The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

things it isn’t called is the Green Man. And, my pub was in Hertfordshire and this place was . . . off the M6. All very reasonable and reassuring.

Only I wasn’t very reassured. I mean, I obviously couldn’t just leave it there. The thing to do was get hold of this chap Palmer and see if there was, well, any more to come. Which was going to be tricky if I wasn’t going to look nosy or mad or something else that would shut him up. Neither of us ate much dinner, though there was nothing wrong with the food. We didn’t say much, either. I drank a fair amount.

Then halfway through, Palmer turned up to do his everything-all-right routine, as I’d hoped he would, and as he would have done in my book. I said yes, it was fine, thanks, and then I asked him, I said we’d be very pleased if he’d join us for a brandy afterwards if he’d got time, and he said he’d be delighted. Jolly good, but I was still stuck with this problem of how to dress the thing up.

Jane had said earlier on, why didn’t I just tell the truth, and I’d said, since Palmer hadn’t reacted at all when I gave him my name when I was booking the table – see what I mean? – he’d only have my word for the whole story and might still think I was off my rocker, and she said of course she’d back me up, and I’d said he’d just think he’d got two loonies on his hands instead of one. Anyway, now she said, Some people who’ve read The Green Man must have mentioned it, – fancy that, Mr Palmer, you and Mr Allington and Fred are all in a book by somebody called Kingsley Amis. Obvious enough when you think of it, but like a lot of obvious things, you have got to think of it.

Well, that was the line I took when Palmer rolled up for his brandy, I’m me and I wrote this book and so on. Oh really? he said, more or less. I thought we were buggered, but then he said, Oh yes, now you mention it, I do remember some chap saying something like that, but it must have been two or three years ago – you know, as if that stopped it counting for much. I’m not much of a reader, you see, he said.

So. What about Mr Allington, I said, doesn’t he read? Not what you’d call a reader, he said. Well, that was one down to me, or one up, depending on how you look at it, because my Allington was a tremendous reader, French poetry and all that. Still, the approach had worked after a fashion, and Palmer very decently put up with being cross-questioned on how far this place corresponded with my place, in the book.

Was Mrs Allington blonde? There wasn’t a Mrs Allington any more; she’d died of leukemia quite a long time ago. Had he got his widowed father living here? (Arlington’s father, that is.) No, Mr Allington senior, and his wife, lived in Eastbourne. Was the house, the pub, haunted at all? Not as far as Palmer knew, and he’d been there three years. In fact, the place was only about two hundred years old, which completely clobbered a good half of my novel, where the ghosts had been hard at it more than a hundred years earlier still.

Nearly all of it was like that. Of course, there were some questions I couldn’t ask, for one reason or another. For instance, was Allington a boozer, like my Allington, and even more so, had this Allington had a visit from God. In the book, God turns up in the form of a young man to give Allington some tips on how to deal with the ghosts, who he, God, thinks are a menace to him. No point in going any further into that part.

I said nearly all the answers Palmer gave me were straight negatives. One wasn’t, or rather there were two points where I scored, so to speak. One was that Arlington had a fifteen-year-old daughter called Marilyn living in the house. My Allington’s daughter was thirteen and called Amy, but I’d come somewhere near the mark – too near for comfort.

The other thing was a bit harder to tie down. When I’m writing a novel, I very rarely have any sort of mental picture of any of the characters, what they actually look like. I think a lot of novelists would say the same. But, I don’t know why, I’d had a very clear image of what my chap David Palmer looked like, and now I’d had a really good look at George Palmer, this one here, he was nearly the same as I’d imagined, not so tall, different nose, but still nearly the same. I didn’t care for that.

Palmer, George Palmer, said he had things to see to and took off. I told Jane what I’ve just told you, about the resemblance. She said I could easily have imagined that, and I said I suppose I might. Anyway, she said, what do you think of it all?

I said it could still all be coincidence. What could it be if it isn’t coincidence? she asked. I’d been wondering about that while we were talking to Palmer. Not an easy one. Feeling a complete bloody fool, I said I thought we could have strayed into some kind of parallel world that slightly resembles the world I made up, you know, like in a science-fiction story.

She didn’t laugh or back away. She looked round and spotted a newspaper someone had left on one of the chairs. It was that day’s Sunday Telegraph. She said, if where we are is a world that’s parallel to the real world, it’s bound to be different from the real world in all sorts of ways. Now you read most of the Telegraph this morning, the real Telegraph. Look at this one, she said, and see if it’s any different. Well, I did, and it wasn’t: same front page, same article on the trade unions by Perry, that’s Peregrine Worsthorne, same readers’ letters, same crossword down to the last clue. Well, that was a relief.

But I didn’t stay relieved, because there was another coincidence shaping up. It was a hot night in August when all this happened – or did I mention that before? Anyway, it was. And Allington was out for the evening. It was on a hot night in August, after Allington had come back from an evening out, that the monster, the Green Man, finally takes shape and comes pounding up the road to tear young Amy Allington to pieces. That bit begins on page 225 in my book, if you’re interested.

The other nasty little consideration was this. Unlike some novelists I could name, I invent all my characters, except for a few minor ones here and there. What I mean is, I don’t go in for just renaming people I know and bunging them into a book. But of course, you can’t help putting something of yourself into all your characters, even if it’s only, well, a surly bus-conductor who only comes in for half a page.

Right, obviously, this comes up most of all with your heroes. Now none of my heroes, not even old Lucky Jim, are me, but they can’t help having pretty fair chunks of me in them, some more than others. And Allington in that book was one of the some. I’m more like him than I’m like most of the others; in particular, I’m more like my Maurice Allington in my book than the real Allington, who by the way turned out to be called John, seemed (from what I’d heard) to be like my Maurice Allington. Sorry to be long-winded, but I want to get that quite clear.

So: if, by some fantastic chance, the Green Man, the monster, was going to turn up here, he, or it, seemed more likely to turn up tonight than most nights. And, furthermore, I seemed sort of better cast for the part of the young girl’s father, who manages in the book to save her from the monster, than this young girl’s father did. You see that.

I tried to explain all this to Jane. Evidently I got it across all right, because she said straight away, We’d better stay here tonight, then. If we can, I said, meaning if there was a room. Well, there was, and at the front of the house too, which was important, because in the book that’s the side the monster appears on.

While one of the blokes was taking our stuff out of the car and upstairs, I said to Jane, I’m not going to be like a bloody fool in a ghost story who insists on seeing things through alone, not if I can help it – I’m going to give Bob Conquest a ring. Bob’s an old chum of mine, and about the only one I felt I could ask to come belting up all this way (he lives in Battersea) for such a ridiculous reason. It was just after ten by this time, and the Green Man wasn’t scheduled to put in an appearance till after one a.m., so Bob could make it all right if he started straight away. Fine, except his phone didn’t answer; I tried twice.

Jane said, Get hold of Monkey; I’ll speak to him. Monkey, otherwise known as Colin, is her brother; he lives with us in Barnet. Our number answered all right, but I got my son Philip, who was staying the weekend there. He said Monkey was out at a party, he didn’t know where. So all I could do was the necessary but not at all helpful job of saying we wouldn’t be home till the next morning. So that was that. I mean, I just couldn’t start getting hold of George Palmer and asking him to sit up with us into the small hours in case a ghost came along. Could any of you? I should have said that Philip hasn’t got a car.

Well, we stayed in the bar until it closed. I said to Jane at one point, You don’t think I’m mad, do you? Or silly or anything? She said, On the contrary, I think you’re being extremely practical and sensible. Well, thank God for that. Jane believes in ghosts, you see. My own position on that is exactly that of the man who said, I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’m afraid of them.

Which brings me to one of the oddest things about this whole business. I’m a nervous type by nature, I never go in an aeroplane, I won’t drive a car (Jane does the driving), I don’t even much care for being alone in the house. But, ever since we’d decided to stay the night at this place, all the uneasiness and, let’s face it, the considerable fear I’d started to feel as soon as these coincidences started coming up, it all just fell away. I felt quite confident, I