Greybeard (33 page)

“You’re talking nonsense, Algy. I remember how hard you worked, in Washington and London.”

He laughed. “Know why I joined? Because they offered to fly you out to Washington to join me! That was it! My interest in DOUCH was purely subsidiary to my interest in you.

“It’s true I did the job fairly well during the after-war years, when the government collapsed and the United National Government made peace with the enemy. But look at the chance I missed when we were in Cowley. If I hadn’t been so concerned about us, we could have been in on an important bit of history.

“Instead, we nipped off and vegetated all those dreary years at Sparcot. And what did I do there? Why, I flogged the DOUCH truck just because our bellies were a bit empty. And when I might have redeemed myself at Christ Church by retrieving the truck, I just couldn’t bear to stick out another couple of years’ hard work. Hearing that engine throb out there on the pond, I thought of that bloody truck, and how it stands for all I might have been or had.”

Martha hit at a moth that circled around her face and turned gleamingly to him.

“People who have been betrayed often see themselves as betrayers. Don’t do that, Algy. You’re thinking rubbish tonight. You’re too big a man to puddle about in silly self-deception. Don’t you see that what you’ve just told me is a potted history of your integrity?”

“The lack of it, you mean.”

“No, I don’t. You spent the war first trying to save children, then trying to do something constructive about the future. You married me, when you might have been having the sort of debauches most men of your age were enjoying all over the world. And I suspect you have remained faithful to me ever since. I don’t think that shows any lack of character.

“As for your feebleness at Cowley, you can go and ask old Jeff what he thinks to that one! You sold the DOUCH(E) truck after infinite painful debate with yourself, and saved the whole community at Sparcot from starving. As for getting it back again, why should you? If there is a future for any humans, they’ll be looking ahead, not back. DOUCH was a great idea when it was conceived in the year two thousand. Now we can see it’s irrelevant.

“But what’s never been irrelevant to you is other people — me, among others. You’ve always put me first. I’ve seen it; as you say, I’m not a fool. You put me before your job in Washington and in Cowley. Do you think I minded? If more people had put their fellow human beings before abstractions last century, we shouldn’t be where we are now.” She stopped abruptly. “That’s all, I think. End of lecture. Feeling better, Greybeard?”

He pressed his lips to her veined temple.

“Darling, I tell you we’re all suffering from some form of madness. After all this time — I’ve discovered yours!”

When he woke again, it was light, and Pitt was shaking him. Even before the old trapper spoke, he heard the throb of the steamer again.

“Better get your gun in case it’s pirates, Greybeard,” Pitt said. “The women say the boat’s coming in here.”

Pulling on his trousers, Greybeard moved out barefoot over the dew-soaked grass. Martha and Charley stood peering into the mist; Greybeard went behind them, laying a hand on his wife’s shoulder. This morning the mist was thick as milk. Behind them, the hillside was lost. Summoned by the throbbing of the engine, the women of the religious community were materializing and shuffling down to line the bank.

“The Master is coming! The Master is coming!” they cried.

The throbbing engine stopped. The sound of it died across the water. They strained their eyes to see.

A phantom river steamer appeared, gliding forward in silence. It seemed to have no substance, to exist merely in outline. On its deck, people stood motionless, staring over the sea. The old women on shore, those of them that were capable of it, sank to arthritic knees and cried, “The Master comes to save us!”

“I suppose there must still be depots of coal about, if you know where to look,” Greybeard said to Martha. “Presumably there’s not a coal mine left in action. Or maybe they fuel it with wood. We’d better be wary, but it hardly looks as if its intentions are hostile.”

“I know now how savages feel when the missionaries turn up with a cargo of Bibles,” Martha said. She was looking at a long banner draped along the steamer’s railings, which bore the words REPENT — THE MASTER COMES! And beneath, in smaller letters, “The Second Generation Needs Your Gifts and Prayers. Donations Wanted to Further Our Cause.”

“Looks as if the Bibles have a price tag,” Greybeard observed.

A group of people on the steamer came forward and removed a section of rail; they lowered a small boat into the water, obviously with the intention of coming ashore. At the same time, a loud-hailer opened up with a preliminary rasp and began to address the women ashore.

“Ladies of Wittenham Island, the Master calls you! He greets you and he will deign to see you. But this time he will not leave his holy vessel. If you want to speak with him, you’d better come aboard. We’re putting out a boat to ferry you and your gifts over. Remember, it costs only a dozen eggs to get you into his presence, and for a chicken you can have a word with him.”

The rowing boat put out from the steamer and laboured towards the shore. Two women rowed it, bent double over the oars, coughing and gasping as if on the verge of thrombosis. They became less insubstantial as, emerging from the mist, they reached the bank and climbed ashore.

Martha clutched Greybeard’s hand.

“Do you recognize one of those women? The one spitting into the water now?”

“It can’t be! It looks like old — what was her name?”

“We left her at whatever that place was — Becky! It is, it’s Becky Thomas!”

Martha hurried forward. The women of the island were jostling to get into the boat. Carried in their arms or in baskets were provisions, presumably offerings to lay before the Master. Becky stood to one side, watching the proceedings apathetically. She looked even dirtier than she had in her Sparcot days, and much older, though her body remained plump. Her cheeks were sunken and her nose sharp.

Regarding her, Martha thought, She’s of Algy’s and my parents’ generation. Amazing how some of them still survive, despite those gloomy predictions we used to hear about everyone dying young. Becky must be eighty-five if she’s a day.

And, more stabbingly: What’ll be left of the world if Algy and I ever reach that age?

As Martha approached her, Becky changed her position and stood with her hands on her hips. On one scrawny wrist, Martha noted, was strapped the battered old non-functioning watch that had once been Towin’s pride. Where was he?

“Hello, Becky,” she said. “It’s a small wet world. Are you taking a summer cruise?”

Becky showed little excitement at meeting up with Martha again, or at seeing Greybeard, Charley, and Pitt as they came over to speak to her.

“I belong to the Master now,” she told them. “That’s why I’m privileged even at my age to bear one of the Second Generation children. I shall be delivered of it in the autumn.”

Pitt cackled coarsely. “You was expecting when we left you at that fair place, however many years that was ago. Whatever happened to that kid? I reckon it was a phantom litter, wasn’t it? I always thought so at the time.”

“I was married then, you coarse old brute,” Becky said, “and the Master had not then taken on his Masterhood, so of course I had no issue. Only now I’ve seen the light can I conceive. If you want children, Martha, you’d better bring a gift to the Master and see what he can do for you. He works miracles, he does.”

“What’s happened to old Towin then, Becky?” Charley asked. “Isn’t he on the boat with you?”

She wrinkled her face into a frown.

“Old Towin Thomas was a sinful man, Charley Samuels, and I don’t think of him no more. He wouldn’t believe in the Master, or take the Master’s cures, and as a result he died of a malignant cancer that wasted him away until he didn’t weigh above a stone and a half. Frankly, it was a blessing when he passed over. I’ve followed the Master ever since then. I’m now coming up for my two hundred and twenty-third birthday. I don’t look a day over a hundred, I reckon, do I?”

Greybeard said, “That line sounds familiar. Do we know this Master of yours, then, Becky? It’s not Bunny Jingadangelow, is it?”

“You were always free with your tongue, Greybeard,” Becky said. “You mind how you address him, because he doesn’t use that old name now.”

“It sounds as though he still uses the old tricks, though,” Greybeard said, turning to Martha. “Let’s go aboard and see the old rascal.”

“I’ve no wish to see him,” Martha said.

“Well, look, we don’t want to be stuck here on this sea in this mist. We could be lost here till autumn comes, and by then we ought to be well on our way down river. Let’s go and see Jingadangelow and get him to give us a tow. It’s obvious that the captain of the ship must know his way about.”

They did as he said, and ferried themselves out to the steamer in Pitt’s boat. They climbed aboard, although the deck was already crowded with the faithful and their offerings.

Greybeard had to wait while the women from the island entered the Master’s cabin one by one to receive his blessing before he was allowed to enter. He was then shown in with some ceremony.

Bunny Jingadangelow sprawled in a deck chair, wrapped in the greasy equivalent of a Roman toga, a garment he evidently considered more fitting for his new calling than the antique collection of rabbit skins that had previously been his most notable garment. Around him — and now being carted away by an old man in shorts — were material tributes to his godly qualities: vegetables, lettuces with plushy fat hearts, ducks, fish, eggs, a fowl with its neck newly wrung.

Jingadangelow still affected his curling moustache and sideburns. The rotundity that once afflicted only his chin now covered new territory; his body was corpulent, his face assumed the pasty and lopsided podginess of a gibbous moon and was of a hitherto unprecedented blandness — though it gathered a good percentage of its area into a scowl as Greybeard entered. Becky had evidently passed on the news of his visit.

“I wanted to see you because I always thought you had a rare gift of insight,” Greybeard said.

“That is perfectly true. It led me to divinity. But I assure you, Mr Greybeard, since I gather that you still call yourself by that undistinguished sobriquet, that I have no intention of exchanging gossip about the past. I have outlived the past, as I intend to outlive the future.”

“You are still in your old Eternal Life racket, I see, though the props are more elaborate.”

“You observe this hand bell? I have merely to ring it to have you removed from here. You must not insult me. I have achieved sanctity.” He rested a plump hand on the table by his side, and pouted in discontent. “If you haven’t arrived to join my Second Generationists, just what do you want?”

“Well, I thought — I came to see you about Becky Thomas and this pregnancy of hers. You’ve no — ”

“That’s what you told me last time we met, centuries ago. Becky’s no business of yours — she’s become one of the faithful since her husband died. You fancy yourself a bit as a leader of men, don’t you, without actually leading them?”

“I don’t lead anyone, because I — ”

“Because you’re a sort of wanderer! What is your goal in life? You haven’t one! Throw your lot in with me, man, and live out your days in comfort. I don’t spend all my life tramping around this lake in a leaky boat. I’ve got a base at the south end called Hagbourne. Come there with me.”

“And become a — whatever you call your followers, and make my wife become one? Not likely! We — ”

Jingadangelow raised his little bell and tinkled it.

Two old women doddered in, both dressed in a parody of a toga, one of them run to a gross corpulence and with protruding eyes that took in only the Master.

“Priestesses of the Second Generation,” Jingadangelow said, “tell me the objects of my coming.”

With a singsong delivery, in which the thinner woman led by about half a sentence, they replied, “You came to replace the God that has deserted us; you came to replace the men who have left us; you came to replace the children that were denied us.”

“There’s nothing physical in all this, you understand, Greybeard,” Jingadangelow said parenthetically.

“You bring us hope where we had only ashes; you bring us life where we had only sorrow; you bring us full wombs where we had only empty stomachs.”

“You’ll agree the prose, in its pseudobiblical way, is pretty telling.”

“You make the unbelievers die from the land; you make the believers survive; and you will make the children of the believers into a Second Generation which shall refurnish the earth with people.”

“Very good, priestesses. Your Master is pleased with you, and particularly with Sister Madge, who puts the thing over as if she believes what she’s saying. Now, girls, recite what you must do for all this to come to pass.”

Again the two women assumed the recitative. “We must put away all sin in ourselves; we must put away all sin in others; we must honour and cherish the Master.”

“That is what one may term the qualifying clause,” Jingadangelow said to Greybeard. “All right, priestesses, you may go now.”

They fell to holding his hand and patting his head, begging to be allowed to stay, and mouthing pieces of jargon to him.