The Crack (14 page)

The Crack was filling up. Miraculously, the water chose only the river-bed for its thunderous arrival and as it swirled past them the little band sighed and sobbed with relief.

The Crack disappeared under the torrent. The water rose to within a foot of the embankment, found its level, and stopped. Bowlby's makeshift bridge was swept away.

Clasping each other with delight, Baba and Stone ran down to the river to wash.

A bearded man sat alone by the Serpentine in Hyde Park. Slowly, patiently, he was mending an antiquated balloon. While he did so he whistled through his teeth and smiled from time to time, reminding himself of the pleasures and excitements that lay ahead in the new world; and the fact that he alone, of all men, would be able to guide the human race through the snares and difficulties that lay ahead.

Waters had buried his wife and family some time ago. Their graves, crude memorials to a way of life that had no purpose or meaning, lay scattered in the patchy grass of the park. An up-ended bench marked one, a broken model boat another. He had made no effort to twist the improvised tombstones into the shape of the cross: something else was at the root of the Universe and he cared little now who knew he thought that.

‘The Age of Aquarius,' Waters hummed to himself. ‘Jeremy Waters, Superstar!'

The balloon was ready at last. And so, Waters reflected as he climbed aboard complacently, was its owner. Since the disappearance of Baba and the terrible heart-wrenching pain he had suffered then, he had become an entirely reconstructed man.
L'homme integrale
, as the Cubans would have it. In future, Waters would live only for the public good. He would weep only for public causes. If men died in war, Waters would feel a limb amputated. There had been too much concern with private matters, too little for the tragic, sometimes ridiculous ways of humanity. When his family had died of starvation, Waters had had to admit to a sense of relief.

The balloon rose easily in the steady wind and drifted south to the river. The ruins of London had never looked more beautiful than now, the crescents of South Kensington no more than jaw formations in which teeth had once stood white and
strong, the Natural History Museum as skeletal and forbidding as its prehistoric contents.

Waters lifted his binoculars and gazed through them as if quizzing a
demi-mondaine
at the opera.

There was the Kings Road, as deserted and forlorn as he had expected to find it. No more boutiques now for the philistine pop singers and their musk-scented, frizzle-haired girls!

There was Cheyne Walk, an enjoyable symbol of the end of capitalism. Rich men's houses as helpless as abandoned toy accordions. Prize-winning gardens filled with crushed delphiniums and split lawns on which the grass would never grow again.

And there – Waters started, adjusted the sights and stared again – there was the river Thames, flowing eagerly and joyously between wide banks.

The river showed no signs of having dried up, of having ever in its majestic history lost its sense of importance, its knowledge of the role it played in the life of the English people. Brown, heavy water rolled ponderously under destroyed bridges. Seagulls sat snugly on the important current.

The wind rose, not playfully but with a strong pull which Waters was unable to counter. He was going too high now, and threw himself about in the balloon so as to keep low over the river. The balloon sank, and he found himself only twenty feet above the muddy swirl, gazing anxiously at the sky for further guidance.

Several people were crossing the river on rafts. Paddling madly with chairlegs and pieces of driftwood, they were almost submerged by water and were groaning loudly as they went.

Waters directed a godlike smile at them. How desperate and futile seemed the efforts of mankind in the face of perils like these! He pitied the motley raftloads of men and women, each one intent on his own salvation.

Then he saw Baba. She was lying back in the arms of a handsome young man and was as relaxed as if out on a punt on a summer's day. Her lovely face, ears lying back docilely against her head, was directed straight at Waters; but she appeared not to see him at all.

Waters cursed as his trusty vehicle rose to new heights and
wafted him across the river altogether. This was the test, he reminded himself grimly. Would he live publicly or privately? Would one Bunny girl be enough to bring him down? No, he said to himself again and again as he strained through the binoculars at the receding scene. On no account. Never, no.

It was with some guilt that Waters realized he was going over the multi-level city and was too preoccupied to see it. Glancing backwards once, he thought he saw two black-robed figures toiling amongst the other workers at the top of a glittering skyscraper – and a small, bald man trying to pin a board on to the side of the rapidly rising building, B-O-W-L, Waters spelt out as he was blown violently to the south. Then his eyes began to sting from the wind, and he hid them behind calloused fingers.

But Waters knew he must land at the first sighting of open countryside. It was time now to think seriously of his mission – and to go back to the city if necessary to preach public living to the masses. First, a deep breath of pure downland air, a stretching of the arms and legs on grass nibbled by generations of sheep, a glimpse perhaps of the awesome stones of the Druids, whose mysteries he had fathomed on his lonely vigil in Hyde Park. What a contrast it would be to the dusty ruins of London! What freedom would be his as he strode, sole master of the breasts and vales and wooded plains of Southern England! His eyes wept in nostalgia despite himself.

From the great height of the balloon the land beneath looked strangely chalky – and dotted with black, like an over-enlarged photograph. No green anywhere; no trees, no lush meadows sprouting a second crop of buttercups. No white spots, their movements so mysterious to a possible visitor from outer space, running lethargically on a worn cricket pitch. No ponds, tadpole-shaped fragments of ancient glass, with their ducks and bodies of drowned witches in their silted depths. No horses, cows – no patchwork of fields, the mustard crop as bright as an iodined thumb. No thatched roofs, roses climbing over rat-infested rafters.

In short, no countryside. The wind seemed to grow tired at the realization that, blow as it might, no leaves would rustle, no branches would bend, no lakes would ruffle like the under-feathers
of a bird – and it dropped, leaving Waters sinking low over the unrecognizable landscape.

He had no idea where he was now. Below, the white dormitory towns stretched as far as the eye could see: a silent, vast necropolis intersected by grey ribbons on which cars crawled like beetles along the legs and arms of the dead. Behind him towered the great complex structures of the city, swaying antennae precariously attached to an inert body. Clouds covered the sun, the air became heavy and humid. Waters felt a terrible, all-embracing fear.

He understood what he was seeing. The knowledge was too much for him to bear, and he threw out ballast wildly in a last effort to rise above it, to glide away across the sea to safety. The balloon rose a few feet, then dropped again. Waters closed his eyes in prayer. He forgot the new religion he had constructed with such care in his days as a hermit by the ruined shell of the Albert Hall. He forgot his mission to save the world. He wanted only one thing now – to survive.

When he opened his eyes, he found his worst suspicions confirmed.

What lay beneath him was – a termitary! Workers swarmed endlessly, tirelessly over the network of towers and passageways and cells-within-cells of the monstrous immobile organism.

Soldiers with tiny red guns guarded the inner and outer ramparts of the structure.

The digestive organs of the community lay directly under him now. Canteens five miles long and ten miles wide gave off a shrill clatter of spoons on plates. Cities of latrines spread out beyond, the walls gaily painted to resemble English summer gardens. Pleasure palaces sported replicas of Palladian villas on their hanging terraces; on simulated motorways petrol-run cars crashed and burned, the flames extinguished instantly by horse-drawn fire-engines.

Waters's balloon drifted listlessly towards a great heap, as jumbled with bright stones and minarets as an Oriental temple. But as he approached he felt his pulse race, his heart beat noisily against his ribs. Something was drawing him down, down –

A light, green and luminous, streamed from the impossible building.

He saw a woman strolling in the labyrinth of courtyards beneath him. Her hair hung down her back like a sparkling fleece. A swarm of workers surrounded her, carrying fruit and mirrors in gold frames.

Waters prayed to be allowed to reach the ground. To serve her, to die in obedience for her was all he asked now. The Queen Ant, the brain of the brilliant mechanism!

The balloon sank lower and lower. The Queen looked up once and her eyes seemed to burn through Waters. The basket bumped once on to the ground –

A rush of air sounded through the stone-studded passages of the palace and ran through the lapidary maze like galloping horses. The Queen's hair blew out behind her in a shield of blinding light. The wind grew, lifting Waters's balloon like a toy and blowing it skywards, south, higher and higher until the termitary was no more than a piece of porous rock that lay half broken off from the mainland.

For Waters, trembling with gratitude at his freedom, could see from his great height both north and south of the Thames as he scudded across the angry skies.

Slowly the South of England was sinking into the sea. The Crack had severed it – and it broke off like the rim of a badly mended plate.

The wind roared and howled. Waters shivered in the icy cold. Miles below, like dwarf Japanese gardens, the tropical zones of Devon and Cornwall disappeared under the sea. Hotels and Hydrangeas formed sunken cities. Along the submerged golf courses fish swam lazily.

Waters's homeland disappeared from sight. Bravely, wrapping himself in his wife's anorak against the cold, he faced the future.

Emma Tennant was born in London and educated at St Paul's Girls' School. She spent the World War II years and her childhood summers at the family's faux Gothic mansion The Glen in Peeblesshire. Her family also owned estates in Trinidad.

Tennant grew up in the modish London of the 1950s and 1960s. She worked as a travel writer for
Queen
magazine and an editor for
Vogue
, publishing her first novel,
The Colour of Rain
, under a pseudonym when she was twenty-six. Between 1975 and 1979, she edited a literary magazine, Bananas, which helped launch the careers of several young novelists.

A large number of books by Tennant have followed: thrillers, children's books, fantasies, and several revisionist takes on classic novels, including a sequel to
Pride and Prejudice called Pemberley
. In later years, she began to write about her own life in such books as
Burnt Diaries
(1999), which details her affair with Ted Hughes.

Tennant has been married four times, including to the journalist and author Christopher Booker and the political writer Alexander Cockburn. She has two daughters and a son, author Matthew Yorke. In April 2008, she married her partner of 33 years, Tim Owens.

Discover books by Emma Tennant published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/EmmaTennant

Confessions of a Sugar Mummy
Heathcliff's Tale
Hotel de Dream
Pemberley
The Autobiography of the Queen
The Colour of Rain
The Crack
Wild Nights

For copyright reasons, any images not belonging to the original author have been
removed from this book. The text has not been changed, and may still contain references to missing images.

This electronic edition published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Reader

Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP

First published in Great Britain 1994 by Penguin Group

Copyright © 1994 by Emma Tennant

All rights reserved
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publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The moral right of the author is asserted.

eISBN: 9781448210879

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