Mandrake (10 page)

‘You’ve done nothing. Christ Almighty—my theories may turn out to be rubbish, I hope to God they do, but they’re as nothing to the arrogance of you boys. D’you know what you are? You’re the man who stamped his foot near Vesuvius just as it happened to start erupting, and looked at it and said: “Goodness, look what I’ve done.” You frighten me, Brunner. Your Mr Mandrake, he frightens me most of all.’

‘He wants you,’ Brunner said. Incredibly, there was something like envy in the dark, impassive face. ‘He wants your mind. He is a good friend, and a good master. You will not regret it. Come and work with us, David.’

‘I don’t like the way you work.’

‘You may find life uncomfortable, otherwise.’

‘I’ll risk that.’

Suddenly then the reasoning calm broke. ‘Come to us. You must. Of your own free mind. It is necessary. I swear to you. Mandrake could tell you—’

‘He won’t get a chance.’

‘For God’s sake, my friend—’

Queston said heavily: ‘I am not your friend. I am not involved. I am a scientist, not a saviour. It pleases you and your people to call yourselves saviours, but you are something else, something I won’t have anything to do with. You can steal my work, but my mind and instincts are my own. Leave them alone. Leave me alone.’

He swung round and went swiftly across the empty ringing room to the door.

‘Come back! ’ Brunner called behind him. ‘David! Come back!’ But the voice vanished as he closed the door, and though he expected every moment to hear running feet, no one hindered him as he went out to the car. In the archway, the man in Ministry uniform saluted him again. Queston did not salute back.

He drove straight back to the cottage. Bright on a hoarding as he left Winchester, he passed one of the Ministry posters: an enormous picture of a high brick wall, and a closed door set in it, and over both the words, in scarlet: ‘Guard Thine Own.’

He drove very fast. He was astounded by the emotion that gripped him: a trembling rage, and a great formless determination which had sprung into roaring life when he had seen his manuscript in Brunner’s hand. He was against them. He was against the spell, whatever it really was, that they had begun to cast. Nothing of it should hold him. Suddenly the constant withdrawing remoteness of all his life had become a positive thing. Something in him was waking for the first time, and it was not a feeling for others or even for himself, and certainly not a feeling for mankind. Perhaps it was scorn. Perhaps that was the only strength. He was his own master for the first time, possessed of a fierce indifference.

He got out of the car. The cold autumn sun stood above the trees; it was midday, and very still. He moved now with great speed, mind and movements controlled by some inner computing mechanism of which he was hardly aware.

Click… click… one action automatically producing the next.

He climbed the ladder to his study. They had even known where to look. The two drawers of his desk gaped empty where the manuscript had been. Queston gazed coldly round the bright room; the cottage was a vacuum, neither welcoming nor hostile. It had been his home, it was so no longer. What would it become now? He jumped suddenly as something knocked at the window; then stared. It was the branch of a tree. The old apple-tree which grew near the back door; he had not realized that its arms spread so close. As he stared, slowly he understood. The cottage would never have a power of its own. It had never possessed enough separate meaning as a place. It belonged to the land, and the land would take it back. As it had taken the dog.

The land should take it back sooner than they thought, then, through the only gesture of defiance he could now make. Swiftness poured into him again, and he pulled out a suitcase from a cupboard; tossed in some papers and notebooks from the desk, took it into the bedroom and stuffed in clothes at random. He took his gun and cartridges from the study, and after some hesitation the two drawings from the wall; laid these in the suitcase, rammed it shut and carried case and gun down the ladder and out to the car.

Then he drove the Lagonda to the edge of the road, at the end of the overgrown little drive. No breeze stirred the silent afternoon; once or twice a leaf spiralled down alone from one of the trees. He got out, walked back to the cottage and took his last spare can of petrol from the cellar.

He unscrewed the cap carefully, and walked to and fro across the kitchen, pouring petrol as he went, scattering it in a jerking gurgling stream. The colourless liquid looked innocent as water, but its smell was all around him. He soaked a rug with the last of it, near the door. Then he set down the can and went outside, inspecting his hands carefully to see that they were dry. With the same swift unbroken certainty he struck a match and held it to a corner of the rug, leaping back as the petrol flared.

Before he was half-way back to the car he could hear the hollow roar as the kitchen filled with flames. He walked on without turning, but paused and looked back with his hand on the car door.

Inside the lower half of the cottage he could see the flames jumping and coiling, reaching upward, strands of yellow in the wreaths of black smoke. A grey haze showed already through the little window upstairs. There was a muffled explosion; he supposed the petrol can had burst. With a sudden irrational panic he thought: The dog is in there—

He shook his head impatiently, got into the car, and drove away. Behind him, billows of dark smoke began to climb into the blue-white autumn sky, towards the sun.

As he drove north from Winchester, wondering where he should go, he found his mind groping for people. He was flotsam; he needed someone to provide a fixed mark which he could grasp as he was washed by. Other people had roots. He needed a refuge until he had time to think.

The mechanical fury had begun to ebb away, leaving him aimless and disturbed. As he drove through the autumn afternoon, along strangely empty roads, he fumbled in memory for the few old friends who might not be displeased now if he were to turn up at their door… only for time to think, only for a little while… there was Anderson, at the Bath Museum… Gilchrist, in London, where was it, the School of Oriental Studies, and a house by the river at Chiswick… who else?

He came to a signpost. Andover. Of course! Stewart lived in Andover: John Stewart, who had blustered him affectionately into the dreadful Rag Days when they were undergraduates; who had shared classes with him and then suddenly, to everyone’s surprise, turned round on his subject and gone into the Church. Queston had visited him once, and found him a genial country vicar with a growing brood of gay, untidy, shrill children. Wasn’t it Andover? Somewhere near there…

He took the Andover road, and drove more cheerfully.

On the edge of the town he drew into the kerb beside a telephone box. Better to ring up first. Solitude seemed to have given him a new shyness, a horror of arriving, unannounced, unwelcome. He thought of his aunt, long ago, jumping nervously as the door-bell rang: ‘O dear, who’s
that
? And me all in a pickle—David, tidy those books away—’

Stewart’s name was in the telephone book, with an Andover number. He dialled twice, but each time heard only a high-pitched buzz. Blankly listening, he looked out through the grubby panes of the glass box at the road; narrow, empty, dwindling into enclosing trees, opaquely lit by the mist that had not properly left the sun, or the sky, all day. He turned inward, and looked at his chin in the small square mirror above the telephone. For a sudden moment he was in the cottage, seeing himself in the mirror above the sink. But this mirror was too low; he was back in the telephone box again. He had always been too tall for telephone boxes.

Irritated by the peevish noise, he dialled the operator. For a long while no one answered, but at last a metallic voice told him that Stewart’s number was a ceased line.

‘What does that mean?’

‘The line has been discontinued,’ the voice said, bored.

‘D’you mean they’ve gone away?’

‘I’m sorry, caller, we have no information. Your number is listed as a ceased line.’

‘Thank you so much,’ Queston said acidly, and hung up. He wrote down Stewart’s address, and drove on into Andover to look for the house. A policeman on the fringe of the town looked up sharply as he passed, and in the driving-mirror Queston saw him turn and stand staring after the car. But in the centre of the town he began to pass other cars, and felt less vulnerable.

It was a large Georgian house, greatly the worse for wear. Facing straight on to the street, with no garden or yard, it was obviously a rectory: everything visible spoke the right devout carelessness of comfort or repair. Queston knocked at the door, with an immense snarling lion’s head whose blackened brass had not been cleaned for a long time.

The woman who came was wispy and sluttish, wiping one hand on a dirty apron and pushing ineffectually with the other at loose strands of hair.

‘Mr Stewart? ’ Queston said tentatively.

‘Who?’

‘Mr Stewart—doesn’t he live here? Isn’t this the rectory?’

‘No,’ the woman said. She raised her eyes to look at him, then glanced away again without interest.

‘Oh. But I thought—he used to live here, didn’t he?’

‘I wouldn’t know.’ She spoke in a flat, country monotone. ‘He’s listed in the phone book at this address.’

‘We haven’t got no phone.’ She glanced up again, seeking an excuse to shut the door. She sniffed, and added: ‘The authorities give us the house. They’d know about your friend. You ask at the office.’

‘The office? ’ Queston said blankly.

‘In the square,’ the woman said, and stared. Then apathy smoothed her face again, and she shut the door. The lion’s head rattled emptily.

In the square, Queston understood. Its largest building, bright with the familiar posters, was labelled ‘Ministry of Planning’. He parked the Lagonda, and went in.

At the inquiry counter an elderly, weather-beaten man in Ministry uniform greeted him with a fatherly smile. A nervous tic continually jerked the corner of his right eye; it gave the smile a faint leering complicity.

‘
Good
afternoon, sir.’

Queston regarded him warily. ‘Good afternoon. I’m trying to find a friend of mine. He seems to have moved.’

The man chuckled warmly, as if he were accustomed to this kind of approach. He reached behind him for a large book. ‘The name, sir?’

‘Stewart. John Stewart.’

The man paused, with his hand on the book. ‘The Reverend?’

‘Yes.’

‘Ah well, sir, I can tell you that without looking.’ His eyes twinkled. Combined with the twitch, the effect was startling. ‘He went home, a fair time ago now.’

‘Home?’

‘To Scotland. Edinburgh, I think it was.’

Queston stood still. ‘Are you sure?’

‘O yes, sir, quite sure. A lot of people have gone home, of course. But Scotland, yes, it was Scotland.’

‘Thank you.’

‘No place like home,’ the man said, like a chanting child, still smiling at him. ‘You’ll be wanting to get back too, I dare say, time’s getting on. From London, are you?’

‘No,’ Queston said, and knew, looking at the bright eyes that were keen beneath the cosiness, that he would have to localize himself. He made up his mind quickly. ‘I’m off to Bath.’

As he uttered the word, incredulity, concern, warning flickered over the man’s face; and Queston gave himself no time to find why the smile suddenly died, but went hastily out. As he swung the Lagonda round towards the Bath road, and Anderson, he was brooding over the first shock of what the man had said. The proof, the innocent proof, of an absurdity that masked the sinister persistence of the thing that the Ministry was doing. Stewart had gone home to Scotland… but Stewart had never lived in Scotland. His father had been a pleasant bank manager in Pinner, with a genteel English voice. The only Scottish thing about the family had been its name: and once, long ago, its roots.

The light was beginning to fade as he came out again into the street. He got into the car, and switched on the ignition. The fuel tank showed two-thirds full. He switched the key back, thought of trying to telephone Anderson in Bath, and then decided against it. He could always spend the night in a hotel when he arrived. Across Salisbury Plain how long a drive was it? Well, time enough.

He sat in the car, staring out. Farther down the street, groups of youths and girls were pushing and giggling into the thirsty-bright doors of a cinema; content, accustomed to living their lives in their own town, unaffected by change. He looked up, at the dour black building and the neat sign ‘Ministry of Planning’. It was all clever, and ridiculously simple. Exploiting the sense of security that a man had in his own home; glorifying the old atavistic homing instinct until he really believed himself better off where his roots were—even if, in Stewart’s case, the roots had to be dug up by the Ministry themselves. In a country long overshadowed now by greater powers, and fearing all the time the war those powers might bring on them, they had everything on their side: given the chance to duck out from the shadow of disaster, ninety-nine men out of a hundred would be only too willing to do what they were told.

He sat staring blankly at the steering-wheel. Suppose, after all, that his own ideas were fantasy—or, as Brunner had claimed, half-fantasy. Suppose that the Ministry had managed to harness, by some mysterious means, this new strange force that operated from both inside and outside men’s minds. Then,
why
? Mandrake was exploiting the primeval attachment to place, and the desperate longing for peace—but to what end?

The light died above him as he sat there, and the sky faded to a deep grey-blue. The cinema swallowed its crowds, and stood quiet. He jerked at the starter, and drove out westward to the faint-glowing horizon of the Bath road.

On all the clear main road to Amesbury he passed no other car. The Ministry needed no rules; their advice was enough. ‘Is your journey really necessary? ’ Well no, it isn’t when you come to think of it, let’s stay at home. Sheep. But remember yourself, remember the hours you stood fiddling with the engine, docile as the rest of them, when you had meant to leave the cottage for London—