A steepish bank rose ahead of him. He had forgotten that the park was not everywhere level. He plunged flailingly and succeeded in getting to the top.
But his speed had been slowed yet more.
Then the moon was blotted out again. The renewed darkness somehow gave him hope. He managed to increase his pace, taking huge leaps over the thick grass. But now he could hear more than excited whining from the pack behind him. He could hear breathing, hoarse gasping.
He did not dare turn his head.
A sharp little bark seemed to come from almost under his heels. He lunged forward once more.
And at last the ground appeared to be favouring him. He was at the start, he realised from the lower height of the big plane trees ahead, of quite a steep long dip. And wasn’t that Piccadilly once more to his right? He swerved at once towards the distant outline of its tall buildings. In streets there would be shelter.
A thick-trunked plane loomed up. He peered ahead at it furiously. Could he climb it? But the swollen trunk would be impossible, and the nearest branches were much too high to jump to. Firewood. Damned firewood. Low branches would have been hacked off long ago.
But the ground was sloping downwards more steeply now, and that seemed to be favouring his heavy weight rather than the small bodies of his pursuers. The whines and whimpering were surely not so near now.
Then he tripped.
Concealed in the long swishing grass, some obstacle had sent him tumbling headlong. And the dogs were not so far behind after all. A moment later he felt hard paw-pads on his bare face and stubby claws begin to scrape. He rolled to protect himself.
His head came into contact with what had tripped him. A long branch broken off in some storm and hidden in the grass. He pushed out both hands and gripped it. Yes, it should make a weapon.
With a desperate heave he hurled off the animal beginning to tear at his coat collar and two others he could feel on his buttocks and staggered to his feet. He changed his grip on the branch and swung it with all his might round in a long low arc. And he felt it hit. Once and again. There were snarls in the dark. He flung his whole body round in the other direction, sweeping the awkward branch back the way it had come. And again he made contact.
He could see now that the pack – there must be a dozen or more of them – were crouching there assessing the change of fortune. Too many to keep at bay for ever.
He began to retreat step by step. One, two, three, four. None of the animals had moved. Five, six. And then they started to come, growling deep in their throats, advancing soon faster than he could step backwards. He hurled the whole branch at them two-handed, heard a crack as it hit, turned and pounded off.
But, he realised at once, he had now been cut off from Piccadilly. And once more he could hear that eager whining close to his heels.
He ran on.
At last he came to the end of the long uphill stretch he had run down before and on the flat he felt he was holding his distance, just. But for how long could he keep going at this pace? He strained air in through his taut-stretched mouth.
There came a path, a wide irregular line of black asphalt. He thought of following it, but had no time to make the decision. At the far side after another few leaping paces he came to a bank again. He scrambled up, wearying with each stride.
They were nearer now, he could hear. Once more the sound of their breathing was in his ears. He wanted achingly to lie down to end it all. But the thought of teeth tearing at his flesh kept him running.
The moon emerged again. By its soft spread of light he saw that he had come right back across the park and was near the corner he had originally been making for. Beyond the jagged remains of a set of tall railings lay the high intact form of the Palace. But that was a full two hundred yards away.
He felt a sudden heavy tug at the skirt of his burberry. It nearly brought him to a halt. But the force of his careering flight was too great. The double cloth ripped and he shot forward. A moment later he found himself stumbling out of the high grass and on to asphalt, a round area of it.
And there directly in front of him was a lamp-post. It was ten or twelve feet tall and he saw at once that its pillar sprang with marvellous rightness from a thicker base about four feet high. Clear in the moonlight the figure ‘22’, long ago painted in white on the dark base by some officious maintenance man, jabbed at his conscious.
With not the least hesitation, he leapt upwards. His right foot landed on the narrow top of the base. His hands went clasping round the pillar. There was a long cross-bar just underneath the big lantern, made for resting a ladder against. It looked frail, but he stretched up to it with grasping extended fingers. He caught hold and heaved. The bar held. He was able to reach up with his right hand as he scrabbled a tyre-shod foot against the pillar and grasp the top of the lantern, its glass holed by long-ago thrown stones. He heaved and hauled himself upwards till he got first his knees and then his feet on to the cross-bar. Then he looked down.
He was a clear ten feet or more above the ground. Round the lamp the dogs jumped and snarled. But the largest of them – it looked like a Dobermann – was able to get only to within six inches of his feet.
A wave of sickness came over him and he had to hold on hard as he could to stop himself falling.
He shook his head. All right, he was out of the animals’ reach, but he was far from saved. They showed no signs of leaving and there was no means of getting past them. A leap, however desperate, would put him only where he had been before, almost within biting distance.
He took a long survey of his surroundings. In the moonlight the distant scene was peaceful as a painting. The branches of the planes nearby moved a little with the wind but otherwise everything was as still as if he was indeed looking at a landscape picture. Away beyond the broken park railings he could see the Victoria monument, a small whitish hillock with the figure at the very top, still gilded, glinting as it caught the light. Further round there loomed the immense white bulk of the Palace, like a cliff. And nothing stirring.
So it was stalemate.
He was like the man in Dr Satpathi’s story, he thought with a wry twinge, dancing round the tree with the bear. Only in this picture-still scene there was no traveller likely to come by to whom he could call out ingeniously that coins were falling from the bear’s anus. And even if his equivalent should come into view it was more than likely that a shout would send him running hard for safety. Innocent dupes, and Good Samaritans, had long ago learnt better in this London.
Nor was he at all sure that if some similar magical opportunity did present itself he would be resourceful enough to seize it. He felt too chilled. In mind and body. It was all very well in theory to wish for a bicycle to steal and feel wily because he had had the wish. But, caught now in real trouble, no glimmer of wiliness seemed to have rubbed off on him from anywhere.
No, so far as he could see he was going to be clinging here – already all but two or three of the dogs had sat back patiently on their haunches – when daylight came and still clinging when midday arrived and over in distant Wimbledon Jasmine would begin to cease to float on Tommy’s potions and slip for ever beyond his reach.
If he could cling on even as long as that. Because it was certainly a question of needing to cling. The bulky inverted shape of the lantern permitted nothing else.
He took another hope-deprived look round. And checked himself. Across at the Palace the great twelve-foot railings round the forecourt had been broken in one small place down to about half their original height, possibly by some stray shell in the Second Riots. If he could only get to that gap he could surely scramble over and the height of the remaining railings ought to be enough to stop the dogs or at least to keep them back for some time. And there must be somewhere round the far side of the huge building where he could find some sort of hiding-place and lose them. It was a possibility. It must be.
Before the thought of all the things that might go wrong had got too deep a grip he acted.
He shifted his position quietly so as not to excite the dogs again, and then he flung himself outwards and downwards, legs stiffly extended, aiming as well as he could for the head of the big Dobermann.
It worked. He hit the dog full on its jowls. A bony crunch. With a heave forward of his whole torso he managed to prevent himself falling on his back. He staggered off the animal’s body and set off running, hard as his legs would go.
And, he felt almost certain as he pounded towards the Palace railings, the rest of the pack had been taken by surprise by his sudden action. He left the soft earth of the park and headed full out across the wide weed-clumped roadway at the start of Constitution Hill. The gap in the railings was straight in front of him.
He reached it. It was not as high as he had thought looking at it from a distance, though that made it easier for him as he scrambled over.
But it was not going to hold the dogs back for long. He felt panic leap up again. The high white stone walls of the Palace, all heavy blocks and pillars, stared at him blankly. He was not going to be able to force his way in anywhere there.
One of the dogs, a collie, he saw as he glanced back, had already jumped for the gap. It was stuck at the top, wriggling this way and that and yelping frenziedly. It would be over in an instant.
‘Help,’ he called out, ridiculously.
And at once a tall pair of flush double-doors at the head of a short flight of steps at the nearest corner of the building were drawn rapidly back and out into the moonlight there stepped a figure.
It was that of a little old woman, well under five feet tall, with a shock of straight hair, wearing wrapped round her a big old dark-grey plastic mackintosh, gesturing and capering wildly and uttering piercingly shrill shrieks.
Part Nine
However odd and unexpected the apparition at the Palace side-door, Mark had no hesitation in running straight over. The furious barking of the pack behind him urged him on irresistibly.
In seconds he had pelted across the broad forecourt and was at the foot of the steps.
‘Come on, come on. That’s right.’
The little old woman seemed no less bizarre close to than she had done at his first prayer-answered sight of her. The hair standing out round her head like a crudely-made upside-down grass basket was of a dark grey. The face beneath, now that he could see something of it, looked tanned as leather and was scored with deep wrinkles everywhere. And her mackintosh garment, hacked short with shears, wrapped her round a good one and a half times and was secured by thick red ceremonial cording, probably from the Palace out of which she had so suddenly emerged.
He climbed up to her, panting too heavily to speak.
‘Come in, come in,’ she said, cackling with excitement. ‘Let Old Marigold get these doors shut. Dratted dogs. Never any peace from ‘em.’
He stumbled inside. The place was in black darkness. Behind him the little old woman slammed both doors one after the other. He leant against the wall beside them, too exhausted to move.
In the blackness his rescuer was muttering away but, with warm relief washing through all his taut body, he was not willing to make the effort to understand her.
Then once more an aniseed whiff from the broken bottle came to his nostrils and he felt in his mind again the claws that had scraped at his face, the tug on the skirt of his old coat that had nearly brought him down and the crunching jar when his feet had struck the head of the big Dobermann. Frantically he plunged his hand into his pocket, grasped the lining, dragged it out and sent fragments of glass scattering with a bright clatter over what must be a marble floor. Then he beat and rubbed at the sticky soaked lining in a preposterous attempt to eliminate every last taint of the treacherous stuff.
He knew he was sobbing with repulsion. And he could not stop himself.
‘There, there. You’re all right now. You’re all right. They’ve gone, them dogs. Gone right away. You’ll be all right now with Old Marigold. Old Mad Marigold.’
The last two cackled words of would-be comfort stopped the sobbing when they penetrated as effectively as a thrown bucket of cold water.
Mad Marigold. Mad. Of course, she had shown every sign of being a madwoman. Yet another mad person. Again involved with madness. The loony window-cleaner. The Rev, surely paranoid. Even Brian Parkinson, cheerful and good-hearted though he was, not truly sane, or he would never have led them into that trouble. Or had the against-logic willpower to get them out. And then the Happies in their swerving swaying truck. Self-induced lunacy there certainly.
It was a mad world he was moving in. But no wonder. The years leading up to the breakdown of the city had been enough to have driven any number of people insane. All those half-acknowledged, or often unacknowledged, cases, the borderline certifiable in the days when there had been doctors to certify, the merely odd, the mutterers in the streets and all those derelicts spun off by an ever-faster-whirling society. And there must, too, be wandering now thousands from institutions and hospitals who when there was no longer anyone to look after them had just walked out.
No, no wonder the old woman in the dark beside him – she was chirruping and humming to herself like some contented little animal – should turn out to be mentally unbalanced. She must, since she had had no hesitation in calling herself mad, be one of the escapees. But her company would have its complications. Perhaps, though, they would not be thrust together long.
‘Here.’
Suddenly she had addressed him more clearly, even peremptorily.
‘Here. We’ll have a lovely time, you an’ me. There’s no one else here just now, you know. No one. Generally is, every time Old Marigold comes. But this once, not a bleeding soul. So it’s nice to be together, eh?’
Cautiously he made no answer.
‘Eh? Eh? Nice for Old Marigold to have you to talk to?’
He felt her hand suddenly on his face in the dark, fingers feeling at his cheeks and beard like cold dry little dancers. He flinched.
‘Oh, you’re nice. Old Marigold can tell. Old Marigold can feel it out. You’re nice. Nice, but a bit scared, eh? Scared of poor old Mad Marigold.’
Another stiffening of his facial muscles must have told her that she had hit on the truth, because she gave a brief cackle of laughter.
‘Oh, but you ain’t got no need to be. Old Marigold may be gorn in the head, but she’s pretty well harmless. Pretty well harmless. Tell you what.’
He prickled at the abrupt addition.
Marigold laughed again.
‘No. I was going to say: we’ll have a bit o’ light. That’ll cheer you up, an’ Old Marigold ain’t so mad as what she ain’t got a butt o’ candle in her pocket. You wait. We’ll have a light, an’ then we’ll go an’ have our breffkast. Ain’t daytime yet, but we’ll have breffkast all the same.’
‘No,’he said. ‘No.’
He would explain to her. That would be the best way.
‘Look, Marigold,’ he began. ‘I can’t stay to have breakfast with you because I’m on my way to Wimbledon and I’m in a great hurry. I’ve come from Highgate and I was crossing Green Park when those dogs … You see, I’ve got something very important to do at Wimbledon. It’s to see my wife. I’m afraid she’s very ill.’
‘Dying,’ said Marigold. ‘Dying. Dying.’
‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘Somehow you’ve guessed it. She is dying, and I’ve got to get to her as quickly as I can.’
‘ ’Course you have.’
Ah, marvellous. She’d taken the point.
‘So, can you show me how to get out of the Palace somewhere else, on the far side where the dogs won’t find me?’
She did not reply. He felt a dart of exasperation. Then he heard her moving in the dark. What was she doing? The answer came at once. There was a scraping sound and a little flare of light sprang up. A match. She had matches. How had a witless old woman like her got hold of matches?
‘Oh, Old Marigold knows them as has matches,’ she said, as if he had spoken his question alou
d. ‘An’ she knows what to barter for ‘em. Oh, yes, Mad Marigold’s a clever one, she is.’
She had lit a candle now. He saw her seamed and creased old face, the nose curling down almost to the lips and hairs sprouting at random under the grass-basket thatch of hair.
‘You come upstairs with me,’ she said. ‘An’ I’ll just get me things together.’
‘Your things?’
‘Yes, got to get me things, if I’m coming with you.’
‘But – but you’re not.’
He sounded ridiculously indignant, even to his own ears.
‘Have to, dear, won’t I, if you’re in a hurry to get to your poor wife,’ she replied, cheerfully unput-off. ‘You ain’t got the sense to get along on your own, an’ that’s a fac’. Setting off across Green Park like that in the middle o’ the night. Stands to reason there’d be dogs. But you wouldn’t see that, you wouldn’t. You just don’t know the half of it.’
She was already mounting a wide staircase, its fine gilt banisters glinting in the wavering flame of her candle-butt. He followed. To be left in the thick dark in the vast maze of the Palace would be senseless.
And it was true enough really that he was an innocent abroad. She was right about that, mad though she might be.
The stairs brought them to a large room on the first floor. He sensed that it occupied probably the whole front corner of the great building, although beyond the halo of light from Marigold’s candle he could see little more than a patch of deep red ceiling, tall walls of a lightish blue colour and what looked like Chinese-type decoration with, below, a dado of heavy gold and red in a bamboo-trellis design.
Standing against the dado was an ancient shopping push-basket with two little wheels and a handle like a walking-stick and beside it, spread out on sheets of old newspaper, was a collection of packets and parcels, bottles and boxes and jampots half-filled with dark liquids. Marigold squatted down and with the dexterity of long practice replaced lids, tied up string and put each item swiftly into its place in the basket.
A Long Walk to Wimbledon Page 14