Greybeard (6 page)

“Looks like an old public house,” Charley said. “No sign of life about it. Deserted, I should say.”

As he spoke, they heard a cough from beyond the hedgerow.

They crouched, peering among the haws that hung there, scanning the field beyond. The field ran down to the river. Though it was drenched in mist, its freedom from weed and other growth indicated the presence of some sort of ruminative life. Their breath steamed in the brush as they scanned the place. The cough came again.

Greybeard pointed silently. In the corner of the field closest to the house, a shed stood. Clustered against one side of it were sheep, four or five of them.

“I thought sheep had died out long ago,” Charley muttered.

“It means there’s someone in the house.”

“We don’t want an argument with them. Let’s pull farther upstream. We’ve an hour more daylight yet.”

“No, let’s look over this place. They’re isolated here; they may be glad of company, if we can convince them we’re friendly.”

It was impossible to overcome the feeling that they might be covered by one or more guns from the silent building. Keeping their gaze on the vacant windows, they moved forward. In front of the house, with ample cover nearby, stood a car of dejected appearance. It had long since slumped into a posture of defeat, its tires sagged onto the ground. They ran to it, crouching behind it to observe the house. Still no sign of movement. They saw that most of the windows were boarded up.

“Is there anyone there?” Greybeard called. No answer came.

As Charley had guessed, it was a public house. The old inn sign lay rotting nearby, and a name board had curled away from over the front door and lay across the well-worn steps. On a downstairs window they read the word ALES engraved there. Greybeard took in the details before calling again. Still there was no answer.

“We’ll try around the back,” he said, rising.

“Don’t you think we’d be all right in the boat for one night?”

“It will be cold later. Let’s try the back.”

At the rear of the building, a track led from the back door towards the sheep field. Standing against the damp brickwork, Greybeard with his rifle at the ready, they called again. Nobody replied. Greybeard leaned forward and stared quickly into the nearest window. A man was sitting just inside, looking at him.

His heart gave a jerk. He fell back against Charley, his spine suddenly chill. When he had control of his nerves, he thrust his gun forward and rapped on a windowpane.

“We’re friends,” he called. Silence.

“We’re friends, you bastard!” This time he shattered the pane. The glass fell, then silence again. The two men looked at each other, their faces close and drawn.

“He must be sick or dead or something,” Charley said. Ducking past Greybeard and under the window, he reached the back door. With a shoulder against it, he turned the handle and charged in. Greybeard followed.

The face of the seated man was as grey as the daylight at which he stared with such fixity. His lips were ravaged and broken as if by a powerful poison. He sat upright in an old chair facing the sink. In his lap, still not entirely empty, lay a can of pesticide.

Charley crossed himself. “May he rest in peace. There’s provocation enough for anyone taking their own life these days.”

Greybeard took the can of pesticide and hurled it out into the bushes.

“Why did he kill himself? It can’t have been for want of food, with his sheep still out there. We’ll have to search the house, Charley. There may be someone else here.”

Upstairs, in a room into which the dying sun still gleamed, they found her. She was wasted to nothing under the blankets. In a receptacle by her bedside was a pool of something that might have been clotted soup. She had died of an illness, that much was obvious; that she had been dead longer than the man downstairs was also apparent, for the room was thick with the odour of death.

“Probably cancer,” Greybeard said. “Her husband had no reason to go on living once she’d gone.” He had to break the silence, though breathing in the room was difficult. Pulling himself together, he said, “Let’s get them both outside and hidden in the bushes. Then we can move in here for the night.”

“We must give them burial, Algy.”

“It takes too much energy. Let’s get settled in and be thankful we found a safe place so easily.”

“We may have been guided here to give these poor souls decent burial.”

Greybeard looked slantingly at the brown object rotting on the pillow.

“Why should the Almighty want that back, Charley?”

“You might as well ask why He wants us here.”

“By God, I often do ask it, Charley. Now, don’t argue; let’s get the corpses hidden where the women won’t see them, and perhaps in the morning we’ll think about burial.”

With as good a grace as he could muster, Charley helped in the dreary business. The best place of concealment turned out to be the shed in the field. They left the corpses there, with the sheep — there proved to be six of them — looking on. They saw to it that the sheep had water, wrenched open a couple of windows to air the house, and went to get the rest of the party. When the boat was safely moored, they all moved into the house.

Down in the cellars where barrels of beer had once stood, they found a smoked joint of meat hanging on a hook to be out of the reach of rats — of those there was plenty of evidence. They found a lamp that contained sheep fat and stank villainously, though it burned well. And Towin found five bottles of gin in a crate hidden in an unused grate.

“Just what I need for my rheumatics, then!” he said, opening a bottle. Placing his sharp nose over the mouth, he inhaled eagerly and then took a swig.

The women piled wood into a range in the kitchen and prepared a meal, disguising the high taste of the mutton with some of the herbs that lay in jars in the larder. Their warmth came back to them. Something like the elderly brother of a party spirit revived between them, and when they had eaten, they settled down for sleep in a cheerful frame of mind.

Martha and Greybeard bedded down in a small parlour on the ground floor. Since it was evident by many signs that the dead couple had not lived in a state of siege, Greybeard saw no reason for them to keep a guard; under Mole’s regime they had grown obsessed with such precautions. After all, as every year went by, man should have less to fear from his fellow men, and this house seemed to be far from any other settlement...

All the same, he was not easy. He had said nothing to the others, but before leaving the boat he had felt in the lockers under the decking to get the two bayonets he had stored there; he wished to arm Towin and Charley with them; but the bayonets were missing, together with other things he had stowed there. The loss meant but one thing: somebody else had known of the whereabouts of his boat.

When Martha was asleep, he rose. The mutton-fat light still burned, though he had shielded its glow from the window. He stood, letting his mind become like a landscape into which strange thoughts could wander. He felt the frost gathering outside the house, and the silence, and turned away to close his mind again. The light stood on an old chest of drawers. He opened one of the drawers at random and looked in. It contained family trinkets, a broken clock, some pencil stubs, an ink bottle empty of ink. With a feeling of wrongdoing, he pocketed the two longest bits of pencil and opened the neighbourhood drawer. Two photograph albums of an old-fashioned kind lay there. On top of them was the framed picture of a child.

The child was a boy of about six, a cheerful boy whose smile showed a gap in his teeth. He was holding a model railway engine and wore long tartan trousers. The print had faded somewhat. Probably it was a boyhood photograph of the man now stacked carelessly out in the sheep shed.

Sudden tears stood in Greybeard’s eyes. Childhood itself lay in the rotting drawers of the world, a memory that could not stand permanently against time. Since that awful — accident, crime, disaster, in the last century, there had been no more babies born. There were no more children, no more boys like this. Nor, by now, were there any more adolescents, or young men, or young women with their proud style; not even the middle-aged were left now. Of the seven ages of man, little but the last remained.

“The fifties group are still pretty youthful,” Greybeard told himself, bracing his shoulders. And despite all the hardships, and the ghastliness that had gone before, there were plenty of spry sixty-year-olds about. Oh, it would take a few years yet before... But the fact remained that he was one of the youngest men on earth.

No, that wasn’t quite true. Persistent rumour had it that an occasional couple was still bearing children; and in the past there had been cases... There had even been the pathetic instance of Eve, in the early days at Sparcot, who had borne a girl to Major Trouter and then disappeared. A month later, both she and her baby were found dead by a wood-gathering expedition... But apart from that, you never saw anyone young. The accident had been thorough. The old had inherited the earth.

Mortal flesh now wore only the Gothic shapes of age. Death stood impatiently over the land, waiting to count his last few pilgrims.

And from all this, I do derive a terrible pleasure, Greybeard admitted, looking down at the impaled smile in the photograph. They could tear me apart before I’d confess, but somewhere it is there, a little stoaty thing that makes of a global disaster a personal triumph. Perhaps it’s this fool’s attitude I’ve always taken that any experience can be of value. Perhaps it’s the reassurance to be derived from knowing that even if you live to be a hundred, you’ll never be an old fogy: you’ll always be the younger generation.

He beat out the silly thought that had grown in him so often. Yet it remained smouldering. His life had been lucky, wonderfully lucky, for all mankind’s ill luck.

Not that mankind suffered alone. All mammals were nearly as hard hit. Dogs had ceased to whelp. The fox had almost died out; its habit of rearing its young in earths had doubtless contributed to its ultimate recovery — that and the abundance of food that came its way as man’s grip on the land slackened. The domestic pig had died out even before the dogs, though perhaps as much because it was everywhere killed and eaten recklessly as because it failed to litter. The domestic cat and the horse proved as sterile as man; only its comparatively large number of offspring per litter had allowed the cat to survive. It was said to be multiplying in some districts again; peddlers visiting Sparcot spoke of plagues of feral cats here and there.

Bigger members of the cat tribe had also suffered. All over the world, the story in the early nineteen-eighties had been the same: the creatures of the world were incapable of reproduction. The earth — such was the apocalyptic nature of the event that it was easy even for an agnostic to think of it in biblical terms — the earth failed to bring forth its increase. Only the smaller creatures that sheltered in the earth itself had escaped wholly unscathed from that period when man had fallen victim of his own inventions.

Oh, it was an old tale now, and nearly half a century separated the milk teeth smiling in the photograph from the corrupt grin that let in frost out in the sheep shed.

Greybeard shut the drawer with a slam.

Something had disturbed the sheep. They were bleating in fright.

He had a superstitious picture of the dead walking, and blocked it off. Some sort of animal predator would be a more likely explanation of the disturbance. He went into the kitchen and peered through the window. The sky was lighter than he had expected. A chip of moon shone, giving frail shape to the nearby trees. Putting an ear to the draft pouring through the broken pane, Greybeard could hear the sheep trotting in their field. Frost glittered on the pinched sedges outside the door; as he looked at its tiny lost reflections, he heard the creak-crunch of footsteps moving across a stretch of grass. He raised his rifle. It was impossible to get out without making a noise opening the back door.

The footsteps came nearer; a man, all shadow, passed the window.

“Halt or I fire!” Greybeard called. Though the man had disappeared from his line of sight, he reckoned on the shock of discovery freezing him still.

“Is that you, Greybeard?” The voice came hollow from outside. “Is that you, Greybeard? Keep your itchy finger off that trigger.”

Even as he recognized the voice, Martha came to his side, clutching her coat about her. He thrust the rifle into her hands.

“Hold this and keep me covered,” he whispered. Aloud, he said, “Come in front of the window with your hands up.”

A man appeared in silhouette, his fingers stretched as if to rake the sky. He gave a cackling laugh. Martha swung the rifle to cover him. Greybeard flung open the door and motioned the man in, stepping back to let him pass. The old poacher, Jeff Pitt, walked into the kitchen and lowered his arms.

“You still want to buy that beaver, Greybeard?” he asked, grinning his old canine grin.

Greybeard took his gun and put an arm around Martha’s frail shoulders. He kicked the door shut and surveyed Pitt unsmilingly.

“It must be you who stole the provisions from my boat. Why did you follow us? Have you a boat of your own?”

“I didn’t swim, you know!” Pitt’s gaze ran restlessly about the room as he spoke. “I’m better at hiding my little canoe than you were! I’ve watched you for weeks, loading up your boat. There isn’t much goes on at Sparcot I don’t know about. So today, when you did your flit, I thought I’d chance running into the gnomes and come and see how you were all getting on.”