‘I’m sorry, Maurice. I suddenly went into the most ghastly panic. I somehow got the idea you didn’t like me at all. The most frightful sense of insecurity. Women get that, you know. Well, some women do, anyway. There was simply nothing I could do about it, honestly.’
I kissed her. ‘I understand,’ I said, and meant it. ‘But up there … you did have a splendid time, didn’t you?’
‘Mm. Splen … did.’ With her hegemony of sensitivity re-established, she must have felt she could afford to be generous. ‘Absolutely splendid.’
‘But nothing to what Joyce and I will do for you, I promise you.’
‘Maurice, you are completely extraordinary. One moment you’re having a dizzy spell and the next you’re keeping up the pressure to make me have an orgy with you. What makes you so incredibly sort of changeable?’
On the drive back, I advanced a theory or two about what made me like that, never ceasing to imply that, whatever it might be, Diana and her attractiveness and fascinatingness had a hand in it up to the collar-bone. I said I would pick her up the next day at the same place and time, made her promise to think over the orgy project (I was pretty sure she had already decided in favour of it, but to say so at this stage might have made her seem interesting almost to a fault), dropped her at the corner and went off to pick up my vegetables and fruit.
This last operation took a bare three-quarters of an hour, and would have taken only half as long but for the slow-motion of both the farmers concerned. The older of the two performed as if I had turned up to buy his daughters instead of his lettuces and tomatoes; the younger, whose top incisor teeth lay horizontally on his lower lip and who smelt a lot, treated me like a Tsarist tax official. Throughout, my sexual elation kept being overlaid by unsought memories of what had happened in the wood and by notions that in thinking about my father as little as possible all day I had behaved badly to him. The pain in my back did what it could on this side of the scales by coming up with some unusually firm and authoritative twinges.
By the time I had driven the truck into the yard at the Green Man and sent for Ramon to come and unload it, it was twenty past six and my thoughts had homed in on drink. I had a large one—one only in the sense that I did not allow my glass to become empty before topping it up to an even higher level than before—while I showered and put on my evening rig-out. Then I looked in on Amy, who was watching a TV inquiry into householders’ insurance and who was, if anything, rather less polysyllabic than usual. My father’s absence made this entire section of the daily routine seem unduly contracted. I had a word with David Palmer and joined Nick, Lucy and Joyce in the bar just after seven, not at all looking forward to a couple of hours of work. We had a drink (I switched to sherry, my standard public potation at this hour), and very soon the first diners had reached the menu-conning stage.
There were no difficulties, none at least that stuck in my mind. By the time I got to the third, or possibly the fourth, party, however, I found I was beginning to encounter the problem I had failed to solve on my return from Baldock earlier that day: continuing to talk constructively without being able to remember, even in outline, what had been said just before. My order-pad was a help here, but not when it was a matter of deciding what to write down on it. The bar became almost empty. Those in search of an earlyish meal had either moved into the dining-room or fled out of the front door at the sight of me. A little later again, I suggested to David that now would be a good time to have a look at the kitchen. I understood him to say that this was of course an excellent idea, but that it might make just as much sense to defer it to a later stage, rather than carry it out so comparatively soon after a previous visit. I wondered just how soon afterwards it was, and whether, while having my look at the kitchen, I had said anything noteworthy, either for its wit or for its insight into the human condition. David’s expression gave no help here. Using his special reliable voice, he said,
‘Mr Allington, why don’t you let me take over now for what’s left of the evening? There’s only a few late bookings tonight, and you must have had a tiring day, and you’ll be handing over to me anyway at ten o’clock. And you agreed with me the other day that I ought to have more solo time.’
‘Thank you, David, but I think I’ll carry on for a bit. Remember we’ve got Professor Burgess booked for nine thirty, and I want to see to him personally, after that souffle disaster when he was here before.’
As regards coherence, this was probably no great advance on what I had been saying for the last twenty or forty minutes; the point was that I knew what I had said, and even what David had said just earlier. I was back in control, or nearly so, without having done anything to earn it in the way of sleep or abstention, a familiar enough experience. Equally familiar would be the experience of sliding out of control again without having done a great deal to earn that, so I made a brief but violent attack on the cheese, biscuits and stuffed olives Fred had put out on the counter, and resolved to drink no more until I was up in the apartment. David got most of this, and shortly withdrew.
Burgess, a caricature of a savant, arrived soon afterwards with his wife, also a caricature of a savant, though of a more purely learned, perhaps more Germanic, type. They had brought along a couple of friends, less discernibly erudite than themselves. As expected, they all went for the grouse—the first of the year to have hung long enough—accompanied by a couple of bottles of the Chateau Lafite
I had got the Burgesses and their friends settled, and was about to make a round of the other tables when I caught sight of a man standing by the window, perhaps looking out through a chink in the curtains, although he seemed to be in a slightly wrong position for doing this. I was pretty sure he had not been there when I came into the room. For a moment, I assumed this person to be a guest concerned about, for instance, the state of the lights of his car. Then, as my innkeeper’s reflexes sent me across the room with officiously helpful tread, I saw that the figure was wearing a short grey wig and a black gown and white bands at the throat. By now I was no more than six feet away. I halted.
‘Dr Underhill?’
It is never true that we speak so entirely without volition as not to realize, even for an instant, that it is we who have spoken. But I had not had the least conscious intention of pronouncing that name.
In leisurely fashion, but without delay, the head turned and the eyes met mine. They were dark-brown eyes with deeply creased lids, thick lower lashes and arching brows. I also saw a pale, indoors complexion scattered with broken veins to what seemed an incongruous degree, a broad forehead, a long, skewed nose and a mouth that, in another’s face, I might have called humorous, with very clearly defined lips. Then, or rather at once, Dr Underhill recognized me. Then he smiled. It was the kind of smile with which a bully might greet an inferior person prepared to join with him in the persecution of some helpless third party. It also held a certain menace, as if any squeamishness in persecution would result in accomplice becoming victim.
I turned to the nearest table, where there sat a party of three youngish London lawyers and their wives, and said loudly, ‘Do you see him? Man in the black … Just here, there…’
Underhill had gone when I looked round. I felt a great weary irritation at the predictability of this. I floundered idiotically on for a bit about his having been there a moment before, and how they must surely have seen him, before I realized that I could not stand up any more. My heart was perfectly steady just then, I was not dizzy or ill, and I have never fainted in my life; it was simply that my legs would not do their job. Somebody—the head waiter —caught me. I heard alarmed voices and scuffling sounds as people got to their feet. Immediately, and from nowhere, David arrived. He put his arm round me, called out a sharp order for my wife and son to he fetched from the bar and steered me into the hall. Here he sat me down in an upright-backed Regency chair by the fireplace and tried to loosen my collar, but I prevented him.
‘It’s all right, David, really. Just … nothing at all.’
Nick said, ‘What’s the matter, Dad?’ and Joyce said, ‘I’ll phone Jack.’
‘No, don’t do that. No need for that. I just came over a bit dizzy. I must have been drinking faster than I realized. I’m all right now.’
‘Where would you like to be, Mr Allington? Can you make it upstairs if we give you a hand?’
‘Please don’t bother, I think I can make it on my own.’ I got up, not all that shakily, and saw that people were watching me from the dining-room and bar door and elsewhere. ‘Could you tell anybody who’s interested that I’ve been under severe strain recently, or some such flap-doodle? Everyone’ll think I was as tight as a tick anyway, but I
