The Green Man

“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 melange 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.

‘If there had been a story about a woman ghost, dressed as I described, would you have believed that that was what I’d seen?’

‘Yes,’ she said, confounding me, and showing she knew she had.

‘Are you saying you believe in ghosts?’

‘Yes. In the sense that I believe that people see ghosts. I can’t think how any reasonable person can be in doubt on that score. That’s not the same, of course, as saying that you see a ghost in the same way as you see a real person. Ghosts aren’t there, so you can’t take photographs of them or anything. But people see them all right.’

‘You mean they think they see them,’ said Nick. ‘They imagine it.’

‘Well, not quite, darling. I would suggest that they see ghosts in something of the same sort of way as they have hallucinations or religious visions. We don’t say, for instance, that St Bernadette thought she saw the Virgin Mary, unless we’re trying to accuse her of misrepresenting what happened, or implying that she was mistaken or deceived. Unless we mean something like that we say she saw the Virgin Mary.’

‘Who wasn’t really there. I’d call that a hallucination. Same with ghosts.’

‘There’s a similarity, certainly, but it doesn’t go all the way.’ Lucy felt in her current fringed handbag, a red- and-white striped object that had no doubt come from somewhere in particular, and took out a packet of menthol cigarettes. She lit one of these as she went conscientiously on. ‘Different people see the same ghost, at the same time or at widely differing times. Hallucinations don’t seem to work like that. You can make a man have hallucinations by giving him certain drugs, but you can’t make him have the same hallucination as someone else. People can see the same ghost as someone else without knowing the other person saw it until later, and they don’t see a whole series of all sorts of other things as well, like people with hallucinations. Put a man in a haunted house and he may see a ghost, even if he didn’t know it was haunted. Give a man a psychedelic drug and he’ll have hallucinations. We don’t know why in either case, but it’s pretty certain the explanations don’t coincide.’

‘What do you think, Joyce?’ asked Nick, who had listened to all this attentively enough, but with no sign of feeling that anything more than the validity of a theory was at stake.

‘I don’t know anything about it,’ said Joyce, ‘but I think ghosts are all balls. There can’t be any such things. Maurice has been upset, and that’s made him, you know, a bit imaginative.’

‘That’s roughly what I think,’ said Nick.

Lucy frowned to herself and fiddled with her cigarette packet, as if pursuing her line of thought internally.

I had been all too right about not being taken seriously—by which I suppose I had meant causing some sort of stir. Accusations of madness or shouts of ridicule would have been preferable to these sober, sedative evaluations of my idea. ‘Well, what do I do now?’ I asked.

‘Forget it, Dad,’ said Nick, and Joyce nodded.

Lucy drew in her breath consideringly. ‘If this woman turns up again, see if you can touch her. Try and make her speak. It would be quite something if you could, because there are surprisingly few really well-attested instances of a ghost saying anything. Anyway, chase her and find out whether other people can see her. That’d be worth knowing, from your point of view.’

‘I don’t get the point of all that,’ said Joyce.

‘Well … it might be interesting.’

I found myself feeling slightly angry with Lucy. She alone had given me practical advice, which I had already decided to follow, but I disliked her bigoted reasonableness and her air of having already, though nearly thirty years younger than I, accumulated quite enough information and wisdom to deal with anything life might have in store: deal with it better than I could, too. I said in what I hoped was no more than an interested tone,

‘You seem to know a lot about these things, Lucy. Have you studied them?’

‘Not studied, no,’ she said, to rebuke me for seeming to suggest that she had taken a university course in ghosts. ‘But I have looked at the problem. I was doing a paper on the meaning of unverifiable statements, and it just happened to strike me that saying you’ve seen a ghost is one of a special class of unverifiable statements. I read a few accounts. Some interesting points of correspondence, I thought. This business, for instance, about the temperature dropping or seeming to drop before a manifestation. It’s been claimed that thermometers have registered it, but I’m not convinced. It could be subjective, a concomitant of the person entering the physiological state in which they can see ghosts. Did you feel cold before you saw this woman?’