was one of the most sensitive and observant characters one could wish to meet, and it’s never struck you that I can’t stand the man I’m married to, and you’re supposed to be so frightfully interested in me.’
I was sure I had never seen or heard anything to suggest that Diana was on anything but—at worst— tolerable terms with Jack, but could not make out whether all this was aimed at justifying her dealing with me or, more likely but just as merely, constituted one more tactical move in her campaign to show me up as coarser in spirit than some other people round the place—herself, for instance. However, before I could devise some ramshackle confession of emotional inferiority, she had shifted a little away from me, as if to enable us to see each other’s faces properly, but with a series of movements that involved her whole body. These continued while I watched her jaw sink and her eyes grow fixed in the doltish look they had taken on the previous afternoon. Arching her back, she said without hyphens,
‘All right, let’s do it. Whenever you like. I’ll do whatever you like.’
I was so excited that it was all over quite soon, but I have never known a woman who did not set a high value on male excitement, and in that short space I was able to produce a compelling pot-pourri of everything that had happened between us before. That is denigrating it a good deal, actually. I cannot imagine ever quite forgetting what it was like, while I can remember anything. And if what set it off was a little impure, in at least two senses, then let it be impure. Alternatively, fuck you. Anybody who feels like saying that a particular sexual act of any ordinary sort, possibly of any sort at all, ought not to have been enjoyable is a monster, large or little.
On the drive back to the corner, Diana was subdued. I wondered whether this was a prelude to her making a bid for a new kind of interestingness by telling me she had changed her mind about the orgy project, but I could not wonder very hard or for long at a time because I was thinking how best to put another proposal to her, one just as tricky in its way. Finally I said,
‘Diana, there’s something else I want to ask you.’
‘What, you and me and David Palmer?’
‘No, quite different. I think I’ve found out about a place where there may be some buried treasure. Would you give me a hand looking for it?’
‘Maurice, how frightfully exciting. What sort of treasure? How did you find out about it?’
‘I came across some old papers to do with the house, just saying where the stuff had been put, nothing about what it consisted of. Of course, there may be nothing in it.’
‘I see. Where is it?’
‘Apparently, uh, it’s in that little graveyard just up the road from the Green Man.’
‘In a grave? In someone’s coffin?’
‘That’s what the papers said, yes.’
‘You’re proposing to dig up a grave and open someone’s coffin?’ She was getting the idea fast.
‘Yes. It’s a very old grave and so on. There won’t be anything in it but bones. And this treasure.’
‘Maurice Allington, have you gone totally and completely out of your mind?’
‘No, I don’t think so. Why?’
‘You can’t be serious. Digging up a grave.’
‘I assure you I am serious. I want that treasure. As I say, there may be nothing there at all, or something quite worthless, but you never know. I asked you to help because I must have somebody to hold the torch and lend a hand generally, and you’re the only person I can ask who won’t be shocked out of their mind.’
That went down very satisfactorily, but she still had a piece of finessing to do. ‘It’s not true, though, is it, about lending a hand? You want company. You’re afraid to do it on your own.’
I nodded with pretended ruefulness. The last bit was not true either: if there was going to be anything out of the ordinary to see in that graveyard, I just wanted somebody else on hand to see it too. But I had not lied when I said that Diana was the only one I could ask. That was something substantial in her favour.
‘Has it got to be at night?’
‘Well, yes, I think so, don’t you? with people passing by on the road all day long, and sterling chaps doing things to the soil. It shouldn’t take more than half an hour or so.’
‘There’s no curse or anything on it, is there?’
‘Oh, good God, no, nothing like that. The fellow was just after a safe place to stow a few things.’
‘Oh, very well, then. I’ll come along. It might be quite fun.’
‘Out of the ordinary, anyway. What about tonight? No point in hanging about. Can you get away?’
‘Of course I can. I do as I please.’
We had reached the corner. I arranged to pick her up at half-past midnight at a spot nearer her house. On the way back home, I stopped at the graveyard and looked Underhill’s grave over with some care. I could foresee no special difficulty later: there was nothing in the way of a stone to lift, and the soil, when I prodded it, seemed to be as light as elsewhere in the area. Whatever the place might feel like in the dark, at five o’clock on a summer afternoon it was solidly un-eerie, giving no impression of age or decay, merely of rankness and dilapidation, heavily overgrown for the most part (though not in Underhill’s corner), and littered with more ice-cream wrappers and beer-cans than fragments of headstone.
I drove to the Green Man, went upstairs and started on a quick drink before bathing and changing. I sat in a nondescript but comfortable armchair beside the fireplace, facing the window in the front wall. This had its curtains drawn, but there was plenty of light from the other Window to my left, where the French girl stood. Amy’s gramophone was playing some farrago of crashes, bumps and yells from her room down the passage. As I listened, or endured hearing it, the noise stopped abruptly. Sipping my Scotch, I waited half-consciously for another record to go on. How quiet it was by contrast; totally quiet, in fact. And that was not just odd, it was impossible. No inn is silent for more than a couple of seconds at a time, except for four or five hours between the last departure to bed and the stirrings of the first servant. I went to the door and opened it; there was no sound whatever. When I turned back to the room, I found that it looked different in some way, different, at any rate, from how it had looked when I entered it five minutes before. It was darker. But how could that be? Sunlight was streaming in as brightly as ever from the side window. Ah: it was the other window that was darker. There was no light at all showing between the curtains and at their edges. That was impossible, too. Feeling for the moment nothing but a great curiosity, I hurried over to those curtains and threw them apart.
Outside, it was night, absolutely dark it seemed at first, as if I had opened my eyes thousands of fathoms under water, at the sea bed. Then I saw it was not really as dark as all that: there was a three-quarter moon low in the sky, and no cloud to speak of. The horizon and the distance were the same as any night, except that a plantation of conifers just below the sky-line was missing. In the middle distance, small fields under cultivation replaced the areas of grassland I had always seen before. And in the foreground, immediately below me, the hedge lining the road had gone, and the telegraph-poles—of course—had gone, and the road itself had dwindled to a rough track. Although nothing moved, it was a living scene, not the equivalent of a still photograph.
I turned back to the dining-room, which was quite unchanged. My five sculptured people looked into space as ever, but for the first time I thought I found something slightly malignant in their impassivity. I crossed to the side window, and looked out on the familiar daytime landscape. As I watched, a light-blue sports car, a TR5 by the look of it, emerged from the direction of the village and moved, accelerating sharply but in complete silence, up the road towards the house. It did not—of course—come into view at the front window.
I stood and thought. There was an obvious case for rushing along to Amy and bringing her here, in the hope of proving to myself and everybody else that I was not seeing things, or rather that what I saw was really there, or at least that I was not insane. But I could not subject that child to the terror of either seeing what I saw, or finding that she and I were seeing differently. And, if I did go down the passage to her room, I was far from sure that I would find her there, or anything there that I knew.
At this point of irresolution, I heard voices below me, male and female, and then an outside door shutting at the front of the house, but it was not the sound of my front door. The woman I had twice seen on the landing came into view carrying a small lantern and set off towards the village—I caught the merest glimpse of her face, but her general outline and her gait left me in no doubt. Very faintly, the man’s voice was again audible from the floor beneath, this time with a different intonation, one of a peculiar monotony, one I could identify, or, if I tried, name a close parallel to. Yes, a parson, a priest, intoning a part of the service that is best got over quickly.
The woman was almost out of my view; I could just see the swaying light of her lantern. Then I picked up a movement on the other side, from the direction of, among other things, what at this stage I need only call the wood. A tall and immensely broad figure came stumping awkwardly along the track, massive legs, apparently of not
