Greybeard (11 page)

Giving him a searching glance, Timberlane said, “You’re sick, man. You’d better get back to barracks and have a doctor examine you.”

The revolver jerked. “Just get her rolling. Don’t talk to me.” He coughed, and ran a hand heavily over his face. One of his eyelids developed a nervous flutter and he glanced over his shoulder at Martha.

“Really, don’t you think — ”

“Shut up, woman!”

With Timberlane hugging the wheel, they crawled down a little dead side street. Two Cowley Fathers in black habits were carrying a woman between them, moving with difficulty under her weight; her left hand trailed against the pavement. They stood absolutely still as the truck came level with them and did not move until it had gone past. The dead vacant face of the woman gaped at Martha as they growled by. Pitt swallowed spittle audibly.

As if coming to a resolution, he raised his revolver. As the point swung towards Timberlane, Martha screamed. Her husband trod on the brake. They rocked back and forth, the engine died, they stopped.

Before Timberlane could heave himself around, Pitt dropped the gun and hid his face in his hands. He was weeping and raving, but what he said was indistinguishable.

The slack-mouthed fellow said, “Keep still! Keep still! Don’t run away! We don’t none of us want to get shot.”

Timberlane had the captain’s revolver in his hand. He knocked Pitt’s arms down from his face. Seeing how his weapon had changed owners sobered Pitt.

“Shoot me if you must — think I’d care? Go on, better get it over with. I shall be shot anyhow when Croucher finds I let you escape. Shoot us all and be done with it!”

“I never done no one any harm — I used to be a postman. Let me get out! Don’t shoot me,” the slack-mouthed guard said. He still nursed his revolver helplessly on his lap. The sight of his captain’s breakdown had completely disorganized him.

“Why should I shoot either of you?” Timberlane asked curtly. “Equally, why should you shoot me? What were your orders, Pitt?”

“I spared your life. You can spare mine. You’re a gentleman! Put the gun away. Let me have it again. Shut it in a locker.” He was recovering again, still confused, but cocky and casting his untrustworthy eye about. Timberlane kept the gun aimed at his chest.

“Let’s have that explanation.”

“It was Croucher’s orders. He had me in front of me — I mean in front of him — this morning. Said that this vehicle of yours should be in his hands. Said you were just an intellectual troublemaker, a spy maybe, from London. Once you’d got the truck moving, I was to shoot you and your lady wife. Then Studley here and me was to report back to him with the vehicle. But I couldn’t do it, honest, I’m not cut out for this sort of thing. I had a wife and family — I’ve had enough of all this killing — if my poor old Vi — ”

“Cut out the ham acting, Mr Pitt, and let us think,” Martha said. She put an arm over her husband’s shoulder. “So we couldn’t trust friend Croucher after all.”

“He couldn’t trust us. Men in his position may be fundamentally liberal, but they have to remove random elements.”

“You got that phrase from my father. Okay, Algy, so we’re random elements again — now what do we do?”

To her surprise, he twisted around and kissed her. There was a hard gaiety in him. He was the man in command. He removed the revolver from the unprotesting Studley, and slipped it into a locker.

“In the circumstances we have no alternatives. We’re getting out of Oxford. We’ll head west towards Devon. That would seem to be the best bet. Pitt, will you and Studley join us?”

“You’ll never get out of Oxford and Cowley. The barricades are up. They were put up during the night across all roads leading out of town.”

“If you want to throw in your lot with us, you take orders from me. Are you going to join us? Yes or no?”

“But I’m telling you, the barricades are up. You couldn’t get out of town, not if you were Croucher you couldn’t,” Pitt said.

“You must have a pass or something to permit you to be driving around the streets. What was that thing you flashed at the guard as we left the barracks?”

Pitt brought a pass sheet out of his tunic pocket, and handed it over.

“I’ll have your tunic, too. From now on you are demoted to private. Sorry, Pitt, but you didn’t exactly earn your promotion, did you?”

“I’m no murderer, if that’s what you mean.” His manner was steadier now. “Look, I tell you we’ll all get killed if you attempt to drive through the barricades. They’ve established these big concrete blocks everywhere. They stop traffic and tip up GEMs.”

“Get that tunic off before we talk.”

The Cowley Fathers came level with the truck. They stared in before labouring into a public house with their burden.

As Timberlane passed his jacket over to Martha and slipped on Pitt’s tunic — it creaked at its rotten seams as he struggled into it — he said, “Food must be still coming into the town, mustn’t it? Food, stores, ammunition — God knows what. Don’t tell me Croucher isn’t intelligent enough to organize that. In fact he’s probably looting the counties all around for his supplies.”

Unexpectedly, Studley leaned forward and tapped Timberlane on the shoulder. “That’s right, sir, and there’s a fish convoy coming up from Southampton due here this morning, ’cause I heard that Transport Sergeant Tucker say so when we signed for the windrush earlier on.”

“Good man! The barriers will have to go down to let the convoy through. As the convoy enters, we go out. Which way will it be coming from?”

As they trundled south through the devouring sunlight, the sound of an explosion came to them. Farther up the road, they saw by a pall of smoke to their right that Donnington Bridge had been blown up. A way out of the city had been cut off. Nobody spoke. Like the cholera, the desolation in the streets was contagious.

At Rose Hill, the blocks of flats set back from the road were as blank as cliffs. The only alleviation to the stark nudity of the thoroughfare was an ambulance that crawled from a service road, its blue light revolving. All its windows were blanketed. It mounted the grass verge, crossed the main road only a few yards ahead of the DOUCH(E) vehicle, and stopped on the opposite verge with a final shudder. As they passed it, they caught sight of the driver sprawled across the wheel...

Farther on, among private houses, it was less like death. In several front gardens old men and women were burning bonfires. And what superstition did that represent, Martha wondered.

When they reached a roundabout, soldiers with slung rifles came out from a check point to meet them. Timberlane leaned out of the window and flashed the pass without stopping. The soldiers waved him on.

“How much farther?” Timberlane asked.

“We’re nearly there. The roadblock we want is at Littlemore Railway Bridge. Beyond that it’s just country,” Pitt said.

“Croucher has a long boundary to defend.”

“That’s why he wants more men. This blocking of roads was a bright idea of his. It helps keep strangers out as well as us in. He doesn’t want deserters getting away and setting up an opposition, does he? The road takes a right bend here towards the bridge, and there’s a road joins it from the right. Ah, there’s that pub, the Marlborough — that’s on the corner!”

“Right, do what I told you. Take a tip from that ambulance we passed. All right, Martha, my sweet? Here we go!”

As they rounded the bend, Timberlane slumped over the wheel, trailing his right hand out of the window. Pitt slumped beside him; the other two lolled back in their seats. Steering carefully, Timberlane negotiated their vehicle in a drunken line towards the public house Pitt had mentioned. He let it mount the pavement, then twisted the wheel and released the clutch while remaining in gear. The truck shuddered violently before stopping. They were facing Littlemore Bridge, a mere two hundred yards up the road.

“Good, keep where you are,” Timberlane said. “Let’s hope the Southampton convoy is on time. How many vehicles is it likely to consist of, Studley?”

“Four, five, six. Hard to tell. It varies.”

“Then we ought to aim to get through after the second truck.”

As Timberlane spoke, he was scanning ahead. The railway line lay hidden in its cutting. The road narrowed into two traffic lanes by the bridge. It was concealed beyond the bridge by the rise of the land, but fortunately the roadblock had been set up on this side of the bridge, and so was visible from where they waited. It consisted of a collection of concrete blocks, two old lorries, and wooden poles. A small wooden building nearby had been taken over by the military; it looked as if it might house a machine gun. Only one soldier could be seen, leaning by the door of the building and shading his eyes to look down the road at them.

A builder’s lorry stood near the barrier. A man was standing in it, throwing bricks down to another man. They appeared to be strengthening the defences, and to judge by their clumsy movements, they were unused to the job.

Minutes passed. The whole scene was nondescript; this dull stretch of road was neither town nor country. Not only did the sunlight drain it of all its pretensions; it had perhaps never been surveyed as purposefully as Timberlane surveyed it now. The slothful movements of the men handling bricks took on a sort of dreamlike persistence. Flies entered the DOUCH(E) truck, droning their way fruitlessly about the interior. Their noise reminded Martha of the long summer days of her girlhood, when into her happiness, to become an inseparable part of it, had entered the realization that a wrong like a curse hung over her and over her parents and over her friends — and over everyone. She had seen the
effects
of the curse spread wider and wider, like the sand in a desert sandstorm that erodes the sky. Wide-eyed, she stared at the hunched back of her husband, indulging herself in a little horror fantasy that he was dead, really dead of the cholera. She succeeded in frightening herself.

“Algy — ”

“Here they come! Watch it now! Lie flat, Martha; they’re bound to shoot as we go through.”

He sent them rolling forward, bumping back onto the road. A first lorry, a big furniture lorry plastered in dust, humped itself over the narrow bridge from the other side. One soldier came to attend to it; he drew back part of the wooden barricade to allow the lorry through. It growled forward through the narrow opening. As it moved down the road towards the DOUCH(E) vehicle, a second lorry — this one an army lorry with a torn canopy — appeared over the bridge.

Their timing had to be good. Rolling steadily ahead, the DOUCH(E) truck had to pass that second lorry as close to the bridge as possible. Timberlane pressed his foot down harder. Elms by the roadside, tawdry from dust, scattered sunlight red and white across his vision. They passed the first lorry. The driver called something. They sped towards the army lorry. It was coming through the concrete blocks. The driver saw Timberlane, gestured, accelerated, swung his wheel to the near side. The sentry ran forward, swinging up his rifle. His mouth flapped. His words were lost in the sound of engines. Timberlane drove straight at him.

They roared past the army lorry without touching it, all four of them instinctively watching and yelling. Their offside headlight struck the soldier before he could turn. His rifle went flying. Like a bag of cement, he was flung against one of the concrete blocks. Something screamed as they scraped past the barrier: steel on stone. As they lurched across the bridge, the third vehicle in the convoy loomed up ahead of them.

From the wooden sentry post they had passed, a machine gun woke into action. Bullets clattered against the grating across the back of their truck, making the inside ring like a steel drum. The windscreen of the vehicle ahead shattered; new rips bloomed sharp across its old canvas. With a whistle of tires, it slewed off to one side. The driver flung open his door, but fell back into the cab as it canted to the other side. Bumping and jarring, it smashed through railings down the embankment towards the railway line below.

Timberlane had swerved in the other direction to avoid hitting the lorry. Only the accident that overtook it enabled him to get past it. They lurched forward again, and the road was clear ahead. The machine gun was still barking, but the lie of the land sheltered them from it.

If Studley had not collapsed at that point, and had to be rested in a deserted village called Sparcot, where other refugees were gathering, they might have made it down to Devon. But Studley had the cholera; and a paranoiac called Mole arrived to turn them into a fortified outpost; and a week later severe rains washed out a host of opportunities. The halt at Sparcot lasted for eleven long grey years.

Looking back to that time, Martha reflected on the way in which the nervous excitement of their stay at Cowley had embalmed it in memory, so that it all came back easily. The years that followed were less clear, for they had been dulled by misery and monotony. The death of Studley; the deaths of several others of that original bunch of refugees; the appearance of Big Jim Mole, and the quarrels as he distributed them among the deserted houses of the village; the endless struggle, the fights over women; the abandonment of hope, convention, and lipstick; these were now like figures in a huge but faded tapestry to which she would not turn again.

One event in those days (ah, but the absence of children had been a sharper wound in her mind then!) remained with her clearly, because she knew it still fretted her husband. That was their bartering of the DOUCH(E) truck, during the second winter at Sparcot, when they were all lightheaded from starvation. They exchanged it for a cartload of rotting fish, parsnips, and vitamin pills belonging to a one-eyed wandering hawker. She and Algy had haggled with him throughout one afternoon, to watch him in the end drive away into the dusk in their truck. In the darkness of that winter, their miseries had reached their deepest point.