Cold War in a Country Garden
Page 1
Cold War in a Country Garden
Lindsay Gutteridge
Contents
Cold War in a Country Garden
PART ONE
1
2
3
PART TWO
1
2
3
4
5
PART THREE
1
2
3
4
5
PART FOUR
1
2
3
4
5
copyright
To Annie and to Richard
And now to the Abbyss I pass
Of that unfathomable Grass,
Where men like Grashoppers appear,
But Grashoppers are Gyants there:
They, in their squeaking Laugh, contemn
Us as we walk more low then them:
And, from the Precipices tall
Of the green spir’s, to us do call.
(Andrew Marvell)
PART ONE
1
Mathew Dilke stood in the June sun and looked up at his rockery. The sun had burned his forehead and shoulders a bright pink; the rest of his naked body had the pallor of a mill-worker on a day trip to the sea.
He was a strongly built man, like an all-in wrestler, with bunchy shoulders and a short neck; agile in spite of a thick waist.
Age: thirty-seven.
Hair: receding.
His most dramatic feature: a nose like a scimitar jutting out of a broad face, very thin with flared nostrils. It gave his face a touch of nervous arrogance.
The little alpines had rooted well since he had planted them in the spring, the pink flowerettes on the London Pride had turned white and were falling like confetti.
The lawn needed mowing; in his absence it had got out of hand. He strolled along the base of the rockery towards the western end where the hollyhocks grew; as he looked up he saw a movement on a leaf. An ant which had been rapidly moving along the leaf edge suddenly stopped; two other ants appeared beside the first motionless insect. Dilke felt uneasy, the creatures seemed to be observing him; he decided to move away, and as he did so the leaf swung and tilted slightly with the weight of more ants which appeared on its edge. As if on command they turned, ran to where the leaf joined the main stem of the plant and started to descend its thick stalk. Dilke looked up at the vast broken slopes of the rockery, tracing with his eyes a route through its maze of cliff-like rocks and steep slopes.
He took the first slope at a hard run, his impetus carrying him up to the first rock. He caught the trailing strands of a crawling rock plant and pulled himself up the stone face.
He ran and climbed steadily towards the summit where the rockery met the lawn, his feet loosened the soil, tumbling it down the slopes in small avalanches. Climbing on to the topmost rock he sat for a moment to regain his breath. Far below him he saw the ants running in line, coming very fast.
They were about thirty minutes behind him. He got to his feet and turned and ran into the lawn. Daisies grew profusely and he ran through the forest of their stalks, their heads forming an almost continuous canopy above him; the sunlight filtered down through the white petals throwing a luminous light over the green moss on which he travelled.
He came to the first crazy-paving stone and climbed up on to it. Now that he had left the shelter of the lawn a hard, dry wind struck him, making his patches of sunburn smart. He looked back towards the rockery, searching for his pursuers, but nothing moved except the tossing sea of daisy heads. He turned and looked along the paved pathway that led to the compost bin behind the laurels. The paving stretched before him, each stone separated from its neighbour by a shallow valley. He set off at a fast jog, the smooth stone surface bouncing the sunlight up into his squinting eyes.
Down into the first valley; up on to the second stone with a glance back for the ants.
Down into the second valley; glance back.
Third valley; as he plunged down its side he disturbed a Cabbage White which was sunbathing out of the breeze. It went up like a mad helicopter, the wind from its huge powdery wings tossing the grass blades, and Dilke slipped and fell among a shower of dislodged wing scales; a cross-wind caught the butterfly and carried it out of sight over the valley edge.
When he climbed on to stone number three and looked back, the first of the ants were leaping into view. They streamed on to the first paving stone, travelling more quickly than Dilke, but he stuck to his even jog. When he ran on to the last of the crazy-paving slabs, they were only one stone behind him. He increased his speed and when he came to the sloping ground which lay in the shadow of the laurels he sprinted between the hills of trash which had spilled from the compost bin; across potato peelings, round squashed lemons, and amongst a litter of broken eggshells he found the drug capsule. It lay in two halves, one half filled by a drop of water. He emptied it and stepped in, pulling the second half over his head, tugging and twisting to make a tight friction fit. The moulded edges were imperfectly finished and sufficiently rough to give him hand-holds. Assembled, it was almost three-eighths of an inch long, giving ample room to move and breathe.*
* Dilke stands below Marvell—page vii
The first ant arrived just as he finished making the capsule safe. He could see it clearly through the transparent side of the container and to Dilke it seemed as big as a pony. He crouched fearfully as it ran its twitching antennae over the capsule and bit at the curved surface with its massive toothed jaws. Then Dilke was surrounded by ants, their dark blood-red armour gleaming, their articulated legs rattling together as they scrambled around and over the capsule. It rocked and rolled violently, throwing Dilke from side to side. The container’s smooth, pliable and slightly soapy surface defeated all their efforts to get at the creature inside. They hoisted it up and started back the way they had come. Then instead of carrying him north along the paved way they struck off to the west on a trail through the lawn.
At first the trail was deserted, but Dilke saw from the interior of his jerking vehicle that more and more ants were using the track, until at last they joined a main thoroughfare. Here the ants travelled in both directions; those going the same way as Dilke’s captors were burdened with loot: leaves, sticks, pieces from the carcases of larger insects, living green aphids. Those going the other way were unencumbered, travelling at a run.
Suddenly they went from the glaring sunlight into darkness. Dilke felt the walls of the capsule turn cold and wet with condensation, he wiped it away and as his eyes became accustomed to the gloom he realized that he was being carried down a long sloping tunnel, deep into the earth. A soft, bluish light lit the passage and, when at last it widened, the phosphorescent glow illuminated a vast open chamber. Its floor was thronged with ants, its walls and arched roof were covered with a cellular pattern, alive with ants. He was in a City of Ants.
His presence in the capsule stirred the ants near him into a frenzy of excitement and they tried to break through the wall to attack him. He was thrown dizzily about inside the capsule but once more the ants were unable to break in. When they gave up their attempts the capsule had rolled into a short cul-de-sac which branched off a passage leading from the City Hall. As the hours passed cold struck through the walls of the capsule and Dilke shifted his bruised limbs restlessly to keep warm. His thoughts, fixed on his desolate future, were interrupted by the sounds of shuffling feet on the floor of the passageway and the scraping of insect bodies pushing along its walls. He sat up and rubbed away the mist on the inside of the capsule with his forearm. Passing the end of the cul-de-sac was a herd of green aphids; they trudged stolidly
along, herded by a small number of ant workers. When the aphid cows came to a stop, the ants moved amongst them delicately milking them of their honey dew, gently stroking the cows with their feelers and eagerly licking up the drops of fluid. The milkers went after a while leaving the aphids crowded in the passageway, a few of them wandered into the dead-end passage and stood near Dilke’s capsule. After some hesitation and encouraged by his growing hunger, Dilke forced open the capsule and stepped out.
It was bitterly cold. There was a strange mixture of smells on the air, part chemical, part decayed flesh and part the sickly sweet smell of aphid milk. The creatures appeared to be docile and not alarmed by Dilke; they came waist-high and he walked quietly amongst them, mimicking the actions of the ants, and was rewarded by gifts of the sweet excreta. Its flavour, though unlike any thing Dilke had ever tasted, was not unpleasant. It filled his belly and he returned satisfied to his refuge.
Two things had impressed Mathew Dilke about this micro-world: the high wind which prevailed above ground, and the noise underground. It was like an underwater recording of marine life which he had once heard: groans, roars, clicks, throbbing bumping sounds; combined with a high-pitched fluctuating noise like electronic soundwaves.
The subterranean life gave few indications of the passing of time, but Dilke thought he detected a pattern of activity. The aphid herds came and went, the ants surged like city workers back and forth along the passageway, the volume of noise rose and fell.
There was no future for Dilke in this byeway in an ants’ nest.
He waited till the noise of insect traffic died down and when the pipings and clickings had stopped he opened the capsule and crept to the main passage. It was deserted. From his right came a humming sound, to his left the tunnel sloped upwards. He walked to the left slowly and fearfully now that he was without protection. He had entered a labyrinth of tunnels and he decided always to take the route which led upwards. After an hour of slow progress the light grew fainter and fainter until he could see nothing before him. The ground beneath his feet became rough and littered with stones and he could no longer feel the walls with his hands.
Dilke felt utterly weary. The stress of his experiences, his inadequate diet, and now the feeling of being entombed without light and without hope of escape, crushed his spirits. He closed his eyes against the blackness, his head fell back, his arms hung loosely at his sides. After a while he opened his eyes; above his head he saw the winking lights of the Plough and low down on the faintly defined horizon was the North Star.
2
He had escaped. Above him, swaying slightly, were the black silhouettes of leaves; as his eyes became used to the dim light he saw a rough track leading downhill. He ran down the path intent on getting far away from the nest before morning brought the ant-hill to life. He ran until the first stirring of the morning breeze moved the grass blades at the side of the track and the cold light of dawn crept up from the horizon. He heard a distant churring and singing of cicadas in the rockery and was startled by the same song suddenly magnified a thousand times; he leapt away from the sound to the side of the track. Through the morning mist he saw the creature, as big as a bullock, which made the noise.
The cicada crouched, vigorously rasping out its deafening song. Curious to see how the creature made the noise, Dilke moved nearer to it. The cicada stopped in mid-song, appeared to sense the man’s approach and suddenly, with a convulsive movement of its hind legs, it vanished into the lightening sky.
A clump of hollyhocks grew at the side of the track, soaring above Dilke like Eiffel towers. He decided that he had run far enough, climbed up the stalk of a plant, seated himself astride a jutting stem with his back against the trunk and waited for the sun. A ground mist lay across the lawn and the leaves below him were dotted with drops of dew like crystal igloos. He considered his situation.
This was a jungle peopled with creatures more savage than those known to man. If he was to survive he must find shelter, a place he could barricade: any hole or corner would not do.
The light of the rising sun slanted across the lawn, dispersing the mist. Its rays were caught in the domes of dew and split up into shimmering rainbows. Dilke could see all his garden, some of it still shadowed by the lime trees at the end of the lawn. He climbed farther up the hollyhock; the landscape lay drowsily under the June sun. He looked beyond his garden to the allotment. It lay on a slope and his eyes travelled over an area of rough fallow ground beyond which a planting of carrots had gone to seed, a green feathery plantation running up the slope and over the curve of the horizon like a tropical forest. And towering above the horizon was the angular shape of a garden shed. A tangle of honeysuckle crawled up its side and was heaped on top; a blue heat-haze softened its outlines and the sun glittered on the fallen blossoms which lay like snow in the corrugations of the sloping roof.
The exertions of climbing and a substance oozing from the pores of the plant made Dilke hot and sticky and he bathed in dew which had gathered in a watery blob at the junction of veins in a leaf. He pressed his hand through the surface tension of the drop into its interior and his body slid in after his hand and arm. He sat down inside it and rubbed his body briskly; it was cold but invigorating, like sitting inside a balloon filled with ice-water. After his bath he looked down from the edge of the leaf. Traffic was in full swing along the ants’ trail that ran near the foot of the hollyhock; a spider dropped past the leaf on which Dilke stood in a fast controlled fall at the end of its thread; a drift of dandelion clocks floated slowly past, some of them twirling singly, some of them waltzing together in interlocked groups. One of the clocks hovered over Dilke, then slowly dropped in the still air above the leaf. The heavy seed-pod, suspended from a white head of delicate hollow filaments which gave it buoyancy, came swinging down. Dilke shoved the pod away. It hit the leaf and dragged along its surface, the hooks on the pod leaving raw green tracks behind them.
Again Dilke fixed his attention on the distant shed. In it there would be manmade things, amongst them he might find some sort of container in which he could live. Dilke made the decision: the shed looked about half a day’s march away, if he started now he would be there before night. He took a long drink, descended the plant, waited till there was a break in the flow of ant traffic and ran across the track into the broken fallow ground.
He moved at a fast walking pace up the long slope to the wall of green foliage which marked the edge of the carrot plantation. The surface was very rough, with huge clods of earth and stones and a multitude of gullies that ran all ways. He travelled along the bottom of the gullies to conceal himself from foraging ants which he had seen marching on the horizon. At last he came out of this rough terrain; before him stretched smoother ground at the other side of which lay the plantation.
He set off across the plain leaving a low cloud of dust behind him.
The smoothness of the ground was broken by craters. When Dilke came to the first one he skirted its edge. Turning his head to see into the smooth-sided crater he saw a movement out of the corner of his eye: it was an ant following him at a sharp hunting trot. It too left a dust trail behind it; it too had come out of the rough ground from the north. It must have been tracking him for some time. Dilke ran round the curve of a crater, picked up a rock as big as his fist and threw it at the beast in the way one would seek to discourage a big dog. But this only provoked it: with a quick flourish of its antennae it jumped towards him over the edge of the crater, ran down the slope, then clambered up towards him. The crater was faced with small loose rocks and the ant lost its foot-hold. It slid back to the bottom of the hole. Suddenly, like a burst from a volcanic geyser, there was a flurry of sand in the crater bottom. The ant’s movements became frantic: it fell and turned about, the sun flashing on its churning legs and armoured carapace. From the centre of the crater came two huge, hooked claws and part of the head of a submerged monster. The oiled, metallic pincers snapped shut on the desperate ant; head, claws, ant—all sank into th
e sand. There was a sound like that of sticks being broken, a last tiny flurry in the sand, and the sides of the crater became still and smooth. For a time Dilke stood transfixed. Then he ran towards the plantation, making wide detours around craters on the way.
He flung himself panting under the first plant. The dust which covered him from head to foot was streaked with sweat. His throat was parched, his forehead and shoulders were burnt by the sun but his mind kept returning to the sights and sounds which he had seen. Gradually his breath came more easily and after he had lain for some time looking up at the sky through the fronds of the carrots he resumed his march. He discovered that the carrots were planted in parallel lines. The lines ran north and south and he walked down one of the avenues. From the brow of the hill he saw the shed through the carrot tops, its wooden walls silvery grey with age, its green, panelled door taken from a demolished house. The allotment owner had died last year. His son-in-law was not a gardener and he had nailed two rough-sawn deal planks across the door to keep out children.
At last Dilke walked out of the plantation. The shed filled his whole field of vision; the surface of the huge door pitted with burst paint blisters, the new planks a raw yellow in the light of the evening sun.
He climbed the threshold, passed under the door and went inside. The light was dim, a gale rushed under the door and swept the floor clean of debris. Along the walls and in the corners of the shed were piled the collected tools and litter of a lifetime. Hoes, rakes, spades, a fishing-rod, a bicycle pump, stacks of plant-pots. In the fading light he could see shelves stacked with boxes and jam-jars. A bunch of rusting keys and hanks of raffia hung from nails. The light was dying fast and the roof overhead was like a black sky, with stars of light shining through nail holes in the corrugated sheets. He started down the long perspective of the plank floor looking for a home. In the corner, lying at an angle on a pile of sacks, was an old wooden box, its surface covered with inlaid veneers, cracked and falling away. A glint of yellow near the top caught his eye: recessed into the box was a brass lock, the keyhole was covered by a heavy, sliding door.