The Crack (12 page)

‘There'll be a Greek taverna,' Baba murmured. ‘And bierkellers where delicious cold beer is brought the instant you ask for it. And then I might dress up myself and go to the biggest hotel as a hostess. I wonder what that would be like?'

As Baba mused, pausing often to rub her back or sit disconsolately on an overturned island, the sun grew hotter and the picture of the big hotel cooler and more delightful.

‘Fountains in the hall,' said poor Baba aloud. ‘And a great underground swimming-pool with dark green plastic water-lily leaves floating on it. And on each leaf a frosted cocktail – yes (for she was getting hungry too) an avocado pear in a bed of ice
and a White Lady beside it with a lovely little cherry sticking out the top …'

Baba's left foot struck something hard and cold, and she gave a cry of pain.

Looking up, she thought for a moment that the sun had gone in at last and a great grey cloud had taken its place. A biassed coolness, even a slight dampness, filled the air.

Then she screamed again. A horrible little man was crouching just above her head. All round him, as far as the eye could see, was an expanse of grim, wet stone broken by ledges that supported other monsters just as terrifying. Decayed grey teeth snarled down in grimaces of hostility. Listless eyes out-stared her as she gazed pathetically up at them for a sign of friendship. Here the sun was unable to penetrate. Here the Crack had darted in vain, leaving only faint fissures in the massive walls.

‘Where can I be?' moaned Baba. ‘How do I get round this one?'

At least it was cool in the shadow of the vast mausoleum. Baba pressed her aching shoulders against the walls, feeling with a shudder of relief the deathly touch of stone on flesh. Even the sight of a beetle crawling carelessly from one lichen-filled crack to another failed to move her away.

Something hard and sticky dropped on to Baba's head.

Too afraid to cry out again, she leapt back and stared upwards. The little grinning devil was melting! His leer, directed, it seemed, straight at Baba, assumed ridiculous proportions. A gnarled hand, fingers arranged in some ancient imprecation, plopped to the ground beside Baba's feet. To right and left, swaying and cracking on their ledges, the other demons began to do the same.

The sun was winning the battle. From the highest buttress – so high that Baba had to fling her head right back to see where it soared to meet the sky – lead cannonballs turned to black treacle and poured over the sides to splash beside her on the ground. With a deep groan that sounded like the breaking of bones, the great wall settled down several feet into its foundations.

‘I'd better get away from here,' Baba told herself. ‘This is getting dangerous!'

The sound of voices paralysed her just as she was about to turn and run for her life.

They weren't friendly voices, either: some were shrill and querulous, and seemed to be demanding some sort of human sacrifice. Others were deep and menacing, threatening to put an end there and then to the shrill ones if they didn't hold their tongues at once.

Baba dug her carmine fingernails deep into a crack in the wall and pulled herself up six feet. She was grateful now for the athletic body which had brought her such speedy promotion at the Playboy. Another agile leap and she found herself on the ledge where the melting devil had stood. She was on a level now with the other grotesque creatures – and she could feel the reason for their impending disintegration. The sun beat on her head like a stone hammer. Her nose and lips flattened into a gargoyle grin. Heart beating, she turned to face the crowd, her bare toes gripping the ledge and her arms spreadeagled against the wall.

‘What I say is,' shrieked one of the shrill voices below, ‘let's find him now and string him up! Beat him to death! Crucify him!'

From her perch Baba could see that the crowd was divided into two elements.

There were the scholars from the Reading Room – they had clambered out, she supposed, when the last preposterous explanation for the Crack had been delivered – and there was a motley group of middle-aged people in rags. It was impossible to tell who they were, but it was clear from their fresh indignation that they hadn't been in London at the time of the cataclysm. ‘Calm, calm,' Ebbing-Smith Senior was saying. ‘We have no reasonable proof that the causes for the disaster proffered by our Birmingham and Manchester friends here are in any way correct.'

‘Better than your hypothesis,' snapped one of the lady historians.

‘Listen here.' A portly, ragged man (a Birmingham businessman,
Baba supposed) stepped out of the crowd and waved his arms for silence. ‘I don't care what you eggheads have worked out in your museum,' he went on when everyone was looking at him obediently. ‘All I know is that we've had to walk all the way South and now you won't listen to what really happened. Theories are nothing to facts is what I say –'

A hubbub broke out from the scholars at this and Baba found herself wriggling with impatience so that she almost fell from her precarious ledge. If only they would let him say what really did happen, she thought, and felt tears of despair sting her eyes. What's the matter with them?

A young scholar, prematurely bald and wearing hornrim glasses cracked by the heat of the walk from the Reading Room, was making a show of admiring the building rather than listen to the expert from Birmingham.

He strolled around the base of the great wall, his murmurs of appreciation drifting up to poor Baba's agonizing resting-place.

‘I must say that the Abbey shows us even today that the methods of construction used in the Middle Ages were infinitely superior to ours,' he remarked to one of the younger lady historians. ‘Our Abbey has resisted every onslaught, don't you feel?'

‘I know where everyone has gone,' insisted the Birmingham businessman. ‘And I know who the culprit is.'

The right arm and devil's fork of a large and fast-melting triton fell to the ground, narrowly missing the young scholar. He looked up apprehensively.

‘Watch it!' cried the shrill Northern faction of the crowd. ‘The bloody place is collapsing!'

All eyes gazed upwards, and trained themselves on Baba. She held her breath, turned to stone herself as the ravening faces peered up at her. ‘That's an interesting one.' The young scholar pointed her out. ‘A female gargoyle in the early fourteenth-century tradition. Demonstrating the evil of woman, the misogyny of the time. How strange to contemplate the feelings of the anonymous stonemason as he chipped away at the image of what he most dreaded and desired! How moving to –'

But at this point the crowd from the North bore down on the young scholar and silenced him. Slowly, painfully, Baba's heartbeats returned to normal.

When the uproar died down, Ebbing-Smith could be heard once more. ‘I suggest,' he said in the reasonable tone which had led so many to be fooled by his unlikely theories in the past, ‘that we go to the river and confront this speculator McDougall with the matter. If our friends here are telling the truth, he will be unable to deny the consequences of his actions.' ‘McDougall suggested to me,' the businessman went on obstinately, ‘a deal whereby I supplied the materials for a bloody great dormitory town on the other side of the river and supplied them at half price in return for what he termed “residential advantages” this side.'

‘Disgusting,' muttered a Hungarian scientist from amongst the dense group of scholars.

‘And I maintain,' spoke up a man from amongst the group of itinerant merchants, ‘I maintain he put too many people over there too quickly. Hence the land to the south of the river became over-weighted and these cracks appeared in the surface of the earth.'

‘Most unscientific,' sighed an attractive young geologist on whom Baba looked down longingly. ‘We can but go and see, I suppose.'

The crowd, muttering discontentedly, turned away from the frowning façade of the Abbey and went off down a narrow street Baba had never seen before.

So that's where the river lies, she thought to herself in excitement. If I follow them I'll find Medea and she'll take care of me. Thank God for that!

Even as she sprang down from the ledge and ran happily after the vengeful crowd, Baba felt the stirrings of an impossible hunger.

And as she caught up with the straggling Birmingham and Manchester wives in the tail of the procession she realized they were feeling the same thing.

‘If I don't have a pasty and a nice cup of tea I'm not going any further,' a kindly looking woman remarked fiercely. ‘How about you, Mabel?'

‘I'll go on strike without,' Mabel agreed.

The presence of foreigners in her city had suddenly made Baba realize where she was. After their first surprise at seeing her amongst them, the women agreed to be led to the best food shop in the world. It was with some difficulty that Baba located the handsome geologist; but once found, he admitted to an appetite that would brook no refusal.

‘I daresay it's worth the detour,' he said loftily as Baba tugged at his arm.

Without anyone noticing them, the hungry group broke off from the crowd and followed Baba to Knightsbridge.

The sails of the
Lady Merrie Englande
flapped listlessly as she tacked home on the last leg of her round-the-world-journey.

Walter Rugglesby was in his cabin writing up the log. A knighthood awaited him at Plymouth, but he had decided to surprise the world press and TV by sailing up the Thames instead and disembarking at the Tower of London. ‘Rugglesby the Difficult Genius' was the term used to describe him in American and British Sunday papers – for Rugglesby had demanded a doubling of the prize money, and ‘a wife in every port', which meant that a pretty girl in national costume in each port passed by Rugglesby had had to be paid to wave vigorously at him as he went by. And that was not all. Rugglesby had offended good taste by designing his own coat of arms before the world trip, instead of waiting for the Queen to confer a knighthood on him. In anticipation of the vast prize money, he had built a glass and aluminium house with 364 rooms, explaining in his interviews that he only intended to leave home on one day a year, and would spend the others each in a different setting – and when asked, with some suspicion, on which day he planned to go out had replied Christmas Day, to go and visit his mother. It was thus that Rugglesby continued to entrance and intrigue his public.

The
Lady Merrie Englande
was no ordinary boat either. She appeared, when sailing on the high seas, to be no more than a catamaran – but Rugglesby had so planned and built her that she could cope with dry land too, skimming like a hovercraft when she chose and growling into four-wheel-drive like a Land-Rover when the terrain was tough. Rugglesby's next trip, in fact, would consist of crossing the Sahara in her; and the one after was scheduled to be the ascent of Everest; but he had mentioned none of this to the media. His landing
at the Tower and subsequent gliding through the streets of London to the Savoy was a secret which he shared only with his tame albatross and the monotonous, heaving waves in which he had lived and slept for a whole year past.

‘I am God,' Rugglesby wrote in the log. ‘Between me and humanity are nine hierarchical bands. A fine day today, wind slight N.E. Albatross finished my home-made plum cake at 11.43 BST. Sighted the white cliffs at 08.56.'

With a sigh of satisfaction he closed the great book, due to be auctioned at Sotheby's later in the year, and went up on deck.

The shores of England were nearer than he had expected. Or rather, they seemed to have come out to meet him. Beaches ten miles long and oddly dry stretched to the mouth of the Thames, as if the tides had ceased to function and the land under the sea had been left exposed for several days.

Dried seaweed made a ragged carpet over the cracked mud. Dead fish and half-opened shells lay like the remains of a huge maritime banquet, and overhead seabirds flapped and dived like vultures.

Rugglesby went to the controls. He felt no surprise at the change from sea to landscape, but was slightly alarmed at the absence of a welcoming committee and eager crowd. He had been almost sure that his surprise arrival had been guessed at, and that only the naive would go to Plymouth in the expectation of finding him there.

The
Lady Merrie Englande
skimmed over the unnatural shore to the mouth of the Thames, and then paused. Rugglesby rubbed at his eyes in amazement. The Thames was as wide as the Amazon. A great crack at least fifty feet wide lay along its centre like a giant cobra.

With a flicker of panic, Rugglesby consulted his maps. Was it possible that he had arrived in South America by mistake, that the trusty
Lady Merrie
had been going round in circles for the last three months?

Then he remembered who he was. If he said this was England, then it was England. True, he had lost contact in the last few days with his sponsors. He had imagined that their excitement at his return was too great to be expressed – and
that they had been busy preparing the Savoy for his welcome party. Now he saw that other things had occupied their imaginations.

Gritting his teeth in annoyance Rugglesby put the
Lady Merrie
into low fly. Gracefully the lovely amphibian glided up the Crack towards her destination.

The women in Bowlby's internment camp saw the
Lady Merrie
and let out a great cry of hope and anguish.

Lady Bowlby's supplies of champagne and chartreuse from Pierre Courvoisier's cellars had dried up the day before, and although Lady Bowlby herself had joined them on the strength of her gesture she was no longer popular there. Old Mrs Brown stirred up trouble in the camp. ‘It's all her fault. She's the one who ought to go, in my opinion.'

‘We should draw lots,' insisted the gentle Noreen. ‘It wouldn't be fair otherwise.'