The going was difficult, with slippery tussocks of grass, patches of crumbling soil and here and there holes in the ground a foot or more deep. As I neared the crest, there appeared the slender chimney-pots of the Green Man, the shallow tiled slopes of the roofs, finally the main body of the house and the outbuildings. The annexe containing the guest bedrooms was hidden by the bulk of the original inn. As I stood there, an inconspicuous figure, no doubt, against the taller hillside behind me, I saw a car approach and turn into the yard (possibly the Cambridge party who had booked by telephone the previous day), and then somebody standing at one of the dining-room windows and looking in my general direction. Whoever it was—one of the waiters, I assumed, in an interval of laying for dinner—could scarcely have seen me, but there was no point in an unnecessary risk. I turned to retrace my steps, then noticed a rough path leading through the wood towards the track. This would take me some dozens of yards out of my way, but would be preferable to the scrambling, stumbling route I had followed a minute before. I started along the path.
Immediately I felt very frightened indeed. At first—if it makes any sense to say so—this did not alarm me. I am well acquainted with causeless fear, with the apparently random onset of all the standard symptoms, from accelerated pulse and breathing to tingling at the nape of the neck and rear part of the scalp, sudden profuse sweating and a strong desire to cry out. Then, as my heart went into a prolonged stumbling tremor, the concomitants of fear, in themselves no more than very disagreeable, seemed to bring fear itself. I halted on the path. For a few more seconds I wondered if I were really about to die, but soon after that I became certain that whatever was going to happen was outside me. What it might be, or where, I could not imagine. Something frightening, yes; something monstrous, so monstrous that the mere fact of it, its coming to pass at all, would be harder to bear than its actual menace to me personally. My head began to tremble uncontrollably. I heard, or thought I heard, a whispering sound like the wind through grasses, saw, had no doubt that I saw, the growth of ivy on a near-by oak ripple and turn its leaves to and fro, as if in the wind, but there was no wind. Just beyond this, I saw a shadow move in a thicket, but I knew there was nobody else in the wood, and there was no sun. This was the place that Underhill’s ghost had been seen watching, and what had terrified him was here. With a sharp snap, one of the fronds of a large fern growing beside the path detached itself from its root, turning over and over like a leaf in a squall as it moved fitfully towards the thicket where the shadow had appeared. I did not wait to see if it was still there, but ran headlong down the path, through the wood and out of it on to the track I had walked up five minutes before, and down it again to where Diana sat smoking a cigarette on the edge of the hollow.
At my approach, she turned her head with a display of grace which faltered when she looked at me. ‘What’s the matter? Why the great gallop? You’re—’
‘Come on,’ I said, panting. I must have shouted it.
‘What’s the matter? Are you ill? What’s the matter?’
‘All right. Got to go. Now—’
Diana did no more than look genuinely alarmed while I got us into the truck, turned it unhandily round and drove as fast as possible down the track to the road. There, I turned away from the village. After about a mile, I found a field of pasture with an open gate and parked just inside. I had got my breath back and had stopped trembling, had been frightened only in retrospect ever since leaving that wood. But that was how I felt still. I opened the dashboard cupboard—yes, there was a half-bottle of Scotch, nearly full. I saw in passing that I had thought to mix a bit of water in for reasons of taste. I drank it all.
I realized that I would have to think of something to say to Diana, who had gone on sitting unnaturally quiet beside me, but my mind was a blank. I began to talk in the hope that words would bring ideas.
‘Sorry about that. I suddenly felt absolutely terrible. I had to get away from that place. I don’t know what it was, I just felt awful.’
‘Ill, you mean?’
‘Not exactly. No, not ill. Just … No, I can’t describe it, I’m afraid. Some sort of neurotic thing, I suppose. Anyway, it’s over now.’
‘Maurice.’ For once she sounded sincerely diffident about what was to follow her operating call-sign.
‘Yes, Diana?’
‘Maurice … tell me one thing frankly. This isn’t a way of letting me know you don’t want to have anything more to do with me in this kind of way, is it?’
‘A what? How could it be that?’
‘Well, you might have decided it made you feel too awful, guilt and so on, and so you piled it on and made it into a sort of dizzy spell as a way of saying it was all too much for you.’ (No diffidence now.) ‘Because I suppose what you really mean is I didn’t do the right things for you or something.’
This, I reflected, from a woman who, three minutes earlier, had been showing every sign of real concern about another person. ‘Of course not. Nothing like that, I assure you.’
‘Because if you think I’m not good enough for you or something it’s better if you say so straight away.’
‘If that’s what you’re afraid of,’ I said furiously, ‘it must be because I’m not good enough for you, whatever I do. Do you imagine I make love like that every day?’
She blinked her eyes and twitched her mouth and shoulders for a short while as evidence of internal conflict. Then she smiled and touched my hand.
‘I’m sorry, Maurice. I suddenly went into the most ghastly panic. I somehow got the idea you didn’t like me at all. The most frightful sense of insecurity. Women get that, you know. Well, some women do, anyway. There was simply nothing I could do about it, honestly.’
I kissed her. ‘I understand,’ I said, and meant it. ‘But up there … you did have a splendid time, didn’t you?’
‘Mm. Splen … did.’ With her hegemony of sensitivity re-established, she must have felt she could afford to be generous. ‘Absolutely splendid.’
‘But nothing to what Joyce and I will do for you, I promise you.’
‘Maurice, you are completely extraordinary. One moment you’re having a dizzy spell and the next you’re keeping up the pressure to make me have an orgy with you. What makes you so incredibly sort of changeable?’
On the drive back, I advanced a theory or two about what made me like that, never ceasing to imply that, whatever it might be, Diana and her attractiveness and fascinatingness had a hand in it up to the collar-bone. I said I would pick her up the next day at the same place and time, made her promise to think over the orgy project (I was pretty sure she had already decided in favour of it, but to say so at this stage might have made her seem interesting almost to a fault), dropped her at the corner and went off to pick up my vegetables and fruit.
This last operation took a bare three-quarters of an hour, and would have taken only half as long but for the slow-motion of both the farmers concerned. The older of the two performed as if I had turned up to buy his daughters instead of his lettuces and tomatoes; the younger, whose top incisor teeth lay horizontally on his lower lip and who smelt a lot, treated me like a Tsarist tax official. Throughout, my sexual elation kept being overlaid by unsought memories of what had happened in the wood and by notions that in thinking about my father as little as possible all day I had behaved badly to him. The pain in my back did what it could on this side of the scales by coming up with some unusually firm and authoritative twinges.