Through no fault of hers, on the other hand, her service to me was limited. I could not tell Lucy or anyone else, including myself, that I had not read the affidavit before. It was possible—I disbelievingly supposed it to be just possible—that my earlier couple of readings had impressed the facts on some buried part of my mind, from which something had dredged them up to create an illusion. What that particular something might have been was in itself mysterious, because any thought of Underhill’s ghost I had about my mind at the time had also been pretty deeply buried, but that sort of problem is no problem in an unphilosophical age in which lack of total disproof is taken as the larger half of proof.
I had refolded Grace’s statement and was about to close the book on it and the other papers, when my eye fell on another passage of Thornton’s I had forgotten, more precisely on a single phrase in brackets in the middle of his account of the unseen nocturnal prowler: ‘which some suspect to have been the Doctor’s agent’. At once I saw what I should have seen earlier, or had seen without knowing what it was I saw. The witness who had disagreed about the expression on the face of Underhill’s ghost had not really disagreed at alclass="underline" they had seen him as he had been in life at different times, separated perhaps by a matter of seconds. He had had a look of clinical curiosity as he waited to find out just what sort of creature he had conjured up out of the wood, and this look had changed to one of horror when it came into his view on its way to tear his wife or his enemy to pieces. And this creature, or its phantom, had somehow not been fully laid to rest at Underhill’s death, had from time to time tried to find its way into its former controller’s house-—for further instructions? And it had made the sound of moving branches and twigs and leaves as it walked because that was what it consisted of. And if I had been able to wait long enough in the copse that afternoon, I would have seen it too; it, or its phantom.
The whole left half of my body, including arm and leg, shook emphatically to and fro four times. My immediate thought was that I had now started to experience jactitation while fully conscious, and this filled me with fear, until I realized that I had merely shivered from fear, the double fear I had already felt at lunch-time, fear both of what had come into my mind and of the fact that it had done so and was going to stay there. I did not know anybody well enough, I could not imagine anybody knowing anybody well enough, to be able to tell him or her a tale like this. Perhaps I would have found this a less unlikely concept if I had not recently passed from being a notorious drunk to being a notorious drunk who had begun to see things, but I doubt it. Anyway, I was going to have to deal with this myself, without any clear idea of what this was or what dealing with it would entail. Thought was going to be necessary: that much could be glimpsed. I tried to do some thinking now, and got to the point of perceiving that the reason why Thornton had found no clear link, almost no link at all, between Underhill and the wood creature was that he had never visited the copse (or, if he had, whatever conditions had been operating six hours ago had been absent then). That was the farthest I could go for the moment. I felt I had had enough of my own company for a bit, whatever the disadvantages of swelling the number. I went to the bathroom, washed briefly, threw some after-shave lotion round my face to vie the fumes of whisky and set off down to the bar.
I was back up again in half an hour, after chatting with a couple of businessmen from Stevenage and a young farmer from round about who was rich enough to be doing his farming on purpose, so to speak. As I remounted the stairs, I found I had forgotten every word of the conversation, not by way of the instant-amnesia process I had had the benefit of twice earlier, but owing to that alcohol-fuelled unmemorability that does something to make middle age less intolerable, however coarsely tuned it may become with use. On the landing I was ready for an appearance of the woman with auburn hair, presumably Underhill’s wife, and a tractable spectre by local standards; but she was not to be seen. Then, finally, just at the apartment door, I had a moment of simple selfish joy at the memory of what had happened in the hollow by the wood, and in that moment experienced a genuine hallucination, wonderfully and purely tactile, of Diana’s naked flesh against my own. It has never surprised me that some men should try to beat Don Juan’s traditional total, only that more do not. Seduction is the unique sensual act; other pleasures, including sex per se, are mere activities, durative and repetitive. Each particular seduction is a final and unchangeable thing, a part of history, like a century before lunch or a winning try (few of which carry the bonus of orgasm). And a sculpture can become nothing but a stale grotesque, a poem lose all its edge, but nothing of the sort can happen to what you got up to that night with the princess or the barmaid.
In the dining-room, the three of them were sitting over coffee. No drink had been so much as poured. While they struggled with the silence that had arisen at my entry, I got myself a glass of claret and started on some bread and a piece of Cheddar. In an under-rehearsed way, Nick said casually that, since he happened to have brought a bit of work with him and nothing was going on at the university, he would—if convenient, and only if—welcome the chance of a couple of days off from young Josephine, who was teething again, and stay on for the funeral. Lucy would return for this occasion, if that was all right, but meanwhile intended to go back home the following morning. I said that that and everything else would be all right.
Outside, I could hear men and women coming out of my house, standing about and chattering, getting into their cars and driving away, a series of sounds that always filled me with momentary animation and sadness and unconsidered envy. In the room, tonight as every night, the old Roman, the Elizabethan boys, the French officers and the French girl looked better than by day, more assimilated into the rest of the environment, though no less to be felt as presences. The humidity seemed to have increased again; at any rate, there was sweat on my forehead and at the roots of my hair.
Joyce said, ‘Isn’t it incredible to think that last night Gramps was just as much alive as any of us?’ She was never one to be put off a disturbing remark merely by its obviousness.
‘I suppose it is,’ I said. ‘But it’s not the sort of thing anybody spends much time trying to take in, even in a situation like this, where you’d imagine none of us would be able to get our minds off it. That’s what’s really incredible. And I honestly can’t see why everybody who isn’t a child, everybody who’s theoretically old enough to have understood what death means, doesn’t spend all his time thinking about it. It’s a pretty arresting thought, not being anything, not being anywhere, and yet the world still being here. Simply having everything stopping for ever, not just for millions of years. And getting to the point where that’s all there is in front of you. I can imagine anyone finding themselves thoroughly wrapped up in that prospect, especially since it’s where we’re going to get to sooner or later, and perhaps sooner. Of course, it’s not really true to say that that’s all that’s going to be in front of you. There are all sorts of other things thrown in, like waiting to see the doctor, and fixing up to have a test, and waiting for the test, and waiting for the result of the test, and fixing up another test, and waiting for that, and waiting for that result, and going in for a period of observation, and being kept in, and waiting for the operation, and waiting for the anaesthetist, and waiting to hear what they found, and waiting for the second operation, and waiting to hear how that went, and being told they can unfortunately do nothing radically curative but naturally all measures will be taken to prolong life and alleviate suffering, and that’s where you start. A long way to go from there before you get to the first lot of things that are turning up for the last time, like your birthday and going away and going out to dinner, and then the rest of those things, like going out anywhere and going downstairs and getting into bed and waking up and lying down and shutting your eyes and beginning to feel drowsy. And that’s where you start, too.’