Mandrake (5 page)

‘S’right.’ The man nodded approvingly. ‘Born and bred. Mind you, there’s a good few outsiders here still. But they’re going. Old Mandrake, he knows how to get what he wants.’

Queston looked at him sharply. ‘Mandrake?’

‘The Minister,’ the old guide said. He lifted his uniform cap to settle it more comfortably on his head, and Queston’s attention was drawn again to the gold lettering round its band.

‘What are those initials on your cap?’

‘The Ministry, of course. Ministry of Planning. That’s what I’m here for. Everyone asks about the Plan when they come up here.’

‘Ministry of Planning? ’ For a moment Queston did not understand. Then he added slowly: ‘I see. So the Ministry of Town and Country Planning changed its name.’

‘Lord yes, years ago. Got much bigger since then. They say we’re the biggest of them all now, by a long way.’

‘I dare say,’ Queston said. ‘Thank you.’ He gave the old man fifty cents and moved back to the lift. The children were already jostling and chattering round him again.

‘Lovely view then, isn’t it, Bobbie? ’ said one of the nuns to a small boy. Queston smiled involuntarily at the voice; it bore a strong, crude Birmingham accent, somehow incongruous against the medieval black robe.

‘I don’t go much on it,’ the child said, with the same rising ugly inflexion. ‘It’s all right, like, but I’d rather have home.’

‘O yes, Mother,’ the children said.

‘Tisn’t like home.’ The lift dropped towards the street.

‘For two weeks, perhaps three,’ Queston said. ‘Only that I’d prefer it to a hotel. I’m in one at the moment, but they seem to cost a fortune nowadays.’

‘Ah. They would.’ The estate agent nodded obscurely. ‘Well, for two weeks we should be able to find you a furnished flat without much trouble. It’s when the time’s more than a month that difficulties start.’

‘I thought it would be the other way round. It always used to be.’

‘O no, not now. The London Plan, you see, that’s made the difference. You’d need London birth and residence qualifications if you were proposing to stay for long.’

It was like a familiar chord ringing through the room. ‘That’s just for the new blocks of flats surely? ’ Queston said.

‘No indeed—anywhere. Furnished or unfurnished, houses or flats. Makes life very difficult for us, I can tell you. My partner, he’s an Irishman, it looks as if he’ll have to get out. Outside the Plan boundary, anyway. Luckily for me I was born in Camden Town—proper birth right now, being a Londoner. Strangers are beginning to have a hard time finding these short-term places. Still, I think we can get one for you. Chelsea district, did you say?’

Queston said, with more decision than before: ‘Only for two weeks.’

He learned more, in those two weeks, of the achievements of Arthur Mandrake’s Ministry of Planning. Its powers seemed undefined, but large. Public and press alike had clearly accepted it as a messianic deliverance from the chaos, in a crowded island, of sprawling houses and slow roads. Behind the Minister, he gathered, was the same nucleus of men which had made up the original Oxford Committee. But he did not try to go back to Oxford, to see Thorp-Gudgeon. He was not sure why. He bought a road map, and saw new unfamiliar patterns: the motorways sweeping unbroken round Oxford, parting and joining again, like a river enfolding an island. The railway was still marked, but no roads into the city at all.

The same patterns lay now round the other towns which the Ministry had made into modern walled citadels: Cambridge, Durham, York, Gloucester, Bangor, Nottingham, Edinburgh, Aberdeen. And London seemed to be contracting too, into its old series of villages. He heard fewer foreign accents in the streets; few accents at all, except those of Londoners. The children from Birmingham had clearly been unusual. Yet there were plenty of guides near public buildings, in the same uniform and insignia as the old man he had met on the Piccadilly Tower. Were they for the Londoners themselves?

Everywhere he saw Ministry of Planning posters, on hoardings and underground stations, all preaching the same theme. ‘Londoners, know your London ’—beneath a picture-map of the city. ‘London Belongs to You ’—with a sentimental portrait of a beaming family entering a great block of flats beside the dome of St Paul’s. And one poster in particular, cryptic and apparently purposeless, he saw more often than any: an enlarged aerial photograph of London, overprinted, in giant luminous red capitals, with the words:

‘Guard Thine Own.’

He wondered that no one, no one at all, should see any sinister ideological overtones in all this. But then he heard Mandrake’s voice on the London local radio, recorded from one of the Ministry public meetings organized in a different region each week. And the speech was harmless and undistinguished: a flat exposition of the need for local loyalties and ordered towns, mingled with an undisguised appeal for votes. An election was due in a few months’ time, and Mandrake was deputy leader of the party now.

Gradually Queston’s mind stopped fidgeting over the Minister. The ordinary course of life was not affected, after all. Politics had never engaged him. He sometimes wondered whether anything, except his work, had ever engaged him at all. He had never known his parents; had he really yet known anyone else? With all events, with all people, it was as it always was with women; he could enter them often enough, but never feel himself involved in their existence. He was always the observer; the man outside, looking in.

And the only thing that seemed of importance to him now, still, was the fate of his few obscure Brazilians: the people of the caves. He took little note of the growing hysteria in London’s newspaper headlines, that played ideally to the cosy isolationism of Mandrake and his party; he felt nothing but a fatalistic boredom over the chance of Russia and America reviving their latent antipathy on the surface of the moon, or of China invading the farthest Soviet states. Instead he looked only inside his own mind, at the nightmare ideas that played to and fro howling to be put into coherent shape. He had to be alone, for a long time now, to write what he must write about the power of the caves.

He came very near to being convinced that the nightmare could never find any real major shape. If two separate things had not happened, before he submerged himself in the writing of his book, he might never have realized the dangers growing all round him; or the extent to which the harmless politician Mandrake was involved.

He drove to Winchester, to see a local estate agent recommended by the London firm. When he came back two days later, he knew that he had found the place where he would go to work. It was a small, remote cottage on the Hampshire estate that had become the Wessex National Park; a cottage built originally, the agent knowledgeably told him, for the head keeper. ‘Only there’s not much to keep nowadays, ha-ha.’

It was two miles from the nearest village, and half a mile from the nearest road; a rough track led to it, and there was no telephone. It had an overgrown garden, with roses and brambles twining in a thicket that rapped thinly against the small leaded windows; and an orchard of ancient dwarflike trees rustled at the back. There was running water, but no electricity or gas; one room below, and a ladder-staircase leading to two others above. Standing alone at the back door—he ducked his head to go through—Queston sniffed the thick sweetness of long grass, lime-trees, honeysuckle, and felt satisfaction as the silence isolated him.

He ordered furniture in Winchester the next day. On his way back to London in the whining Lagonda, he stopped for a sandwich in Alton. It was unchanged from the small, uneventful town that he dimly remembered; there were few people in the pub.

Standing cheerfully munching at the bar, his hand cupped round the first pint of beer he had drunk in England for a decade, he became aware of the voices of two people on the other side of a black pillar beam. A man and a woman; he could not see their faces, only two hands holding glasses on the bar. The man’s curved easily round a whisky; the woman’s fingers fiddled nervously with the stem of a glass holding what he guessed to begin. It was a very large gin. The hand took it suddenly out of sight, and when it reappeared half the drink was gone.

It was the slight hysterical rise in her voice which caught his attention.

‘I
told
him it was a stupid idea. I never wanted to leave London, but he wouldn’t listen. If only we’d stayed at home… he was so determined to have a farm.’

‘It always surprised me,’ the man’s voice said. ‘Geoffrey was so much the city man.’

‘Of course he was. We belonged in London. He was a real Cockney, you know—born in the sound of Bow Bells. He always used to be proud of saying so. And then all of a sudden this mad idea about being a farmer, and leaving the Exchange. And I couldn’t talk him out of it. O God—’

The voice broke. The man’s hand left its glass, and moved across to grip her wrist reassuringly. It stayed there. ‘You must try to forget it all, Sheila. You mustn’t brood. I knew it wasn’t a good idea for you to go to the funeral.’

‘I wouldn’t have minded so much if I’d been able to think of his body in there.’

‘Hush,’ the man said.

‘I can’t help it, Tom. All in little bits like that, my Geoffrey—’

Queston choked, feeling a mouthful of beer in his throat like a fist, and caught the eye of the barman. The man raised an eyebrow reprovingly, and began filling a dish with peanuts.

The woman’s arm remained on the bar with the man’s fingers clasped round it; her other hand came out and the glass disappeared again. She said, gulping: ‘Everything went wrong from the beginning, you know? The weather was wrong all year, and nothing grew properly, and we both hated the country really, it’s so damn dull. Geoff did too, though he wouldn’t admit it. It was the country that killed him in the end, I know it was. They shouldn’t have been harvesting then, or something. He didn’t really understand that combine, it was like a horrible great animal. O Tom, imagine the moment when he slipped—’

The fingers tightened. ‘Darling, stop it!’

There was a pause, and then her voice was lower, unemotional. Queston could hardly catch the words. ‘They tried to stop me going out in that field the next day, but I went. There was blood all over the straw. It was dark, not red. I was surprised it wasn’t red. But you could tell it was blood. Like a sort of sacrifice. That’s what I seriously believe, Tom. The land taking a sort of sacrifice, because we shouldn’t have been there. We should have stayed where our roots were.’

‘Now you’re going back to London you must stop dreaming up things like that…’ The man’s voice began a long soothing monologue, and Queston finished his sandwiches and went away. Poor little bitch, he thought repentantly as he drove over the Hog’s Back, glancing on either side at the sweeping gold-brown harvested fields. He thought of the dark blood on the stubble. Poor little bitch. ‘A sort of sacrifice—’

The blood seemed at first to be the only connecting link. It was in London, the day before his final departure for the cottage; the builders there had finished rapid over-paid alterations, the furniture was in, he had sent down his clothes and a crate of books. He had settled into his work, and was about to shut the door behind him.

He spent too long, that last London morning, vainly hunting the memoirs of an eighteenth-century Jesuit whose sharp-eyed meanderings through British Guiana he remembered, dimly, as having once sparked the beginnings of his own ideas. No one had heard of the book; perhaps he had imagined it. Coming out of the last bookshop he was suddenly irritated by the pressing crowds and the cliff-like cold walls of the ubiquitous blocks of flats, still unfinished here and deeply echoing with pile-drivers and drills. Charing Cross Road was a roaring mass of people and cars; the Plan, he reflected, had not been as successful as all that. Reluctantly, he made for the nearest Tube station. It was the simplest means of getting home, though he did not like to be underground.

He threaded his way to the end of the platform. A train had just hummed and rumbled out, and few people stood round him there. Queston waited, fidgeting. Beside him, a voice said: ‘Excuse me—’

It was a broad, perspiring man in a tight tweed suit, with a very new suitcase at his feet. He had sandy hair cut clumsily short, and the deep red-brown skin of the fair man who spends most of his life in the sun and wind. His eyes were very wide and blue, but their gaze shifted uneasily from side to side, holding Queston’s only for a moment, flicking away, flicking back again.

‘Sorry to bother you, but can you tell me how to get to Baker Street?’

Through the rolling sequence of country vowels, it took Queston some seconds to understand what he had said. He tried to place the accent; Devon, perhaps, or Somerset. On the bleak, grubby platform the man looked as out of place as a sheaf of corn.

‘Sorry, I’m afraid I don’t—’ he turned, scanning the motley wall for a map. ‘Here. This’ll tell you.’

The man followed him gratefully, talking in relief. ‘These things don’t mean much to me, I just don’t know London. They told me to change here… I’ve never been here before, you see. Come up for a holiday.’

Queston pointed. ‘There you are. We’re here, and you get a train to Oxford Circus, then change on to the Bakerloo line.’

‘Ah,’ the man said doubtfully. ‘Thank you.’ He put down his case again and eased a finger inside his collar. ‘I don’t know—London—it overpowers you, doesn’t it? My daughter I’m going to, she’s a real town girl now. Married a London lad. But not me, I’m not easy in it. Everything’s so quick. Unwelcoming sort of place.’

Queston smiled without speaking, feeling the familiar impulse to remain detached, uninvolved. He looked up the platform to see if the train was coming.

‘Be glad to get home,’ the man said, half to himself. ‘I don’t like the feel of it.’ The accent seemed stronger, as if it were a refuge.

‘Tisn’t the people at all, ’tis the place itself. London really tries to push you out, I do believe.’

Suddenly it was like looking at a photographic negative. Queston heard an echo in his head of the reverse, the positive: the woman’s voice in the Alton pub saying: ‘The land taking a sort of sacrifice, because we shouldn’t have been there…’ He found himself staring at the man as if he had only just caught sight of him.