If there’s something in it, nobody with any sense would want to know.īut Maurice knows what he saw, so he starts looking into Underhill, starting with the work of an old scholar named Thornton. If there’s nothing in it there’s nothing in it. Can’t do you any good, even if it is all only in your mind - worse if it’s that, in fact. Nobody wants to see ghosts or think they see them or whatever you prefer. His older son Nick is the most skeptical and the most worried: Oh, they think he thinks he saw something, of course, but they wouldn’t be surprised if Maurice’s lifestyle was finally catching up with him. When Maurice begins to tell others about the occurrence, they scoff, albeit politely. It’s possible he’s responsible for two unexplained deaths - all this intrigue! Underhill, a fellow at Cambridge, lived at the inn in the late 1600s. Maurice thinks little of it until he believes he sees the ghost of Thomas Underhill, the notorious ghost from the old stories of The Green Man. Like a classic ghost story, then, The Green Man builds its tension slowly, with only a few slight hints that something is happening within the folds of the day-to-day. She says nothing, and she’s gone before Maurice has a chance to wonder who she is. The only bit of ghostliness we get here is the appearance of a red-haired woman on the upper landing, where most guests don’t go. Maurice runs around the inn, slightly exasperated and self-centered, drinking and planning how he can seduce his doctor’s wife. When the story begins it is pleasantly like watching an old episode of Fawlty Towers. Maurice lives at The Green Man with his second wife, his thirteen-year-old daughter (who was with his first wife when she was struck by a car and killed), and his seventy-nine-year-old father. Life, for Maurice Allington, is a daily repetition of filling time, particularly with his favorite activities: drink and seduction. He owns The Green Man, an inn that has a charming back story of being haunted.

The green man kingsley