The Crack (7 page)

Courvoisier jumped.

The brown fog enveloped him almost at once but Baba, her eyes scanning the horizon, could just make out long cars with fins like sharks cruising peacefully on the other side. Perhaps it would be all right there after all …

The rope ran out through Baba's fingers. An impossible weight jerked her face down into the mud. The echoing cry that rose from the Crack brought a flock of seagulls, hysterically circling the waterless river, to flap and scream above.

With a last wrench, the rope flew out of Baba's hands and slid into the mouth of the Crack.

The reverberations of the shout died away. The seagulls, no longer curious, flew upstream in search of rotting fish. Baba, her eyes staring in terror from her brown face, struggled back to shore.

Jeremy Waters worked hard, his fingers trembling with impatience. It was clear to him now that if he and his family reached the other side, they would at last find the life which he had hoped to find in Hampstead.

At last, a society in which ecology and socialism went hand in hand. A society of brothers, fighting together to preserve the strange and beautiful structures thrown up by the Crack, and treating each other with decency and respect.

Communism without a dictatorship! And the worst of it was that Waters might be too late. Everyone else had got there first.

He trembled to think of what had got going there in his absence. State Capitalism, perhaps. Or plain old-fashioned capitalism, with notorious evil-doers like Sir Max Bowlby and Joshua McDougall in control of the town planning. Aided and abetted by a fascist like Pierre Courvoisier, the Common Marketeer – Waters gritted his teeth as he toiled on, putting the finishing touches to the vehicle which would carry them safely across.

He had heard the news of the Crack from his son's transistor radio. A sinister, chilling woman's voice had announced after hours of vacuous pop music:

The river is exhausted, the banks are wide,
A new life for women on the Other Side.

And he had risen from his trance of fear at the foot of the new Nash Acropolis to find that his mission awaited him and he might well be too late for it!

Not that Waters saw himself as a saviour. But after all his father had fought in the Spanish Civil War. His great-uncle had gone to Russia in 1919 and come back with an entirely
new life-style, freeing his butler and housemaids from serfdom. An ancestor on his mother's side had been a Tolpuddle martyr. It was clearly Waters's duty, as the revolutionary intellectual he had trained himself to be, to reach the masses and show them the light.

The balloon was nearly ready. Life-jackets from the crashed Jumbo provided ballast. Dead stewardesses' skirts, stitched together by the patient Mrs Waters, waited for the wind. The body of the vessel, which had caused the most trouble, was made up out of carefully assembled portions of fuselage. A kitbox in the pilot's cabin had supplied glue and nails.

‘It's nice to think,' Waters remarked as he worked happily, ‘that the simple necessity – the nail, the pot of glue – is still to be found on board one of these giants of a technological age. And, thanks to these early inventions, we shall soon be airborne.'

‘There's no wind,' Waters's son pointed out.

Little enthusiasm had been shown by the family for the expedition. Even Waters's wife, with all the blandishments of a new life for women on the other side, had shown a stubborn refusal to look optimistically into the future.

‘Pessimism of the will, optimism of the intellect, darling,' Waters breezed. ‘I only hope that when we get there we won't find ourselves too hopelessly individualistic.'

Waters refrained from voicing his real fears. After all, if they found fascism on the other side they could always get into the balloon and take off again. But he knew he had to fight the Robinson Crusoe in him. It would be only too easy to settle down here in Regent's Park, welcome the odd lame duck who had failed to get there to join their commune, and be out of the main course of history altogether. And then who would remember him? Sweating, he worked on.

It seemed as if providence was on their side. After twenty-four hours of a brown, windless sky, dispelled a little by the rays of the sun but sluggish and humid to the point of being unbearable, a delightful little breeze got up just as the balloon was completed.

He lit a fire from driftwood and the Cardin skirts filled out with hot air and billowed proudly. As the wind grew in force
the vehicle moved slightly on the ground, as if impatient to be off. Waters stood back and smiled. He turned to his family, who were sitting in attitudes of dejection amongst the crushed tulips. The wind tugged at their clothes and moaned in the fallen masonry of the Nash terraces.

‘That's what I heard before,' Waters pronounced. ‘That great rushing sound. Remember?'

He knew as he spoke that the rushing sound had been something terrible and supernatural, and not the wind at all – but again there was no point in encouraging despondency. Everything should seem as normal as possible.

With resigned, defeated expressions the Waters family climbed aboard the balloon. The wind had reached gale force by now. Waters, with the gay air of a paterfamilias at a coconut stall, threw out a handful of life-jackets.

The balloon rose with a sudden life of its own.

Several of the children and step-children gave cries of delight. Waters smiled kindly. It was almost too good to be true – they were high above Regent's Park already and had a splendid view of the new London. The B.B.C. building had collapsed into the street: Waters found himself suppressing a smile of pleasure. If only they had accepted his demands to speak on their programmes, to warn of the dangers that lay ahead for mankind! They had invariably chosen pseudo-scientists who had put the problem in far too far-reaching terms. And look at them now! He hoped piously that they had been able to get out alive.

A moment of sadness came with the sight of Billings and Edmonds, where he had been fitted out for private school, no more than a pile of rubble on the ground. And Simpson's! Waters glanced down at his suit and told himself sternly that these were the feelings he must guard against. If necessary, the spinning and weaving skills he and his wife had cultivated in Hampstead would be taught to the masses on the other side.

When they passed over Jermyn Street and Savile Row, however, Waters averted his gaze. Burlington House still stood – thank heavens for that! He wondered vaguely about the National Gallery and the Tate.

Then the direction of the wind changed.

The balloon turned violently to one side, spilling out the family spaniel and discarding the remaining ballast. With a sickening heave they rose higher and higher until they were engulfed by wet clouds. London was no longer visible below. And the wind became whimsical, tossing the frail vessel first in one direction and then another. It seemed, to Waters's fear-crazed brain, to have taken on a life of its own, and to be teasing them with its hidden intentions. Waters thought of the bully at his school thirty years before: a slight lull would be followed by a vigorous shaking; a moment of hope by torment more awful than anything that had preceded it.

Mrs Waters looked at her husband timidly. ‘Are we crossing now?' she asked. Accustomed to rough Channel crossings, she folded her hands and looked with resignation down at her stomach. Waters could be strangely unsympathetic when she was sick.

‘I like it up here!' the youngest Waters child cried. ‘Can we stay up here for ever, Daddy?'

As if in reply to this foolish question, the wind gave a succession of brisk puffs, which reminded Waters of a cherub with his cheeks blown out, a picture that had always entranced him in his nursery. In between the puffs was a sinister stillness – and each time the balloon fell at least twenty feet, only to be buoyed up again before it was too late. Mrs Waters, retaining her gracious poise, was sick over the side.

A great puff swept them once more sideways in a movement that was oddly like skating on a rink made of air. Then the wind dropped. They went down fast. Waters managed a sickly smile, meant to be reassuring. They went faster – the brown clouds thinned, the tops of trees came at them like spears – the grassy earth bulged out to meet them.

When the balloon hit the Serpentine, a flock of naked bathers scattered like flamingoes on to the muddy banks. Putrid water rose in a fan and drenched the Waters as they lay stunned in the belly of their amateurish vehicle.

On tiptoe, the naked men and women peered in at them. Then they began to laugh. The laughter was mad and babyish, as if an infant were being tickled to the point of hysteria.

Waters closed his eyes immediately after opening them. From the thick lips of one of the men hung a much-chewed baby's rattle. A woman of about forty with straggling grey hair was blowing her nose on the back of her hand and rubbing it vigorously on Mrs Waters's blouse. Several of the bathers were crying and moaning with laughter – and in some cases a real crying fit ensued. Worst of all, a trickle of urine ran down the leg of a mournful-looking woman who stood, thumb in mouth, at a short distance from the others.

So this was the new paradise!

Waters gritted his teeth and pulled himself to a half-sitting position. Rousseau was forgotten. Man in his innocent loveliness, waiting only for the guidance of Waters, presented itself to his horrified gaze.

‘Savages!' he groaned.

Slithering down the trampled mud towards them came two black-robed figures. With their long matted hair and heavy, purposeful stride they transported Waters to the nightmares of his childhood, when John the Baptist and Jesus together came to punish him for being naughty. Unconsciously, he prayed for deliverance.

Harcourt and Thirsk stopped as they reached the fringes of their flock.

‘A balloon,' Harcourt announced. ‘Men from another culture, Joe?'

‘A case of womb envy,' Thirsk allowed. He put out a restraining hand as Harcourt was about to dash forward. ‘We must remember the new methods of anthropology,' he went on. ‘We do not appear on the scene to annotate and classify. We observe, and we appreciate a life-style that does not resemble our own but is nevertheless contemporaneous with it. We do not overlay our post-imperialist value-judgements.'

‘Quite so,' Harcourt said faintly. Waters's head and shoulders were just visible in the balloon and he was ashamed to find himself relieved at the fact the man was dressed. So much nakedness had once more caused a longing for order, which only a return to the States could gratify.

‘We will not pronounce these people savages, whatever their ritual may be,' Thirsk intoned. ‘Incest taboos – cannibalism –'

Waters, catching the word cannibalism, shuddered to his feet in the balloon. Instincts normally denied to late twentieth-century bourgeois man crowded in on his feverish brain. The draft-dodgers he had sheltered in his Hampstead home were no longer a proud memory. His uncle George, a conscientious objector in the war, seemed now a ludicrous and pathetic figure. Squaring his shoulders, Waters snarled openly across the crowd at Thirsk.

‘He's certainly violent,' Harcourt whispered nervously. ‘What do we do now?'

Thirsk, who needed violence daily as much as a carnivorous animal needs red meat, bared his teeth in turn at Waters. Thirsk's patients looked wonderingly from one adult to another. Memories of childhood traumas, impossible fights between their parents, aggression towards themselves flooded back. Ned and Mary, who had been in care since the ages of one and two, started to scream first.

‘Who are you?' Waters shouted over the shrieks. ‘Where am I? Is this the other side?'

Thirsk smiled. He said quietly, ‘Yes, this is the other side. Welcome, brother. You must forgive the children. They are only expressing themselves. They need a father to vent their pent-up feelings, and I'm afraid the fact you descended from the skies caused the God/Sun King complex to manifest itself.'

Waters gave a bitter smile. Thirsk's speech was familiar –
Hampstead was crawling with men like this – and he furiously regretted having been impressed by their theories. He had even bought their books! Once more, he bared his teeth in a snarl.

‘We must work together for a new society,' Thirsk went on in his too-reasonable voice. ‘And this is my colleague, Nigel Harcourt.'

Without thinking, Waters extended his hand politely. Another wave of rage overcame him when he saw that such symbols from a dead culture had been discarded and Harcourt only looked him in the eye.

Thirsk's children, amused by Waters's family, started to play housey with the youngest daughter in the roots of a great oak. Peals of laughter drifted towards the adults as the real and artificial children, darting amongst the branches of the fallen tree, exposed themselves to each other and set up fast-changing games of Mummy and Daddy. Mrs Waters, terrified that her children might become corrupted, ran screaming over the grass to put an end to the pre-latency amusements.

Waters took the opportunity to look warily around.

What he saw was Hyde Park. Disbelievingly, he raised his binoculars. It was lucky, he thought with grim satisfaction, that he had had the presence of mind to grab them as he was swept from his Hampstead drawing-room.

In the distance, by the armless Peter Pan statue, a pile of grey-flannelled nannies lay on the ground. Coroneted perambulators heaped behind them, the brightly polished wreckage gleaming in the sun. A handful of babies, their hair still neatly plastered to their heads and their scrubbed faces aglow with pleasure, crawled aimlessly round the bodies of their warders.

There was no doubt about it. The ruined Albert Hall, splendid as the Coliseum, was clearly visible. Millionaire's Row, untouched by the disaster, stood straight and unashamed. By adjusting the focus of the powerful binoculars, Waters could see the deserted Derry and Toms roof garden. He turned to Thirsk with a thin smile.