Greybeard

by Brian W Aldiss

“You can have some wine if you talk interestingly,” he said, leaning back in his chair and pointing a patronizing fork at them. “My friends and I are always happy to be entertained by the tales of travellers, lies though they generally are. If you’re going to lie, have the kindness to make them big ’uns.”

  “In my childhood,” Martha said, nodding gravely to the other gentlemen, whose mouths worked busily as they returned the gesture, “hosts were expected to entertain visitors, not vice versa. But in those days, seats of learning housed courtesy rather than cattle.”

  Morton raised a pair of feathery eyebrows and put down his glass.

  “Madam,” he said, “forgive me. If you dress like a cowherd’s woman, you must be used to being mistaken for a cowherd’s woman, don’t you know. To each his or her own eccentricity. Allow me to pour you a little of this negus, and then we will talk together as equals — at least until it is proved otherwise.”

  The wine was good enough to take off some of the sharpness of Morton’s speech. Greybeard said as much.

  “It drinks well enough,” one of the Fellows agreed carelessly. He was a tallowy man, addressed as Gavin, with a yellow face and a forehead from which he constantly wiped sebum. “It’s only a homegrown wine, unfortunately. We finished off the last of the college cellars the day the Dean was deposed.”

  The three men bowed their heads in mock-reverence at mention of the Dean.

  “What is your story, then, strangers?” Morton asked, in a more unbuttoned fashion.

  Greybeard spoke briefly of their years in London, of their brush with Croucher in Cowley, and of their long withdrawal at Sparcot. However much the Fellows regretted the absence of palpable lies, they expressed interest in the account.

  “I remember this Commander Croucher,” Morton said. “He was not a bad chap as dictators go. Fortunately, he was the sort of illiterate who preserves an undue respect for learning. Perhaps because his father, it was rumoured, was a college servant, his attitude to the university was astonishingly respectful. We had to be inside college by seven p.m., but that was no hardship. I recall that even at the time we regarded his regime as one of historical necessity. It was after he died that things became really intolerable. Croucher’s soldiery turned into a rabble of looters. That was the worst time in our whole miserable half-century of decline.”

  “What happened to these soldiers?”

  “Roughly what you’d expect. They killed each other, and then the cholera got the rest of them, thank heaven, don’t you know. For a year, this was a city of the dead. The colleges were closed. Nobody about. I took over a cottage outside the city. After a time, people started drifting back. Then, that winter or the next, the flu hit us.”

  “We missed serious flu epidemics at Sparcot,” Greybeard said.

  “You were fortunate. You were also fortunate in that the flu missed very few centres of population, by all accounts, so you were spared armed bands of starving louts roving the country and pillaging.”

  The Fellow addressed as Vivian said, “At its best, this country could support only half the populace by home agriculture. Under worsening conditions it might support under a sixth of the number. In normal times the death rate would be about six hundred thousand per year. There are of course no accurate figures available, but I would hazard that at the time of which we speak, about twenty-twenty or a little earlier, the population shrank from about twenty-seven million to twelve million. One can easily calculate that in the decade since then the population must have shrunk to a mere six million, estimating by the old death rate. Given another decade — ”

  “Thank you, no more statistics, Vivian,” Morton said. To his visitors, he added, “Oxford has been peaceful since the flu epidemic. Of course, there was the trouble with Balliol.”

  “What happened there?” Martha asked, accepting another glass of the homemade wine.

  “Balliol thought it would like to rule Oxford, don’t you know. There was some paltry business about trying to collect arrears of rent from their city properties. The townspeople appealed to Christ Church for assistance. Fortunately we were able to give it.

  “We had a rather terrible artillery man, a Colonel Appleyard, taking refuge with us at the time. He was an undergraduate of the house — ploughed, poor fellow, and fit for nothing but a military life — but he had a couple of mortars with him. Trench mortars, don’t you know. He set them up in the quad and began to bombard — to mortar, I suppose one should say, if the verb can be used in that application — Balliol.”

  Gavin chuckled and added, “Appleyard’s aim was somewhat uncertain, and he demolished most of the property in between Balliol and here, including Jesus College; but the Master of Balliol ran up his white flag, and we have all lived equably ever after.”

  The three Fellows were put in a good humour by this anecdote, and ran over the salient points of the campaign among themselves, forgetting their visitors. Mopping his forehead, Gavin said, “Some of the colleges are built like little fortresses; it is pleasant to see this aspect is to some extent functional.”

  “Has the lake we sailed over to reach Folly Bridge any particular history?” Greybeard inquired.

  “Particular meaning pertaining to? Why, yes and no, although nothing so dramatic — nothing so full of human interest, shall we say — as the Balliol campaign,” Morton said. “The Meadow Lake, as our local men know it, covers ground that was always liable to flood, even in the palmy days of the Thames Conservancy, rest their souls. Now it is a permanent flood, thanks to the work of undermining the banks carried out by an army of coypus.”

  “Coypu is an animal?” Martha asked.

  “A rodent, madam, of the echimyidae family, hailing from South America, now as much a native of Oxford as Gavin or I — and I fancy will continue to be so long after we are put to rest, eh, Gavin? You might not have seen the creature on your travels, since it is shy and conceals itself. But you must come and see our menagerie, and meet our tame coypus.”

  He escorted them through several odorous rooms, in which he kept a number of animals in cages. Most of them ran to him and appeared glad to see him.

  The coypus enjoyed a small pool set in the stone slabs of a ground-floor room. They looked like a cross between a beaver and a rat. Morton explained how they had been imported into the country back in the twentieth century to be bred on farms for their nutria fur. Some had escaped, to become a pest throughout much of East Anglia. In several concentrated drives, they had been almost exterminated; after the Accident, they had multiplied again, slowly at first and then, hitting their stride like so many other rapid-breeding creatures, very fast. They spread westward along rivers, and it now seemed as if they covered half the country.

  “They will be the end of the Thames,” Morton said. “They ruin any watercourse. Fortunately, they more than justify their existence by being both very good to eat and to wear! Fricasseed coypu is one of the great consolations of our senility, eh, Vivian? Perhaps you have observed how many people are able to afford their old bones the luxury of a fur coat.”

  Martha mentioned the pine martens they had seen.

  “Eh, very interesting! They must be spreading eastwards from Wales, which was the only part of Britain where they survived a century ago. All over the world there must be far-reaching changes in animal behaviour and habitat; if only one could have another life in which to chart it all... Ah, well, that’s not a fruitful thing to wish, is it?”

  Morton finished by offering Martha a job as an assistant to his menagerie keeper, and advising Greybeard to see a Farmer Flitch, who was wanting a man for odd jobs.

  Joseph Flitch was an octogenarian as active as a man twenty years his junior. He needed to be. He supported a house full of nagging women: his wife, his wife’s two hoary old sisters, their mother, and two daughters, one prematurely senile, the other permanently crippled with arthritis. Of this unhappy crew of harridans, Mrs Flitch was, perhaps because the rule in her household was the survival of the fiercest, undoubtedly th
e fiercest. She took an instant spite to Greybeard.

  Flitch led him around to an outhouse, shook his hand, and engaged him for what Norman Morton had said would be a fair price. “Oi knows as you will be a good man by the way the missus took against you,” he declared, speaking in a broad Oxfordshire that at first barely escaped incomprehensibility.

  He was — not unnaturally in the circumstances — a morose man. He was also a shrewd and enterprising man, as Greybeard saw, and ran an expanding business. His farm was at Osney, on the edge of Meadow Lake, and he employed several men on it. Flitch had been one of the first to take advantage of the changing natural conditions, and used the spreading reed beds as a supply of thatch materials. No brick or tile was made in the locality; but several of the better houses thereabouts were handsomely covered in a deep layer of Farmer Flitch’s thatch.

  It was Greybeard’s job to row himself about the lake harvesting armful after armful of the reeds. Since he used his own boat for this, Flitch, a fair dealer, presented him with a gigantic, warm, and waterproof nutria coat, which had belonged to a man who died in debt to him. Snug in the coat, Greybeard spent most of his daylight hours working slowly about the lake, feeling himself absorbed between the flat prospect of water and marsh and the mould of sky. It was a period of quiet punctuated by the startlements of water birds; sometimes he filled the dinghy with an abundance of reed, and could then spend half an hour fishing for his and Martha’s supper. On these occasions, he saw many different sorts of rodent swimming in and out of the swampy places: not only water rats but the larger animals, beaver, otter, and the coypu, in whose skin he was clad. Once he saw a female coypu with young being suckled as they swam along.

  Although he accepted that hard-worked time among the reeds, he did not forget the lesson he had gained at Sparcot, that serenity came not from the external world but from within. If he needed reminding, he had only to cut reeds in his favourite bay. From there he had a view of a large burial place, to which almost every day a grey knot of mourners came with a coffin. As Flitch dryly remarked when Greybeard commented on the graveyard, “Ah, they keep a-planting of’em, but there ain’t any more of’em growing up.”

  So he would then go home to Martha, often with his beard coated with frost, back to the draughty room in Killcanon that she had succeeded in turning into a home. Both Charley and Pitt lived outside Christ Church, where they had secured cheaper and more tumbledown lodgings; Charley, whom they saw most days, had secured a job of sorts in a tannery; Pitt had returned to his old game of poaching and made little attempt to seek out their company. Greybeard saw him once along the south bank of the lake, a small and independent old figure.

  On the darkest mornings Greybeard was at the great college gate at six, waiting for it to be opened to go to work. One morning, when he had been working for Flitch for a month, a bell in the ruinous Tom Tower above his head began to toll.

  It was New Year’s Day, which the inhabitants of Oxford held in festival.

  “I don’t expect any work off you today,” Flitch said when Greybeard showed himself at the little dairy. “Life’s short enough as well as being long enough — you’re a young man, you are, go and enjoy yourself.”

  “What year is it, Joe? I’ve lost my calendar and forgotten where we are.”

  “What’s it matter where we are? I barely keep the score of my own years, never mind the world’s. You go on home to your Martha.”

  “I’m just thinking. Why wasn’t Christmas Day celebrated?”

  Flitch straightened up from the sheep he was milking and regarded Greybeard with an amused look. “You mean why should it be celebrated? I can tell you’re no sort of a religious man, or you wouldn’t ask that. Christmas was invented to celebrate the birth of God’s Son, wasn’t it? And the Fellows in Christ Church reckon as it aren’t in what you might call good taste to celebrate birth any more.” He moved his stool and pail to a nanny goat and added, “ ’Course, if you were under tenancy to Balliol or Magdalen, now they do recognize Christmas still.”

  “Are you a religious man, Joe?”

  Flitch pulled a face. “I leaves that sort of thing to women.” Greybeard tramped back through the miry streets to Martha. He saw by the look in her face that there was some excitement brewing. She explained that this was the day when the children of Balliol were displayed in The Broad, and she wanted to go and see them.

  “We don’t want to see children, Martha. It’ll only upset you. Stay here with me, where it’s cosy. Let’s look up Tubby at the gate and have a drink with him. Or come and meet old Joe Flitch — you don’t have to see his womenfolk. Or — ”

  “Algy, I want to be taken to see the children. I can stand the shock. Besides, it’s a sort of social event, and they’re few and far enough between.” She tucked her hair inside her hood, eyeing him in a friendly but detached way. He shook his head and took her by the arm.

  “You were always a stubborn woman, Martha.”

  “Where you are concerned, I’m always as weak as water, and you know it.”

  Along the path known as The Corn, presumably from a ploughed-up strip of wheatland along one side of it, many people were flocking. Their appearance was as grey and seamed as that of the ruined buildings below which they shuffled; they sucked their gums against the cold and did not chatter much. They gave way falteringly to a cart pulled by reindeer. As the cart creaked level with Martha and Greybeard, someone called her name.

  Norman Morton, with a scholastic gown draped over a thick array of furs, rode in the cart, accompanied by some of the other Fellows, including the two Greybeard had spoken with already, the tallowy Gavin, the silent Vivian. He made the driver stop the cart, and invited the two pedestrians to climb up. They stepped up on the wheel hubs and were helped in.

  “Are you surprised to find me participating in the common pleasure?” Morton asked. “I take as much interest in Balliol’s children as I do in my own animals. They make a pretty display as pets and reflect a little much-needed popularity onto the Master. What will happen to them when they are grown-up, as they will be in a few years, is a matter beyond the power of the Master to decide.”

  The cart trundled to a convenient position before the battered fortress of Balliol, with its graceless Victorian façade. The ultimate effectiveness of Colonel Appleyard’s mortar fire was apparent. The tower had been reduced to a stump, and two large sections of the façade were patched rather clumsily with new stone. A sort of scaffold had been erected outside the main gate and the college flag hung over it.

  The crowd here was as large as those Martha and Greybeard had seen in earlier years. Although the atmosphere was more solemn than gay, hawkers moved among the numbers assembled, selling scarves and cheap jewellery and hats made of swans’ feathers and hot dogs and pamphlets. Morton pointed to one man who bore a tray full of broadsheets and books.

  “You see — Oxford continues to be the home of printing, right to the bitter end. There is much to be said for tradition, don’t you know. Let’s see what the rogue has to offer, eh?”

  The rogue was a husky, broken-mouthed man with a notice pinned to his coat saying “Bookseller to the University Press,” but most of his wares were intended, as Morton’s friend Gavin remarked, turning over an ill-printed edition of a thriller, for the rabble.

  Martha bought a four-page pamphlet produced for the occasion, and headed, HAPPY NEW YEAR OXFORD 2030!! She turned it over and handed it to Greybeard.

  “Poetry seems to have come back into its own. Though this is mainly nursery-pornographic. Does it remind you of anything?”

  He read the first verse. The mixture of childishness and smut did seem familiar.

  “Little man Blue,

  Come rouse up your horn,

  The babies all bellow,

  They aren’t getting born.”

  “America...” he said. The names of everything had deserted him over almost thirty years. Then he smiled at her. “Our best man — I can see him so clearly — what was it he call
ed this sort of stuff? ‘Slouch’! By golly, how it takes you back!” He wrapped his arm around her.

  “Jack Pilbeam,” she said. They both laughed, surprised by pleasure, and said simultaneously, “My memory is getting so bad...”

  Momentarily, both of them escaped from the present and the festering frames and rotten breath of the crowd about them.

  They were back when the world was cleaner, in that heady Washington they had known.

  One of Bill Dyson’s wedding presents to them was a permit for them to travel throughout the States. They took part of their honeymoon in Niagara, rejoicing in the hackneyed choice, pretending they were American, listening to the mighty fall of waters.

  While they were there they heard the news. Martha’s kidnapper was found and arrested. He proved to be Dusty Dykes. The news of the arrest made headlines everywhere; but next day there was a mighty factory fire in Detroit to fill the front pages.

  That world of news and event was buried. Even in their memories it lived only flickeringly, for they formed part of the general disintegration. Greybeard closed his eyes and could not look at Martha.

  The parade began. Various dignitaries, flanked by guards, marched from the gates of Balliol. Some mounted the scaffold, some guarded the way. The Master appeared, old and frail, his face a dead white against his black gown and hat. He was helped up the steps. He made a speech as brief as it was inaudible, subsiding into a fit of coughing, after which the children emerged from the college.

  The girl appeared first, walking pertly and looking about her as she went. At the cheer that rose from the crowd, her face lit; she climbed the platform and waved. She was completely hairless, the structure of her skull knobbly through her pale skin. One of her ears, as Greybeard had been warned, was swollen until it was no more than a confused mess of flesh. When she turned so that it was towards the spectators, she resembled a goblin.

  The crowd was delighted by the sight of youth. Many people clapped.

  The boys appeared next. The one with the withered arm looked unwell; his face was pinched and bluish; he stood there apathetically, waving but not smiling. He was perhaps thirteen. The other boy was older and healthier. His eye as he regarded the crowd was calculating; Greybeard watched him with sympathy, knowing how untrustworthy a crowd is. Perhaps the boy felt that those who cheered so easily today might by next year be after his blood, if the wind but changed direction. So he waved and smiled, and never smiled with his eyes.