Kingsley Amis - The Green Man

At my approach, she turned her head with a display of grace which faltered when she looked at me. ‘What’s the matter? Why the great gallop? You’re—’

‘Come on,’ I said, panting. I must have shouted it.

‘What’s the matter? Are you ill? What’s the matter?’

‘All right. Got to go. Now—’

Diana did no more than look genuinely alarmed while I got us into the truck, turned it unhandily round and drove as fast as possible down the track to the road. There, I turned away from the village. After about a mile, I found a field of pasture with an open gate and parked just inside. I had got my breath back and had stopped trembling, had been frightened only in retrospect ever since leaving that wood. But that was how I felt still. I opened the dashboard cupboard—yes, there was a half-bottle of Scotch, nearly full. I saw in passing that I had thought to mix a bit of water in for reasons of taste. I drank it all.

I realized that I would have to think of something to say to Diana, who had gone on sitting unnaturally quiet beside me, but my mind was a blank. I began to talk in the hope that words would bring ideas.

‘Sorry about that. I suddenly felt absolutely terrible. I had to get away from that place. I don’t know what it was, I just felt awful.’

‘Ill, you mean?’

‘Not exactly. No, not ill. Just … No, I can’t describe it, I’m afraid. Some sort of neurotic thing, I suppose. Anyway, it’s over now.’

‘Maurice.’ For once she sounded sincerely diffident about what was to follow her operating call-sign.

‘Yes, Diana?’

‘Maurice … tell me one thing frankly. This isn’t a way of letting me know you don’t want to have anything more to do with me in this kind of way, is it?’

‘A what? How could it be that?’

‘Well, you might have decided it made you feel too awful, guilt and so on, and so you piled it on and made it into a sort of dizzy spell as a way of saying it was all too much for you.’ (No diffidence now.) ‘Because I suppose what you really mean is I didn’t do the right things for you or something.’

This, I reflected, from a woman who, three minutes earlier, had been showing every sign of real concern about another person. ‘Of course not. Nothing like that, I assure you.’

‘Because if you think I’m not good enough for you or something it’s better if you say so straight away.’

‘If that’s what you’re afraid of,’ I said furiously, ‘it must be because I’m not good enough for you, whatever I do. Do you imagine I make love like that every day?’

She blinked her eyes and twitched her mouth and shoulders for a short while as evidence of internal conflict. Then she smiled and touched my hand.

‘I’m sorry, Maurice. I suddenly went into the most ghastly panic. I somehow got the idea you didn’t like me at all. The most frightful sense of insecurity. Women get that, you know. Well, some women do, anyway. There was simply nothing I could do about it, honestly.’

I kissed her. ‘I understand,’ I said, and meant it. ‘But up there … you did have a splendid time, didn’t you?’

‘Mm. Splen … did.’ With her hegemony of sensitivity re-established, she must have felt she could afford to be generous. ‘Absolutely splendid.’

‘But nothing to what Joyce and I will do for you, I promise you.’

‘Maurice, you are completely extraordinary. One moment you’re having a dizzy spell and the next you’re keeping up the pressure to make me have an orgy with you. What makes you so incredibly sort of changeable?’

On the drive back, I advanced a theory or two about what made me like that, never ceasing to imply that, whatever it might be, Diana and her attractiveness and fascinatingness had a hand in it up to the collar-bone. I said I would pick her up the next day at the same place and time, made her promise to think over the orgy project (I was pretty sure she had already decided in favour of it, but to say so at this stage might have made her seem interesting almost to a fault), dropped her at the corner and went off to pick up my vegetables and fruit.

This last operation took a bare three-quarters of an hour, and would have taken only half as long but for the slow-motion of both the farmers concerned. The older of the two performed as if I had turned up to buy his daughters instead of his lettuces and tomatoes; the younger, whose top incisor teeth lay horizontally on his lower lip and who smelt a lot, treated me like a Tsarist tax official. Throughout, my sexual elation kept being overlaid by unsought memories of what had happened in the wood and by notions that in thinking about my father as little as possible all day I had behaved badly to him. The pain in my back did what it could on this side of the scales by coming up with some unusually firm and authoritative twinges.

By the time I had driven the truck into the yard at the Green Man and sent for Ramón to come and unload it, it was twenty past six and my thoughts had homed in on drink. I had a large one—one only in the sense that I did not allow my glass to become empty before topping it up to an even higher level than before—while I showered and put on my evening rig-out. Then I looked in on Amy, who was watching a TV inquiry into householders’ insurance and who was, if anything, rather less polysyllabic than usual. My father’s absence made this entire section of the daily routine seem unduly contracted. I had a word with David Palmer and joined Nick, Lucy and Joyce in the bar just after seven, not at all looking forward to a couple of hours of work. We had a drink (I switched to sherry, my standard public potation at this hour), and very soon the first diners had reached the menu-conning stage.

There were no difficulties, none at least that stuck in my mind. By the time I got to the third, or possibly the fourth, party, however, I found I was beginning to encounter the problem I had failed to solve on my return from Baldock earlier that day: continuing to talk constructively without being able to remember, even in outline, what had been said just before. My order-pad was a help here, but not when it was a matter of deciding what to write down on it. The bar became almost empty. Those in search of an earlyish meal had either moved into the dining-room or fled out of the front door at the sight of me. A little later again, I suggested to David that now would be a good time to have a look at the kitchen. I understood him to say that this was of course an excellent idea, but that it might make just as much sense to defer it to a later stage, rather than carry it out so comparatively soon after a previous visit. I wondered just how soon afterwards it was, and whether, while having my look at the kitchen, I had said anything noteworthy, either for its wit or for its insight into the human condition. David’s expression gave no help here. Using his special reliable voice, he said,

‘Mr Allington, why don’t you let me take over now for what’s left of the evening? There’s only a few late bookings tonight, and you must have had a tiring day, and you’ll be handing over to me anyway at ten o’clock. And you agreed with me the other day that I ought to have more solo time.’

‘Thank you, David, but I think I’ll carry on for a bit. Remember we’ve got Professor Burgess booked for nine thirty, and I want to see to him personally, after that soufflé disaster when he was here before.’

As regards coherence, this was probably no great advance on what I had been saying for the last twenty or forty minutes; the point was that I knew what I had said, and even what David had said just earlier. I was back in control, or nearly so, without having done anything to earn it in the way of sleep or abstention, a familiar enough experience. Equally familiar would be the experience of sliding out of control again without having done a great deal to earn that, so I made a brief but violent attack on the cheese, biscuits and stuffed olives Fred had put out on the counter, and resolved to drink no more until I was up in the apartment. David got most of this, and shortly withdrew.