I sent Fred off with the paper, served, in his absence, three medium sherries and (with concealed distaste) a lager and lime, and took a party of early diners through the menu, pushing the rather boring salmon and some incipiently elderly pork a little less gently than the Good Food Guide might have approved. After that, a visit to the kitchen, where David Palmer and the chef had everything under control, including Ramón, who assured me that he was not now desiring to return to Espain. Then, a call at the tiny office under the angle of the main staircase. My wife was listlessly working her way through the bills, but lost some of her listlessness (she never seemed to lose quite all of it) on being told to forget all that crap for now and go up and change. She even gave me a hasty kiss on the ear.
Returning to the bar by way of the still-room, where I swallowed down a very large Scotch put there for me by Fred, I did some more takings-through the menu. The last of the batch was an elderly couple from Baltimore, on their way to Cambridge in search of things historical and breaking their journey at my house to take in a few of the same, or similar. The man, a retired lawyer, had evidently been doing his homework, not a testing task in this instance. Periphrastically but courteously, he inquired after our ghost, or ghosts.
The above describes a typical August evening service at the inn run by Maurice Allington, protagonist of Kingsley Amis’ 1969 novel The Green Man. Maurice is on a second wife and a bottle of Scotch a day, with a daughter from the first marriage to raise and eventually protect from the menaces of the titular creature, a pagan monstrosity of trunks, branches, twigs, and leaves. The main subplot to be managed alongside the ghost story is his attempt to combine adultery (friend Diana) and marital relations (wife Joyce) in one go, three ways. Maurice has some thoughts on husbands and wives, then, some moments of Fawlty Towers-like comedy of errors, and before the real confrontation with the supernatural, some research to be done into the ghastly goings-on, which are traceable to a 17th century Cambridge occultist named Thomas Underhill. On this, the fifth page (in the New York Review of Books reissue), Maurice has already sighted one of the ghosts inquired after by the retired Baltimore lawyer, but she has been introduced as if a wandering guest, so it’s the end of the second paragraph that first names the ghost theme proper.
Amis makes of Maurice something as close to an author surrogate as Lucky Jim Dixon, as far as peevishness. Amis the man’s pet peeves become Amis the author’s pet peevishnesses. The “lager and lime” order disapproved of here is called “an exit application from the human race” in his collection of writing on booze, Everyday Drinking, though his Maurice, ever the warm and convivial host, won’t say anything. And the thought of the same nervous bundle of antipathies made to run an inn, rather than sit at the typewriter, is highly productive for comic purposes.
Why is the pork called “elderly”, rather than “old”? Because elderly is a euphemism and thus a comic understatement for old, and pairs better with the qualifying “incipiently”. When Maurice stops in the kitchen, narration and reported speech are merged, “everything under control”, or not, if things are out of control. He reports some implausibly prolix speech from Ramón the kitchen porter, who is “not now desiring to return”, but ends by transcribing Ramón’s “Spain” phonetically (“Espain”) to make the contrast with what we are assured was paraphrasis. There seems to be a paradoxical and assonant pun in the wife “listlessly working her way through the bills,” (emphasis mine), before consonance becomes the game with “lose”, “lost,” and “listlessness”, and the wife is fussily and negatively defined as one who never quite loses all of her listlessness.
On his way to the bar, Maurice reveals that barman Fred has to keep him in liquor as well as the customers, serving a “very large Scotch” which will be redundantly “swallowed down” (emphasis his). After that, the customers can be grouped mentally into a “batch”, among them the Baltimore couple described with that word “elderly”. The equivocation between “the same” and “similar” can only really be neurotic, since the “things historical” have not been specified. This kind of thing is a twitchy habit in Amis’ writing and is not often discussed as part of the Amis temperament, the self-misgivings to go with the misanthropy. There is another apparent distinction without a difference in the final sentence, between “periphrastically” and “courteously”. Surely periphrasis is the most obvious verbal mode when one wishes to be courteous. But we are to understand that the disjunction is between what irritates Maurice and what he begrudgingly acknowledges as a gift, between the tedium of the talk, and its related or consequent politeness. Then the equivocal “x, or y” form is repeated with the singular and plural of “ghost”, but these immaterial things do matter, as we should like to know how many spectral foes Maurice is to face. Amis may well have noticed his own anxiety a couple sentences previous, and contrived to repeat its rhythm when arriving at what will become the object, or objects, of Maurice’s fear, and, if he’s written a good enough novel, ours.