‘Oh, I doubt that. No worse than me, anyway.’
‘Because … the moment you said that about Joyce and us I suddenly started feeling frightfully randy. I mean as regards straight away, not just for when we have the get-together. Is that absolutely unspeakable and depraved of me? I wonder whether it’s anything to do with what we’ve been—’
I had been about to plead tiredness outwardly, and blame Jack’s pills inwardly, when I realized that nothing like that was called for. Diana’s interestingness had started taking more and more interesting forms. In something less than a quarter of a minute we were kneeling face to face in a patch of shadow.
‘We can’t really—’
‘No, let’s just take our—’
‘Okay, yes, fine.’
In another quarter of a minute we were at it again. I had about the least sense possible of another person being there at all; there was a lot of wool and other material, some cheek, some panting, some movement, some pressure, and what was I doing. Even that was set at a distance by the lack of everything else, for a time. Suddenly it all turned very immediate and as much as anybody could deal with. Diana’s body lifted and seemed enormous, then sank back and became slender and powerless again.
This was not an occasion for lingering. I was just going to move away when my heart gave a prolonged vibration and Diana screamed—no ladylike squeak, either, but a full-throated yell of fear.
‘There’s somebody watching us. Look, there, in the …
As quickly as I could, I disengaged myself and turned, still on one knee. The moon was less bright than it had been, but I could not have missed any creature or movement. There was none.
‘It was … He was standing in the middle of the road, looking at me. Oh God. Ghastly. Staring at me.’
She had struggled to a sitting position. I knelt beside her and put my arm round her.
‘There’s nobody there now,’ I said. ‘It’s all right.’
There was something awful about him. Something wrong with the shape of him. Not like proper arms and legs. I only saw him just for a second, but he was sort of deformed. Not really deformed, though, not the way people are. He was the wrong shape. Too thick in some places and too thin in others.’
‘What was he made of?’
‘Made of?’ she asked in renewed fear. ‘How do you mean?’
‘Sorry, I … What was he wearing?’
‘Wearing? I couldn’t see. He was only there for a moment.’
‘What colour?’
‘You can’t see colours in this light.’
True, but no matter: there had been no real need to ask. Diana had justified her inclusion in tonight’s party; though not quite in the way I had hoped, by seeing what I saw when I saw it. Another thought struck me. ‘Did he move at all, make any—?’
‘No. I told you. He was just standing there, and the next minute he’d gone.’
‘You mean vanished?’
‘Well … I didn’t see him go.’
‘He must have gone pretty bloody quick to be in the middle of the road when you screamed and nowhere in sight when I looked.’
‘Yes … I suppose he must. Who could it have been?’
I was trying to reason, or at least to be relatively rational. The ghost of the green man, as ghosts were supposed to do, as Underhill’s ghost was apparently accustomed to do, had appeared in an instant and disappeared in an instant, called into brief being, it might be, by our activities at its master’s grave, perhaps by the disturbance or removal of the silver figure, which must in that case be associated with it in some way, though the one was certainly not the image of the other. At any rate, while there was plenty of excuse for alarm, I could see no reason for it. All my instincts confirmed Lucy’s pronouncement that a mere phantom cannot inflict direct harm on anyone, and that (like those Underhill had conjured up in the case of the Tyler girl) the most it can actually do is terrify. And any terror that was not of the kind inspired by a fly-sized scarlet-and-green bird … No, any such terror could be faced, or could be fled from; must always be less terrible than a portable, infinitely adaptable demon living and acting in the mind.
I pulled myself together. ‘Sorry. Who was it? Some farm boy on his way home from a drink. They come in pretty odd shapes and sizes round here. Anyway, he couldn’t possibly have recognized you, so don’t worry about it. It’s … good God, it’s nearly three o’clock. I’ll take you home.’
Like Amy earlier, Diana went through the motions of acquiescence while making it plain that my proffered explanation did not satisfy her. She said almost nothing on the way back. I parked the car off the road and walked her towards the house.
‘I’m very grateful to you for coming along tonight.’
‘Oh … it’s nothing.’
‘About the get-together with Joyce—can I telephone you? What would be a good time?’
‘Any time.’
‘Let’s make it soon. What about tomorrow?’
‘Isn’t it your father’s funeral tomorrow?’
‘Yes, but that’ll be all over by lunch-time.’
‘Maurice …‘ She rejected the shoddy pseudo-psychological question I had been preparing myself for. That … just now. It wasn’t a ghost I saw, was it, Maurice? Because it did vanish, I thought.’
For this one I was about half prepared. ‘Yes, I was thinking along those lines. I suppose, well, it could have been, granted there are such things. Rather a funny place to find a ghost, though, isn’t it? in the middle of a country road. I just don’t know.’
‘Then … when you said it must have been a farm chap you were sort of trying to put my mind at rest, were you?’
‘Yes. Of course.’
‘Or your own mind at rest?’
‘That too.’
‘Maurice … one of the things I like about you is that you’re completely honest.’ She kissed me on the cheek. ‘Run along now. Give me a ring about Joyce as soon as you like.’
She ran vivaciously off, doubly puffed up, I assumed, at having got me to admit to needing to put my own mind at rest and at the thought—unconfided to me, which was odd—that she had ‘demonstrated a fresh superiority by seeing a ghost when I had not. Did she now think she had really seen a ghost? What would she think if and when Jack should tell her that I had claimed to be seeing ghosts? Never mind; I was genuinely tired now, so tired that I staggered as if from drink (which for once could not be) when I walked from the garage to the house.
I washed down two more pills with heavily watered Scotch and went straight to bed, having locked up the casket in the office. I needed what sleep I could get, with a funeral and an orgy ahead, and, no doubt, something more.
4: The Young Man
‘Death’s an integral part of life, after all. We settle for it by the mere act of being born. Let’s face it, Mr Allington, it is possible to take the end of the road a bloody sight too seriously.’
‘And you don’t mean because we ought to think of it as the gateway to another mode of being and part of God’s purpose and so on.’
‘Good God, no. I don’t mean that at all. Not at all.’
The Reverend Tom Rodney Sonnenschein, Rector of St James’s, Fareham, sounded quite shocked. He did not really look shocked, because he had one of those smooth, middle-aged-boyish faces that seem unfitted, even at moments of warmth or concern (if any), to express much more than a mild petulance. In the church and at the graveside, I had supposed him to be showing indignation at the known godlessness of all those in attendance, or perhaps to be suffering physically; now, in the bar of the Green Man, it was becoming deducible that he had been merely bored. I found it odd, and oddly unwelcome too, to meet a clergyman who was turning out to be, doctrinally speaking, rather to the Left of a hardened unbeliever like myself; but no doubt he would soon be off to some more spiritually challenging parish in London, and anyhow I did not proposed to see the man again after today.