Greybeard (25 page)

“What age are these children? Have you seen them?” Greybeard asked,

“Oh yes, I’ve seen them all right. Everyone’s seen the Balliol children. I wouldn’t miss them. The girl’s a little beauty. She’s about ten, and was born of an imbecile woman living at Kidlington, which is a village away in the woods to the north. The two boys, I don’t know where they come from, but one had a hard time before he got here, and was displayed by a showman in Reading, I heard tell.”

“These are genuine, normal children?”

“One of the boys has got a withered arm, a little arm that finishes off with three fingers at his elbow, but you wouldn’t call that a proper disfigurement, and the girl has no hair and something a bit funny with her ear, but nothing really wrong, and she waves very pretty to the crowd.”

“And you’ve actually seen them?”

“Yes, I’ve seen them in The Broad, where they parade. The boys don’t wave so much, because they’re older, but they’re nice fresh young chaps, and it’s certainly good to see a bit of smooth flesh.”

“You’re sure they’re real? Not old men disguised, or anything like that?”

“Oh no, no, no, nothing like that. They’re small, just like children in old pictures, and you can’t mistake young skin, can you?

“Well, you have horses here. Perhaps you have children.”

They changed the topic then, and after some discussion, the porter’s son advised Greybeard to go and speak to one of the college Fellows, Mr Norman Morton, who was responsible for employing people in the college.

Martha and he made a frugal meal of some tough cold beaver and a hunk of bread that Martha had bought from one of the stalls the previous evening; then she and Greybeard told Charley and Pitt where they were going, and headed for Norman Morton’s rooms.

In Peck, the farthest quadrangle of the college, a fine two-storey stable had been built, with room to house beasts and carts. Morton had his suite of rooms facing this stable. In some of these rooms he lived; in others he kept animals.

He was a tall man, broad-shouldered and stooped, with a nervous nod to his head and a countenance so lined it looked as if it had been patiently assembled from bits of string. Greybeard judged him to be well into his eighties, but he showed no sign of intending to give up good living yet awhile. When a servant ushered Martha and Greybeard into his presence, Mr Norman Morton was engaged with two cronies in sipping a hot spiced wine and demolishing what looked like a leg of mutton.

“You can have some wine if you talk interestingly,” he said, leaning back in his chair and pointing a patronizing fork at them. “My friends and I are always happy to be entertained by the tales of travellers, lies though they generally are. If you’re going to lie, have the kindness to make them big ’uns.”

“In my childhood,” Martha said, nodding gravely to the other gentlemen, whose mouths worked busily as they returned the gesture, “hosts were expected to entertain visitors, not vice versa. But in those days, seats of learning housed courtesy rather than cattle.”

Morton raised a pair of feathery eyebrows and put down his glass.

“Madam,” he said, “forgive me. If you dress like a cowherd’s woman, you must be used to being mistaken for a cowherd’s woman, don’t you know. To each his or her own eccentricity. Allow me to pour you a little of this negus, and then we will talk together as equals — at least until it is proved otherwise.”

The wine was good enough to take off some of the sharpness of Morton’s speech. Greybeard said as much.

“It drinks well enough,” one of the Fellows agreed carelessly. He was a tallowy man, addressed as Gavin, with a yellow face and a forehead from which he constantly wiped sebum. “It’s only a homegrown wine, unfortunately. We finished off the last of the college cellars the day the Dean was deposed.”

The three men bowed their heads in mock-reverence at mention of the Dean.

“What is your story, then, strangers?” Morton asked, in a more unbuttoned fashion.

Greybeard spoke briefly of their years in London, of their brush with Croucher in Cowley, and of their long withdrawal at Sparcot. However much the Fellows regretted the absence of palpable lies, they expressed interest in the account.

“I remember this Commander Croucher,” Morton said. “He was not a bad chap as dictators go. Fortunately, he was the sort of illiterate who preserves an undue respect for learning. Perhaps because his father, it was rumoured, was a college servant, his attitude to the university was astonishingly respectful. We had to be inside college by seven p.m., but that was no hardship. I recall that even at the time we regarded his regime as one of historical necessity. It was after he died that things became really intolerable. Croucher’s soldiery turned into a rabble of looters. That was the worst time in our whole miserable half-century of decline.”

“What happened to these soldiers?”

“Roughly what you’d expect. They killed each other, and then the cholera got the rest of them, thank heaven, don’t you know. For a year, this was a city of the dead. The colleges were closed. Nobody about. I took over a cottage outside the city. After a time, people started drifting back. Then, that winter or the next, the flu hit us.”

“We missed serious flu epidemics at Sparcot,” Greybeard said.

“You were fortunate. You were also fortunate in that the flu missed very few centres of population, by all accounts, so you were spared armed bands of starving louts roving the country and pillaging.”

The Fellow addressed as Vivian said, “At its best, this country could support only half the populace by home agriculture. Under worsening conditions it might support under a sixth of the number. In normal times the death rate would be about six hundred thousand per year. There are of course no accurate figures available, but I would hazard that at the time of which we speak, about twenty-twenty or a little earlier, the population shrank from about twenty-seven million to twelve million. One can easily calculate that in the decade since then the population must have shrunk to a mere six million, estimating by the old death rate. Given another decade — ”

“Thank you, no more statistics, Vivian,” Morton said. To his visitors, he added, “Oxford has been peaceful since the flu epidemic. Of course, there was the trouble with Balliol.”

“What happened there?” Martha asked, accepting another glass of the homemade wine.

“Balliol thought it would like to rule Oxford, don’t you know. There was some paltry business about trying to collect arrears of rent from their city properties. The townspeople appealed to Christ Church for assistance. Fortunately we were able to give it.

“We had a rather terrible artillery man, a Colonel Appleyard, taking refuge with us at the time. He was an undergraduate of the house — ploughed, poor fellow, and fit for nothing but a military life — but he had a couple of mortars with him. Trench mortars, don’t you know. He set them up in the quad and began to bombard — to mortar, I suppose one should say, if the verb can be used in that application — Balliol.”

Gavin chuckled and added, “Appleyard’s aim was somewhat uncertain, and he demolished most of the property in between Balliol and here, including Jesus College; but the Master of Balliol ran up his white flag, and we have all lived equably ever after.”

The three Fellows were put in a good humour by this anecdote, and ran over the salient points of the campaign among themselves, forgetting their visitors. Mopping his forehead, Gavin said, “Some of the colleges are built like little fortresses; it is pleasant to see this aspect is to some extent functional.”

“Has the lake we sailed over to reach Folly Bridge any particular history?” Greybeard inquired.

“Particular meaning pertaining to? Why, yes and no, although nothing so dramatic — nothing so full of human interest, shall we say — as the Balliol campaign,” Morton said. “The Meadow Lake, as our local men know it, covers ground that was always liable to flood, even in the palmy days of the Thames Conservancy, rest their souls. Now it is a permanent flood, thanks to the work of undermining the banks carried out by an army of coypus.”

“Coypu is an animal?” Martha asked.

“A rodent, madam, of the echimyidae family, hailing from South America, now as much a native of Oxford as Gavin or I — and I fancy will continue to be so long after we are put to rest, eh, Gavin? You might not have seen the creature on your travels, since it is shy and conceals itself. But you must come and see our menagerie, and meet our tame coypus.”

He escorted them through several odorous rooms, in which he kept a number of animals in cages. Most of them ran to him and appeared glad to see him.

The coypus enjoyed a small pool set in the stone slabs of a ground-floor room. They looked like a cross between a beaver and a rat. Morton explained how they had been imported into the country back in the twentieth century to be bred on farms for their nutria fur. Some had escaped, to become a pest throughout much of East Anglia. In several concentrated drives, they had been almost exterminated; after the Accident, they had multiplied again, slowly at first and then, hitting their stride like so many other rapid-breeding creatures, very fast. They spread westward along rivers, and it now seemed as if they covered half the country.

“They will be the end of the Thames,” Morton said. “They ruin any watercourse. Fortunately, they more than justify their existence by being both very good to eat and to wear! Fricasseed coypu is one of the great consolations of our senility, eh, Vivian? Perhaps you have observed how many people are able to afford their old bones the luxury of a fur coat.”

Martha mentioned the pine martens they had seen.

“Eh, very interesting!
They
must be spreading eastwards from Wales, which was the only part of Britain where they survived a century ago. All over the world there must be far-reaching changes in animal behaviour and habitat; if only one could have another life in which to chart it all... Ah, well, that’s not a fruitful thing to wish, is it?”

Morton finished by offering Martha a job as an assistant to his menagerie keeper, and advising Greybeard to see a Farmer Flitch, who was wanting a man for odd jobs.

Joseph Flitch was an octogenarian as active as a man twenty years his junior. He needed to be. He supported a house full of nagging women: his wife, his wife’s two hoary old sisters, their mother, and two daughters, one prematurely senile, the other permanently crippled with arthritis. Of this unhappy crew of harridans, Mrs Flitch was, perhaps because the rule in her household was the survival of the fiercest, undoubtedly the fiercest. She took an instant spite to Greybeard.

Flitch led him around to an outhouse, shook his hand, and engaged him for what Norman Morton had said would be a fair price. “Oi knows as you will be a good man by the way the missus took against you,” he declared, speaking in a broad Oxfordshire that at first barely escaped incomprehensibility.

He was — not unnaturally in the circumstances — a morose man. He was also a shrewd and enterprising man, as Greybeard saw, and ran an expanding business. His farm was at Osney, on the edge of Meadow Lake, and he employed several men on it. Flitch had been one of the first to take advantage of the changing natural conditions, and used the spreading reed beds as a supply of thatch materials. No brick or tile was made in the locality; but several of the better houses thereabouts were handsomely covered in a deep layer of Farmer Flitch’s thatch.

It was Greybeard’s job to row himself about the lake harvesting armful after armful of the reeds. Since he used his own boat for this, Flitch, a fair dealer, presented him with a gigantic, warm, and waterproof nutria coat, which had belonged to a man who died in debt to him. Snug in the coat, Greybeard spent most of his daylight hours working slowly about the lake, feeling himself absorbed between the flat prospect of water and marsh and the mould of sky. It was a period of quiet punctuated by the startlements of water birds; sometimes he filled the dinghy with an abundance of reed, and could then spend half an hour fishing for his and Martha’s supper. On these occasions, he saw many different sorts of rodent swimming in and out of the swampy places: not only water rats but the larger animals, beaver, otter, and the coypu, in whose skin he was clad. Once he saw a female coypu with young being suckled as they swam along.

Although he accepted that hard-worked time among the reeds, he did not forget the lesson he had gained at Sparcot, that serenity came not from the external world but from within. If he needed reminding, he had only to cut reeds in his favourite bay. From there he had a view of a large burial place, to which almost every day a grey knot of mourners came with a coffin. As Flitch dryly remarked when Greybeard commented on the graveyard, “Ah, they keep a-planting of’em, but there ain’t any more of’em growing up.”

So he would then go home to Martha, often with his beard coated with frost, back to the draughty room in Killcanon that she had succeeded in turning into a home. Both Charley and Pitt lived outside Christ Church, where they had secured cheaper and more tumbledown lodgings; Charley, whom they saw most days, had secured a job of sorts in a tannery; Pitt had returned to his old game of poaching and made little attempt to seek out their company. Greybeard saw him once along the south bank of the lake, a small and independent old figure.

On the darkest mornings Greybeard was at the great college gate at six, waiting for it to be opened to go to work. One morning, when he had been working for Flitch for a month, a bell in the ruinous Tom Tower above his head began to toll.