‘What would I have to do?’ he asked.
She gave a cackle of laughter.
‘Oh, it ain’t difficult, dearie. To be mad. Ain’t no trouble at all.’
‘Yes, but …’
‘Talk to yourself, dear. You could begin by that.’
She turned and set off again.
‘Come on, come on,’ she said. ‘Waiting about won’t be no help.’
She headed straight towards the bridge, past the open space of Bessborough Gardens to the right with the tower building on its south side that had looked so romantic when they had first seen it in the distance now no more than a battered wreck. The push-basket went in an ever-louder squeak-squeak-squeak rhythm, and all in a moment the sun rose clear of the horizon in a burst of pure gold light.
Following her, he kept his head hanging not daring to let whatever watchful eyes there were in the two tanks up on the bridge get even the least glimpse of his face. Talk to yourself, Marigold had said. Well, perhaps that would be enough to make him look decently mad. And his appearance must be raggle-taggle enough after all that he had been through. The strip ripped by the dog from the back of his burberry was still dangling down behind him.
‘Wife, wife, bane of my life. Wife, wife, bane of my life. Death to the French. Curses on thee, Spanish jade. A sleep and a forgetting. A sleep and a forgetting.’
The phrases, old familiar pieces of mental flotsam, rose from his subconscious with surprising ease. He began to swing his head from side to side to the beat of them.
Mad. Yes, he might do as a madman.
‘Wife, wife, bane of my life. Wife, wife …’
They had reached the start of the road sweeping along beside the River. The tanks, squat and silent, were only fifty yards distant.
A swing of his flopping head gave him a glimpse far away to his left of something shining brightly in the sun’s first golden rays. At the next swing he recognised it. The Henry Moore sculpture up on the river embankment. A bronze, humped and enduring. Well, it had endured more than a little in the past years. More than a little. March on, Marigold. Only yards to go surely.
‘Halt, who goes there?’
He had to look up now from his head-swinging muttering.
From behind the nearer of the tanks two huge inflated figures had stepped. Soldiers in riot dress, green-drab all over, padded chests, padded legs, little flat toughened plastic spats over vulnerable ankles, padded arms with wide gridded plastic shields strapped to each right one, big drum-like helmets merging into neck-guard flaps with thin eye-slits going half-way round.
The voice that had come from behind the closer one had boomed hollowly from the confinement.
‘It’s Mad Marigold, dearie. Only Old Mad Marigold, what they locked up ’cos she would go a-walking where she wanted. Old Mad Marigold, what they wanted to take a slice out o’ her head. But, oh dear, she were too clever for ’em. Too clever by half. Walked out o’ their place in her nightie, she did. All down the High Street in her old white nightie.’
She sounded madder by a good deal now, a wild cracked uncontrolled voice and wild uncontrolled thoughts. How mad was she then in fact? There was something of an act in this, so how much of it all was an act?
The answer came to him instantly and definitely, for all that he could produce no reasoning to back it. No, it was not an act. Marigold was mad. Incontrovertibly mad, despite her way of putting it on when it looked as if it would pay.
But would it pay now?
‘Sorry, luv. You can’t come this way. Bridges are blocked today.’
The hollow voice revealed itself as young and sympathetic. But a stickler for the rules.
Should they try one of the other bridges and see if they had better luck? Or would it be possible for him to swim it? He took a look down to the water thirty or forty feet below. Lighter in colour by a good deal than the Thames that had used to be, it was flowing fast, heavy and rain-laden. No, it would be a hell of a swim, and as likely as not at any moment a rifle bullet from above would bring it to a messy, sodden end.
He dropped his head again and took up his steady mad murmur.
‘Wife, wife, bane of my life. A sleep and a forgetting. A sleep and …’
‘But Marigold’s got to get to the other side. Marigold likes the other side.’
‘Dare say you do, luv. But I can’t let you by. Officer’d have my guts.’
Stopped. Barred. Journey’s end. Now. Here.
‘But that’s the nice side for Marigold. Poor old Marigold. Poor old Mad Marigold, all down the High Street in her white nightie.’
‘ ’Ere, ducks.’ It was the second gross padded figure, from the sound of him a good deal older than the first. ‘Look, the officer’s having his breakfast just now, and it ain’t as if this is a real security area. So you just wander across, eh? And we won’t see you.’
The younger sentry seemed decidedly unhappy.
‘Oh, go on, they’ll not get us into trouble. Just you keep well over Lambeth way when you get across, ducks. Lambeth way. We don’t go much further than that, ‘cept the bridges. Know which way’s Lambeth, do you?’
‘Oh, yes. Marigold knows that. Marigold used to have her old Auntie May down by there afore it was all burnt down. All burnt to cinders. Black as black. Oh, yes, Marigold knows Lambeth all right.’
‘Well, you keep that way, ducks. You and your friend, and you won’t come to no harm.’
‘Oh, thank you, lovie. You’re kind to a poor old mad girl, you is. Kind as kind. Kind as kind.’
And, adding her murmuring to his own incoherent mutter, she began to push the squeaky shopper wanderingly in front of her off along the wide stretch of the bridge. He wandered and flopped in her wake.
‘Wife, wife. Wife, wife. Wife, wife.’
At last he risked a look ahead. The rest of the long bridge was empty, but, he could see as they neared the crest, there were a good many more troops on the far side, three tanks, five or six scout-cars, a short column of men in battle-smocks marching across the wide space in front of the black rail viaduct that had once taken the lines out of Waterloo Station along beside the River.
Would they be able, when they reached the foot of the bridge, to steer a way through them all? There was plenty of space, and they ought to find it possible to keep clear of any actual contact. But he would not feel happy until they were out of sight of the military altogether.
But what was the meaning of such a concentration of force, and in such an evident state of readiness? What was it the older sentry had said? All the bridges blocked today. Was an Army push into the centre of the city really on the verge of beginning?
And would that be the beginning of a new beginning? The eventual re-establishment of order? And, if it was successful, what sort of order would there be? Did the mere creation of order inevitably foster the growth of a plant that in the end with its intertwining of tendril and tendril – like his run-to-wild front garden back in Highgate – would choke the whole race out of existence? Or did we have in us, lost once but perhaps to be kept at a second chance, enough humility not to pile complication on complication, desire on desire?
Well, the answer to that would come when it would come, perhaps quite soon with those waiting troops down there, perhaps in some other, different and later way. There was nothing to be done about it for him. What he had to do was to get to Jasmine. Jasmine, still under the bolstering influence of those concoctions of Tommy’s, still alive and needing him. But for how much longer now?
Marigold, pushing her ever-squeaking shopper ahead of him, unexpectedly came to a halt.
‘Now we’ll have our breffkastses,’ she said.
‘Breakfasts?’
He nearly added, ‘Are you mad?’
‘But, Marigold, we haven’t even got across the bridge. We can’t stop now. We mustn’t stop till we’re well past all that lot down there.’
‘Got to. You go an’ sit up on the edge there, an’ Marigold’ll come an’ sit beside you an
’ then we’ll have a really nice breffkast.’
‘No, Marigold. If those sentries we got past see us stopping, they’ll come back and ask us what we’re up to. We must get on as fast as we can.’
‘Oh, you don’t know nothing, you don’t. Not fit to be out o’ school, you ain’t.’
She was busying herself rummaging in the shopper.
‘Look, Marigold – ‘
She glanced up sharply from her search, face malevolently alive.
‘Radios,’ she spat out at him.
He frowned.
‘Ain’t you never heard of radios. They all got ‘em, you know. An’ if those fellers we got by sees us hurrying an’ ducking an’ scared as scalded cats, they’ll be on their radios to the ones down there quick as quick. An’ then you’ll see who can kid ‘em out of putting us in one o’ their places.’
She was right, he realised. A sweat broke out all across his shoulders. If they had hurried as he had wanted to, the chances were that they would have drawn attention to themselves. And then they would have been stopped at the far end. And this time held.
No, to drift to a halt here as they had done, to sit up on the bridge parapet and eat something and chatter to each other, that ought to be the way to make sure they were taken for a couple of safe loonies. Marigold was right.
Only all the time they would be dangling themselves within reach of the military.
From the shopper Marigold had now produced a substantial packet swathed in an ancient newspaper – it was The Times, he saw – and had begun carefully unwrapping it. It proved to contain a good quantity of some darkish meat or other, small slivers taken off the bone. He wondered where she had succeeded in getting hold of that. It had been a long time since he himself had had anything other than his scrawny vegetables. And long, too, since he had eaten at all. He felt immensely hungry.
Marigold hopped up on to the wide-topped red-painted metal parapet looking down on to the swift-flowing Thames.
‘Up you come,’ she ordered. ‘It’s nice here.’
He sat himself beside her. She offered him the meat. He took a piece. It had been smoked and tasted pretty strong, but that was to be expected if it had been wrapped up long in that very ancient newspaper. He munched ravenously.
Marigold slid the rest of the pile on to the wall top and handed him the much-creased Times.
‘Now,’ she said twisting her legs happily together, ‘you can read it to me while we have our breffkasts.’
Well, it might make it easier to play out the charade.
He looked at the smeared print. The paper dated back to August 3, 1976. Perhaps she had found it lining some servant’s chest-of-drawers back in the Palace.
‘What shall I read?’ he asked.
‘Anything, dearie, anything. It’s all the same, ain’t it?’
‘Well, yes,’ he acknowledged. ‘But isn’t there something you’d particularly like?’
She peered at the greasy folded sheet.
‘Don’t that say “Letters”?’ she asked, jabbing a finger. ‘Don’t you think Marigold can’t read if she has to. “Letters” is what used to be on the outside o’ Post Offices, an’ I used to get me money from them. Read me one o’ the letters.’
He looked at the page. The Times had used to go in for occasional light relief in its letters columns. Perhaps one of those. Derivation of ‘Camp’. No. Learned and slightly facetious discussion about the precise meaning of that ridiculous term he had long since forgotten – hadn’t it meant something like ‘Highly exaggerated, with a touch of the effeminate’? – was hardly going to interest Marigold, however half-important it had once seemed. Ah, this might do. Foie Gras at Westminster.
He read her the letter under that heading. Apparently some Members of Parliament in those long-ago days had been complaining about the method of making pâté de fois gras in France by force-feeding geese. And now someone was defending that minute consideration for animals.
‘Yeh,’ Marigold said when he had finished, ‘but they always done that, them Frogs. So what’s the fuss? Give us another one.’
But before he could pick out anything else, she suddenly looked up with a jerk into the now bright blue sky.
‘Listen, listen,’ she said.
He listened. A thin persistent droning sound was coming from somewhere high above them. A plane. In a disquieting quarter-second time-slip the sound took him back to the old days when if ever the traffic was quiet enough the noise of aircraft engines lacing the sky could be heard almost continuously.
He searched the blue now and in a few moments located far above the wheeling of the scavenger kites the source of this buzzfly droning. Very high up, a plane was making its way across the sky, wings glinting in the sunlight like a tiny silver fish.
An unusual sight, though not unprecedented. Aircraft seemed to overfly London now and again still, for what reason he did not know. But every two or three months he would see one. Perhaps the wrecked metropolis lay on some alternative route that weather conditions occasionally imposed, say between New York and Peking. So why was this plane making Marigold so agitated?
She was bouncing up and down on the wide parapet.
‘One for joy, two for sorrow, three for a boy, four for tomorrow.’
‘Marigold, do they bring luck too?’
He was half-prepared to believe the claim.
‘ ’Course they do. Don’t you know nothing? Well, come on then, boy, read more. Read me more. This is going to be all right,’
He hoped it was. But he could not stop himself being acutely conscious of how exposed they were. The young conscientious sentry by the tanks, would he after all take it into his head to order them back? All those men at the other end, what was to stop one of them, or more, suddenly setting out to investigate the two figures perched up here, full in the sunlight?
Take his mind off it. Read, as Marigold had asked.
He plunged at random. A letter from a surgeon.
‘ “In my clinic I saw a 17-year-old youth who told me that he was suffering from dyspepsia. He also told me that he smoked 30 cigarettes a day and drank between three and six pints of beer every night.”‘
‘No,’ Marigold broke in. ‘Saw enough o’ the likes o’ that lad when I was younger. Go to another one.’
He refolded the greasy tattered paper with difficulty.
‘Here’s something. “Ice Cream War in Finchley Road.”’’ It was an item in the Diary column. ‘Do you remember ice cream, Marigold?’
‘What you think? I may be mad, but I ain’t a cow or something. I knows what’s happened to me. An’ that’s been a sight too much.’
He felt the rebuke was just.
He read her the story. It was about a price war that had broken out between two American or half-American firms setting up to sell their particular products in Britain.
‘Silly fools,’ she said at the end of it. ‘Here, have some more o’ this an’ find something else.’
He chewed a couple more of the meat slivers. He was still very hungry. And it was sensible, too, to build up energy while they could. He would need all the vigour he could muster to get to Wimbledon with much time to spare.
How much longer did they need to spend here?
He took a careful look both ways along the bridge. Behind the tanks the two riot-dressed sentries were apparently talking quietly together. Down at the other end activity seemed to be minimal. The platoon that had been marching across the wide space had been dismissed to take a break and had begun to sit themselves down on the ground or up on a low wall. Perhaps that lucky plane was working for them.
He turned back to the paper, taking a long drink from a bottle of water Marigold had handed him.
Time to speak out against the idea that pornography can be a good thing. No, not Marigold. Though she might have her ideas on that subject, and perhaps they would be as simply trenchant as the other comments she had made. But he turned a page. There had been a sale due at Christie’s: a phonogr
aph doll was illustrated from a collection of ‘Ceramics and Works of Art’. And Sotheby’s had been offering ‘Oak furniture, treen, fire insurance marks, pewter and metalwork’.
And people had paid money for such things. A lot of money when there had been money, however inflation puffy.
He turned a few pages in a clump. There were fragments missing from their edges, not torn away but fallen off.
‘ “Britain steadily deserting bus and train services”’ he offered.
‘Well, we know they did that, don’t we? An’ look where it got’em. Them jams. There all night in their cars. Bleeding idiots.’
‘Yes.’
There was an item headed Poison Gas Evacuation, but he decided that Marigold’s comment on the unthinking rush to car ownership could be applied as well more or less to factories for manufacturing dangerous substances placed near centres of population. He looked for something else.
Ah, this might be up her street. Shopping. He read the first item on the page that caught his eye.
‘ “At Harrods until August 7, an exclusive free gift for men. Aramis 900 is a pale blue pochette toilet bag. The gift includes Herbal After Shave, Hair Conditioner and either Daily Shampoo I, for normal to oily hair, or Daily II, for normal to dry hair. Free to any customer who buys two products or more from the Aramis 900 range.” ’
Marigold gave a hoot of a laugh.
‘We could do with some o’ that, couldn’t we?’ she said. ‘We don’t half pong, the pair of us.’
Smell? Well, yes, he must do. Washing without soap for so long could not have helped, and he had hated the stink of soap-boiling so much he had made the stuff as infrequently as possible. And since leaving home he must have added considerably to the body odour with which he had set out. Still, better to pong a bit, even more than a bit, than to be a slave to Daily Shampoo I or Daily Shampoo II.
He tried another item.
‘ “Could you fancy your man in a smock? Or yourself for that matter since their appeal is uni-sexual? Part of the hand-crafted, back to natural living trend …” ’
Well, they had got back to natural living now all right. And without dressing up in smocks. But it was hardly a way of life he would have embraced voluntarily.
A Long Walk to Wimbledon Page 16