The Green Man

days, was too cunningly deep-seated for me to be able to nick off its top with my razor, nor, of course, could I have squeezed it out except at the price of messing up about a tenth of my face.

‘Instructions to a pimple,’ I said to myself as I worked on my upper lip. ‘One. Acquire head as slowly as possible. Exception: if can arrange first appearance after six p.m., reverse this procedure. Prominent head viewed for first time morning after party, etc., valuable aid nullifying in retrospect subject’s subtle seduction moves, gay fund of anecdotes, etc. Two. Select site either where squeezing painful, e.g. round eye, cheek near nose, or where skin too soft for efficient squeezing, e.g. between mouth and chin, at side of neck (if latter, prefer area where shirt-collar will rub). Three. Appear in combination, near existing pustule(s). If none, take as focal point patch of broken veins, mole, birthmark, anything a-bloody-tall, in fact’ —I was talking aloud now, though not loudly— ’which will aid the impression that some major skin disorder is about to break out of its beachhead and overrun every visible square inch up to the hairline, and be sure to pick a day when the poor sod’s meeting his girl,’ I finished not so not loudly, after a small disjunctive voice in my head had asked me whether I knew I had some frightfully funny sort of spot thing on my chin.

Things failed to pick up much in the kitchen, where I stood drinking coffee, eating a piece of toast and listening and looking while the chef told and showed me how badly Ramon had done his cleaning job the previous day. I put David on to that, on to everything else for the next six or eight hours too, and was off, at any rate as far as the office. Here I put a call through to John Duerinckx-Williams in Cambridge. For my present purpose, or indeed for any other I might have there, he was the only possibility among the dozen or so university people I knew otherwise than as guests at my house; I would not have asked any of those I had known as an undergraduate there, back in the mid-1930s, to tell me the time, let alone to help me with what must seem outlandish inquiries.

Despite everything the St Matthew’s porter could do, I finally got hold of Duerinckx-Williams, who said he would see me at eleven o’clock. I was just about to go and find Joyce and tell her something of my plans for the day, when I caught sight of the cheap folio notebook in which I, and she and David too, used to scribble down reminders and messages. The left-hand pages were folded round against the back cover; on the topmost right-hand page there was some stuff about meat in David’s hand, then, in my own, information in overwhelming detail, almost amounting to a curriculum vitae, from a London art dealer who had finally cancelled his booking and rung off abruptly when I told him we had no TV in the bedrooms. But that had been last week, ten days ago. Then I started to read something I thought at first I had never seen before, but soon realized I must have, because I had written it myself, at whatever hour of whichever night and however drunkenly. It ran:

‘Accent like west of England with bit of Irish. Voice wrong, artificial. Something funny about movement, as if behind glass. ?no air displacement. Could not touch. Did not see hand going through, was like hand still  in front of h  between him and me even tho hand stretched out and he less than foot away.  Could not ask  Still ‘injaynious’ ? =poss[ess]ed of intelligence. No answer where. Proof. Behind head, body about 3” by 1?, silver, arms out, left hand missing, smiling. Wanted to’

With what I might term shallow alcoholic amnesia, a man can be quite easily reminded of what he has temporarily forgotten. The deeper sort blots out memory beyond recall. This was the case here: I was prepared to believe that I had conversed with Thomas Underhill’s ghost last night, but I would never know what it had been like to do so. I might do better next time; it seemed to me there was going to be a next time. If so, I must try to clear up some obscurities: exactly what, for instance, the ‘proof’ of Underhill’s survival after death was supposed to prove, and also what it might consist of. The idea that he had been carrying or wearing some kind of giant silver brooch ‘behind his head’ was unhelpfully bizarre; I recognized that, like most of those whose midnight selves write notes to their daytime selves, I had thought some vital points too obvious and memorable to be worth the trouble of recording. At a future meeting, too, I might establish whether my account of trying to touch what I had seen and heard was a brilliant attempt to describe the indescribable or a straightforward result of drunken uncertainty about relative distances. Other questions could be cleared up at once, such as why I had written on a past page of the notebook—to conceal my story from others —and why I had nevertheless propped the book open at that place—not to conceal it from myself: a reconstruction almost too plausible to be likely.

I hurried upstairs and met Joyce on the landing. At first, she put on a not-speaking act, presumably by way of showing me how much she wanted me to talk to her, but soon abandoned this.

‘What’s happened?’ she asked, looking me over.

‘Happened? How do you mean?’

‘You’re all sort of excited. Charged up.’

It was true. Ever since receiving my own message, I had been mounting on a spiral of elation and disquiet, a state I was not used to. I suppose I was equally unfamiliar with the prospect of setting off to do something of which the end was unforeseeable. I could not even remember when I had last felt in any way strung up, as now, for a reason—not a very full or clear reason, certainly, but one with a sense of adequacy about it.

I decided to play all this down. ‘Really? I must say I don’t notice it particularly. Standard awful to bloody awful is how it feels from here.’

‘Oh, all right. What are you going to Cambridge for?’

‘To look up some stuff about the house, as I said.’

‘How can that take all day?’

‘It might not, as I said. It depends how soon I find what I’m looking for.’

‘You’re not, you know, meeting anybody there, are you?’

‘I’m going to see Nick’s old supervisor, yes, but not anybody in the sense you mean.’

‘Mm. What’s Nick going to do all the time?’

‘He can please himself. He’s brought some of his university stuff along. Or he could do something with Amy.’

‘Why don’t you take them both with you into Cambridge? There’s a lot more there they could—’

‘I’d have to hang about waiting for them, and I told you I might be coming more or less straight back. Anyway, I’m going on my own.’

‘Oh, all right. You know Lucy’s off this morning?’

‘She’ll be here again tomorrow for the funeral. But say goodbye to her for me if you like.’

‘Do you want me to do the wages and stamps and things?’

‘Would you? I must be off.’

I took a quick and fairly small nip in the still-room and was soon belting up the A595 in the Volkswagen. It was a genuine hot day, with the humidity down for once and the sunshine unfiltered by haze. Vehicles flashed and glistened as they moved, their bare metal seemingly burnished, their paintwork sheened with oil. They hurtled past me in the opposite direction, swung into and out of corners ahead, pulled aside to overtake as if with an extra dash, like actors conscious of appearing against an advantageous background. Even in the deep shadows of the trees lining the road, individual branches and clusters of leaves and patches of soil reflected light with an intensity, and yet with a depth of colour, that I was used to seeing only in Alpes-Maritimes. In the middle distance, refraction-mirages, illusory strips of still water lying across the road, constantly came into view and vanished. Beyond Royston, the confluence of the A10 and the A505 brought heavier traffic, but I kept my average up to forty-five or better. The outskirts of Cambridge rolled by, with the familiar thickening of wayside timber and shrub that suggests the approach to a forest rather than a town. Then this disappeared into the fenland openness of the place itself, never crowded-looking even at mid-morning in term-time, and the landmarks were there: the Leys School, Addenbrookes Hospital, Fitzwilliam Street (where I had had digs when sitting my scholarship in 1933), Peterhouse, Pembroke and finally, more or less side by side with St Catherine’s on the corner of Trumpington Street and Silver Street, the long bitten-off rectangle of St Matthew’s, a flat-fronted Tudor structure not too badly restored at the end of the eighteenth century.

I found a parking space only a hundred yards from the main gate. The outer walls bore chalked or whitewashed slogans here and there: COMMUNALIZE COLLEGE ESTATES, NUDE LIE-IN GIRTON 2.30 SAT., EXAMS ARE TOTALITARIAN. First one whiskered youth in an open frugiferous shirt, then another with long hair like oakum, scanned me closely as they passed, each slowing almost to a stop the better to check me for bodily signs of fascism, oppression by free speech, passive racial violence and the like. I survived this, entered and cross the front court (which looked oppressively clean to my eyes), went through a low archway and ascended to the square