The Green Man (28 page)

‘I
don’t know. You were dreaming.’

‘I
don’t think I was. I wasn’t, was I?’

She was
looking hard at me. ‘No,’ I said. ‘It was real.’

‘Well
done, Dad,’ she said, and took my hand.

‘What
for?’

‘Not
pretending. And being brave. What happened to the man?’

‘He ran
away. He won’t be back.’

‘What
happened to Victor? The man killed him, didn’t he?’

‘Yes. But
it was over in a moment.’

‘He was
brave too. It wasn’t really you telling me to get up and come downstairs, was
it? Then what was it really?’

‘I
think that part of it must have been a sort of dream. You imagined it. No, not
quite that. There was a spell on the house, so that people saw things and heard
things when there wasn’t anybody there.’

‘You
mean like that screaming the other day?’

‘That
was part of it. But it’s all over now, I promise you.’

‘Okay,
Dad. I mean I believe you. I’m all right. Where’s Victor? He’s not just still
lying there, is he?’

‘No.
I’ve got him safe. I’m going off to bury him in a minute.’

‘Good
idea. Come and see me again when you’ve got time.’

‘Would
you like me to get Joyce or Magdalena to sit with you?’

‘No,
I’ll be all right. Could you pass me that magazine about Jonathan Swift there
on my dressing-table?’

‘Jonathan
Swift? Oh, I see.’

The
front page of the publication carried a colour photograph of a young man (or
so I assumed him to be) who had yet to undergo his first haircut or shave; it
had been deliberately worsened in quality by a no doubt advanced fuzzing
process, and had evidently been taken from some sunken chamber or hole in the
ground at its subject’s feet. I handed the thing to Amy, who immediately opened
it and started reading.

‘What
would you like for lunch?’

‘Hamburger
and baked beans and chips and tomato sauce and tinned cherries and cream and a
Coke … uh, please, Dad.’

‘Won’t
that be too much for you? Dr Maybury said you were to just have something
light.’

‘Oh,
Dad. I’m so hungry. I’ll eat it slowly.’

‘All
right, then, I’ll fix it.’

I went
downstairs in search of David and found him in the front bar, an
all-too-popular rendezvous on Sunday mornings. It was full of middle-aged men
in Caribbean shirts drinking pints of bitter, and less straightforwardly
middle-aged women in floral trouser-suits drinking Pimm’s. They were all
talking as if from one side of a busy street to the other, but quietened down
and stared into their drinks when they saw me, out of respect for the bereaved,
or the insane. David was in the middle of taking an order from a party of six
that included a pair of identically dressed identical twin queers, and looked
as though he had had trouble getting that far. He greeted me apprehensively, no
doubt hoping, with some justification, that I was not about to ask him to do
anything along the lines of preparing a room for Count and Countess Dracula,
and cheered up a good deal when I did no more than tell him Amy’s wishes and
say I would be resuming charge at 6 p.m. (I had determined to finish everything
by then.)

With
this out of the way, Nick and Lucy not yet emerged and Joyce nowhere to be
seen, I picked up the hammer and chisel I had used on my dining-room floor and
dropped them in the passenger’s seat of the trade truck. Then I fetched Victor
from the gardening hut, where he had lain wrapped in sacking since I stowed him
there before breakfast. I also took a shovel and a scythe. The least
unsatisfactory plan I could think of was to drive up as close as possible to
the graveyard gate, unload and then re-park the truck at an inconspicuous distance.
In the event, nobody saw me; at this time everyone was in the pub or the
kitchen.

First,
Victor. I soon found him a pleasant, secluded spot near the wall, out of sight
from where Underhill lay, and in that soil it was not difficult to open a
trench eighteen inches deep or so. In he went, and I shovelled the earth back
into place, thinking how much I would miss his total lack of dignity and of
ill nature. A couple of days earlier, I should probably have considered taking
his body to the vet, in the hope of establishing something about the force that
had killed him, something objectively factual that would support my story. But
by now I had given up all such notions: I had seen what I had seen, and there
would never be a way of convincing anyone else that I had. I smoothed the earth
flat with my hands.

The
second task was a far more formidable affair. I had some idea of direction, but
very little of distance, and I spent over an hour and a half, and had cleared
something like twenty square yards of ground, before I found the silver figure
in a tuft of couch-grass; I suppose even then I was lucky. Laying it on a
triangular piece of somebody’s headstone, I went at it with the hammer and
chisel and, aided by the softness of the metal, quickly had it in half a dozen
not easily recognizable pieces, which I buried in different parts of the
graveyard. Having done this I felt a lot safer, but by no means safe. More effort
was going to be necessary before that state could be attained.

I was
just about to move on to the next job when a thought struck me. I went over to
where Underhill was buried, dropped the tools and pissed on his grave.

‘You
bastard,’ I said. ‘You tried to pretend you hadn’t chosen me, out of all the
people who’ve lived in that house since you. You just waited until Amy was the
age you liked, and then you set to work to arouse my curiosity. And in your
present form you couldn’t do to her what you did to those other poor kids, so
you tried to kill her instead. For fun. Very scientific. Some purpose.’

Again
without being seen, I returned to the truck and drove through the village,
which under the bright sunshine had a look of spurious significance, as if its
inhabitants were known to be the wisest and happiest in England. I drew up
outside the rectory, a small but beautiful Queen Anne house across the road
from the church. Its garden was overgrown and littered with rubbish, including
a number of framed pictures, mostly of country scenes, which had presumably
come with the house. Music was rampaging away inside it. I tugged at the rusty
iron bell-pull and an electronic chime sounded from within. After about a
minute, a rather better-kempt version of Jonathan Swift opened the door. He
looked at me while he chewed something.

‘Is the
rector at home?’ I asked.

‘Who
are you?’

‘One of
his parishioners.’

‘His
what?’

‘Parishioners.
People who live in his parish. Round here. Is he at home?’

‘I’ll
see.’

He
turned away, but the advancing shape of the Reverend Tom Rodney, clad in a
turquoise tee-shirt and skin-tight black denim trousers, was now to be seen
over his shoulder.

‘What
is it, Cliff? Oh … Mr Allington. Do you want to see me?’

‘Well
yes, I was hoping to. If you’ve got a minute.’

‘Uh …
of course. Do come in. I’m afraid everything’s in a bit of a mess. Oh, Mr
Allington, this is Lord Cliff Oswestry.’

‘Ch-do,’
said Lord Cliff.

‘Hi
there, man,’ I said, not sure whether he had adopted the title for some trade
reason, or had acquired it willy-nilly.

Judging
by his manner so far, I favoured the second of these.

‘I
haven’t had a chance to clear up all the crap,’ said the rector. ‘We got back
about three this morning, and I just made morning service with a big low on.
Oh, Cliff dear, could you turn it down a bit? I’m afraid Cliff and I are sort
of hooked on Benjie again. He does get to one, doesn’t he?’

By now
we were in a sort of drawing-room with black wallpaper on three walls and gold
on the fourth, a squat bamboo screen enclosing nothing in particular and a lot
of suède-topped stools. I could not see much crap, apart from some broken
crockery that looked as if it had been hurled rather than dropped, and an
object resembling an aerial sculpture that had made a forced landing. An
invisible singer with a bad head-cold was doing his best to reach some
unreasonably high notes among a lot of orchestral fuss. Very soon this faded to
a murmur, presumably by the agency of Lord Cliff, of whom I saw no more.

‘Well,
what’s the trouble?’ asked the rector, almost like a real rector. This kind of
thing must be an example of the dead weight of tradition he was constantly on
guard against, sometimes, as now, with inadequate vigilance.

‘No
trouble,’ I said, squirming about on my stool in search of some tolerable
position. ‘There are two things I’d like to bring up. The first is that the
seventh centenary of the founding of my house, the Green Man, comes round next
month, as you probably know.’

‘Oh
yes, somebody was telling me about it the other day.’

The
somebody must have been the Father of Lies himself, since I had just made up
the centenary idea. In the same improvisatory vein, I went on, ‘Anyway, I was
thinking of throwing a rather special party to mark the occasion. It’s been a
very good summer for me, financially that is, and if this weather keeps up I
could put on quite a show in the garden there. I get quite a lot of, well,
prominent people at my house from time to time, show business, television,
fashion, even the odd politician, and I thought I’d just invite the lot. You
never know who might turn up. Anyway, I was wondering if you’d like to come
along. Plus any chums you might care to invite, of course.’

People’s
eyes do not actually glisten unless they are weeping, but the rector put up a
convincing simulacrum of it without recourse to tears. ‘Could I bring my
bishop? The old sweetie would adore it so.’

‘You
can bring the Moderator of the Free Church of Scotland if you like.’

‘Oh,
how super.’ His eyes stopped glistening. ‘What was the other thing?’

‘Oh
yes. I expect you’ve heard that my house is haunted. Well, it’s been getting
quite troublesome recently. I’d like you to perform a service of exorcism to
get rid of the spirits, or whatever they are.’

‘You’ve
got
to be joking.’

‘I’m
perfectly serious.’

‘Oh,
come on. You mean you’ve actually been seeing ghosts?
Really.’

‘Yes,
really. Otherwise I shouldn’t have bothered you.’

‘You
don’t suppose a lot of religious mumbo-jumbo could have the slightest effect,
do you? On
anything?’

‘I don’t
know. I’d like to give it a trial. It would be a great favour to me if you’d
just run through the service, Rector.’

I was
fully prepared to go on and tell him in the plainest terms that no exorcism
meant no invitation to the party, but he was ahead of me. No doubt the course
of his career had trained him to recognize a
quid pro quo
as soon as he
set eyes on one, or rather overtrained him, because he would never get any kind
of
quo
from me. With the irritation which his face was so well
constructed to express, he asked, ‘When?’

‘Now. I
can drive you there in three minutes.’

‘Oh,
honestly,’
he said, but without heat, and was busy in calculation for a moment. My bet
is that he had spotted the annoyance-potential to Lord Cliff of going off with
me on such an eccentric errand. ‘Oh, very well, but I think it’s shaking to
find a person of your education falling prey to gross superstition like this.’
But he got off his stool nimbly enough.

‘You’d
better put on your regalia for this do, I think.’

‘Oh,
for …‘ Lord Cliff (on my reading) entered his thoughts again, and he cheered
up a little. ‘Might as well do the thing properly while one’s about it, I
suppose. Amuse yourself. Have some fruit. Back in a trice.’

There
was a bunch of bananas on a table-top of an untrimmed chunk of slate, I ate a
couple and told myself I was having lunch. But, in my experience, even a lunch
as light as that needs washing down. I went to a likely-looking (also very
nasty-looking) cupboard I had spotted on first entering the room. Apart from
what might have been sticks of incense and what almost certainly were marijuana
cigarettes, it contained gin, vermouth, Campari, white port, a variety of
horrible drinks from the eastern Mediterranean, a siphon of soda and no
glasses. I rejected the idea of mixing myself a dry Martini in a near-by
ash-tray, and took a swig from the gin-bottle. Warm neat gin is nobody’s
nectar, but I managed to get some down without coughing much. I chased it with
soda-water, taking this perforce from the nozzle of the siphon, a different
kind of feat, then swallowed a pill. As I did so, it crossed my mind that, if
Underhill had been able to manufacture a hundred scarlet-and-green birds, he
could certainly have manufactured one. It was true that he had produced something
like my hypnagogic visions, which I had had for years, since long before moving
into his house, but his version of these had been a passable copy, a
counterfeit, whereas (I realized for the first time) the birds had been exact
replicas of the original one I had seen in the bathroom—how like him to have
tested a weapon before using it in earnest. Well, when I had had time to forget
just how much the solitary bird had frightened me, there was going to be a case
for going back on the bottle: the half-bottle, at least.