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‘No more than usual.’

‘Right. Now, whatever you see in this way can’t harm you. I can understand your being frightened by these things, but try to remember that that’s as much as they can do. Delirium tremens is a warning, not a disaster in itself, and we can deal with it. It’s usually brought on by emotional strain, plus drink, of course, and I’d put all this down to your father’s death. I think these ghosts of yours were a sort of prelude to the business in the bathroom, and your general idea that there are sinister and hostile characters around is very common in these cases. Are you with me?’

‘In the sense that I understand what you mean, yes.’

‘Okay. What you need is some time off. Now, young David’s a very competent lad, and Joyce—’

‘I’m not going inside, Jack.’

‘It’s not inside, for Christ’s sake. It’s a nursing home that deals with all sorts of things, with a very nice—’

‘I’m not going. There’s too much to see to here. I’ve got my father’s funeral tomorrow, for one thing. Later, perhaps. You’ve got to tide me over. Tell me what I …‘ I heard returning footsteps and speeded up. ‘Keep your mouth shut and get me some pills. There are pills, aren’t there?’

Nick came in.

‘Of a sort. All right. But I disagree.’ Jack turned to Nick. ‘Okay?’

‘Yes. Sorry, it was engaged all the time.’

‘Yes, I know. Well, the verdict on your father is that he’s been hitting the bottle a bit too hard. So he’s going to cut it down, with medical help.’

‘Cut it down, hell,’ I said. ‘I shan’t want another drink for the next fifty years.’

‘No, Maurice. That’s the surest way to, uh, run into trouble. You’re to cut down your intake by half in the first instance, and I mean half, not more. Take things as easy as you can. Lean on young David. And talk to Nick and Joyce about this. That’s medical advice. Well, I’m not going to be as late as I thought. Nick, if you like to pop round in about half an hour there’s some stuff for him I’d like you to pick up, if you would. Ring me any time you like, Maurice. This’ll pass off in a couple of days, provided you do as I say. Goodbye now.’

‘I’ll see you out, Jack,’ said Nick.

‘Oh, there’s no … All right. Thanks.’

As soon as they had gone, I shut my eyes. Just a precaution: I was already feeling better, or less bad. Except under the immediate threat of death, life can never be only one thing. Bird or no bird, I was going to pick up Diana later and find out what Underhill had had buried with him. The doing of that would probably be frightening, but so much the better. I would not be able to be frightened of seeing the bird while I was frightened of what might happen in the graveyard.

Nick came back and pulled up a low chair next to mine.

‘He didn’t drop in by chance, Nick, did he?’

‘No. I asked him to. Just as well, as he said.’

‘What did you ask him a minute ago?’

‘Whether he thought you were going off your head. He said some things did point that way, but on the whole he thought not.’

‘Well, that’s cheering, I must say.’

‘What’s wrong, Dad? I mean really wrong.’

‘Nothing. Hitting the bottle. You heard all that. Jack’s a terrible puritan about drink. It’s his way of—’

‘Balls. With the greatest disrespect along with a lot of respect, balls. You’ve decided not to tell me. And you think that’s pretty marvellous of you. Heroic sensitive Maurice Allington keeps his mouth shut as to what’s weighing on his heroic sensitive soul. But it isn’t like that. You’re just too lazy and arrogant and equal to everything (you think) to take the trouble to notice people like your son, and your wife, and deem them bloody well worthy of being let into the great secret of how you feel and what you think about everything, in fact what you’re like. Sorry, Dad, it wasn’t the time to say it, I know, but there’s nothing good about being self-sufficient except over things that don’t matter or when you’ve got to be because there just isn’t anybody else around, but that isn’t so in your case—it’s bad that you don’t depend on other people, especially the ones that depend on you. I can see you’re feeling rotten, but if anything really crappy happened and it could have been prevented by you telling someone like me, or Joyce, what was going on beforehand, then you’d only have yourself to blame, or rather I’d blame myself too for not going on at you about it. Which I’ll stop doing now, but I’ll go on with it when you’re feeling better. Sorry, Dad. Forget it for now.’ He put out his hand and I gripped it. ‘You just say how you want things to be this evening, and I’ll see to it that’s how they are.’

I stated some vague preferences about everything being normal, and about perhaps a look at television. Without giving any reason, Nick said that he would move the (family, non-Amy) set from the drawing-room, where it spent nine-tenths of its time, and plug it into its sockets here in the dining-room. He did all that, and shortly afterwards went off to pick up my pills at Jack’s, leaving me watching, rather in Amy style, a programme about rehousing schemes in (I think) Salford.

As soon as Nick had gone, I picked up a hammer, a chisel and some sort of steel bar from the tool-box in the utilities cupboard, collected a couple of torches from their drawer in the office, went outside to the hut where the very idle and disagreeable old man (all I could get) whom I paid to do the gardening spent his time drinking tea and, no doubt, pulling his wire, found a spade showing no signs of recent use and stowed all these implements in the back of the Volkswagen. Doing this cheered me, and also helped me considerably to shove beneath the surface of my mind any question of what the hell I thought I was doing. It must have been at about this point, in fact, that I became finally committed to following the Underhill thing through, in the sense that afterwards I never once considered turning back until it was too late.

Another distraction, of course, was the problem of how to introduce to Joyce the topic of the orgy project. I was determined to talk her into this with the least possible delay, without at the same time having any idea at all about how to start, or how to go on either. If other things had been normal, to get, or seem, very drunk might have looked like an obvious preliminary, but getting so would not do now, seeming so would quite probably not fool Joyce, who knew me well, at least in such areas as this, and neither was likely to make the right impression, whatever that might be. I turned it all over in my mind while, accompanied by David, I made a sketchy round of bar, kitchen and dining-room, but could think of no solution. This did not worry me, perhaps because before I started I had opened Jack’s package and swallowed two parti-coloured transparent cylinders containing some sort of coarse brown powder and very roughly resembling dolls’ egg-timers. I would have to trust to the inspiration of the moment, in other words put my head down and charge full tilt.

The moment came shortly before nine o’clock, after I had had a desultory chat with Amy in her room and come upon Joyce and Nick in the dining-room. No sooner had I mixed myself a water and Scotch—ten to one—and given Joyce a glass of Tio Pepe than Nick said, staring at me rather, that he felt like going down to the bar for a bit and would see us at dinner.

Joyce asked me how I was and I soon satisfied her curiosity, which had not seemed to be of the burning sort in the first place. Then I said,

‘I ran into Diana this afternoon, on my way back from Cambridge.’

‘Ran into her?’

‘She was just coming out of the post office as I went by, so I stopped and gave her a lift. She had a shopping-bag or so.’

‘And?’

‘Well, it was all rather curious. Would you say she got tight at all? I don’t mean on my scale, but at all?’