The Green Man

bitter, took a pill, bought a quarter-bottle of White Horse and drove on. In Cambridge I went into a cinema, and sat through forty minutes of a wide-screen Western (in which, apart from much talk and even more dead silence, one man shot at another and missed) before deciding that I felt too tense and jittery to continue. On bad days, sitting in a cinema can give me a curiously strong foretaste of dying, out of some fortuitous combination of the darkness, the felt presence of unseen strangers, the vast, unnaturally-coloured, ever-changing images, the voices that are not quite like voices. I walked the streets for a while, counting my footsteps and telling myself that something interesting was going to happen between three hundred and three hundred and fifty, and that this would show everybody that Allington was a good judge, whose predictions could be relied on. By the three hundred and forties nothing remotely interesting had turned up, not even a passable woman, so I settled for the stand of paperbacked novels I could see through the window of a supermarket. The place was still open; I went in and bought something I had never heard of by a writer whose first book, a satire on provincial life, I remembered had been commended at the time. In the little cocktail bar of the University Arms, I got through about forty minutes’ worth of this too, before going out and dropping it into a rubbish basket on the way back to my car. To the endemic unreality of all fiction, the author had added contributions of his own: an inability to leave even the most utilitarian sentence unadorned by some verbal frill or knob or curlicue, recalling those savage cultures whose sacred objects and buildings are decorated in every square inch; a rooted habit of proceeding by way of violent and perfunctory transitions from one slackly observed scene to the next; and an unvaried method of characterization whereby, having portrayed a person as one sort of cliche, he presently revealed him as a predictable different sort of cliche. Oh well, what had I expected? The thing was a novel.

On the road again, and in the dark this time, I very soon felt panic settling upon me. I had reason (of a sort) to feel afraid of encountering Underhill; this was nothing to do with that, a pure, unmotivated, objectless fear that, in my boyhood, had sent me running out of the house and across the common that it faced until I could literally not run any more, and, later, had caused me to read the entire contents of a newspaper aloud to myself as fast as possible while I tapped first one foot and then the other as fast as possible. This is a poor frame of mind in which to drive a car among traffic moving at between thirty miles an hour and sixty-five or more on a not particularly wide road. Each time, as I pulled out to overtake in the face of a column of oncoming headlights or at the approach to a blind corner, rational fear seemed as if it would drive out irrational fear for ever, to recede unnoticed and unremembered as soon as the danger was past.

The accident took place on a bend of the A595 about three miles south of Royston and four from home. I caught up with a largish car, a Humber Hawk or something similar, which was ambling along at about forty, and started to pass it a couple of hundred yards from the start of the bend, not an outstandingly dangerous manoeuvre provided the Hawk maintained its original speed. No doubt spurred by an idiot resentment at being overtaken by a car half the size of his, its driver accelerated instead. As, more or less side by side, the two vehicles began curving round to the left, an immense articulated lorry, chains of red lights outlining its extra wide load, appeared from the other direction. I had not the m.p.h. to pass the Hawk, and could not predict what it might do; so, trusting to my memory of a road I had travelled four times a week for seven years, I swung to the right across the front of the lorry and into the wide grass verge I hoped very much was there. It was there, but rougher and more sloping than I had thought. These features slowed me down, at any rate, and I was not going very fast when I drove into the brickwork of a culvert (as I learned later) and hit my head on something.

‘Are you all right, mate?’ asked a voice.

‘Yes, thank you..’

‘Well, you bloody well oughtn’t to be. You daft or something? Double-banking on a bend like that? Pissed, I suppose, like ‘em all.’

‘No.’

‘Flat pissed, you must be, if you aren’t off your rocker. Yeah, he’s okay. No call to be, but he is, so he says.’

Another voice spoke then, but I never remembered to what effect. I know only that, after some lapse of time, I was standing in front of my house while a car—a Humber Hawk, perhaps—receded into the distance. I felt like a man on the moon, almost weightless, or as if on the point of disembodiment, like myself after a heavy night and a heavy lunch, like a child, observant without expectation, curious and disinterested.

It was eight minutes to midnight. Just nice time, I said to myself. Indoors, everything was quiet and in darkness. Splendid. I went to the bar and fetched a tumbler, a siphon of soda and a bottle of Glen Grant, took a weak drink and a pill, and settled down in the public dining-room to wait the remaining two minutes. I sat at a corner table in the part where Underhill’s parlour had been, with just the one heavily shaded light in front of me turned on, out of consideration to him. I was almost directly facing the window at which he was accustomed to make his appearances, with the hall door diagonally opposite. The night was warm, but not humid.

Very faintly, I heard the church clock in the village begin striking midnight. I could not remember whether, with clocks that do not strike the quarters, the first note or the last signified the hour. Nothing happened, at any rate, while the clock was striking. And nothing happened after it had finished, either. I waited. The clock must be fast. But my own watch said two and a bit minutes after twelve.

By ten past I had decided that I had got the whole thing wrong, I had misunderstood Underhill’s message, it had not been a message at all, I had been mistaken about the freshness of the ink, he had just been seeing if I could be fooled into keeping this appointment, he had been joking. But I was not going to give him up yet. I sat there, unable to find any way of helping the time to pass. Through my mind went thoughts of Joyce, and Amy, and Diana, and my father, and Margaret, and the young man, and death, and ghosts, and drink, and Joyce again, and Amy again. In my current (perhaps precarious, but remarkably durable) state of detachment, all these topics struck me as very interesting but of no personal moment whatever, like, say, the New England whaling industry in the nineteenth century being considered by an intelligent and imaginative Grimsby trawlerman of our own time.

I went on not looking at my watch for much longer than I would have thought was possible. Then I did. It was three minutes to one. Fine. To wait an hour was as much as politeness and sanity demanded. I poured a short weak drink and sipped it deliberately. As faintly as before, but, it seemed to me, more distinctly, the church clock sounded, and I got up to go.

‘Stay. I am come as I said I would,’ said somebody, somebody standing in the shadows of the corner directly opposite the door.

‘You’re late, Dr Underhill.’

‘Not so, I’ve been most punctual. Now to the purpose. Have you our silver friend about you?’

I had not thought of this for hours, but when I felt in my pocket the thing was there. ‘Yes.’

There was a sort of sigh from the corner. ‘That’s well. Be so good as to place it on the table before you.’

I did as I was told. ‘There. What now?’

‘Now I’ll entertain you.’

‘Before you do, may I ask a question?’

‘Assuredly.’

‘When did you write that note asking me to meet you tonight?’

‘This morning, by your reckoning, the morning of the day just past. But yours was the hand that writ, mine merely the hand that guided yours.’

‘I don’t remember that.’

‘Not to remember is your quality, Mr Allington.’

‘Is that why you chose me to … assist you, or whatever it is you want me to do?’

‘How have I chosen you, when it is you that have each time come in search of me? But now, pray you, have done for the moment. There are many marvels in store.’

I had time to admire the justice of my own description of the voice—sounding as if artificially produced, with a kind of Gloucester-cum-Cork accent—before Underhill’s show began. The room was suddenly and brightly illuminated, only it was not the room any more, but a cave, or a cave-mouth. A group of naked women flashed into apparent existence, in mid-performance of some sort of slow, writhing, vaguely Oriental ballet. Their voluptuousness was extreme, and also theoretical, like the fantasy-drawings of a prurient but talented schoolboy: enormous breasts, nipples that in proportion were even more enormous, tiny waists, spreading hips and buttocks, sexual organs displaced forwards into the V of the crotch, as in Indian sculpture. There was monotonous music and a strong scent of roses. I would have grinned at all this, had it not been for something two-dimensional about the dancers and their movements that gave me the uncomfortable sensation of watching them through an invisible