The Green Man (5 page)

‘Not
now.’

Amy had
turned off the TV set and was sitting on her bed, but not in her previous
posture.

‘Gramps
has been taken ill,’ I said.

‘Is he
dead?’

‘Yes,
but it was all over in a second and it didn’t hurt him. He can’t have known
anything about it. He was very old, you know, and it might have happened any
day. That’s how it is with very old people.’

‘But
there was so much I meant to say to him.’

‘What
about?’

‘All
sorts of things.’ Amy got up and came and put her hands on my shoulders. ‘I’m
sorry your father’s dead.’

This
made me cry. I sat down on the bed for a few minutes while she held my hand and
stroked the back of my neck. When I had finished crying, she sent me off,
saying that I was not to worry about her, that she would be all right and would
see me in the morning.

In the
dining-room, the two women were sitting on the window-seat, Diana with her arm
round Joyce’s shoulders. Joyce’s head was lowered and her yellow hair had
fallen over her face. Jack handed me a tumbler half-full of whisky with a
little water. I drank it all.

‘Amy
all right?’ asked Jack. ‘Good. I’ll look in on her in a minute. Now we’ll have
to get your father on to his bed. You and I can do it, or I can go and fetch
someone from downstairs if you don’t feel up to it.’

‘I can
do it. You and I can do it.’

‘Come
on, then.’

Jack
took my father under the arms and I by the ankles. Diana was there to open the
door. By holding him close against his chest, Jack saw to it that my father’s
head did not loll much. He went on talking as we moved.

‘I’ll
get young Palmer up here as soon as we’ve done this, if you approve, just to
put him in the picture. There’s nothing more that needs doing tonight. The
district nurse will be in first thing in the morning to lay him out. I’ll be along
too, with the death certificate. Someone will have to take that in to the registrar
in Baldock and fix things up with the undertakers. Will you do that?’

‘Yes.’
We stood now in the bedroom. ‘What are you looking for?’

‘Blanket.’

‘Bottom
drawer there.’

We
covered my father up and left him. The rest was soon done. All of us managed to
eat a little, Jack rather more.

David
Palmer appeared, listened, said and looked how sorry he was and went. I
telephoned my son Nick, aged twenty-four, an assistant lecturer in French
literature at a university in the Midlands. He told me he would get somebody to
look after two-year-old Josephine and come down by car with his wife, Lucy, the
next morning, arriving in time for a late lunch. I realized with a shock that
there was nobody else to inform: my father’s brother and sister had died
without issue, and I had neither. By eleven thirty, a good three-quarters of an
hour before the last non-residents would ordinarily have been out of the place,
word of the death had spread and everything was quiet. Finally, the Mayburys
and Joyce and I stood at the doorway of the apartment.

‘Don’t
come down,’ said Jack. ‘Fred’ll let us out. Have a good long sleep—Joyce one of
the red bombs, Maurice three of the Belrepose things.’ Speaking neither briskly
nor with emotionalism, he added, ‘Well, I’m sorry he’s gone. He was a decent
old boy, with plenty of sense. I expect you’ll miss him a lot, Maurice’

This
mild show of commiseration and its accompanying glance, which carried sympathy
of a depersonalized sort, were Jack’s first non-utilitarian responses to what
had happened, nor did he enlarge on them. He said good night in a high
monotone, as somebody like Fred might call it across the bar, and led the way
towards the stairs. After kissing Joyce and glancing in my direction, but not
directly at me, Diana followed, She did not, I was almost touched to see, do
any of this with the air of imparting by her silence a message more eloquent
than any mere words could have conveyed. The same had been true of her earlier
restraint of manner. I felt it was uncharitable of me to wonder how long this
uncharacteristic behaviour of hers would last, but wonder I did. Nothing short
of physical handicap has ever made anybody turn over a new leaf.

‘Let’s
go to bed straight away,’ said Joyce. ‘You must be absolutely whacked.’

I was
indeed utterly tired out in body, as if I had been standing all day in the
same position, but had no inclination for sleep, or for lying down in the dark
waiting to go to sleep. ‘One more Scotch,’ I said.

‘Not a
giant one, Maurice. And only one.’ She spoke pleadingly. ‘Don’t sit up
drinking. Bring it into the bedroom.’

I did
as she said, first looking in on Amy, who was lying asleep quite
unemphatically, so to speak, without the parade of concentration or abandonment
I have seen in grown women. Would my father’s departure leave much of a hole in
her world? I could not imagine any of the things she had said she had meant to
say to him: his attitude to her had been one of uncertain geniality, she had
behaved to him with something not far from a child’s version of this, a
brightness that had been absent-minded and self-regarding at the same time, and
they had never, so far as I had noticed, talked together much. But he had been
about the place every day of the year and a half since she had come to live
here after her mother’s death, and I could see that no sort of hole in a small
world could really be a small hole.

‘Was
she all right?’ asked Joyce when I carried my whisky into our bedroom, the next
along the passage from Amy’s and no broader from window to door, but with more
length. Standing in this extra space, she popped one of her red sleeping-pills
into her mouth and gulped water.

‘Asleep,
anyway. Have you seen the Belreposes?’

‘Here.
Three sounds rather a lot, doesn’t it? With you drinking as well, I mean. I
suppose Jack knows all about it.’

‘They’re
not barbiturates.’

I
chased the white tablets down with whisky, watching Joyce as she kicked off her
shoes, pulled her dress over her head and hung it up in the wall-cupboard. The
small moment in which she stepped away and turned to go down the room was
enough for me to take in the fine swell of her breasts under the spotless white
brassière, in unimprovable proportion with the breadth of her shoulders and
back and the spreading fullness of her rib-cage. She had not taken three paces
towards the bed before I had put my glass down on her dressing-table and caught
her round her naked waist.

She
held me against her with a quick firmness that belonged to somebody comforting
somebody. When, as she very soon did, she found that it was not comfort I was
after, at least not in the ordinary sense, her body stiffened.

‘Oh,
Maurice, not now, surely.’

‘Especially
now. Straight away. Come on.’

I had
only once before in my life felt such a totally possessing urge to make love
to a woman, with the mind sliding into involuntary dormancy and the body
starting to set up on its own several stages earlier than usual. That time had
been as I was watching a mistress of mine cutting bread in her kitchen while
her husband laid the table in the dining-room across the passage, so that my
mind and body had had to return to normal working with the minimum of delay.
It was not going to be at all like that tonight.

Joyce was
quite naked, I only selectively so, when I dragged the quilt aside and pushed
her down on the bed. By now she was responding in her long, slow rhythms,
breathing deeply at no more than a marginally quickening rate, clasping her
powerful limbs round me. I was just about aware of an urgency that had a way of
seeming infinitely postponable. It was not really, of course, and at some
imperceptible signal, a distant traffic noise or a memory or a new movement
from one or the other of us or a thought about tomorrow, I took us both to the
point, once and then another time or so. Very quickly after that, the facts of
the last hour presented themselves as if until now I had only heard of them
through some distant and inarticulate intermediary. My heart seemed to stop
for a moment, then lurched into violent motion. I got out of bed at top speed.

‘Are
you all right?’ asked Joyce.

‘Fine.’

After
standing still for a moment, I finished undressing, put on my pyjamas and went
to the bathroom. Then I looked into the drawing-room and saw the evening paper
neatly folded on a low table by the place where my father had always sat, into
the dining-room and saw the armchair where he had died. The triteness of these
images calmed me for the moment. Back in the bedroom, I found that Joyce,
usually ready for a chat at this stage, was lying with the bedclothes pulled up
over her face. This went to confirm my suspicion that she was feeling ashamed,
not of having made love on the night of my father’s death, but of having
enjoyed it. However, when I had got into bed she spoke in a wide-awake voice.

‘I
suppose it was natural, doing it like that, like an instinct. You know, Nature
trying to see to it that life goes on. Funny, though, it didn’t feel like an
instinct. More like something you read about. The idea, I mean.’

I had
not thought of this side of things until then, and was faintly irritated by her
shrewdness, or what might have seemed shrewdness to an outsider. Still, it was
very consoling that I was having to deal with Joyce here, not Diana, who would
have been thrown into ecstasies of needling speculation.

‘I
wasn’t faking it,’ I said. ‘A man can’t fake.’

‘I
know, darling. I didn’t mean that. Just how it might sound.’ Her hand came back
behind her and caught mine. ‘Do you think you can sleep?’

‘Yes, I
think so. Could you just clear one thing up? Won’t take a minute.’

‘What?’

‘Then I
can forget about it. Tell me exactly how it happened in there. I shall always
sort of wonder about it if I don’t know exactly.’

‘Well,
he’d just been saying something about people had the right not to be disturbed
in their own private houses, and then he stopped and got up, much more quickly
than he usually does, and he was staring.’

‘What
at?’

‘I
don’t know. Nothing. He was looking towards the door. Then he called out, and
Jack asked him what was the matter and was he all right, and then he fell
against the table and Jack caught him.’

‘What
did he call out?’

‘I
don’t know. It wasn’t a word or anything. Then Jack and I, we started moving
him and then you came back. He didn’t seem to be in any pain. He just looked
very surprised.’

‘Frightened?’

‘Well …
a bit, perhaps.’

‘Only a
bit?’

‘Well,
a lot, actually. He must have been feeling it coming on, you know, the cerebral
thing.’

‘Yes.
That would frighten you all right. I see.’

‘Don’t
worry about it.’ Joyce squeezed my hand. ‘You couldn’t have done anything about
it even if you had been there.’

‘No I
suppose I couldn’t.’

‘Of
course you couldn’t.’

‘I
forgot to tell Amy where … that he’s in his room.’

‘She
won’t go in there. I’ll see to it in the morning. I’ll have to go to sleep now.
These bombs really knock you out.’

We said
good night and switched off our bedside lamps. I turned on to my right side,
towards where the window was, though nothing could be seen of it. The night was
still very warm, but the humidity had fallen off a good deal in the last hour.
My pillow seemed hotter than my cheek as soon as the two touched, and formed
itself into a series of hard ridges and irregular planes. My heart was beating heavily
and moderately fast, as on the threshold of some minor ordeal, like going into
the dentist’s surgery or getting up to make a speech. I lay there waiting for
it to make one of the trip-and-lurch movements it had made ten minutes earlier
and perhaps a couple of dozen times during the day and evening. I had mentioned
this phenomenon to Jack, who had said, condescendingly rather than impatiently,
but in any case quite emphatically, that it was not significant, that my heart
was merely giving itself, every so often, an extra and premature signal to
beat, so that the beat after that was delayed, and might seem stronger than
normal. All I could say (to myself) was that at times like the present the
bloody thing certainly felt significant. After a minute or two of waiting,
there came the expected quiver, followed by a pause prolonged enough to make me
draw in my breath, and then a small punch against the inside of my chest. I
told myself it was all right, it was nerves, it would go off as it always had,
I was a hypochondriac, the Belreposes would be taking over any minute, it was
natural, it was egotistical. Yes: already calmer, easier, steadier, more
comfortable, cooler, slower, quieter, drowsier, vaguer …

What
was before my closed eyes was the usual shifting pall of dark purple, dark grey
and other dark that was never quite different enough to be given the name of
any other colour. It had been there all along, of course, but now I started
looking at it, knowing what would happen when I did, but unable not to, because
it was simply the next thing. Almost at once a dim orange-yellow light came up.
It illuminated something that had the smooth, rounded and tapering qualities of
a part of the human body, but without any guide to scale it was impossible to
tell whether I was looking at leg or nose, forearm or finger, breast or chin.
Soon a greyish male profile, nearly complete, its expression puzzled or
brooding, drifted diagonally in front of this and blotted most of it out. The
upper lip twitched, grew suddenly in size and began drifting slowly outwards,
swelling at a reduced rate until it was like a thick rope of intestine. Another
orange light flared up irregularly in the lower part of my field of vision and
played on the intestine-like form from underneath, showing it to be veined and
glistening. The face had tilted away out of existence. When the orange glow had
faded, there was a kind of new start: shivering veils of brown and yellow
appeared and vanished quickly, to reveal a gloomy cavern of which the walls and
roof were human, but in a distant sense. No component was identifiable, only
that unique surface quality, half matt, half sheen, that belongs to naked skin.