The Green Man

‘Watch him over the chef’s stuff, won’t you? And the ice-cream coupes. Explain to him that they’ve got to look as good as new even though the guests never see them.’

‘I have, Mr Allington.’

‘Well, explain it to him again, using threats if necessary. Tell him he’s to bring them to me personally before lunch. Oh yes —two extra upstairs for that. My son and his wife are driving down. Is that the lot?’

‘Just about. There’s a bath-towel gone, that Birmingham couple, and an ash-tray, Fred says, one of the heavy glass ones.’

‘You know, David, I feel like driving up to Birmingham and finding those people’s bloody house and burgling it to get that towel. It’s the only way we’d ever see it again. Or putting tea-cloths and old dusters in all the bedrooms in future and making them get rid of their fag-ends in empty baked-beans tins. I don’t know why we go on bothering. Well, there’s nothing else to do, I suppose. If that’s all you’ve got I’m off to Baldock.’

‘Right, Mr Allington.’ David’s long, very slightly ridiculous face took on a resolute look. ‘I just want to say, if there’s anything extra or special you want done, I’d be more than happy to do it. You’ve only to say. And all the staff feel the same.’

‘Thank you, David, I can’t think of anything at the moment, but I’ll be sure to let you know if there is.’

David left. I collected the cash for the bank, found and pocketed the list I had made for the drink supplier, put on my check cap and went into the hall. The char, a youngish, rather pretty woman in jeans and tee-shirt, was crossing towards the dining-room, vacuum-cleaner in hand.

‘Cooler today,’ she said, raising her eyebrows briefly, as if alluding to how I looked or was dressed.

‘But tonight it’ll be as hot as ever, you just see.’

She acknowledged this thrust with a diagonal movement of her head, and passed from view. I recognized in her one on whom the lives, or deaths, of others made little impression. Then Amy appeared, looking eager and rather well turned out in a clean candy-striped shirt and skirt.

‘What time are we leaving, Daddy?’

‘Oh, darling.’ I remembered, for the first time that morning. ‘I’m sorry, but I’m afraid it’ll have to be another day.’

‘Oh no. Oh, what a drag. Oh, why?’

‘Well … I fixed it up with you before…’

‘Before Gramps died—I know. But what’s that got to do with it? He wouldn’t have minded me coming. He liked us doing things together.’

‘I know, but there are special things I have to do, like registering the death and going to the undertakers’. You’d hate all that.’

‘I wouldn’t mind. What’s the undertakers’?’

‘The people who’ll be doing the funeral.’

‘I wouldn’t mind. I could sit in the car. I bet you’ll have a coffee anyway. I could look round the shops and meet you at the car.’

‘I’m sorry, Amy.’ And I was, but I could not contemplate getting through the next couple of hours in any company, however relaxing, and I had long ago faced the fact that I was never quite at my ease with Amy. ‘It wouldn’t be the right sort of thing for you. You can come with me tomorrow.’

This only made her angry. ‘Oh, yawn. I don’t want to come tomorrow, I want to come today. You just don’t want me.’

‘Amy, stop shouting.’

‘You don’t care about me. You don’t care what I do. There’s never anything for me to do.’

‘You can help Joyce in the bedrooms, it’s good—’

‘Oh, fantastic. Huge thanks. Dad-oh.’

‘I won’t have you talking like that.’

‘I’ve talked like it now. And I’ll take LSD and reefers and you’ll care then. No, you won’t. You won’t care.’

‘Amy, go up to your room.’

She made a blaring noise, halfway between a yell and a groan, and stamped off. I waited until, quite distinctly through the thickness of the building, I heard her door slam. At once, with impeccable sardonic timing, the vacuum-cleaner started up in the dining-room. I left the house.

It was indeed cooler today. The sun, standing immediately above the patch of woods towards which the ghost of Thomas Underhill was said to gaze, had not yet broken through a thin mist or veil of low cloud. As I walked over to where my Volkswagen was parked in the yard. I told myself that I could soon start to relish the state of being alone (not rid of Amy, just alone for a guaranteed period), only to find, as usual, that being alone meant that I was stuck with myself, with the outside and inside of my body, with my memories and anticipations and present feelings, with that indefinable sphere of being that is the sum of these and yet something beyond them, and with the assorted uneasiness of the whole. Two’s company, which is bad enough in all conscience, but one’s a crowd.

I was putting the Volkswagen into gear when a dull pain of irregular but defined shape switched itself on in my left lower back, a little below the waistline. It stayed in being for perhaps twenty seconds, perfectly steady in intensity, then at once vanished. It had been behaving in this sort of way for about a week now. Was it sharper this morning than when I had first noticed it, did it come on more frequently and stay for longer? I thought perhaps it was and did. It was cancer of the kidney. It was not cancer of the kidney, but that disease whereby the kidney ceases to function and has to be removed by surgery, and then the other kidney carries on perfectly well until it too becomes useless and has to be removed by surgery, and then there is total dependence on a machine. It was not a disease of the kidney, but a mild inflammation set up by too much drinking, easily knocked out by a few doses of Holland’s gin and a reduction in doses of other liquors. It was not an inflammation, or only in the sense that it was one of those meaningless aches and pains that clear up of their own accord and unnoticeably when they are not thought about. Ah, but what was the standard procedure for not thinking about this one, or any one?

The pain came back as I was turning south-west on to the A595, and stayed for a little more than twenty seconds this time, unless that was my imagination. I thought to myself how much more welcome a faculty the imagination would be if we could tell when it was at work and when not. That might make it more efficient, too. My own was certainly unequal to the task of suggesting how I would deal with the situation if my kidney really were under some lethal assault. I had fallen victim to some pretty serious afflictions in my time, but so far they had tended to yield to treatment. The previous summer I had managed to check and even reverse the onset of Huntington’s chorea—a progressive disease of the nervous system ending in total helplessness, and normally incurable—simply by cutting down my intake of Scotch. A year or so earlier, a cancer of the large intestine had begun retreating to dormancy as soon as I stopped eating the local greengages and plums, gave up drinking two bottles of claret a day and curbed my fondness for raw onions, hot pickles and curry. A new, more powerful reading-light had cleared up a severe brain tumour inside a week. All my other lesions, growths, atrophies and rare viral infections had gone the same way. So far.

That was the point. Other people’s hypochondria is always good for a laugh, or rather, whenever one gets as far as beginning to think about it, just fairly good for a grin. Each case of one’s own is hilarious, as soon as that case is past. The trouble with the hypochondriac, considered as a figure of fun, is that he will be wrong about his condition nine hundred and ninety-nine times, and absolutely right the thousandth time, or the thousand-and-first, or the one after that. As soon as I had reached this perception, the pain in my back underlined it elegantly by returning for about half a minute.

I had joined the A507 and was coming into Baldock without noticing anything I had seen on the way or done to keep me on the way. Now that I was about to deal with about the last thing concerning my father that I would ever have to deal with, it was thoughts of him that intervened between me and what I was doing. I parked the Volkswagen in the broad main street of the town and remembered playing cricket with him on the sands at Pevensey Bay in, good God, 1925 or 1926. Once I had been out first ball and he had praised me afterwards for my sportsmanship in accepting this with a good grace. While I waited, then was dealt with, at the registry, I thought about that daily round of his in the village, and wished I had accompanied him on it just once more than I had. By the time I reached the undertakers’, my mind was on his first stroke and his recovery from it, and in the bank I tried to imagine what his mental life had been like afterwards, with sufficient success to send me straight across to the