Contents

About the Book

About the Author

Also by Kingsley Amis

Dedication

Title Page

1. The Red-Haired Woman

2. Dr Thomas Underhill

3. The Small Bird

4. The Young Man

5. A Movement in the Grass

Copyright

About the Book

Like all good coaching inns, The Green Man is said to boast a resident ghost: Dr Thomas Underhill, a notorious seventeenth-century practitioner of black arts and sexual deviancy. However, the landlord, Maurice Allington, is the sole witness to the renaissance of the malevolent Underhill. Led by an anxious desire to vindicate his sanity, Allington strives to uncover the key to Underhill’s satanic powers. All while the skeletons in Allington’s own cupboard rattle to get out.

About the Author

Kingsley Amis was born in south London in 1922 and was educated at the City of London School and St John’s College, Oxford. After the publication of Lucky Jim in 1954, Kingsley Amis wrote over twenty novels, including The Alteration, winner of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, The Old Devils, winner of the Booker Prize in 1986, and The Biographer’s Moustache, which was to be his last book. He also wrote on politics, education, language, films, television, restaurants and drink. Kingsley Amis was awarded the CBE in 1981 and received a knighthood in 1990. He died in October 1995.

THE HISTORY OF VINTAGE

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To Sargy Mann

The Green Man

Kingsley Amis

FICTION BY KINGSLEY AMIS

Lucky Jim

That Uncertain Feeling

I Like It Here

Take a Girl Like You

One Fat Englishman

The Anti-Death League

I Want It Now

Girl, 20

The Riverside Villas Murder

Ending Up

The Crime of the Century

The Alteration

Jake’s Thing

Collected Short Stories

Russian Hide-and-Seek

Stanley and the Women

The Old Devils

Difficulties with Girls

The Folks that Live on the Hill

The Russian Girl

Mr Barrett’s Secret and Other Stories

You Can’t Do Both

The Biographer’s Moustache

1

The Red-Haired Woman

FAREHAM, Herts	THE GREEN MAN
½ mile off A595	Mill End 0043

THE POINT ABOUT white Burgundies is that I hate them myself. I take whatever my wine supplier will let me have at a good price (which I would never dream of doing with any other drinkable). I enjoyed seeing those glasses of Chablis or Pouilly Fuissé so closely resembling a blend of cold chalk soup and alum cordial with an additive or two to bring it to the colour of children’s pee, being peered and sniffed at, rolled round the shrinking tongue and forced down somehow by parties of young technology dons from Cambridge or junior television producers and their girls. Minor, harmless compensations of this sort are all too rare in a modern innkeeper’s day.

In fact, most of my trade did come either from London or the twenty-odd miles from Cambridge, with a little more from the nearest Hertfordshire towns. I got the occasional passer-by, of course, but not as many as my colleagues on the A10 to the east of me and the A505 to the north-west. The A595 is a mere sub-artery connecting Stevenage and Royston, and although I put up a sign on it the day I opened, not many transients ever bothered to turn off and try to find the Green Man in preference to using one of the pubs directly beside the main road. All right with me, that. About my only point of agreement with John Fothergill, the buckle-shoed posturer who had the Spread Eagle in Thame when I was a boy and founded a reputation and a book on being nasty to his guests, is lack of warmth towards the sort of people who use two halves of bitter and two tomato juices as a quadruple ticket to the lavatories and washbasins. The villagers from Fareham itself, and from Sandon and Mill End, each of the two about a mile away, were obviously a different matter. They put back their pints steadily and quietly in the public bar, filling it at week-ends, and had an agreeable short way with dinner-jacketed seekers after rustic atmosphere or the authentic life of the working class.

The locals, with some assistance from the various hearty young men who came in to dine, got through plenty of beer, as much as a couple of dozen tens of bitter a week in the summer. Whatever might be said about its prices, the wine too went quickly enough. Refusing, as I have always done, to offer any but fresh meat, vegetables and fruit, poses a daily transport problem. All this, together with keeping up stocks of salt and metal-polish, flowers and toothpicks, takes a good deal of arranging. One way and another, I used to spend a good two or three hours of almost every day out of my house. But this could be less than a hardship to a man with a newish second wife, a teenaged daughter by a first marriage and an ancient and decrepit father (apart from a staff of nine) to be variously coped with.

Last summer, in particular, would have taxed a more hardened and versatile coper than me. As if in the service of some underground anti-hotelier organization, successive guests tried to rape the chambermaid, called for a priest at 3 a.m., wanted a room to take girlie photographs in, were found dead in bed. A party of sociology students from Cambridge, rebuked for exchanging obscenities at protest-meeting volume, poured beer over young David Palmer, my trainee assistant, and then staged a sit-in. After nearly a year of no worse than average conduct, the Spanish kitchen porter went into a heavy bout of Peeping Tom behaviour, notably but not at all exclusively at the grille outside the ladies’ lavatory, attracted the attention of the police and was finally deported. The deep-fat fryer caught fire twice, once during a session of the South Hertfordshire branch of the Wine and Food Society. My wife seemed lethargic, my daughter withdrawn. My father, now in his eightieth year, had another stroke, his third, not serious in itself but not propitious. I felt rather strung up, and was on a bottle of Scotch a day, though this had been standard for twenty years.

One Wednesday about the middle of August reached a new level. In the morning there had been trouble with the repatriated voyeur’s successor, Ramón, who had refused to pile and burn the rubbish on the grounds that he had already had to do the breakfast dishes. Then, while I was picking up the tea, coffee and such at the dry-goods warehouse in Baldock, the ice-maker had broken down. It never performed with much conviction in hot weather, and the temperature most of that week was in the upper seventies. An electrician had to be found and fetched. Three sets of hotel guests with four young children between them, no doubt under orders from anti-hotelier HQ, turned up from nowhere between 5.30 and 5.40. My wife succeeded almost totally in blaming this on me.

Later, having settled my father in front of the open drawing-room window with a weak Scotch-and-water, I came out of our apartment on the upper storey to find somebody standing, back turned to me, near the stairhead. I took this person for a woman in an evening dress rather heavy for a humid August evening. There was no function in the banqueting chamber, the only public room on that floor, until the following week, and our apartment was clearly marked as private.

With my best offensive suavity, I said, ‘Can I help you, madam?’

Instantly, but without a sound, the figure turned to face me. I vaguely saw a pale, thin-lipped face, heavy auburn ringlets and some kind of large bluish pendant at the throat. Much more clearly than this, I sensed a surprise and alarm that seemed disproportionate: my arrival on the landing could hardly have been inaudible to one only twenty feet away, and it was obvious enough who I was.

At that moment my father called to me, and without thinking I looked away.

‘Yes, Father?’

‘Oh, Maurice . . . could you send up an evening paper? The local one will do.’

‘I’ll get Fred to bring one up.’

‘Soon, if you would, Maurice, and if Fred’s free.’

‘Yes, Father.’

This took no more than a dozen seconds, but when they were over the landing was empty. The woman must have decided to cut short her display of heightened sensitivity and pursue her search on the ground floor. No doubt she was more successful there, for I saw nothing of her as I came down the stairs, crossed the few feet of hall and entered the front bar.

This long, low room, with small windows revealing the thickness of its outer wall, and normally cool and dry in summer, was stickily oppressive that evening. Fred Soames, the barman, had the fans going, but as I joined him behind the counter and waited for him to finish serving a round of drinks, I could feel sweat trickling down under my frilled shirt and dinner-jacket. I was uneasy too, and not just in my habitual unlocalized way. I was bothered by something about the appearance or demeanour of the woman I had seen on the landing, something it was now too late to define. Even less reasonably, I felt certain that, when my father called to me, he had changed his mind about what he wanted to say. I could not imagine what his original thought had been, and, again, I would not now be able to find out. His memory in such cases extended over seconds only.

I sent Fred off with the paper, served, in his absence, three medium sherries and (with concealed distaste) a lager and lime, and took a party of early diners through the menu, pushing the rather boring salmon and some incipiently elderly pork a little less gently than the Good Food Guide might have approved. After that, a visit to the kitchen, where David Palmer and the chef had everything under control, including Ramón, who assured me that he was not now desiring to return to Espain. Then, a call at the tiny office under the angle of the main staircase. My wife was listlessly working her way through the bills, but lost some of her listlessness (she never seemed to lose quite all of it) on being told to forget all that crap for now and go up and change. She even gave me a hasty kiss on the ear.

Returning to the bar by way of the still-room, where I swallowed down a very large Scotch put there for me by Fred, I did some more takings-through the menu. The last of the batch was an elderly couple from Baltimore, on their way to Cambridge in search of things historical and breaking their journey at my house to take in a few of the same, or similar. The man, a retired lawyer, had evidently been doing his homework, not a testing task in this instance. Periphrastically but courteously, he inquired after our ghost, or ghosts.

I went into the routine, first piously turning down a drink. ‘The main one was somebody called Dr Thomas Underhill who lived here in the later seventeenth century. He was in holy orders, but he wasn’t the parson of the parish; he was a scholar who for some reason gave up his Cambridge fellowship and bought this place. He’s buried in that little churchyard just up the road, but he nearly didn’t get buried at all. He was so wicked that when he died the sexton wouldn’t dig a grave for him, and the local rector refused to officiate at his funeral. They had to get a sexton from Royston, and a clergyman all the way from Peterhouse in Cambridge. Some of the people round about said that Underhill had killed his wife, whom he used to quarrel with a lot, apparently, and he was also supposed to have brought about the death of a farmer he’d had trouble with over some land deal.

‘Well, the odd thing is that both these people were murdered all right, half torn to pieces, in fact, in the most brutal way, but in both cases the bodies were found in the open, at almost the same spot on the road to the village, although the murders were six years apart, and on both occasions it was established beyond doubt that Underhill was indoors here at the time. The obvious guess is that he hired chaps to do the job for him, but they were never caught, nobody even saw them, and the force used on the victims, they say, was disproportionate for an ordinary commercial killing.

‘Anyway, Underhill, or rather his ghost, turned up quite a few times at a window in what’s now part of the dining-room, peering out and apparently watching something. All the witnesses seem to have been very struck by the expression on his face and his general demeanour, but, according to the story, there was a lot of disagreement about what he actually looked like. One chap said he thought Underhill was behaving as if he were terrified out of his wits. Someone else thought he was showing the detached curiosity of a man of science observing an experiment. It doesn’t sound very consistent, does it? but then . . .’

‘Could it not be, Mr Allington, could it not be that this . . . apparition was engaged, if one might so put the matter, in . . . surveying the actuality of the crimes, or the, the shadow of the actuality of the crimes he had brought to pass, and that the various observers were witnessing successive stages in his reaction to the spectacle of brutal violence, from . . . clinical disinterest to horror, and it might be, agonized remorse?’

‘An interesting point.’ I did not add that it had occurred, in a less Jamesian form, to almost everybody who had heard this story. ‘But in that case he was standing at the wrong window, facing away from the spot where the murders were done towards a patch of woods. Nothing has ever happened there as far as I know, nothing to do with this business anyway.’

‘I see. Then let me turn to another consideration. In the latter part of your strange and fascinating tale, Mr Allington, that concerning the figure of . . . the revenant, I noticed that you employed the past tense, thereby . . . implying that these manifestations are also a thing of the past. Is that, would that be correct, sir?’

The old lad’s brain could evidently work a little faster than his organs of speech. ‘Quite correct. Nothing has been seen since I took over the house seven years ago, and the people I bought it from, who’d had it for much longer, had never seen anything either. They had heard that an elderly relative of a predecessor had been frightened by what could have been Underhill’s ghost when he was a boy, but that must have been in Victorian times. No, I’m afraid if there ever was anything, it’s all over now.’

‘Just so. I have read that this house has known at least one ghost, which would seem to . . . indicate the possibility, at least, of another.’

‘Yes. Nothing was ever actually seen of him at any stage. A few people said they used to hear somebody walking round the outside of the house at night and trying the doors and windows. Of course, every village must have two or three characters who wouldn’t be averse to a bit of burglary at a place of this size if they could find an easy entry.’

‘Did nobody take the obvious course of looking out to see . . . what there might have been to see?’

‘Apparently not. They said they didn’t like the noise whoever it was made while he was going round. He rustled and crackled as he moved. That’s as much sense as I’ve been able to make of it.’

‘And this . . . person also no longer visits the scene?’

‘No.’

I spoke a little shortly. I usually enjoyed telling all this, but tonight it seemed silly, fully vouched for by written evidence and yet at the same time a blatant piece of stock-in-trade. My heart was beating irregularly and uncomfortably and I longed for another drink. My clothes were glueing themselves to me in the damp heat, which seemed to be increasing as the evening advanced. I did my best to listen to further inquiries, mainly about the documentary basis for my story. These I checked by saying, untruthfully, that I had nothing of the sort in my own possession, and that all the stuff was in the county archives in Hertford town. The last stages of the conversation were lengthened by my guest’s habit of pausing frequently in search of some even more roundabout way of expressing himself than the one which had first occurred to him. Finally, a party at the other end of the bar reached the menu stage, and to them, after receiving a couple of paragraphs of thanks, I moved away.

By the time I had got the new party off, dashed into the still-room thirsty and out refreshed, done a brief tour of the dining-room in modified orderly-officer style, agreed hypocritically that a sauce vinaigrette for avocado pears had too much salt, been lavish about making this good (the tasted pears would go very nicely into the chef’s salad at tomorrow’s lunch), turned down on the office telephone a request for a double room that night from a drunken Cambridge undergraduate or sociology don and given my wife, downstairs again in a quite good sort of silver dress, a glass of Tio Pepe, it was nine twenty. We were to dine, as usual when no major function was in the book, at ten o’clock in the apartment. I was expecting two private guests, Dr and Mrs Maybury. Jack Maybury was the family doctor and a personal friend, or, more precisely, somebody I could bear to talk to. Among that tiny proportion of humanity more entertaining than very bad television, Jack stood high. Diana Maybury made television seem irrelevant, dull; an enormous feat.

They arrived when I was behind the bar again, being very candid with a London museum curator about the third most expensive claret on the list being the best value for money. Jack, a shock-headed, bony figure in a crumpled suit of biscuit-coloured linen, waved briefly and strode off, as usual, in the direction of the office to tell the local telephone exchange where he was. Diana joined my wife in the small alcove beside the fireplace. Together, they made an impressive, rather erective sight, both of them tall, blonde and full-breasted, but so different in other ways that they might have been chosen for some textbook illustration showing the width of divergence among basically similar physical types, or, more to the purpose, an X-certificate Swedish film that would fall a long way short of sticking to straight sex. Dull would he be of soul that would pass up the chance of taking the pair of them to bed. Their visible differences – Diana’s slim build, light-tawny hair-colour, hazel eyes, tanned skin and nervous demeanour alongside the strength and roundness, the yellow and blue and pale rose, the slow, steady movements of Joyce, my wife – suggested that there were others to be discovered, no less striking. In the past few weeks I had made some progress towards a vital part of this objective: persuading Diana to come to bed with me. Joyce knew nothing about this, nor about the more ambitious plan; but as I watched them exchange a kiss of greeting in the alcove, it was clear to me that they had always shown a subdued sexual feeling towards each other. Or was it not really clear at all, not true, just attractive as a fantasy?

The museum curator, having taken my advice and saved eleven shillings on his claret, not quite unexpectedly ordered a half-bottle of Château d’Yquem (37/6) to go with his sweet course. I bowed approvingly, told Fred to pass the word to the wine-waiter, mixed Diana a gin and bitter lemon, her invariable pre-dinner drink, and carried it over. I tried for her mouth when I kissed her, but got the side of her chin instead. There was a pause after that. Not for the first time, the idea of chatting to these two seemed altogether less attractive than what I had been thinking about a minute before. Jack reappeared while I was still exploring the topic of the heat and humidity. He kissed Joyce as unceremoniously as he had waved to me on arrival, then moved me aside. He was supposed to be a great hammer of his female patients, but, like most men of whom that sort of thing is said, he had on the whole a disinclination for female society.

‘Cheers,’ he said, raising for a short space the glass of Campari and soda Fred would have served him. ‘How’s everybody, then?’

Coming from one’s family doctor, this query went beyond mere phatic communion, and Jack always managed to get a slight air of hostility into it. He was inclined to be snobbish about health, implying that the lack of it sprang from some vulgar shortcoming, to be accepted as distastefully inevitable if not actually deplored. This probably served quite well as a form of pressure on his patients to get better.

‘Oh, all carrying on all right, I think.’

‘How’s your father?’ he asked, probing one of the several weak spots in my defences, and lighting a cigarette without taking his eyes off me.

‘About the same. Very piano.’

‘Very what?’ Jack just might not have heard me against the alcohol-fired roar of other voices in the bar, but more likely he meant to rebuke me for using frivolous diction in a solemn context. ‘What?’

‘Piano. You know. Subdued. Not doing or saying much.’

‘You must realize that’s to be expected at his age and in his condition.’

‘I do, I assure you.’

‘And Amy?’ asked Jack vigilantly, referring to my daughter.

‘Well . . . she seems to be okay, as far as I can tell. Watches television a lot, plays her pop records, all that kind of thing.’

Jack stared into his drink, not what I would have called a very meaningful move on the part of somebody drinking what he was drinking, and said nothing. Perhaps he felt that what I had said was condemnatory enough without assistance from him.

‘There’s not much for her to do here,’ I went on defensively, ‘and she hasn’t had time to make any real friends round about. Not that she’d have much in common with the village kids, I imagine. And it’s the holidays, of course.’

Still Jack said nothing. He sniffed, not altogether at physical need.

‘Joyce has been a bit sluggish. She’s had a lot of work to do these last weeks. And there’s this weather. In fact it’s been a pretty tiring summer for everybody. I’m going to try and get the three of us away for a few days at the beginning of September.’

‘What about you?’ asked Jack with a touch of contempt.

‘I’m all right.’

‘Are you, by God. You don’t look it. Listen, Maurice, I won’t get a chance later – you ought to see yourself. Your colour’s bad – yes, I know all about your not getting much of a chance to get out, but you ought to be able to manage an hour’s walk in the afternoons. You’re sweating excessively.’

‘Indeed I am.’ I wiped with my handkerchief the saturated hair above my ears. ‘So would you be if you had to charge around this damn place trying to keep your eye on half a dozen things at once, and in this weather too.’

‘I’ve been charging around too, and I’m not in the state you’re in.’

‘You’re ten years younger than I am.’

‘What of it? Maurice, what you have is alcoholic sweating. How many have you put down already this evening?’

‘Just a couple.’

‘Huh. I know your couples. Couple of trebles. You’ll have another half a couple before we go up, and at least a couple and a half after dinner. That’s well over half a bottle, plus three or four glasses of wine and whatever you had at midday. It’s too much.’

‘I’m used to it. I can take it.’

‘You’re used to it, yes. And you’ve got the remains of a first-class constitution. But you can’t take it the way you could in the past. You’re fifty-three. You’ve come to one of those places where the road goes sharply downhill for a bit. It’ll go on going downhill if you carry on as you are. How have you been feeling today?’

‘I’m all right. I told you.’

‘Oh, come on. How have you really been feeling?’

‘Oh . . . Bloody awful.’

‘You’ve been feeling bloody awful for a couple of months. Because you’ve been drinking too much.’

‘The only time I can be reasonably sure of not feeling bloody awful is a couple of hours or so at the end of a day’s drinking.’

‘You’ll get less sure, believe me. How’s the jactitation?’

‘Better, I think. Yes, definitely better.’

‘And the hallucinations?’

‘About the same.’

What we were referring to was less disagreeable than it may sound. A form of jactitation, taking place round about the moment of falling asleep, is known to almost everybody’s experience: that convulsive straightening of the leg which is often accompanied by a short explanatory dream about stumbling, or missing the bottom stair. In more habitual and pronounced cases, the jerking movement may affect any muscles, including those of the face, and may occur up to a dozen times or more before the subject finally attains sleep, or abandons the quest for it.

At this level of intensity, jactitation is associated with hypnagogic (onset-of-sleep-accompanying) hallucinations. These antecede jactitation, taking place when the subject is more fully awake, or even wide awake, but with the eyes closed. They are not dreams. They might be described as visions of no obvious meaning seen under poor conditions. Their nearest, or least distant, parallel is what happens to people who have spent much of the day with their eyes fixed on a scene that varies only within certain fixed limits, as when travelling by car, and who find, when they close their eyes for the night, that a kind of muted version of what they have been looking at is unrolling itself against the inside of their eyelids; but there are large differences. The hallucinations lack all sense of depth of frame, and there is never much in the way of background, often none. A piece of a wall, a corner of a fireplace, a glimpse of a chair or table is the most that can be made out; one is always indoors, if anywhere. More important, the hallucinatory images are invariably, so to speak, fictitious. Nothing known ever presents itself.

The images are, on the whole, human. Out of the darkness there will appear a face, or a face with neck and shoulders, or part of a face, or something that cannot be precisely described, but resembles a face more closely than anything else, perhaps seeming to move slowly or changing its expression. Also commonly seen are other parts of the body, a buttock and thigh, a whole torso, a solitary foot. In my case, these are often naked, but this may be the product of my own erotic tendencies, not a necessary feature of the experience. The strange distortions and appendages that, much of the time, accompany the recognizable naked forms tend to diminish their erotic quality. I am not myself sexually moved by a breast divided into segments like a peeled orange, or a pair of thighs that converge into a single swollen knee.

From all this, it might be thought that the hypnagogic hallucination is something to be feared. To an extent this is so, but (in my case) the various images, though frequently grotesque or puzzling, have not much power to terrify. And, as against the times when an unremarkable profile suddenly turns full face and glares in lunatic rage, or becomes quite inhuman, there are the rarer times when something beautiful shows itself clearly, in a small flare of soft yellow light, before fading into nothing, into the state of a vanished fiction. What is most unwelcome about these visions is the expectation of the jerks and twitches, the joltings into total wakefulness and the delaying of sleep, which they always portend.

I looked briefly ahead now to this prospect as Jack and I stood talking in the bar, which had begun to fill up with the first guests out of the dining-room and people from the nearer places who had driven over for the later half of the evening. I said to Jack,

‘I suppose you’re going to tell me all that stuff is due to drink.’

‘There’s a connection all right.’

‘Last time we talked about this you said there was a connection with epilepsy. You can’t have it both ways.’

‘Why not, if it is both ways? Anyway, the epilepsy thing is a technicality. I can’t tell you you’ll never have an epileptic fit, any more than I can tell you you’ll never break your leg, but I can tell you there’s no sign of it at the moment. Another thing I can tell you, though, is that there’s a bloody sight more than a technical connection between your drinking and your jumps and faces. Stress. It’s all stress.’

‘Alcohol relieves stress.’

‘At first. Look, come off it, Maurice. After twenty years on the bottle you don’t need me to lecture you about vicious circles and descending spirals and what-not. I’m not asking you to cut it out completely. That wouldn’t be a good idea at all. Knock it off a bit. Try keeping away from the hard stuff until the evening. You’d better start that soon if you feel like seeing sixty. But I don’t want you sitting there upstairs like a death’s head at the feast, so forget about it for tonight. Go and throw down another of your specials and then trot round the dining-room apologizing for the bits of dogshit in the steak-and-kidney pudding while I chat up these birds.’

I did approximately as I had been told, finally getting away rather later than expected by reason of a full-length oral review of my cuisine, delivered at the speed of one addressing a large audience of high-grade mental defectives, from my Baltimore guest. After hearing this out, and responding in appropriately rounded periods, I took my departure and went up to the flat.

The sound of an authoritative and rather peevish male voice, speaking with a strong Central European accent, was coming from my daughter’s bedroom. Thirteen-year-old Amy, tall, thin and pale, was sitting bent forward on the edge of her bed with her cheeks in her hands and elbows on knees. Her surroundings expressed her age and station with overdone fidelity: coloured photographs of singers and actors cut from magazines and Scotch-taped to the walls, a miniature lidless gramophone in pastel pink, records and gaudy record-sleeves, the former seldom inside the latter, fragments of clothing, most of them looking too narrow for their purposes, a great many jars and pots and small plastic bottles grouped on the top of the dressing-table round a television set. On the screen of this, a hairy man was saying to a bald man, ‘But the effects of these attacks on the dollar will not of course immediately be apparent. And we must wait to see which will be the remedies adopted.’

‘Darling, what on earth are you watching this for?’ I asked.

Amy shrugged her shoulders without otherwise altering her position.

‘What else is there on?’

‘Music on one of them – you know, with all violins and things – and horses on the other.’

‘But you like horses.’

‘Not these ones.’

‘What’s wrong with them?’

‘All in lines.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘All in lines.

‘I don’t see why you feel you’ve always got to watch something, no matter what it is. You can’t possibly . . . I wish you’d read a book occasionally.’

‘But you must understand that this in the first place is not a matter for the International Monetary Fund,’ said the hairy man with contempt.

‘Sweetheart, turn that down, will you? I can’t hear a thing . . . That’s better,’ I said as Amy, her eyes still on the screen, put one long-fingered hand to the remote-control box at her side and reduced the hairy man’s voice to a far-away shout. ‘Now listen: Dr Maybury and his wife are here for dinner tonight. They’ll be coming up here in a minute. Why don’t you slip your nightdress on now and clean your teeth and run in and chat to them for a little while before you go to bed?’

‘No thanks, Daddy.’

‘But you like them. You’re always saying you like them.’

‘No thanks.’

‘Well, come and say good night to Gramps, then.’

‘I have.’

As I stood there for a moment by the bed, wishing I knew how to give my daughter a life, I happened to notice the photograph of her dead mother in its place on the wall beside the window. Why I did so I had no idea, and I thought I had made no movement, but Amy, apparently without having glanced aside, knew what I had seen. She shifted her legs slightly, as if in discomfort. I said suddenly, trying to sound enthusiastic,

‘I know what: I’ve got to go into Baldock again tomorrow morning. What I’ve got to do won’t take more than a few minutes, so you could come in with me and we could have a cup of . . . You could have a Coke.’

‘Okay, Daddy,’ said Amy in a placatory voice.

‘Now I’ll be back in fifteen minutes to say good night to you and I expect you to be in bed by then. Don’t forget to clean your teeth.’

‘Okay.’

The hairy man having had his hour, it was the recommendation of a shampoo, delivered in the tones of somebody in mid-orgasm, that filled the small room before I had shut the door after me. Amy was not yet a woman, but, even when much younger, she had developed the totally female habit of behaving coolly, or coldly, to a degree that must have a reason, while denying to the death not only the existence of the reason but also the existence of the behaviour. I had not given her the chance just now of doing any denying, but I had not needed to. I was intimidated by the behaviour, and now and then appalled by the reason, while avoiding the question of what it was. Amy and I had never discussed Margaret’s death in a street accident eighteen months previously, nor her leaving me, taking Amy with her, nearly three years before that, nor Margaret herself; beyond necessities, we had barely mentioned her. In the end, I would have to find a way of doing something about that, and the behaviour, and the reason. Perhaps I could make a start on the trip to Baldock in the morning. Perhaps.

I went down the sloping passage and into the dining-room, a broad, rather low-ceilinged affair with a beautiful seventeenth-century heraldic stone fireplace I had uncovered behind Victorian brickwork. Here Magdalena, Ramón’s wife, a tubby little woman of about thirty-five, was laying bowls of chilled vichyssoise round the five places at the oval table. The windows were open, the curtains undrawn, and when I lit the candles their flames swayed slightly without breaking. A breeze from the Chilterns was just managing to reach as far up as here. The air it brought seemed no cooler. When Magdalena, muttering quite amiably to herself, had departed, I walked to the window at the front of the house, but found little relief.

There was nothing to see, only the empty room reflected in the large square pane. My pieces of statuary stood in their places: a good copy of a Roman terracotta head of an old man on a pedestal beside the door, a pair of Elizabethan youths looking vaguely towards each other from rectangular niches in the far wall, busts of a naval officer and of a military man of the Napoleonic period above the fireplace, and a pretty bronze of a girl, probably French and of the 1890s or just after, on another pedestal in front of the window at my left, placed so as to catch the morning sun. As I stood with my back to the room I could not make out much of her, but from all the others that oddly exact balance between the animate and the inanimate, constantly maintained when they were viewed direct, seemed to have departed. In the glass of the window they looked newly empty of any life. I turned round and faced them: yes, once more human as well as mineral.

With the A595 just too far off for individual vehicles to be heard, and no one, for the moment, moving about in the forecourt, everything seemed quiet until I listened. Then the murmur of voices became audible from downstairs, but, again, none could be distinguished from the rest. I said to myself that if a minute went by without any sort of separate sound emerging, I would go to the cupboard in the bedroom and give myself another drink. I began counting in my head: one – thousand – two – thousand – three – thousand – four – thousand . . . The thousand business helps one to attain the correct rhythm, and by using it over the years I have reached the point at which I can guarantee an accuracy of within two seconds per timed minute. This is a useful accomplishment in such situations as having to boil eggs without the aid of a watch, but usefulness is not really the end in view.

I had reached thirty-eight thousand in this count, and was preparing to congratulate myself on entering the last third of the course, when I heard a clearly differentiated and half-expected sound from the drawing-room across the passage, a mingled groaning and clearing of the throat. My father, having heard Magdalena’s departure, but not wanting to have it thought that he was acting directly on this signal, had decided that it was time for him to stir himself and come to table. He had deprived me of my drink, but there was a case for saying that that was just as well.

I heard his step, slow and steady, and after a moment the door opened. He said something wearily unfriendly as he found he was being preceded over the threshold by Victor Hugo, who got under his feet even more than most people’s.

Victor was a blue-point Siamese, a neutered tom-cat now in the third year of his age. He entered, as usual, in vague semi-flight, as from something that was probably not a menace, but which it was as well to be on the safe side about. Becoming aware of me, he approached, again as usual, with an air of uncertainty not so much about who I was as about what I was, and of keeping a very open mind on the range of possible answers. Was I potassium nitrate, or next October twelvemonth, or Christianity, or a chess problem – perhaps involving a variation on the Falkbeer counter-gambit? When he reached me, he gave up the problem and toppled on to my feet like an elephant pierced by a bullet in some vital spot. Victor was, among other things, the reason why no dogs were allowed at the Green Man. The effort of categorizing them might have proved too much for him.