Mandrake (20 page)

They were old, sunk into the wisdom of defeat, though Mary herself seemed only about twenty. The old woman, tugging a shapeless knitted shawl closer round her shoulders, said petulantly: ‘When are we going down? It’s nearly time. It’ll be warm there. Mary, we ought to be going down.’

‘In a moment, Mum. We’ve got visitors, they’re hungry. I’m just going to the kitchen. We’ll be going down soon.’ She touched her mother’s shoulder, and disappeared. The old man sat with a muffler round his neck, mumbling at an empty pipe. He said, looking at Queston from watery eyes: ‘Cold out.’

‘It is indeed.’

‘Very cold. Never used to be so cold.’

‘No.’

‘Lots of things have changed.’

‘Gloucester has changed,’ Queston said, experimentally. ‘You have a wall round the city now. That used not to be there.’

‘Ah, but it did. In the beginning. You not a Gloucester man? ’ The old man peered at him suspiciously.

‘We’re visiting. Passing through… it’s a lovely city.’

‘Certainly is.’ He relaxed again. ‘Quiet as it was in my grandfather’s day, now. They’ve got the right idea for once, the politicians. I never voted for this government, I’ll tell you that, but they’ve done well. Could have pranged everything, but they’ve given us peace and quiet. Keep ourselves to ourselves, that’s all we ever wanted. All that Common Market nonsense—England’s an island, isn’t it?’

Queston said, half to himself: ‘No man is an island—’

‘That’s John Donne,’ the old man said unexpectedly. ‘Knew a chap in the R.A.F. used to spout him by the yard. Some good poems, too.’ He grinned a lascivious old grin.

‘Anything you can mention, Dad knew someone who could do it in the R.A.F.’ The girl had come back. ‘Isn’t that right? ’ She said it without malice, smiling at him.

‘Good lot of chaps, say what you like,’ the old man said mildly. ‘An intelligent service, the Air Force. D’you know,’ he said to Queston, ‘we had two university lecturers and a barrister in my squadron.’

‘Indeed,’ Queston said politely.

‘Bombers, I was in. Rear-gunner. Nasty job that, you copped all the odd flak that was going. I remember once—’

‘Not now, Dad,’ the girl Mary said. She put two plates on the table. More gently, she added: ‘There’s no talk of war now. You know that. It’s all forgotten. The Minister said, if you want to go back, go back by centuries, to the good things. Not dropping bombs on people.’

‘True enough. True enough.’ The old man nodded. Fie pulled out his pipe again and sucked at it. ‘You haven’t got a smoke, I suppose? ’ he said hopefully to Queston.

‘Sorry.’

‘I haven’t had a pipe since—well, never mind.’

The plates held a grey, glutinous mess with pools of sugar melting into a watery liquid on its surface. ‘Porridge, I’m afraid,’ the girl said apologetically. ‘It’s all we’re down to at the end of the week. Ration day tomorrow. But it’s hot, it’ll fill you. O, and there’s some milk. Here.’

She put a tin of condensed milk on the table between them, a white hardened crust edging the hole gashed in its top. It was not out of place; the whole room had an air of having gone to seed, with the clutter of dispirited poverty lying over what had been solid prosperous comfort. Damp clothes were draped round the fire; a worn, half-mended rug hung untidily over a chair; dust was thick on a massive Victorian sideboard. The two old people sat listlessly watching by the fire. It was a family, and it was warm, uncomplaining, friendly; but there was no vitality in it.

They ate the porridge with an eagerness that surprised them. The oats, were distinct and nutty, with a welcoming smell. ‘This is good,’ Beth said, taking breath. She smiled tentatively at the girl. ‘Ration day tomorrow—what did you mean?’

‘O, it’s much the same here as anywhere, I imagine. Food supplies sent to the town cooperative once a month, doled out once a week. Actually the Guild does the distribution here. It’s all right when there’s enough sugar. There wasn’t any, one week. That’s what we miss most. Funny, isn’t it?’

‘They’re very good really,’ the mother said. ‘They do their best.’

Queston ate more slowly. He could feel Beth’s astonishment through his own.

‘Like the war,’ said the old man placidly. ‘No, love, it’s all right, not the blood and thunder. But the rationing, and everyone mucking in and making the best of things. It’s wonderful, you know. I never thought we’d see that spirit back again. Got it back just in time, if you ask me. People were getting things too easy, they had time to make trouble.’

‘Learn to be content with what you’ve got, that’s what I say.’ The mother nodded; the long, rocking, bobbing nod of the old. ‘We’re all safe now… Mary, when are we going down?’

‘In a minute, Mum.’ She was looking at Queston, with the same secret half-inviting smile that he had pretended not to see at the beginning. ‘You look worried. What’s the matter?’

Worried,
he thought. ‘The rationing. How long has it lasted?’

‘Two months. Maybe three.’

‘My God. So short a time ago—’

‘It’s not long, I suppose,’ she said calmly.

‘But how can you—’ he heard his voice explode and crack, and they were all three staring at him. Except Beth, troubled, looking away into a nothing of her own. The faces stared, glazed, self-contained.

‘—How can you accept all this so easily? Don’t you remember the way you were living a year ago? Don’t you ever ask who’s responsible for all this happening? Or why? Don’t you care?’

There was a pause, and then the old man leaned forward and patted him on the knee. ‘We’re safe, lad,’ he said kindly. ‘No one cares how much they pay for that.’

‘Are we going down yet, Mary?’

‘We’ll go now, Mum.’

Queston and Beth went with them, though the father did not; the girl Mary seemed to take it for granted. There was in any case no question of leaving Gloucester that night. Beth still said scarcely a word, only clung silently to Queston’s hand, and he was appalled when he looked at the fear tense in her face. ‘Relax, love, nothing’s going to happen. I’m still here.’ But he knew that she was back in the fear of whatever had happened to her before they came together; and he had no great faith in his hopefulness himself.

The streets were not empty now. Other footsteps, other dim shapes went before and beside them as they walked through the dark. Nobody spoke. The ghostly cavalcade moved along like a march of sleepwalkers, soft and purposeful. Mary led them after the rest. Fatigue dulled Queston’s brain, and the depressing lethargy of the place gave him the feeling of moving through a dream. There was the same half-reality about the darkness, masking all detail, and the mysterious intensity of the silent onward press.

Down. Down. When are we going down? He saw at last what it meant. Beyond the cathedral, on the edge of the Close with the four-tipped tower high over their heads, they came to a long ramp leading down to a yellow, gaping square. The figures before them showed suddenly distinct as they went down, black shapes rimmed against the light. They moved in groups of three or four, and then they disappeared.

He thought of the catacombs, and then of other things. The ramp was walled with thick concrete, and he saw the great reinforced steel doors, outward opening, fixed back against the sides.
Lasciate ogni speranza
…

It was one of the old fall-out shelters, from the panic that ended the sixties and brought Mandrake his last opportunity. He stood still, staring at it. Below, through that door, it must run right under the cathedral. Under the crypt. What a hell of a place to build it.

Beth turned back to him at the tug of his hand when he stopped. He looked at her face, and it was vague, blank, listening; the face of all those drifting down past them into the shelter. It was as if she wore a mask. He shouted at her: ‘Beth!’

She blinked at the violence, and seemed to wake.

‘No,’ he said urgently. ‘Not down there. Not us.’

‘Why not, Mr Queston?’

The voice was behind him and over his head, and he saw the looming black figure of the big woman who had come to the caravan; her face lit dimly now by the faint yellow glow of the entrance as he looked back and up at her, so that the dark eyes and full mouth showed more clearly, voluptuously, than before.

The old irrational terror was fighting through him, of the caves, of the brooding darkness under the earth.

‘Why not? ’ she said.

‘Why should you go down there? There’s nothing to shelter from now. It’s a mausoleum. Damn you, it’s dangerous. You know as well as I do.’ He flung the obliquity at her like a challenge.

More of the dark-clad women stood behind her, melting silently towards them out of the night. ‘Dangerous? ’ she said softly. ‘Not this time. Listen to it.’

He knew that she was returning his words of an hour before, and that she did not mean a listening with the ears. He turned unwillingly towards the gaping mouth of the man-made cave, and his mind felt at it, and she was right. The place was indifferent. Its force neither drove him away nor drew him in.

She said: ‘I told you. We’re Gloucester. We let you in. Have you got within a hundred yards of a live town before? This is our place. If we accept you, it can’t do you any harm. Go down.’

‘You’re mad,’ he said coldly. ‘No one can master it. Never. It’s not a tool. You’re obeying, and you don’t know it. That’s the great tragic joke, you don’t know.’

‘I know your delusions,’ she said with amusement. ‘Do you think anyone takes you seriously? My dear Mr Queston, you’re a case history.’ From some hidden pocket in her great engulfing black cloak she drew out a book, and held it up. ‘Two-thirds genius, as the preface says, and one-third fantasy. The mind running away with itself. It happens to many scholars, the men with the most brilliant minds of all… their subject gets the better of them, comes alive for them…’

Queston seized the book from her, but even before he opened it he knew what had happened. The print of the title-page stared up at him, clear and bold even in the faint light:
Time Will Say Nothing,
by David Queston, B.Sc., M.A., D.Phil., Oxford University Press.

Beside him, Beth said, pleased: ‘O darling—’

He hardly even heard. He looked up.

‘A limited edition,’ the big woman said, smiling at him. ‘Circulated among certain selected people. Dr Klaus Brunner edited it for you—he has really done it very well. A most amusing book, I enjoyed it immensely. Parts of it are really very funny indeed, I congratulate you. But you really mustn’t expect anyone to take you seriously…’

Queston said nothing, shaken by a tide of anger. He had been tiresome, he had not cooperated. So they had disarmed him in the most subtly effective way they could. Hide the truth, and it might leak out; hold it up to ridicule, and you destroy it. It couldn’t have needed much. A little ironic interpolation from Brunner here and there, and the whole thing easily crumbled into fantasy. The comic science-fiction of a dotty scholar. If there had been anything he could have done to combat the Ministry and their masters, by persuading people of the real significance of this new dreadful world, it was gone now. Now there was nothing he could do.

‘You see, I know all about your ideas.’ She was smiling down at him, immense and Junoesque and repugnantly intimate. For the first time he noticed a man standing in her shadow. She waved towards the shelter. ‘Come down, Mr Queston. We have a little experiment at our meeting tonight. It will interest you. It may even convince you that you are wrong.’

The man at her elbow shifted as if in reminder, and she took his arm as they began to move. Queston walked automatically, his rage ebbing to leave a dead emptiness that he had not felt since before he met Beth. At his side, she moved her free hand to turn up the high red collar round her face as they walked down the slope to the shelter entrance. The small uneasy gesture caught at him and roused him; suddenly protective, he pressed her hand. It tightened round his, the fingers twining close.

The woman said: ‘This is Mr Oakley. He has been asking to meet you. He’s a journalist.’

‘Christopher Oakley,’ the man said, holding out his hand. ‘Hallo.’ He was younger than Queston, and shorter; a slight, fair-haired man with curious light-blue eyes darting in a constant half-smile. His shoulders were hunched for warmth in a sheepskin jacket; the heavy white collar made him seem smaller still.

‘Don’t tell me we still have newspapers,’ Queston said. He shook hands briefly as they paused again, but his attention was on the gaping doorway ahead.

‘Only locals. I’m from Reuters. I liked your book.’ The small man spoke quickly, with an accent that sounded American.

‘I doubt if it’s my book you’ve read.’

He said: ‘It’s yours O.K.’ The big woman had moved ahead, and he spoke softly. The light eyes held Queston’s.

‘I seem to be out on a limb, but I got more out of it than friend Brunner’s gags. It tied up with ideas I’ve had for a long time.’

Queston looked at him sharply; but the woman had turned back and Oakley was wearing the vague half-smile again.

‘Your title intrigued me. What’s it mean?’

Queston said: ‘A quotation. Of no significance now.’ He remembered Beth, and gestured vaguely. ‘This is Miss Summers. Mr Oakley.’

Oakley cocked his head to look across at her, like a small dusty sparrow. ‘We’ve met before, I think. Elizabeth Summers, isn’t it? The actress?’

Queston glanced from one to the other in surprise, with a flick of pride. Beth had not told him she was well known. He felt amiable towards the journalist.

She nodded, without expression, and smiled briefly. ‘Hallo.’

The young man dropped back, looking pleased with himself, as they began to move again, and Queston slipped his arm across her shoulders and hugged her briefly. She turned her face Up to him at once. ‘David, I’m frightened. Stay with me.’

‘Don’t worry, love. I won’t go away.’ There seemed suddenly a deeper urgency in her fear than there had been before, and he was puzzled. But then they were inside.

A long corridor, half-dark, warm with the breath and bodies of those crowding ahead; he saw them only in a light that troubled him, hurt his eyes vaguely, until he realized that the strangeness was that it was blue. The lamps set deep in the heavy concrete roof glowed with a dark phosphorescent blue that made them seem to hover forward in the air; and yet they cast no colour on the faces round him, but gave a deceptive colourless half-light, like the moon. Full of shadows. Because of the shadows, he took some time to make out the appalling size of the room they came to, a great echoing chamber; at first he noticed only the noise. And that troubled him too, rising round him unbearably loud and overwhelming and yet with a wrong pitch, a lightness—until he realized why. It was the noise of women’s voices. The crowding thousands were nearly all women, excited, tense, and the atmosphere prickled with the near-breaking eagerness, a kind of hunger, that he had sensed in the women in the caravan.