Kingsley Amis - The Green Man

They arrived when I was behind the bar again, being very candid with a London museum curator about the third most expensive claret on the list being the best value for money. Jack, a shock-headed, bony figure in a crumpled suit of biscuit-coloured linen, waved briefly and strode off, as usual, in the direction of the office to tell the local telephone exchange where he was. Diana joined my wife in the small alcove beside the fireplace. Together, they made an impressive, rather erective sight, both of them tall, blonde and full-breasted, but so different in other ways that they might have been chosen for some textbook illustration showing the width of divergence among basically similar physical types, or, more to the purpose, an X-certificate Swedish film that would fall a long way short of sticking to straight sex. Dull would he be of soul that would pass up the chance of taking the pair of them to bed. Their visible differences—Diana’s slim build, light-tawny hair-colour, hazel eyes, tanned skin and nervous demeanour alongside the strength and roundness, the yellow and blue and pale rose, the slow, steady movements of Joyce, my wife—suggested that there were others to be discovered, no less striking. In the past few weeks I had made some progress towards a vital part of this objective: persuading Diana to come to bed with me. Joyce knew nothing about this, nor about the more ambitious plan; but as I watched them exchange a kiss of greeting in the alcove, it was clear to me that they had always shown a subdued sexual feeling towards each other. Or was it not really clear at all, not true, just attractive as a fantasy?

The museum curator, having taken my advice and saved eleven shillings on his claret, not quite unexpectedly ordered a half-bottle of Château d’Yquem (37/6) to go with his sweet course. I bowed approvingly, told Fred to pass the word to the wine-waiter, mixed Diana a gin and bitter lemon, her invariable pre-dinner drink, and carried it over. I tried for her mouth when I kissed her, but got the side of her chin instead. There was a pause after that. Not for the first time, the idea of chatting to these two seemed altogether less attractive than what I had been thinking about a minute before. Jack reappeared while I was still exploring the topic of the heat and humidity. He kissed Joyce as unceremoniously as he had waved to me on arrival, then moved me aside. He was supposed to be a great hammer of his female patients, but, like most men of whom that sort of thing is said, he had on the whole a disinclination for female society.

‘Cheers,’ he said, raising for a short space the glass of Cam-pan and soda Fred would have served him. ‘How’s everybody, then?’

Coming from one’s family doctor, this query went beyond mere phatic communion, and Jack always managed to get a slight air of hostility into it. He was inclined to be snobbish about health, implying that the lack of it sprang from some vulgar shortcoming, to be accepted as distastefully inevitable if not actually deplored. This probably served quite well as a form of pressure on his patients to get better.

‘Oh, all carrying on all right, I think.’

‘How’s your father?’ he asked, probing one of the several weak spots in my defences, and lighting a cigarette without taking his eyes off me.

‘About the same. Very piano.’

‘Very what?’ Jack just might not have heard me against the alcohol-fired roar of other voices in the bar, but more likely he meant to rebuke me for using frivolous diction in a solemn context. ‘What?’

‘Piano. You know. Subdued. Not doing or saying much.’

‘You must realize that’s to be expected at his age and in his condition.’

‘I do, I assure you.’

‘And Amy?’ asked Jack vigilantly, referring to my daughter.

‘Well … she seems to be okay, as far as I can tell. Watches television a lot, plays her pop records, all that kind of thing.’

Jack stared into his drink, not what I would have called a very meaningful move on the part of somebody drinking what he was drinking, and said nothing. Perhaps he felt that what I had said was condemnatory enough without assistance from him.

‘There’s not much for her to do here,’ I went on defensively, ‘and she hasn’t had time to make any real friends round about. Not that she’d have much in common with the village kids, I imagine. And it’s the holidays, of course.’

Still Jack said nothing. He sniffed, not altogether at physical need.

‘Joyce has been a bit sluggish. She’s had a lot of work to do these last weeks. And there’s this weather. In fact it’s been a pretty tiring summer for everybody. I’m going to try and get the three of us away for a few days at the beginning of September.’

‘What about you?’ asked Jack with a touch of contempt.

‘I’m all right.’

‘Are you, by God. You don’t look it. Listen, Maurice, I won’t get a chance later—you ought to see yourself. Your colour’s bad—yes, I know all about your not getting much of a chance to get out, but you ought to be able to manage an hour’s walk in the afternoons. You’re sweating excessively.’

‘Indeed I am.’ I wiped with my handkerchief the saturated hair above my ears. ‘So would you be if you had to charge around this damn place trying to keep your eye on half a dozen things at once, and in this weather too.’

‘I’ve been charging around too, and I’m not in the state you’re in.’

‘You’re ten years younger than I am.’

‘What of it? Maurice, what you have is alcoholic sweating. How many have you put down already this evening?’

‘Just a couple.’

‘Huh. I know your couples. Couple of trebles. You’ll have another half a couple before we go up, and at least a couple and a half after dinner. That’s well over half a bottle, plus three or four glasses of wine and whatever you had at midday. It’s too much.’

‘I’m used to it. I can take it.’

‘You’re used to it, yes. And you’ve got the remains of a first-class constitution. But you can’t take it the way you could in the past. You’re fifty-three. You’ve come to one of those places where the road goes sharply downhill for a bit. It’ll go on going downhill if you carry on as you are. How have you been feeling today?’

‘I’m all right. I told you.’

‘Oh, come on. How have you really been feeling?’

‘Oh … Bloody awful.’

‘You’ve been feeling bloody awful for a couple of months. Because you’ve been drinking too much.’

‘The only time I can be reasonably sure of not feeling bloody awful is a couple of hours or so at the end of a day’s drinking.’

‘You’ll get less sure, believe me. How’s the jactitation?’

‘Better, I think. Yes, definitely better.’

‘And the hallucinations?’

‘About the same.’

What we were referring to was less disagreeable than it may sound. A form of jactitation, taking place round about the moment of falling asleep, is known to almost everybody’s experience: that convulsive straightening of the leg which is often accompanied by a short explanatory dream about stumbling, or missing the bottom stair. In more habitual and pronounced cases, the jerking movement may affect any muscles, including those of the face, and may occur up to a dozen times or more before the subject finally attains sleep, or abandons the quest for it.

At this level of intensity, jactitation is associated with hypnagogic (onset-of-sleep-accompanying) hallucinations. These antecede jactitation, taking place when the subject is more fully awake, or even wide awake, but with the eyes closed. They are not dreams. They might be described as visions of no obvious meaning seen under poor conditions. Their nearest, or least distant, parallel is what happens to people who have spent much of the day with their eyes fixed on a scene that varies only within certain fixed limits, as when travelling by car, and who find, when they close their eyes for the night, that a kind of muted version of what they have been looking at is unrolling itself against the inside of their eyelids; but there are large differences. The hallucinations lack all sense of depth of frame, and there is never much in the way of background, often none. A piece of a wall, a corner of a fireplace, a glimpse of a chair or table is the most that can be made out; one is always indoors, if anywhere. More important, the hallucinatory images are invariably, so to speak, fictitious. Nothing known ever presents itself.