The Crack (2 page)

‘Oh, Simon!' she gasped, ‘watch out!'

Coming towards them at full speed was a violent-looking boy of about fifteen in the only other sports car – a yellow Porsche. In spite of the tiny dimensions of both cars, and the fact that the drivers' knees were practically under their chins, there was a genuine thrill in the confrontation and Simon found himself gritting his teeth and swearing under his breath. Ten feet… five feet …

‘Stop!' Baba screamed.

Crash! The cars met head on. The deafening sound of the colliding cars set up a chorus of oohs and aahs from the people round the track. Then someone shrieked with real fear. Flames were springing up from the twisted bonnets and an acrid smell filled the air.

‘Can't reverse!' Simon yelled at the boy. ‘We're stuck!'

Uselessly, he stabbed at the accelerator. The orange flames leapt high. An attendant ran forward, and strong arms pulled Baba out of the car. The flames licked contentedly at the boy in the yellow Porsche and then turned to run with sly speed in the direction of the Bugatti passenger seat.

Both Simon and the occupant of the Porsche were jammed in their seats, the toy dashboards across their chests like steel bars. Silent now, the crowd formed a semi-circle at a distance of ten feet from the conflagration.

Then all the lights went out. At first, there was no reaction from the crowd; like moths they were held entranced by the merry fire, the movement of the orange spikes as they shot roof-high. Then everyone realized at once what had happened. The whole funfair had fused. A gelatinous darkness made itself felt in every chest, a suffocating black blanket came down like a hangman's noose. From the stranded patients in the Big Dipper the first screams of terror came through the windless air.

‘It's everywhere!' The attendant holding Baba relaxed his
grip as he scanned Park Lane and the Hilton and the distant swirl of Hyde Park Corner. The bright lights of the fair had gone out. Only the flames from the charred cars continued to eat their way busily through vicuna suit and Levis, bumpers and imitation racing tyres.

‘My god!' Baba hardly recognized her own voice, a low croaking sound. Released by the attendant, she found herself wandering, dazed, away from the flames and down a step on to the ground. Above her towered the Big Wheel, motionless, the passengers in the invisible boxes calling out for help and shouting conflicting suggestions. She stumbled on, her mind numb. Soon the light from the flames died down. People were bumped against – some of them as soft as bales of cloth and others sharp and angular. Objects – flags probably or the coats of people who were trying to let themselves down from stranded wagons – brushed across her face. The funfair had become a gigantic ghost train.

And there was no moon! Even in her semi-conscious state, Baba realized that this total darkness was something she had never known before in her life. A sort of vertigo overtook her, and she put her hands out in front of her for support. Perhaps Simon would be there – perhaps it was all a bad dream and she would wake in his suite in the Hilton. Like last night. Only this was tonight. All the same, power cuts in London were common enough. How Simon would laugh at the British strikes – how he would –

But every moment it became clearer to Baba that Simon was dead. She stopped, looking down at where her feet presumably were. If only she could see her feet! It was such a simple thing to ask. And she never wanted anything more.

She looked up again. A tiny flicker of hope flitted across her mind. Something white – strangely phosphorescent, like the light from a crowd of fireflies – was moving just ahead of her. She followed it, stretching out her hand. Her fingers met a substance that yielded and flew apart under her touch, then closed again round her hand and bathed her wrist with the same pale radiance.

It was hair. Medea Smith turned her head at Baba's touch. Her face, cavernous under the white curtain which fell to her
shoulders, had three circles of black in the place of eyes and mouth. Then she turned again and the phantom head moved on through the unseen crowd.

Baba followed.

At Sir Max Bowlby's house the ladies left the dining-room at the end of dinner and the gentlemen were left to their port and cigars.

Bowlby, a property millionaire, had recently bought the house in Cheyne Walk and decorated it in the eastern style, with rich hangings from India and low tables inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Only his dining-room was conventional: a long mahogany table, Old Masters on the walls and a Waterford glass chandelier which gave out a million iridescent rays from candles regularly trimmed by footmen.

Because the dining-room was lit only by candles, Sir Max Bowlby and his friends were unaware that the lights had gone out all over London. They were discussing their property abroad, and Sir Evelyn Jacobs was boasting that his private island in the Caribbean was worth at least ten times more than he had paid for it.

‘You still can't beat the Med,' Sir Max said comfortably. ‘I really cleaned up in Sardinia. And it's a lovely development, mind you.' He always felt constrained to remind people that there is beauty in money too.

‘What I say is,' put in Mr Joshua McDougall, ‘that this holiday boom is all very well, but what happens when there's a depression? People don't take holidays. And what are people always looking for? Flats. Somewhere to live. And where?'

‘London,' Sir Max said. ‘I agree, Joshua. But –'

‘London Development Company will never fail,' McDougall announced with solemnity. ‘The entire south-east of England has become the greatest boom area in the history of property speculation.'

At that moment, to Sir Evelyn's slight alarm, the floor seemed to move under his chair. It was as if, the thought flashed
through his mind, a large whale had surfaced somewhere under the floorboards and was now edging its way up through the carpet. Sir Evelyn looked accusingly at Sir Max's brandy.

But Sir Max had felt it as well; and the rather weedy little husband of an heiress cousin of Sir Max's gave a squeak of surprise and fear.

‘Don't tell me Cheyne Walk is flooding,' Sir Max said sonorously, as if it would immediately stop flooding if he asked it to. ‘Did you feel anything, Evelyn?'

Sir Evelyn said he had. With expressions of protective concern, the gentlemen rose to go and find the ladies. Too bad if they were frightened in any way. Sir Max threw open the door, and then stopped.

‘That's funny.' He frowned into the black passage. ‘All the lights seem to have gone out. Didn't realize there was a power cut this evening.'

‘There isn't,' said the weedy husband.

‘Your house doesn't seem to be in very good shape,' laughed McDougall.

Lighting a match and paying no attention to this remark, Sir Max went bravely out into the passage. At that moment the floor gave a distinctive heave and the mahogany table subsided slowly on to it like a sheep lying down to die. Porcelain plates and cut-glass goblets rolled on to the carpet and lay still.

‘Good God,' said McDougall. ‘Did you have the house surveyed properly, Max?'

Bowlby, flickering match in hand, went grimly towards the staircase. The banister jumped nervously back at his touch. As his foot went out to the first step, the entire staircase, with the slow grace of a Chinese paper decoration opening out, arched its back and became an interesting but useless accordion. Bowlby staggered back, to be caught by Sir Evelyn.

‘This is preposterous,' McDougall said. ‘In property and you can't keep your own house in order. What about my wife? She's up there – probably frightened to death. Where's the phone? We must rescue her at all costs.'

It was well known that McDougall had married a famous model only a few weeks before. None of the other men expressed
any concern for their wives, and it was McDougall, gold lighter in hand, who had to grope his way to the phone at the far end of the hall. Hummocks had risen in the passage and he scrambled from one to the other, not noticing that the walls, although still perfectly in line, were contracting quite fast and threatened to squeeze him to death before he attained his goal.

‘The phone's dead,' he shouted desperately from his impending grave. ‘What's going on here for Christ's sake, Bowlby?'

Upstairs, as the walls of the downstairs hall embraced Joshua McDougall like the friendly white arms of a male nurse, the women were staring with fascinated horror out of the window. Caught in the middle of powdering their noses by the blackout, they were more friendly towards each other than they would normally have been. Lady Bowlby had been rescued from the bathroom by the new Mrs McDougall, and the traces of animosity which had shown at dinner had now disappeared.

‘I just can't believe it,' the heiress married to the weedy husband said. ‘I'm so frightened – I –'

‘Let's look at it rationally,' suggested Lady Bowlby. ‘We can't go down the stairs because they've collapsed. We –'

‘How can you be rational about something like this?' said the new Mrs McDougall with a shudder. ‘I mean, just look at it now.'

There was silence as they gathered round the window again. Only an occasional sob from the heiress could be heard in the room.

Outside there was the river. But it was a river surprisingly wide. In the light from the few stars great stretches of mud could be seen; broken bridges lay like snapped elastic on the swampy ooze. And – it was difficult to make out – it seemed the Embankment had cracked and fallen down on to the mud below. It was hard to tell if there was any water in the river at all.

‘Suppose,' said Mrs McDougall. ‘I mean, suppose it's a crack. In the earth's surface. Suppose …'

‘We must wait for the police,' said Lady Bowlby calmly. ‘Things are bound to be all right further inland.'

With these comforting words, she stared out of the window again. With another heave, like a man trying to shrug off an overcoat, the house moved several more feet towards the bank of the exhausted river.

In the light of the dying flames from the burning bumper cars, someone had been clever enough to knot together various lengths of rope so that Thirsk's patients could be lowered from the highest cars of the Big Dipper. Subdued, they trotted obediently after him through the darkened funfair.

‘I don't know what we're going to do,' Thirsk confided to a lay analyst who was accompanying him, anxious for instructions. ‘We can't go North, that's for certain.'

The lay analyst – Harcourt was his name – nodded agreement. Behind them towered the new mountain of North London, the foothills extending as far as Marble Arch. In the grey starlight which had succeeded the total blackness of the cataclysm, it was just possible to make out the jagged peaks and narrow ravines of what once had been Hampstead and Primrose Hill.

‘Harley Street will be buried as it deserved to be,' Thirsk said with satisfaction. ‘This is an earthquake, I suppose. But in London!'

‘Certainly a disaster area,' said Harcourt, who was not famed for his quickness of mind. ‘But when's the relief coming? And what is the Government doing about all this, I'd like to know?'

‘We'll make for Westminster,' Thirsk said firmly. He had already forgotten his virulent attack of the day before on the British parliamentary system, and his oath to construct an Alternative Society through regression methods.

‘A demonstration,' Harcourt agreed warmly. ‘This neglect is monstrous!'

‘We'll be getting help from the States by morning,' Thirsk reminded him.

‘They've cut down on Foreign Aid,' Harcourt put in. ‘Suppose we get nothing?'

With this thought in mind, the two doctors walked slowly
towards Hyde Park Corner, each stooped over a push-chair. Behind, the older ‘children' squabbled and stumbled, some of them sitting down on the churned-up road to remove their shoes and others crying loudly as they were bumped against in the dark. Of Thirsk and Harcourt's two ‘babies', Thirsk's was giving the most trouble. A man of thirty-five, Jo-Jo by name, he had only half an hour before been born on the Dipper, and his thin screams echoed through the cold night air. On top of that, his dummy kept slipping from his mouth on to the ruined tarmac and Thirsk had to bend for it, cursing every time as it disappeared under the folds of his black robe. Harcourt's baby, a middle-aged woman with an evil expression and a spiteful way of rocking in the push-chair so that it nearly tilted over at every step, had taken an instant dislike to Jo-Jo – her hands came out like claws whenever she was in reach of him and she had already managed several times to poke him in the eye.

‘Well,' Thirsk said gloomily. ‘Here we are. What shall we do with them?'

Here was Hyde Park Corner. The fact that it had taken so long to guide the patients along Park Lane clearly showed that their chances of reaching Westminster by morning were low. Thirsk and Harcourt looked at each other, and gravely inclined their heads.

‘Yes,' Harcourt said after a while. ‘I think they'll do better here.'

‘Some of the buildings remain.' He was accustomed to having to justify his decisions. ‘And with the help of the Government we can collect them in the morning.'

‘Exactly,' said Harcourt.

Hyde Park Corner was, of course, unrecognizable. The twisted metal of crashed cars lay scattered at the base of the great earth mound that had gone up like a gigantic molehill. Picking their way carefully through the debris, the doctors led their charges to the roofless hospital that once had been St George's.

‘Perfectly all right for a few hours,' Thirsk said briskly. He shepherded his charges into the abandoned casualty ward, stepping with care over the stretchered bodies of recent car-crash
victims. ‘Pity we've got no toys for them though,' he added looking round. ‘The fives and over aren't going to like it much here.'