Greybeard (3 page)

“He’s a beauty, isn’t he? Seen a lot of ’em about just lately. You can spot ’em more easily in the winter. Or perhaps they are just growing more plentiful in these parts.”

“Everything that can still multiply is doing so,” Greybeard said harshly.

“I’ll sell you the next one I catch, Greybeard. I haven’t forgotten what happened before we came to Sparcot. You can have the next one I catch. I’ve got my snares set along under the bank.”

“You’re a regular old poacher, Jeff,” Charley said. “Unlike the rest of us, you’ve never had to change your job.”

“What do you mean? Me never had to change my job? You’re daft, Charley Samuels! I spent most of my life in a stinking machine-tool factory before the revolution and all that. Not that I wasn’t always keen on nature — but I never reckoned I’d get it at such close quarters, as you might say.”

“You’re a real old man of the woods now, anyhow.”

“Think I don’t know you’re laughing at me? I’m no fool, Charley, whatever you may think to yourself. But I reckon it’s terrible the way us town people have been turned into sort of half-baked country bumpkins, don’t you? What’s there left to life? All of us in rags and tatters, full of worms and the toothache! Where’s it all going to end, eh, I’d like to know? Where’s it all going to end?” He turned to scrutinize the woods again.

“We’re doing okay,” Greybeard said. It was his invariable answer to the invariable question. Charley also had his invariable answer.

“It’s the Lord’s plan, Jeff, and you don’t do any good by worrying over it. We cannot say what He has in mind for us.”

“After all He’s done to us this last fifty years,” Jeff said, “I’m surprised you’re still on speaking terms with Him.”

“It will end according to His will,” Charley said.

Pitt gathered up all the wrinkles of his face, spat, and passed on with his dead otter.

Where could it all end, Greybeard asked himself, except in humiliation and despair? He did not ask the question aloud. Though he liked Charley’s optimism, he had no more patience than old Pitt with the too-easy answers of the belief that nourished that optimism.

They walked on. Charley began to discuss the various accounts of people who claimed to have seen gnomes and little men, in the woods, or on rooftops, or licking the teats of the cows. Greybeard answered automatically; old Pitt’s fruitless question remained with him. Where was it all going to end? The question, like a bit of gristle in the mouth, was difficult to get rid of; yet increasingly he found himself chewing on it.

When they had walked right around the perimeter, they came again to the Thames at the western boundary, where it entered their land. They stopped and stared at the water.

Tugging, fretting, it moved about a countless number of obstacles on its course — oh yes, which it took as it has ever done! — to the sea. Even the assuaging power of water could not silence Greybeard’s mind.

“How old are you, Charley?” he asked.

“I’ve given up counting the years. Don’t look so glum! What’s suddenly worrying you? You’re a cheerful man, Greybeard; don’t start fretting about the future. Look at that water — it’ll get where it wants to go, but it isn’t worrying.”

“I don’t find any comfort in your analogy.”

“Don’t you, now? Well, then, you should do.”

Greybeard thought how tiresome and colourless Charley was, but he answered patiently. “You’re a sensible man, Charley. Surely we must think ahead? This is getting to be a pensioner’s planet. You can see the danger signs as well as I can. There are no young men and women anymore. The number of us capable of maintaining even the present low standard of living is declining year by year. We — ”

“We can’t do anything about it. Get that firmly into your mind and you’ll feel better about the whole situation. The idea that man can do anything useful about his fate is an old idea. What do I mean? Yes, a fossil. It’s something from another period... We can’t do anything. We just get carried along, like the water in this river.”

“You read a lot of things into the river,” Greybeard said, half laughing. He kicked a stone into the water. A scuttling and a plop followed as some small creature — possibly a water rat, for they were on the increase again — dived for safety.

They stood silent, Charley’s shoulders a little bent. When he spoke again, it was to quote poetry.

“ ‘The woods decay, the woods decay and fall

The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,

Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath...’ ”

Between the heavy prosaic man reciting Tennyson and the woods leaning across the river lay an incongruity. Laboriously, Greybeard said, “For a cheerful man, you know some depressing poetry.”

“That was what my father brought me up on. I’ve told you about that mouldy little shop of his...” One of the characteristics of age was that all avenues of talk led backwards in time.

“I’ll leave you to get on with your patrol,” Charley said, but Greybeard clutched his arm. He had caught a noise upstream distinct from the sound of the water.

He moved forward to the water’s edge and looked. Something was coming downstream, though overhanging foliage obscured details. Breaking into a trot, Greybeard made for the stone bridge, with Charley following at a fast walk behind him.

From the crown of the bridge they had a clear view upstream. A cumbersome boat was dipping into view only some eighty yards away. By its curved bow, he guessed it had once been a powered craft. Now it was being rowed and poled along by a number of whiteheads, while a sail hung slackly from the mast. Greybeard pulled his elder whistle from an inner pocket and blew on it two long blasts. He nodded to Charley and hurried over to the water mill, where Big Jim Mole lived.

Mole was already opening the door as Greybeard arrived. The years had yet to drain off all his natural ferocity. He was a stocky man with a fierce piggy face and a tangle of grey hair protruding from his ears as well as his skull. He seemed to survey Greybeard with nostrils as well as eyes.

“What’s the racket about, Greybeard?” he asked.

Greybeard told him. Mole came out smartly, buttoning his ancient army greatcoat. Behind him came Major Trouter, a small man who limped badly and helped himself along with a stick. As he emerged into the grey daylight, he began to shout orders in his high squeaking voice. People were still hanging about after the false alarm. They began to fall in promptly, if raggedly, women as well as men, into a prearranged pattern of defence.

The population of Sparcot was a many-coated beast. The individuals that comprised it had sewn themselves into a wide variety of clothes and of rags that passed for clothes. Coats of carpet and skirts of curtain material were to be seen. Some of the men wore waistcoats cobbled from fox skins, clumsily cured; some of the women wore torn army greatcoats. Despite this variety, the general effect was colourless, and nobody stood out particularly against the neutral landscape. A universal distribution of sunken cheeks and grey hairs added to the impression of a sad uniformity.

Many an old mouth coughed out the winter’s air. Many a back was bent, many a leg dragged. Sparcot was a citadel for the ailments: arthritis, lumbago, rheumatism, cataract, pneumonia, influenza, sciatica, dizziness. Chests, livers, backs, heads, caused much complaint, and the talk in an evening was mostly of the weather and toothache. For all that, the villagers responded spryly to the sound of the whistle.

Greybeard observed this with approval, even while wondering how necessary it was; he had helped Trouter organize the defence system before an increasing estrangement with Mole and Trouter had caused him to take a less prominent part in affairs.

The two long whistle blasts signified a threat by water. Though most travellers nowadays were peaceable (and paid toll before they passed under Sparcot Bridge), few of the villagers had forgotten the day, five or six years ago, when they had been threatened by a solitary river pirate armed with a flame-thrower.

Flame-throwers seemed to be growing scarcer. Like petrol, machine guns, and ammunition, they were the produce of another century, and the relics of a vanished world. But anything arriving by water was the subject for a general stand-to.

Accordingly, a strongly armed party of villagers — many of them carried homemade bows and arrows — was gathered along the riverside by the time the strange boat came up. They crouched behind a low and broken wall, ready to attack or defend, a little extra excitement shaking through their veins.

The approaching boat travelled sideways to the stream. It was manned by as unruly a set of landlubbers as ever cast anchor. The oarsmen seemed as much concerned with keeping the boat from capsizing as with making progress forward; as it was, they appeared to be having little luck in either endeavour.

This lack of skill was due not only to the difficulty inherent in rowing a fifty-year-old, thirty-foot-long cruiser with a rotten hull, or to the presence aboard of fully a dozen people with their possessions. In the cockpit of the cruiser, struggling under the grip of four men, was a rebellious pack reindeer.

Although the beast had been pollarded — as the custom was since one of the last authoritarian governments had introduced the animal into the country some twenty years ago — it was strong enough to cause considerable damage; and reindeer were more valuable than men. They could be used for milking and meat production when cattle were scarce, and they made good transport animals; whereas men could only grow older.

Despite this distraction, one of the navigators, acting as lookout and standing in the bow of the boat, sighted the massed forces of Sparcot and called out a warning. She was a tall, dark woman, lean and hard, her dyed black hair knotted down under a scarf. When she called to the rowers, the promptness with which they rested on their oars showed how glad they were to do so. Someone squatting behind one of the baggages of clothing piled on deck passed the dark woman a white flag. She thrust it aloft and called out to the waiting villagers over the water.

“What’s she yelling about?” John Meller asked. He was an old soldier who had once been a sort of batman to Mole, until the latter threw him out in exasperation as useless. Nearly ninety, Meller was as thin as a staff and as deaf as a stone, though his one remaining eye was still sharp.

The woman’s voice came again, confident though it asked a favour. “Let us come by in peace. We have no wish to harm you and no need to stop. Let us by, villagers!”

Greybeard bawled her message into Meller’s ear. The whitehead shook his scruffy skull and grinned to show he had not heard. “Kill the men and rape the women! I’ll take the dark-haired hussy in the front.”

Mole and Trouter came forward, shouting orders. They had evidently decided they were under no serious threat from the boat.

“We must stop them and inspect them,” Mole said. “Get the pole out. Move there, you men! Let’s have a parley with this shower and see who they are and what they want. They must have something we need.”

During this activity, Towin Thomas had come up beside Greybeard and Charley Samuels. In his efforts to see the boat clearly, he knotted his face into a grimace. He dug Greybeard in the ribs with a patched elbow.

“Hey, Greybeard, that reindeer wouldn’t come amiss for the heavy work, would it?” he said, sucking the end of his cudgel reflectively. “We could use it behind the plough, couldn’t we?”

“We’ve no right to take it from them.”

“You’re not getting religious ideas about that reindeer, are you? You’re letting old Charley’s line of talk get you down.”

“I never listen to a thing either Charley or you say,” Greybeard said.

A long pole that had done duty carrying telephone wires in the days when a telephone system existed was slid out across the water until its tip rested between two stones on the farther bank. The river narrowed here towards the ruined bridge farther downstream. This spot had afforded the villagers a useful revenue for years; their levies on river-going craft supplemented their less enthusiastic attempts at husbandry. It was the one inspired idea of Big Jim Mole’s otherwise dull and oppressive reign. To reinforce the threat of the pole, the Sparcot men now showed themselves in strength along the bank. Mole ran forward brandishing a sword, calling for the strangers to heave to.

The tall, dark woman on the boat waved her fists at them.

“Respect the white flag of peace, you mangy bastards!” she yelled. “Let us come by without spoiling. We’re homeless as it is. We’ve nothing to spare for the likes of you.”

Her crew had less spirit than she. They shipped their oars and punting sticks and let the boat drift under the stone bridge until it rested against the pole. Elated to find such a defenceless prize, the villagers dragged it against the near bank with grapnels. The reindeer lifted its heavy head and blared its defiance; the dark woman shrieked her disgust.

“Hey there, you with the butcher’s snout,” she cried, pointing at Mole. “You listen to me, we’re your neighbours. We only come from Grafton Lock. Is this how you treat your neighbours, you fusty old pirate?”

A murmur ran through the crowd on the bank. Jeff Pitt was the first to recognize the woman. She was known as Gypsy Joan, and her name was something of a legend even among villagers who had never ventured into her territory.

Jim Mole and Trouter stepped forward and bawled at her to be silent, but again she shouted them down.