Operation Pax (11 page)

At the same time he envied the workmen their anonymity. He realized that he looked queer among them, a hurrying figure with nothing to do with the place. As far as his eye could see, there were only these workmen, all geared into this antlike, squalidly impressive communal effort, and himself, a piece of loose grit in it – something lawless and on its own, slipping through the cogs to an irregular and problematical fate.

There was now a metalled road under his feet. And solitude around him. He stopped, alarmed. The workmen had vanished, because in this part of the new estate their work was done. He could hear their clatter behind him. And far ahead he could see different signs of life: patches of grass and flowers, a scattering of television aerials, washing fluttering on a line. Ahead of him people had already moved in. But round about him there was an intermediate stage in the growth of this mass building: rows of these little houses, blank, empty and unquickened. He felt, just because they were so empty, that anything might come out of them. He might turn his head for a moment and there, standing in each little doorway, might be one of his own hidden fears. It was another tableau that would build itself into his evil dreams of the long tunnel.

The empty road in front of him was a regular chequer of sunlight and shadow. Each house cast its identical black cube of shade; and monotonously, just past this, was a shorter finger of shade from the sort of glorified dog kennel provided as an outhouse. He was near the end of the uninhabited block or belt – he could even see what looked like a main road ahead – when he found himself at a dead halt, quivering like a horse that has pulled up in its stride. For a second he was at a loss to account for his own action. And then he saw. Thirty yards ahead of him, the regular pattern of shade was broken. Between two of the cubes, instead of the expected blunt finger, lay an irregular mass of shadow, as if of something crouched low with an uplifted arm. He dragged himself forward, his breath shortening with every step. He read taut muscles, poised limbs into the enigmatical shape. He managed one more stride. Close beside one of the outhouses was the twisted trunk of an ancient apple tree. Its boughs had been lopped, but through some failure of energy it had not been grubbed out. A few shoots were springing from it. There was reason for it to cast a shadow instinct with life. It was the only thing left alive in all this wilderness.

Routh ran. He almost stumbled over a sticky-mouthed child on a tricycle – an intrepid explorer from the inhabited country ahead. There were voices – kids screaming, women gossiping, a baker’s boy shouting at a horse – and gusts of music from the Light Programme. A few men, already at home from work or out of it, were pottering about their prefabs, obliterating what small patches of earth they had under useless little concrete paths and bird baths. Routh spared them a glance of contempt as he ran. They took no interest in him whatever. Probably they thought he was running for a bus.

And so he was. For straight in front of him was a red double-decker, comfortingly urban in suggestion, waiting at its terminus – its side scrawled with a slogan exhorting the prefab population to National Saving. Routh put his last strength into leaping on the platform, and as he did so the bus moved off.

The upper deck was empty. As he swayed forward and slumped down he realized how done up he was. He realized too that he was still wearing the leggings he used on the Douglas. They made him look conspicuous now he was dismounted, and he hastily tugged them off and bundled them up as he heard the conductress climbing the stair.

‘Fare, please.’

He fumbled in a breast pocket and brought out a ten shilling note. ‘As far as you go.’

‘Hey?’ The girl seemed to doubt if she heard correctly. ‘What d’you say?’

‘I said “As far as you go.” I can’t say farther than that, can I?’ Routh did his best to import an elaborate facetiousness into his tone.

‘That will be one and ten. But you can have the Mental Hospital for a shilling.’ The girl gave him a ticket, a handful of change, and a long stare. As soon as she had gone away he looked at the ticket. But it had only numbers on it, and told him nothing. He began to keep a lookout for a signpost, a milestone, the indicator of a bus coming the other way. The bus might be bound for Witney, somewhere like that. It stopped in a hamlet and a number of people got on. Routh peered down at them anxiously as they mounted. It was three old women and a girl. At least it looked like that. He must suspect anyone, however unlikely, who took as much as a glance at him. It would be the same in a teashop or in the places one went for shelter: a cinema or a public library. He might feel the sudden prick of a needle.
Excuse me, my friend has fainted. But luckily I have my car outside
.

But perhaps that was only in stories. Perhaps they couldn’t really get you with a drug like that. The bus stopped once more and its upper deck was invaded by a tumbling and shouting crowd of airmen. Most of them seemed no more than lads; they flung themselves on the seats, tossed each other cigarettes, called across the bus to particular cronies from whom they had been separated in the crush, craned their necks to study the conductress when she came up for fares. Here, Routh thought, was the best bodyguard he had found yet.

At last he glimpsed a roadsign and saw that they were running into Abingdon. The name conveyed almost nothing to him. He was sure it wasn’t on any main line to London. Not that it mattered, if he had really broken the trail behind him at last.

They were in a market place, and there was a lot of coming and going downstairs. He got large, vague comfort from the solid mass of laughing and shouting boys behind him. There were only two seats vacant up here: the one beside himself and the corresponding one across the gangway. The bus began to move, and then jerked to a stop again. There was some sort of flurry below. He peered out and saw, foreshortened with a queer effect of comedy, the hurrying figures of two nuns. They skirted the bus, one of them flourishing an incongruously secular-looking umbrella at the driver. Then they clambered on. The bus twisted its way out of Abingdon. Routh dropped into a doze.

When he woke up one of the nuns was sitting beside him, and the second had taken the other spare seat just over the gangway. Queer how they had to go about in couples. As if anyone would think of making passes at an old creature like that. Not that this one was necessarily old, since it was impossible to see her face. Pricked by idle and drowsy curiosity, Routh leant forward to take a peep. But still he couldn’t see anything. The nun had an enormous white starched hood. She must feel as if she lived at the end of a tunnel. Routh wondered why such things had been invented. As blinkers, more or less, he supposed. See no evil unless it came at you head-on. That sort of thing.

He thought he might catch a glimpse of the other nun instead. When she turned to speak to her companion it ought to be possible at least to catch sight of her nose. But she showed no disposition to do this. Both of them sat perfectly still. Perhaps they were asleep. Or perhaps just staring straight ahead of them. Or again, they might be praying. But when they prayed didn’t they go fumbling and clicking at a string of beads? Routh’s eyes went to the hands of the nun sitting beside him. They were idle in her lap. Suddenly, and just as he was taking this in, she slid both hands beneath the black folds of her gown.

The bus was already airless and fuggy. Routh yawned. He remembered vaguely that giving way to sleepiness was a luxury in which, for some reason, he must not at present indulge himself. He yawned again – and jerked fully awake with a start that almost dislocated his jaw. He had experienced, against the screen of his closed eyes, a vivid image on the idle hands of the nun before she had slipped them out of sight. They were large and hairy hands. They were not a woman’s hands at all.

The bus cornered sharply and Routh was flung against the inscrutably shrouded form beside him. What he seemed to feel, through every nerve of his arm and side and thigh, was an unyielding sinewy strength, implacably planted in his path to freedom, poised and ready to –

Like a train running into a cutting, the bus plunged out of clear sunshine and between two thickly wooded slopes. In the same instant the shrouded figures both rose and turned upon Routh. It was a moment of absolute horror. The voices of the young airmen behind him seemed to rise in diabolic mockery. Routh understood that he was in hell. In another instant the bus was again in sunlight, and the hooded shape that had been no more than a silhouette bending over him took on interior form and feature. With a tremendous effort Routh looked it in the face. He saw a wizened old woman with steel spectacles. She clutched an umbrella in one small, clawlike hand. With the other she had been steadying herself on the back of the seat close by Routh. But now, glancing at him and seeing something of what was in his face, she touched him lightly on the shoulder, murmured an indistinguishable phrase and went swaying down the gangway. The second nun was younger and went past with lowered eyes. The bus stopped. Routh glimpsed them a moment later, walking slowly up an avenue towards a conventual-looking building behind a high wall. And the shouting and laughing of the airmen was again entirely human.

Routh fell back in his seat, knowing that fear, unintermitted through all that day, had pushed him to the very verge of madness.

The bus swung right-handed round a corner and descended a hill. Routh found that he was looking down at a gas works. Beyond the gas works, mellow in the misted sunlight of a late afternoon in autumn, were the towers of Oxford. And from these, very faintly, there came the chiming of innumerable bells.

Routh and Others in Oxford

Turrets and Terrases, and glittering Spires.

– PARADISE REGAIN’D

Mr Bultitude stepped out of the main gateway of Bede’s and looked about him in mild surprise. It was true that nothing had much changed since his performing the same operation on the previous day. Directly in front of him the Ionic pillars of the Ashmolean Museum supported a pediment above which Phoebus Apollo continued to elevate the dubious symbolism of a vestigial and extinguished torch. On his right, the martyrs Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley, perched on their Gothic memorial, presided over a confused area of cab ranks, bicycle parks, and subterraneous public lavatories. To the left, and closing the vista of Beaumont Street, Worcester College with its staring clock kept a sort of Cyclopean guard upon the learned of the University, as if set there to prevent their escaping to the railway station.

All this was familiar to Mr Bultitude. But it is proper in a scholar, thus emerging from his cloister, to survey the chaotic life of everyday in momentary benign astonishment. Few, in point of fact, neglect this ritual. Mr Bultitude, having performed it punctiliously, turned left, rolled sideways to give a wide berth to a plunging young woman in a BA gown – Mark Bultitude was a renowned misogynist – and proceeded to propel himself laboriously forward. Mr Bultitude’s form was globular and his legs were short; he had much the appearance of a mechanical toy designed to exploit the force of gravity upon a board or tray judiciously inclined; only he never seemed to enjoy the good fortune of facing a down gradient. In conversation with his pupils, indeed, he was accustomed to refer to Beaumont Street as ‘that damned hill’; and to attribute to the fatigues and dangers attendant upon tackling this declivity his own indisposition to stir at all frequently from his rooms.

Witticisms of this water, reiterated over many years (which, in Oxford, can be a crucial point) had earned for Mr Bultitude a notable reputation as a University character. Freshmen would nudge each other in the street and intimate with awe that there was Mark Bultitude. If they were scientists they cherished hopes that their own tutors (who had proved to be insufferably dull) might be persuaded to arrange for their transfer to the care of this scintillating intelligence. If on the other hand they pursued more humane studies, but were sufficiently well born, wealthy, good-looking or clever to have some hope of making Mark Bultitude’s dinner table, they importuned sundry uncles, godfathers, former house masters, and others of the great man’s generation and familiar acquaintance, to open up some avenue to this grand social advancement. Of all this Mark Bultitude approved. He valued highly his reputation as Oxford’s most completely civilized being.

And an infallible index of civilization, he maintained, was simplicity of taste. His present expedition might have been instanced as evidencing his own possession of this quality. For his intention – as he had explained to a mildly astonished porter on turning out of Bede’s – was to venture as far as the Oxford Playhouse, where he proposed later in the week to provide two of his favourite pupils with an evening’s wholesome entertainment. They were to see a delicious old comedy by Mr Noel Coward. And he was now going to book seats.

Mr Bultitude, pausing only to pat on the head the youngest son of the Professor of Egyptology (a serious child who had been spending the afternoon in numismatic studies in the University galleries), moved steadily up (or, as it may have been, down) Beaumont Street, and presently arrived at the theatre without mishap. Having secured his tickets he emerged through the swing doors and stood, puffing gently as from healthful exercise, and contemplating with evident misgiving the toilsome hundred yards of his return journey. In this posture he was discovered and greeted by an acquaintance.

‘Good afternoon, Bultitude. Like myself, you are taking a turn in this mild autumn sunshine.’

Mr Bultitude, who disliked having positive statements made about himself in this way, nodded curtly. ‘Good afternoon, Ourglass. What some take, others give.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ Dr Ourglass was an obscure man from an obscure college, and understood to be wholly occupied with obscure speculations on Phoenician trade routes. ‘I don’t follow you.’