One could run away from war, but never – not even with the rags of honour – from the prospect of peace.
On the second night, thus cornered by conscience, I took my troubles, like many a better man before me, down to the bar.
The jukebox was playing Lonesome Road; I wished I had laid a bet on it, particularly since it seemed that they were now playing it for me. I had had four drinks up in my room already, and was in a take-your-choice mood; ready to be sad and sorry for myself, ready to argue about anything, ready for a laugh. It was the day before the mid-month pay day, and the bar was nearly empty. The Ox – Callaghan – and the Weasel propped up one end of it. Two men were playing checkers at a side table, and two others watching them. Joe was at his position of trust behind the counter. Then there was me, and that was all. A festive evening at Bone Lake was under way.
I got my drink, and asked Joe about Ed the pilot, whom I wanted to see.
‘He’s gone after the doctor, up at Frobisher,’ Joe told me. ‘They’ve had plenty trouble up there.’
‘When will he be back?’
Joe shrugged. ‘Anybody’s guess. The way I heard it, they were snowed in again. But good.’ He looked at me, guardedly. ‘How’s the old man?’
‘Not too well.’
‘You want to get the doc for him?’
Down at the far end of the bar, the other two were listening to us. The raw antennae which were now part of my equipment, where the old man was concerned, began to come alive. I said: ‘He could use a doctor. But it may be too late.’ Joe gave the counter a swab and a polish, carefully watching his own hand as it moved to and fro. Then he asked: ‘How’s that?’
‘He’s very sick. The way he was when he left here.’
‘That’s too bad,’ said Joe.
Down the length of the bar, Callaghan raised his voice. ‘Labelle said he was walking OK when he left the station. Said he looked fine.’
I didn’t answer that one, but sipped my drink and stared at nothing. They were all guilty and they knew it. I wasn’t going to help them out. The silence settled round us, full of second thoughts.
Callaghan spoke again. ‘They say you’re taking care of the old man.’
The fifth strong drink was having its effect. For me, there could be no more denials. I saw now where I was going. If it could happen to St Paul on the road to Damascus, it could happen to me at Bone Lake.
‘Yes, I’m taking care of him. It’s time somebody did.’
The Weasel said, with a snigger: ‘You taking care of the girl, too?’
I didn’t answer that, either; the joke fell, like the traditional lead balloon, flat on the floor of the bar. Callaghan half-turned, towards his friend, and growled: ‘Knock it off, you!’ and then came back to me. ‘What’s the trouble with the old man?’ he asked.
‘You should know. You hit him.’
But Callaghan had already been tampering with the evidence. ‘I didn’t hit him. Not the way I could. I gave him the back of my hand, that’s all. And he asked for it! I’ve got witnesses for that.’
I said: ‘He’s seventy years old.’
‘That’s what’s wrong with him, then. We’ve all got to go, some time.’
Joe came up with a fresh glass and a prompt salute: ‘Have this one on the house.’
I took it, and justified it, in the same moment of time. Let it be my farewell to the corrupt world. I leant back against the bar and said: ‘He’s not dying of old age. He’s dying of a crack on the side of the face, and lying about in the police station without a doctor, and walking a mile home when it was fifteen below zero. He’s dying of brutality and neglect. He’s dying for you.’ I had meant to say ‘because of you’, not ‘for you’, but that was the way it came out. I raised my glass and finished, idiotically: ‘So cheers!’
In the foolish silence after that, Callaghan said: ‘Sounds like old age to me.’
At his side, the Weasel nudged him, and then called out to me: ‘Your girlfriend wants you.’
Mary was standing in the doorway, looking towards me. I had not seen her for two days; I had forgotten how shabby and second-rate she looked, how poor an ally. But this was something else that I would not worry about, nor relate to the merit scale of the past. Mary need not pass any family inspection; my friends didn’t have to be jealous. She was a fellow believer. I walked over to the door, and to her.
‘How is he?’
‘Not so good.’ She glanced towards the others, and then back to me. ‘He wants to see you, though.’
‘It’s mutual.’
The eyes in the thin face narrowed sharply. ‘If you’re going to be cute–’
I said: ‘I’m going to listen to him. That’s all I want to do, now.’
Then I took her arm, and we walked out together. It did not even feel strange. No couple, on their way to visit Shepherd, could ever be ill-matched.
A Little Night Music
The room was the same; the old man was not. He had changed shockingly in the brief time since I had last seen him; then he had been tired and freshly wounded, now he was riven by pain and exhaustion. When I came into his room, he was lying back against the grey pillows with his eyes closed; he was transparently pale, and the bony face had shrunk down to a pinched mask. The faded blanket on the bed seemed like his graveclothes, and the brave word ‘blighty’ a label on a package ready for despatch.
But the man himself was brave, as I knew by now; when he heard the door shut he opened his eyes, and even leaned forward to greet me. Then he began to talk, straight away, without wasting time, as though he realized that time was not there to waste. He talked, also, as if he knew already that I believed.
Mary sat on the bed, holding his hand; I sat in the armchair, as I had done before; we were probably the most attentive audience he had ever had. I don’t think that either of us had any choice. In that wretched room, on that wretched bier, he grew in authority even as he weakened. There were long pauses, but except for a couple of times when I wanted something explained, or a detail added to a phrase I did not understand, I never thought to interrupt.
What he said, I have set down as I remember it.
He said: ‘I have thought for a long time about the people of that world. In fact I’ve thought about it for nearly a quarter of a century. We can deduce a great deal from the refrigerator, and its contents. Here was a whole city of food, perhaps a hundred square miles. It was the sole survivor of world destruction – but what a survivor! After millions of years, it was still in working order; the solar power – or perhaps it was atomic – still functioned perfectly; the vast stores were intact; and it was all controlled by a handful of men. For all we know, they may have been specially bred for the job. But certainly there were very few of them. The process of automation was complete.
‘It shows how amazingly far they had advanced; much farther than the meagre inch of our earliest history – the hot water and the central heating of the Romans, the celestial accuracy of the Chinese or the Druids. These people were infinitely further along the road than that. This was a modern storehouse of modern food. In fact they stored it better than we have learned to do today.’
He considered again; then he said: ‘I hope they managed it better than we do; I hope they had solved our problem of plenty. I hope they gave it away when people were hungry, instead of holding out for a price, or burning what they could not use. But perhaps this was their basic problem too, the one that finally defeated them. Perhaps that was why their world came to an end.
‘I have often wondered what made that man on guard come outside. Did he think someone was trying to steal his food? Or did he perhaps come out to give it away, and the world blew up in his face? If only I could have talked with him! If only we could know what the world was quarrelling about!’
He mused, wandered off at a tangent; he said: ‘No doubt it was something utterly foolish, as it might be today. They had plenty of food; they had learned to harness power and growth; they could feed the world
. Or perhaps they could only feed half the world, and the other half of the world had better eggs or caviare – or they were thought to have them … But what appalling waste! They had learned to use the richest source of life, the sea; they had discovered the seabed – the millions of years of sediment, the filtering-down of dead fish, dead animals, dead men, dead weed; the compost heap of time itself.’
Now he went off on a long rambling aside; he said: ‘The idea that we will starve because we will outgrow the earth’s surface, that food only flourishes on land, is childish. What we produce on land is only a tiny spill-over from the true source of life – water. But if we must cling to these old-fashioned ideas, we can already go a long way towards conquering that problem. Sea water, distilled, can make a garden, a granary, out of all our modern deserts: the Sahara, the Kalahari, the centre of Australia, the dry crusts of Texas and Arizona and Arabia. Yet if we truly want to learn from the past, we should study what the people of that world accomplished. They made themselves another garden, on the seabed itself.’
Then he returned to what he called ‘the last quarrel’, on which he must have thought most deeply of all. He said: ‘Perhaps it did not concern food. These people had food in abundance. Perhaps, with all their technical advances, they remained as irrational as we are. Perhaps the fatal spark was pride. Or Helen of Troy. Or some crude insult at the Olympic Games. Or a miserable frontier dispute over ten square miles of swamp. Or the television rights to the moon. Or the colour of a skin.’ For the first time, he laughed. ‘Or the thickness of a skin. Perhaps it was a collision between the armadillo men and some softer race with delicate complexions and supple bodies, who thought themselves the tender elect. Perhaps they were only like us, after all: clever, accomplished, yet fundamentally greedy and suspicious.
‘Perhaps their children were poisoned, as ours are, by adult ambition. Nearly all children are innocent and generous, to start with; they could continue so, but they rarely do. You have only to watch refugee children in a Pestalozzi village–’ (I did not then know what he was talking about, though I do now) ‘–to see this rule of innocence, this natural love. At the beginning, they are all brothers. Then they catch an infection of hate, they breathe the corrupt air of battle, they grow claws, and most of them are lost for ever.’
He was silent for a long time after that; he looked exhausted to the point of death; I was afraid that we would hear little more save his disjointed wandering down the last pathway. But after he had rested, and Mary had brought him warm milk and resettled his pillows, he rallied amazingly. He had much more to say, and I had never been so glad to listen. There were moments when I would have bought his life with my own.
He said: ‘But whatever the quarrel, we have the fact of destruction. Indeed, I believe that we have it on record, in our first and best history book. We cannot tell how much of the Bible is race memory, but I am sure it is an accurate picture of what has gone before. I am sure that our world was unaccountably born with knowledge of that remote past, that catastrophe …’ This was one of the few moments when he was watching my face, instead of staring into the drab middle distance, and he must have found disbelief there, because he said, energetically: ‘No, it is not too far-fetched! Consider the oldest tales of the beginning of the world. They speak of the earth vaporized, and gradually cooling; of swirling mists, invading seas. It is a perfect picture of the aftermath of an atomic explosion. And there are many other references to support the picture of a vast cataclysm.
‘Take one of the simplest, the story of the Ark and the Flood. We read of a tidal wave lapping against high mountains, just not reaching the wretched survivors of some ruined plain. Don’t forget, when the waters receded, those survivors would have to start all over again; however clever they might be, they would have nothing in the whole world to work with but water and a few baulks of timber … And Lot’s wife, turning to look at a city in flames, changed into a pillar of salt – instantly calcified, let us say, by unimaginable heat. Hiroshima also had its pillars of salt. After the fire-storm, there were human shapes fused into the very fabric of concrete buildings.
‘“The earth was without form, and void”,’ said Shepherd. ‘I believe that was literally true. I believe it was shapeless, and empty, because these people had made it so. They learned how to blow themselves up, and then they went ahead and did it. Perhaps it wasn’t even the first time. Perhaps it always happens. Perhaps we always go as far as we can, in discovery, and then we go too far. Perhaps we have had Hiroshima before, many times. And then we made atomic faces at each other. And then we had the hydrogen bomb, and then we quarrelled over Berlin, or Africa, or China, or food, or space. And then we did – whatever we’re going to do next.’
Interrupting for the first time, I said the first thing that came into my mind: ‘God wouldn’t allow it!’
The old man smiled, smoothing the worn blanket with a hand equally worn. ‘Ah, if I could believe that … I must tell you that I have never believed, and I am not going to start now. It would be wrong. However much I want to … IfGod is my kind of man–’ I cannot begin to describe the wistful humility with which he said these strange words, ‘–then He will forgive someone who denies Him to the end, even though that end terrifies him. Of course I am afraid of death, but I will not beg for mercy.
‘For me, it is a matter of reason,’ he said. ‘It is so much more likely that the universe is ruled by chance than that God plans – or allows – our horrible mistakes and failures and accidents; the fire which burns a whole orphanage, the hurricane that destroys a city, the boy of ten who wastes away with leukaemia … Who, with power to prevent, could allow such things? Who could be so senseless and cruel? But if I am wrong, then you are wrong. God would allow us to destroy our world. He would have great patience. And great anger. And infinite belief. He would look down and say: “If they annihilate themselves again, they deserve to. But perhaps this time …”’
At that moment, there was an interruption, of the crudest possible sort. Without a word or a knock, the door sprang open, and Mrs Cross advanced into the room.
She had not improved, nor softened; she was the same sort of person, plagued by anger and suspicion, plaguing us in return. She stood four-square in the middle of the bedroom, looking from Mary to myself, looking last of all at the gaunt figure on the bed. Her voice was harsh as she said: ‘What’s going on around here?’
I got up, and put myself between her and the bed, trying to mask and protect our charge. I said: ‘Nothing’s going on. Mr Shepherd is very ill, that’s all. He mustn’t be disturbed.’
She bent, and peered round us; her eyes dwelt on the old man as if she were pricing his chances of life. Then she said: ‘He’s sick, he should be in hospital. That’s what they’re for. You planning to take him away?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘He owes rent.’
‘It will be paid.’ I came nearer to her, trying to draw her towards the doorway again, out of earshot, anywhere; it was a shameful moment which I must somehow cancel out. ‘But I can’t have him worried now.’
‘You can’t!’ Her voice exploded into sneering insult. ‘Who are you, for God’s sake? Just tell me that! This is my house, and my room. It’s a single room, not a convention hall!’ She was looking at Mary now, with the utmost contempt. ‘You know what I mean, miss! It’s time we straightened a few things up around here!’
Mary did not answer, did not even look in her direction; she also had half risen, and put her body between Mrs Cross and the old man. I edged forward again, and said loudly: ‘That’s enough. Leave us alone.’
‘I’ll decide what’s enough!’ said Mrs Cross, in a fresh fury. ‘This house is private. It’s not a hospital. It’s not a morgue, either!’
I cursed her; I hated her; I could have killed her there and then. To talk thus, in his hearing, as if he were not present, was iniquitous. Her sole purpose was to get him to die somewhere else … I advanced again, until I was touching her, and she had to fall ba
ck a pace. I said: ‘He’s staying here. And I’m staying here. And you’re leaving now!’
She must have caught some desperation in my trembling voice, for she gave ground again, until she stood in the doorway. Her eyes darted round the room, as if she were memorizing the evidence for some vicious legal battle to come. She shouted: ‘We’ll see about that!’ and turned, and slammed the door behind her with shattering violence.
I looked immediately at the old man. The noise had shaken him, as it had shaken the whole rickety house; I could hear him gasping with shock. Though long subjected to Mrs Cross, and ready to excuse and forgive her, he was not strong enough to withstand such barbarous thrusts. Iforesaw then that this horrible invasion, topped off by the explosion of the slamming door, would be a mortal blow, that he would now begin to fail. The long shadows in the room seemed to grow deeper and darker, as the scene changed for the one that must follow it.
But he could still joke about such things, in a very small way. Taking up his story once more, in a feeble whisper, he gave Mrs Cross an oblique, gently satirical salute.
‘You may not think so, at this precise moment, but we are not inevitably doomed to hate and destroy one another … Of course we can balance the world on love and faith, any time we choose. We can make it the mirror of paradise, if we want to … Vaguely we do want to. But do we want to enough? Will we choose, in fact, or will we spit it all out in each other’s faces?’
He began to ramble then, moving his head restlessly, speaking of a worldwide yearning for peace which had never been strong enough to overcome envy and suspicion. I had an idea that we had heard his last rational words; he was wasting before our eyes, and the word ‘waste’ was a desolate one. Hungry to stay in touch with him, I began to ask random questions, anything I could think of to encourage him to answer.
The Time Before This Page 8