The Green Man

‘I suppose you’re going to tell me all that stuff is due to drink’

‘There’s a connection all right.’

‘Last time we talked about this you said there was a connection with epilepsy. You can’t have it both ways.’

‘Why not, if it is both ways? Anyway, the epilepsy thing is a technicality. I can’t tell you you’ll never have an epileptic fit, any more than I can tell you you’ll never break your leg, but I can tell you there’s no sign of it at the moment. Another thing I can tell you, though, is that there’s a bloody sight more than a technical connection between your drinking and your jumps and faces. Stress. It’s all stress.’

‘Alcohol relieves stress.’

‘At first. Look, come off it, Maurice. After twenty years on the bottle you don’t need me to lecture you about vicious circles and descending spirals and what-not. I’m not asking you to cut it out completely. That wouldn’t be a good idea at all. Knock it off a bit. Try keeping away from the hard stuff until the evening. You’d better start that soon if you feel like seeing sixty. But I don’t want you sitting there upstairs like a death’s head at the feast, so forget about it for tonight. Go and throw down another of your specials and then trot round the dining-room apologizing for the bits of dogshit in the steak-and-kidney pudding while I chat up these birds.’

I did approximately as I had been told, finally getting away rather later than expected by reason of a full- length oral review of my cuisine, delivered at the speed of one addressing a large audience of high-grade mental defectives, from my Baltimore guest. After hearing this out, and responding in appropriately rounded periods, I took my departure and went up to the flat.

The sound of an authoritative and rather peevish male voice, speaking with a strong Central European accent, was coming from my daughter’s bedroom. Thirteen-year-old Amy, tall, thin and pale, was sitting bent forward on the edge of her bed with her cheeks in her hands and elbows on knees. Her surroundings expressed her age and station with overdone fidelity: coloured photographs of singers and actors cut from magazines and Scotch- taped to the walls, a miniature lidless gramophone in pastel pink, records and gaudy record-sleeves, the former seldom inside the latter, fragments of clothing, most of them looking too narrow for their purposes, a great many jars and pots and small plastic bottles grouped on the top of the dressing-table round a television set. On the screen of this, a hairy man was saying to a bald man, ‘But the effects of these attacks on the dollar will not of course immediately be apparent. And we must wait to see which will be the remedies adopted.’

‘Darling, what on earth are you watching this for?’ I asked. Amy shrugged her shoulders without otherwise altering her position.

‘What else is there on?’

‘Music on one of them—you know, with all violins and things—and horses on the other.’

‘But you like horses.’

‘Not these ones.’

‘What’s wrong with them?’

‘All in lines.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘All in lines.’

‘I don’t see why you feel you’ve always got to watch something, no matter what it is. You can’t possibly … I wish you’d read a book occasionally.’

‘But you must understand that this in the first place is not a matter for the International Monetary Fund,’ said the hairy man with contempt.

‘Sweetheart, turn that down, will you? I can’t hear a thing … That’s better,’ I said as Amy, her eyes still on the screen, put one long-fingered hand to the remote-control box at her side and reduced the hairy man’s voice to a far-away shout. ‘Now listen: Dr Maybury and his wife are here for dinner tonight. They’ll be coming up here in a minute. Why don’t you slip your nightdress on now and clean your teeth and run in and chat to them for a little while before you go to bed?’

‘No thanks, Daddy.’

‘But you like them. You’re always saying you like them.’

‘No thanks.’

‘Well, come and say good night to Gramps, then.’

‘I have.’

As I stood there for a moment by the bed, wishing I knew how to give my daughter a life, I happened to notice the photograph of her dead mother in its place on the wall beside the window. Why I did so I had no idea, and I thought I had made no movement, but Amy, apparently without having glanced aside, knew what I had seen. She shifted her legs slightly, as if in discomfort. I said suddenly, trying to sound enthusiastic,

‘I know what: I’ve got to go into Baldock again tomorrow morning. What I’ve got to do won’t take more than a few minutes, so you could come in with me and we could have a cup of … You could have a Coke.’

‘Okay, Daddy,’ said Amy in a placatory voice.

‘Now I’ll be back in fifteen minutes to say good night to you and I expect you to be in bed by then. Don’t forget to clean your teeth.’

‘Okay.’

The hairy man having had his hour, it was the recommendation of a shampoo, delivered in the tones of somebody in mid-orgasm, that filled the small room before I had shut the door after me. Amy was not yet a woman, but, even when much younger, she had developed the totally female habit of behaving coolly, or coldly, to a degree that must have a reason, while denying to the death not only the existence of the reason but also the existence of the behaviour. I had not given her the chance just now of doing any denying, but I had not needed to. I was intimidated by the behaviour, and now and then appalled by the reason, while avoiding the question of what it was. Amy and I had never discussed Margaret’s death in a street accident eighteen months previously, nor her leaving me, taking Amy with her, nearly three years before that, nor Margaret herself; beyond necessities, we had barely mentioned her. In the end, I would have to find a way of doing something about that, and the behaviour, and the reason. Perhaps I could make a start on the trip to Baldock in the morning. Perhaps.

I went down the sloping passage and into the dining-room, a broad, rather low-ceilinged affair with a beautiful seventeenth-century heraldic stone fireplace I had uncovered behind Victorian brickwork. Here Magdalena, Ramon’s wife, a tubby little woman of about thirty-five, was laying bowls of chilled vichyssoise round the five places at the oval table. The windows were open, the curtains undrawn, and when I lit the candles their flames swayed slightly without breaking. A breeze from the Chilterns was just managing to reach as far up as here. The air it brought seemed no cooler. When Magdalena, muttering quite amiably to herself, had departed, I walked to the widow at the front of the house, but found little relief.

There was nothing to see, only the empty room reflected in the large square pane. My pieces of statuary stood in their places: a good copy of a Roman terracotta head of an old man on a pedestal beside the door, a pair of Elizabethan youths looking vaguely towards each other from rectangular niches in the far wall, busts of a naval officer and of a military man of the Napoleonic period above the fireplace, and a pretty bronze of a girl, probably French and of the 1890s or just after, on another pedestal in front of the window at my left, placed so as to catch the morning sun. As I stood with my back to the room I could not make out much of her, but from all the others that oddly exact balance between the animate and the inanimate, constantly maintained when they were viewed direct, seemed to have departed. In the glass of the window they looked newly empty of any life. I turned round and faced them: yes, once more human as well as mineral.

With the A595 just too far off for individual vehicles to be heard, and no one, for the moment, moving about in the forecourt, everything seemed quiet until I listened. Then the murmur of voices became audible from downstairs, but, again, none could be distinguished from the rest. I said to myself that if a minute went by without any sort of separate sound emerging, I would go to the cupboard in the bedroom and give myself another drink. I began counting in my head: one—thousand—two—thousand—three—thousand—four—thousand … The thousand business helps one to attain the correct rhythm, and by using it over the years I have reached the point at which I can guarantee an accuracy of within two seconds per timed minute. This is a useful accomplishment in such situations as having to boil eggs without the aid of a watch, but usefulness is not really the end in view.

I had reached thirty-eight thousand in this count, and was preparing to congratulate myself on entering the last third of the course, when I heard a clearly differentiated and half-expected sound from the drawing-room across the passage, a mingled groaning and clearing of the throat. My father, having heard Magdalena’s departure, but not