Free The Green Man by Kingsley Amis Page B

it’s a warm
day and there hasn’t been any rain for nearly a fortnight, so I thought we
could manage very nicely out of doors. There’s an ideal spot less than a mile
from here.’
    ‘Well
known to you from previous use for the same general purpose, no doubt.’
    ‘That’s
it.’
    ‘Maurice,
will you be frightfully annoyed if I ask you something?’
    ‘Oh, I
shouldn’t think so. Try me and see what happens.’
    ‘Maurice,
what is it that makes you such a tremendous womanizer?’
    ‘But I’m
not. I was fairly active in my youth, but that’s a long time ago.’
    ‘You are a tre … men … dous womanizer. Everybody in the village knows that no
attractive female who comes to your house is safe from you.’
    ‘How
often do you think an unattached one of those comes wandering in?’
    ‘They
don’t have to be unattached, do they? What about the wife of that Dutch
tulip-grower in the spring?’
    ‘Soil
expert. That was different. He passed out in the dining-room, David put him to
bed, and she said she didn’t feel sleepy and it was a beautiful night. What
could I do?’
    ‘But
what’s at the back of it all, Maurice? What makes you so determined to make
love to me, for instance?’
    ‘Sex, I
should imagine.’
    I knew
this would be nowhere near good enough for Diana in her present mood, indeed in
the only mood I had ever seen her in in the three years I had known her.
Glumly, I tried to run up in my mind a spontaneous-sounding remake of the
standard full answer—reproductive urge, power thing, proving one’s masculinity
(to be introduced one moment and decisively rejected the next), restlessness,
curiosity, man-polygamous-woman-monagamous (to be frankly described as old hat
but at the same time not dismissible out of hand) and the rest of it, the whole
mixture heftily spiked with pornographic flattery. However, I had barely
started on this grim chore when Diana herself let me off that particular hook
by attending to our route.
    ‘Where
are we going? You’re taking us back to the village.’
    ‘Just
round the edge of the village. We cross the main road in a minute and go up
behind the hill, a bit beyond where the new houses are going up.’
    ‘But
that’s almost opposite the Green Man.’
    ‘Not
really. And you can’t be seen from there.’
    ‘Pretty
close all the same.’ A farm lorry came into view ahead and The Guardian went
up again. From within it she continued, ‘Is that part of it, Maurice? Part of
the thrill for you? Flaunting it?’
    ‘There’ll
be no flaunting if I have any say in the matter, and as I said no one can see
you anyway.’
    ‘Still…’
She lowered the paper. ‘Do you know another thing that’s been puzzling me
dreadfully?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Why
you haven’t done anything about me until practically the other day. You and I
have known each other jolly nearly since Jack and I moved to Fareham, and you
just treat me as a friend, and then you suddenly start making these colossal
passes at me. All I’m asking is, why … the change?’
    This
was her least dispiriting query so far, at any rate in the sense that I could
think of no answer, either then or later. Almost at random, I said, ‘I suppose
I’ve realized I’m nearly an old man. I haven’t got all the time in the world
any longer.’
    ‘That’s
complete and utter rubbish, Maurice, and you know it, darling. You haven’t got
a paunch and you’ve got all your hair and I can’t think how you do it when you
drink so much but you look about forty-four or five at the outside, so don’t be
so silly.’
    She had
more or less had to say something on these lines, since to declare a fondness,
whether sneaking or flagrant, for budding old-age pensioners would have made
her seem to herself one of the wrong sorts of interesting person. But it was
nice to hear it said just the same.
    We duly
crossed the main road beside the dilapidated and overgrown churchyard where
Thomas Underhill was buried, and climbed a twisting lane