Greybeard (5 page)

Jim Mole stood on the bridge, pointing his revolver down into the melee. Whether or not he had hit anyone with his first two shots it was impossible for Greybeard to see. As he strained his eyes, Martha came up beside him.

“Mole ever the bad leader!” Greybeard exclaimed. “He’s brutal enough, but he has no sense of how to restore discipline — or if he had, he’s in his dotage now and has forgotten. Firing at people in the boats can only make matters worse.”

Someone was shouting hoarsely to get the boat to the bank. Nobody obeyed, and abandoning all discipline, the two crews fought each other. Senile anger had overwhelmed them again. The Grafton boat, a capacious old motor launch, tipped dangerously as the villagers piled in upon its unlucky occupants. To add to the clamour, others were running up and down the bank, crying advice or threats.

“We’re all mad,” Martha said. “And our bag is packed.”

He flashed her a brief look of love.

With three overlapping splashes, three ancient Graftonites fell or were knocked overboard into the water. Evidently there was some half-formed scheme to appropriate their boat for use as a second ferry; but as the two craft drifted downstream, the motor launch capsized.

White heads bobbed amid white water. A great stupid outcry went up from the bank. Mole fired his revolver into the confusion.

“Damn them all to hell!” Greybeard said. “These moments of unreason — they overcome people so easily. You know that that packman who was through here last week claimed that the people of Stamford had set fire to their houses without cause. And the population of Burford cleared out overnight because they thought the place had been taken over by gnomes! Gnomes — old Jeff Pitt has gnomes on his brain! Then there are all these reports of mass suicides. Perhaps this will be the end — general madness. Perhaps we’re witnessing the end!”

On the stage of the world it was rapidly growing darker. The average age of the population already stood high in the seventies. Each succeeding year saw it rise higher. In a few more years... An emotion not unlike exhilaration filled Greybeard, a sort of wonderment to think he might be present at the end of the world. No: at the end of humankind. The world would go on; man might die, but the earth still yielded up its abundance.

They went back into the house. A suitcase — incongruous item in pigskin that had made a journey down the years to a ruined world — stood on the dry side of the hall.

He looked around him, looked around the room at the furniture they had salvaged from other houses, at Martha’s roughly drawn calendar on one wall, with its year, 2029, written in red, at the fern she grew in an old pot. Eleven years since they arrived here from Cowley with Pitt, eleven years of padding around the perimeter to keep the world out.

“Let’s go,” he said, adding as an afterthought, “do you mind leaving, Martha?”

“I don’t know what I’m letting myself in for, do I? You’d better just take me along.”

“At least there’s a measure of safety here. I don’t know what I’m letting you in for.”

“No weakness now, Mr Greybeard.” On impulse, she added, “May I get Charley Samuels if he is in? He’d miss us most. He ought to come with us.”

He nodded, reluctant to have anyone share his plan, yet reluctant to say no to Martha. She was gone. He stood there, heavy, feeling the weight of the past. Yes, Charley ought to come with them, and not only because the two of them had fought side by side almost thirty years ago. That old battle brought back no emotion; because it belonged to a different age, it cauterized feeling. The young soldier involved in that conflict was a different being from the man standing in this destitute room; he even went by a different name.

A log still smouldered in the grate; but in the hall and on the stairs, which creaked in the long nights as if gnomes were more reality than legend, the smell of damp was as thick as twilight. They would leave this dwelling, and soon it would all decompose like a man’s body, into its separate glues and dusts.

Now he could understand why people set fire to their own homes. Fire was clean; cleanliness was a principle that man had otherwise lost. An angry pleasure roused in him at the thought of moving on, though as ever he showed little of what he felt.

He went briskly to the front door. Martha was stepping over the bricks that marked the old dividing line between their garden and the next. With her was Charley Samuels, his muffler of grey wool around his head and throat, his coat tied tight, a pack on his back, the fox Isaac straining at its leash. His face was the scaly yellow colour of a boiled fowl, but he looked resolute enough. He came up to Greybeard and gripped his hand. Frosty tears stood in his eyes.

Anxious to avoid an emotional scene, Greybeard said, “We need you with us, Charley, to deliver sermons at us.”

But Charley only shook his hand the harder.

“I was just packing. I’m your man, Greybeard. I saw that criminal sinner Mole shoot poor old Betty from the bridge. His day will dawn, his day will dawn.” His words came thickly. “I vowed on that instant that I’d dwell no more in the tents of the unrighteous.”

Greybeard thought of old Betty, nodding over the guardroom fire so recently; by now her stew would be spoiled.

The fox whined and pranced with impatience.

“Isaac seems to agree with you,” Greybeard said, with something of his wife’s attempt at humour. “Let’s go, then, while everyone’s attention is distracted.”

“It won’t be the first time we’ve worked together,” Charley said.

Nodding in agreement, Greybeard turned back into the hall; he did not particularly want any sentimentalizing from old Charley.

He picked up the suitcase his wife had packed. Deliberately, he left the front door of their house open. Martha shut it. She fell into step behind him, with Charley and the dog-fox. They walked down the relapsed road eastwards, and out into the fields. They marched parallel with the riverbank, in the general direction of the horns of the old ruined bridge.

Greybeard took it at a good pace, deliberately not easing up for the older Charley’s sake; Charley might as well see from the start that only in one aspect was this an escape; like every escape, it was also a new test. He drew up sharply when he saw two figures ahead, making for the same break in the thicket as he was.

The sighting was mutual. The figures were those of a man and a woman; the man knotted up his face, snaring his eyes between brow and cheek to see who followed him. Recognition too was mutual.

“Where are you off to, Towin, you old scrounger?” Greybeard asked when his party had caught up. He looked at the wispy old man, cuddling his cudgel and wrapped in a monstrous garment composed of blanket, animal hide, and portions of half a dozen old coats, and then regarded Towin’s wife, Becky. Becky Thomas, in her mid-seventies, was possibly some ten years younger than her husband. A plump, birdlike woman, she carried two small sacks and was dressed in a garment as imposingly disorganized as her husband’s. Her ascendancy over her husband was rarely disputed, and she spoke first now, her voice sharp. “We might ask you lot the same thing. Where are you going?”

“By the looks of things, we’re off on the same errand as you,” Towin said. “We’re getting out of this mouldy concentration camp while we’ve still got legs on us.”

“That’s why we’re wearing these things we’ve got on,” Becky said. “We’ve been preparing to leave for some time. This seemed a good opportunity, with old Mole and the major busy. But we’d never thought you might be hopping it, Greybeard. You’re well in with the major, unlike us folk.”

Ignoring the jibe, Greybeard looked them over carefully.

“Towin’s about right with his ‘concentration camp.’ But where are you thinking of going?”

“We thought we might sort of head south and pick up the old road towards the downs,” Becky said.

“You’d better join us,” Greybeard said curtly. “We don’t know what conditions we may meet. I’ve got a boat provisioned and hidden below the weir. Let’s get moving.”

Hidden in the thicket, drawn up from the river’s edge, sheltered in the remains of a small byre, lay a sixteen-foot clinker-built dinghy. Under Greybeard’s instruction, they lifted it down into the water. Charley and Towin held it steady while he piled their few possessions into it. A previous owner had equipped the craft with a canopy, which they erected. The bows were decked in; the canopy covered most of the rest of the length. Three pairs of paddles lay on the planking of the boat, together with a rudder and tiller. These latter Greybeard fitted into place.

They wasted no time. Their nearness to the settlement was emphasized by the shouting they could still hear upstream.

Martha and Becky were helped into seats. The men climbed in; Greybeard let down the centreboard. Under his direction, Becky took the steering while the rest of them paddled — awkwardly and with a certain amount of guarded cursing from Towin, who took off his beloved broken wristwatch before getting down to work. They manoeuvred themselves into midstream, the current took them, and they began to move.

Over against the farther bank, a patch of colour bobbed. A body was trapped between two chunks of masonry carried down from the broken bridge. Its head was submerged beneath an ever-breaking wave from the little weir; but the orange, green, red, and yellow stripes of the shirt left them in no doubt that it was Sam Bulstow.

An hour later, when they were well clear of Sparcot, Martha began to sing. The song came quietly at first, then she gave her notes words.

“ ‘Here shall he see

No enemy

But winter and rough weather...’ ”

“Towin, you’re right with your remark about concentration camps,” she broke off to say. “Everything at Sparcot was getting so worn and — overused, grimy and overused. Here, it could never be like that.” She indicated the growth drooping over the bank of the river.

“Where are you planning that we should go?” Charley asked Greybeard.

That was something he had never thought of fully. The dinghy had represented no more than his store of hope. But without cogitation he said, “We will make our way down the Thames to the estuary. We can improvise ourselves a mast and a sail later, and get to the sea. Then we will see what the coast looks like.”

“It would be good to see the sea again,” Charley said soberly.

“I had a summer holiday at — what was the name of the place? It had a pier — Southend,” Towin said, snugging down into his collar as he paddled. “I’d think it would be pretty sharpish cold at this time of the year — it was bad enough then. Do you think the pier could still be standing? Very pretty pier it was.”

“You daft thing, it will be tumbled down years ago,” his wife said.

The fox stood with its paws on the side of the boat, its sharp muzzle picking up scents from the bank. It looked ready for anything.

Nobody mentioned Scots or gnomes or stoats. Martha’s brief song was still with them, and they dared be nothing but optimistic.

After half an hour, they were forced to rest. Towin was exhausted, and they all found the unaccustomed exercise tiring. Becky tried to take over the paddle from Martha, but she was too unskilled and impatient to wield it effectively. After a while Charley and Greybeard shared the work between them. The sound of blade meeting water hung heavily between the bushes that fringed the river, and mist began to veil the way before them. The two women huddled together on the seat by the tiller.

“I’m still a townswoman at heart,” Martha said. “The lure of the countryside is strongest when I’m away from it. Unfortunately, the alternatives to the countryside are growing fewer. Where are we going to stop for the night, Algy?”

“We’ll be pulling in as soon as we sight a good spot,” Greybeard said. “We must get well away from Sparcot, but we don’t want to overtake Gypsy Joan’s crew from Grafton. Keep a good heart. I’ve some provisions stored in the boat, as well as what we’ve brought with us.”

“You’re a deep one,” Towin said. “You ought to have shot Jim Mole and taken over Sparcot, man. The people would have backed you.”

Greybeard did not reply.

The river unfolded itself with a series of bends, a cripple in a rack of sedges making its way eastwards to liberty. When a bridge loomed ahead, they ceased paddling and drifted towards it. It was a good Georgian structure with a high arch and sound parapet; they snuggled into the bank on the upstream side of it. Greybeard took up his rifle.

“There should be habitation near a bridge,” he said. “Stay here while I go and look around.”

“I’ll come with you,” Charley said. “Isaac can stay in the boat.”

He gave the anxious beast’s leash to Martha, who fondled the fox to keep it quiet. The two men stepped out of the boat. They climbed up the bank and crouched among rotting plants.

Behind them, an overripe winter’s sun blinked at them from among trees. Except for the sun, distorted by the bare trunks through which it shone, all else was told in tones of grey. A mist like a snowdrift hung low across the land. Before them, beyond the littered road that crossed the bridge, was a large building. It seemed to stand on top of the mist without touching the ground. Under a muddle of tall chimney stacks, it lay ancient and wicked and without life; the sun was reflected from an upper windowpane, endowing it with one lustreless eye. When nothing moved but a scatter of rooks winging overhead, the men heaved themselves up onto the road, and crossed to the cover of a hedgerow.