Greybeard (10 page)

“I don’t think that’s a question you can ask. He can be trusted as far as circumstances allow. He had a way of not seeming to take in all that I was saying — as if his mind was working all the time on another problem. Perhaps I got a glimpse of that problem when he visualized a world populated by monsters. Perhaps he felt he must have someone to rule over, even if it was only a — a collection of abnormalities.”

His wife’s thoughts returned to a point they had reached earlier in the day.

“Everyone is obsessed with the Accident, even if they do not show it immediately. We’re all sick with guilt. Perhaps that’s Croucher’s trouble, and he has to live with a vision of himself ruling over a twilight world of cripples and deformed creatures.”

“His grip on the present seems stronger than that would imply.”

“How strong is anyone’s grip on the present?”

“It’s a pretty fleeting grip, as the cholera reminds us, but...”

“Our society, our biosphere, has been sick for forty years now. How can the individual remain healthy in it? We may all be madder than we know.”

Not liking the note in her voice, Timberlane went over and sat on the edge of her bed, saying strongly, “Anyhow, our immediate concern is with Croucher. It will suit the DOUCH scheme if we co-operate with him, so that’s what we will do. But I still can’t see why, at a time like this, he should want to encumber himself with me.”

“I can think of a reason. He doesn’t want you. He’s after the truck.”

He squeezed her hand. “It could be that. He might think that as we have come from London, I have recorded information he could use. Indeed I may have done. London is his best-organized enemy at present. I wonder how long they will leave the truck where it is now?”

The DOUCH(E) truck was a valuable piece of equipment. When national governments broke down, as foreseen by the Washington foundation, the trucks became in themselves small DOUCH HQs. They contained full recording equipment, stores, and sundry supplies; they were fully armoured; an hour’s work would convert them into tracked vehicles; they ran on the recently perfected charge-battery system, and had an emergency drive that worked on petrol or any of the current petrol substitutes. This neat packet of technology, or rather Timberlane’s sample of it, had been left in its garage, below the flat in Iffley Road.

“I have the keys still,” Timberlane said, “and the vehicle is shuttered down. They haven’t asked me for the keys.”

Martha’s eyes were closed. She heard him, but she was too tired to reply.

“We’re well placed here to observe contemporary history,” he said. “What DOUCH did not consider was that the vehicles might be an attraction to the history-makers. Whatever happens, we must not let the truck pass out of our control.”

After a minute of silence, he added, “The vehicle must be our first concern.”

With the sudden energy of fury she sat up on the bed. “Damn and blast the bloody vehicle,” she said. “What about me?”

She slept fitfully throughout that stuffy night in the barracks. The silence was fractured by army boots stamping across a parade ground, by shouts, by the close vibrations of a mosquito, or by the surge of a windrush coming home. Her bed rumbled like an empty stomach when she turned in it.

Night, it seemed to her, was a padded pin cushion — she almost had it in her hand, so closely did its warmth match the humidity of her palm — and into it, an infinite number of pins, went the sound effects of militant humanity. But each pin pierced her as well as the cushion. Towards morning the noises grew less frequent, though the heat bowl of the square outside remained unemptied. Then from a different quarter came the faint ring, long continued, of an alarm clock. Distantly, a cock crowed. She heard a town clock — Magdalen? — chime five. Birds quarrelled over the dawn in their guttering. Army noises slowly took over again. The clang of buckets and iron utensils from the cookhouse proclaimed that preparations for breakfast had begun. She slept, fading out on a tide of despair.

Her sleep was deep and restorative.

Timberlane was sitting, grey and unshaven, on the edge of his bed when she awoke. A guard came in with a breakfast tray, set it down, and departed.

“How are you feeling, my love?”

“I’m better this morning, Algy. But what a noise there was in the night.”

“A lot of stretcher parties, I’m afraid,” he said, glancing out of the window. “We’re in one of the centres of infection here. I am prepared to give Croucher guarantees about my conduct if he’ll let us live away from here.”

She went over to him, cupping his stubbly jaws in her hands. “You’ve come to a decision, then?”

“I had last night. We took on a job with DOUCH(E). We are after history, and history is now being made here. I think we must trust Croucher; so we remain in Cowley to co-operate with him.”

“You know I don’t question your decisions, Algy. But can we trust a man in his position?”

“Let’s just say that a man in his position does not seem to have any reason to shoot us out of hand,” he said.

“Perhaps a woman looks at these things differently, but let’s not allow DOUCH to take precedence over our safety.”

“Look at it this way, Martha. In Washington we didn’t just take on obligations; we took on a way of thinking that makes sense when most human activities no longer do. That may have a lot to do with the way we have survived as a pair in London while all around us personal relationships were going to pot. We have a mission; we must serve it, or it won’t serve us.”

“You put it like that and it sounds fine. Just let’s not fall into the trap of putting ideas before people, eh?”

They turned their attention to the breakfast. It looked like soldiers’ rations; because tea was scarce, there was weak beer to drink; to eat, there were the inevitable vitamin pills that had established themselves as a national food since domestic animals were stricken, a grainy bread, and some fillets of a brown and nameless fish. Because whales and seals had almost vanished from the sea, and freak radiation effects seemed to have encouraged the growth of plankton and minute crustacea, fish had multiplied. Many farmers in coastal areas throughout the world had been forced to take to the seas when their livestock dwindled; so there was still a strip of fish to stretch across the cracked plates of the world.

As they ate, Martha said, “This Corporal Pitt who is acting as combined jailer and bodyguard is a nice sort of man. If we must have someone sitting over us all the time, perhaps we could have him. Ask Croucher about it when you see him.”

They were swallowing the vitamin pills down with the last of the beer when Pitt came in with another guard. On his shoulder tabs Pitt wore the insignia of a captain.

“It looks as if we have to congratulate you on a good and swift promotion,” said Martha.

“You needn’t be funny,” Pitt said sharply. “There happens to be a shortage of good men around these parts.”

“I was not trying to be funny, Mr Pitt, and I can see from the number of stretchers busy outside that men are growing scarcer all the while.”

“It doesn’t do to try and make jokes about the plague.”

“My wife was attempting to be pleasant,” Timberlane said. “Just watch how you answer her, or there will be complaints in.”

“If you have any complaints, address them to me,” Pitt said.

The Timberlanes exchanged glances. The unassuming corporal of the night before had disappeared; this man’s voice was ragged and his whole manner highly strung. Martha went over to her mirror and sat down before it. How the hollows crept on in her cheeks! She felt stronger today, but the thought of the trials and heat that lay before them gave her no reassurance. She felt in the springs of her menstruation a dull pain, as if her infertile and unfertilizable ovaries protested their own sterility. Laboriously, from her pots and tubes, she endeavoured to conjure into her face a life and warmth she felt she would never again in actuality possess.

As she worked, she studied Pitt in the glass. Was that nervous manner simply a result of sudden promotion, or was there another reason for it?

“I am taking you and Mrs Timberlane out on a mission in ten minutes,” he told Timberlane. “Get yourself ready. We shall proceed to your old flat in Iffley Road. There we shall pick up your recording van, and go up to the Churchill Hospital.”

“What for? I have an appointment with Commander Croucher. He said nothing to me about this yesterday.”

“He told me he did tell you about it. You said you wanted documentary evidence of what has been going on up at the hospital. We are going up there to get it.”

“I see. But my appointment — ”

“Look, don’t argue with me, I’ve got my orders, see, and I’m going to carry them out. You don’t have appointments here, anyway — we just have orders. The commander is busy.”

“But he told me — ”

Captain Pitt tapped his newly acquired revolver for emphasis.

“Ten minutes, and we are going out. I’ll be back for you. You are both coming with me to collect your vehicle.” He turned on his heel and marched noisily out. The other guard, a big slack-jawed fellow, moved ostentatiously to stand by the door.

“What’s it mean?” Martha asked, going to her husband. He put his arms about her waist and gave her a worried frown.

“Croucher must have changed his mind in some way. Yet it may be perfectly okay. I did ask to see the Churchill records, so perhaps he is trying to show he will co-operate with us.”

“But Pitt is so different, too. Last night he was telling me about his wife, and how he had been forced to take part in this massacre in the centre of Oxford...”

“Perhaps his promotion has gone to his head...”

“Oh, it’s the uncertainty, Algy, everything’s so — nothing’s definite, nobody knows what’s going to happen from day to day... Perhaps they are just after the truck.”

She stood with her head against his chest, he stood with his arms around her, neither saying more until Pitt returned. He beckoned to them and they went down into the square, the new captain leading and the slack-mouthed guard following.

They climbed into a windrush. Under Pitt’s control, the motor faltered and caught, and they moved slowly across the parade ground and through the gates with a wave at the sentries.

The new day had brought no improvement in Oxford’s appearance. Down Hollow Way, a row of semidetacheds burned in a devitalized fashion, as though a puff of wind might extinguish the blaze; smoke from the fire hung over the area. Near the old motor works there was military activity, much of it disorganized. They heard a shot fired. In the Cowley Road, the long straggling street of shops that pointed towards the ancient spires of Oxford, the façades were often boarded or broken. Refuse lay deep on the pavements. By one or two of the shops old women queued for goods, silent and apart, with scarves around their mouths despite the growing heat. Dust eddying from the underthrust of the windrush blew around their broken shoes. They ignored it, in the semblance of dignity that abjection brings.

Throughout the journey Pitt’s face was like brittle leather. His nose, like the beak of a falcon, pointed only ahead. None of the company spoke. When they arrived at the flat, he settled the machine to a poor landing in the middle of the road. Martha was glad to climb out; their windrush was full of stale male odours.

Within twenty-four hours their flat had become a strange place. She had forgotten how shabby and unpainted it looked from outside. They saw a soldier sitting at what had been their living-room window. He commanded a line of fire onto the garage door. At present, he was leaning out of the flat window shouting down to a ragged old man clad in a pair of shorts and a mackintosh. The old man stood in the gutter clutching a bundle of newspapers.

“Oxford Mail!”
the old man croaked. As Timberlane went to buy one, Pitt made as if to stop him, muttered “Why not?” and turned away. Martha was the only one to see the gesture.

The paper was a single sheet peppered with literals. A prominently featured leader rejoiced in being able to resume publication now that law and order had been restored; elsewhere it announced that anyone trying to leave the city boundaries without permission would be shot; it announced that the Super

Cinema would give a daily film show; it ordered all men under the age of sixty-five to report within forty-eight hours to one of fifteen schools converted into emergency military posts. Clearly, the newspaper had fallen under the commander’s control.

“Let’s get moving. We haven’t got all day,” Captain Pitt said.

Timberlane tucked the paper into his hip pocket and moved towards the garage. He unlocked it and went in. Pitt stood close by his side as he squeezed along the shuttered DOUCH(E) truck and fingered the combination lock on the driver’s door. Martha watched the captain’s face; over and over, he was moistening his dry lips.

The two men climbed into the truck. Timberlane unlocked the steering column and backed slowly out into the road. Pitt called to the soldier in the window to lock up the flat and drive his windrush back to the barracks. Martha and the slack-mouthed guard were told to climb aboard the truck. They settled themselves in the seats immediately behind the driver. Both Pitt and his subordinate sat with revolvers in their hands, resting them on their knees.

“Drive towards the Churchill,” Pitt said. “Take it very slowly. There’s no hurry at all.” He cleared his throat nervously. Sweat stood out on his forehead. He rubbed his left thumb up and down the barrel of his revolver without ceasing.