Greybeard (17 page)

“There’s no chance she might really be about to bear a child?”

“My dear Timberlane — if you will pardon my not using your somewhat inane sobriquet — hope springs as eternal to the human womb as to the human breast, but I am surprised to find you seem to share her hope.”

“I suppose I do. You said yourself that hope was valuable.”

“Not valuable: imperative. But you must hope for yourself — when we hope for other people we are invariably disappointed. Our dreams have jurisdiction only over ourselves. Knowing you as I do, I see that you really came to me for your own sake. I rejoice to see it. My friend, you love life, you love this life with all its blemishes, with all its tastes and distastes — you also desire my immortality cure, do you not?”

Resting his throbbing head on his hand, Greybeard quaffed down more drink and said, “Many years ago I was in Oxford — in Cowley, to be accurate — when I heard of a treatment, it was just a rumour, a treatment that might prolong life, perhaps for several hundred years. It was something they were developing at a hospital there. Is it possible this could be done? I’d want scientific evidence before I believe.”

“Of course you do, naturally, undeniably, and I would expect nothing less of a man like you,” Jingadangelow said, nodding so vigorously that the woman was almost dislodged from his lap. “The best scientific evidence is empirical. You shall have empirical evidence. You shall have the full treatment — I’m absolutely convinced that you could afford it — and you shall then see for yourself that you never grow a day older.”

Squinting at him cunningly, Greybeard said, “Shall I have to come to Mockweagles?”

“Ah ha, he’s clever, isn’t he, Ruthie? He’s prepared the way for himself nicely. That’s the sort of man I prefer to deal with. I — ”

“Where is Mockweagles?” Greybeard asked.

“It’s what you might call my research headquarters. I reside there when I am not travelling the road.”

“I know, I know. You have few secrets from me, Dr Jingadangelow. It’s twenty-nine storeys high, more like a castle than a skyscraper...”

“Possibly your informants have been slightly exaggerating, Timberlane, but your general picture is of course amazingly accurate, as Joan will tell you, eh, my pet? But first we should get a few details straight; you will want your lovely wife to undergo the treatment too?”

“Of course I will, you old fool. I can quote poetry too, you know; to be a member of DOUCH(E) you have to be educated. ‘Let me not to the marriage of two minds omit impediment...’ How does it go? Shakespeare, Doctor, Shakespeare. Ever make his acquaintance? First-class scholar... Oh, there is my wife! Martha!”

He staggered to his feet, knocking over his glass. Martha hurried towards him, anxiety in her face. Charley Samuels was close behind, carrying Isaac in his arms.

“Oh, Algy, Algy, you must come at once. We’ve been robbed!”

“What do you mean, robbed?” He stared stupidly at her, resenting the interruption of his train of thought.

“While we were bringing you in here after you were attacked, thieves got into the boats and took everything they could lay their hands on.”

“The sheep!”

“They’ve all been taken, and our supplies.”

Greybeard turned to Jingadangelow and made a loose gesture of courtesy.

“Be seeing you, Doctor. Got to go — den of thieves — we’ve been robbed.”

“I always mourn to see a scholar suffer, Mr Timberlane,” Jingadangelow said, bowing his massive head towards Martha, without otherwise moving.

As he hurried into the open with Martha and Charley, Greybeard said brokenly, “Why did you leave the boats?”

“You know why! We had to leave them when we heard you were in trouble. We heard they were beating you up. Everything’s gone except the boats themselves.”

“My rifle!”

“Luckily Jeff Pitt had your rifle with him.”

Charley put the fox down, and it pulled on ahead. They pushed through the dark, down the uneven road. There were few lights now. Greybeard realized how late it was; he had lost the idea of time. Potsluck Tavern had its single window boarded up. The bonfires were mere smouldering cones of ash. One or two stalls were being shut by their owners; otherwise, the place was silent. A thin chip of moon, high overhead, shone on the expanse of flood water that threaded its way through the darkness of the land. Breathing the sharp air steadied the pulse in Greybeard’s head.

“That Jingadangelow’s behind all this,” Charley said savagely. “He has these travelling people in the power of his hand, from what I’ve seen and heard. He’s a charlatan. You shouldn’t have had anything to do with him, Greybeard.”

“Charlatans have their ambivalences,” Greybeard said, recognizing the preposterousness of the words as soon as they were out. Hurriedly he said, “Where are Becky and Towin?”

“They’re down by the river with Jeff now. We couldn’t find them first off, then they turned up. They were busy celebrating.”

As they came off the road and padded over soggy ground, they saw the trio huddled by the riverbank near the dinghy, carrying a couple of lanterns. They all stood together, not saying much. The celebration was over. Isaac padded unhappily in the mud until Charley took pity on him and lifted him into his arms.

“It would be best if we leave this place straight away,” Greybeard said, when examination proved that though the two boats were indeed all that was left to them, they were intact.

“This is not the place for us, and I am ashamed of my part in this evening’s events.”

“If you’d taken my advice, you’d never have left the boat in the first place,” Pitt said. “They’re just a lot of crooks here. It’s the loss of the sheep that grieves me.”

“You could have stayed by the boat as you were told,” Greybeard pointed out sharply. Turning to the others, he said, “My feeling is that we’ll be better off on the river. It is a fine night; I have alcohol in my system to row off. By tomorrow we can reach Oxford and get work and shelter there. It will be a very different place from what it was when Martha and I were last there, however many years ago that was. Do you all agree to leaving this thieves’ den now?”

Towin coughed, shifting his lantern from hand to hand.

“Actually, me and the missus was thinking of staying here, like. We made some great friends, see, called Liz and Bob, and we thought we’d join forces with them — if you had no particular objection. We aren’t much set on this idea of going down the river, as you know.” In the moonlight, he smiled his injured wolf’s grin and shuffled his feet.

“I need rest in my condition,” Becky said. She spoke more boldly than her husband, glaring at them through the sickly light. “I’ve had enough of being in that little leaking boat. We’d be better off with these friends of ours.”

“I’m sure that’s not true, Becky,” Martha said.

“Why, I should catch my death of cold in that boat, me in my condition. Tow agrees with me.”

“He always has to,” Pitt observed.

There was a silence as they stood together but separate in the dark. Much lay between them they could never express, currents of liking and resentment, affinity and aversion — vague but not the less strong for that.

“All right, if you’ve decided, we’ll continue without you,” Greybeard said. “Watch your belongings, that’s all I say.”

“We don’t like leaving you, Greybeard,” Towin said. “And you and Charley can keep that bit of money you owe me.”

“It’s entirely your choice.”

“That’s what I said,” Becky said. “We’re about old enough to take care of ourselves, I should reckon.”

As they were shaking hands all around, bidding each other goodbye, Charley started to hop about and scold.

“This fox has picked up all the fleas in Christendom. Isaac, you’re letting them loose on me, you villain!”

Setting the fox down, he ordered it towards the water. The fox understood what was required of it. It moved backwards into the flood, slowly, slowly, brush first and then the rusty length of its body, and finally its head. Pitt held a lantern so that they could see it better.

“What’s he doing? Is he going to drown himself?” Martha asked anxiously.

“No, Martha, only humans take their own lives,” Charley said. “Animals have got more faith. Isaac knows fleas don’t like cold water. This is his way of getting rid of them. They climb right up his body onto his muzzle, see, to avoid a soaking. You watch him now.”

Only part of the fox’s head was above the water. He sank down until his muzzle alone was showing. Then he ducked under completely. A circle of little fleas was left struggling on the surface. Isaac came up a yard away, bounded ashore, shook himself, and raced around in circles before returning to his master.

“I never saw a smarter trick,” Towin said to Becky, nodding his head, as the others climbed into the boats. “It must be something like that that the world’s doing to human beings, when you work it out — shaking us off its snout.”

“You’re talking a lot of rubbish, Towin Thomas,” she said.

They stood waving as the boats moved slowly away, Towin with his cheeks screwed up to see the particular outline merge with the general gloom.

“Well, there they go,” Charley said, pulling on his paddle. “She’s a sharp-tongued one, but I’m sorry to leave them in such a thieves’ den.”

They were towing Jeff Pitt’s little boat, so he could be in with them. He said, “Who’s the thieves? It might have been Jingadangelow’s men took our property. On the other hand, I reckon it might just as well have been old Towin. I never did trust him, crafty old blighter.”

“Whoever it was, the Lord will provide for us,” Charley said. He bent his back and guided his paddle deeper into the sedgey waters.

Chapter Four

Washington

In the first dreary days at Sparcot, when the rabble cast up there were forming into a community and the disease-ridden summer broke into a rain-swept autumn, Charley Samuels had not realized for some while that he knew the big man with the high bald head and growing beard. It was a time when everyone was more alert for enemies than friends.

Charley arrived at Sparcot some days after the Timberlanes, and in a dejected state of mind.

His father had owned a small bookshop in a South Coast town. Ambrose Samuels was a man of gloom and tempers. When he was in his most smiling mood, he would read aloud to Mrs Samuels, the boy Charley, and his two sisters, Ruth and Rachel. He read to them from the thousands of obsolete theological books with which the second floor of the old shop was stocked, or from the works of obsolete and morose poets that sold no better than the theology.

Much of this dead stock thus inevitably passed into Charley’s mind. He could quote it at any later time of life, without knowing who wrote it or when, remembering only that it came from what his father had designated as “a gilt-tooled thirty-two-mo” or a “tree’d calf octavo.”

“All men think all men mortal but themselves;

Themselves, when some alarming shock of fate

Strikes through their wounded hearts the sudden dread.

But their hearts wounded, like the wounded air,

Soon close; where passed the shaft, no trace is found.

As from the wing no scar the sky retains;

The parted wave no furrow from the keel;

So dies in human hearts the thought of death.

Even with the tender tear which Nature sheds

O’er those we love, we drop it in their grave.”

It was a lie. When Charley was eleven, an alarming shock of fate set the thought of death in his heart forever. In his eleventh year came the radiation sickness — the result of that deliberate act men called the Accident. His father died of cancer a year later.

The shop was sold. Mrs Samuels took her children to live in her home town, where she got a secretarial job. Charley went to work when he was fifteen. His mother died three years later.

He took a series of unskilled jobs while trying to act as father to his sisters. That had been in the late eighties and early nineteen-nineties. Compared with what was to come, it was — morally and economically — a fairly stable time. But work became harder to get. He saw his sisters established in good jobs while he was unemployed.

It was the outbreak of war that had the final shaping of him. He was twenty-nine. This madness added to madness, as nations bled themselves fighting over the few children who survived, decided him that there had to be something higher than man if all creation was not a mockery. Only in religion, it seemed to him, lay an antidote to despair. He had himself baptized into the Methodist Church — a step that would have enraged his father.

To avoid being called to fight in the war, Charley joined the Infantop Corps, a semi-international branch of Childsweep, dedicated to saving life rather than taking it. At once he had been swept away from Rachel and Ruth and plunged into the thick of the global struggle. It was then he met Algy Timberlane.

With the revolution and Britain’s withdrawal from the war in 2005, Charley returned to look after his sisters again. He found to his horror that Ruth and Rachel had taken to prostitution and were prospering. It was all done very discreetly, and they still worked in the afternoon at a nearby shop. Charley closed down part of his mind, settled in with them, and defended them where and when he could.