Several men, among them the ablest, had shot themselves. It was then that Eve, a young girl who was mistress to Trouter, bore a child with no deformity. She had gone mad and run away. A month later her body and the baby’s were found in a wood near by.
In that vile winter, Martha and Greybeard had organized lectures, not entirely with Mole’s approval. They had spoken on history, on geography, on politics, on the lessons to be learnt from life — but as all their subject matter was necessarily drawn from an existence that died even as they spoke, the lectures were a failure. To the hunger and deprivation had been added something more sinister: a sense that there was no longer a place on earth for mind.
Someone had invented a brief-lived phrase for that feeling: the Brain Curtain. Certainly the brain curtain had descended that winter with a vengeance.
In January, the fieldfares brought their harsh song of Norway to Sparcot. In February, cold winds blew and snow fell every day. In March, the sparrows mated on the crusted and dirty piles of ice. Only in April did a softer air return.
During that month, Charley Samuels married Iris Ryde. Charley and Timberlane had fought together in the war, years earlier, when both had formed part of the Infantop Corps. It had been a good day when he arrived at the motley little village. When he married, he moved his bride into the house next to Martha and Algy. Six years later, Iris died of cancer that, like sterility, was an effect of the Accident.
That had been an ill time. And all the while they had laboured under Mole’s fears, hardly aware of the imposition. To get away was like a convalescence, when one looks back and sees for the first time how ill one has been. Martha recalled how eagerly they had conspired with nature, encouraging the roads to decay, sealing them off from the dangerous world outside, and how anxiously they guarded Sparcot against the day when Croucher’s forces moved to overwhelm them.
Croucher never came to Sparcot. He died from the pandemic that killed so many of his followers and converted his stronghold into a morgue. By the time the disease had run its course, large organizations had gone the way of large animals; the hedges grew, the copses heaved their shoulders and became forests; the rivers spread into marshland; and the mammal with the big brain eked out his dotage in small communities.
III. The River: Swifford Fair
Both human beings and sheep coughed a good deal as the boats sailed downstream. The party had lost its first sense of adventure. They were too old and had seen too much wrong to entertain high feeling for long. The cold and the landscape also had a hand in subduing them: bearded with rime like the face of an ancient spirit, the vegetation formed part of a scene that patently had come about and would continue without reference to the stray humans crossing it.
In the sharp winter’s air, their breath steamed behind them. The dinghy went first, followed by Jeff Pitt rowing his little boat, with two sheep in a net lying against his tattered backside. Their progress was slow; Pitt’s pride in his rowing was greater than his ability.
In the dinghy, Charley and Greybeard rowed most of the time, and Martha sat at the tiller facing them. Becky and Towin Thomas remained sulkily at one side; Becky had wished to stay at the inn where the sheep were until the liquor and the winter ran out, but Greybeard had overruled her. The rest of the sheep now lay between them on the bottom of the boat.
Once, tired of having a man sit idle beside her, Becky had ordered Towin to get into Jeff Pitt’s boat and help him row. The experiment had not been successful. The boat had almost capsized. Pitt had cursed continuously. Now Pitt rowed alone, thinking his own thoughts.
His was, in its sixty-fifth year of existence, a strange spiky face. Although his nose still protruded, a gradual loss of teeth and a drying of flesh had brought his jawline and chin also into prominence.
Since his arrival at Sparcot, when he had been happy enough to get away from Greybeard, the ex-captain of Croucher’s guard had led a solitary life. That he resented the existence into which he was forced was clear enough; though he never confided, his air was the air of a man long used to bitterness; the fact remained that he, more effectively than anyone else, had taken to a poacher’s ways.
Though he had thrown in his lot with the others now, his unsocial disposition still lingered; he rowed with his back to the dinghy, gazing watchfully back at the ruffled winter landscape through which they had journeyed. He was with them, but his manner suggested he was not necessarily for them.
Between low banks scourged tawny and white by the frost, their way crackled continuously as ice shattered under their bows. On the second afternoon after they had left the inn where they found the sheep, they smelt wood smoke and saw its haze ahead of them, heavy over the stream. Soon they reached a place where the ice was broken and a fire smouldered on the bank. Greybeard reached for his rifle, Charley seized his knife, Martha sat alertly watching; Towin and Becky ducked out of sight below the decking. Pitt rose and pointed.
“My God, the gnomes!” he exclaimed. “There’s one of them for sure!”
On the bank, dancing near the fire, was a little white figure, flexing its legs and arms. It sang to itself in a voice like a creaking bough. When it saw the boats through the bare shanks of a bush, it stopped. Coming forward to the edge of the bank, it clasped hands over the black fur of its crutch and called to them. Though they could not understand what it was saying, they rowed mesmerized towards it.
By the time they reached the bank, the figure had put on some clothes and looked more human. Behind it they saw, half hidden in an ash copse, a tarred barn. The figure was jigging and pointing to the barn, talking rapidly at them as he did so.
He was a lively octogenarian, judging by appearance, a sprightly grotesque with a tatter of red and violet capillaries running from one cheekbone to another over the alp of his nose. His beard and top-knot formed one continuous conflagration of hair, tied bottom and top below jaw and above crown, and dyed a deep tangerine. He danced like a skeleton and motioned to them.
“Are you alone? Can we put in here?” Greybeard called.
“I don’t like the look of him — let’s press on,” Jeff Pitt called, labouring his boat up through the panes of ice. “We don’t know what we’re letting ourselves in for.”
The skeleton cried something unintelligible, jumping back when Greybeard climbed ashore. He clutched some red and green beads that hung round his neck. “Sirrer vine daver zwimmin,” he said.
“Oh — fine day for swimming! You have been swimming? Isn’t it cold? Aren’t you afraid of cutting yourself on the ice?”
“Warreryer zay? Diddy zay zomminer bout thize?”
“He doesn’t seem to understand me any better than I can understand him,” Greybeard remarked to the others in the boats. But with patience, he managed to penetrate the skeleton’s thick accent. His name appeared to be Norsgrey, and he was a traveller. He was staying with his wife, Lita, in the barn they saw through the ash trees. He would welcome the company of Greybeard and his party.
Like Charley’s fox, the sheep were all on tethers. They were made to jump ashore, where they immediately began cropping the harsh grasses. The humans dragged their boats up and secured them. They stood stretching themselves, to force the chill and stiffness from their limbs. Then they made towards the barn, moving their legs painfully. As they became used to the skeleton’s accent, what he had to say became more intelligible, though in content his talk was wild.
His preoccupation was with badgers. Norsgrey believed in the magical power of badgers. He had a daughter, he told them, who would be nearly sixty now, who had run off into the woods (“when they was a-seeding and a-branching themselves up to march forth and strangle down the towns of man”) and she had married a badger. There were badger men in the woods now who were her sons, and badger girls her daughters, black and white in their faces, very lovely to behold.
“Are there stoats round here?” Martha asked, cutting off what threatened to be a long monologue. Old Norsgrey paused outside the barn and pointed into the
lower branches of a tree.
“There’s one now, a-looking down at us, Mrs. Lady, sitting in its wicked little nest as cute as you like. But he won’t touch us ’cos he knows as I’m related to the badgers by matterrimony.”
They stared and could see only the pale grey twigs of ash thrusting black-capped into the air. Inside the barn, an ancient reindeer lay in the half-dark, its four broad hooves clumped together. Becky gave a shriek of surprise as it turned its ancient sullen face towards them. Hens clucked and scattered at their entrance.
“Don’t make a lot of row,” Norsgrey warned them. “Lita’s asleep, and I don’t want her wakened. I’ll turn you out if you disturb her, but if you’re quiet, and give me a bite of supper, I’ll let you stay here, nice and warm and comfortable — and safe from all those hungry stoats outside.”
“What ails your wife?” Towin asked. “I’m not staying in here if there’s illness.”
“Don’t you insult my wife. She’s never had an illness in her life. Just keep quiet and behave.”
“I’ll go and get our kit from the boat,” Greybeard said. Charley and the fox came back to the river with him. As they loaded themselves, Charley spoke with some show of embarrassment, looking not at Greybeard but at the cool grey landscape.
“Towin and his Becky would have stayed at the place where the dead man sat in his kitchen,” he said. “They didn’t care to come any further, but we persuaded them. That’s right, isn’t it, Greybeard?”
“You know it is.”
“Right. What I want to ask you, then, is this. How far are we going? What are you planning? What have you got in mind?”
Greybeard looked at the river. “You’re a religious man, Charley. Don’t you think God might have something in mind for us?”
Charley laughed curtly. “That would sound better if you believed in God yourself. But suppose I thought He had in mind for us to settle down here, what would you do? I don’t see what you are aiming on doing.”
“We’re not far enough from Sparcot to stop yet. They might make an expedition and catch us here.”
“You know that’s nonsense as well as I do. Truth of the matter is, you don’t really know where you want to go, or why, isn’t that it?”
Greybeard looked at the solid face of the man he had known for so long. “Each day I become more sure. I want to get to the mouth of the river, to the sea.”
Nodding, Charley picked up his equipment and started to trudge back towards the barn. Isaac led the way.
Greybeard made as if to add something, then changed his mind. He did not believe in explaining. To Towin and Becky, this journey was just another hardship; to him, it was an end in itself. The hardship of it was a pleasure. Life was a pleasure; he looked back at its moments, many of them as much shrouded in mist as the opposite bank of the Thames; objectively, many of them held only misery, fear, confusion; but afterwards, and even at the time, he had known an exhilaration stronger than the misery, fear, or confusion. A fragment of belief came to him from another epoch: Cogito ergo sum. For him that had not been true; his truth had been, Sentio ergo sum. I feel so I exist. He enjoyed this fearful, miserable, confused life, and not only because it made more sense than non-life. He could never explain that to anyone; he did not have to explain it to Martha; she knew; she felt as he did in that respect.
Distantly he heard music. He looked about him with a tingle of unease, recalling the tales Pitt and others told of gnomes and little people, for this was a little music. But he realized it came to him over a long distance. Was it — he had almost forgotten the name of the instrument — an accordion?
He went thoughtfully back to the barn, and asked Norsgrey about it. The old man, sprawling with his back to the reindeer’s flank, looked up keenly through his orange hair.
“That would be Swifford Fair. I just come from there, done a bit of trading. That’s where I got my hens.” As ever, it was hard to make out what he was saying.
“How far’s Swifford from here?”
“Road will take you quicker than the river. A mile as the crow flies. Two miles by road. Five by your river. I’ll buy your boat from you, give you a good price.” They did not agree to that, but they gave the old man some of their food. The sheep they had killed ate well, cut up into a stew and flavoured with some herbs which Norsgrey supplied from his little cart. When they ate meat, they took it in the form of stews, for stews were kindest to old teeth and tender gums.
“Why doesn’t your wife come and eat with us?” Towin asked. “Is she fussy about strangers or something?”
“She’s asleep like I told you behind that blue curtain. You leave her alone — she’s done you no harm.”
The blue curtain was stretched across one corner of the barn, from the cart to a nail on the wall. The barn was now uncomfortably full, for they brought the sheep in with them at dusk. They made uneasy bedfellows with the hens and the old reindeer. The glow of their lamps hardly reached up to the rafters. Those rafters had ceased to be living timber two and a half centuries before. Other life now took refuge in them: grubs, beetles, larvae, spiders, chrysalises slung to the beams with silken threads, fleas and their pupae in swallows’ nests, awaiting their owner’s return in the next unfailing spring. For these simple creatures, many generations had passed since man contrived his own extinction.
“Here, how old was you reckoning I was?” Norsgrey asked, thrusting his colourful countenance into Martha’s face.
“I wasn’t really thinking,” Martha said sweetly. “You was thinking about seventy, wasn’t you?”
“I really was not thinking. I prefer not to think about age; it is one of my least favourite subjects.”
“Well, think about mine, then. An early seventy you’d say, wouldn’t you?”
“Possibly.” Norsgrey let out a shriek of triumph, and then looked apprehensively towards the blue curtain. “Well, let me tell you that you’d be wrong, Mrs. Lady — ah, oh dear, yes, very wrong. Shall I tell you how old I am? Shall I? You won’t believe me?”
“Go on, how old are you?” Towin asked, growing interested. “Eighty-five, I’d say you were. I bet you’re older than me, and I was born in 1945, the year they dropped that first atomic bomb. I bet you were born before 1945, mate.”
“They don’t have years with numbers attached any more,” Norsgrey said with immense scorn, and turned back to Martha. “You won’t believe this, Mrs. Lady, but I’m close on two hundred years old, very close indeed. In fact you might say that it was my two hundredth birthday next week.”
Martha raised an ironical eyebrow. She said, “You look well for your age.”
“You’re never two hundred, no more than I am,” Towin said scornfully.
“That I am. I’m two hundred, and what’s more I shall still be be knocking around the old world when all you buggers are dead and buried.”
Towin leant forward and kicked the old man’s boot angrily. Norsgrey brought up a stick and whacked Towin smartly over the shin. Yelping, Towin heaved himself up on his knees and brought his cudgel down at the old man’s flaming cranium. Charley stopped the blow in mid-swing.
“Give over,” he said sternly. “Towin, leave the poor old chap his delusions.”
“’Tisn’t no delusion,” Norsgrey said irritably. “You can ask my wife when she wakes up.”
Throughout this conversation and during the meal, Pitt had said hardly a word, sitting withdrawn into himself as he so often did in the Sparcot days. Now he said, mildly enough, “We’d’a done better if you’d listened to what I said and stayed on the river rather than settle down in this madhouse for the night. All the world to choose from and you had to choose here!”
“You can get outside if you don’t like the company,” Norsgrey said. “Your trouble is you’re rude as well as stupid. Praise be, you’ll die! None of you lot know anything of the world — you’ve been stuck in that place wherever-it-was you told me about. There are strange new things in the world you’ve never heard of.”
&nb
sp; “Such as?” Charley asked.
“See this red and green necklace I got round my neck? I got it from Mockweagles. I’m one of the few men who’ve actually been to Mockweagles. I paid two young cow reindeer for it, and it was cheap at half the price. Only you have to call back there once every hundred years to renew, like, or one morning as you open your eyelids on a new dawn — phutt! you crumble into dust, all but your eyeballs.”
“What happens to them?” Becky asked, peering at him through the thick lampglow.
Norsgrey laughed. “Eyeballs never die. Didn’t you know that, Mrs. Taffy? They never die. I seen them watching out of thickets at night. They wink at you to remind you what will happen to you if you forget to go back to Mockweagles.”
“Where is this place Mockweagles?” Greybeard asked.
“I shouldn’t be telling you this. There aren’t any eyeballs looking, are there? Well, there’s this place Mockweagles, only it’s secret, see, and it lies right in the middle of a thicket. It’s a castle — well, more like a sort of skyscraper than a castle, really. Only they don’t live on the bottom twenty floors; those are empty. I mean, you’ve got to go right up to the top floor to find them.”
“Them, who are them?”
“Oh, men, just ordinary men, only one of them has got a sort of second head with a sealed up mouth coming out of his neck. They live for ever because they’re immortals, see. And I’m like them, because I won’t ever die, only you have to go back there once every hundred years. I’ve just been back there now, on my way south.”
“You mean this is your second call there?”
“My third. I went there first of all for the treatment, and you have to go to get your beads renewed.” He ran his fingers through the orange curtain of his beard and peered at them. They were silent.
Greybeard Page 9