The Green Man (7 page)

After
three quick double whiskies I felt better: I was drunk, in fact, drunk with
that pristine freshness, that semi-mystical elevation of spirit which, every
time, seems destined to last for ever. There was nothing worth knowing that I
did not know, or rather would not turn out to know when I saw my way to turning
my attention to it. Life and death were not problems, just points about which a
certain rather limited type of misconception tended to agglutinate. By
definition, or something of the kind, every problem was really a non-problem.
Nodding my head confidentially to myself about the simple force of this
perception, I left the pub and made for where there was a fair case for
believing I had left the Volkswagen.

Finding
it took some time. Indeed, I was still looking for it when it became clear that
I was doing so, not in Baldock, but in the yard of the Green Man, where I saw I
must have recently driven the thing. There was a bright dent at the rear
offside corner that I was nearly sure I had not seen before. This bothered me
to some degree, until I realized that no event that had failed to impede my progress
to this place could have been particularly significant. The next moment I was
in the hall talking to David Palmer, very lucidly and cogently, but with
continuous difficulty in remembering what I had been saying to him ten seconds
earlier. He seemed to think that my anxieties or inquiries or reassurances,
though interesting and valuable in their own right, were of no very immediate
concern. Accompanied for some reason by Fred, he saw me to the foot of the
stairs, where I spent a little while making it plain that I did not need, and
would not brook, the slightest assistance.

I made
it to the landing perfectly well, but only after a great deal of effort,
enough, in fact, to get me on the way to coming round. I had not had one of
these time-lapse things at such an early hour before, nor after so few drinks
immediately beforehand. Well, today was a special day. I was crossing to the
apartment door when the woman I had seen the previous evening, almost at this
very spot, suddenly came past me—from where, I had no idea—and hurried to the
top of the stairs. Without thinking, I called out after her, something quite unmanagerial
like, ‘What are you doing here?’ She took no notice, began to descend, and
when, after a not very competent pursuit, I reached the stairhead, she had
gone.

I got
down the stairs as quickly as I could without falling over, rather slowly, that
is. David was just approaching the couple of steps that lead down to the
dining-room. I spoke his, name, louder than I had meant to, and he turned round
abruptly.

‘Yes,
Mr Allington? Is anything the matter?’

‘Look,
David…’

‘Hallo,
Dad,’ said the voice of my son Nick. ‘We got here earlier than—’

‘Just a
moment, Nick. David, did you see a woman coming down the stairs just now?’

‘No, I
don’t think I—’

‘In a
long dress, with reddish kind of hair? Only, God, ten or fifteen seconds before
I started speaking to you.’

David
considered this for so long that I wanted to scream at him. I had time now to
notice whether we were attracting any attention, but I did not use it.
Eventually David said, ‘I wasn’t conscious of anybody, but I walked straight
across from the bar, and I wasn’t really noticing, I’m sorry.’

‘All
right, David, it doesn’t matter. I thought it might have been someone who
bounced a cheque on me once, that’s all. It doesn’t matter. Let me know if
there are any problems in the dining-room. Hallo, Nick.’ We kissed; David went
on his way. ‘Sorry about that, I just thought … Where’s Lucy? Did you have a
good journey?’

‘Fine.
She’s over in the annexe, having a wash. What’s wrong, Dad?’

‘Nothing.
I mean it’s been a bit of a hellish day, as you can imagine, what with all the …‘

‘No,
now. You look as if you’ve had a scare or something’

‘Oh
no.’ I had had a scare all right. Come to that, I was still having one. I did
not know whether to be more frightened at the idea that had come into my mind,
or at the fact that it had come there and showed no signs of going away. I
tried to let it lie without examining it. ‘To tell you the truth, Nick, I had a
few quick drinks in Baldock, which you’ll understand, a bit too quick probably,
anyway I very nearly took a bad toss on the stairs just now when I was chasing
that bloody woman. Might have been nasty. Bit off-putting. You get the idea.’

Nick, a
tall square figure with his mother’s dark hair and eyes, looked at me stolidly.
He knew that I had not told him the truth, but was not going to take me up on
it. ‘You’d better have another, then,’ he said in the quick tolerant voice he
bad first used to me when he was a child of ten. ‘Shall we go up? Lucy knows
the way.’

A few
minutes later, Lucy joined Nick and Joyce and me in the dining-room. She came
and kissed my cheek with an air perfectly suggesting that, while not for a
moment abating her dislike and disapproval of me, she was not, in view of the
circumstances, going to get at me today unless provoked. I had always wondered
what Nick saw in such a dumpy little personage, with her snouty nose,
short-cut indeterminate hair, curious shawls and fringed handbags. Nor had he
ever tried to enlighten me. Still, I had to admit that they seemed to get on
well enough together.

Amy
came in and stared at me until I had noticed the dirty sweater and holed jeans
she had exchanged for her earlier getup. Then, still staring at intervals, she
went over and started being theatrically cordial to Lucy, whom she knew I knew
she thought was a snob. I told things to Nick while my mind worked away on its
idea like an intelligent animal functioning without human supervision, rounding
up facts, sorting through questions and wonderings. It went assiduously on
while lunch was served.

Joyce
had put up a cold collation: artichoke with a
vinaigrette,
a Bradenham
ham, a tongue the chef had pressed himself, a game pie from the same hand,
salads and a cheese board with radishes and spring onions. I missed out the
artichoke, a dish I have always tended to despise on biological grounds. I
used to say that a man with a weight problem should eat nothing else, since
after each meal he would be left with fewer calories in him than he had burnt
up in the toil of disentangling from the bloody things what shreds of nourishment
they contained. I would speculate that a really small man, one compelled by his
size to eat with a frequency distantly comparable to that of the shrew or the
mole, would soon die of starvation and/ or exhaustion if locked up in a warehouse
full of artichokes, and sooner still if compelled besides to go through the
rigmarole of dunking each leaf in
vinaigrette.
But I did not go into any
of this now, partly because Joyce, who liked every edible thing and artichokes
particularly, always came back with the accusation that I hated food.

This is
true enough. For me, food not only interrupts everything while people eat it
and sit about waiting for more of it to be served, but also casts a spell of
vacancy before and after. No other sensual activity must take place at a set
time to be enjoyed by anybody at all, or comes up so inexorably and so often.
Some of the stuff I can stand. Fruit slides down, bread soon goes to nothing,
and all pungent swallowables have a value of their own that transcends mere
food. As for the rest of it, chewing away at the vile texture of meat, pulling
bones out of tasteless mouthfuls of fish or encompassing the sheer nullity of
vegetables is not my idea of a treat. At least sex does not demand a
simultaneous outflow of talk, and drink needs no mastication.

No
drinking to speak of went on at this lunch. While I tried to keep my mind
entirely on my objections to food, I covered some ham and tongue with chutney
and hot sauce and washed the mixture down with a powerful tumbler of whisky and
water. It did not look very powerful, thanks to my use of one of those
light-coloured Scotches so handy for the man who wants a stronger potion than
he cares to advertise to his company. The onions and radishes got me through a
small hunk of fresh Cheddar; I had made a good meal. We went on to coffee, that
traditional device for prolonging artificially the conditions and atmosphere of
food-consumption. I took a lot of it, not in the hope of sobering up, for
coffee is no help there and I was already as sober as I could hope to be, but
to render myself reasonably wakeful. I wanted to be in some sort of form for
later that afternoon.

As soon
as Amy had left the table I made up my mind. There is always the chance, when
only two people are talking together, that the one may listen carefully to the
other and take seriously what he says. No such risk attaches to gatherings of
more than two. So I gave up the idea of taking Nick aside afterwards, poured
myself more coffee and, addressing him rather than anyone else, said as
casually as I could,

‘You
know, I’ve been wondering if there mightn’t have been something … slightly
curious going on about the time the old man died. I asked—’

‘Curious
in what way?’ asked Lucy sharply, intent on getting this settled before I
could switch the conversation irrevocably to football or the prospects for the
harvest.

‘I was
coming to that, actually. According to Joyce, just before he collapsed he stood
up and stared in the direction of the door, only there was nothing there. Then,
immediately before he died, he said to me, “Who?” and, “Over by the …“ something.
I think what he meant to say was, “Who (was that standing) over by the (door)?”
That’s—’

‘I
don’t see anything very curious about that,’ said Lucy. ‘He was having a
stroke—he might have—’

‘Carry
on, Dad,’ said Nick.

‘Yes.
That’s the first thing, or the first two things. Then, he’d been talking a few
minutes earlier about hearing somebody walking up and down the passage outside
here. I can’t think of any actual person that could have been, though it
wouldn’t be at all significant on its own, I admit. Then, twice, last night and
again an hour or so ago, I saw a woman dressed in a, well, it might have been
an eighteenth-century ordinary domestic kind of dress, at the top of these
stairs. And I think she vanished, both times. I don’t really know about last
night, but today, when she went down the stairs I followed her, and no one had
seen her. If she went out by the front door, Nick would have seen her, wouldn’t
you, Nick? I’m sorry I spun you that yarn about her, but I was a bit het up at
the time. Anyway, did you see anyone like that as you were coming in?’

The
relief I had been looking for, that of simply telling somebody about my idea,
had destroyed my casual tone, and Nick answered very deliberately.

‘Yes, I
couldn’t have helped noticing, and there wasn’t anybody. But so what? Who do
you think she was, this woman?’

I found
I could not say the word that had been in my mind. ‘Well … you’ve heard this
house is supposed to be haunted. I don’t know what it’s sensible to say about
things like that, but it does make you think. And then there was Victor…’ I glanced
at him sitting in front of the fireplace with his toes tucked in under him like
a dish-cover, the picture of a cat to whom nothing out of the way, almost
nothing at all, had ever happened. ‘He acted very scared just when my father
collapsed. Shot past me out of the room when I came back in. Very scared
indeed.’

I could
think of nothing more for the moment. All three of my audience looked as if
they had been listening for a long time to a recital that, although not in the
least strange or unexpected, was embarrassingly difficult to deal with except
by straightforward, all-out insult. I felt garrulous, egocentric and very, very
silly. In the end, Lucy stirred and said judicially—I remembered that she had
taken an upper second in some vaguely philosophical mélange at a ‘new’
university— ‘I take it you’re referring to the possible presence of
ghosts.’

To hear
the word spoken took all the heart out of me. I could not even summon up a dab
of sarcasm about haunted houses and vanishing women in antique dress often
being thought to carry some such association. ‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Well,
in the first place it isn’t cats that are supposed to be sensitive to
paranormal phenomena, it’s dogs. There’s no way of knowing what your father
saw, if anything, and you’re making a lot out of what he said, a few disjointed
words you may not even have heard correctly. As for the woman you saw, well …
Anybody might have wandered up from the hall and down again. Are you sure she
couldn’t have gone into one of the rooms on the ground floor, the ladies’ for
instance?’

‘No,
I’m not. What about the footsteps in the passage?’

‘What
about them? You said yourself they wouldn’t he significant on their own.’

‘Mm.’ I
drank some coffee.

‘I
remember you telling us the story about the ghost who’s supposed to turn up in
the dining-room, but that was a man, wasn’t it? Have you ever heard anything
about a woman ghost?’

‘No.’

Lucy
did not actually say, ‘Your witness,’ but she hardly needed to. Nick looked at
me indulgently, Joyce irritably, or with what could have been irritation if she
had not recently been reminded that I had lost my father. I searched my brain.
This was not altogether easy. Some shift in my metabolism, or perhaps the gill
of whisky I had been putting away, had made me slightly drunk. Then, contrary
to the odds, something came up. I turned to Lucy again.