Kingsley Amis - The Green Man

‘Let’s go to bed straight away,’ said Joyce. ‘You must be absolutely whacked.’

I was indeed utterly tired out in body, as if I had been standing all day in the same position, but had no inclination for sleep, or for lying down in the dark waiting to go to sleep. ‘One more Scotch,’ I said.

‘Not a giant one, Maurice. And only one.’ She spoke pleadingly. ‘Don’t sit up drinking. Bring it into the bedroom.’

I did as she said, first looking in on Amy, who was lying asleep quite unemphatically, so to speak, without the parade of concentration or abandonment I have seen in grown women. Would my father’s departure leave much of a hole in her world? I could not imagine any of the things she had said she had meant to say to him: his attitude to her had been one of uncertain geniality, she had behaved to him with something not far from a child’s version of this, a brightness that had been absent-minded and self-regarding at the same time, and they had never, so far as I had noticed, talked together much. But he had been about the place every day of the year and a half since she had come to live here after her mother’s death, and I could see that no sort of hole in a small world could really be a small hole.

‘Was she all right?’ asked Joyce when I carried my whisky into our bedroom, the next along the passage from Amy’s and no broader from window to door, but with more length. Standing in this extra space, she popped one of her red sleeping-pills into her mouth and gulped water.

‘Asleep, anyway. Have you seen the Belreposes?’

‘Here. Three sounds rather a lot, doesn’t it? With you drinking as well, I mean. I suppose Jack knows all about it.’

‘They’re not barbiturates.’

I chased the white tablets down with whisky, watching Joyce as she kicked off her shoes, pulled her dress over her head and hung it up in the wall-cupboard. The small moment in which she stepped away and turned to go down the room was enough for me to take in the fine swell of her breasts under the spotless white brassière, in unimprovable proportion with the breadth of her shoulders and back and the spreading fullness of her rib-cage. She had not taken three paces towards the bed before I had put my glass down on her dressing-table and caught her round her naked waist.

She held me against her with a quick firmness that belonged to somebody comforting somebody. When, as she very soon did, she found that it was not comfort I was after, at least not in the ordinary sense, her body stiffened.

‘Oh, Maurice, not now, surely.’

‘Especially now. Straight away. Come on.’

I had only once before in my life felt such a totally possessing urge to make love to a woman, with the mind sliding into involuntary dormancy and the body starting to set up on its own several stages earlier than usual. That time had been as I was watching a mistress of mine cutting bread in her kitchen while her husband laid the table in the dining-room across the passage, so that my mind and body had had to return to normal working with the minimum of delay. It was not going to be at all like that tonight.

Joyce was quite naked, I only selectively so, when I dragged the quilt aside and pushed her down on the bed. By now she was responding in her long, slow rhythms, breathing deeply at no more than a marginally quickening rate, clasping her powerful limbs round me. I was just about aware of an urgency that had a way of seeming infinitely postponable. It was not really, of course, and at some imperceptible signal, a distant traffic noise or a memory or a new movement from one or the other of us or a thought about tomorrow, I took us both to the point, once and then another time or so. Very quickly after that, the facts of the last hour presented themselves as if until now I had only heard of them through some distant and inarticulate intermediary. My heart seemed to stop for a moment, then lurched into violent motion. I got out of bed at top speed.

‘Are you all right?’ asked Joyce.

‘Fine.’

After standing still for a moment, I finished undressing, put on my pyjamas and went to the bathroom. Then I looked into the drawing-room and saw the evening paper neatly folded on a low table by the place where my father had always sat, into the dining-room and saw the armchair where he had died. The triteness of these images calmed me for the moment. Back in the bedroom, I found that Joyce, usually ready for a chat at this stage, was lying with the bedclothes pulled up over her face. This went to confirm my suspicion that she was feeling ashamed, not of having made love on the night of my father’s death, but of having enjoyed it. However, when I had got into bed she spoke in a wide-awake voice.

‘I suppose it was natural, doing it like that, like an instinct. You know, Nature trying to see to it that life goes on. Funny, though, it didn’t feel like an instinct. More like something you read about. The idea, I mean.’

I had not thought of this side of things until then, and was faintly irritated by her shrewdness, or what might have seemed shrewdness to an outsider. Still, it was very consoling that I was having to deal with Joyce here, not Diana, who would have been thrown into ecstasies of needling speculation.

‘I wasn’t faking it,’ I said. ‘A man can’t fake.’

‘I know, darling. I didn’t mean that. Just how it might sound.’ Her hand came back behind her and caught mine. ‘Do you think you can sleep?’

‘Yes, I think so. Could you just clear one thing up? Won’t take a minute.’

‘What?’

‘Then I can forget about it. Tell me exactly how it happened in there. I shall always sort of wonder about it if I don’t know exactly.’

‘Well, he’d just been saying something about people had the right not to be disturbed in their own private houses, and then he stopped and got up, much more quickly than he usually does, and he was staring.’

‘What at?’

‘I don’t know. Nothing. He was looking towards the door. Then he called out, and Jack asked him what was the matter and was he all right, and then he fell against the table and Jack caught him.’

‘What did he call out?’

‘I don’t know. It wasn’t a word or anything. Then Jack and I, we started moving him and then you came back. He didn’t seem to be in any pain. He just looked very surprised.’

‘Frightened?’

‘Well … a bit, perhaps.’

‘Only a bit?’

‘Well, a lot, actually. He must have been feeling it coming on, you know, the cerebral thing.’

‘Yes. That would frighten you all right. I see.’

‘Don’t worry about it.’ Joyce squeezed my hand. ‘You couldn’t have done anything about it even if you had been there.’

‘No I suppose I couldn’t.’

‘Of course you couldn’t.’

‘I forgot to tell Amy where … that he’s in his room.’

‘She won’t go in there. I’ll see to it in the morning. I’ll have to go to sleep now. These bombs really knock you out.’

We said good night and switched off our bedside lamps. I turned on to my right side, towards where the window was, though nothing could be seen of it. The night was still very warm, but the humidity had fallen off a good deal in the last hour. My pillow seemed hotter than my cheek as soon as the two touched, and formed itself into a series of hard ridges and irregular planes. My heart was beating heavily and moderately fast, as on the threshold of some minor ordeal, like going into the dentist’s surgery or getting up to make a speech. I lay there waiting for it to make one of the trip-and-lurch movements it had made ten minutes earlier and perhaps a couple of dozen times during the day and evening. I had mentioned this phenomenon to Jack, who had said, condescendingly rather than impatiently, but in any case quite emphatically, that it was not significant, that my heart was merely giving itself, every so often, an extra and premature signal to beat, so that the beat after that was delayed, and might seem stronger than normal. All I could say (to myself) was that at times like the present the bloody thing certainly felt significant. After a minute or two of waiting, there came the expected quiver, followed by a pause prolonged enough to make me draw in my breath, and then a small punch against the inside of my chest. I told myself it was all right, it was nerves, it would go off as it always had, I was a hypochondriac, the Belreposes would be taking over any minute, it was natural, it was egotistical. Yes: already calmer, easier, steadier, more comfortable, cooler, slower, quieter, drowsier, vaguer …