Kingsley Amis - The Green Man

Burgess, a caricature of a savant, arrived soon afterwards with his wife, also a caricature of a savant, though of a more purely learned, perhaps more Germanic, type. They had brought along a couple of friends, less discernibly erudite than themselves. As expected, they all went for the grouse—the first of the year to have hung long enough—accompanied by a couple of bottles of the Château Lafite 1955 I kept under the counter for a few people like old Burgess, and preceded by some of the chef’s admirable kipper pâté. I ushered them into the dining-room myself; the head waiter, alerted in advance, met us at the doorway. The rather low-ceilinged room, a little over half-full, looked pleasantly welcoming with its candles, polished silver, polished oak and dark-blue leather, and was much cooler than the bar had been. The sight and sound of so much eating and talking daunted me a little, but there was a certain amount of drinking going on as well: not enough to satisfy me, but then there never is.

I had got the Burgesses and their friends settled, and was about to make a round of the other tables when I caught sight of a man standing by the window, perhaps looking out through a chink in the curtains, although he seemed to be in a slightly wrong position for doing this. I was pretty sure he had not been there when I came into the room. For a moment, I assumed this person to be a guest concerned about, for instance, the state of the lights of his car. Then, as my innkeeper’s reflexes sent me across the room with officiously helpful tread, I saw that the figure was wearing a short grey wig and a black gown and white bands at the throat. By now I was no more than six feet away. I halted.

‘Dr Underhill?’

It is never true that we speak so entirely without volition as not to realize, even for an instant, that it is we who have spoken. But I had not had the least conscious intention of pronouncing that name.

In leisurely fashion, but without delay, the head turned and the eyes met mine. They were dark-brown eyes with deeply creased lids, thick lower lashes and arching brows. I also saw a pale, indoors complexion scattered with broken veins to what seemed an incongruous degree, a broad forehead, a long, skewed nose and a mouth that, in another’s face, I might have called humorous, with very clearly defined lips. Then, or rather at once, Dr Underhill recognized me. Then he smiled. It was the kind of smile with which a bully might greet an inferior person prepared to join with him in the persecution of some helpless third party. It also held a certain menace, as if any squeamishness in persecution would result in accomplice becoming victim.

I turned to the nearest table, where there sat a party of three youngish London lawyers and their wives, and said loudly, ‘Do you see him? Man in the black … Just here, there…’

Underhill had gone when I looked round. I felt a great weary irritation at the predictability of this. I floundered idiotically on for a bit about his having been there a moment before, and how they must surely have seen him, before I realized that I could not stand up any more. My heart was perfectly steady just then, I was not dizzy or ill, and I have never fainted in my life; it was simply that my legs would not do their job. Somebody—the head waiter—caught me. I heard alarmed voices and scuffling sounds as people got to their feet. Immediately, and from nowhere, David arrived. He put his arm round me, called out a sharp order for my wife and son to he fetched from the bar and steered me into the hall. Here he sat me down in an upright-backed Regency chair by the fireplace and tried to loosen my collar, but I prevented him.

‘It’s all right, David, really. Just … nothing at all.’

Nick said, ‘What’s the matter, Dad?’ and Joyce said, ‘I’ll phone Jack.’

‘No, don’t do that. No need for that. I just came over a bit dizzy. I must have been drinking faster than I realized. I’m all right now.’

‘Where would you like to be, Mr Allington? Can you make it upstairs if we give you a hand?’

‘Please don’t bother, I think I can make it on my own.’ I got up, not all that shakily, and saw that people were watching me from the dining-room and bar door and elsewhere. ‘Could you tell anybody who’s interested that I’ve been under severe strain recently, or some such flap-doodle? Everyone’ll think I was as tight as a tick anyway, but I suppose we might as well preserve the outward forms if we can.’

‘I’m sure very few of them will think that, Mr Allington.’

‘Oh well, what of it? I’ll be off now. Don’t worry, David. If Ramón goes berserk with the meat-cleaver you’d better let me know, but short of that the house is all yours until the morning. Good night.’

None too comfortably, the four of us settled in the drawing-room, so called by my predecessor, though its lack of spaciousness and its pretty unrelieved symmetry made it, for me, a mere parlour or ante-room. I had never much tried to make it more than barely decent, had rather tended to turn it into a dump for the less attractive furniture and a couple of bits of statuary that had started to get on my nerves, a portrait bust of an early-Victorian divine and a female nude in some pale wood, sloppily modernistic in tendency, which I had bought in Cambridge after a heavy lunch at the Garden House and had since been too lazy to get rid of. Only my father had seemed to like the room, or at least had used it regularly. However, we would not be disturbed here.

I told them what I had seen. Nick watched me with great concern, Joyce with concern, Lucy with responsible vigilance, like a member of a team conducting a nationwide survey of drunks who see ghosts. Halfway through, I made Nick fetch me a small Scotch and water. He demurred, but I made him.

Joyce lost her look of concern as I talked. When I had finished, she said, ‘Sounds like D.T.s to me, don’t you think?’ in the interested voice she had used in discussing my father’s chances of surviving the current year, and, once, to suggest that Amy’s remoteness might he due to mental sub-normality.

‘Christ, what an idea,’ said Nick.

‘What’s so terrible about it? I mean, if it’s that you can deal with it. Not like going mad, after all.’

Nick turned to Lucy. ‘Isn’t D.T.s little animals and that type of stuff?’

‘Very often, yes,’ said Lucy dependably. ‘Something completely removed from reality, anyway. A man just standing about smiling hardly counts as that.’

This was a small relief, but I rather wished she had not spoken as if what I had seen was on the same level as one of the waiters wearing a dirty collar. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘what was it, then?’

Nick drew back his lips and shook his head earnestly. ‘You were pissed, Dad. I don’t know whether you realize, but you were really droning away when you were talking to the three of us in the bar just before.’

‘I’m not pissed now.’

‘Well no, but in the meantime you’ve had a shock and that does pull people round. But earlier on you were. Oh, you were making plenty of sense, but I know the way your voice goes, and your eyes.’

‘But I’d come round after that. I was talking to David … Look, Nick, you go down now and ask Professor Burgess. He’ll tell you I was all right. Go on.’

‘Oh, Dad. How can I go and ask him?’

‘Go down and get hold of David and the two of you take some of the regular people aside, David knows who they are, and ask them if they saw somebody standing by the window. I’ve described how he looked, so they’ll be——’

‘Christ, Dad … Let it drop. Take my advice, honestly. All their bloody tongues’ll be flapping as it is. Don’t go and make it worse. You don’t want it going round that the landlord of the Green Man seems to be seeing things. Don’t mind me saying this, just with the four of us, but they all know you’re a boozer. And anyway they wouldn’t remember seeing anyone, not even taken it in. Really, let it go.’