The Green Man

suppose we might as well preserve the outward forms if we can.’

‘I’m sure very few of them will think that, Mr Allington.’

‘Oh well, what of it? I’ll be off now. Don’t worry, David. If Ramon goes berserk with the meat-cleaver you’d better let me know, but short of that the house is all yours until the morning. Good night.’

None too comfortably, the four of us settled in the drawing-room, so called by my predecessor, though its lack of spaciousness and its pretty unrelieved symmetry made it, for me, a mere parlour or ante-room. I had never much tried to make it more than barely decent, had rather tended to turn it into a dump for the less attractive furniture and a couple of bits of statuary that had started to get on my nerves, a portrait bust of an early-Victorian divine and a female nude in some pale wood, sloppily modernistic in tendency, which I had bought in Cambridge after a heavy lunch at the Garden House and had since been too lazy to get rid of. Only my father had seemed to like the room, or at least had used it regularly. However, we would not be disturbed here.

I told them what I had seen. Nick watched me with great concern, Joyce with concern, Lucy with responsible vigilance, like a member of a team conducting a nationwide survey of drunks who see ghosts. Halfway through, I made Nick fetch me a small Scotch and water. He demurred, but I made him.

Joyce lost her look of concern as I talked. When I had finished, she said, ‘Sounds like D.T.s to me, don’t you think?’ in the interested voice she had used in discussing my father’s chances of surviving the current year, and, once, to suggest that Amy’s remoteness might he due to mental sub-normality.

‘Christ, what an idea,’ said Nick.

‘What’s so terrible about it? I mean, if it’s that you can deal with it. Not like going mad, after all.’

Nick turned to Lucy. ‘Isn’t D.T.s little animals and that type of stuff?’

‘Very often, yes,’ said Lucy dependably. ‘Something completely removed from reality, anyway. A man just standing about smiling hardly counts as that.’

This was a small relief, but I rather wished she had not spoken as if what I had seen was on the same level as one of the waiters wearing a dirty collar. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘what was it, then?’

Nick drew back his lips and shook his head earnestly. ‘You were pissed, Dad. I don’t know whether you realize, but you were really droning away when you were talking to the three of us in the bar just before.’

‘I’m not pissed now.’

‘Well no, but in the meantime you’ve had a shock and that does pull people round. But earlier on you were. Oh, you were making plenty of sense, but I know the way your voice goes, and your eyes.’

‘But I’d come round after that. I was talking to David … Look, Nick, you go down now and ask Professor Burgess. He’ll tell you I was all right. Go on.’

‘Oh, Dad. How can I go and ask him?’

‘Go down and get hold of David and the two of you take some of the regular people aside, David knows who they are, and ask them if they saw somebody standing by the window. I’ve described how he looked, so they’ll be ——’

‘Christ, Dad … Let it drop. Take my advice, honestly. All their bloody tongues’ll be flapping as it is. Don’t go and make it worse. You don’t want it going round that the landlord of the Green Man seems to be seeing things. Don’t mind me saying this, just with the four of us, but they all know you’re a boozer. And anyway they wouldn’t remember seeing anyone, not even taken it in. Really, let it go.’

‘Nick, go and get David up here.’

‘No.’ Nick’s face went hard in a way I had known for a dozen years. ‘No use keeping it up, Dad. It’s not on.’

There was silence. Joyce drew her legs up under her and smoothed her hair, not looking at anyone. Lucy clicked her lighter at a menthol cigarette.

‘What do you think?’ I asked her unwillingly.

‘No investigation, of course. We know that’s out. Basically, I agree with Nick. That is, I think you’d been under a certain amount of strain, you had ghosts in your mind, you knew the story about this Underhill character, your judgment was, let’s say, impaired by alcohol, and the lighting in the dining-room is subdued, especially over by the window. There was somebody standing there, I’m quite ready to believe, but a real person, a waiter or one of the customers. As before, you thought you saw a ghost.’

‘But the wig, and the clothes…’

‘You filled them in out of your mind.’

‘But he recognized me, and he smiled at me.’

‘Of course he did. You were his boss, or else his host, and you’d just embarrassed him slightly by calling him by the wrong name.’

‘He’d disappeared. When I—’

‘He’d moved away.’

Another silence, in which I heard Magdalena enter the apartment and go into the dining-room. I very much wanted to tell the three what had happened in the wood, if only to dissent from Lucy’s Q.E.D., but I could think of no innocent reason for having gone there, and anyway I had been under strain, alcohol, etc., then too.

‘So I imagined it,’ I said, finishing my whisky.

‘That’s what I think,’ said Lucy, ‘but it’s only what I think. I could quite easily be proved wrong.’

‘Oh, really? How?’

‘I could be proved wrong tomorrow, in fact any moment, by someone else seeing what you see—though it goes without saying that if nobody else sees what you say you see, that’s no proof you didn’t see it—or if you found out something from a ghost you couldn’t otherwise have known about, then that would be not exactly a proof, but it would weigh with me considerably.’

‘What sort of thing?’

‘Well, supposing you saw a ghost walk through what’s now part of a wall, say, but it was a doorway or something in the past, and afterwards you found evidence of the doorway which you’d never have found unaided. Anything like that—something in a book, or behind a hidden panel there was no other clue to, that sort of thing would certainly weigh with me.’

Joyce said, ‘I must go and see to Magdalena,’ and left the room. Nick was screaming quietly and rocking from side to side.

‘Oh, ballocks, darling,’ he said. ‘What if something does weigh with you? Why don’t you leave him alone and let him forget about it? Sorry, Dad, I know you’re still here. Nobody wants to see ghosts or think they see them or whatever you prefer. Can’t do you any good, even if it is all only in your mind—worse if it’s that, in fact. As I said, Dad, drop it. If there’s nothing in it there’s nothing in it. If there’s something in it, nobody with any sense would want to know.’

Putting her hands on her knees, Lucy gave a pedagogical sigh. ‘Ghosts can’t harm you. They aren’t there, as I explained earlier.’

‘You could get driven, uh, get pretty disturbed by buggering about with that kind of thing.’

‘That’s up to the person. No ghost can drive anybody out of their mind, any more than a human being can. People go out of their minds because of something about them, inside them.’

I knew, without looking, that Nick was making a face at his wife. Neither spoke. I said I would go and lie down for an hour and then probably reappear for a final drink or two and some more chat, if anybody wanted any. In the passage outside I ran into Joyce.

‘Dinner’s ready,’ she said. ‘I was just coming to—’

‘I don’t want any, thank you.’

‘You ought to eat something.’ She sounded unconvinced.

‘I’m not hungry. I might have a bit of cheese later.’

‘All right. Where are you off to now?’

‘Going to have a little nap.’

‘And then you’ll get up about the time I’m coming to bed and go and talk to Nick and then sit on your own with the whisky-bottle until about two o’clock and tomorrow I’ll see you at lunch and after that in the bar in the evening with everybody else there and so on like today and yesterday and that’s what you and I are going to do tomorrow.’