Greybeard (29 page)

Of course, the miserable business with the boys had upset her. But after all, she knew Sofftoys and its workings. She had been a secretary in the firm before Arthur married her, a little irresponsible slip of a thing with a good figure and twinkling eyes. Even now, he could recall his surprise when she agreed to marry him. He told himself he was not like most men: he did not forget the good or the bad things in his past life.

It was the good things that sharpened his present miseries.

Plodding through the grass, he shook his head and repeated, “We haven’t bought the place yet.”

They reached the summerhouse, and he pushed the door open. The summerhouse was a tiny semi-rustic affair with an ornamental bargeboard hanging low enough to catch a tall man’s head and one window set in its riverside wall. It contained two folded garden chairs leaning across one corner, a rotted awning of some kind, and an empty oil drum. Arthur glanced round it in distaste, closed the door again, and leaned against it, looking at Patricia.

Yes, for him she was attractive still, even after her illness and the death of Frank and eleven years of marriage to him. He felt an awful complex thing rise in his breast, and wanted to tell her all in one breath that she was too good for him, that he was doing his best, that she ought to see that ever since those bloody bombs were let off the world was going to hell in a bucket, and that he knew she was a bit sweet on Keith and was glad for her sake if it made her happy, provided she just didn’t leave him —

“I hope Algy hasn’t fallen in the river and drowned,” she said, dropping her eyes before his gaze. “But perhaps he’s gone back to the house. Let’s go back and see.”

“Pat, never mind about the boy. Look, I’m sorry about all this — I mean about life and things being difficult lately. I love you very much, darling. I know I’m a bit of a duffer, but the times we live in — ”

She had heard him use that phrase “I know I’m a bit of a duffer” in apology before, as if apology was the same as reform. She lost track of what he was saying under a memory of the Christmas before last, when she had induced him to give a party for some of their friends and business acquaintances. It had not been a success. Arthur had sensed it was not succeeding, and — to her dismay — had produced a pack of cards and said to a knot of his junior employees and their wives, with a host’s hollow geniality, “Look, I can see the party’s not going too well — perhaps you’d like to see a few card tricks.”

Standing there in the cool afternoon, she blushed dull red again at her embarrassment and his. There were no shames like social shames, suffered before people who would always try to smile. He was pathetic to think that naming the truth altered it in any way.

“Are you listening, Pat?” Arthur said. He still leaned against the door, as if trying to keep something trapped inside. “You don’t seem to listen to me these days. You know I love you. What I’m trying to say is this — we can’t buy Mayburn, not at present. Business is too bad. It would be unwise. I saw my bank manager today, and he said it wouldn’t be wise. You know we have an overdraft already. He said times were going to be worse before they were better. Very much worse.”

“But it was all arranged! You promised!”

“The bank manager explained — ”

“Damn the bank manager, and damn you! What did you do, show him a new card trick? You promised me when Frank died that we — ”

“Patty, dear, I know I promised, but I just can’t. We’re not children. Don’t you understand, we haven’t got the money?”

“What about one of your life insurances — ” she began, then checked herself. He had moved towards her and then stopped, afraid he would be repulsed if he came nearer. His suit looked shabby and needed pressing. The set of his face was unfamiliar to her. Her anger left her. “Are you telling me we’re
bankrupt?”

He wetted his lips.

“It’s not as bad as that, of course. You know we have Moxan looking into matters. But last month’s figures are very poor indeed.”

At this she looked angry.

“Well, are things bad or aren’t they, Arthur? Why not come out with it and tell me the truth? You treat me like a child.”

He looked painfully at her, his face puffy, wondering which of half a dozen things would be best to say to her. That he loved her for her streak of childishness? That although he wanted her to share his troubles, he did not want her hurt? That he needed her understanding? That it made him miserable to quarrel in this ugly strange garden?

As always, he had a sense of missing in what he said the complexity he felt.

“I’m just saying, Pat, last month’s figures are very bad — very bad indeed.”

“Do you mean nobody is buying Sofftoys anymore?”

“That’s about it, yes.”

“Not even Jock Bear?”

“No, my dear, not even little Jock Bear.”

She took his arm, and they walked together towards the empty house without speaking.

When they found Algy was not in the house, other troubles were temporarily forgotten as they began to worry about the boy. They called continuously through the bare and echoing rooms. No answer came back.

Patricia ran out from the house, still calling, running through the bushes, down towards the river, full of a fright she dared not name. She was level with the summerhouse when a voice called “Mummy!” As she swerved towards it, Algy was standing there in the gloom with the door half open; like a small projectile, he came flying to her, weeping.

Clutching him tightly, she asked him why he had remained in biding when they had looked for him before.

He had no way of explaining, though he blurted out something about a girl and a game of hide-and-seek.

It had been a game; when his father opened the summerhouse door and looked in, it remained a desperate game. He wanted his father to find him and embrace him. He did not know why he crouched behind the garden chairs, half fearing discovery.

Stiff with pins and needles, he remained where he was when the door closed again. He had overheard the conversation between his parents, a secret conversation more terrible for being mainly incomprehensible. It told him that there existed a tremendous threatening world with which no one — not even his father — could come to terms; and that they lived not among solid and certain things but in a crumbling pastry world. Guilty and afraid, he hid from his knowledge behind the chairs, anxious to be found, scared of the finding.

“It was naughty and cruel of you, Algy, do you hear? You knew I would be worried with the river so near. And you are not to play with strangers — I told you before, they sometimes have sicknesses about which you know nothing. You heard us calling you — why didn’t you come out immediately?”

He answered only with sobs.

“You frightened Mummy very much, and you are a naughty boy. Why don’t you say something? You’re never going to play here again, do you understand? Never!”

“I shall see Martha Broughton again, shan’t I?”

“No. We’re not going to live here, Algy. Daddy’s not going to buy the house, and you’re coming home and going straight to bed. Do you understand?”

“It was a game, Mummy!”

“It was a very nasty game.”

Only when they were in the car and driving back to Twickenham did Algy cheer up and lean over from the back seat to stroke his father’s head.

“Daddy, when we get home, would you do some of those card tricks to cheer us up with?” he asked.

“You’re going to bed as soon as you get home,” Arthur Timberlane said, unmoved.

While Patricia was upstairs seeing that Algy got into bed as soon as possible, Arthur walked moodily about before the television. The colour reception was bad this evening, giving the three gentlemen sitting round a BBC table the genial hues of apoplectics. They were all, one of them with considerable pipemanship, being euphoric about world conditions.

Their bland voices only infuriated Arthur. He had no faith in the present government, though it had replaced, less than a year ago, the previous pro-bomb government. He had no faith in the people who supported the government. The shuffle only demonstrated people’s fatuous belief in a political cure for a human condition, Arthur thought.

Throughout the nineteen-sixties and seventies, a period representing most of his adult life, Arthur had prided himself on remaining unscared by the dangers of nuclear warfare. “If it comes to the point — well, too bad, but worrying isn’t going to stop it coming”: that had been his commonsense man-in-the-street approach to the whole thing. Politicians, after all, were paid to worry about such matters; he was better occupied fighting his way up Sofftoys Ltd, which he joined in the sixties as a junior traveller.

The bomb tests were on and off in turn, as the Communist countries and the Western ones played their incomprehensible game of ideology; nobody kept count of the detonations, and one grew bored with the occasional scares about increasing radiation in the northern hemisphere and overdoses of strontium in the bones of Lapp reindeer or the teeth of St Louis schoolchildren.

With a sort of rudimentary space travel developing in the sixties and seventies, and Mars, Venus, Mercury, and Jupiter being examined, it had seemed only natural that the two leading powers should announce that they were conducting a series of “controlled” nuclear detonations in space. The American “rainbow bomb” in the early sixties proved to be the first of many. People — even scientists — grumbled, but the grumbles went unheeded. And most people felt it must be safer to activate the bombs beyond Earth’s atmosphere.

Well, it had not been safer. Man had acted in ignorance before; this time the ignorance exacted a high price. The van Allen belts, those girdles of radiation encircling the Earth, and in some parts much wider than the diameter of the Earth, were thrown into a state of violent activity by the nuclear blasts, all of which were in the multi-megaton range. The belts had pulsated, contracting and then opening again, and then again contracting to a lesser degree. Visually, the effect of this perturbation was small, apart from some spectacular displays of aurorae boreales and australies down into even equatorial latitudes. Vitally, the disturbance was much greater. The biosphere received two thorough if brief duckings in hard radiation.

Long-term results of this ducking could not as yet, barely a year later, be predicted. But the immediate results were evident. Although most of the world’s human population went down with something like a dose of influenza and vomiting, most of them recovered. Children suffered most severely, many of them — depending on how much they had been exposed — losing their hair or their nails, or dying, as Frank Timberlane died. Most of the women pregnant at the time of the disturbance had suffered miscarriages. Animals, and in particular those mammals most exposed to an open sky, had suffered similarly. Reports from the dwindling game reserves of Africa suggested that the larger wild animals had been severely hit. Only the musk-ox of Greenland and the hardy reindeer of Scandinavia’s north (where earlier generations of the creature had presumably reached some sort of immunity to cosmic and other fast-travelling particles) seemed to be almost entirely unaffected. A high percentage — some authorities put the figure at 85 percent — of domestic dogs and cats had been stricken; they developed mange or cancer, and had to be destroyed.

All of which pointed to a moral that they should have learned long before, Arthur thought: Never trust a bunch of lousy politicians to do your thinking for you. Obviously they should have had sense enough to explode their ruddy bombs on the moon.

As he bent down and switched the wall TV set off, letting the three bland men whirl away into darkness, Patricia came down into the room. She carried a shirt and a pair of pants due for a dip in the washing machine.

“Algy’s miserable. I’ve got him into bed but he wants you to go up and see him,” she said.

“I’m not going up to see him. I’ve had enough of him for today.”

“He wants you, Arthur. He loves you.”

“I’m angry with him still, hiding from me like that. No, I’m not particularly angry. But you’ve been at him, haven’t you, upsetting him and telling him we wouldn’t be going to live at Mayburn?”

“Someone had to tell him sometime, Arthur. I didn’t think you’d have the courage to.”

“Oh, don’t let’s bicker like this, Patty darling. You know I’m upset still about poor little Frank dying.”

“First it’s the firm, then it’s Frank! Really, Arthur, you must think I don’t fret about the same things, but someone has to keep the house and things going.”

“Don’t let’s quarrel. Everything’s miserable enough as it is.”

“I’m not quarrelling, I’m telling you.”

He looked forlornly at her, pursed up his face, and shook his head, uncertain whether to be pathetic or defiant, and achieving an ineffectual mixture of the two. “I only wanted a bit of comfort, else I wouldn’t have spoken.”

“Pity you did, then,” she said sharply. “I can’t bear you when you make that foolish face at me, Arthur, I really can’t.” She walked over to the wall and switched the big screen on again. “Why don’t you go up and say good night to Algy? He wants a bit of comfort too.”

“I’m going out. I’m sick of everything.”

He marched into the hall and struggled into his heavy blue serge overcoat. She turned her eyes away from the pathos of his struggle, thinking that anything she said would only provoke an argument. As he opened the front door, she called, “Don’t forget that Edgar and Venice will be round in about half an hour.”