-packed amalgams
of bough, twig, stem and leaf. I was trying to remember what drawing or
painting this structure resembled when I heard a noise, distant but not
unrecognizable: it sounded like the snapping of greenery and minor branches
made by a man or large animal moving through dense woods. At the same time, a
shift of illumination began to reveal an upper chest, a throat and neck, the
point of a wooden chin.
I
clapped my fingers over my eyes and rubbed them fiercely: I had no desire to
see the face that topped such a body. In a flash, literally in a flash,
everything was gone, noise and all. I pretended to myself that I had heard
something from outside; but I knew that that snapping sound had come from
inside, again in the most literal sense. Just as I was never in any doubt that
what I ‘saw’ with my eyes shut was not really there, so I knew that what I had
just ‘heard’ was not real either. Tomorrow I might feel appalled at the
prospect of a regular, or sporadic, aural addition to these nightly appearances;
at the moment I was too tired. When I closed my eyes again, I saw at once that
the show was over: all intensity, all potential had departed from the messages
of my optic nerves, and the dark curtain before me stirred more feebly with
every breath.
I had
now come to the outer edge of sleep. As I had known it would, jactitation set
in. My right foot, my whole right leg, jerked with a local violence, my head, my
mouth and chin, my upper lip, what felt like the whole top half of my body, my
left wrist, my left wrist again, moved of their own accord, once or twice with
the prelude of a disembodied, watery feeling that advertised their intention,
more often quite unexpectedly. I was returned to momentary wakefulness several
times by what I assumed to be similar convulsions, though I could not locate
them, and once by a triple shaking of the shoulder so like the intervention of
one arousing a sleeper that, if I had not quickly remembered disturbances as
acute in the past, I might have been alarmed. Finally, images and thoughts and
words came from nowhere in particular and were all mingled in some other thing
that gradually had less and less to do with me: pretty dress, excuse me you’re
wanted on the, you ought to realize, very good soup, if there’s anything I can,
long time ago, be all very dusty, not to agree on the way he, moment she was
there and the next, water with it, over by the, darling, tree, spoon, window, shoulders,
stairs, hot, sorry, man …
2: Dr Thomas Underhill
At ten o’clock the next
morning I was in the office finishing the day’s arrangements with David Palmer.
‘What
about Ramón?’ I asked.
‘Well,
he’s done the vegetable dishes—quite good, really, in parts—and I’ve put him on
the coffee-pots. No complaints so far. From him, that is.’
‘Watch
him over the chef’s stuff, won’t you? And the ice-cream
coupes.
Explain
to him that they’ve got to look as good as new even though the guests never see
them.’
‘I
have, Mr Allington.’
‘Well,
explain it to him again, using threats if necessary. Tell him he’s to bring
them to me personally before lunch. Oh yes —two extra upstairs for that. My son
and his wife are driving down. Is that the lot?’
‘Just
about. There’s a bath-towel gone, that Birmingham couple, and an ash-tray, Fred
says, one of the heavy glass ones.’
‘You
know, David, I feel like driving up to Birmingham and finding those people’s
bloody house and burgling it to get that towel. It’s the only way we’d ever see
it again. Or putting tea-cloths and old dusters in all the bedrooms in future
and making them get rid of their fag-ends in empty baked-beans tins. I don’t
know why we go on bothering. Well, there’s nothing else to do, I suppose. If
that’s all you’ve got I’m off to Baldock.’
‘Right,
Mr Allington.’ David’s long, very slightly ridiculous face took on a resolute
look. ‘I just want to say, if there’s anything extra or special you want done,
I’d be more than happy to do it. You’ve only to say. And all the staff feel the
same.’
‘Thank
you, David, I can’t think of anything at the moment, but I’ll be sure to let
you know if there is.’
David
left. I collected the cash for the bank, found and pocketed the list I had made
for the drink supplier, put on my check cap and went into the hall. The char, a
youngish, rather pretty woman in jeans and tee-shirt, was crossing towards the
dining-room, vacuum-cleaner in hand.
‘Cooler
today,’ she said, raising her eyebrows briefly, as if alluding to how I looked
or was dressed.
‘But
tonight it’ll be as hot as ever, you just see.’
She
acknowledged this thrust with a diagonal movement of her head, and passed from
view. I recognized in her one on whom the lives, or deaths, of others made
little impression. Then Amy appeared, looking eager and rather well turned out
in a clean candy-striped shirt and skirt.
‘What
time are we leaving, Daddy?’
‘Oh,
darling.’ I remembered, for the first time that morning. ‘I’m sorry, but I’m
afraid it’ll have to be another day.’
‘Oh
no.
Oh, what a
drag.
Oh,
why?’
‘Well …
I fixed it up with you before…’
‘Before
Gramps died—I know. But what’s that got to do with it? He wouldn’t have minded
me coming. He liked us doing things together.’
‘I
know, but there are special things I have to do, like registering the death
and going to the undertakers’. You’d hate all that.’
‘I
wouldn’t mind. What’s the undertakers’?’
‘The
people who’ll be doing the funeral.’
‘I
wouldn’t mind. I could sit in the car. I bet you’ll have a coffee anyway. I
could look round the shops and meet you at the car.’
‘I’m
sorry, Amy.’ And I was, but I could not contemplate getting through the next
couple of hours in any company, however relaxing, and I had long ago faced the
fact that I was never quite at my ease with Amy. ‘It wouldn’t be the right sort
of thing for you. You can come with me tomorrow.’
This
only made her angry. ‘Oh,
yawn.
I don’t want to come tomorrow, I want to
come today. You just don’t want me.’
‘Amy,
stop shouting.’
‘You
don’t care about me. You don’t care what I do. There’s never anything for me to
do.’
‘You
can help Joyce in the bedrooms, it’s good—’
‘Oh,
fantastic.
Huge thanks.
Dad-oh.’
‘I
won’t have you talking like that.’
‘I’ve
talked like it now. And I’ll take LSD and reefers and you’ll care then. No, you
won’t. You won’t care.’
‘Amy,
go up to your room.’
She
made a blaring noise, halfway between a yell and a groan, and stamped
off.
I
waited until, quite distinctly through the thickness of the building, I heard
her door slam. At once, with impeccable sardonic timing, the vacuum-cleaner
started up in the dining-room. I left the house.
It was
indeed cooler today. The sun, standing immediately above the patch of woods
towards which the ghost of Thomas Underhill was said to gaze, had not yet
broken through a thin mist or veil of low cloud. As I walked over to where my
Volkswagen was parked in the yard. I told myself that I could soon start to
relish the state of being alone (not rid of Amy, just alone for a guaranteed
period), only to find, as usual, that being alone meant that I was stuck with
myself, with the outside and inside of my body, with my memories and anticipations
and present feelings, with that indefinable sphere of being that is the sum of
these and yet something beyond them, and with the assorted uneasiness of the
whole. Two’s company, which is bad enough in all conscience, but one’s a crowd.
I was
putting the Volkswagen into gear when a dull pain of irregular but defined
shape switched itself on in my left lower back, a little below the waistline.
It stayed in being for perhaps twenty seconds, perfectly steady in intensity,
then at once vanished. It had been behaving in this sort of way for about a
week now. Was it sharper this morning than when I had first noticed it, did it
come on more frequently and stay for longer? I thought perhaps it was and did.
It was cancer of the kidney. It was not cancer of the kidney, but that disease
whereby the kidney ceases to function and has to be removed by surgery, and
then the other kidney carries on perfectly well until it too becomes useless
and has to be removed by surgery, and then there is total dependence on a
machine. It was not a disease of the kidney, but a mild inflammation set up by
too much drinking, easily knocked out by a few doses of Holland’s gin and a reduction
in doses of other liquors. It was not an inflammation, or only in the sense
that it was one of those meaningless aches and pains that clear up of their own
accord and unnoticeably when they are not thought about. Ah, but what was the
standard procedure for not thinking about this one, or any one?
The
pain came back as I was turning south-west on to the
A595,
and stayed
for a little more than twenty seconds this time, unless that was my
imagination. I thought to myself how much more welcome a faculty the
imagination would be if we could tell when it was at work and when not. That
might make it more efficient, too. My own was certainly unequal to the task of
suggesting how I would deal with the situation if my kidney really were under
some lethal assault. I had fallen victim to some pretty serious afflictions in
my time, but so far they had tended to yield to treatment. The previous summer
I had managed to check and even reverse the onset of Huntington’s chorea—a
progressive disease of the nervous system ending in total helplessness, and
normally incurable—simply by cutting down my intake of Scotch. A year or so
earlier, a cancer of the large intestine had begun retreating to dormancy as
soon as I stopped eating the local greengages and plums, gave up drinking two
bottles of claret a day and curbed my fondness for raw onions, hot pickles and
curry. A new, more powerful reading-light had cleared up a severe brain tumour
inside a week. All my other lesions, growths, atrophies and rare viral infections
had gone the same way. So far.
That
was the point. Other people’s hypochondria is always good for a laugh, or
rather, whenever one gets as far as beginning to think about it, just fairly
good for a grin. Each case of one’s own is hilarious, as soon as that case is
past. The trouble with the hypochondriac, considered as a figure of fun, is
that he will be wrong about his condition nine hundred and ninety-nine times,
and absolutely right the thousandth time, or the thousand-and-first, or the one
after that. As soon as I had reached this perception, the pain in my back
underlined it elegantly by returning for about half a minute.
I had
joined the A507 and was coming into Baldock without noticing anything I had
seen on the way or done to keep me on the way. Now that I was about to deal
with about the last thing concerning my father that I would ever have to deal
with, it was thoughts of him that intervened between me and what I was doing. I
parked the Volkswagen in the broad main street of the town and remembered
playing cricket with him on the sands at Pevensey Bay in, good God, 1925 or
1926. Once I had been out first ball and he had praised me afterwards for my
sportsmanship in accepting this with a good grace. While I waited, then was
dealt with, at the registry, I thought about that daily round of his in the
village, and wished I had accompanied him on it just once more than I had. By
the time I reached the undertakers’, my mind was on his first stroke and his
recovery from it, and in the bank I tried to imagine what his mental life had
been like afterwards, with sufficient success to send me straight across to the
George and Dragon at eleven thirty sharp. I had had just enough attention to
spare for what I had been doing to notice how trivial and dull everything about
it had been, not momentous at all, not even dramatically unmomentous, registrar
and undertaker and bank clerk all pretty well interchangeable.