The Green Man

afterwards went off to pick up my pills at Jack’s, leaving me watching, rather in Amy style, a programme about rehousing schemes in (I think) Salford.

As soon as Nick had gone, I picked up a hammer, a chisel and some sort of steel bar from the tool-box in the utilities cupboard, collected a couple of torches from their drawer in the office, went outside to the hut where the very idle and disagreeable old man (all I could get) whom I paid to do the gardening spent his time drinking tea and, no doubt, pulling his wire, found a spade showing no signs of recent use and stowed all these implements in the back of the Volkswagen. Doing this cheered me, and also helped me considerably to shove beneath the surface of my mind any question of what the hell I thought I was doing. It must have been at about this point, in fact, that I became finally committed to following the Underhill thing through, in the sense that afterwards I never once considered turning back until it was too late.

Another distraction, of course, was the problem of how to introduce to Joyce the topic of the orgy project. I was determined to talk her into this with the least possible delay, without at the same time having any idea at all about how to start, or how to go on either. If other things had been normal, to get, or seem, very drunk might have looked like an obvious preliminary, but getting so would not do now, seeming so would quite probably not fool Joyce, who knew me well, at least in such areas as this, and neither was likely to make the right impression, whatever that might be. I turned it all over in my mind while, accompanied by David, I made a sketchy round of bar, kitchen and dining-room, but could think of no solution. This did not worry me, perhaps because before I started I had opened Jack’s package and swallowed two parti-coloured transparent cylinders containing some sort of coarse brown powder and very roughly resembling dolls’ egg-timers. I would have to trust to the inspiration of the moment, in other words put my head down and charge full tilt.

The moment came shortly before nine o’clock, after I had had a desultory chat with Amy in her room and come upon Joyce and Nick in the dining-room. No sooner had I mixed myself a water and Scotch—ten to one—and given Joyce a glass of Tio Pepe than Nick said, staring at me rather, that he felt like going down to the bar for a bit and would see us at dinner.

Joyce asked me how I was and I soon satisfied her curiosity, which had not seemed to be of the burning sort in the first place. Then I said,

‘I ran into Diana this afternoon, on my way back from Cambridge.’

‘Ran into her?’

‘She was just coming out of the post office as I went by, so I stopped and gave her a lift. She had a shopping-bag or so.’

‘And?’

‘Well, it was all rather curious. Would you say she got tight at all? I don’t mean on my scale, but at all?’

‘No.’

‘No, neither would I, but she did seem a bit tight this afternoon. Or something, from the way she went on. Anyway, she started saying how marvellously attractive she thought you were, wonderful colouring, terrific figure and everything, so much so that it began to dawn on me that she wasn’t just paying compliments, she had something particular in mind. So, after a bit it all began to come out.’

‘Go on.’

‘She went into a great kind of thing about how dull life was in Fareham, for people like her and you and me, and of course I agreed with that, and how we ought to do something about it, get some excitement from somewhere. Such as where? Well, what was wrong with the idea of the three of us having a little romp together?’ Joyce said nothing, so I went on, ‘She meant all going to bed. I thought she was joking at first, but evidently not. I said I wasn’t sure I could satisfy two ladies all by myself, and she said I needn’t worry, that wouldn’t be necessary.

‘What did she mean?’

‘Well, I suppose she meant, in fact I’m sure she meant you and she could have fun together between times. It would be all sort of mixed.’

‘I see. What did you say?’

‘I said I thought she had something, but naturally I couldn’t commit myself until I’d talked to you about it. Oh, there was one other thing she said. We needn’t worry about the Jack side of it, because it turns out she hates him.’

Joyce looked at me for the first time since we had started talking. ‘Diana hates Jack?’

‘That’s what she said.’

‘You mean she had to tell you?’ (At this point it was I who said nothing.) The first time we met them Diana couldn’t bear Jack, and she’s gone on not being able to bear him ever since. How funny you’ve never noticed.’

‘Why didn’t you mention it to me?’

‘I thought it was so obvious it wasn’t worth mentioning.’

‘That’s not how things work. In the ordinary way you’d have been bound to bring it up some time, just casually. Why have you been keeping it to yourself for so long?’

‘Pretty good deduction,’ said Joyce, apparently with genuine mild admiration, though I was on the alert about appearances, at any rate for the moment. ‘I haven’t mentioned it because I was waiting to see if you’d ever notice it on your own, and you haven’t. That’s typical, both bits, I mean you not noticing and you seeing straight away that I’d not mentioned it on purpose. That’s how you are. You sort of observe all the time, and do it bloody well, often, and yet you don’t see. Do you see what I mean?’

‘Yes, and you may be right,’ I said, trying not to sound impatient. ‘But let’s get back to Diana’s idea. She seemed to think we could—’

‘She meant that you’d, well, do her, for instance, and then she and I would work each other over for a bit, until you were ready again, and then you’d do me from behind, I don’t mean, you know, just from behind while she sort of did the front of me, and then she and I would go on together again until perhaps you could do the same thing again only the other way round, or else you and I could divide her up and take different bits of her, and then you and she could take different bits of me, and so on. Is that the kind of thing?’

‘Roughly, yes.’ Listening to Joyce’s outline had been not altogether unlike having the plot of Romeo and Juliet summarized by a plasterer’s mate. At the same time I was swallowing hard with the effort not to want to laugh. ‘Of course, we’d find plenty of—’

‘All right.’

‘What?’

‘Let’s do it, then.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes. We might just as well. Why shouldn’t we? You fix it up with Diana and let me know. Now I must go and find Magdalena. There’s the chef’s gazpacho tonight, and then lamb cutlets Reform. Ought to be damn good.’.

With Victor in a loose ball on my lap, I sat and tried, not very hard, to watch Friday Playhouse, one of those two-character efforts which nevertheless seem marred by the excessive size of the cast. I was puzzled by the sensation that Joyce had let the situation down in some way: having wished beforehand for nothing better than her ready acceptance of the orgy project, I was now wishing she had put up objections for me to beat or wheedle out of the way. There was material here for a mental discussion about sex and power, but I shelved this. Perhaps it was Joyce’s reaction that had—against all the odds —made me feel less than totally triumphant about the replacement of orgy project by orgy prospect, or perhaps it was just Jack’s pills. If the latter, then there was a problem looming.

Dinner came and went; so did further television, culminating, or ending, in a discussion about God that made God seem comparatively immediate and to be reckoned with, as if God’s sphere of influence might reach out to within a few light-years of the Solar System any millennium now, or traces of God’s activities had been proved to extend as late as the beginning of the Devonian Age. Joyce went silently off to bed before it was over. Nick sat on for a while over a journal of French studies, then told me I was to wake him at any time if I felt like some company, and retired in his turn.

It was exactly midnight. I washed down two more pills with the puny draught I must habituate myself to, and left the apartment, picking up a lightweight raincoat on the way. This —camouflage, not protection from the weather—I put on and buttoned up to the chin before hurrying downstairs and out at the side door. In the open, there was plenty of movement to and fro, and plenty of standing about, too; as I waited in the shadows for a clear