Free The Green Man by Kingsley Amis

that: the table broke up. Joyce went off to check the bed-linen. I said I
would take a short nap and then go and collect fruit and vegetables from a
couple of farms in the district. Nick said that in that case, if it was all
right, he would ring up John Duerinckx-Williams, the French scholar who had
been his supervisor at St Matthew’s, and see if he could arrange that he and
Lucy should drive up to Cambridge and have a cup of tea with him, returning
about six o’clock. I said that sounded a good idea, and we parted.
    It was
two fifty. I had a shower, put on clean clothing and otherwise prepared myself
for encountering Diana. For some reason I could not then discover, I felt sure
she would turn up. I combed my hair carefully, then decided it looked too much
like a dark-red wig, and worked on making it seem careless but cared for. By
the time I was satisfied it was too late for a nap. Not that I could have
managed one of any sort: I was too strung up. With me, this is normally an
altogether unpleasant state, but fluctuating within it now was a tinge of
amorous expectancy. I looked at my face in the glass. It was all right really:
on the pale side, a bit red under the eyes, and that ageing division between
chin and jaw at least as perceptible as ever; but physically not unpresentable.
What I had against it was its sameness and its continuity, always available
with its display of cheap sternness and furtive worry, always a partner to
unnecessary and unavoidable questioning. Timing it just right, my heart gave
one of its lurches and, following up dependably, the pain in my back, which I
had not thought about since the morning, turned itself on. I retaliated
immediately by making a face of maniacal relish at myself and marching purposefully
out of the room. I am too old a hand to be put off pleasure by even the certain
prospect of not enjoying it. What will have been, will have been.
    The
pain went. I backed the 8-cwt trade truck out of the garage and drove towards
the centre of the village. The engine was not loud enough to drown the horrible
roaring and rattling noises from a couple of earth-moving machines that were
levelling a slope beyond the back gardens of a dotted line of cottages. Here,
perhaps in early 1984 if the present rate of progress was maintained, a row of
houses was to be built, though I could not imagine what sort of person was
going to be forced to live in them. The village itself looked as if it had been
uninhabited for some weeks. A mail van coated with dust stood outside the
corner shop, its driver more than just possibly in the arms of the
postmistress, a middle-aged spinster people said was a funny sort and who
certainly had two illegitimate children as well as an authentic bedridden
mother. Everywhere else, if not actually dead, they were brooding about their
wheat, dimly contemplating the afternoon milking, hoping on the whole that it
would be fine for the Saturday cricket match against Sandon, dropping tea-bags
into the pot, playing with the baby, asleep. Rural life is a mystery until one
realizes that nearly all of it, everywhere in the world, is spent in preparing
for and recovering from short but punishing bouts of the tedium inseparable
from the tasks of the land, or rather their failure to give the least sense of
achievement, as it might be a lifetime spent washing up out of doors. I have
never understood why anybody agreed to go on being a rustic after about 1400.
    The
Mayburys’ house, a genuine-looking stone structure that might have been a
converted dames’ school or primitive pickle factory, was at the farther end of
the village. I drove past it, along a pot-holed road between bramble hedges,
turned off and stopped on a patch of bare sandy soil at the corner of a farm
track that led between fields of corn, the place where I had met Diana on two
previous and unrewarding occasions. It was three thirty-two.
    In the
middle distance, beyond the crops, a man hunched up on a tractor was