When I opened the coffin, there was an odour of dry earth and of what I can only describe as powerful clean sheets; nothing in the least disagreeable. I took the torch from Diana, who bent closer while I ran its beam up and down. Underhill was totally and securely wrapped in linen, rather flattened about the abdomen and below, with the sharpness of bone showing through at knees and feet. At first I saw nothing but all this, then caught a gleam of dull metal at the end by the head. My fingers closed on something and I pulled it out and shone the torch on to it. What I held was a rough leaden casket, rectangular, about the size of a box of fifty cigarettes or a little thicker through. There was a lid, but the metal of this had been crudely fused with that of the casket itself, the whole forming a serviceable damp-proof container. I shook it and it rattled in a muffled, impeded way. I thought I knew what was rattling and what was impeding.
‘Is that all?’ asked Diana.
I shone the torch up and down and across. ‘This was all I expected there to be here. I’ll unwrap him if you like, but I don’t—’
‘No. Never mind. Let’s get the lid on again.’
This too took a long time, and so did shovelling the earth back into an approximation of where it had been. It would obviously be years before the signs of interference ceased to be noticeable, but I could not imagine the Fareham constable, a chubby young man who spent as much time as was relevant at Newmarket races and the rest of the time talking about these and such matters, in the role of inquirer into the possible despoliation of some old bugger’s grave from way back.
‘Well, that’s it,’ I said.
‘Aren’t you going to open that thing you found?’
I considered. As I moved the earth and roughly levelled it off, I had been thinking of almost nothing beyond the prospect of opening the casket, but had visualized total seclusion. On the other hand, after something like two hours of unstinted and largely silent co-operation, Diana was entitled to some return, or at least would be expecting it. Fair enough. And yet, if I really was right about the thing that had rattled … But the possibility of antagonizing Diana at this stage…
I found the hammer and the chisel. ‘Yes. Why not?’
In a couple of minutes I had made enough impression along the line of the original lid to prise the soft metal out of the way. I up-ended the casket and a small object fell into the palm of my hand. It was intensely cold, so much colder than the lead of its container that I nearly dropped it. Diana shone the torch. There it was, just as described; a silver figure about three inches tall and half that from one extended hand to where the other had been, with a smile of sorts on its face. I am no judge of silver, but I knew that the thing was much more than three hundred years old.
‘What an ugly little creature,’ said Diana. ‘What is it? Do you think it’s valuable? It’s only silver, isn’t it?’
I hardly heard her. Here was Underhill’s proof. If I had thought to show what I had found this morning in my office notebook, to Nick or anyone else, before starting on tonight’s expedition, I would now have had something to show the world—something, but not a proof, perhaps a case of extrasensory perception, perhaps just a curious coincidence, an interesting story, an oddity. It was a proof only for me, and even I could not have said how much it really proved. Not yet, at least; but I felt a kind of hope I had never felt before.
‘Maurice? Is it a charm or something? What do you think it is?’
‘I don’t know. I must try to find out. Hold on a minute.’
The expected sheets of paper could be seen inside the casket. I drew them out and unfolded them. They too were cold to the touch, but whether owing to true cold or to damp I did not know or care. The handwriting, the first words were enough, but for a few moments I read mechanically on.
‘AVE, O MI AMICE SAPIENTISSIME. As thou see’est, thou hast understood mee aright. Count thyself the most fortunate of mankind, for shortly the veritable Secret of Life shall be reveal’d to thee. But mark curiously what follows, & thou shalt possess what is more durable than Riches, more to be envy’d than a Crown…’
‘What does it say? Anything about this charm thing?’
‘Not that I can see. Most of it’s in Latin. Legal stuff, probably. I’ll have a go at sorting it out some time.’
Well, I had been right about the papers too, but there was nothing supernatural in that. I folded them up again, slipped then and the silver figure back where they had been and managed to fit the casket into the side pocket of my dinner-jacket. Then I started picking up the tools.
‘Is that the lot? Not much of a show, was it?’
‘Oh, we did find something, didn’t we? Not too bad.’
‘I don’t call that treasure.’
‘That thing may be worth a bit, we don’t know. I’ll find somebody in Cambridge who’ll tell us.’
‘Where are you going to say you got it from?’
‘Leave that to me.’
As we were leaving by the churchyard gate, a gust of wind, unexpected on such a still night, stirred the branches and leaves above our heads. I must have sweated even more than I had thought, because the air struck chill. At the same moment, the light of the torch in Diana’s hand dimmed abruptly. We made our way back to the Volkswagen by almost unassisted moonlight. Down the empty road, the Green Man was in complete darkness, and there was no sound but that of our own progress until I opened the back door of the car and stowed the tools. Diana, a shifting, breathing shape, faintly illuminated at temple, shoulder and elbow, turned to me.
‘Where does Joyce imagine you are tonight?’ she asked, with something of her husband’s accusatory tone.
‘If she happened to wake up, which she never does, she’d think I was sitting up reading or drinking or brooding. But listen, I asked her about our little get-together idea and she was all for it. Any time to suit us.’
Diana reacted to this, but for a couple of seconds I could not have said how. Then she came forward, pressed herself against me and began a steady to-and-fro wriggle.
‘Maurice.’
‘Yes?’
‘Maurice, do you think I might be the most terrible sort of kinky pervert type without knowing it?’
‘Oh, I doubt that. No worse than me, anyway.’
‘Because … the moment you said that about Joyce and us I suddenly started feeling frightfully randy. I mean as regards straight away, not just for when we have the get-together. Is that absolutely unspeakable and depraved of me? I wonder whether it’s anything to do with what we’ve been—’
I had been about to plead tiredness outwardly, and blame Jack’s pills inwardly, when I realized that nothing like that was called for. Diana’s interestingness had started taking more and more interesting forms. In something less than a quarter of a minute we were kneeling face to face in a patch of shadow.
‘We can’t really—’
‘No, let’s just take our—’
‘Okay, yes, fine.’
In another quarter of a minute we were at it again. I had about the least sense possible of another person being there at all; there was a lot of wool and other material, some cheek, some panting, some movement, some pressure, and what was I doing. Even that was set at a distance by the lack of everything else, for a time. Suddenly it all turned very immediate and as much as anybody could deal with. Diana’s body lifted and seemed enormous, then sank back and became slender and powerless again.
This was not an occasion for lingering. I was just going to move away when my heart gave a prolonged vibration and Diana screamed—no ladylike squeak, either, but a full-throated yell of fear.
‘There’s somebody watching us. Look, there, in the …
As quickly as I could, I disengaged myself and turned, still on one knee. The moon was less bright than it had been, but I could not have missed any creature or movement. There was none.
‘It was … He was standing in the middle of the road, looking at me. Oh God. Ghastly. Staring at me.’
She had struggled
to a sitting position. I knelt beside her and put my arm round her.
‘There’s nobody there now,’ I said. ‘It’s all right.’
There was something awful about him. Something wrong with the shape of him. Not like proper arms and legs. I only saw him just for a second, but he was sort of deformed. Not really deformed, though, not the way people are. He was the wrong shape. Too thick in some places and too thin in others.’
‘What was he made of?’
‘Made of?’ she asked in renewed fear. ‘How do you mean?’
‘Sorry, I … What was he wearing?’
‘Wearing? I couldn’t see. He was only there for a moment.’
‘What colour?’
‘You can’t see colours in this light.’
True, but no matter: there had been no real need to ask. Diana had justified her inclusion in tonight’s party; though not quite in the way I had hoped, by seeing what I saw when I saw it. Another thought struck me. ‘Did he move at all, make any—?’
‘No. I told you. He was just standing there, and the next minute he’d gone.’
‘You mean vanished?’
‘Well … I didn’t see him go.’
‘He must have gone pretty bloody quick to be in the middle of the road when you screamed and nowhere in sight when I looked.’
‘Yes … I suppose he must. Who could it have been?’
I was trying to reason, or at least to be relatively rational. The ghost of the green man, as ghosts were supposed to do, as Underhill’s ghost was apparently accustomed to do, had appeared in an instant and disappeared in an instant, called into brief being, it might be, by our activities at its master’s grave, perhaps by the disturbance or removal of the silver figure, which must in that case be associated with it in some way, though the one was certainly not the image of the other. At any rate, while there was plenty of excuse for alarm, I could see no reason for it. All my instincts confirmed Lucy’s pronouncement that a mere phantom cannot inflict direct harm on anyone, and that (like those Underhill had conjured up in the case of the Tyler girl) the most it can actually do is terrify. And any terror that was not of the kind inspired by a fly-sized scarlet-and-green bird … No, any such terror could be faced, or could be fled from; must always be less terrible than a portable, infinitely adaptable demon living and acting in the mind.
I pulled myself together. ‘Sorry. Who was it? Some farm boy on his way home from a drink. They come in pretty odd shapes and sizes round here. Anyway, he couldn’t possibly have recognized you, so don’t worry about it. It’s … good God, it’s nearly three o’clock. I’ll take you home.’
Like Amy earlier, Diana went through the motions of acquiescence while making it plain that my proffered explanation did not satisfy her. She said almost nothing on the way back. I parked the car off the road and walked her towards the house.
‘I’m very grateful to you for coming along tonight.’
‘Oh … it’s nothing.’
‘About the get-together with Joyce—can I telephone you? What would be a good time?’
‘Any time.’
‘Let’s make it soon. What about tomorrow?’
‘Isn’t it your father’s funeral tomorrow?’
‘Yes, but that’ll be all over by lunch-time.’
‘Maurice …‘ She rejected the shoddy pseudo-psychological question I had been preparing myself for. That … just now. It wasn’t a ghost I saw, was it, Maurice? Because it did vanish, I thought.’
For this one I was about half prepared. ‘Yes, I was thinking along those lines. I suppose, well, it could have been, granted there are such things. Rather a funny place to find a ghost, though, isn’t it? in the middle of a country road. I just don’t know.’
‘Then … when you said it must have been a farm chap you were sort of trying to put my mind at rest, were you?’
‘Yes. Of course.’
‘Or your own mind at rest?’
‘That too.’
‘Maurice … one of the things I like about you is that you’re completely honest.’ She kissed me on the cheek. ‘Run along now. Give me a ring about Joyce as soon as you like.’
She ran vivaciously off, doubly puffed up, I assumed, at having got me to admit to needing to put my own mind at rest and at the thought—unconfided to me, which was odd—that she had ‘demonstrated a fresh superiority by seeing a ghost when I had not. Did she now think she had really seen a ghost? What would she think if and when Jack should tell her that I had claimed to be seeing ghosts? Never mind; I was genuinely tired now, so tired that I staggered as if from drink (which for once could not be) when I walked from the garage to the house.
I washed down two more pills with heavily watered Scotch and went straight to bed, having locked up the casket in the office. I needed what sleep I could get, with a funeral and an orgy ahead, and, no doubt, something more.
4: The Young Man
‘Death’s an integral part of life, after all. We settle for it by the mere act of being born. Let’s face it, Mr Allington, it is possible to take the end of the road a bloody sight too seriously.’
‘And you don’t mean because we ought to think of it as the gateway to another mode of being and part of God’s purpose and so on.’
‘Good God, no. I don’t mean that at all. Not at all.’
The Reverend Tom Rodney Sonnenschein, Rector of St James’s, Fareham, sounded quite shocked. He did not really look shocked, because he had one of those smooth, middle-aged-boyish faces that seem unfitted, even at moments of warmth or concern (if any), to express much more than a mild petulance. In the church and at the graveside, I had supposed him to be showing indignation at the known godlessness of all those in attendance, or perhaps to be suffering physically; now, in the bar of the Green Man, it was becoming deducible that he had been merely bored. I found it odd, and oddly unwelcome too, to meet a clergyman who was turning out to be, doctrinally speaking, rather to the Left of a hardened unbeliever like myself; but no doubt he would soon be off to some more spiritually challenging parish in London, and anyhow I did not proposed to see the man again after today.
‘Not at all?’ I asked.
‘You know, this whole immortality bit’s been pretty well done to death. One’s got to take the historical angle. Immortality’s just a passing phase. Basically, it was thought up by the Victorians, especially the early Victorians, as a sort of guilt thing. They’d created the evils of the Industrial Revolution, they could sense what kind of ghastly bloody monster capitalism was going to turn out to be, and the only refuge from hell on earth they could think of was a new life away from the smoke and the stink and the cries of the starving kids. Whereas today, of course, now it’s beginning to get through people’s heads at last that capitalism just won’t do, that the whole bloody thing’s simply not on, and we can set about changing society so as to give everybody a meaningful and organic existence here on earth, well, we can put immortality back in the junk-room along with, oh, mutton-chop whiskers and Mr Gladstone and the Salvation Army and evolution.’
‘Evolution?’
‘Surely,’ stated the rector, simultaneously smiling hard and frowning hard and dilating his nostrils and blinking rapidly, one for each, perhaps, of his pieces of junk-room furniture.
‘Oh well … But what I don’t quite see is why these Victorians of yours were so keen on the idea of an after-life when they were so eaten up with guilt about what they’d been doing in this one. They’d have thought they’d be much more likely to end up in hell than in any sort of—’
‘Oh, but, my dear, that’s the whole point, do you see. They were mad about hell—it was going to be just like their public school, where they’d had the only really intense emotional experiences they were capable of. Caning and flogging and fagging and cold baths and rowing and slip-practice and a terrifying all-powerful old man always telling you what utter shit you were and how you were polluting yourself. They were off their heads about it, I promise you. You don’t imagine it’s a
coincidence, do you, that this was the great age of masochism, chiefly in England but by no means confined to here?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘An age of masochism couldn’t be a coincidence.’
‘Well, hardly, could it? The whole thing’s absolutely basic to the capitalist psyche, love of pain and punishment and misery generally, all the Protestant qualities. If you wanted to be smart without being too superficial, you could say that the immortality of the soul was invented by Dr Arnold of Rugby— bit unfair on the old love, but there we are.’
‘Could you? But isn’t there a lot about it in the Bible? And a lot of stuff about pain and punishment in the Middle Ages? And hasn’t the Catholic Church always taken personal immortality very seriously?’
‘Let’s just take those points in order, shall we? There’s virtually nothing about it in the Old Testament, which has come to be generally recognized as the more uncompromising and more unsentimental of the two. Quite frankly, the Jesus of the Gospels can be a bit of a wet liberal at times, when he’s not taking off into flights of rather schmaltzy Semitic metaphor. As regards the Middle Ages, their devils and red-hot pincers and so on represented nothing more than a displaced enactment of what they wanted their enemies to suffer on earth. The Catholic Church, well … Simple pie in the sky, isn’t it generally agreed? I mean, you don’t think it’s an accident, do you, that they invariably give their support to backward and reactionary if not actually vicious régimes, like in Spain and Portugal and Ireland and—?’
‘Yes, I know the ones you mean. Well, I don’t know what I think. But you’ve certainly given me a most interesting exposition, Rector.’