‘I was going to ask you about that ghost business of yours. Is it still, you know …?‘
‘All taken care of. All over. I’ll tell you the full story some day.’
‘Not some day. The next time we meet. So long, Dad—I’ll ring you tonight. Oh: Amy was asking where you were. Said she had something to say to you. And you listen, whatever it is. And you say something to her. Please, Dad.’
I found Amy sitting up in bed, while the TV screen showed a pair of unengaging candlesticks and an octogenarian voice said, ‘They’re very beautiful, aren’t they? I should say late eighteenth century, not English, of course…’
‘Turn it off, Dad, please.’
I turned it off and settled down on the edge of the bed.
‘How are you feeling, Ame?’
‘Fine, thank you. Joyce is going away, isn’t she?’
‘How do you know?’
‘She told me. She came in to see if I wanted anything and we had a chat, and I asked her if we were going to Eastbourne for the week-end before I go back to school like we did last year, and she said you and I might be, but she wouldn’t be with us then. Then she told me. She was upset, but she wasn’t crying or anything.’
‘How extraordinary. Just telling you like that.’
‘Not really. You know how she tells you things without thinking what you’re going to think about them.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘You don’t seem to have much luck with your wives, do you, Dad? Perhaps you don’t give them enough treats. Anyway, I started thinking about what we ought to do. Now I’m thirteen now. I shan’t want to get married until I’m about twenty-one. That’s eight years, at least that, because I might not find the right man straight away. And I can help you all that time. I’m quite good at cooking already, and if you don’t mind me being in the kitchen when we’re not busy I can learn a lot more just by watching. And I can take telephone messages and things like that, and when I’m older I’ll be able to do other things, like seeing to the accounts. I’ll be very useful.’
‘That’s sweet of you, darling,’ I said, and made to embrace her, but she drew back and glared at me.
‘No it isn’t I’m not saying it just to make you feel better. That’s what you do. I’ve been thinking about it very seriously, and making plans. To start with, I think you ought to sell this place, because of Gramps dying and Joyce going away and the man last night. We ought to go somewhere where I can go to a good school and live at home. Cambridge or Eastbourne or somewhere like that would be the sort of place. Don’t you think that’s what we ought to do?’
‘Yes. You’re right we’ve got to get away. Of course, it depends on what hotels and inns and so on are on the market, where we go, I mean.’
‘It’ll all be up to you, that part of it. Then when we think we’ve found a place, we can go and look at schools.’
‘I’ll start making inquiries tomorrow.’
‘If you’ve got time.’
‘No, I’ll have time.’
She reached out to me, and I kissed her and held her. Soon afterwards I left, after having my offer to turn the TV set on rejected: she said she wanted to go on thinking. It was time to go and shower and change for the evening. As I started on this, I reflected that things had sorted themselves out after a fashion. Or some things had. I was feeling tense again, and my heart was beating heavily, moving towards the point where it would begin to flutter and stumble. Also, as had been happening increasingly of late, I noticed how clumsy I was getting, knocking my shoulder against the bathroom door-jamb, barking my knuckles on the shower-taps when I reached for them, slamming the soap down in the holder with unwilled violence, as if I were drunk, which I certainly was not, or as if my powers of co-ordination were progressively deteriorating. That thought wearied me unendurably, and so did the thought that tomorrow was another week, and I must telephone the insurance company about the Volkswagen, and see the solicitor about my father’s will, and fetch the meat, and bank the takings, and make new arrangements about fruit and vegetables, and prepare for another week after that. And Joyce, and selling the house, and looking for another, and finding somebody to go to bed with.
Much sooner than I could have expected (I had not really had any such expectation), I found I had begun to understand the meaning of the young man’s prophecy that I would come to appreciate death and what it had to offer. Death was my only means of getting away for good from this body and all its pseudo-symptoms of disease and fear, from the constant awareness of this body, from this person, with his ruthlessness and sentimentality and ineffective, insincere, impracticable notions of behaving better, from attending to my own thoughts and from counting in thousands to smother them and from my face in the glass. He had said I would never be free of him as long as the world lasted, and I believed him, but when I died I would be free of Maurice Allington for longer than that.
I put on my dinner-jacket, swallowed a strong whisky and went downstairs to begin the evening round.
Kingsley Amis, The Green Man
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