The Green Man Read Online Free PDF Page B

whether I realized that I was so the other. I got up, said I was going
to say good night to Amy and went off to do so, ringing for Magdalena on my way
out.
    Amy’s
appearance and posture had changed to the minimum degree consistent with her
having been Amy sitting on bed before and being Amy sitting in bed now. On the
television screen, a young woman was denouncing an older one who was keeping
her back turned throughout, not so much out of inattention or deliberate
rudeness as with the mere object of letting the audience see her face at the
same time as her accuser’s. For a moment I watched, in the hope of seeing them
do a smart about-turn at the end of the speech, and wondering to what extent
real life would he affected if there were to grow up a new convention that
people always had to be facing the same way before they could speak to each
other. Then I went over to Amy.
    ‘What
time does this finish?’
    ‘Nearly
over now.’
    ‘Mind
you put it off the moment it is. Have you cleaned your teeth?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Good
girlie. Don’t forget we’re going into Baldock in the morning.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Good night,
then.’
    I bent
over to kiss her cheek. At the same time, there came a succession of sounds
from the dining-room: a shout or loud cry in my father’s voice, some hurried
words from Jack, a sort of bumping crash made by a collision with furniture, a
confusion of voices. I told Amy to stay where she was, and ran back to the
dining-room.
    When I
opened the door, Victor rushed past me, his tail swollen with erected hair.
Across the room, Jack, with some assistance from Joyce, was dragging my father,
who was completely limp, to a near-by armchair. At my father’s place at table
there was an overturned dining-chair and some crockery and cutlery on the
floor. Some drink had been spilt. Diana, who had been watching the others,
turned and looked at me in fear.
    ‘He
started staring and then he stood up and called out and then he just sort of
collapsed and hit the table and Jack caught him,’ she said in a jumbled voice:
no elocution now.
    I went
past her. ‘What’s happened?’
    Jack
was lowering my father into the armchair. When he had done this, he said,
‘Cerebral haemorrhage, I should imagine.’
    ‘Is he
going to die?’
    ‘Yes,
it’s quite possible.’
    ‘Soon?’
    ‘Quite
possibly.’
    ‘What
can you do about it?’
    ‘Nothing
that’ll prevent him dying if he’s going to.’
    I
looked at Jack, and he at me. I could not tell what he was thinking. He had his
finger against my father’s pulse. My body, I myself, seemed to consist of my
face and the front of my torso, down as far as the base of the belly. I knelt
by the armchair and heard slow, deep breathing. My father’s eyes were open,
with the pupils apparently fixed in the left-hand corners. Apart from this he
looked quite normal, even relaxed.
    ‘Father,’
I said, and thought he stirred slightly. But there was nothing to say next. I
wondered what was going on in that brain, what it saw, or fancied it saw:
something irrelevant, perhaps, something pleasant, sunshine and fields. Or something
not pleasant, something ugly, something bewildering. I imagined a desperate,
prolonged effort to understand what was happening, and a discomfort so enormous
as to be worse than pain, because lacking the merciful power of pain to
extinguish thought, feeling, identity, the sense of time, everything but itself.
This idea terrified me, but it also pointed out to me, with irresistible
clarity and firmness, what I was to say next.
    I leant
closer. ‘Father. This is Maurice. Are you awake? Do you know where you are?
This is Maurice, Father. Tell me what’s going on where you are. Is there
anything to see? Describe how you feel. What are you thinking?’
    Behind
me, Jack said coldly, ‘He can’t hear you.’
    ‘Father.
Can you hear me? Nod your head if you can.’
    In
slow, mechanical tones, like a gramophone record played at too low a speed, my
father said,