An overwhelming desire to get out of the house took hold of me and helped me to stop crying. There were more things to be done before I could leave. A quick shower and a change of underclothes took off the sweat and grime of my exertions with the floor-boards. When I had dressed I went in search of Lucy, and by good luck found her alone in the great bedroom, brushing her short head of hair with surprising energy.
‘Lucy, I’m going out now and won’t be back till late. Will you tell the others? I’ll talk to David before I go.’
‘By all means.’
‘And there’s something else I’d like you to do for me. I want everybody in bed and preferably asleep by midnight. Well, I know you can’t put them to sleep, but Joyce is never any problem, and if you could try to get Nick off in good time, that would be a great help to me.’
‘I’ll do everything I can, of course. Uh, Maurice, is this something to do with your ghosts, or is it, you know, somebody you want to see privately?’
She made this allusion to my amorous activities (I had not known that—or not bothered before now to wonder whether— she knew about them) with commendable tact of manner. ‘It’s my ghosts,’ I said.
‘I see. Would you like me as a witness?’
‘Thank you for offering, Lucy, but I’m sure he won’t come if there’s anyone else apart from me about. You believe I saw him before really, don’t you?’
‘I still think you thought you saw him, but I may be wrong. Did you find that thing you were looking for under the floor?’
‘Yes.’
‘Was it any good?’
‘No.’
‘Like the writing on that piece of paper?’
This was an inspired guess or feat of deduction. ‘Very much like that.’
‘Well, let me know what happens tonight, if anything does.’
‘I will. Thanks, Lucy.’
The last thing was getting hold of David and asking him to see to it that the few expected outside diners and drinkers were similarly off the premises by midnight. The resident guests could not actually be sent to their rooms, but they were unlikely to feel like prolonged carousing in the bar the night after a funeral so close by. I supposed, at least, that talking to David would be the last thing, until I almost literally ran into Joyce and Diana in the car-park.
They had their jewellery and their garden-party look on again, and were unfeignedly sorry to see me. I thought at first that they were (as they might well be) nervous of possible embarrassment, then I thought that they were simply resentful at the intrusion of any third party, and then I saw that they were even more simply annoyed because I had turned up.
‘Hallo,’ I said brightly. At that moment I could not devise any other utterance that seemed absolutely free of irony and/or obscenity.
They exchanged their now familiar glance of consultation, and Joyce said, ‘We thought we’d go and have a drink in the village.’
‘Good idea. I’m going out myself. Don’t wait up for me.’
‘Do you want me to leave you something to eat?’
‘No thanks. See you, then.’
While they got slowly into the Mini-Cooper, I got quickly into the Volkswagen, reflecting on Diana’s silence during the last exchange. I had never before known her to be content with less than about a two-thirds share of any conversation, however brief. And her whole demeanour over those dozen seconds had been docile, almost subservient. Whatever had happened between those two had had plenty of time to happen, I decided when I looked at my watch and found that the time was exactly eight o’clock.
My spirits, which had been improving a little, fell again sharply when I contemplated the four hours that had somehow to be filled in. I still had no idea where I was making for, and the mere action of driving at speed towards no destination had the effect of emphasizing to me my anxiety to escape, which soon started to make me feel as if I were being pursued by some malignant person or thing. Only as if; I was perfectly clear in my mind that nobody and nothing was pursuing me; but I have never known a powerful illusion of this kind to be appreciably weakened by being recognized as an illusion. I had touched eighty on the A595, and missed a head-on collision with a petrol tanker by a few seconds, before it occurred to me that no speed is great enough to permit a man to escape from himself. I found the banality of this idea soothing, and was able to drive less furiously thereafter.
I stopped at the George on the outskirts of Royston, ate some tongue sandwiches, drank a pint and a half of bitter, took a pill, bought a quarter-bottle of White Horse and drove on. In Cambridge I went into a cinema, and sat through forty minutes of a wide-screen Western (in which, apart from much talk and even more dead silence, one man shot at another and missed) before deciding that I felt too tense and jittery to continue. On bad days, sitting in a cinema can give me a curiously strong foretaste of dying, out of some fortuitous combination of the darkness, the felt presence of unseen strangers, the vast, unnaturally-coloured, ever-changing images, the voices that are not quite like voices. I walked the streets for a while, counting my footsteps and telling myself that something interesting was going to happen between three hundred and three hundred and fifty, and that this would show everybody that Allington was a good judge, whose predictions could be relied on. By the three hundred and forties nothing remotely interesting had turned up, not even a passable woman, so I settled for the stand of paperbacked novels I could see through the window of a supermarket. The place was still open; I went in and bought something I had never heard of by a writer whose first book, a satire on provincial life, I remembered had been commended at the time. In the little cocktail bar of the University Arms, I got through about forty minutes’ worth of this too, before going out and dropping it into a rubbish basket on the way back to my car. To the endemic unreality of all fiction, the author had added contributions of his own: an inability to leave even the most utilitarian sentence unadorned by some verbal frill or knob or curlicue, recalling those savage cultures whose sacred objects and buildings are decorated in every square inch; a rooted habit of proceeding by way of violent and perfunctory transitions from one slackly observed scene to the next; and an unvaried method of characterization whereby, having portrayed a person as one sort of cliché, he presently revealed him as a predictable different sort of cliché. Oh well, what had I expected? The thing was a novel.
On the road again, and in the dark this time, I very soon felt panic settling upon me. I had reason (of a sort) to feel afraid of encountering Underhill; this was nothing to do with that, a pure, unmotivated, objectless fear that, in my boyhood, had sent me running out of the house and across the common that it faced until I could literally not run any more, and, later, had caused me to read the entire contents of a newspaper aloud to myself as fast as possible while I tapped first one foot and then the other as fast as possible. This is a poor frame of mind in which to drive a car among traffic moving at between thirty miles an hour and sixty-five or more on a not particularly wide road. Each time, as I pulled out to overtake in the face of a column of oncoming headlights or at the approach to a blind corner, rational fear seemed as if it would drive out irrational fear for ever, to recede unnoticed and unremembered as soon as the danger was past.
The accident took place on a bend of the A595 about three miles south of Royston and four from home. I caught up with a largish car, a Humber Hawk or something similar, which was ambling along at about forty, and started to pass it a couple of hundred yards from the start of the bend, not an outstandingly dangerous manoeuvre provided the Hawk maintained its original speed. No doubt spurred by an idiot resentment at being overtaken by a car half the size of his, its driver accelerated instead. As, more or less side by side, the two vehicles began curving round to the left, an immense articulated lorry, chains of red lights outlining its extra wide load, appeared from the other direction. I had not the m.p.h. to pass the Hawk, and could not predict what it might do; so, trusting to my memory of a road I had travelled four times a week for seven years, I swung to the right across the front of the lorry and into the wide grass verge I hoped very much was there. It was there, but rougher and more sloping than I had thought. These features slowed me down, at any rate, and I was not going very fast when I drove into the brickwork of a culvert (as I learned later) and hit my head on something.