Kingsley Amis - The Green Man

First, Victor. I soon found him a pleasant, secluded spot near the wall, out of sight from where Underhill lay, and in that soil it was not difficult to open a trench eighteen inches deep or so. In he went, and I shovelled the earth back into place, thinking how much I would miss his total lack of dignity and of ill nature. A couple of days earlier, I should probably have considered taking his body to the vet, in the hope of establishing something about the force that had killed him, something objectively factual that would support my story. But by now I had given up all such notions: I had seen what I had seen, and there would never be a way of convincing anyone else that I had. I smoothed the earth flat with my hands.

The second task was a far more formidable affair. I had some idea of direction, but very little of distance, and I spent over an hour and a half, and had cleared something like twenty square yards of ground, before I found the silver figure in a tuft of couch-grass; I suppose even then I was lucky. Laying it on a triangular piece of somebody’s headstone, I went at it with the hammer and chisel and, aided by the softness of the metal, quickly had it in half a dozen not easily recognizable pieces, which I buried in different parts of the graveyard. Having done this I felt a lot safer, but by no means safe. More effort was going to be necessary before that state could be attained.

I was just about to move on to the next job when a thought struck me. I went over to where Underhill was buried, dropped the tools and pissed on his grave.

‘You bastard,’ I said. ‘You tried to pretend you hadn’t chosen me, out of all the people who’ve lived in that house since you. You just waited until Amy was the age you liked, and then you set to work to arouse my curiosity. And in your present form you couldn’t do to her what you did to those other poor kids, so you tried to kill her instead. For fun. Very scientific. Some purpose.’

Again without being seen, I returned to the truck and drove through the village, which under the bright sunshine had a look of spurious significance, as if its inhabitants were known to be the wisest and happiest in England. I drew up outside the rectory, a small but beautiful Queen Anne house across the road from the church. Its garden was overgrown and littered with rubbish, including a number of framed pictures, mostly of country scenes, which had presumably come with the house. Music was rampaging away inside it. I tugged at the rusty iron bell-pull and an electronic chime sounded from within. After about a minute, a rather better-kempt version of Jonathan Swift opened the door. He looked at me while he chewed something.

‘Is the rector at home?’ I asked.

‘Who are you?’

‘One of his parishioners.’

‘His what?’

‘Parishioners. People who live in his parish. Round here. Is he at home?’

‘I’ll see.’

He turned away, but the advancing shape of the Reverend Tom Rodney, clad in a turquoise tee-shirt and skin-tight black denim trousers, was now to be seen over his shoulder.

‘What is it, Cliff? Oh … Mr Allington. Do you want to see me?’

‘Well yes, I was hoping to. If you’ve got a minute.’

‘Uh … of course. Do come in. I’m afraid everything’s in a bit of a mess. Oh, Mr Allington, this is Lord Cliff Oswestry.’

‘Ch-do,’ said Lord Cliff.

‘Hi there, man,’ I said, not sure whether he had adopted the title for some trade reason, or had acquired it willy-nilly.

Judging by his manner so far, I favoured the second of these.

‘I haven’t had a chance to clear up all the crap,’ said the rector. ‘We got back about three this morning, and I just made morning service with a big low on. Oh, Cliff dear, could you turn it down a bit? I’m afraid Cliff and I are sort of hooked on Benjie again. He does get to one, doesn’t he?’

By now we were in a sort of drawing-room with black wallpaper on three walls and gold on the fourth, a squat bamboo screen enclosing nothing in particular and a lot of suède-topped stools. I could not see much crap, apart from some broken crockery that looked as if it had been hurled rather than dropped, and an object resembling an aerial sculpture that had made a forced landing. An invisible singer with a bad head-cold was doing his best to reach some unreasonably high notes among a lot of orchestral fuss. Very soon this faded to a murmur, presumably by the agency of Lord Cliff, of whom I saw no more.

‘Well, what’s the trouble?’ asked the rector, almost like a real rector. This kind of thing must be an example of the dead weight of tradition he was constantly on guard against, sometimes, as now, with inadequate vigilance.

‘No trouble,’ I said, squirming about on my stool in search of some tolerable position. ‘There are two things I’d like to bring up. The first is that the seventh centenary of the founding of my house, the Green Man, comes round next month, as you probably know.’

‘Oh yes, somebody was telling me about it the other day.’

The somebody must have been the Father of Lies himself, since I had just made up the centenary idea. In the same improvisatory vein, I went on, ‘Anyway, I was thinking of throwing a rather special party to mark the occasion. It’s been a very good summer for me, financially that is, and if this weather keeps up I could put on quite a show in the garden there. I get quite a lot of, well, prominent people at my house from time to time, show business, television, fashion, even the odd politician, and I thought I’d just invite the lot. You never know who might turn up. Anyway, I was wondering if you’d like to come along. Plus any chums you might care to invite, of course.’

People’s eyes do not actually glisten unless they are weeping, but the rector put up a convincing simulacrum of it without recourse to tears. ‘Could I bring my bishop? The old sweetie would adore it so.’

‘You can bring the Moderator of the Free Church of Scotland if you like.’

‘Oh, how super.’ His eyes stopped glistening. ‘What was the other thing?’

‘Oh yes. I expect you’ve heard that my house is haunted. Well, it’s been getting quite troublesome recently. I’d like you to perform a service of exorcism to get rid of the spirits, or whatever they are.’

‘You’ve got to be joking.’

‘I’m perfectly serious.’

‘Oh, come on. You mean you’ve actually been seeing ghosts? Really.’

‘Yes, really. Otherwise I shouldn’t have bothered you.’

‘You don’t suppose a lot of religious mumbo-jumbo could have the slightest effect, do you? On anything?’

‘I don’t know. I’d like to give it a trial. It would be a great favour to me if you’d just run through the service, Rector.’

I was fully prepared to go on and tell him in the plainest terms that no exorcism meant no invitation to the party, but he was ahead of me. No doubt the course of his career had trained him to recognize a quid pro quo as soon as he set eyes on one, or rather overtrained him, because he would never get any kind of quo from me. With the irritation which his face was so well constructed to express, he asked, ‘When?’

‘Now. I can drive you there in three minutes.’

‘Oh, honestly,’ he said, but without heat, and was busy in calculation for a moment. My bet is that he had spotted the annoyance-potential to Lord Cliff of going off with me on such an eccentric errand. ‘Oh, very well, but I think it’s shaking to find a person of your education falling prey to gross superstition like this.’ But he got off his stool nimbly enough.

‘You’d better put on your regalia for this do, I think.’

‘Oh, for …‘ Lord Cliff (on my reading) entered his thoughts again, and he cheered up a little. ‘Might as well do the thing properly while one’s about it, I suppose. Amuse yourself. Have some fruit. Back in a trice.’