The Green Man

be upon us evermore, through Jesus Christ our Lord, amen. There. I hope you’re quite satisfied?’

‘Perfectly, thank you.’ I assumed that what had just been done would have no effect on the appearances, upstairs, of the red-haired woman, and was content: I had no wish to put an end to that timid, evanescent shade. That’s it, then. I’ll run you back.’

A couple of minutes later, I was about to get into the truck beside the rector when Ramon came up to me.

‘Excuse, Mr. Allington.’

‘What is it?’

‘Mrs Allington like to see you, Mr Allington. In a house.’

‘Whereabouts? Where?’

‘Down estairs. In a office.’

‘Thank you.’

I told the rector I would be back in a minute. Joyce was on the office telephone. She said she had to go now and rang off.

‘Ramon told me you wanted to see me.’

‘I’m sorry, Maurice, but I’m leaving you.’

I looked at her wide, clear blue eyes, but not into them, because, turned in my direction though they were, they were not on me at all. ‘I see. Any particular reason?’

‘I just can’t go on any longer. I can’t go on trying any more. I’m fed up with trying.’

‘Trying to do what? Run your part of the house?’

‘I don’t like doing that, but I could do it if things were different, I wouldn’t mind it at all.’

‘What things?’

‘I’ve tried to love you, but you won’t let me, ever. You just have your own ideas about what to do and when and how, about everything, and they always stay the same, doesn’t matter who you’re dealing with or what they say to you. There’s no use trying to love someone when they’re always doing something else.’

‘These last few days I’ve been having a—’

‘These last few days have been exactly the same as any other few days as far as that’s concerned. More so, I mean with your father and this ghost business and everything, and now Amy, it would have been the time for anyone else but you to sort of be around.’

‘I’ve been around today, but I haven’t seen much of you.’

‘Did you try and find me?—no. And don’t say you’ve got a job to do, because everybody has. If you hadn’t got a job you’d make up things to do. I don’t know what you think about people, which is bad enough, but you certainly go on as if they’re all in the way. Except for just sex, and that’s so that you can get them out of the way for a bit. Or else you just treat them like bottles of whisky—this one’s finished, take it away, bring me another one. It’s only all right for you to do things and you to want things. How could you ask your wife to come to bed with you and your girlfriend? A little experiment, eh? Why not fix it up? Easy enough. It needed two girls and there were two girls, so fine. Why not? You might have had the decency to go to a prostitute or somebody for a thing like that.’

‘You seemed to enjoy it all right.’

‘Yes, I did, it was wonderful, but that was nothing to do with what you’d had in mind. Diana’s coming with me.’

I understood now what Jack had been talking about that morning; he had merely not been told the basic facts—predictably enough. ‘It sounds rather as if you’ve been wasting your time with me all along.’

‘I knew you’d say something like that. That’s how it would strike you: just sex. Just sex is all you know about. But it isn’t just sex with me and her. It’s not a hell of a lot to do with sex at all. It’s being with someone. Who hasn’t always got somewhere more important to be in the next two minutes. Amy won’t miss me much. I couldn’t do enough about being her mother, because you never did anything about making her be my daughter. I’m not going straight away. I’ll stay on until you’ve found someone to help housekeep. We can talk about the divorce in the meantime.’

‘Supposing I made a real effort?’

‘An effort’s no good. And you’d soon forget to make it.’

That was about that. I looked at her eyes again, and her thick yellow hair, not fine, not coarse, simply abundant, with a very slight but firm wave from broad forehead down to strong shoulders. ‘I’m sorry, Joyce.’

‘That’s all right. I’ll always come and see you. Do you think you could possibly go now?’

I went. I heard the key scrape in the lock and a smothered sob from behind the door. It was impossible to think about any of it now, except for one small part which it was impossible not to think about, for a moment at least, the part to do with experiment: ‘a little experiment, eh? Why not?’ Was I really capable of thinking—inclined to think—like that about things, and about people? If so, there might have been more to Underhill’s selection of me as his instrument than the co-presence of Amy in the house: something to do with an affinity. I hated that idea, and tried to suppress it as I walked slowly back to the truck and the rector.

That divine looked at me with more emphatic and specific petulance than usual when I joined him. ‘Nothing of any great gravity, I hope?’

I started the engine and steered out of the car-park. ‘Tom, I can’t say how much I appreciate your taking time to come along here. On a Sunday, too.’

‘What’s so special about Sunday?’

‘Well … aren’t there things like services? Sermons to prepare?’

‘You don’t imagine I’d prepare sermons for a bunch of swedes like I’ve got here, do you? You’ve got to realize the whole sermon thing has gone now, along with antimacassars and button boots.’

‘And evolution.’

‘And evolution, quite so. Anyway, I’ve got Lord Cliff preaching tonight. Not that any of that lot will … Hey, where are we going?’

I had turned uphill instead of down towards the village and the rectory. ‘I’m afraid we’ve got one more call to make.’

‘Oh no. What is it this time?’

‘Exorcism again. In a wood along here.’

‘You positively have to be joking. It’ll take—’

‘What were you saying about Lord Cliff?’

It worked: I saw the corners of his mouth turn up (for once) as he visualized whatever deeply satisfying reaction to his prolonged absence he visualized. When we got to the copse, I handed him a cut-glass vinegar bottle from my kitchen into which I had, without his knowledge, poured half a gill or so of holy water. He accepted this, kitted himself up again and started on the service with what was, for him, a good grace. I walked to and fro, looking for signs of the green man’s embodiment and subsequent disembodiment, and finding them: a fresh scar where the limb of an ash had been torn from the trunk, at a point well above arm’s reach; a scattered heap of bruised leaves from half a dozen kinds of tree and shrub. Such had been the constituents of his form here, in an English wood; he must originally have come to birth, have first been called into being, in some place where the prevailing vegetation consisted of trees with rather uniformly cylindrical trunks and boughs; so at any rate, the lineaments of the now shattered silver figure had seemed to testify. But it, and its power, had proved remarkably adaptable to a radical change of location.

It was very quiet and shady and sunny in the copse. The rector’s voice pursued its slightly irritable, perfunctory course.

‘By the emblems of the eye of the angel, the tooth of the dog, the claw of the lion and the mouth of the fish, I charge thee to depart, enemy of joy, child of perversity, and in the sign of the spirits of the black waters and the white mountain and the wilderness without end, I command thee, in the authority of Christ, to go now to the place of thy choice…’

Suddenly, ten yards off, I saw and heard a shivering among the grasses and bushes, a violent local movement of air too shapeless and multi-directional to be called a whirlwind. At first the disturbance was confined to one spot; then it seemed to spread; no, it was not spreading, it was shifting, at first almost imperceptibly, then at a slow walking pace, then faster, straight for where the rector was standing. I ran past it in a curve and pulled him out of its path. He staggered, almost slipped, steadied himself against the trunk of an oak and glared at me.