Cloud Walker, All Fools' Day, Far Sunset

by Cooper, Edmund

  ‘Do you want one?’

  ‘I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about it.’

  ‘Well, you’d better think about it,’ she said practically. ‘But if you just want a good screw, make up your mind and let’s get it over with. Then we can go our own ways.’

  Her calmness annoyed him. Once more Greville inspected her critically – this time as if he was mentally undressing her. She remained unembarrassed.

  ‘I never make love before noon,’ he remarked humourlessly.

  ‘Who said anything about love?’ she retorted. ‘It’s something people like me have to do to stay alive.’

  Greville refused to let himself show any pity, because pity was nothing more than placing a weapon in the hands of an opponent. ‘I suppose even people like you develop a taste for it.’

  ‘Especially people like me,’ said Liz. ‘And especially if we get screwed about twice a day for a year or two. We either jump in the river or develop a taste for it.’ She returned his critical inspection with interest. ‘Mind you,’ she added, ‘there are times when it’s repulsive anyway, but I’ve learned to put up with them.’

  Greville slapped her. It was not a very hard blow, but surprisingly she began to cry.

  Despite the implications of her last remark, he didn’t know why he had slapped her – just as he didn’t know why he was now putting his arm round her shoulder and trying to comfort her.

  ‘It wasn’t you. It wasn’t you,’ she sobbed. ‘It was those horrible dogs … Oh, hell, I want to be sick.’

  Greville opened the car door and helped her out. She retched, but very little came up. When she had finished, she began to shiver violently. With the shotgun in his hand and keeping an alert eye for dogs, he made her walk up and down until the shivering stopped.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said at last. ‘I seem to be thanking you for everything, don’t I?’

  ‘It’s a habit you’ll grow out of.’

  ‘Yes … I don’t even know your name.’

  ‘Call me Greville.’

  ‘Is that all of it?’

  ‘It’s enough.’

  Liz sighed. ‘Well, what are you going to do with me, Greville?’

  ‘I don’t know. I shall have to think about it.’

  ‘Don’t think too long. If you don’t want your pound of flesh, I’m going to try and get a bit nearer Jane.’

  He laughed. ‘You’ve got about as much chance of finding Jane as of finding a needle in the proverbial but now obsolete haystack.’

  ‘What’s that to you?’ demanded Liz wearily. ‘We’re all nut-cases together. Besides, I have a sort of built-in direction-finding apparatus. And, anyway, it doesn’t matter how I waste my time, does it?’

  ‘It matters to me,’ said Greville. And suddenly he was amazed to realise that it did. ‘It’s quite a long time since I talked to anybody,’ he said, as if that explained everything. ‘I think I might take you home with me. You might even be useful.’

  ‘I’m no good for anything but screwing,’ said Liz flatly.

  ‘For all I know you might not even be any good at that. Incidentally, while we’re on the subject, try to find another word for it.’

  ‘Does it offend your modesty?’

  ‘No,’ he said evenly. ‘Only my aesthetic sense. Now, if you have got over having the vapours, let’s think in terms of breakfast.’

  FIVE

  Breakfast consisted of very salty ham, coarse home-made bread and bottled beer. They ate it near Cleopatra’s Needle, on the Embankment. It was a long time since Liz had been in London, and she wanted to see what time, transnormals, and the reign of cats and dogs had done to it. She was not haunted by ghosts as Greville was, and she was fifteen years younger. Also she had never really known the normal world, for all her growing and most of her exploring had been done during the terrible decade of Omega radiation. So she could not experience the perspective of sadness that Greville experienced, nor could she be aware as he was aware of the immense tragedy in the passing of a great city. If she did not seem to notice the desolation so much it was simply because experience had taught her that this kind of desolation was natural: it was just a part of life.

  They ate their meal sitting in the car and watched the sun climb slowly with the bright golden promise of another warm day. The food was part of the rations Greville had brought with him on his obsessional anniversary visit to Chelsea Bridge. There had, of course, been a practical excuse for the long – and hazardous – expedition from his cottage in Norfolk to the great city. He was on the scrounge – for guns, ammunition, shoes, clothing, tools, books, and almost anything.

  He had been living in East Anglia for about eighteen months. He had drifted there and found the cottage that he had made into his private lair purely by chance. When the Leicester Volunteer Force disintegrated in 1979 – along with practically every other quasi-social organisation in the country – he had almost instinctively made his way south. On his wanderings he had become entangled, and rapidly disentangled, with several small groups of one kind or another. But he had not attached himself or allowed himself to become personally involved for the very simple reason that he knew that most of the groups he had encountered were doomed. Some of them had been no more than amateur brigands, others were small tribes based loosely on the family and recognising only the ties of real or symbolic kinship, yet others were fanatical do-gooders trying with a few dozen hands to resurrect the body and spirit of an entire civilisation. But none of them had staying power because they were either living on the past or trying to rebuild it. They could not understand that, in the broad sense, they were nothing more than grave-robbers – like Egyptian peasants looting from the Valley of the Tombs of Kings.

  Greville was disgusted with failure, his own and everyone else’s. So he recoiled from membership of a group – any group – and determined to lead a fairly solitary existence. Above all, he needed time to think, time to come to terms with a mad world, time to come to terms with his own private madness.

  He had discovered the cottage in Norfolk as he struggled vaguely towards London. It was more than a cottage: it was a citadel, for it stood on an island less than an acre in size in Ambergreave Lake, about twenty miles south of Norwich. There had once been an Ambergreave Manor, a rambling sixteenth-century mansion, that had been burned down in 1976 when the owner poured two gallons of petrol over himself and struck a match. The cottage on the island had originally been built as a folly at a time when such architectural extravagances were popular attractions in the grounds of large English country houses. But a nineteenth-century Lord of Ambergreave, who took a serious and considerably optimistic view of his qualities as a poet, had the folly converted to a retreat where he could live in splendid isolation for weeks at a time while churning out an abundance of sonnets that would surely establish a considerable niche for him in English literary history.

  Unfortunately, it did not occur to him that English Literature itself was subject to mortality. Nor could he have possibly entertained the notion that within five years of his death his poems would be forgotten by everyone but the printer to whom he had paid in the course of time more than a thousand guineas for the publication of various slim volumes.

  Such, however, proved to be the case. Greville had discovered his effigy in marble above a substantial-looking vault in the churchyard of the village of Ambergreave, which was about three miles away from the remains of the manor house. The grave – and, in fact, the entire churchyard – was rapidly disappearing under a mass of weeds and shrubs. But he had been sufficiently interested in the man who had provided his ideal retreat to find out something about him. The inscription below the statue read: To the undying memory of Augustus Rowley, visionary, philosopher and man of letters. Born 1833: died 1873 of languishment and a profound melancholy. He here awaits the vindication of time and circumstance, secure in the belief that he accurately interpreted the call of his Maker.

  Greville had been amused by the wordy epitaph, which he suspe
cted had been written by Augustus Rowley himself. And, indeed, he had reason to be grateful to that obscure and pathetic dilettante, for the cottage on the island in a lake that was itself the creation of some previous Rowley had proved to be an ideal lair for a solitary transnormal in the transnormal world of the late twentieth century.

  Indulging a whim, Greville had cut down the weeds that were scrambling vigorously round the grave of Augustus. Occasionally he would visit the churchyard and indulge in one-sided conversations with the extinct visionary, philosopher and man of letters. He took especial pleasure in trying to explain to the mute and invisible Augustus the present state of a world that, in the nineteenth century, must then have seemed to be the still point, the fixed centre of a turning universe. He had a happy feeling that if Augustus could really have appreciated the catastrophe that had overtaken his secure and well-ordered cosmos, it would have been quite enough to make that man of letters turn from the exquisite sculpture of his deathless sonnets to the quarry-like blastings of free verse.

  Now, as Greville sat in the car with Liz and gazed at the battered lines of Waterloo Bridge, one span of which had been almost demolished by unknown causes and about which there lay a wreckage of small craft, and some quite sizeable pleasure boats, he was reminded of Augustus Rowley’s certain conviction of immortality. Sic transit gloria mundi … This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.

  ‘You are miles away,’ said Liz. ‘Where the hell are you?’

  He looked at her with a start and realised that she had finished eating. She had also emptied her bottle of beer.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Greville. He lifted his own bottle to his lips and drank from it gratefully. He suddenly felt very thirsty. ‘Would you like another bottle? There’s a crate in the back of the car.’

  ‘No, thank you … What were you thinking about? Were you wondering what to do with me?’

  ‘No. That problem’s settled, at least. I’m taking you back to Norfolk. If you make yourself agreeable, I might even eventually let you go chasing off after your sister Jane.’

  ‘And if I don’t make myself agreeable?’

  ‘Then I might toss you back to the dogs.’

  ‘Oh, well,’ said Liz equably and obscurely, ‘while there’s a choice, life is not without interest … Now, what were you thinking about? You had a sort of sad, faraway look in your eyes.’

  ‘Augustus Rowley,’ he said, ‘and mortality.’

  Then he told her about the cottage on the island and about Augustus Rowley’s grave and the tiny ghost-like village of Ambergreave.

  ‘It sounds all right,’ remarked Liz noncommittally, when he had finished, ‘and Norfolk’s on the way to Lancashire, so maybe I’m not doing too badly.’

  ‘You could have done considerably worse about an hour ago,’ Greville reminded her. ‘So don’t take anything too much for granted.’

  ‘When are we going back?’ she asked.

  ‘Today. Now, in fact.’

  ‘I thought you were on the scrounge.’

  He pointed to the untidy heap of assorted goods in the back of the station wagon. ‘I did quite a bit of scrounging yesterday. I’ve got enough to be going on with.’

  ‘Oh.’ She seemed disappointed.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I wanted to see a bit of London. The last time I was here I was hardly more than a kid.’

  ‘There’s nothing much to see,’ he said flatly. ‘Nothing but death and destruction, dogs, rats and a million broken windows.’

  ‘If we looked around a bit, you might find something you needed,’ said Liz hopefully.

  Greville smiled. She was as eager and as pathetic as a child trying to talk an adult into giving it an outing.

  ‘All right,’ he capitulated. ‘You can have a couple of hours. Then it’s back to Norfolk. I can’t risk any night driving.’

  ‘Greville, you’re my kind of transie,’ she said gleefully. ‘And any time you feel like a good screw—’ she pulled a face ‘—I mean, any time you wish to engage in carnal distraction, just make a noise.’

  He laughed. ‘Where do you want to go to first?’

  ‘The Festival Hall. About ten centuries ago, I was taken to a concert there – a piano recital by a Hungarian called Georgia Sniffles, or something like that. He was marvellous. I always remembered it.’

  ‘Waterloo Bridge doesn’t look too healthy,’ Greville pointed out.

  ‘Aren’t there any other bridges?’

  He started the car, turned it round and went back to Westminster Bridge. Presently, after having made various detours round blocked streets, he pulled up outside the Festival Hall. Liz jumped out happily.

  ‘Careful,’ he warned. ‘There may be a brigade of livestock lurking inside.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Liz. ‘There’s nothing to eat here, except maybe a few hundredweight of sheet music.’

  Nevertheless, Greville loaded his shotgun and then rummaged in the back of the station wagon until he found a single-barrel four-ten, which he gave to Liz with a handful of cartridges. He also gave her a battery powered torch.

  ‘It’s going to be dark inside,’ he said. ‘But don’t use the torch more than you need. Dry cells that still work are hard to come by these days.’

  The Festival Hall seemed like a great derelict barn. Broken glass lay around in profusion. As they passed through the main doorway, they left the bright morning sunlight behind and entered a deep necropolitan gloom. The thin pencil beam of the torch probed a scene of desolation. Much of the wood panelling had been ripped away – presumably for fuel – and even the banisters of the main staircase had been hacked to pieces.

  Liz, determined not to be oppressed by the destruction, began to hum tunelessly to herself. She led the way up the stairs, hesitating only momentarily when she had to step over a clean-picked skeleton still wearing the tattered remains of a printed dress like a grotesquely gay shroud.

  ‘Rats,’ said Greville, as the torch beam hovered briefly over the sad heap of bones.

  ‘Where?’ whispered Liz apprehensively.

  ‘I don’t mean here and now. But that’s the work of rats. Dogs would have crunched the bones. So would the kind of cats that have managed to survive … Let’s get out. This place is too depressing.’

  ‘I want to see the hall,’ protested Liz. ‘I want to see where Georgie Sniffles had his grand piano, and I want to imagine all the people – the fat old ladies, the men in dinner jackets, the boys in brown corduroy, and all those girls in silk and taffeta rustling like a million grasshoppers.’

  ‘If you hear any rustling,’ retorted Greville, ‘shoot first and have visions afterwards. Rats don’t make allowances for nostalgia.’

  Eventually they groped their way into the auditorium, a vault so black and so still that it seemed as if no sound at all – and certainly not music – could have disturbed its slumber for a thousand years. Strangely, there was not much damage. Here and there seats had been slashed, or clawed; and there was an overwhelming mustiness. But apart from cobwebs and mildew, the hall was structurally intact.

  Liz shone the torch on the stage – and gave a small cry of wonder; for the last performance ever given in the Festival Hall had been The Nutcracker ballet. And the backcloth, frayed and tattered, was still miraculously hanging. Great faded Russian fir trees still loomed magically in the crystal forests dreamed of by Tchaikovsky. A few scatterings of paper snow – or rat leavings – lay carelessly on the bare boards; and it seemed for a moment as if the lights might go up, the music begin, and the bright figure of the Snow Queen float gracefully from behind black velvet drapes.

  ‘Oh! Isn’t that absolutely wonderful!’ breathed Liz. ‘You can almost feel it – after all these terrible years.’

  Suddenly, she dropped the torch and began to sob.

  ‘Come on,’ said Greville in a voice that was purposefully harsh. ‘You’ve seen enough. We’re getting out of here.’

  He picked up the torch and guided
the still sobbing Liz away from the fir trees and the pathetic and enduring snow. As they went down the stairs he wondered if, before the rats came, the skeleton lying bleakly under its covering of printed cotton had also seen Tchaikovsky’s fir trees and the paper snow of history. Perhaps the sad little skeleton had even danced upon that very stage. Perhaps it had once been a prima ballerina. Perhaps … He cut off the thoughts before they could develop further. He did not want to know about the past any more. All he wanted – and all Liz wanted – was the blessed sunlight.

  As they returned to it, the summer morning seemed incredibly sweet. They could not have been inside the Festival Hall more than about ten minutes. But to Greville it had seemed more like ten years. Slowly, Liz was recovering herself.

  ‘Maybe it would be better if we cut out the sight-seeing and headed for Norfolk,’ said Greville gently. ‘There’s not very much left in London now – apart from ghosts and scavengers.’

  However, despite her recent tears, Liz was not to be deterred. ‘I may never come here again,’ she said. ‘I may get myself killed or swallowed up in the north … London was such a lovely exciting city, wasn’t it? I want to store up a few memories to tell all the grandchildren I’ll most likely never have … Besides, you promised. You promised me a couple of hours. You wouldn’t go back on your promise, would you?’

  Greville sighed. ‘I suppose you wouldn’t be a transie if you didn’t like banging your head on a wall. Where to next?’

  ‘The centre of the universe,’ said Liz, suddenly gay. ‘Piccadilly Circus. We’ll sit in the Lyon’s Corner House, and drink coffee and watch all the people going to work.’

  Greville drove the car back over Westminster Bridge, along the Embankment and up Northumberland Avenue. When they reached Trafalgar Square, it seemed momentarily like the day after a stupendous carnival or an orgy on the grand scale. There were two or three buses – one of them overturned – a cluster of taxis straddling the entry to the Strand, and an assortment of private cars large and small. Also there were people, lying about with careless abandon as if they were too drunk to move, as if they might have been celebrating some momentous occasion – such as the end of a war to end all wars.