Greybeard

by Brian Wilson Aldiss

  “The fifties group are still pretty youthful,” Greybeard told himself, bracing his shoulders. And despite all the hardships, and the ghastliness that had gone before, there were plenty of spry sixty-year-olds about. Oh, it would take a few years yet before… But the fact remained that he was one of the youngest men on earth.

  No, that wasn’t quite true. Persistent rumour had it that an occasional couple was still bearing children; and in the past there had been cases… There had even been the pathetic instance of Eve, in the early days of Sparcot, who had borne a girl to Major Trouter and then disappeared. A month later, both she and her baby were found dead by a wood-gathering expedition… But apart from that, you never saw anyone young. The accident had been thorough. The old had inherited the earth.

  Mortal flesh now wore only the gothic shapes of age. Death stood impatiently over the land, waiting to count his last few pilgrims.

  …And from all this, I do derive a terrible pleasure, Greybeard admitted, looking down at the impaled smile in the photograph. They could tear me apart before I’d confess, but somewhere it is there, a little stoaty thing that makes of a global disaster a personal triumph. Perhaps it’s this fool attitude I’ve always taken that any experience can be of value. Perhaps it’s the reassurance to be derived from knowing that even if you live to be a hundred, you’ll never be an old fogey: you’ll always be the younger generation.

  He beat out the silly thought that had grown in him so often. Yet it remained smouldering. His life had been lucky, wonderfully lucky, for all mankind’s ill luck.

  Not that mankind suffered alone. All mammals were nearly as hard hit. Dogs had ceased to whelp. The fox had almost died out; its habit of rearing its young in earths had doubtless contributed to its ultimate recovery — that and the abundance of food that came its way as man’s grip on the land slackened. The domestic pig had died out even before the dogs, though perhaps as much because it was everywhere killed and eaten recklessly as because it failed to litter. The domestic cat and the horse proved as sterile as man; only its comparatively large number of offspring per litter had allowed the cat to survive. It was said to be multiplying in some districts again; pedlars visiting Sparcot spoke of plagues of feral cats here and there.

  Bigger members of the cat tribe had also suffered. All over the world, the story in the early nineteen-eighties had been the same: the creatures of the world were incapable of reproduction. The earth — such was the apocalyptic nature of the event that it was easy even for an agnostic to think of it in biblical terms — the earth failed to bring forth its increase. Only the smaller creatures that sheltered in the earth itself had escaped wholly unscathed from that period when man had fallen victim of his own inventions.

  Oh, it was an old tale now, and nearly half a century separated the milk teeth smiling in the photograph from the corrupt grin that let in frost out in the sheep shed.

  Greybeard shut the drawer with a slam. Something had disturbed the sheep. They were bleating in fright. He had a superstitious picture of the dead walking, and blocked it off. Some sort of animal predator would be a more likely explanation of the disturbance. He went into the kitchen and peered through the window. The sky was lighter than he had expected. A chip of moon shone, giving frail shape to the nearby trees. Putting an ear to the draught pouring through the broken pane, Greybeard could hear the sheep trotting in their field. Frost glittered on the pinched sedges outside the door; as he looked at its tiny lost reflections, he heard the creak-crunch of footsteps moving across a stretch of grass. He raised his rifle. It was impossible to get out without making a noise opening the back door.

  The footsteps came nearer; a man, all shadow, passed the window. “Halt or I fire!” Greybeard called. Though the man had disappeared from his line of sight, he reckoned on the shock of discovery freezing him still.

  “Is that you, Greybeard?” The voice came hollow from outside. “Is that you, Greybeard? Keep your itchy finger off that trigger.”

  Even as he recognized the voice, Martha came to his side, clutching her coat about her. He thrust the rifle into her hands.

  “Hold this and keep me covered,” he whispered. Aloud, he said, “Come in front of the window with your hands up.”

  A man appeared in silhouette, his fingers stretched as if to rake the sky. He gave a cackling laugh. Martha swung the rifle to cover him. Greybeard flung open the door and motioned the man in, stepping back to let him pass. The old poacher, Jeff Pitt, walked into the kitchen and lowered his arms.

  “You still want to buy that otter, Greybeard?” he asked, grinning his old canine grin. Greybeard took his gun and put an arm round Martha’s frail shoulders. He kicked the door shut and surveyed Pitt unsmilingly.

  “It must be you who stole the provisions from my boat. Why did you follow us? Have you a boat of your own?”

  “I didn’t swim, you know!” Pitt’s gaze ran restlessly about the room as he spoke. “I’m better at hiding my little canoe than you were! I’ve watched you for weeks, loading up your boat. There isn’t much goes on at Sparcot I don’t know about. So today, when you did your flit, I thought I’d chance running into the gnomes and come and see how you were all getting on.”

  “As you see, we survive, and you nearly got yourself shot. What are you planning to do now you’re here, Jeff?”

  The old man blew on his fingers and moved over to the range, where some heat still lingered. As his custom was, he looked neither of them straight in the face.

  “I thought I might come with you as far as Reading, if you were going that far. And if your good lady wife would have my company.”

  “If you come with us, you must give any weapons you possess to my husband,” Martha said sharply. Cocking an eyebrow to see if he surprised them, Pitt drew an old service revolver from his coat pocket.

  Deftly, he removed the shells from it and handed it across to Greybeard. “Since you’re so mad keen on my company, the pair of you,” he said, “I’ll give you some of my knowledge as well as my gun. Before we all settle down to a cosy night’s rest, let’s be smart and drive them sheep in here, out of harm’s way. Don’t you know what a bit of luck you’ve chanced on? Them sheep are worth a fortune apiece. Further down river, at somewhere like Reading, we should be little kings on account of them — if we don’t get knocked off, of course.”

  Greybeard slipped the revolver into his pocket. He looked a long time at the wizened face before him. Pitt gave him a wet-chinned grin of reassurance.

  “You get back into bed, sweet,” Greybeard said to Martha. “We’ll get the sheep. I’m sure Jeff has a good idea.”

  She could see how much it went against the grain for him to acknowledge the worth of an idea he felt he should have thought of himself. She gave him a closed eye look and went through into the other room as the men left the house. The mutton fat spluttered in the lamp. Wearily, as she lay down again on the improvised bed — it might have been midnight, but she guessed that in an hypothetical world of clocks it would be accounted not yet nine p.m. — the face of Jeff Pitt came before her.

  His face had been moulded until it expressed age as much as personality; it had been undermined by the years, until with its wrinkled cheeks and ruined molars it became a common face, closely resembling, say, Towin Thomas’s, and many another countenance that had survived the same storms. These old men, in a time bereft of proper medical and dental care, had taken on a facial resemblance to other forms of life, to wolves, to apes, or to the bark of trees. They seemed, Martha thought, to merge increasingly with the landscape they inhabited.

  It was difficult to recall the less raggle-taggle Jeff Pitt she had known when their party first established itself at Sparcot. Perhaps he had been less cocky then, under the fever of events. His teeth had been better, and he wore his army uniform. He had been a gunman then, if an ineffectual one, not a poacher. Since then, how much he had changed!

  But perhaps they had all changed in that period. It was eleven years, and the world had been a
very different place.

  II. Cowley

  They had been lucky ever to get to Sparcot. During the last few days in Cowley, the factory suburb of Oxford, she had not thought they would escape at all. For that was the autumn of the dusty year 2018, when cholera lent its hand to the other troubles that plagued mankind.

  Martha was almost a prisoner in the Cowley flat in which she and Greybeard — but in those days he was simply the forty-three-years-old Algernon Timberlane — had been forcibly installed.

  They had driven to Oxford from London, after the death of Algy’s mother. Their truck had been stopped on the borders of Oxfordshire; they found martial law prevailing, and a Commander Croucher in charge, with his headquarters in Cowley. Military police had escorted them to this flat; although they were given no choice in the matter, the premises proved to be satisfactory.

  For all the trouble sweeping the country and the world, Martha’s chief enemy at present was boredom. She sat doing endless jigsaws of farms at blossom time, trappers in Canada, beaches at Acapulco, and listening to the drizzle of light music from her handbag radio; throughout the sweltering days she waited for Algy to return.

  Few vehicles moved along the Iffley Road outside. Occasionally one would growl by with an engine note that she thought was familiar. She would jump up, often to stand staring out of the window for a long time after she realized her mistake.

  Martha looked out on an unfamiliar city. She smiled to think how they had been buoyed with the spirit of adventure on the drive down from London, laughing, and boasting of how young they felt, how they were ready for anything — yet already she was surfeited of jigsaws and worried by Algy’s increasingly heavy drinking.

  When they were in America, he drank a lot, but the drinking there with Jack Pilbeam, an eager companion, had a gaiety about it lacking now. Gaiety! The last few months in London had held no gaiety. The government enforced a strict curfew; Martha’s father had disappeared into the night, presumably arrested without trial; and as the cholera spread, Patricia, Algy’s feckless old mother, deserted by her third husband, had died in agony.

  She ran her fingers over the window-sill. They came away dirty and she looked at them. She laughed her curt laugh at an inner thought, and returned to the table. With an effort, she forced herself to go on building the sunlit beach of Acapulco. The Cowley shops opened only in the afternoon. She was grateful for the diversion they offered. To go into the street, she deliberately made herself unattractive, wore an old bonnet and pulled coarse stockings over her fine legs, despite the heat, for the soldiers had a rough way with women.

  This afternoon, she noticed fewer uniforms about. Rumour had it that several platoons were being driven east, to guard against possible attack from London. Other rumour said the soldiers were confined to their barracks and dying like flies.

  Standing in line by the white-tiled fishmonger’s shop in the Cowley Road, Martha found that her secret fears accepted this latter rumour the more readily. The overheated air held a taste of death. She wore a handkerchief over her nose and mouth, as did most of the other women. Rumour of plague becomes most convincing when strained through dirty squares of fabric.

  “I told my husband I’d rather he didn’t join up,” the woman next to Martha told her. “But you can’t get Bill to listen if he don’t want to. See, he used to work at the garage, but he reckons they’ll lay him off sooner or later, so he reckons he’d be better in the army. I told him straight, I said, I’ve had enough of war if you haven’t, but he said, ‘This is different from war, it’s a case of every man for himself.’ You don’t know what to do for the best, really, do you?”

  As she trudged back to the flat with her ration of dried and nameless fish, Martha echoed the woman’s words.

  She went and sat at the table, folded her arms on it, and rested her head on her arms. In that position, she let her thoughts ramble, waiting all the while for sound of that precious truck which would herald Timberlane’s return.

  When finally she heard the truck outside, she went down to meet Timberlane. As he opened the door, she clung to him, but he pushed her off.

  “I’m dirty, I’m foul, Martha,” he said. “Don’t touch me till I’ve washed and got this jacket off.”

  “What’s the matter? What’s been happening?” He caught the overwrought note in her voice. “They’re dying, you know. People, everywhere.”

  “I know they’re dying.”

  “Well, it’s getting worse. It’s spread from London. They’re dying in the streets now, and not getting shifted. The army’s doing what it can, but the troops are no more immune to the infection than anyone else.”

  “The army! You mean Croucher’s men!”

  “You could have worse men ruling the Midlands than Croucher. He’s keeping order. He understands the necessity for running some sort of public service, he’s got hygiene men out. Nobody could do more.”

  “You know he’s a murderer. Algy, how can you speak well of him?”

  They went upstairs. Timberlane flung his jacket into a corner. He sat down with a glass and a bottle of gin. He added a little water, and began to sip at it steadily. His face was heavy, the set of his mouth and eyes gave him a brooding look. Beads of sweat stood on his bald head.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said. His voice was tired and stony: Martha felt her own slip into the same cast. The shabby room was set solid with their discomfort. A fly buzzed fitfully against the window pane.

  “What do you want to talk about?”

  “For God’s sake, Martha, I don’t want to talk about anything. I’m sick of the stink of death and fear, I’ve been going round with my recorder all day, doing my bloody stuff for DOUCH(E). I just want to drink myself into a stupor.”

  Although she had compassion for him, she would not let him see it. “Algy — your day has been no worse than mine. I’ve spent all day sitting here doing these jigsaw puzzles till I could scream. I’ve spoken to no one but a woman at the fish shop. For the rest of the time, the door has been locked and bolted as you instructed. Am I just expected to sit here in silence while you get drunk?”

  “Not by me you’re not. You haven’t got that amount of control over your tongue.” She went over to the window, her back to him. She thought: I am not sick; I am vital in my senses; I can still give a man all he wants; I am Martha Timberlane, born Martha Broughton, forty-three years of age.

  She heard his glass shatter in a far corner.

  “Martha, I’m sorry. Murdering, getting drunk, dying, living, they’re all reduced to the same dead level…”

  Martha made no answer. With an old magazine, she crushed the fly buzzing against the window. She closed her eyes to feel how hot her eyelids were. At the table, Timberlane went on talking. “I’ll get over it, but to see my poor dear silly mother panting for years, recalling how I loved her as a kid… Ah… Get me another glass, love — get two. Let’s finish this gin. Sod the whole rotten system! How much longer are people going to be able to take this?”

  “This what?” she asked, without turning round.

  “This lack of children. This sterility. This creeping paralysis. What else do you think I mean?”

  “I’m sorry, I’ve got a headache.” She wanted his sympathy, not his speeches, but she could see that something had upset him, that he was going to have a talk, and that the gin was there to help him talk. She got him another glass.

  “What I’m saying is, Martha, that it’s finally sinking in on people that the human race is not going to produce any more young. Those little bawling bundles we used to see outside shops in prams are gone for good. Those little girls that used to play with dolls and empty cereal packets are things of the past. The knot of teenagers standing on corners or bellowing by on motor bikes have had it for ever. They aren’t coming back. Nor are we ever going to see a nice fresh young twenty-year-old girl pass us like a blessing in the street, with her little bum and tits like a banner. Where are all your young sportsmen? Remember the cri
cket teams, Martha? Football, eh? What about the romantic leads of television and the cinema? They’ve all gone! Where are the pop singers of yesteryear? Sure, there are still games of football going on. The fifty-year-olds creak round as best they can…”

  “Stop it, Algy. I know we’re all sterile as well as you do. We knew that when we got married, seventeen years ago. I don’t want to hear it once more.”

  When he spoke again, his voice was so changed that she turned and looked at him. “Don’t think I want to hear it again, either. But you see how every day reveals the wretched truth all over again. The misery always comes hot and new. We’re over forty now, and there’s scarcely anyone younger than we. You only have to walk through Oxford to see how old and dusty the world is getting. And it’s now that youth is passing that the lack of replenishments is really being felt — in the marrow.”

  She gave him another measure of gin, and set a glass down on the table for herself. He looked up at her with a wry smile, and poured her a measure.

  “Perhaps it’s the death of my mother makes me talk like this. I’m sorry, Martha, particularly when we don’t know what’s become of your father. All the while I’ve been so busy living my life, Mother’s been living hers. You know what her life’s been like! She fell in love with three useless men, my father, Keith Barratt, and this Irishman, poor woman! Somehow I feel we should have done more to help her.”

  “You know she enjoyed herself in her own way. We’ve said all this before.”

  He wiped his brow and head on a handkerchief and grinned more relaxedly. “Maybe that’s what happens when the mainspring of the world snaps: everyone is doomed for ever to think and say what they thought and said yesterday.”

  “We don’t have to despair, Algy. We’ve survived years of war, we’ve come through waves of puritanism and promiscuity. We’ve got away from London, where they are in for real trouble, now that the last authoritarian government has broken down. True, Cowley’s far from being a bed of roses, but Croucher is only a local phenomenon; if we can survive him, things may get better, become more settled. Then we can get somewhere permanent to live.”