Greybeard (31 page)

“This is terrible!” Venice stood in the middle of the room, clasping her forehead. “What seems so crazy to me is to think that half a dozen rotten bombs could do anything so — so catastrophic. It isn’t as if they let them off on Earth! How can these damned van Allen layers be so unstable?”

“A Russian Professor Zilinkoff suggested at the conference that the belts may indeed be unstable and easily activated by slight radioactive overloads from either the sun or the Earth. He suggested that the same contractions that have hit us now also took place at the end of the Cretaceous Era; it’s a bit fanciful, but it would explain the sudden extinction of the ancient orders of land, sea, and air dinosaurs. They died off because their gonads were rendered ineffective, as ours are now.”

“How long before we recover? I mean, we will recover?” Venice said.

“I hate to think I’m like a dinosaur,” Patricia said, conscious of Keith’s gaze upon her.

“There’s one ray of comfort,” Keith said brightly, holding up a finger of promise to them. “If this sterility stunt is going on all over the world, it won’t half be a relief to countries like China and India. For years they’ve been groaning about their population multiplying like rabbits! Now they’ll have a chance to thin the ranks a bit. Five years — or let’s be generous and say ten years — without any more kids born, and I reckon that a lot of the world’s troubles can be sorted out before the next lot start coming!”

Patricia sprawled on the sofa beside him, clutching his lapel.

“Oh, Keith darling,” she sobbed, “you’re such a comfort always!”

They were so engrossed in talk that they did not hear Dr MacMichael’s knock at the front door. He hesitated there a moment, hearing their voices within and reluctant to enter. Keith Barratt had left the door slightly ajar. He pushed it open and stepped dubiously into the hall.

On the stairs, half hidden in the darkness, a small figure in pyjamas confronted him.

“Hello, Toad, what are you doing there?” the doctor asked affectionately. As he went over to Algy, the boy retreated a step or two and held up a warning finger.

“Ssh, don’t make a noise, Doctor! They’re talking very seriously in there. I don’t know what it’s about but I should think it’s about me. I did something awful today.”

“You’d better get up to bed, Algernon. Come on, upstairs with you! I’ll come too.” He clutched the child’s hand and they went up the rest of the stairs together. “Where’s young Jock Bear? Is he creeping round the house without a dressing gown too?”

“He’s already in bed, for all the good he is. I thought you were Daddy. That’s why I crept downstairs. I was going to say I was sorry to him for what I did wrong.”

MacMichael stared at the toes of his shoes. “I’m sure he’d forgive you, Toad, whatever it was — and I don’t suppose it was anything too terrible you did.”

“Daddy and I think it was pretty terrible. That’s why it’s important for me to see him. Do you know where he is?”

The old doctor did not reply for a moment, as he stood by the boy’s bed watching him climb between the sheets with the bear in tartan pyjamas. Then he said, “Algernon, you are getting a big lad. So you mustn’t mind too much if you don’t see your father for — well, for a little while. There will be other men about, and we will help you if we can.”

“All right — but I must see him again soon, because he’s going to teach me to do the Four Ace trick. I’ll teach you when I’ve learned, if you like.”

Algy snuggled himself down between the sheets until there was little more than a tuft of hair, a nose, and a pair of eyes showing. He looked hard at the doctor, standing there anxious and familiar in an old raincoat.

“You know I’m your friend, Algernon, don’t you?”

“You must be, I suppose, because I heard Mummy tell Aunt Venny that you saved my life. I almost ran out of resources, didn’t I? But would you like to do something real important for me?”

“Tell me what it is, and I’ll try.”

“Would you think I was mad if I whispered?”

Dr MacMichael went close to the bed and bent his head over the pillow.

“Shoot, pal,” he said.

“You know that bald girl, Martha Broughton? We were going to live next to her till I mucked things up. Do you think you could make Daddy have her round here so that I could play with her?”

“I promise I’ll do that, Algy. I promise.”

“She’s awfully bald — I mean
really
bald, but I like her. Perhaps girls are better without hair.”

Gently, the doctor said, “I’ll see she comes round here before the end of the week, because I like her very much too.”

“Gosh, you’re a pretty good doctor. I’ll show you I’m grateful — I won’t bust any more of your thermometers.”

Dr MacMichael smoothed the hair on the boy’s head and left the room. He waited at the top of the stairs to master his emotions, straightened his tie, and then went down to tell the others about the car crash.

Chapter Seven

The River: The End

Wildlife swarmed back across the earth as abundantly as it had ever done. In its great congress, there were a few phyla absent; but in numbers the multitude was as rich as it had ever been.

The earth had great powers of replenishment, and would have as long as the sun maintained its present output of energy. It had supported many different kinds of life through many different ages. As far as that outcast spit of the European mainland called the British Isles was concerned, its flora and fauna had never entirely regained the richness they enjoyed before the Pleistocene. During that period, the glaciers descended over much of the Northern Hemisphere, driving life southwards before them. But the ice retreated again; life followed it back towards its northern strongholds. Towards the end of the Pleistocene, like the opening of a giant hand, a stream of life poured across the lands that had recently been barren. The ascendancy of man had only momentarily affected the copiousness of this stream.

Now the stream was a great tide of petals, leaves, fur, scales, and feathers. Nothing could stem it, though it contained its own balances. Every summer saw its weight increasing as it followed paths and habits established, in many cases, in distant ages before Homo sapiens made his appearance.

The summer nights were brief. They retained something of the translucence of the day, losing the last of their warmth only as light seeped once more across the landscape, so that the sigh of cool air that brought dawn ruffled the pelts of animals and the feathers of innumerable birds as they woke to one more day of living.

The rousing of these creatures provided the first sounds to be heard every morning in a tent pitched so near the water that it was reflected on the surface.

When Greybeard and Martha and Charley Samuels rose at this time, it was to find themselves on the edge of a widening Thames dissolved in mist. The new day drew from the land a haze into which a myriad ducks scattered. As the day advanced, the mist became orange-tinted before it thinned, to reveal the ducks flying overhead or sailing in convoy on the burnished water.

Before the mists cleared, wings whispering overhead suggested the gathering of an invisible host. Geese, heading for their feeding grounds, moved over with a hollow sound that contrasted with the clat of flying swans. Smaller birds flew at higher levels. There were birds of prey, too, eagles and falcons that were comparative strangers to the region.

Some of these birds had travelled over vast tracts of land to feed here, from the little teal to the shelduck, strutting with his striking plumage through the mud. Many of the migrants had been forced here by adamant necessity: their little warm-blooded morsels of fledglings, with a high metabolic rate to sustain, would starve to death if left without food for eight hours; so their parents had flown to more northerly latitudes, where the hours of daylight at this time of the year lingered long over the feeding grounds.

The humans were of all the living things in this region of mist and water the least bound to such natural necessities. But they, unlike the proliferating bird life about them, had no instinctual means of determining their direction, and within three days of leaving Oxford, their journey towards the river mouth was snared in a maze of waterways.

Their way might be difficult to find, but a sense of leisure filled them, and they felt no compulsion to get out of an area so abundantly stocked with food. Herons, geese, and duck went into a series of soups and stews at which Martha excelled herself. Fish seemed to ask only to be pulled from the river.

In these activities they had few human rivals. Those few came mostly from the north side of the flood, from the settlements that still remained outside Oxford. They saw stoats hunting again, though not in packs, and an animal they took to be a polecat, making off through reeds with a mallard in its jaws. They saw otter and coypu and, at the place where they camped on the third night, the spoor of some sort of deer that had come down to the water’s edge to drink.

Here, next morning, Greybeard and Martha stood over their fire poaching fish with mint and cress, when a voice behind them said, “I’m inviting myself in for breakfast!”

Floating towards them over the water, his oars raised and dripping water from the rowlocks, was Jeff Pitt in a much-mended rowing boat.

“Fine friends you turn out to be,” he said across the intervening water. “I go out on a little hunting expedition with some friends. When I come back to Oxford, I find old Charley’s gone and his landlady’s heartbroken. I go up to Christ Church, and you two have disappeared. It’s a fine way to treat me!”

Embarrassed by the sense of grievance they felt behind his words, Martha and Greybeard went to the water’s edge to greet him. When he had found that they had actually left Oxford, Pitt had guessed the direction they would take; he told them that as a sign of his own cleverness as they helped secure his boat. He climbed stiffly out and shook them both by the hand, which he managed to do without looking them straight in the face.

“You can’t leave me behind, you know,” he said. “We belong together. It may be a long time ago, Greybeard, but I’ve not forgotten you could have killed me that time when I was supposed to shoot you.”

Greybeard laughed. “The idea never even entered my head.”

“Ah, well, it’s because it didn’t that I’m shaking your hand now. What you cooking there? Now I’m with you, I’ll see you don’t starve.”

“We were intending to fob off starvation with salmon this morning, Jeff,” Martha said, hitching her skirt to squat over the open stove. “These must be the first salmon caught in the Thames for two hundred years.”

Pitt folded his tattered arms and looked askance at the fish. “I’ll catch you bigger ’uns than that, Martha. You need me about the place — older we get, more we need friends. Where’s old Holy Joe Samuels, then?”

“Just taking a morning walk. He’ll be back, and horrified to see you standing here, no doubt.”

When Charley returned and finished slapping Pitt on the back, they sat down to eat their meal. Slowly the heat mist thinned, revealing more and more of their surroundings. The world expanded, showing itself full of sky and reflections of sky.

“You see, you could be lost here easy enough,” Pitt said. Now the first pleasure of reunion was over, he lapsed into his customary grumbling tone. “Some of the lads I know back in Oxford used to be freebooters and sort of water-highwaymen around this region, until they became too old and turned to a bit of quiet poaching instead. They still talk about the old days, and they were telling me that there was a lot of fierce fights went on here some years back. They call this the Sea of Barks, you know.”

“I heard them speak of it in Oxford,” Charley said. “They say it’s still spreading, but there are fewer folk to chart it now.”

Pitt wore two old jackets and a pair of trousers. He felt in one of the pockets of the inner jacket and produced a square of paper, which he unfolded and handed to Greybeard. Greybeard recognized the paper; it was one of the broadsheets distributed during the last exhibition of the Balliol children. On its back, a map was drawn in ink.

“It shows you what this region’s like now, according to these pals of mine, who explored most of it,” Pitt said. “Can you understand it?”

“It’s a good map, Jeff. Although there are names missing here, it’s easy to identify the old features. Barks must be a corruption of the old Berkshire.”

Martha and Charley peered at the map with him. Marked on the southern tip of the Sea of Barks was Goring. There, on either side of the old river, two ranges of hills, the Chilterns and the Berkshire Downs, met. The river had become blocked at that point and, rising, had flooded all the land north of it, where a sort of triangular trough was formed between the two ridges of hills and the Cotswolds.

Charley nodded. “Although it’s far from being a sea, it’s easily twenty miles across from east to west, and perhaps fifteen the other way. Plenty of room to get lost on it.”

Martha traced the edge of the so-called sea with a finger and said, “A lot of towns must have been submerged in it, Abingdon and Wallingford among them. This makes Meadow Lake appear a mere pond! If the water level is still rising, I suppose in time the two stretches of water will meet, and then Oxford itself will sink.”