‘Why are you here, Jack?’
‘I dropped in for a drink on the way back to my surgery. Just as well, it appears. Nick, would you ring Diana and tell her I’ll be late?’ He gave the number and Nick went. ‘Now, Maurice, let’s have your story,’ he went on, gently for him.
I told him enough about the green man, and about the woman’s screams, and that Amy had said she had heard them too. I did not mention the other noise we had both heard.
‘So you think Amy shared your experience, or part of it? I see. When was this? I see. But there’s more, is there?’
‘Yes. I saw a bird flying round the bathroom. Very small, it was.’ At this point I began sobbing again. ‘But it was flying like a big bird. Beating its wings slowly. It went away quite soon. I’d had a big drink not long before, because I was so relieved that Amy had heard the screams, that somebody else as well as me had, I mean. I expect that had something to do with it.’
‘Well, possibly, yes, but it’s a much longer-term thing than that. You need a slow build-up normally.’
‘I suppose it was…’
‘It does sound like a little D.T., certainly, whereas your wooden chap on the whole doesn’t much. Have you had that sort of dream before, Maurice?’
‘I told you, it wasn’t a dream. I never dream.’
‘Couldn’t you just have nodded off in your chair? Surely you—’
‘No, I saw it.’
‘All right.’ He started to take my pulse.
‘What will that tell you?’
‘Very little, probably. Still sweating a lot?’
‘Not today.’
‘Had the shakes at all?’
‘No more than usual.’
‘Right. Now, whatever you see in this way can’t harm you. I can understand your being frightened by these things, but try to remember that that’s as much as they can do. Delirium tremens is a warning, not a disaster in itself, and we can deal with it. It’s usually brought on by emotional strain, plus drink, of course, and I’d put all this down to your father’s death. I think these ghosts of yours were a sort of prelude to the business in the bathroom, and your general idea that there are sinister and hostile characters around is very common in these cases. Are you with me?’
‘In the sense that I understand what you mean, yes.’
‘Okay. What you need is some time off. Now, young David’s a very competent lad, and Joyce—’
‘I’m not going inside, Jack.’
‘It’s not inside, for Christ’s sake. It’s a nursing home that deals with all sorts of things, with a very nice—’
‘I’m not going. There’s too much to see to here. I’ve got my father’s funeral tomorrow, for one thing. Later, perhaps. You’ve got to tide me over. Tell me what I …‘ I heard returning footsteps and speeded up. ‘Keep your mouth shut and get me some pills. There are pills, aren’t there?’
Nick came in.
‘Of a sort. All right. But I disagree.’ Jack turned to Nick. ‘Okay?’
‘Yes. Sorry, it was engaged all the time.’
‘Yes, I know. Well, the verdict on your father is that he’s been hitting the bottle a bit too hard. So he’s going to cut it down, with medical help.’
‘Cut it down, hell,’ I said. ‘I shan’t want another drink for the next fifty years.’
‘No, Maurice. That’s the surest way to, uh, run into trouble. You’re to cut down your intake by half in the first instance, and I mean half, not more. Take things as easy as you can. Lean on young David. And talk to Nick and Joyce about this. That’s medical advice. Well, I’m not going to be as late as I thought. Nick, if you like to pop round in about half an hour there’s some stuff for him I’d like you to pick up, if you would. Ring me any time you like, Maurice. This’ll pass off in a couple of days, provided you do as I say. Goodbye now.’
‘I’ll see you out, Jack,’ said Nick.
‘Oh, there’s no … All right. Thanks.’
As soon as they had gone, I shut my eyes. Just a precaution: I was already feeling better, or less bad. Except under the immediate threat of death, life can never be only one thing. Bird or no bird, I was going to pick up Diana later and find out what Underhill had had buried with him. The doing of that would probably be frightening, but so much the better. I would not be able to be frightened of seeing the bird while I was frightened of what might happen in the graveyard.
Nick came back and pulled up a low chair next to mine.
‘He didn’t drop in by chance, Nick, did he?’
‘No. I asked him to. Just as well, as he said.’
‘What did you ask him a minute ago?’
‘Whether he thought you were going off your head. He said some things did point that way, but on the whole he thought not.’
‘Well, that’s cheering, I must say.’
‘What’s wrong, Dad? I mean really wrong.’
‘Nothing. Hitting the bottle. You heard all that. Jack’s a terrible puritan about drink. It’s his way of—’
‘Balls. With the greatest disrespect along with a lot of respect, balls. You’ve decided not to tell me. And you think that’s pretty marvellous of you. Heroic sensitive Maurice Allington keeps his mouth shut as to what’s weighing on his heroic sensitive soul. But it isn’t like that. You’re just too lazy and arrogant and equal to everything (you think) to take the trouble to notice people like your son, and your wife, and deem them bloody well worthy of being let into the great secret of how you feel and what you think about everything, in fact what you’re like. Sorry, Dad, it wasn’t the time to say it, I know, but there’s nothing good about being self-sufficient except over things that don’t matter or when you’ve got to be because there just isn’t anybody else around, but that isn’t so in your case—it’s bad that you don’t depend on other people, especially the ones that depend on you. I can see you’re feeling rotten, but if anything really crappy happened and it could have been prevented by you telling someone like me, or Joyce, what was going on beforehand, then you’d only have yourself to blame, or rather I’d blame myself too for not going on at you about it. Which I’ll stop doing now, but I’ll go on with it when you’re feeling better. Sorry, Dad. Forget it for now.’ He put out his hand and I gripped it. ‘You just say how you want things to be this evening, and I’ll see to it that’s how they are.’
I stated some vague preferences about everything being normal, and about perhaps a look at television. Without giving any reason, Nick said that he would move the (family, non-Amy) set from the drawing-room, where it spent nine-tenths of its time, and plug it into its sockets here in the dining-room. He did all that, and shortly afterwards went off to pick up my pills at Jack’s, leaving me watching, rather in Amy style, a programme about rehousing schemes in (I think) Salford.
As soon as Nick had gone, I picked up a hammer, a chisel and some sort of steel bar from the tool-box in the utilities cupboard, collected a couple of torches from their drawer in the office, went outside to the hut where the very idle and disagreeable old man (all I could get) whom I paid to do the gardening spent his time drinking tea and, no doubt, pulling his wire, found a spade showing no signs of recent use and stowed all these implements in the back of the Volkswagen. Doing this cheered me, and also helped me considerably to shove beneath the surface of my mind any question of what the hell I thought I was doing. It must have been at about this point, in fact, that I became finally committed to following the Underhill thing through, in the sense that afterwards I never once considered turning back until it was too late.
Another distraction, of course, was the problem of how to introduce to Joyce the topic of the orgy project. I was determined to talk her into this with the least possible delay, without at the same time having any idea at all about how to start, or how to go on either. If other things had been normal, to get, or seem, very drunk might have looked like an obvious preliminary, but getting so would not do now, seeming so would quite probably not fool Joyce, who knew me well, at least in suc
h areas as this, and neither was likely to make the right impression, whatever that might be. I turned it all over in my mind while, accompanied by David, I made a sketchy round of bar, kitchen and dining-room, but could think of no solution. This did not worry me, perhaps because before I started I had opened Jack’s package and swallowed two parti-coloured transparent cylinders containing some sort of coarse brown powder and very roughly resembling dolls’ egg-timers. I would have to trust to the inspiration of the moment, in other words put my head down and charge full tilt.
The moment came shortly before nine o’clock, after I had had a desultory chat with Amy in her room and come upon Joyce and Nick in the dining-room. No sooner had I mixed myself a water and Scotch—ten to one—and given Joyce a glass of Tio Pepe than Nick said, staring at me rather, that he felt like going down to the bar for a bit and would see us at dinner.
Joyce asked me how I was and I soon satisfied her curiosity, which had not seemed to be of the burning sort in the first place. Then I said,
‘I ran into Diana this afternoon, on my way back from Cambridge.’
‘Ran into her?’
‘She was just coming out of the post office as I went by, so I stopped and gave her a lift. She had a shopping-bag or so.’
‘And?’
‘Well, it was all rather curious. Would you say she got tight at all? I don’t mean on my scale, but at all?’
‘No.’
‘No, neither would I, but she did seem a bit tight this afternoon. Or something, from the way she went on. Anyway, she started saying how marvellously attractive she thought you were, wonderful colouring, terrific figure and everything, so much so that it began to dawn on me that she wasn’t just paying compliments, she had something particular in mind. So, after a bit it all began to come out.’
‘Go on.’
‘She went into a great kind of thing about how dull life was in Fareham, for people like her and you and me, and of course I agreed with that, and how we ought to do something about it, get some excitement from somewhere. Such as where? Well, what was wrong with the idea of the three of us having a little romp together?’ Joyce said nothing, so I went on, ‘She meant all going to bed. I thought she was joking at first, but evidently not. I said I wasn’t sure I could satisfy two ladies all by myself, and she said I needn’t worry, that wouldn’t be necessary.
‘What did she mean?’
‘Well, I suppose she meant, in fact I’m sure she meant you and she could have fun together between times. It would be all sort of mixed.’
‘I see. What did you say?’
‘I said I thought she had something, but naturally I couldn’t commit myself until I’d talked to you about it. Oh, there was one other thing she said. We needn’t worry about the Jack side of it, because it turns out she hates him.’
Joyce looked at me for the first time since we had started talking. ‘Diana hates Jack?’
‘That’s what she said.’
‘You mean she had to tell you?’ (At this point it was I who said nothing.) The first time we met them Diana couldn’t bear Jack, and she’s gone on not being able to bear him ever since. How funny you’ve never noticed.’
‘Why didn’t you mention it to me?’
‘I thought it was so obvious it wasn’t worth mentioning.’
‘That’s not how things work. In the ordinary way you’d have been bound to bring it up some time, just casually. Why have you been keeping it to yourself for so long?’
‘Pretty good deduction,’ said Joyce, apparently with genuine mild admiration, though I was on the alert about appearances, at any rate for the moment. ‘I haven’t mentioned it because I was waiting to see if you’d ever notice it on your own, and you haven’t. That’s typical, both bits, I mean you not noticing and you seeing straight away that I’d not mentioned it on purpose. That’s how you are. You sort of observe all the time, and do it bloody well, often, and yet you don’t see. Do you see what I mean?’
‘Yes, and you may be right,’ I said, trying not to sound impatient. ‘But let’s get back to Diana’s idea. She seemed to think we could—’
‘She meant that you’d, well, do her, for instance, and then she and I would work each other over for a bit, until you were ready again, and then you’d do me from behind, I don’t mean, you know, just from behind while she sort of did the front of me, and then she and I would go on together again until perhaps you could do the same thing again only the other way round, or else you and I could divide her up and take different bits of her, and then you and she could take different bits of me, and so on. Is that the kind of thing?’
‘Roughly, yes.’ Listening to Joyce’s outline had been not altogether unlike having the plot of Romeo and Juliet summarized by a plasterer’s mate. At the same time I was swallowing hard with the effort not to want to laugh. ‘Of course, we’d find plenty of—’
‘All right.’
‘What?’
‘Let’s do it, then.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes. We might just as well. Why shouldn’t we? You fix it up with Diana and let me know. Now I must go and find Magdalena. There’s the chef’s gazpacho tonight, and then lamb cutlets Reform. Ought to be damn good.’.
With Victor in a loose ball on my lap, I sat and tried, not very hard, to watch Friday Playhouse, one of those two-character efforts which nevertheless seem marred by the excessive size of the cast. I was puzzled by the sensation that Joyce had let the situation down in some way: having wished beforehand for nothing better than her ready acceptance of the orgy project, I was now wishing she had put up objections for me to beat or wheedle out of the way. There was material here for a mental discussion about sex and power, but I shelved this. Perhaps it was Joyce’s reaction that had—against all the odds —made me feel less than totally triumphant about the replacement of orgy project by orgy prospect, or perhaps it was just Jack’s pills. If the latter, then there was a problem looming.
Dinner came and went; so did further television, culminating, or ending, in a discussion about God that made God seem comparatively immediate and to be reckoned with, as if God’s sphere of influence might reach out to within a few light-years of the Solar System any millennium now, or traces of God’s activities had been proved to extend as late as the beginning of the Devonian Age. Joyce went silently off to bed before it was over. Nick sat on for a while over a journal of French studies, then told me I was to wake him at any time if I felt like some company, and retired in his turn.
It was exactly midnight. I washed down two more pills with the puny draught I must habituate myself to, and left the apartment, picking up a lightweight raincoat on the way. This —camouflage, not protection from the weather—I put on and buttoned up to the chin before hurrying downstairs and out at the side door. In the open, there was plenty of movement to and fro, and plenty of standing about, too; as I waited in the shadows for a clear moment, I congratulated myself on having allowed plenty of time. At last a man half-lifted a girl into a car I considered he was much too young to own, and drove off, leaving the car-park empty of people. I scuttled across to the Volkswagen and got away without being seen, feeling light-headed in a more literal sense than I would have imagined possible, had I ever considered the matter: the parts of my brain usually reserved for thinking seemed to have been invaded by some gas, of low atomic weight but not otherwise tricky to handle—helium, perhaps, rather than hydrogen.
To use up spare minutes, I drove round the village a couple of times. It was deserted and showed hardly a light. Diana was waiting at the place we had agreed; I picked her up with most of the swift efficiency of somebody on TV mounting a robbery or an assassination. This parallel obviously occurred to her too, and for the next few minutes she interrogated me about the sense of adventure, and whether its appeal to men rather than women did or did not go to show that men were really frightfully school-boyish at heart, in all sorts … of ways. I probably said it did.
We reached the graveyard. I parked
the car off the road in the deep shade of a pair of elms; there was a thin but clear moon. Diana stood and waited, hands in the pockets of her rather schoolmistressy cardigan, while I collected the tools out of the back.
‘Don’t you feel scared, Maurice?’
‘Not at the moment, no. Why should I?’
‘But you told me you knew you were going to be, and that’s why you insisted on me coming along.’
‘Oh yes. I was really thinking about when we actually start. Take this, would you? Keep the light pointed away from the road.’
We moved off through the thick grass, halting and standing still for a quarter of a minute or so while the headlights of a car, no doubt full of drunken diners from the Green Man, swept towards and across us, or near us. The corroded iron gate of the graveyard leaned open. We entered, the torch Diana held making odd bits of greenery, at our feet or at head height, flare up like a mild and miniature firework display. One after the other, we stumbled over minor obstructions.
‘Careful,’ I said. ‘Round here by the wall. A bit more to your left. Yes, that’s it, there.’
‘So here we are … Maurice, don’t you feel a frightful sense that one’s about to do something one really wasn’t meant to do? Oh, I know this Christianity thing’s pretty well on its last legs these days, but surely there’s a kind of basic thing about not interfering with last resting-places and all that, you know, superstition and primitive fear and the rest of it. Do you honestly think it’s worth it?’
‘That remains to be seen. Hold the torch steady. The next part is going to be totally boring.’
I was understating it. Even a dry, sandy soil yields very slowly to the spade, and it must have been an hour at least before, soaked with sweat and unsteady on my feet, I had uncovered most of the top of the long oaken box I was after. Diana had behaved very creditably in the interval, taking time and trouble to wedge the torch into a crevice in the wall, initiating no discussions, hurrying to shield the light whenever a car approached on the road, falling asleep once for ten or fifteen minutes. She was awake when I finished digging and held the torch again—the reserve one, the battery of the first having given out—while I got going with the hammer and chisel. I had the latter muffled with sacking, but the noise was still considerable in the silence. However, that silence was otherwise unbroken by now, we were a hundred and fifty yards at least from the nearest houses, which were all in darkness, and a dozen taps and some creaking while I levered away were as much as was unavoidable.