Kingsley Amis - Green Man The

THE GREEN MAN

Kingsley Amis

1: The Red-haired Woman

No sooner has one gone over ones surpriseat finding a genuine coaching inn less than 40 miles from Londonand 8 from theMIthan one is marvelling at the quality of the equally genuine English fare(the occasional disaster apart!). There has been an inn on this site since the MiddleAges, from which parts of the present building date; after some 190 years ofservice as a dwelling its original function and something of its originalappearance, were restored in 1961. Mr Allington will tell its story to theinterested (there is, or was, at least one ghost) and be your candid guidethrough the longish menu. Try the eel soup (6/-), pheasant pie (15/6), saddleof mutton and caper sauce (17/6), treacle roil (5/6). Wine list short,good (except for white Burgundies), a little expensive. Worthington E. Bass,Whitbread Tankard on draught. Friendly, efficient service. No childrensprices.

CI. Su L. Must Book L; F, Sa & Su D.Meals 12.30-3; 7-10.30. Alcmain dishes 12/6 to 25/-. Seats 40. Car park. No dogs. B&B from42/6.

Class A

App. Bernard Levin; Lord Norwich; John Dankworth; Harry Harrison;Wynford Vaughan-Thomas; Dennis Brogan; Brian W. Aldiss; and many others.

The point about whiteBurgundies is that I hate them myself. I take whatever my wine supplier willlet me have at a good price (which I would never dream of doing with any otherdrinkable). I enjoyed seeing those glasses of Chablis or Pouilly Fuiss, soclosely resembling a blend of cold chalk soup and alum cordial with an additiveor two to bring it to the colour of childrens pee, being peered and sniffedat, rolled round the shrinking tongue and forced down somehow by parties of youngtechnology dons from Cambridge or junior television producers and their girls.Minor, harmless compensations of this sort are all too rare in a moderninnkeepers day.

Infact, most of my trade did come either from London or the twenty-odd miles fromCambridge, with a little more from the nearest Hertfordshire towns. I got theoccasional passer-by, of course, but not as many as my colleagues on the A10 tothe east of me and the A505 to the north-west. The A595 is a mere sub-arteryconnecting Stevenage and Royston, and although I put up a sign on it the day Iopened, not many transients ever bothered to turn off and try to find the GreenMan in preference to using one of the pubs directly beside the main road. Allright with me, that. About my only point of agreement with John Fothergill, thebuckle-shoed posturer who had the Spread Eagle in Thame when I was a boy andfounded a reputation and a book on being nasty to his, guests, is lack ofwarmth towards the sort of people who use two halves of bitter and two tomatojuices as a quadruple ticket to the lavatories and washbasins. The villagersfrom Fareham itself, and from Sandon and Mill End, each of the two about a mileaway, were obviously a different matter. They put back their pints steadily andquietly in the public bar, filling it at week-ends, and had an agreeable shortway with dinner-jacketed seekers after rustic atmosphere or the authentic lifeof the working class.

Thelocals, with some assistance from the various hearty young men who came in todine, got through plenty of beer, as much as a couple of dozen tens of bitter aweek in the summer. Whatever might be said about its prices, the wine too wentquickly enough. Refusing, as I have always done, to offer any but fresh meat,vegetables and fruit, poses a daily transport problem. All this, together withkeeping up stocks of salt and metal-polish flowers and toothpicks, takes a gooddeal of arranging. One way and another, I used to spend a good two or threehours of almost every day out of my house. But this could be less than ahardship to a man with a newish second wife, a teenaged daughter by a firstmarriage and an ancient and decrepit father (apart from a staff of nine) to bevariously coped with.

Lastsummer, in particular, would have taxed a more hardened and versatile coperthan me. As if in the service of some underground anti-hotelier organization,successive guests tried to rape the chambermaid, called for a priest at 3 a.m.,wanted a room to take girlie photographs in, were found dead in bed. A party ofsociology students from Cambridge, rebuked for exchanging obscenities atprotest-meeting volume, poured beer over young David Palmer, my traineeassistant, and then staged a sit-in. After nearly a year of no worse thanaverage conduct, the Spanish kitchen porter went into a heavy bout of PeepingTom behaviour, notably but not at all exclusively at the grille outside theladies lavatory, attracted the attention of the police and was finallydeported. The deep-fat fryer caught fire twice, once during a session of theSouth Hertfordshire branch of the Wine and Food Society. My wife seemed lethargic,my daughter withdrawn. My father, now in his eightieth year, had anotherstroke, his third, not serious in itself but not propitious. I felt ratherstrung up, and was on a bottle of Scotch a day, though this had been standardfor twenty years.

OneWednesday about the middle of August reached a new level. In the morning therehad been trouble with the repatriated voyeurs successor, Ramn, who hadrefused to pile and burn the rubbish on the grounds that he had already had todo the breakfast dishes. Then, while I was picking up the tea, coffee and suchat the dry-goods warehouse in Baldock, the ice-maker had broken down. It neverperformed with much conviction in hot weather, and the temperature most ofthat week was in the upper seventies. An electrician had to be found andfetched. Three sets of hotel guests with four young children between them, nodoubt under orders from anti-hotelier HQ, turned up from nowhere between 5.30and 5.40. My wife succeeded almost totally in blaming this on me.

Later,having settled my father in front of the open drawing-room window with a weakScotch-and-water, I came out of our apartment on the upper storey to findsomebody standing, back turned to me, near the stairhead. I took this person fora women in an evening dress rather heavy for a humid August evening. There wasno function in the banqueting chamber, the only public room on that floor,until the following week, and our apartment was clearly marked as private.

With mybest offensive suavity, I said, Can I help you. madam?

Instantly,but without a sound, the figure turned to face me. I vaguely saw a pale,thin-lipped face, heavy auburn ringlets and some kind of large bluish pendantat the throat. Much more clearly than this, I sensed a surprise and alarm thatseemed disproportionate: my arrival on the landing could hardly have beeninaudible to one only twenty feet away, and it was obvious enough who I was.

At thatmoment my father called to me, and without thinking I looked away.

Yes,Father?

Oh,Maurice could you send up an evening paper? The local one will do.

Illget Fred to bring one up.

Soon,if you would, Maurice, and if Freds free.

Yes,Father.

Thistook no more than a dozen seconds, but when they were over the landing wasempty. The woman must have decide to cut short her display of heightenedsensitivity and pursue her search on the ground floor. No doubt she was moresuccessful there, for I saw nothing of her as I came down the stairs, crossedthe few feet of hall and entered the front bar.

Thislong, low room, with small windows revealing the thickness of its outer wall,and normally cool and dry in summer, was stickily oppressive that evening.Fred Soames, the barman, had the fans going, but as I joined him behind thecounter and waited for him to finish serving a round of drinks, I could feelsweat trickling down under my frilled shirt and dinner-jacket. I was uneasytoo, and not just in my habitual unlocalized way. I was bothered by somethingabout the appearance or demeanour of the woman I had seen on the landing,something it was now too late to define. Even less reasonably, I felt certainthat, when my father called to me, he had changed his mind about what he wantedto say. I could not imagine what his original thought had been, and, again, Iwould not now be able to find out. His memory in such cases extended overseconds only.