Mandrake (7 page)

The man frowned. ‘Be careful, Mr Queston.’

Queston stared at him. Was he mad, or just stupid? The man paused, with the same distant expression, and seemed to change his mind. He said, more mildly: ‘Any inaccuracy makes things difficult for us, you see. Tell me, are you particularly attached to Yorkshire?’

‘I don’t remember it. I believe we moved soon after I was born.’

The man wrote; then looked up again. ‘What about this part of the country?’

‘It’s very beautiful. Very English.’

‘Would you say your roots were here?’

‘O Lord no.’

‘Yet you chose to come here to write your book.’

‘I wanted peace and quiet.’

‘But you would be distressed if, say, you had to leave this cottage tomorrow? You would miss it?’

‘I have a ten-year lease,’ Queston said dryly. ‘With the option of renewal.’

The man looked at him, and smiled. He took a long breath, with the air of one trying a new approach to a simpleton. ‘There must be one place from your early life that you remember with most affection. Where would you say your roots are, Mr Queston?’

The same word again, that struck an oddly unpleasant note. ‘I don’t have any roots. Damn it, I’m not a plant.’

‘We all have roots,’ the man said, patiently.

‘Well, I don’t.’ Queston picked up his cup, but the coffee was cold. He leaned across to jerk it into the sink. The sunlight still streaming in through the door made him restless. ‘Look here, if you’ll forgive my saying so, I don’t see much point in all this. I’m living here, and that’s that. What more do you want?’

‘I have my instructions,’ the man said.

‘Who from?’

‘The Ministry of Planning.’

Queston paused. ‘Indeed,’ he said slowly.

‘There are three questions I have to put to you, Mr Queston.’ The round dark eyes were wide with self-conscious pomp in the round dark head. ‘I should advise you to answer them as best you can. You say you have no roots. But if your first son were to be born, where would you like it to be?’

‘I am unmarried. And careful.’

The man sighed. ‘Very well. If you knew you were to die in a month’s time, where would you choose to spend your last days?’

Queston stood up. His growing resentment had become active dislike. ‘Buckingham Palace.’

‘You are not being helpful,’ the man said stolidly.

‘You are most perceptive.’

‘One more question. If you were forced to leave here, where would you go?’

‘I’m afraid my time is valuable. If you don’t mind—’

The man spoke very quietly. ‘Answer my question.’

‘I don’t know where the hell I should go. Since this cottage is legally mine for the next eight years the question hardly arises.’

‘The law changes, Mr Queston.’ He stood up, closing his briefcase. ‘You have been—out of touch.’ He turned towards the door, then said, casually: ‘Perhaps your roots were with the lady in Brazil?’

The faint but unmistakable stress on the word ‘lady’ brought anger whipping away astonishment. How had they known about that dead affair? ‘Get out,’ Queston said. He put his hand on the butt of the gun where it rested against the table, and saw the man’s eyes narrow. Suddenly he felt an extraordinary undercurrent of menace; the man’s impregnable confidence was that of one backed by an enormous weight of organized authority.

‘You will be hearing from us, Mr Queston.’ His eyes slid away again with the same other-attentive air as before. He stepped out past the dog, who lay on the doorstep; she put back her ears, but did not growl.

The man gestured at her, and said over his shoulder: ‘They should all be sent back to Scotland, where they belong. It will be seen to, soon enough.’

‘The breed’s Welsh, as it happens. And she came from a farm two miles from here.’ Queston’s retort came automatically triumphant, like a child’s jeer, before he had realized quite what he had heard. But while he realized, the man had gone, and he saw only the dew glinting on the wet red blackberries and filigree cobwebs laced between the leaves, in the small jungle that cut off the cottage from the road.

The milkman’s van did not come until the sun was dropping into the trees. Queston heard its clattering engine, and waited at the door.

‘George! Where the hell have you been? I’m gasping for a cup of tea. Have the cows run dry?’

George was an amiable, dim-witted youth, vainly seeking sophistication in a leather jacket and black jeans. He wore them in all weathers, and the air now was close and hot. He mopped his red, large-featured face. ‘Three pints?’

‘That’s right. Got any eggs?’

‘Dozen?’

‘I’ll come to the van. What made you so late?’

George seemed uneasy, his eyes vacant and dazed. His rural drawl was more impenetrable than usual. ‘Men in the village, from the office. Couldn’t get owt sooner.’ He put down the cartons of milk and made off towards the road. Queston followed, and took the tray of eggs that the boy thrust at him.

‘Come and have a cuppa,’ he said impulsively, surprised to find himself grasping at a chance of company. ‘It must be the end of your round.’

‘Can’t,’ George said. He climbed into the driving-seat.

‘Thanks all the same. Gotta get home.’ He looked out furtively at the fields edging the road, as if expecting something to pounce. ‘That’s right. Home.’

Queston stared at him. Was the boy drunk?

‘What did you mean about men in the village from the office? Was it some census chap from the Ministry of Planning?’

George reacted as if the words were some unutterable blasphemy. He jerked suddenly in his seat, and hastily started the engine. He said a third time, barely audible: ‘Gotta get home.’

Queston stepped back, puzzled, but as the engine belched the boy leaned across the nearside window and shouted to him over the din. He looked across Queston’s shoulder, without meeting his eyes. ‘Shan’t be calling any more, Mr Queston. Sorry. Not allowed. You’re beyond the line. Have to come and get your own milk, if you like.’

Queston opened his mouth to argue, but the van began to move. He caught a last glimpse of George’s hot, confused face, and heard him call: ‘You’re beyond the line.’

He went back to the cottage, carrying the eggs. Beyond what line?

The night was airless and hot; as he lay in bed the darkness pressed insistently round him as if it caught away his breath. Yet September was half gone already. Every year it had been the same, since he came to the cottage. The summers long, hot, longer every year, the cauldron of sunshine cooling only when the first autumn mists began.

And even the nights hot, that was the strange thing. He had grown accustomed to heat in the last twenty years; but to a heat that died into vicious cold at night when summer was past its peak. Not this, now: this was different. The nights were hot, without wind, without moisture; even tonight, though dew would form before morning, the stars were brilliantly clear. It would be the same until winter came, a sudden, brutal winter, biting into the year with animal teeth. No heat or mildness then; only cold, low cloud, and snow in the wind.

He lay on his back on the bed, looking out. Downstairs he could hear the dog whimpering restlessly in her sleep. There was no sound outside. No sound at all. For a long time now the noises of the night had been still. He could not get used to that silence. No scrape of crickets, no bats squeaking, or hooting owls, no sudden chatter of a night-jar. Even the cottage had ceased to mutter and creak. It was as if the whole countryside waited, holding its breath. Waited for what?

Queston turned on his side. A cold runnel of sweat trickled down his bare chest. He felt oppressed, uneasy, and troubled at his uneasiness. For two years he had felt no sensation unconnected with the determined pattern of his days: to work, eat, sleep. Perhaps the breaking of the pattern, with the end of the book, had beaten down the barricades, and the arrival of the stranger only linked him again to the reactions he should have felt before. Perhaps this overwhelming sense of doom was natural to other men when they were alone.

He lay listening to the silence, and did not sleep.

The important thing now was for the book to be published. Fantasy or not, it might strike home. He had found it developing strangely as he wrote; the long analysis of man’s two-way relationship with place, interwoven with a great unexpected diatribe against those who manipulated it for their own ends (he thought of the indignation Thorp-Gudgeon would splutter at him, and grinned). But both those were straightforward enough. It was when he had come to write of the deeper implications of it all—of the fate of the cave people, and all others who surrendered, without knowing it, to a force they had unleashed and could not now control—that he began to frighten even himself. He was not sure even now whether he had produced fantasy or prophecy; whether he would present the book as a fictional exercise or a solemn warning backed by all the force of his name and reputation. The more he thought about his curious visitor, the more he leaned towards the second of these. It might at least show Mr Mandrake what he was playing with. Unless he would simply laugh.

He had written to his publishers, but now he decided to go to London without waiting for their reply. He could deliver the manuscript, at any rate.

He stripped the car of its plastic covering, and inspected the engine. Better play safe; it hadn’t seen much use, and no one had looked at it for a long time. He worked on it all the morning, checking the battery and cleaning the single sparking plug with infinite care. At midday, admiring the purring turbine, he decided it was too late to set out.

The next morning, very early, he topped up the tank with petrol from the cans he had stacked in the cellar when he first came—there was no garage in the village, and he had been determined never to go farther away than that. Then he looked critically at the Lagonda again, and decided it needed polishing. He had turned to fetch a clean rag from the cottage when he realized with a peculiar shock what he was doing. The engine could have been checked within half an hour. The car could be washed down far more easily at a garage. All these things were excuses.

He was making excuses for delaying the journey to London. Something in his mind was struggling to produce reasons why he should stay at home. Just one more hour, just one more day.

The early mist was fading, and the sun growing warm. Queston looked round at the cottage, and the soft light on the reddening trees. A humming silence lay over it all; suddenly he was stirred by the beauty of the place that had housed him for two years. You never liked London, said the thing in his mind, gently insistent: a pity to go on a day like this, a pity to leave home…

It was like pushing against gravity. Queston shook his head violently; went to fill the dog’s water-bowl and leave her a day’s meal; threw the brown-paper parcel of his manuscript on the back seat of the car, and drove away.

On the way, brooding over his reactions, he decided to go by train; there could be no wandering off the route then, or freak decisions to turn back for home. He made for Micheldever, a small station on the London line, and left the Lagonda in the yard. The station was deserted, and he had to shout before an ancient, creaking little man, surly and muttering, emerged from some hidden depths; even then, before he could buy a ticket, the old man had to shuffle away to fetch the booking-office key. When the ticket was handed over at last, suspicion trickling out with it through the grimy window, it cost at least three times as much as Queston remembered for journeys of that length two years before.

A train was due in half an hour. ‘You’re in luck,’ the old man said obscurely, and vanished, coughing with a childish, painful noise.

Queston walked slowly up and down the long platform, listening to his own steps. A nightingale was bubbling somewhere in the green, dark wall of fir-trees that grew close on the other side of the track; he could smell the resinous warmth of the air. It was like a ghost station, where nothing so vibrantly mechanical as a train would ever come. Even the old familiar holiday posters were missing from the walls; the poster-frames were still there, but gaping empty. Only in the waiting-room, with its bare wooden benches forlorn round the walls, did he find one poster glaring down at him. It carried no picture; no purple Highland loch or pneumatic beauty queen: but three lines of bold black type on a white ground.

IS YOUR JOURNEY

REALLY

NECESSARY?

Queston stared. The words woke a vague echo in his mind; there had been such posters when he was a child, he thought, shackling the worried country during the Second World War. Thirty-five years ago.

But this poster was quite clearly brand new.

Twenty minutes late, the train came in: a diesel car with one coach. There were only three other passengers beside himself, and every station platform where they stopped was as bare as Micheldever had been.

Even the platforms at Waterloo were half empty. At the barrier, a uniformed inspector peered closely at his ticket.

‘You’ll be coming back today, sir?’

‘Yes, of course,’ Queston said. ‘It’s a day return ticket, isn’t it?’

‘Just checking,’ the man said. He held out a slip of green paper. ‘Here’s your pass.’

‘Pass? ’ Queston looked down at the slip. It was printed, in neat black type:
London Regional Council: admit bearer for twenty-four hours
: and overstamped with the date. He said, incautiously: ‘What’s this for?’

‘Not been here for some time, have you? ’ The man glanced up at him with a faint patronizing grin; the tolerance of the cockney for the provincial. ‘You hang on to that, mate, and give it up when you get on your train tonight. You’ll need it if you happen to get stopped by a bobby for anything, too.’

‘Good God,’ said Queston; but a woman behind him was impatiently clicking her tongue, and he moved on out of the way. As he passed, he caught sight of the letters ‘
m.o.p.’
on the ticket inspector’s cap.

He crossed the deserted station. Although it was midday, the snack bars and restaurants were closed. They looked as though they had been closed for a long time. There were no taxis in the station approach. Queston set out to walk.