The Green Man (8 page)

‘If
there had been a story about a woman ghost, dressed as I described, would you
have believed that that was what I’d seen?’

‘Yes,’
she said, confounding me, and showing she knew she had.

‘Are
you saying you believe in ghosts?’

‘Yes.
In the sense that I believe that people see ghosts. I can’t think how any
reasonable person can be in doubt on that score. That’s not the same, of
course, as saying that you see a ghost in the same way as you see a real
person. Ghosts aren’t
there,
so you can’t take photographs of them or
anything. But people see them all right.’

‘You
mean they think they see them,’ said Nick. ‘They imagine it.’

‘Well,
not quite, darling. I would suggest that they see ghosts in something of the
same
sort
of way as they have hallucinations or religious visions. We
don’t say, for instance, that St Bernadette
thought
she saw the Virgin
Mary, unless we’re trying to accuse her of misrepresenting what happened, or
implying that she was mistaken or deceived. Unless we mean something like that
we say she saw the Virgin Mary.’

‘Who
wasn’t really there. I’d call that a hallucination. Same with ghosts.’

‘There’s
a similarity, certainly, but it doesn’t go all the way.’ Lucy felt in her
current fringed handbag, a red-and-white striped object that had no doubt come
from somewhere in particular, and took out a packet of menthol cigarettes. She
lit one of these as she went conscientiously on. ‘Different people see the same
ghost, at the same time or at widely differing times. Hallucinations don’t seem
to work like that. You can make a man have hallucinations by giving him certain
drugs, but you can’t make him have the same hallucination as someone else.
People can see the same ghost as someone else without knowing the other person
saw it until later, and they don’t see a whole series of all sorts of other
things as well, like people with hallucinations. Put a man in a haunted house
and he may see a ghost, even if he didn’t know it was haunted. Give a man a
psychedelic drug and he’ll have hallucinations. We don’t know
why
in
either case, but it’s pretty certain the explanations don’t coincide.’

‘What
do you think, Joyce?’ asked Nick, who had listened to all this attentively
enough, but with no sign of feeling that anything more than the validity of a
theory was at stake.

‘I
don’t know anything about it,’ said Joyce, ‘but I think ghosts are all balls.
There can’t be any such things. Maurice has been upset, and that’s made him,
you know, a bit imaginative.’

‘That’s
roughly what I think,’ said Nick.

Lucy
frowned to herself and fiddled with her cigarette packet, as if pursuing her
line of thought internally.

I had
been all too right about not being taken seriously—by which I suppose I had
meant causing some sort of stir. Accusations of madness or shouts of ridicule
would have been preferable to these sober, sedative evaluations of my idea.
‘Well, what do I do now?’ I asked.

‘Forget
it, Dad,’ said Nick, and Joyce nodded.

Lucy
drew in her breath consideringly. ‘If this woman turns up again, see if you can
touch her. Try and make her speak. It would be quite something if you could,
because there are surprisingly few really well-attested instances of a ghost
saying anything. Anyway, chase her and find out whether other people can see
her. That’d be worth knowing, from your point of view.’

‘I
don’t get the point of all that,’ said Joyce.

‘Well …
it might be interesting.’

I found
myself feeling slightly angry with Lucy. She alone had given me practical advice,
which I had already decided to follow, but I disliked her bigoted
reasonableness and her air of having already, though nearly thirty years
younger than I, accumulated quite enough information and wisdom to deal with
anything life might have in store: deal with it better than I could, too. I
said in what I hoped was no more than an interested tone,

‘You
seem to know a lot about these things, Lucy. Have you studied them?’

‘Not
studied,
no,’ she said, to rebuke me for seeming to suggest that she had taken a
university course in ghosts. ‘But I have looked at the problem. I was doing a
paper on the meaning of unverifiable statements, and it just happened to
strike me that saying you’ve seen a ghost is one of a special class of
unverifiable statements. I read a few accounts. Some interesting points of
correspondence, I thought. This business, for instance, about the temperature
dropping or seeming to drop before a manifestation. It’s been claimed that
thermometers have registered it, but I’m not convinced. It could be subjective,
a concomitant of the person entering the physiological state in which they can
see ghosts. Did you feel cold before you saw this woman?’

‘No.
Hot. I mean there was no change.’

‘No. My
own view is that there aren’t any ghosts around here. At the moment, anyway.
But tell me … Maurice,’ said Lucy, giving just a hint of what it cost her to
call me by my name, ‘would you say you believe in ghosts?’

‘God, I
don’t know.’ Until last night’s events and today’s appearance had taken on their
present shape, I would have answered no without thinking about it. But I am not
enough of a bloody fool to have bought the Green Man if I had heard any talk of
hauntings in living memory. ‘Of course, if any more evidence turns up …

‘Any
evidence is how I’d put it. I could be wrong, but according to me you only
thought you saw a ghost.’

That
was that: the table broke up. Joyce went off to check the bed-linen. I said I
would take a short nap and then go and collect fruit and vegetables from a
couple of farms in the district. Nick said that in that case, if it was all
right, he would ring up John Duerinckx-Williams, the French scholar who had
been his supervisor at St Matthew’s, and see if he could arrange that he and
Lucy should drive up to Cambridge and have a cup of tea with him, returning
about six o’clock. I said that sounded a good idea, and we parted.

It was
two fifty. I had a shower, put on clean clothing and otherwise prepared myself
for encountering Diana. For some reason I could not then discover, I felt sure
she would turn up. I combed my hair carefully, then decided it looked too much
like a dark-red wig, and worked on making it seem careless but cared for. By
the time I was satisfied it was too late for a nap. Not that I could have
managed one of any sort: I was too strung up. With me, this is normally an
altogether unpleasant state, but fluctuating within it now was a tinge of
amorous expectancy. I looked at my face in the glass. It was all right really:
on the pale side, a bit red under the eyes, and that ageing division between
chin and jaw at least as perceptible as ever; but physically not unpresentable.
What I had against it was its sameness and its continuity, always available
with its display of cheap sternness and furtive worry, always a partner to
unnecessary and unavoidable questioning. Timing it just right, my heart gave
one of its lurches and, following up dependably, the pain in my back, which I
had not thought about since the morning, turned itself on. I retaliated
immediately by making a face of maniacal relish at myself and marching purposefully
out of the room. I am too old a hand to be put off pleasure by even the certain
prospect of not enjoying it. What will have been, will have been.

The
pain went. I backed the 8-cwt trade truck out of the garage and drove towards
the centre of the village. The engine was not loud enough to drown the horrible
roaring and rattling noises from a couple of earth-moving machines that were
levelling a slope beyond the back gardens of a dotted line of cottages. Here,
perhaps in early 1984 if the present rate of progress was maintained, a row of
houses was to be built, though I could not imagine what sort of person was
going to be forced to live in them. The village itself looked as if it had been
uninhabited for some weeks. A mail van coated with dust stood outside the
corner shop, its driver more than just possibly in the arms of the
postmistress, a middle-aged spinster people said was a funny sort and who
certainly had two illegitimate children as well as an authentic bedridden
mother. Everywhere else, if not actually dead, they were brooding about their
wheat, dimly contemplating the afternoon milking, hoping on the whole that it
would be fine for the Saturday cricket match against Sandon, dropping tea-bags
into the pot, playing with the baby, asleep. Rural life is a mystery until one
realizes that nearly all of it, everywhere in the world, is spent in preparing
for and recovering from short but punishing bouts of the tedium inseparable
from the tasks of the land, or rather their failure to give the least sense of
achievement, as it might be a lifetime spent washing up out of doors. I have
never understood why anybody agreed to go on being a rustic after about 1400.

The
Mayburys’ house, a genuine-looking stone structure that might have been a
converted dames’ school or primitive pickle factory, was at the farther end of
the village. I drove past it, along a pot-holed road between bramble hedges,
turned off and stopped on a patch of bare sandy soil at the corner of a farm
track that led between fields of corn, the place where I had met Diana on two
previous and unrewarding occasions. It was three thirty-two.

In the
middle distance, beyond the crops, a man hunched up on a tractor was slowly
dragging some farming implement across a large area of naked earth. From where
I was (and I dare say anyone on the spot with a magnifying-glass would have
told the same tale), this activity seemed to leave matters as they had been,
apart from the multiple ruts being made in the soil. Probably the fellow was
getting nerved up, trying to accustom himself to the idea of performing some
actual deed of tillage there the following week.

His
machinery was making the only audible sound, apart from the song of a blackbird
with nothing better to do. I had barely started to hope I would not have time
to think about things when I heard a third sound, turned my head and saw Diana
approaching on foot—only five minutes late, quixotically early, in fact, by her
standards: a good sign. She was wearing a dark-blue shirt and a tweed skirt,
and was carrying a folded newspaper. I wondered slightly about the newspaper.
When she reached the truck, I leaned across and opened the door on that side,
but she made no move to get in.

‘Well,
Maurice,’ she said.

‘Hallo,
Diana. Let’s go, shall we?’

‘Maurice,
don’t you think it’s rather extraordinary of you to have decided to come along
after all this afternoon?’ She said this in full-blooded oral
Chick’s Own
style,
with tiny hyphens of silence between the syllables of the hard words. To say it
all while being seen to do so, she had to bend both neck and knees and also
rely on my remaining twisted round in my seat and leaning deeply over towards
her.

‘We can
talk about that when we’re on our way.’

‘But
don’t you think so? To be prepared to make advances to somebody else’s wife
less than eighteen hours after you’ve seen your father die?’

The
lack of hesitancy about the number of hours, evincing previous calculation, had
a point to it. I understood now why I had been so sure earlier that she would
appear as asked: I had sensed that she would not have been able to resist the
chance of such a meaty interrogation-session. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘If
you’ll get in I’ll see if I can explain.’

‘I
mean, most men who’ve had that happen to them wouldn’t even contemplate that
sort of thing. What makes you so different?’

‘I’ll
be giving you a full demonstration of it shortly. Come on.’

As if
only then making up her mind, she settled herself beside me. I took her in my
arms and kissed her forcefully. She remained passive until I put my hand on her
breast, when she promptly removed it. Nevertheless, I was sure she was going to
yield that afternoon when she was ready to, and this time understood at the
same moment why I was sure. By opening her legs to me today of all days, she
would be being strangely responsive to my strange need, finding herself
strangely in tune with this strange man—in other words, she could represent
herself as an interesting person. But before she got on to being strangely
responsive, she was going to exact her full toll by making me put up with her
questioning patiently enough, and long enough, for it to seem that I agreed she
was an interesting person. Seeming, luckily for me, was all that was going to
be required, since she needed no real confirmation of her view of herself.
True, but why, then, was there any need for me even to do any seeming? Most
likely she was just looking forward to the simple pleasure of watching my
antics as I battled to master my impatience.

Diana
had opened her newspaper—The
Guardian,
of course —but was evidently not
reading it. When, as we approached a corner, an old man sitting in his garden
came into view, she hid her face in the middle pages. Good security, and a
further good sign, had one been needed, but if she wanted to avoid being seen
in my car why had she just now stood by it in the open for a full minute? Other
people’s priorities are endlessly odd.

‘Where
are you taking me?’ she asked.