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Through broken reeds the creature moved. It was not alone; its mate followed, and behind her five youngsters, joining the hunt with eagerness.

The stoats had swum a brook. Now they climbed from the chill water, up the bank and through the reeds, bodies low to the ground, necks outstretched, the young ones in imitation of their father. Father looked out with an impersonal hunger at rabbits frisking for food not many feet away.

This had once been wheat land. Taking advantage of a period of neglect, weeds had risen up and had their day, choking the cereal. Later, a fire spread across the land, burning down the thistles and giant grasses. Rabbits, which prefer low growth, had moved in, nibbling the fresh green shoots that thrust through the ash. The shoots that survived this thinning process found themselves with plenty of space in which to grow, and were now fair-sized young trees. The number of rabbits had consequently declined, for rabbits like open land; so the grass had its chance to return. Now it, in its turn was being thinned beneath the continuing spread of the beeches. The few rabbits that hopped there were thin of flank.

They were also wary. One of them saw the beady eyes watching in the rushes. It leapt for shelter and the others followed. At once the adult stoats were covering ground, twin stretches of brown rippling across the open space. The rabbits bolted down into their warrens. Without pause, the stoats followed. They could go anywhere. The world - this tiny piece of the world - was theirs.

Not many miles away, under the same tattered winter sky and by the banks of the same river, the wilderness had been cleared. In the wilderness, a pattern was still discernible; it was no longer a valid pattern, and so it faded year by year. Large trees, to some of which a raddled leaf still clung, marked the position of ancient hedges. They enclosed tangles of vegetation covering what had once been fields: brambles, lacerating their way like rusty barbed wire towards the centre of the fields, and elders, and prickly briars, as well as a sturdy growth of saplings. Along the edge of the clearing, these unruly hedges had been used as a stockade against further growth in a wide and ragged arc, thus protecting an area of some few hundred acres which had its longer side against the river.

This rude stockade was patrolled by an old man in a coarse shirt of orange, green, red, and yellow stripes. The shirt furnished almost the only splash of colour in the entire bedraggled landscape; it had been made from the canvas of a deckchair.

At intervals, the barrier of vegetation was broken by paths trodden into the undergrowth. The paths were brief and ended in crude latrines, where holes had been dug and covered with tarpaulins or wooden battens. These were the sanitary arrangements of the village of Sparcot.

The village itself lay on the river in the middle of its clearing. It had been built, or rather it had accumulated in the course of centuries, in the shape of an H, with the cross bar leading to a stone bridge spanning the river. The bridge still spanned the river, but led only to a thicket from which the villagers gathered much of their firewood.

Of the two longer roads, the one nearest the river had been intended to serve only the needs of the village. This it still did; one leg of it led to an old water mill where lived Big Jim Mole, the boss of Sparcot. The other road had once been a main road. After the houses petered out, it led in each direction into the stockaded wilderness of vegetation; there it was dragged down like a snake in a crocodile’s throat and devoured under the weight of undergrowth.

All the houses of Sparcot showed signs of neglect. Some were ruined; some were uninhabited ruins. A hundred and twelve people lived here. None of them had been born in Sparcot.

Where two of the roads joined, there stood a stone building that had served as a post office. Its upper windows commanded a view both of the bridge in one direction and the cultivated land with wilderness beyond in the other. This was now the village guardroom and, since Jim Mole insisted that a guard was always kept, it was occupied now.

There were three people sitting or lying in the old barren room. An old woman, long past her eightieth year, sat by a wood stove, humming to herself and nodding her head. She held out her hands to the stove, on which she was warming up stew in a tin platter. Like the others, she was wrapped against a wintry chill that the stove did little to dispel.

Of the two men present, one was extremely ancient in appearance, although his eye was bright. He lay on a palliasse on the floor, restlessly looking about him, staring up at the ceiling as if to puzzle out the meaning of the cracks there, or at the walls as if to solve the riddle of their damp patches. His face, sharp as a stoat’s beneath its stubble, wore an irritable look, for the old woman’s humming jarred his nerves.

Only the third occupant of the guardroom was properly alert. He was a well-built man in his middle fifties, without a paunch, but not so starveling thin as his companions. He sat in a creaking chair by the window, a rifle by his side. Although he was reading a book, he looked up frequently, directing his gaze through the window. With one of these glances, he saw the patrol man with the colourful shirt approaching over the pastures.

“Sam’s coming,” he said. He put his book down as he spoke. His name was Algy Timberlane. He had a thick grizzled beard that grew down almost to his navel, where it had been cut sharply across. Because of this beard, he was known as Greybeard, although he lived in a world of greybeards. But his high and almost bald head lent emphasis to the beard, and its texture, barred as it was with stripes of black hair sprouting thickly from the jawline and fading out lower down, made it particularly noticeable in a world no longer able to afford other forms of personal adornment.

When he spoke, the woman stopped her humming without giving any other sign she had heard. The man on the palliasse sat up and put a hand on the cudgel that lay beside him. He screwed his face up, sharpening his gaze to peer at the clock that ticked noisily on a shelf; then he squinted at his wristwatch. This battered old souvenir of another world was Towin Thomas’s most cherished possession, although it had not worked in a decade.

“Sam’s early coming off guard, twenty minutes early,” he said. “Old sciver. Worked up an appetite for lunch, strolling round out there. You better watch that hash of yours, Betty - I’m the only one I’m wanting to get indigestion off that grub, girl.”

Betty shook her head. It was as much a nervous tick as a negation of anything that the man with the cudgel might have said. She kept her hands to the fire, not looking round.

Towin Thomas picked up his cudgel and rose stiffly to his feet, helping himself up against the table. He joined Greybeard at the window, peering through the dirty pane and rubbing it with his sleeve.

“That’s Sam Bulstow all right. You can’t mistake that shirt.” Sam Bulstow walked down the littered street. Rubble, broken tiles and litter lay on the pavements; dock and fennel - mortified by winter - sprouted from shattered gratings. Sam Bulstow walked in the middle of the road. There had been no traffic but pedestrians for several years now. He turned in when he reached the post office, and the watchers heard his footsteps on the boards of the room below them.

Without excitement, they listened to the whole performance of his getting upstairs: the groans of the bare treads; the squeak of a horny palm on the hand rail as it helped tug its owner upwards; the rasp and heave of lungs challenged by every step.

Finally, Sam appeared in the guardroom. The gaudy stripes of his shirt threw up some of their colour on to the white stubble of his jaws. He stood for a while staring in at them, resting on the frame of the door to regain his breath.

“You’re early if it’s dinner you’re after,” Betty said, without bothering to turn her head. Nobody paid her any attention, and she nodded her old rats’ tails to herself in disapproval.

Sam just stood where he was, showing his yellow and brown teeth in a pant. “The Scotsmen are getting near,” he said.

Betty turned her neck stiffly to look at Greybeard. Towin Thomas arranged his crafty old wolf’s visage over the top of his cudgel and looked at Sam with his eyes screwed up.

“Maybe they’re after your job, Sammy, man,” he said. “Who gave you that bit of information, Sam?” Greybeard asked. Sam came slowly into the room, sneaking a sharp look at the clock as he did so, and poured himself a drink of water from a battered can standing in a corner. He gulped the water and sank down on to a wooden stool, stretching his fibrous hands out to the fire and generally taking his time before replying.

“There was a packman skirting the northern barricade just now. Told me he was heading for Faringdon. Said the Scotsmen had reached Banbury.”

“Where is this packman?” Greybeard asked, hardly raising his voice, and appearing to look out of the window.

“He’s gone on now, Greybeard. Said he was going to Faringdon.”

“Passed by Sparcot without calling here to sell us anything? Not very likely.”

“I’m only telling you what he said. I’m not responsible for him. I just reckon old Boss Mole ought to know the Scotsmen are coming, that’s all.” Sam’s voice relapsed into the irritable whine they all used at times. Betty turned back to her stove. She said, “Everyone who comes here brings rumours. If it isn’t the Scots, it’s herds of savage animals. Rumours, rumours… It’s as bad as the last war, when they kept telling us there was going to be an invasion. I reckoned at the time they only done it to scare us, but I was scared just the same.”

Sam cut off her muttering. “Rumours or not, I’m telling you what the man said. I thought I ought to come up here and report it. Did I do right or didn’t I?”

“Where had this fellow come from?” Greybeard asked.

“He hadn’t come from anywhere. He was going to Faringdon.” He smiled his sly doggy smile at his joke, and picked up a reflected smile from Towin. “Did he say where he had been?” Greybeard asked patiently. “He said he had been coming from up river. Said there was a lot of stoats heading this way.”

“Eh, that’s another rumour we’ve heard before,” Betty said to herself, nodding her head. “You keep your trap shut, you old cow,” Sam said, without rancour. Greybeard took hold of his rifle by the barrel and moved into the middle of the room until he stood looking down at Sam. “Is that all you have to report, Sam?”

”Scotsmen, stoats - what more do you want from one patrol? I didn’t see any elephants, if you were wondering.” He cracked his grin again, looking again for Towin Thomas’s approval.

“You aren’t bright enough to know an elephant if you saw it, Sam, you old fleapit,” Towin said. Ignoring this exchange, Greybeard said, “Okay, Sam, back you go on patrol. There’s another twenty minutes before you are relieved.”

“What, go back out there just for another lousy twenty minutes? Not on your flaming nelly, Greybeard!

I’ve had it for this afternoon and I’m sitting right here on this stool. Let it ride for twenty minutes. Nobody’s going to run away with Sparcot, whatever Jim Mole may think.”

“You know the dangers as well as I do.”

“You know you’ll never get any sense out of me, not while I’ve got this bad back. These blinking guard duties come round too often for my liking.” Betty and Towin kept silent. The latter cast a glance at his broken wrist watch. Both he and Betty, like everyone else in the village, had had the necessity for continuous guard drummed into them often enough, but they kept their eyes tracing the seamed lines on the board floor, knowing the effort involved in thrusting old legs an extra time up and down stairs and an extra time round the perimeter.

The advantage lay with Sam, as he sensed. Facing Greybeard more boldly, he said, “Why don’t you take over for twenty minutes if you’re so keen on defending the dump? You’re a young man - it’ll do you good to have a stretch.”

Greybeard tucked the leather sling of the rifle over his left shoulder and turned to Towin, who stopped gnawing the top of his cudgel to look up.

“Strike the alarm gong if you want me in a hurry, and not otherwise. Remind old Betty it’s not a dinner gong.”

The woman cackled as he moved towards the door, buttoning his baggy jacket. “Your grub’s just on ready, Algy. Why not stay and eat it?” she asked. Greybeard slammed the door without answering. They listened to his heavy tread descending the stairs. “You don’t reckon he took offence, do you? He wouldn’t report me to old Mole, would he?” Sam asked anxiously. The others mumbled neutrally and hugged their lean ribs; they did not want to be involved in any trouble.

Greybeard walked slowly along the middle of the street, avoiding the puddles still left from a rainstorm two days ago. Most of Sparcot’s drains and gutters were blocked; but the reluctance of the water to run away was due mainly to the marshiness of the land. Somewhere upstream, debris was blocking the river, causing it to overflow its banks. He must speak to Mole; they must get up an expedition to look into the trouble. But Mole was growing increasingly cantankerous, and his policy of isolationism would be against any move out of the village.

He chose to walk by the river, to continue round the perimeter of the stockade afterwards. He brushed through an encroaching elder’s stark spikes, smelling as he did so a melancholy-sweet smell of the river and the things that mouldered by it.

Several of the houses that backed on to the river had been devoured by fire before he and his fellows came to live here. Vegetation grew sturdily inside and outside their shells. On a back gate lying crookedly in long grass, faded lettering proclaimed the name of the nearest shell: Thameside.

Farther on, the houses were undamaged by fire and inhabited. Greybeard’s own house was here. He looked at the windows, but caught no sight of his wife, Martha; she would be sitting quietly by the fire with a blanket round her shoulders, staring into the grate and seeing - what? Suddenly an immense impatience pierced Greybeard. These houses were a poor old huddle of buildings, nestling together like a bunch of ravens with broken wings. Most of them had chimneys or guttering missing; each year they hunched their shoulders higher as the roof-trees sagged. And in general the people fitted in well enough with this air of decay. He did not; nor did he want his Martha to do so.

Deliberately, he slowed his thoughts. Anger was useless. He made a virtue of not being angry. But he longed for a freedom beyond the fly-blown safety of Sparcot.

After the houses came Toby’s trading post - a newer building that, and in better shape than most - and the barns, ungraceful structures that commemorated the lack of skill with which they had been built. Beyond the barns lay the fields, turned up in weals to greet the frosts of winter; shards of water glittered between furrows. Beyond the fields grew the thickets marking the eastern end of Sparcot. Beyond Sparcot lay the immense mysterious territory that was the Thames valley.

Just beyond the province of the village, an old brick bridge with a collapsed arch menaced the river, its remains suggesting the horns of a ram, growing together in old age. Greybeard contemplated it and the fierce little weir just beyond it - for that way lay whatever went by the name of freedom these days - and then turned away to patrol the living stockade.

With the rifle comfortably under one crooked arm, he made his promenade. He could see across to the other side of the clearing; it was deserted, apart from two men walking distantly among cattle, and a stooped figure in the cabbage patch. He had the world almost to himself: and year by year he would have it more to himself.

He snapped down the shutter of his mind on that thought, and began to concentrate on what Sam Bulstow had reported. It was probably an invention to gain him twenty minutes off patrol duty. The rumour about the Scots sounded unlikely - though no less likely than other tales that travellers had brought them, that a Chinese army was marching on London, or that gnomes and elves and men with badger faces had been seen dancing in the woods. Scope for error and ignorance seemed to grow season by season. It would be good to know what was really happening…

Less unlikely than the legend of marching Scots was Sam’s tale of a strange packman. Densely though the thickets grew, there were ways through them, and men who travelled those ways, though the isolated village of Sparcot saw little but the traffic that moved painfully up and down the Thames. Well, they must maintain their watch. Even in these more peaceful days - “the apathy that bringeth perfect peace”, thought Greybeard, wondering what he was quoting - villages that kept no guard could be raided and ruined for the sake of their food stocks, or just for madness. So they believed.

Now he walked among tethered cows, grazing individually round the ragged radius of their halters. They were the new strain, small, sturdy, plump, and full of peace. And young! Tender creatures, surveying Greybeard from moist eyes, creatures that belonged to man but had no share of his decrepitude, creatures that kept the grass short right up to the scrawny bramble bushes.

He saw that one of the animals near the brambles was pulling at its tether. It tossed its head, rolled its eyes, and lowed. Greybeard quickened his pace.

There seemed to be nothing to disturb the cow except a dead rabbit lying by the brambles. As he drew nearer, Greybeard surveyed the rabbit. It was freshly killed. And though it was completely dead, he thought it had moved. He stood almost over it, alert for something wrong, a faint prickle of unease creeping up his backbone.

Certainly the rabbit was dead, killed neatly by the back of the neck. Its neck and anus were bloody, its purple eye glazed.

Yet it moved. Its side heaved.

Shock - an involuntary superstitious dread - coursed through Greybeard. He took a step backwards, sliding the rifle down into his hands. At the same time, the rabbit heaved again and its killer exposed itself to view.

Backing swiftly out of the rabbit’s carcass came a stoat, doubling up its body in its haste to be clear. Its brown coat was enriched with rabbit blood, the tiny savage muzzle it lifted to Greybeard smeared with crimson. He shot it dead before it could move.

The cows plunged and kicked. Like clockwork toys, the figures among the brussels sprout stumps straightened their backs. Birds wheeled up from the rooftops. The gong sounded from the guardroom, as Greybeard had instructed it should. A knot of people congregated outside the barns, hobbling together as if they might pool their rheumy eyesight.

“Blast their eyes, there’s nothing to panic about,” Greybeard growled. But he knew the involuntary shot had been a mistake; he should have clubbed the stoat to death with the butt of his rifle. The sound of firing always woke alarm.

A party of active sixty-year-olds were assembling, and began to march towards him, swinging cudgels of various descriptions. Through his irritation, he had to admit that it was a prompt stand-to. There was plenty of life about the place yet.

“It’s all right!” he called, waving his arms above his head as he went to meet them. “All right! I was attacked by a solitary stoat, that’s all. You can go back.”

Charley Samuels was there, a big man with a sallow colour; he had his tame fox, Isaac, with him on a leash. Charley lived next door to the Timberlanes, and had been increasingly dependent on them since his wife died in the previous spring.

He came in front of the other men and aligned himself with Greybeard. “Next spring, we’ll have a drive to collect more fox cubs and tame them,” he said. “They’ll help keep down any stoats that venture on to our land. We’re getting more rats, too, sheltered in the old buildings. I reckon the stoats are driving ‘em to seek shelter in human habitation. The foxes will take care of the rats too, won’t they, Isaac, boy?”

Still angry with himself, Greybeard made off along the perimeter again. Charley fell in beside him, sympathetically saying nothing. The fox walked between them, dainty with its brush held low.

The rest of the party stood about indecisively in mid-field. Some quieted the cattle or stared at the scattered pieces of stoat; some went back towards the houses, whence others came out to join them in gossip. Their dark figures with white polls stood out against the background of fractured brick.

“They’re half-disappointed there was not some sort of excitement brewing,” Charley said. A peak of his springy hair stood out over his forehead. Once it had been the colour of wheat; it had achieved whiteness so many seasons ago that its owner had come to look on white as its proper and predestined hue, and the wheaty tint had passed into his skin.

Charley’s hair never dangled into his eyes, although it looked as if it would after a vigorous shake of the head. Vigorous shaking was not Charley’s habit; his quality was of stone rather than fire; and in his bearing was evidence of how the years had tested his endurance. It was precisely this air of having withstood so much that these two sturdy elders - in superficial appearance so unlike - had in common.

“Though people don’t like trouble, they enjoy a distraction,” Charley said. “Funny - that shot you fired started my gums aching.”

“It deafened me,” Greybeard admitted. “I wonder if it roused the old men of the mill?” He noticed that Charley glanced towards the mill to see if Mole or his henchman, “Major” Trouter, was coming to investigate.

Catching Greybeard’s glance, Charley grinned rather foolishly and said, by way of something to say, “Here comes old Jeff Pitt to see what all the fuss is.”

They had reached a small stream that wound its way across the cleared land. On its banks stood the stumps of some beeches that the villagers had cut down. From among these, the shaggy old figure of Pitt came. Over one shoulder he carried a stick from which hung the body of an animal. Though several of the villagers ventured some distance afield, Pitt was the only one who roved the wilds on his own. Sparcot was no prison for him. He was a morose and solitary man; he had no friends; and even in the society of the slightly mad, his reputation was for being mad. Certainly his face, as full of whorls as willow bark, was no reassurance of sanity; and his little eyes moved restlessly about, like a pair of fish trapped inside his skull.

“Did someone get shot then?” he asked. When Greybeard told him what happened, Pitt grunted, as if convinced the truth was being concealed from him.

“With you firing away, you’ll have the gnomes and wild things paying us attention,” he said. “I’ll deal with them when they appear.”

“The gnomes are coming, aren’t they?” Pitt muttered; Greybeard’s words had scarcely registered on him.

He turned to gaze at the cold and leafless woods. “They’ll be here before so long, to take the place of children, you mark my words.”

“There are no gnomes round here, Jeff, or they’d have caught you long ago,” Charley said. “What have you got on your stick?”

Eyeing Charley to judge his reaction, Pitt lowered the stick from his shoulder and displayed a fine dog otter, its body two feet long.

“He’s a beauty, isn’t he? Seen a lot of ‘em about just lately. You can spot ‘em more easily in the winter. Or perhaps they are just growing more plentiful in these parts.”

“Everything that can still multiply is doing so,” Greybeard said harshly. “I’ll sell you the next one I catch, Greybeard. I haven’t forgotten what happened before we came to

Sparcot. You can have the next one I catch. I’ve got my snares set along under the bank.”

“You’re a regular old poacher, Jeff,” Charley said. “Unlike the rest of us, you’ve never had to change your job.”

“What do you mean? Me never had to change my job? You’re daft, Charley Samuels! I spent most of my life in a stinking machine tool factory before the revolution and all that. Not that I wasn’t always keen on nature - but I never reckoned I’d get it at such close quarters, as you might say.”

“You’re a real old man of the woods now, anyhow.”

“Think I don’t know you’re laughing at me? I’m no fool, Charley, whatever you may think to yourself. But

I reckon it’s terrible the way us town people have been turned into sort of half-baked country bumpkins, don’t you? What’s there left to life? All of us in rags and tatters, full of worms and the toothache! Where’s it all going to end, eh, I’d like to know? Where’s it all going to end?” He turned to scrutinize the woods again.

“We’re doing okay,” Greybeard said. It was his invariable answer to the invariable question. Charley also had his invariable answer.

“It’s the Lord’s plan, Jeff, and you don’t do any good by worrying over it. We cannot say what he has in mind for us.”

“After all he’s done to us this last fifty years,” Jeff said, “I’m surprised you’re still on speaking terms with him.”

“It will end according to His will,” Charley said. Pitt gathered up all the wrinkles of his face, spat, and passed on with his dead otter.

Where could it all end, Greybeard asked himself, except in humiliation and despair? He did not ask the question aloud. Though he liked Charley’s optimism, he had no more patience than old Pitt with the too easy answers of the belief that nourished that optimism.

They walked on. Charley began to discuss the various accounts of people who claimed to have seen gnomes and little men, in the woods, or on roof tops, or licking the teats of the cows. Greybeard answered automatically; old Pitt’s fruitless question remained with him. Where was it all going to end? The question, like a bit of gristle in the mouth, was difficult to get rid of; yet increasingly he found himself chewing on it.

When they had walked right round the perimeter, they came again to the Thames at the western boundary, where it entered their land. They stopped and stared at the water.

Tugging, fretting, it moved about a countless number of obstacles on its course - oh yes, that it took as it has ever done! - to the sea. Even the assuaging power of water could not silence Greybeard’s mind.

“How old are you, Charley?” he asked. “I’ve given up counting the years. Don’t look so glum! What’s suddenly worrying you? You’re a cheerful man, Greybeard; don’t start fretting about the future. Look at that water - it’ll get where it wants to go, but it isn’t worrying.”

“I don’t find any comfort in your analogy.”

“Don’t you, now? Well then, you should do.” Greybeard thought how tiresome and colourless Charley was, but he answered patiently. “You are a sensible man, Charley. Surely we must think ahead? This is getting to be a pensioners’ planet.

You can see the danger signs as well as I can. There are no young men and women any more. The number of us capable of maintaining even the present low standard of living is declining year by year. We-“

“We can’t do anything about it. Get that firmly into your mind and you’ll feel better about the whole situation. The idea that man can do anything useful about his fate is an old idea - what do I mean? Yes, a fossil. It’s something from another period… We can’t do anything. We just get carried along, like the water in this river.”

“You read a lot of things into the river,” Greybeard said, half-laughing. He kicked a stone into the water. A scuttling and a plop followed, as some small creature - possibly a water rat, for they were on the increase again - dived for safety.

They stood silent, Charley’s shoulders a little bent. When he spoke again, it was to quote poetry.

“The woods decay, the woods decay and fall, The vapours weep their burden to the ground, Man comes and tills the fields and lies beneath -“

Between the heavy prosaic man reciting Tennyson and the woods leaning across the river lay an incongruity. Laboriously, Greybeard said, “For a cheerful man, you know some depressing poetry.”

“That was what my father brought me up on. I’ve told you about that mouldy little shop of his…” One of the characteristics of age was that all avenues of talk led backwards in time.

“I’ll leave you to get on with your patrol,” Charley said, but Greybeard clutched his arm. He had caught a noise upstream distinct from the sound of the water.

He moved forward to the water’s edge and looked. Something was coming downstream, though overhanging foliage obscured details. Breaking into a trot, Greybeard made for the stone bridge, with Charley following at a fast walk behind him.

From the crown of the bridge, they had a clear view upstream. A cumbersome boat was dipping into view only some eighty yards away. By its curved bow, he guessed it had once been a powered craft. Now it was being rowed and poled along by a number of white-heads, while a sail hung slackly from the mast. Greybeard pulled his elder whistle from an inner pocket and blew on it two long blasts. He nodded to Charley and hurried over to the water mill where Big Jim Mole lived.

Mole was already opening the door as Greybeard arrived. The years had yet to drain off all his natural ferocity. He was a stocky man with a fierce piggy face and a tangle of grey hair protruding from his ears as well as his skull. He seemed to survey Greybeard with nostrils as well as eyes.

“What’s the racket about, Greybeard?” he asked. Greybeard told him. Mole came out smartly, buttoning his ancient army greatcoat. Behind him came

Major Trouter, a small man who limped badly and helped himself along with a stick. As he emerged into the grey daylight, he began to shout orders in his high squeaking voice. People were still hanging about after the false alarm. They began to fall in promptly if raggedly, women as well as men, into a pre-arranged pattern of defence.

The population of Sparcot was a many-coated beast. The individuals that comprised it had sewn themselves into a wide variety of clothes and rags that passed for clothes. Coats of carpet and skirts of curtain material were to be seen. Some of the men wore waistcoats cobbled from fox skins, clumsily cured; some of the women wore torn army greatcoats. Despite this variety, the general effect was colourless, and nobody stood out particularly against the neutral landscape. A universal distribution of sunken cheeks and grey hairs added to the impression of a sad uniformity.

Many an old mouth coughed out the winter’s air. Many a back was bent, many a leg dragged. Sparcot was a citadel for the ailments: arthritis, lumbago, rheumatism, cataract, pneumonia, influenza, sciatica, dizziness. Chests, livers, backs, heads, caused much complaint, and the talk in an evening was mostly of the weather and toothache. For all that, the villagers responded spryly to the sound of the whistle.

Greybeard observed this with approval, even while wondering how necessary it was; he had helped Trouter organize the defence system before an increasing estrangement with Mole and Trouter had caused him to take a less prominent part in affairs.

The two long whistle blasts signified a threat by water. Though most travellers nowadays were peaceable (and paid toll before they passed under Sparcot bridge), few of the villagers had forgotten the day, five or six years ago, when they had been threatened by a solitary river pirate armed with a flamethrower. Flame-throwers seemed to be growing scarcer. Like petrol, machine-guns, and ammunition, they were the produce of another century, and the relics of a vanished world. But anything arriving by water was the subject for a general stand to.

Accordingly, a strongly armed party of villagers - many of them carried home-made bows and arrows - was gathered along the riverside by the time the strange boat came up. They crouched behind a low and broken wall, ready to attack or defend, a little extra excitement shaking through their veins.

The approaching boat travelled sideways to the stream. It was manned by as unruly a set of landlubbers as ever cast anchor. The oarsmen seemed as much concerned with keeping the boat from capsizing as with making progress forward; as it was, they appeared to be having little luck in either endeavour.

This lack of skill was due not only to the difficulty inherent in rowing a fifty-year-old, thirty-feet long cruiser with a rotten hull; nor to the presence aboard of fully a dozen people with their possessions. In the cockpit of the cruiser, struggling under the grip of four men, was a rebellious pack reindeer.

Although the beast had been pollarded - as the custom was since the animal was introduced into the country by one of the last authoritarian governments some twenty years ago - it was strong enough to cause considerable damage; and reindeer were more valuable than men. They could be used for milking and meat production when cattle were scarce, and they made good transport animals; whereas men could only grow older.

Despite this distraction, one of the navigators, acting as lookout and standing in the bow of the boat, sighted the massed forces of Sparcot and called out a warning. She was a tall dark woman, lean and hard, her dyed black hair knotted down under a scarf. When she called to the rowers, the promptness with which they rested on their oars showed how glad they were to do so. Someone squatting behind one of the baggages of clothing piled on deck passed the dark woman a white flag. She thrust it aloft and called out to the waiting villagers over the water.

“What’s she yelling about?” John Meller asked. He was an old soldier who had once been a sort of batman to Mole, until the latter threw him out in exasperation as useless. Nearly ninety, Meller was as thin as a staff and as deaf as a stone, though his one remaining eye was still sharp.

The woman’s voice came again, confident though it asked a favour. “Let us come by in peace. We have no wish to harm you and no need to stop. Let us by, villagers!”

Greybeard bawled her message into Meller’s ear. The whitehead shook his scruffy skull and grinned to show he had not heard. “Kill the men and rape the women! I’ll take the dark-haired hussy in the front.”

Mole and Trouter came forward, shouting orders. They had evidently decided they were under no serious threat from the boat.

“We must stop them and inspect them,” Mole said. “Get the pole out. Move there, you men! Let’s have a parley with this shower and see who they are and what they want. They must have something we need.”

During this activity, Towin Thomas had come up beside Greybeard and Charley Samuels. In his efforts to see the boat clearly, he knotted his face into a grimace. He dug Greybeard in the ribs with a patched elbow.

“Hey, Greybeard, that reindeer wouldn’t come amiss for the heavy work, would it?” he said, sucking the end of his cudgel reflectively. “We could use it behind the plough, couldn’t we?”

“We’ve no right to take it from them.”

“You’re not getting religious ideas about that reindeer, are you? You’re letting old Charley’s line of talk get you down.”

“I never listen to a thing either Charley or you say,” Greybeard said. A long pole that had done duty carrying telephone wires in the days when a telephone system existed was slid out across the water, until its tip rested between two stones on the farther bank. The river narrowed here towards the ruined bridge farther downstream. This spot had afforded the villagers a useful revenue for years; their levies on river-going craft supplemented their less enthusiastic attempts at husbandry. It was the one inspired idea of Big Jim Mole’s otherwise dull and oppressive reign. To reinforce the threat of the pole, the Sparcot men now showed themselves in strength along the bank. Mole ran forward brandishing a sword, calling for the strangers to heave to.

The tall dark woman on the boat waved her fists at them. “Respect the white flag of peace, you mangy bastards!” she yelled. “Let us come by without spoiling.

We’re homeless as it is. We’ve nothing to spare for the likes of you.” Her crew had less spirit than she. They shipped their oars and punting sticks and let the boat drift under the stone bridge until it rested against the pole. Elated to find such a defenceless prize, the villagers dragged it against the near bank with grapnels. The reindeer lifted its heavy head and blared its defiance, the dark woman shrieked her disgust.

“Hey there, you with the butcher’s snout,” she cried, pointing at Mole, “You listen to me, we’re your neighbours. We only come from Grafton Lock. Is this how you treat your neighbours, you fusty old pirate?”

A murmur ran through the crowd on the bank. Jeff Pitt was the first to recognize the woman. She was known as Gipsy Joan, and her name was something of a legend even among villagers who had never ventured into her territory.

Jim Mole and Trouter stepped forward and bawled at her to be silent, but again she shouted them down. “Get your hooks out of our side! We’ve got wounded aboard.”

“Shut your gab, woman, and come ashore! Then you won’t get hurt,” Mole said, holding his sword at a more business-like angle. With the major at his side, he stepped towards the boat. Already some of the villagers had attempted to board without orders. Emboldened by the general lack of resistance and keen to get their share of the spoils, they dashed forward, led by two of the women. One of the oarsmen, a hoary old fellow with a sou’wester and a yellow beard, fell into a panic and brought his oar down on to the foremost boarder’s head. The woman went sprawling. A scuffle broke out immediately, despite bellowings from both parties to desist.

The cruiser rocked. The men holding the reindeer moved to protect themselves. Taking advantage of this distraction, the animal broke free of its captors. It clattered across the cabin roof, paused for a moment, and leapt overboard into the Thames. Swimming strongly, it headed downstream. A howl of dismay rose from the boat.

Two of the men who had been looking after the animal jumped in too, crying to the beast to come back. Then they were forced to look after themselves; one of them struggled to the bank, where there were hands to help him out. Down by the horns of the broken bridge, the reindeer climbed ashore, its water-smooth coat heavy against its flanks. It stood on the far shore snorting and shaking its head from side to side, as if troubled by water in its ears. Then it turned and disappeared into a clump of willows.

The second man who jumped in was less successful. He could not reach either bank. The current caught him, sweeping him through the bridge, across its submerged remains, over the weir. His thin cry rose. An arm was flung up amid spray, then there was only the roar of green and white water.

This incident damped the struggles at the boat, so that Mole and Trouter were able to question the crew. The two of them, standing by the cruiser’s rail, saw that Gipsy Joan had not been bluffing when she spoke of carrying wounded. Down in what was once the saloon were huddled nine men and women, some of them nonagenarians by their parched and sunken-eyed aspect. Their poor clothes were torn, their faces and hands bloody. One woman with half her face missing seemed on the point of death, while all maintained a stunned silence more terrible than screaming.

“What’s happened to them?” Mole asked uneasily. “Stoats,” said Gipsy Joan. She and her companions were keen enough to tell their tale. The facts were simple enough. Her group was a small one, but they lived fairly well on a supply of fish from a flooded area next to Grafton Lock. They never kept guard, and had almost no defences. At sunset on the previous day, they had been attacked by a pack - or some said several packs - of stoats. In their fright, the community had taken to their boats and come away as quickly as possible. They predicted that unless deflected by some chance, the stoats would soon sweep into Sparcot.

“Why should they do that?” Trouter asked. “Because they’re hungry, man, why else?” Gipsy Joan said. “They’re multiplying like rabbits and sweeping the country looking for food. Eat anything, them devils will, fish or flesh or carrion. You lot would do well to move out of here.”

Mole looked round uneasily and said, “Don’t start spreading rumours here, woman. We can look after ourselves. We’re not a rabble, we’re properly organized. Get a move on. We’ll let you go through unharmed, seeing that you’ve got trouble on your hands. Get off our territory as fast as you can.”

Joan looked prepared to argue the toss, but two of her leaders, fearful, pulled at her arm and urged that they move at once.

“We’ve another boat coming on behind,” one of these men said. “It’s full of our older unwounded people. We’d be obliged if you’d let them through without holding them up.”

Mole and Trouter stepped back, waving their arms. The mention of stoats had turned them into anxious men.

“On your way!” they shouted, waving their arms, and to their own men, “Pull back the pole and let them get on their way.”

The pole came back. Joan and her crew pushed off from the bank, their ancient cruiser wobbling dangerously. But the contagion of their news had already been caught by those ashore. The word “stoats” passed rapidly from mouth to mouth, and people began to run back to their houses, or towards the village boathouse.

Unlike their enemies the rats, stoats had not declined in numbers. During the last decade, they had greatly increased, both in numbers and daring. Earlier in the year, old Reggy Foster had been attacked by one in the pasture and had had his throat bitten out. The stoats had extended an old occasional habit of theirs and now often hunted in packs, as they did at Grafton. At such times they showed no fear of human beings.

Knowing this, the villagers began to trample about the bank, pushing each other and shouting incoherently.

Jim Mole drew a revolver and levelled it at one of the fleeing backs. “You can’t do that!” Greybeard exclaimed, stepping forward with raised hand. Mole brought the revolver down and pointed it at Greybeard. “You can’t shoot your own people,” Greybeard said firmly. “Can’t I?” Mole asked. His eyes were like blisters on his antique skin. Trouter said something, and he lifted his revolver again and fired it into the air. The villagers looked round in startlement; then most of them began running again. Mole laughed.

“Let ‘em go,” he said. “They’ll only kill ‘emselves.”

“Use reason with them,” Greybeard said, coming closer. “They’re frightened. Firing on them’s no use.

Speak to them.”

“Reason! Get out of my way, Greybeard. They’re mad! They’ll die. We’re all going to die.”

“Are you going to let them go, Jim?” Trouter asked. “You know the trouble with stoats as well as I do,” Mole said. “If they attack in force, we’ve not got enough ammunition to spare to shoot them. We haven’t got good enough bowmen to stop them with arrows. So the sensible thing is to get across the river in our boat and stay there till the little vermin have gone.”

“They can swim, you know,” Trouter said. “I know they can swim. But why should they? They’re after food, not fighting. We’ll be safe on the other side of the river.” He was shivering. “Can you imagine what a stoat attack must be like? You saw those people in that boat. Do you want that to happen to you?”

He was pale now, and looking anxiously about him, as if fearing that the stoats might be arriving already. “We can shut ourselves in the barns and houses if they come,” Greybeard said. “We can defend ourselves without deserting the village. We’re safer staying put.” Mole turned at him savagely, baring his teeth in a gaping snarl. “How many stoat-proof buildings have we got? You know they’ll come after the cattle if they’re really hungry, and then they’ll be all over us at the same time. Who gives orders here anyhow? Not you, Greybeard! Come on, Trouter, what are you waiting for? Let’s get our boat brought out!”

Trouter looked momentarily disposed to argue. Instead, he turned and began shouting orders in his high-pitched voice. He and Mole brushed past Greybeard and ran towards the boathouse, calling, “Keep calm, you bloody cripples, and we’ll ferry you all across.”

The place took on the aspect of a well-stirred anthill. Greybeard noticed that Charley had vanished. The cruiser with the fugitives from Grafton was well down the river now and had negotiated the little weir safely. As Greybeard stood by the bridge and watched the chaos, Martha came up to him.

His wife was a dignified woman, of medium height though she stooped a little as she clutched a blanket about her shoulders. Her face was slightly puddingy and pale, and wrinkled as if age had bound her skull tightly round the edges; yet because of her fine bone structure, she still retained something of the good looks of her youth, while the dark lashes that fringed her eyes still made them compelling.

She saw his far-away look. “You can dream just as well at home,” she said. He took her arm. “I was wondering what lay at the end of the river. I’d give anything to see what life was like on the coast.

Look at us here - we’re so undignified! We’re just a rabble.”

“Aren’t you afraid of the stoats, Algy?”

“Of course I’m afraid of the stoats.” Then he smiled back at her, a little wearily. “And I’m tired of being afraid. Cooped up in this village for eleven years, we’ve all caught Mole’s sickness.” They turned back towards their house. For once, Sparcot was alive. They saw men small in the meadowland, with anxious gestures hurrying their few cows in to shelter. It was against just such emergencies, or in case of flood, that the barns had been built on stilts; when the cattle were driven into them and the doors shut, ramps could be removed, leaving the cattle safe above ground.

As they passed Annie Hunter’s house, the desiccated figure of Willy Tallridge slipped from the side door. He was still buttoning his jacket, and paid them no attention as he hurried towards the river as fast as his eighty-year-old legs would take him. Annie’s bright face, heavy with its usual complement of rouge and powder, appeared at her upper window. She waved a casual greeting to them.

“There’s a stoat-warning out, Annie,” Greybeard called. “They are getting ready to ferry people across the river.”

“Thanks for the warning, darling, but I’ll lock myself in here.”

“You have to hand it to Annie, she’s game,” Greybeard said. “Gamey too, I hear,” Martha said drily. “Do you realize, Algy, that she’s about twenty years older than I?

Poor old Annie, what a fate - to be the oldest professional!” He was searching the tousled meadow, looking despite himself for brown squibs of life riding through the grass, but he smiled at Martha’s joke. Occasionally a remark of hers could bring back a whole world to him, the old world of brittle remarks made at parties where alcohol and nicotine had been ritually consumed. He loved her for the best of reasons, because she was herself.

“Funny thing,” he said. “You’re the only person left in Sparcot who still makes conversation for its own sake. Now go home like a good girl and pack a few essential belongings. Shut yourself in, and I’ll be along in ten minutes. I ought to help the men with the cattle.”

“Algy, I’m nervous. Do we have to pack just to go across the river. What’s happening?” Suddenly his face was hard. “Do what I ask you, Martha. We aren’t going across the river; we’re going down it. We’re leaving Sparcot.” Before she could say more, he walked away. She also turned, walking deliberately down the hollow-cheeked street, and in at her door, into the dark little house. She did it as a positive act. The trepidation that had filled her on hearing her husband’s words did not last; now, as she looked about her at walls from which the paper had peeled and ceilings showing their dirty bare ribs, she whispered a wish that he might mean what he had said.

But leave Sparcot? The world had dwindled until for her it was only Sparcot… As Greybeard went towards the stilted barn, a fight broke out farther down the street. Two groups of people carting belongings down to the river’s edge had collided; they had lapsed into the weak rages that were such a feature of life in the village. The result would be a broken bone, shock, confinement to bed, pneumonia, and another mound in the beggarly greedy graveyard under the fir trees, where the soil was sandy and yielded easily to the spade.

Greybeard had often acted as peacemaker in such disputes. Now he turned away, and made for the cattle. They were as valuable - it had to be faced - as the rabble. The cattle went protestingly up the ramp into the barn. George Swinton, a one-armed old heathen who had killed two men in the Westminster Marches of 2008, darted among them like a fury, hurting them all he could with voice and stick.

A noise like the falling of stricken timber stopped them. Two of the barn’s wooden legs split to ground level. One of the knot of men present called a word of warning. Before it was through his lips, the barn began to settle. Splinters of wood showed like teeth as joists gave. The barn toppled. It slid sideways, rocked, and collapsed in a shower of ruptured planks. Cattle stampeded from the wreckage, or lay beneath it.

“To hell with this shoddy shower! Let’s get ourselves in the boats,” George Swinton said, pushing past Greybeard. And none of the others cared more than he. Flinging aside their sticks, they jostled after him. Greybeard stood where he was as they rushed past: the human race, he thought, sinned against as well as sinning.

Stooping, he helped a heifer free herself from under a fallen beam. She cantered away to the grazing land. She would have to take her chance when and if the stoats came.

As he turned back towards his house, a shot - it sounded like Mole’s revolver - came from the direction of the stone bridge. It was echoed by another. Starlings clattered up from the roof-tops and soared for safety in the trees across the river. Greybeard quickened his pace, doubled through the straggling plot that was the garden of his house, and peered round the corner of it.

By the bridge, a group of villagers was struggling. A low afternoon mist tinted the scene, and the towering trees behind dwarfed it, but through a gap in a collapsing garden wall Greybeard had a clear enough view of what was going on.

The second boat from Grafton floated down the river just as the Sparcot boat was launching itself across stream. It was laden with a motley collection of white-heads, most of whom were now waving their arms with gestures that distance rendered puppet-like. The Sparcot boat was heavily overloaded with the more aggressive members of the community, who had insisted on being on the first ferry trip. Through incompetence and stupidity on both sides, the boats collided.

Jim Mole stood on the bridge, pointing his revolver down into the melee. Whether or not he had hit anyone with his first two shots it was impossible for Greybeard to see. As he strained his eyes, Martha came up beside him.

“Mole ever the bad leader!” Greybeard exclaimed. “He’s brutal enough, but he has no sense of how to restore discipline - or if he had, he’s in his dotage now and has forgotten. Firing at people in the boats can only make matters worse.”

Someone was shouting hoarsely to get the boat to the bank. Nobody obeyed and, abandoning all discipline, the two crews fought each other. Senile anger had overwhelmed them again. The Grafton boat, a capacious old motor launch, tipped dangerously as the villagers piled in upon its unlucky occupants. To add to the clamour, others were running up and down the bank, crying advice or threats.

“We’re all mad,” Martha said, “and our bag is packed.” He flashed her a brief look of love.

With three overlapping splashes, three ancient Graftonites fell or were knocked overboard into the water. Evidently there was some half-formed scheme to appropriate their boat for use as a second ferry; but as the two craft drifted downstream, the motor launch capsized.

White heads bobbed amid white water. A great stupid outcry went up from the bank. Mole fired his revolver into the confusion.

“Damn them all to hell!” Greybeard said. “These moments of unreason - they overcome people so easily. You know that that packman who was through here last week claimed that the people of Stamford had set fire to their houses without cause. And the population of Burford cleared out overnight because they thought the place had been taken over by gnomes! Gnomes - old Jeff Pitt has gnomes on his brain! Then there are all these reports of mass suicides. Perhaps this will be the end - general madness. Perhaps we’re witnessing the end!”

On the stage of the world it was rapidly growing darker. The average age of the population already stood high in the seventies. Each succeeding year saw it rise higher. In a few more years… An emotion not unlike exhilaration filled Greybeard, a sort of wonderment to think he might be present at the end of the world. No: at the end of humankind. The world would go on; man might die, but the earth still yielded up its abundance.

They went back into the house. A suitcase - incongruous item in pigskin that had made a journey down the years to a ruined world - stood on the dry side of the hall.

He looked round him, looked round the room at the furniture they had salvaged from other houses, at Martha’s roughly drawn calendar on one wall, with its year, 2029, written in red, at the fern she grew in an old pot. Eleven years since they arrived here from Cowley with Pitt, eleven years of padding round the perimeter to keep the world out.

“Let’s go,” he said, adding as an afterthought, “Do you mind leaving, Martha?”

“I don’t know what I’m letting myself in for, do I? You’d better just take me along.”

“At least there’s a measure of safety here. I don’t know what I’m letting you in for.”

“No weakness now, Mr. Greybeard.” On impulse, she added, “May I get Charley Samuels if he is in? He’d miss us most. He ought to come with us.” He nodded, reluctant to have anyone share his plan, yet reluctant to say no to Martha. She was gone. He stood there, heavy, feeling the weight of the past. Yes, Charley ought to come with them, and not only because the two of them had fought side by side almost thirty years ago. That old battle brought back no emotion; because it belonged to a different age, it cauterized feeling. The young soldier involved in that conflict was a different being from the man standing in this destitute room; he even went by a different name.

A log of wood still smouldered in the grate; but in the hall and on the stairs, that creaked in the long nights as if gnomes were more reality than legend, the smell of damp was as thick as twilight. They would leave this dwelling, and soon it would all decompose like a man’s body, into its separate glues and dusts.

Now he could understand why people set fire to their own homes. Fire was clean, cleanliness was a principle that man had otherwise lost. An angry pleasure roused in him at the thought of moving on, though as ever he showed little of what he felt.

He went briskly to the front door. Martha was stepping over the bricks that marked the old dividing line between their garden and the next. With her was Charley Samuels, his muffler of grey wool round his head and throat, his coat tied tight, a pack on his back, the fox Isaac straining at its leash. His face was the scaly yellow colour of a boiled fowl, but he looked resolute enough. He came up to Greybeard and gripped his hand. Frosty tears stood in his eyes.

Anxious to avoid an emotional scene, Greybeard said, “We need you with us, Charley, to deliver sermons at us.”

But Charley only shook his hand the harder. “I was just packing. I’m your man, Greybeard. I saw that criminal sinner Mole shoot poor old Betty from the bridge. His day will dawn - his day will dawn.” The words came thickly. “I vowed on that instant that I’d dwell no more in the tents of the unrighteous.”

Greybeard thought of old Betty, nodding over the guardroom fire so recently; by now her stew would be spoilt.

The fox whined and pranced with impatience. “Isaac seems to agree with you,” Greybeard said, with something of his wife’s attempt at humour. “Let’s go, then, while everyone’s attention is distracted.”

“It won’t be the first time we’ve worked together,” Charley said. Nodding in agreement, Greybeard turned back into the hall; he did not particularly want any sentimentalizing from old Charley. He picked up the suitcase his wife had packed. Deliberately, he left the front door of their house open.

Martha shut it. She fell into step behind him, with Charley and the dog-fox. They walked down the relapsed road eastwards, and out into the fields. They marched parallel with the river bank, in the general direction of the horns of the old ruined bridge.

Greybeard took it at a good pace, deliberately not easing up for the older Charley’s sake; Charley might as well see from the start that only in one aspect was this an escape; like every escape, it was also a new test. He drew up sharply when he saw two figures ahead, making for the same break in the thicket as he was.

The sighting was mutual. The figures were those of a man and a woman; the man knotted up his face, snaring his eyes between brow and cheek to see who followed him. Recognition too was mutual.

“Where are you off to, Towin, you old scrounger?” Greybeard asked, when his party had caught up. He looked at the wispy old man, cuddling his cudgel and wrapped in a monstrous garment composed of blanket, animal hide, and portions of half a dozen old coats, and then regarded Towin’s wife, Becky. Becky Thomas, in her mid-seventies, was possibly some ten years younger than her husband. A plump birdlike woman, she carried two small sacks and was dressed in a garment as imposingly disorganized as her husband’s. Her ascendancy over her husband was rarely disputed, and she spoke first now, her voice sharp. “We might ask you lot the same thing. Where are you going?”

“By the looks of things, we’re off on the same errand as you,” Towin said. “We’re getting out of this mouldy concentration camp while we’ve still got legs on us.”

“That’s why we’re wearing these things we’ve got on,” Becky said. “We’ve been preparing to leave for some time. This seemed a good opportunity, with old Mole and the Major busy. But we’d never thought you might be hopping it, Greybeard. You’re well in with the Major, unlike us folk.”

Ignoring the jibe, Greybeard looked them over carefully. “Towin’s about right with his ‘concentration camp’. But where are you thinking of going?”

“We thought we might sort of head south and pick up the old road towards the downs,” Becky said. “You’d better join us,” Greybeard said curtly. “We don’t know what conditions we may meet. I’ve got a boat provisioned and hidden below the weir. Let’s get moving.” Hidden in the thicket, drawn up from the river’s edge, sheltered in the remains of a small byre, lay a sixteen-foot clinker-built dinghy. Under Greybeard’s instruction, they lifted it down into the water. Charley and Towin held it steady while he piled their few possessions into it. A previous owner had equipped the craft with a canopy, which they erected. The bows were decked in; the canopy covered most of the rest of the length. Three pairs of paddles lay on the planking of the boat, together with a rudder and tiller. These latter Greybeard fitted into place.

They wasted no time. Their nearness to the settlement was emphasized by the shouting they could still hear upstream.

Martha and Becky were helped into seats. The men climbed in; Greybeard let down the centreboard. Under his direction, Becky took the steering while the rest of them paddled - awkwardly and with a certain amount of guarded cursing from Towin, who took off his beloved wrist watch before getting down to work. They manoeuvred into midstream, the current took them, and they began to move.

Over against the farther bank, a patch of colour bobbed. A body was trapped between two chunks of masonry carried down from the broken bridge. Its head was submerged beneath an ever-breaking wave from the little weir; but the orange, green, red, and yellow stripes of the shirt left them in no doubt that it was Sam Bulstow.

An hour later, when they were well clear of Sparcot, Martha began to sing. The song came quietly at first, then she gave her notes words.

“Here shall he see No enemy But winter and rough weather…”

“Towin, you’re right with your remark about concentration camps,” she broke off to say. “Everything at Sparcot was getting so worn and - over-used, grimy and over-used. Here, it could never be like that.” She indicated the growth drooping the bank of the river.

“Where are you planning that we should go?” Charley asked Greybeard. That was something he had never thought of fully. The dinghy had represented no more than his store of hope. But without cogitation he said, “We will make our way down the Thames to the estuary. We can improvise ourselves a mast and a sail later, and get to the sea. Then we will see what the coast looks like.”

“It would be good to see the sea again,” Charley said soberly. “I had a summer holiday at - what was the name of the place? It had a pier - Southend,” Towin said, snugging down into his collar as he paddled. “I’d think it would be pretty sharpish cold at this time of the year - it was bad enough then. Do you think the pier could still be standing? Very pretty pier it was.”

“You daft thing, it will be tumbled down years ago,” his wife said. The fox stood with its paws on the side of the boat, its sharp muzzle picking up scents from the bank. It looked ready for anything. Nobody mentioned Scots or gnomes or stoats. Martha’s brief song was still with them, and they dared be nothing but optimistic. After half an hour, they were forced to rest. Towin was exhausted, and they all found the unaccustomed exercise tiring. Becky tried to take over the paddle from Martha, but she was too unskilled and impatient to wield it effectively. After a while, Charley and Greybeard shared the work between them. The sound of blade meeting water hung heavily between the bushes that fringed the river, the mist began to veil the way before them. The two women huddled together on the seat by the tiller.

“I’m still a townswoman at heart,” Martha said. “The lure of the countryside is strongest when I’m away from it. Unfortunately the alternatives to the countryside are growing fewer. Where are we going to stop for the night, Algy?”

”We’ll be pulling in as soon as we sight a good spot,” Greybeard said. “We must get well away from Sparcot, but we don’t want to overtake Gipsy Joan’s crew from Grafton. Keep a good heart. I’ve some provisions stored in the boat, as well as what we’ve brought with us.”

“You’re a deep one,” Towin said. “You ought to have shot Jim Mole and taken over Sparcot, man. The people would have backed you.”

Greybeard did not reply. The river unfolded itself with a series of bends, a cripple in a rack of sedges making its way eastwards to liberty. When a bridge loomed ahead, they ceased paddling and drifted towards it. It was a good Georgian structure with a high arch and sound parapet; they snuggled in to the bank on the upstream side of it. Greybeard took up his rifle.

“There should be habitation near a bridge,” he said. “Stay here while I go and look around.”

“I’ll come with you,” Charley said. “Isaac can stay in the boat.” He gave the anxious beast’s leash to Martha, who fondled the fox to keep it quiet. The two men stepped out of the boat. They climbed up the bank and crouched among rotting plants. Behind them, an overripe winter’s sun blinked at them from among trees. Except for the sun, distorted by the bare trunks through which it shone, all else was told in tones of grey. A mist like a snowdrift hung low across the land. Before them, beyond the littered road that crossed the bridge, was a large building. It seemed to stand on top of the mist without touching the ground. Under a muddle of tall chimney-stacks, it lay ancient and wicked and without life; the sun was reflected from an upper window-pane, endowing it with one lustreless eye. When nothing moved but a scatter of rooks winging overhead, the men heaved themselves up on to the road, and crossed to the cover of a hedgerow.

“Looks like an old public house,” Charley said. “No sign of life about it. Deserted, I should say.” As he spoke, they heard a cough from beyond the hedgerow. They crouched, peering among the haws that hung there, scanning the field beyond. The field ran down to the river. Though it was drenched in mist, its freedom from weed and other growth indicated the presence of some sort of ruminative life. Their breath steamed in the brush as they scanned the place. The cough came again.

Greybeard pointed silently. In the corner of the field closest to the house, a shed stood. Clustered against one side of it were sheep, four or five of them.

“I thought sheep had died out long ago,” Charley muttered. “It means there’s someone in the house.”

“We don’t want an argument with them. Let’s pull farther upstream. We’ve an hour more daylight yet.”

“No, let’s look over this place. They’re isolated here; they may be glad of company, if we can convince them we’re friendly.” It was impossible to overcome the feeling that they might be covered by one or more guns from the silent building. Keeping their gaze on the vacant windows, they moved forward. In front of the house, with ample cover near by, stood a car of dejected appearance. It had long since slumped into a posture of defeat as its tyres sagged on to the ground. They ran to it, crouching behind it to observe the house. Still no sign of movement. They saw that most of the windows were boarded up.

“Is there anyone there?” Greyboard called. No answer came.

As Charley had guessed, it was a public house. The old inn sign lay rotting near by, and a name board had curled away from over the front door and lay across the well-worn steps. On a downstairs window they read the word ALES engraved there. Greybeard took in the details before calling again. Still there was no answer.

“We’ll try round the back,” he said, rising. “Don’t you think we’d be all right in the boat for one night?”

“It will be cold later. Let’s try the back.” At the rear of the building, a track led from the back door towards the sheep field. Standing against the damp brickwork, Greybeard with his rifle at the ready, they called again. Nobody replied. Greybeard leant forward and stared quickly into the nearest window. A man was sitting just inside, looking at him.

His heart gave a jerk. He fell back against Charley, his spine suddenly chill. When he had control of his nerves, he thrust his gun forward and rapped on a window-pane.

“We’re friends,” he called. Silence. “We’re friends, you bastard!” This time he shattered the pane. The glass fell, then silence again. The two men looked at each other, their faces close and drawn. “He must be sick or dead or something,” Charley said. Ducking past Greybeard and under the window, he reached the back door. With a shoulder against it, he turned the handle and charged in. Greybeard followed. The face of the seated man was as grey as the daylight at which he stared with such fixity. His lips were ravaged and broken as if by a powerful poison. He sat upright in an old chair facing the sink. In his lap, still not entirely empty, lay a can of pesticide.

Charley crossed himself. “May he rest in peace. There’s provocation enough for anyone taking their own life these days.”

Greybeard took the can of pesticide and hurled it out into the bushes. “Why did he kill himself? It can’t have been for want of food, with his sheep still out there. We’ll have to search the house, Charley. There may be someone else here.” Upstairs, in a room into which the dying sun still gleamed, they found her. She was wasted to nothing under the blankets. In a receptacle by her bedside was a pool of something that might have been clotted soup. She had died of an illness, that much was obvious; that she had been dead longer than the man downstairs was also apparent, for the room was thick with the odour of death.

“Probably cancer,” Greybeard said. “Her husband had no reason to go on living once she’d gone.” He had to break the silence, though breathing in the room was difficult. Pulling himself together, he said, “Let’s get them both outside and hidden in the bushes. Then we can move in here for the night.”

“We must give them burial, Algy.”

“It takes too much energy. Let’s get settled in and be thankful we found a safe place so easily.”

“We may have been guided here to give these poor souls decent burial.” Greybeard looked slantingly at the brown object rotting on the pillow. “Why should the Almighty want that back, Charley?”

“You might as well ask why he wants us here.”

“By God, I often do ask it, Charley. Now don’t argue; let’s get the corpses hidden where the women won’t see them, and perhaps in the morning we’ll think about burial.” With as good a grace as he could muster, Charley helped in the dreary business. The best place of concealment turned out to be the shed in the field. They left the corpses there, with the sheep - there proved to be six of them - looking on. They saw to it that the sheep had water, wrenched open a couple of windows to air the house, and went to get the rest of the party. When the boat was safely moored, they all moved into the house.

Down in the cellars where barrels of beer had once stood, they found a smoked joint of meat hanging on a hook to be out of the reach of rats - of those there was plenty of evidence. They found a lamp that contained sheep fat and smelt villainously, though it burnt well. And Towin found five bottles of gin in a crate hidden in an unused grate.

“Just what I need for my rheumatics, then!” he said, opening a bottle. Placing his sharp nose over the mouth, he inhaled eagerly and then took a swig.

The women piled wood into a range in the kitchen and prepared a meal, disguising the high taste of the mutton with some of the herbs that lay in jars in the larder. Their warmth came back to them. Something like the elderly brother of a party spirit revived between them, and when they had eaten they settled down for sleep in a cheerful frame of mind.

Martha and Greybeard bedded down in a small parlour on the ground floor. Since it was evident by many signs that the dead couple had not lived in a state of siege, Greybeard saw no reason for them to keep a guard; under Mole’s regime they had grown obsessed with such precautions. After all, as every year went by, man should have less to fear from his fellow men, and this house seemed to be far from any other settlement…

All the same, he was not easy. He had said nothing to the others, but before leaving the boat he had felt in the lockers under the decking to get the two bayonets he had stored there; he wished to arm Towin and Charley with them; but the bayonets were missing, together with other things he had stowed there. The loss meant but one thing: somebody else had known of the whereabouts of his boat.

When Martha was asleep, he rose. The mutton-fat light still burned, though he had shielded its glow from the window. He stood, letting his mind become like a landscape into which strange thoughts could wander. He felt the frost gathering outside the house, and the silence, and turned away to close his mind again. The light stood on an old chest of drawers. He opened one of the drawers at random and looked in. It contained family trinkets, a broken clock, some pencil stubs, an ink bottle empty of ink. With a feeling of wrong-doing, he pocketed the two longest bits of pencil and opened the neighbouring drawer. Two photograph albums of an old-fashioned kind lay there. On top of them was the framed picture of a child.

The child was a boy of about six, a cheerful boy whose smile showed a gap in his teeth. He was holding a model railway engine and wore long tartan trousers. The print had faded somewhat. Probably it was a boyhood photograph of the man now stacked carelessly out in the sheep shed.

Sudden tears stood in Greybeard’s eyes. Childhood itself lay in the rotting drawers of the world, a memory that could not stand permanently against time. Since that awful - accident, crime, disaster - in the last century, there were no more babies born. There were no more children, no more boys like this. Nor, by now, were there any more adolescents, no young men, no young women with their proud style, not even the middle-aged were left now. Of the seven ages of man, little but the last remained.

“The fifties group are still pretty youthful,” Greybeard told himself, bracing his shoulders. And despite all the hardships, and the ghastliness that had gone before, there were plenty of spry sixty-year-olds about. Oh, it would take a few years yet before… But the fact remained that he was one of the youngest men on earth.

No, that wasn’t quite true. Persistent rumour had it that an occasional couple was still bearing children; and in the past there had been cases… There had even been the pathetic instance of Eve, in the early days of Sparcot, who had borne a girl to Major Trouter and then disappeared. A month later, both she and her baby were found dead by a wood-gathering expedition… But apart from that, you never saw anyone young. The accident had been thorough. The old had inherited the earth.

Mortal flesh now wore only the gothic shapes of age. Death stood impatiently over the land, waiting to count his last few pilgrims.

…And from all this, I do derive a terrible pleasure, Greybeard admitted, looking down at the impaled smile in the photograph. They could tear me apart before I’d confess, but somewhere it is there, a little stoaty thing that makes of a global disaster a personal triumph. Perhaps it’s this fool attitude I’ve always taken that any experience can be of value. Perhaps it’s the reassurance to be derived from knowing that even if you live to be a hundred, you’ll never be an old fogey: you’ll always be the younger generation.

He beat out the silly thought that had grown in him so often. Yet it remained smouldering. His life had been lucky, wonderfully lucky, for all mankind’s ill luck.

Not that mankind suffered alone. All mammals were nearly as hard hit. Dogs had ceased to whelp. The fox had almost died out; its habit of rearing its young in earths had doubtless contributed to its ultimate recovery - that and the abundance of food that came its way as man’s grip on the land slackened. The domestic pig had died out even before the dogs, though perhaps as much because it was everywhere killed and eaten recklessly as because it failed to litter. The domestic cat and the horse proved as sterile as man; only its comparatively large number of offspring per litter had allowed the cat to survive. It was said to be multiplying in some districts again; pedlars visiting Sparcot spoke of plagues of feral cats here and there.

Bigger members of the cat tribe had also suffered. All over the world, the story in the early nineteen-eighties had been the same: the creatures of the world were incapable of reproduction. The earth - such was the apocalyptic nature of the event that it was easy even for an agnostic to think of it in biblical terms - the earth failed to bring forth its increase. Only the smaller creatures that sheltered in the earth itself had escaped wholly unscathed from that period when man had fallen victim of his own inventions.

Oh, it was an old tale now, and nearly half a century separated the milk teeth smiling in the photograph from the corrupt grin that let in frost out in the sheep shed.

Greybeard shut the drawer with a slam. Something had disturbed the sheep. They were bleating in fright. He had a superstitious picture of the dead walking, and blocked it off. Some sort of animal predator would be a more likely explanation of the disturbance. He went into the kitchen and peered through the window. The sky was lighter than he had expected. A chip of moon shone, giving frail shape to the nearby trees. Putting an ear to the draught pouring through the broken pane, Greybeard could hear the sheep trotting in their field. Frost glittered on the pinched sedges outside the door; as he looked at its tiny lost reflections, he heard the creak-crunch of footsteps moving across a stretch of grass. He raised his rifle. It was impossible to get out without making a noise opening the back door.

The footsteps came nearer; a man, all shadow, passed the window. “Halt or I fire!” Greybeard called. Though the man had disappeared from his line of sight, he reckoned on the shock of discovery freezing him still. “Is that you, Greybeard?” The voice came hollow from outside. “Is that you, Greybeard? Keep your itchy finger off that trigger.” Even as he recognized the voice, Martha came to his side, clutching her coat about her. He thrust the rifle into her hands. “Hold this and keep me covered,” he whispered. Aloud, he said, “Come in front of the window with your hands up.” A man appeared in silhouette, his fingers stretched as if to rake the sky. He gave a cackling laugh. Martha swung the rifle to cover him. Greybeard flung open the door and motioned the man in, stepping back to let him pass. The old poacher, Jeff Pitt, walked into the kitchen and lowered his arms.

“You still want to buy that otter, Greybeard?” he asked, grinning his old canine grin. Greybeard took his gun and put an arm round Martha’s frail shoulders. He kicked the door shut and surveyed Pitt unsmilingly.

”It must be you who stole the provisions from my boat. Why did you follow us? Have you a boat of your own?”

“I didn’t swim, you know!” Pitt’s gaze ran restlessly about the room as he spoke. “I’m better at hiding my little canoe than you were! I’ve watched you for weeks, loading up your boat. There isn’t much goes on at Sparcot I don’t know about. So today, when you did your flit, I thought I’d chance running into the gnomes and come and see how you were all getting on.”

“As you see, we survive, and you nearly got yourself shot. What are you planning to do now you’re here, Jeff?”

The old man blew on his fingers and moved over to the range, where some heat still lingered. As his custom was, he looked neither of them straight in the face.

“I thought I might come with you as far as Reading, if you were going that far. And if your good lady wife would have my company.”

“If you come with us, you must give any weapons you possess to my husband,” Martha said sharply. Cocking an eyebrow to see if he surprised them, Pitt drew an old service revolver from his coat pocket.

Deftly, he removed the shells from it and handed it across to Greybeard. “Since you’re so mad keen on my company, the pair of you,” he said, “I’ll give you some of my knowledge as well as my gun. Before we all settle down to a cosy night’s rest, let’s be smart and drive them sheep in here, out of harm’s way. Don’t you know what a bit of luck you’ve chanced on? Them sheep are worth a fortune apiece. Further down river, at somewhere like Reading, we should be little kings on account of them - if we don’t get knocked off, of course.”

Greybeard slipped the revolver into his pocket. He looked a long time at the wizened face before him. Pitt gave him a wet-chinned grin of reassurance.

“You get back into bed, sweet,” Greybeard said to Martha. “We’ll get the sheep. I’m sure Jeff has a good idea.”

She could see how much it went against the grain for him to acknowledge the worth of an idea he felt he should have thought of himself. She gave him a closed eye look and went through into the other room as the men left the house. The mutton fat spluttered in the lamp. Wearily, as she lay down again on the improvised bed - it might have been midnight, but she guessed that in an hypothetical world of clocks it would be accounted not yet nine p.m. - the face of Jeff Pitt came before her.

His face had been moulded until it expressed age as much as personality; it had been undermined by the years, until with its wrinkled cheeks and ruined molars it became a common face, closely resembling, say, Towin Thomas’s, and many another countenance that had survived the same storms. These old men, in a time bereft of proper medical and dental care, had taken on a facial resemblance to other forms of life, to wolves, to apes, or to the bark of trees. They seemed, Martha thought, to merge increasingly with the landscape they inhabited.

It was difficult to recall the less raggle-taggle Jeff Pitt she had known when their party first established itself at Sparcot. Perhaps he had been less cocky then, under the fever of events. His teeth had been better, and he wore his army uniform. He had been a gunman then, if an ineffectual one, not a poacher. Since then, how much he had changed!

But perhaps they had all changed in that period. It was eleven years, and the world had been a very different place.

II. Cowley

They had been lucky ever to get to Sparcot. During the last few days in Cowley, the factory suburb of Oxford, she had not thought they would escape at all. For that was the autumn of the dusty year 2018, when cholera lent its hand to the other troubles that plagued mankind.

Martha was almost a prisoner in the Cowley flat in which she and Greybeard - but in those days he was simply the forty-three-years-old Algernon Timberlane - had been forcibly installed.

They had driven to Oxford from London, after the death of Algy’s mother. Their truck had been stopped on the borders of Oxfordshire; they found martial law prevailing, and a Commander Croucher in charge, with his headquarters in Cowley. Military police had escorted them to this flat; although they were given no choice in the matter, the premises proved to be satisfactory.

For all the trouble sweeping the country and the world, Martha’s chief enemy at present was boredom. She sat doing endless jigsaws of farms at blossom time, trappers in Canada, beaches at Acapulco, and listening to the drizzle of light music from her handbag radio; throughout the sweltering days she waited for Algy to return.

Few vehicles moved along the Iffley Road outside. Occasionally one would growl by with an engine note that she thought was familiar. She would jump up, often to stand staring out of the window for a long time after she realized her mistake.

Martha looked out on an unfamiliar city. She smiled to think how they had been buoyed with the spirit of adventure on the drive down from London, laughing, and boasting of how young they felt, how they were ready for anything - yet already she was surfeited of jigsaws and worried by Algy’s increasingly heavy drinking.

When they were in America, he drank a lot, but the drinking there with Jack Pilbeam, an eager companion, had a gaiety about it lacking now. Gaiety! The last few months in London had held no gaiety. The government enforced a strict curfew; Martha’s father had disappeared into the night, presumably arrested without trial; and as the cholera spread, Patricia, Algy’s feckless old mother, deserted by her third husband, had died in agony.

She ran her fingers over the window-sill. They came away dirty and she looked at them. She laughed her curt laugh at an inner thought, and returned to the table. With an effort, she forced herself to go on building the sunlit beach of Acapulco. The Cowley shops opened only in the afternoon. She was grateful for the diversion they offered. To go into the street, she deliberately made herself unattractive, wore an old bonnet and pulled coarse stockings over her fine legs, despite the heat, for the soldiers had a rough way with women.

This afternoon, she noticed fewer uniforms about. Rumour had it that several platoons were being driven east, to guard against possible attack from London. Other rumour said the soldiers were confined to their barracks and dying like flies.

Standing in line by the white-tiled fishmonger’s shop in the Cowley Road, Martha found that her secret fears accepted this latter rumour the more readily. The overheated air held a taste of death. She wore a handkerchief over her nose and mouth, as did most of the other women. Rumour of plague becomes most convincing when strained through dirty squares of fabric.

“I told my husband I’d rather he didn’t join up,” the woman next to Martha told her. “But you can’t get Bill to listen if he don’t want to. See, he used to work at the garage, but he reckons they’ll lay him off sooner or later, so he reckons he’d be better in the army. I told him straight, I said, I’ve had enough of war if you haven’t, but he said, ‘This is different from war, it’s a case of every man for himself.’ You don’t know what to do for the best, really, do you?”

As she trudged back to the flat with her ration of dried and nameless fish, Martha echoed the woman’s words.

She went and sat at the table, folded her arms on it, and rested her head on her arms. In that position, she let her thoughts ramble, waiting all the while for sound of that precious truck which would herald Timberlane’s return.

When finally she heard the truck outside, she went down to meet Timberlane. As he opened the door, she clung to him, but he pushed her off.

“I’m dirty, I’m foul, Martha,” he said. “Don’t touch me till I’ve washed and got this jacket off.”

“What’s the matter? What’s been happening?” He caught the overwrought note in her voice. “They’re dying, you know. People, everywhere.”

“I know they’re dying.”

“Well, it’s getting worse. It’s spread from London. They’re dying in the streets now, and not getting shifted. The army’s doing what it can, but the troops are no more immune to the infection than anyone else.”

“The army! You mean Croucher’s men!”

“You could have worse men ruling the Midlands than Croucher. He’s keeping order. He understands the necessity for running some sort of public service, he’s got hygiene men out. Nobody could do more.”

“You know he’s a murderer. Algy, how can you speak well of him?” They went upstairs. Timberlane flung his jacket into a corner. He sat down with a glass and a bottle of gin. He added a little water, and began to sip at it steadily. His face was heavy, the set of his mouth and eyes gave him a brooding look. Beads of sweat stood on his bald head.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said. His voice was tired and stony: Martha felt her own slip into the same cast. The shabby room was set solid with their discomfort. A fly buzzed fitfully against the window pane.

“What do you want to talk about?”

“For God’s sake, Martha, I don’t want to talk about anything. I’m sick of the stink of death and fear, I’ve been going round with my recorder all day, doing my bloody stuff for DOUCH(E). I just want to drink myself into a stupor.”

Although she had compassion for him, she would not let him see it. “Algy - your day has been no worse than mine. I’ve spent all day sitting here doing these jigsaw puzzles till I could scream. I’ve spoken to no one but a woman at the fish shop. For the rest of the time, the door has been locked and bolted as you instructed. Am I just expected to sit here in silence while you get drunk?”

”Not by me you’re not. You haven’t got that amount of control over your tongue.” She went over to the window, her back to him. She thought: I am not sick; I am vital in my senses; I can still give a man all he wants; I am Martha Timberlane, born Martha Broughton, forty-three years of age. She heard his glass shatter in a far comer.

“Martha, I’m sorry. Murdering, getting drunk, dying, living, they’re all reduced to the same dead level…” Martha made no answer. With an old magazine, she crushed the fly buzzing against the window. She closed her eyes to feel how hot her eyelids were. At the table, Timberlane went on talking. “I’ll get over it, but to see my poor dear silly mother panting for years, recalling how I loved her as a kid…

Ah… Get me another glass, love - get two. Let’s finish this gin. Sod the whole rotten system! How much longer are people going to be able to take this?”

“This what?” she asked, without turning round. “This lack of children. This sterility. This creeping paralysis. What else do you think I mean?”

“I’m sorry, I’ve got a headache.” She wanted his sympathy, not his speeches, but she could see that something had upset him, that he was going to have a talk, and that the gin was there to help him talk. She got him another glass.

“What I’m saying is, Martha, that it’s finally sinking in on people that the human race is not going to produce any more young. Those little bawling bundles we used to see outside shops in prams are gone for good. Those little girls that used to play with dolls and empty cereal packets are things of the past. The knot of teenagers standing on corners or bellowing by on motor bikes have had it for ever. They aren’t coming back. Nor are we ever going to see a nice fresh young twenty-year-old girl pass us like a blessing in the street, with her little bum and tits like a banner. Where are all your young sportsmen? Remember the cricket teams, Martha? Football, eh? What about the romantic leads of television and the cinema? They’ve all gone! Where are the pop singers of yesteryear? Sure, there are still games of football going on. The fifty-year-olds creak round as best they can…”

“Stop it, Algy. I know we’re all sterile as well as you do. We knew that when we got married, seventeen years ago. I don’t want to hear it once more.”

When he spoke again, his voice was so changed that she turned and looked at him. “Don’t think I want to hear it again, either. But you see how every day reveals the wretched truth all over again. The misery always comes hot and new. We’re over forty now, and there’s scarcely anyone younger than we. You only have to walk through Oxford to see how old and dusty the world is getting. And it’s now that youth is passing that the lack of replenishments is really being felt - in the marrow.”

She gave him another measure of gin, and set a glass down on the table for herself. He looked up at her with a wry smile, and poured her a measure.

“Perhaps it’s the death of my mother makes me talk like this. I’m sorry, Martha, particularly when we don’t know what’s become of your father. All the while I’ve been so busy living my life, Mother’s been living hers. You know what her life’s been like! She fell in love with three useless men, my father, Keith Barratt, and this Irishman, poor woman! Somehow I feel we should have done more to help her.”

“You know she enjoyed herself in her own way. We’ve said all this before.” He wiped his brow and head on a handkerchief and grinned more relaxedly. “Maybe that’s what happens when the mainspring of the world snaps: everyone is doomed for ever to think and say what they thought and said yesterday.”

“We don’t have to despair, Algy. We’ve survived years of war, we’ve come through waves of puritanism and promiscuity. We’ve got away from London, where they are in for real trouble, now that the last authoritarian government has broken down. True, Cowley’s far from being a bed of roses, but Croucher is only a local phenomenon; if we can survive him, things may get better, become more settled. Then we can get somewhere permanent to live.”

“I know, my love. We seem to be going through an interim period. The trouble is, there have been a number of interim periods already, and there will be more. I can’t see how stability can ever be achieved again. There’s just a road leading downhill.”

“We don’t have to be involved in politics. DOUCH(E) doesn’t require you to mix in politics to make your reports. We can just find somewhere quiet and reasonably safe for ourselves, surely?”

He laughed. He stood up and looked genuinely amused. Then he stroked her hair with its grey and brown streaks and drew his chair closer.

“Martha, I’m mad about you still! It’s a national failing to think of politics as something that goes on in Parliament. It isn’t; it’s something that goes on inside us. Look, love, the United National Government has broken apart, and thank God for it. But at least its martial law kept things going and wheels turning. Now it has collapsed, millions of people are saying, “I have nothing to save for, no sons, no daughters. Why should I work?”, and they’ve stopped work. Others may have wanted to work, but you can’t carry on industry like that. Disorganize one part effectively, and it all grinds to a halt. The factories of Britain stand empty. We’re making nothing to export. You think America and the Commonwealth and the other countries are going to go on sending us food free? Of course not, especially when a lot of them are harder hit than we are! I know food is short at present, but next year, believe me, there’s going to be real famine. Your safe place won’t exist then, Martha. In fact there may only be one safe place.”

“Abroad?”

“I mean working for Croucher.” She turned away frowning, not wishing to voice again her distrust of the local dictator. “I’ve got a headache, Algy. I shouldn’t be drinking this gin. I think I must go and lie down.” He took her wrist. “Listen to me, Martha. I know I’m a devil to live with just now and I know you don’t want to sleep with me just now, but don’t stop listening to me or the last line of communication will be cut. We may be the final generation, but life’s still precious. I don’t want us to starve. I have made an appointment to see Commander Croucher tomorrow. I’m offering to cooperate.”

“What?”

“Why not?”

“Why not? How many people did he massacre in the centre of Oxford last week? Over sixty, wasn’t it? - and the bodies left lying there for twenty-four hours so that people could count and make sure. And you-”

“Croucher represents law and order, Martha.”

“Madness and disorder!”

“No - the Commander represents as much law and order as we have any right to expect, considering the horrible outrage we have committed on ourselves. There’s a military government in the Home Counties centred on London, and one of the local gentry has set up a paternalistic sort of community covering most of Devon. Apart from them and Croucher, who now controls the South Midlands and down to the South Coast, the country is slipping rapidly into anarchy. Have you thought what it must be like farther up in the Midlands, and in the North, in the industrial areas? What do you think is going to happen up there?”

“They’ll find their own little Crouchers soon enough.”

“Right! And what will their little Crouchers do? March ‘em down south as fast as they can.”

“And risk the cholera?”

”I only hope the cholera stops them! Quite honestly, Martha, I hope this plague wipes out most of the population. If it doesn’t stop the North, then Croucher had better be strong, because he’ll have to be the one to stop them. Have another gin. Here’s to Bonnie Prince Croucher! We’ll have to defend a line across the Cotswolds from Cheltenham to Buckingham. We should be building our defences tomorrow. It would keep Croucher’s troops busyand out of the centre of population where they can spread infection. He’s got too many soldiers; the men join his army rather than work in the car factories. They should be put on defence at once. I shall tell Croucher when I see him…”

She lurched away from the table and went to swill her face under the cold tap. Without drying her face, she rested by the open window, looking at the evening sun trapped in the shoddy suburban street.

“Croucher will be too busy defending himself from the hooligans in London to guard the north,” she said. She didn’t know what either of them was saying. The world was no longer the one into which she had been born; nor was it even the one in which - ah, but they had been young and innocent then! - they had married; for that ceremony was distant in space as well as time, in a Washington they idealized because they had then been idealists, where they had talked a lot of being faithful and being strong… No, they were all mad. Algy was right when he said they had committed a horrible outrage on themselves. She thought about the expression as she stared into the street, no longer listening as Timberlane embarked on one of the long speeches he now liked to make.

Not for the first time, she reflected on how people had grown fond of making rambling monologues; her father had fallen into the habit in recent years. In a vague way, she could analyse the reasons for it: universal doubt, universal guilt. In her own mind, the same monologue rarely stopped, though she guarded her speech. Everyone spoke endlessly to imaginary listeners. Perhaps they were all the same imaginary listener.

It was really the generation before hers that was most to blame, the people who were grown up when she was born, the millions who were adults during the 1960’s and 70’s. They had known all about war and destruction and nuclear power and radiation and death - it was all second nature to them. But they never renounced it. They were like savages who had to go through some fearful initiation rite. Yes, that was it, an initiation rite, and if they had come through it, then perhaps they might have grown up into brave and wise adults. But the ceremony had gone wrong. Too frenzied by far! Instead of a mere circumcision, the whole organ had been lopped off. Though they wept and repented, the outrage had been committed; all they could do was hop about with their deformity, alternately boasting about and bemoaning it.

Through her misery, peering between the seams of her headache, she saw a Windrush with Croucher’s yellow X on its sides swing round the corner and prowl down the street. Windrushes were the locally manufactured variety of hovercraft, a family-sized model now largely appropriated by the military. A man in uniform craned his neck out of the blister, staring at house numbers as he glided down the street. When it drew level with the Timberlane flat, the machine stopped and lowered itself to the ground in a dying roar of engines.

Frightened, Martha summoned Timberlane over to the window. There were two men in the vehicle, both wearing the yellow X on their tunics. One climbed out and walked across the street.

“We’ve nothing to fear,” Timberlane said. He felt in his pocket for the little 7.7 mm. automatic with which DOUCH(E) had armed him. “Lock yourself in the kitchen, love, just in case there’s trouble. Keep quiet.”

“What do they want, do you think?” There was a heavy knocking on the door. “Here, take the gin bottle,” he said, giving her a taut grin. The bottle passed between them, all there was time to exchange. He patted her behind as he pushed her into the kitchen. The knocking was repeated before he could get down to the door.

A coporal was standing there; his mate leaned from the blister of the Windrush, half-whistling and rubbing his lower lip on the protruding snout of his rifle.

”Timberlane? Algernon Timberlane? You’re wanted up at the barracks.” The corporal was an undersized man with a sharp jaw and patches of dark skin under his eyes. He would be only in his early fifties - youngish for these days. His uniform was clean and pressed, and he kept one hand near the revolver at his belt.

“Who wants me? I was just going to have my supper.”

“Commander Croucher wants you, if you’re Timberlane. Better hop in the Windrush with us.” The corporal had a big nose, which he rubbed now in a furtive fashion as he summed up Timberlane. “I have an appointment with the Commander tomorrow.”

“You’ve got an appointment with him this evening, mate. I don’t want any argument.” There seemed no point in arguing. As he turned to shut the door behind him, Martha appeared. She spoke direct to the guard. “I’m Mrs. Timberlane. Will you take me along too?” She was an attractive woman, with a rich line to her, and a certain frankness about her eye that made her appear younger than she was. The corporal looked her over with approval. “They don’t make ‘em like you any more, lady. Hop up with your husband.” She silenced Timberlane’s attempt at protest by hurrying ahead to climb into the Windrush. Impatiently, she shook off the corporal’s hand and swung herself up without aid, ignoring the man’s swift instinctive glance at the thigh she showed.

They toured by an unnecessarily long way to the Victorian pseudo-castle that was Croucher’s military headquarters. On the first part of the way, she thought in anguish to herself, “Isn’t this one of the archetypal situations of the last century -and the Twentieth really was the Last Century: the unexpected peremptory knocking at the door, and the going to find someone there in uniform waiting to take you off somewhere, for reasons unknown? Who invented the situation, that it should be repeated so often? Perhaps this is what happens after an outrage - unable to regenerate, you just have to go on repeating yourself.” She longed to say some of this aloud; she was generalizing in the rather pretentious way her father had done, and generalizing is a form of relief that gains its maximum effect from being uttered aloud; but a look at Timberlane’s face silenced her. She could see he was excited.

She saw the boy in his face as well as the old man. Men! She thought. There was the seat of the whole sickness. They invented these situations. They needed them - torturer or tortured, they needed them. Friend or enemy, they were united in an algolagnia beyond woman’s cure or understanding.

The instant that imperious knocking had sounded at the door, their hated little flat had turned into a place of refuge; the dripping kitchen tap, whistling into its chipped basin, had turned into a symbol of home, the littered pieces of jigsaw a sign of a vast intellectual freedom. She had whispered a prayer for a safe return to the fragmented beach of Acapulco as she hastened down to join her husband.

Now they moved three feet above ground level, and she tasted the chemistries of tension in her bloodstream.

In the September heat, the city slept. But the patient was uneasy in its slumber. Old cartons and newspaper heaved in the gutters. A battery-powered convertible lay with its nose nestling in a shattered shop front. At open windows, people lolled, heavy sunlight filling their gasping mouths. The smell of the patient showed that blood-poisoning had set in.

Before they had gone far, their expectation of seeing a corpse was satisfied, doubly. A man and woman lay together in unlikely attitudes on the parched grass of St. Clement’s roundabout. A group of starlings fluttered round their shoulders.

Timberlane put an arm about Martha and whispered to her as he had when she was a younger woman. “Things will be a lot worse before they’re better,” the beak-nosed corporal said to nobody in particular. “I don’t know what’ll happen to the world, I’m sure.” Their passage sent a wave of dust washing over the houses.

At the barracks, they sailed through the entrance gate and disembarked. The corporal marched them towards a distant archway. The heat in the central square lay thick; they pressed through it, in at a door, along a corridor, and up into cooler quarters. The corporal conferred with another man who summoned them into a further room, where a collection of hot and weary people waited on benches, several of them wearing cholera masks.

They sat there for half an hour before being summoned. Finally they were led into a spacious room furnished in a heavy way that suggested it had once been used as an officers’ mess. Occupying one half of it were a mahogany table and three trestle tables. Men sat at these tables, several of them with maps and papers before them; only the man at the mahogany table had nothing but a notebook before him; he was the only man who did not seem idle. The man at the mahogany table was Commander Peter Croucher.

He looked solid, fleshy, and hard. His face was big and unbeautiful, but it was the face of neither a fool nor a brute. His sparse grey hair was brushed straight back in furrows; his suit was neat, his whole aspect businesslike. He was little more than ten years older than Timberlane; fifty-three or four, say. He looked at the Timberlanes with a tired but appraising look.

Martha knew his reputation. They had heard of the man even before the waves of violence had forced them to leave London. Oxford’s major industry was the production of cars and GEM’S (Ground Effect Machines), particularly the Windrush. Croucher had been Personnel Manager at the largest factory. The United National Government had made him Deputy District Officer for Oxfordshire. On the collapse of the government, the District Officer had been found dead in mysterious circumstances, and Croucher had taken over the old controls, drawing them in tighter.

He spoke without moving. He said, “No invitation was issued for you being here, Mrs. Timberlane.”

“I go everywhere with my husband, Commander.”

“Not if I say not. Guard!”

“Sir.” The corporal marched forward with a parody of army drill. “It was an infringement, you bringing this woman in here, Corporal Pitt. Supervise her immediate removal at once. She can wait outside.” Martha started to protest. Timberlane silenced her, pressing her hand, and she allowed herself to be led away. Croucher got up and came round his table. “Timberlane, you’re the only DOUCH(E) man in the territory under my control. Dissuade your mind that my motives towards you are ulterior. That’s the reverse of the truth. I want you on my side.”

“I shall be on your side if you treat my wife properly.” Croucher gestured to show how poorly he regarded the remark. “What can you offer me in any way advantageous to me?” he asked. The involved semi-literacy of his speech added to his menace in Greybeard’s estimation.

“I’m well informed, Commander. I have an idea that you must defend Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire from the Midlands and the North, if your forces are strong enough. If you could lend me a map-“

Croucher held up a hand. “Look, I’d better cut you down to size a bit, my friend. Just for the record, I don’t need any half-baked intellectual ideas from self-styled pundits like yourself. See these men here, sitting at these tables? They have the mutual benefit of performing my thinking for me, thus utilizing advantageously one of the advantages of having a terra firma in a university city like Oxford. The old Town versus Gown battle has been fought and decided, Mr. Timberlane, as you’d know if you hadn’t been knocking about in London for so long. I decided and implemented it. I rule all Oxford for the benefit of one and all. These blokes are the cream of the colleges that you are seeing here, all very high-flown intellects. See that gink at the end, with the shaky hands and cracked specs? He’s the University Chichele Professor for War, Harold Biggs. Down there, that’s Sir Maurice Rigg, one of the all-time greats at history, I’m told. So kindly infer that I’m asking you about DOUCH(E), not how you’d run operations if you were in my shoes.”

“No doubt one of your intellectual ginks can tell you about DOUCH(E).”

“No they can’t. That’s why it was compulsory you attending here. You see, all the data I’ve got about

DOUCH(E) is that it’s some sort of an intelligence unit with its headquarters in London. London organizations are suspect with me just now, for obvious reasons. Unless you wish to be mistaken for a spy, etcetera, perhaps you ought to set my mind in abeyance about what you intend doing here.”

“I think you misunderstand my attitude, sir. I wish to inform you about DOUCH(E); I am no spy. Although I was brought to you like a captive, I had made an appointment through the patrols to see you tomorrow and offer you what help I could.”

“I am not your dentist. You do not make an appointment with me - you crave an audience.” He rapped his knuckles on the table. “I cavil at your phoney attitude! Get wise to the reality of the situation - I can have you shot anywhere in the curriculum if I find you unconstructive.”

Timberlane said nothing to that. In a more reasonable voice, Croucher said, “Now then, let’s have the lowdown what exactly DOUCH(E) is and how it functions.”

“It is simply an academic unit, sir, although with more power behind it than academic units usually have. Can I explain in private? The nature of the unit’s work is confidential.”

Croucher looked at him with raised eyebrows, turned and surveyed the jaded men at the trestle tables, flicked an eye at two guards.

“I should not cavil at a change of scenery. I work long hours.” They moved into the next room. The guards came too. Although the room was small and hot, it was a relief to get away from the idle faces sitting by the tables. When Croucher gestured to one of the guards, the man opened a window.

“What exactly is this ‘confidential work’ precisely?”, Croucher asked. “It’s a job of documentation,” Timberlane said. “As you know, it was in 1981 that the Accident occurred which sterilized man and most of the higher mammals. The Americans were first to realize the full implications of what was happening. In the nineties, various foundations collaborated in setting up DOUCH in Washington. There it was decided that in view of the unprecedented global conditions, a special emergency study group should be established. This group was to be equipped to function for seventy-five years, whether man eventually recovered his ability to procreate or whether he failed to do so and became extinct. Members were enlisted from all over the world and trained to interpret their country’s agonies objectively and record them permanently.

“The group was called Documentation of Universal Contemporary History. The bracketed E means I’m one of the English wing. I joined the organization early, and was trained in Washington in ‘01. Back in those days, the organization tried to be as pessimistic as possible. Thanks to their realistic thinking, we can go on functioning as individuals even when national and international contacts have broken down.”

“As has now happened. The President was eliminated by a bunch of crooks. The United States is in a state of anarchy. You know that?”

“Britain too.”

”Not so. We have no anarchy here, don’t know the meaning of the word. I know how to keep order, of that you can be quite convinced. Even with this plague on, we have no disorder and British justice prevails.”

“The cholera is only just hitting its stride, Commander Croucher. And mass executions are not a manifestation of order.”

Angrily, Croucher said, “Manifestations, hell! Tomorrow, everyone in the Churchill Hospital will be shot. No doubt you will cry out about that also. But you do not understand. You must expunge the erroneous misapprehension. I have no wish to kill. All I want is to keep order.”

“You must have read enough history to know how hollow that rings.”

“It’s true! Chaos and civil war are absolutely deterrent to me! Listen to me, what YOU tell Me Of

DOUCH(E) confirms what I had already been informed. You were not lying to me. So-”

“Why should I lie to you? If you are the benefactor you claim to be I have nothing to fear from you.”

“Because if I was the madman you take me for, my main objective would be to kill any objective observers of my régime. The reverse is true - I visualize my job as to keep order - only that. Consequentially, I can utilize your DOUCH(E) set-up. I want you here, recording. Your testimony is going to vindicate me and the measures I am forced to implement.”

“Vindicate you before whom? Before posterity? There is no posterity. They died in addled sperm, if you remember.”

They were both sweating freely. The guard behind them shuffled weary feet. Croucher brought a tube of peppermints from his pocket and slipped one into his mouth.

He said, “How long do you keep on persevering with this DOUCH(E) job, Mr. Timberlane?”

“Till I die or get killed.”

“Recording?”

“Yes, recording and filming.”

“For posterity?” After a moment of silence, Timberlane said, “All right, we both think we know where duty lies. But I don’t have to shoot all the poor old wrecks in the Churchill Hospital.” Croucher crunched his peppermint. The eyes in his ugly face stared at the floor as he spoke. “Here’s a nodule of information for you to record. For the last ten years, the Churchill has been devoted to one line of research and one only. The doctors and staff there include some expert biochemists. Their project and endeavour is trying to prolong life. They are not just studying ger - what do you call it, geriatrics; they are looking for a drug, a hormone; I am no medical specialist, and I don’t differentiate one from the other, but they are looking for a way to enable people such as me and you to live to be two hundred or two thousand years old. Impossible boloney! Waste an organization chasing phantoms! I can’t let that hospital run to waste, I want to utilize it for more productive purposes.”

“The Government subsidized the hospital?”

“They did. The corrupt politicians of Westminster aspired to discover this elixir of life and immortality and perpetuate it for their own personal advantage. With that kind of nonsense we aren’t going to be bothered. Life’s too short.”

They stared at each other. “I will accept your offer,” said Timberlane, “though I cannot see how it will benefit you. I will record whatever you do at the Churchill. I would like documentary evidence that what you say about this longevity project is true.”

”Documents! You talk like one of those clever fool dons in the other room. I respect learning, but not pedantry, get that straight. Listen, I’m evacuating the whole bunch of crooks out of that hospital, them and their mad ideas; I don’t believe in the past - I believe in the future.”

To Timberlane it sounded only like an admission of madness. He said, “There is no future, remember? We killed it stone dead in the past.”

Croucher unwrapped another peppermint; his thick lips took it from the palm of his hand. “Come to me tomorrow and I will show you the future. The sterility was not entirely total, you know.

There was, there still are, a minimal trickle of children being born in odd corners of the world - even in Britain. Most of them are defectives - monstrosities beyond your conception.”

“I know what you mean. Do you remember the Infantop Corps during the war years? It was the British equivalent of the American Project Childsweep. I was on that. I know all about monstrosities. My feeling is that it would be sane to kill most of them at birth.”

“A percentage of the local ones are not killed at birth, motherly love being such as it is.” Croucher turned to the guards who were whispering behind him, and irritably ordered them to be silent. He continued, “I’m rounding up all these creatures, whatever they look like. Some of them are minus limbs. Sometimes they are without intelligence and unspeakably stupid. Sometimes they are born inside out, and then they die by degrees - though we have got one boy who survives despite his whole digestive system - stomach, intestines, anus - being on the outside of his body in a sort of bag. It’s a supremely gruesome sight. Oh, we’ve got all sorts of miscellaneous half-human creatures. They will be incarcerated in the Churchill for supervision. They are the future.” When Timberlane did not speak, he added, “Admitted, a frightening future, but it may be the only one. We must labour under the assertion that when these creatures reach adulthood, they will breed normal infants. We shall keep them and make them breed. Assure yourself it’s better a world populated by freaks than a dead world.”

Croucher eyed Timberlane challengingly, as if expecting him to disagree with this proposition. Instead, Timberlane said, “I’ll come and see you in the morning. You will place no censorship on me?”

“You will have a guard with you to ensure security. Corporal Pitt that you met has been detailed for the task. I do not want your reports falling into hostile hands.”

“Is that all?”

“No. I have to consider your own hands as hostile hands. Till you prove them otherwise, your wife will live here in these barracks as a token of your goodwill. You will billet here too. You’ll find the comfort will be more considerable than your flat was. Your belongings are already undergoing transportation to here from the flat.”

“So you are just a dictator, like all the others before you!”

“Be careful - I cannot stomach a stubborn mind! You will soon learn otherwise of me - you’d better! I want you as my conscience. Get that point clarified in your brain with all just momentum. You have seen I have surrounded myself with the intelligentsia; unfortunately, they superficially do what I say - at least to my face. Such a creed revolts me to my skin! I don’t want that from you; I want you to do what you have been trained for. Damn it, why should I bother with you at all when there’s plenty else to worry about? You must do as I say.”

“If I am to be independent, I must retain my independence.”

“Don’t go all highbrow on me! You must do as I say. I ask you to sleep here tonight, and that’s an order.

Think this conversation over, talk with your wife. I saw immediately she was a fairly hirsute type. Remember, I offer you security, Timberlane.”

“In this insanitary fort?”

“You will be sent for in the morning. Guard, take this man away. Give him into Corporal Pitt’s keeping.”

As they came up in a business-like way to take Timberlane, Croucher coughed into a handkerchief, wiped his hand across his brown and said, “One concluding point, Timberlane. I hope friendship will originate between us, as far as that’s possible. But if you cogitate trying to escape, I had better inform you that from tomorrow new restrictive orders are in operation throughout the area in my jurisprudence. I will stamp out the spread of plague at all costs. Anybody caught trying to move from Oxford in future will be shot, no questions asked. Barriers will be erected round the city at dawn. All right, guard, remove him. And expedite me a secretary and a pot of tea immediately.”

Their quarters in the barracks consisted of one large room. It contained a wash basin, a gas ring, and two army beds with a supply of blankets. Their belongings arrived in fits and starts from a lorry downstairs. Other commandeered property arrived spasmodically, until they grew tired of the echo of army boots.

A senile guard sat on a chair in the doorway, fingering a light machine gun and staring at them with the stony curiosity of the bored.

Martha lay on one of the beds with a damp towel across her forehead. Timberlane had given her a full account of the talk with Croucher. They remained in silence, the man sitting on his bed, resting his head heavily on his elbow, sinking slowly into a sort of lethargy.

“Well, we’ve more or less got what we wanted,” Martha said. “We’re working for Croucher with a vengeance. Is he to be trusted?”

“I don’t think that’s a question you can ask. He can be trusted as far as circumstances allow. He had a way of not seeming to take in all that I was saying - as if his mind was working all the time on another problem. Perhaps I got a glimpse of that problem when he visualized a world populated by monsters. Perhaps he felt he must have someone to rule over, even if it was only a - a collection of abnormalities.”

His wife’s thoughts returned to a point they had reached earlier in the day. “Everyone is obsessed with the Accident, even if they do not show it immediately. We’re all sick with guilt. Perhaps that’s Croucher’s trouble, and he has to live with a vision of himself ruling over a twilight world of cripples and deformed creatures.”

“His grip on the present seems stronger than that would imply.”

“How strong is anyone’s grip on the present?”

“It’s a pretty fleeting grip, as the cholera reminds us, but -”

“Our society, our biosphere, has been sick for forty years now. How can the individual remain healthy in it? We may all be madder than we know.” Not liking the note in her voice, Timberlane went over and sat on the edge of her bed, saying strongly,

“Anyhow, our immediate concern is with Croucher. It will suit the DOUCH scheme if we co-operate with him, so that’s what we will do. But I still can’t see why, at a time like this, he should want to encumber himself with me.”

“I can think of a reason. He doesn’t want you. He’s after the truck. He probably thinks there is evidence in it he could use.”

He squeezed her hand. “It could be that. He might think that as we have come from London, I have recorded information he could use. Indeed I may have done. London is his best-organized enemy at present. I wonder how long they will leave the truck where it is now?”

The DOUCH(E) truck was a valuable piece of equipment. When national governments broke down, as foreseen by the Washington foundation, the trucks became in themselves small DOUCH HQ’s. They contained full recording equipment, stores, and sundry supplies; they were fully armoured; an hour’s work would convert them into tracked vehicles; they ran on the recently perfected charge-battery system, and had an emergency drive that worked on petrol or any of the current petrol substitutes. This neat packet of technology, or Timberlane’s sample of it, had been left in its garage, below the flat in Iffley Road.

“I have the keys still,” Timberlane said, “and the vehicle is shuttered down. They haven’t asked me for the keys.”

Martha’s eyes were closed. She heard him, but she was too tired to reply. “We’re well placed here to observe contemporary history,” he said. “What DOUCH did not consider was that the vehicles might be an attraction to the history-makers. Whatever happens, we must not let the truck pass out of our control.”

After a minute of silence, he added, “The vehicle must be our first concern.” With the sudden energy of fury, she sat up on the bed. “Damn and blast the bloody vehicle!” she said.

“What about me?”

She slept fitfully throughout that stuffy night in the barracks. The silence was fractured by army boots stamping across a parade ground, by shouts, by the close vibrations of a mosquito or by the surge of a Windrush coming home. Her bed rumbled like an empty stomach when she turned in it.

Night, it seemed to her, was a padded pincushion - she almost had it in her hand, so closely did its warmth match the humidity of her palm - and into it, an infinite number of pins, went the sound effects of militant humanity. But each pin pierced her as well as the cushion. Towards morning, the noises grew less frequent, though the heat bowl of the square outside remained unemptied. Then from a different quarter came the faint ring, long continued, of an alarm clock. Distantly, a cock crowed. She heard a town clock - Magdalen? - chime five. Birds quarrelled over the dawn in their guttering. Army noises slowly took over again. The clang of buckets and iron utensils from the cookhouse proclaimed that preparations for breakfast had begun. She slept, fading out on a tide of despair.

Her sleep was deep and restorative. Timberlane was sitting grey and unshaven on the edge of his bed when she awoke. A guard came in with a breakfast tray, set it down, and departed. “How are you feeling, my love?”

“I’m better this morning, Algy. But what a noise there was in the night.”

“A lot of stretcher parties, I’m afraid,” he said, glancing out of the window. “We’re in one of the centres of infection here. I am prepared to give Croucher guarantees about my conduct if he’ll let us live away from here.”

She went over to him, cupping his stubby jaws in her hands. “You’ve come to a decision, then?”

“I had last night. We took on a job with DOUCH(E). We are after history, and history is now being made here. I think we must trust Croucher; so we remain in Cowley to co-operate with him.”

“You know I don’t question your decisions, Algy. But can we trust a man in his position?”

“Let’s just say that a man in his position does not seem to have any reason to shoot us out of hand,” he said. “Perhaps a woman looks at these things differently, but let’s not allow DOUCH to take precedence over our safety.”

“Look at it this way, Martha. In Washington we didn’t just take on obligations; we took on a way of thinking that makes sense when most human activities no longer do. That may have a lot to do with the way we have survived as a pair in London while all around us personal relationships are going to pot. We have a mission; we must serve it, or it won’t serve us.”

”You put it like that and it sounds fine. Just let’s not fall into the trap of putting ideas before people, eh?” They turned their attention to the breakfast. It looked like soldier’s rations; because tea was scarce, there was weak beer to drink, and to eat the inevitable vitamin pills that had established themselves as a national food since domestic animals were stricken, a grainy bread, and some fillets of a brown and nameless fish. Because whales and seals had almost vanished from the sea, and freak radiation effects seemed to have en- couraged the growth of plankton and minute crustacea, fish had multiplied. Many farmers in coastal areas throughout the world had been forced to take to the seas when their livestock dwindled; so there was still a strip of fish to stretch across the cracked plates of the world.

As they ate, Martha said, “This Corporal Pitt who is acting as combined gaoler and bodyguard is a nice sort of man. If we must have someone sitting over us all the time, perhaps we could have him. Ask Croucher about it when you see him.”

They were swallowing the vitamin pills down with the last of the beer, when Pitt came in with another guard. On his shoulder tabs, Pitt wore the insignia of a captain.

“It looks as if we have to congratulate you on a good and swift promotion,” said Martha. “You needn’t be funny,” Pitt said sharply. “There happens to be a shortage of good men round these parts.”

“I was not trying to be funny, Mr. Pitt, and I can see from the number of stretchers busy outside that men are growing shorter all the while.”

“It doesn’t do to try and make jokes about the plague.”

“My wife was attempting to be pleasant,” Timberlane said. “Just watch how you answer her, or there will be a complaint in.”

“If you have any complaints, address them to me,” Pitt said. The Timberlanes exchanged glances. The unassuming corporal of the night before had disappeared; this man’s voice was ragged, and his whole manner highly strung. Martha went over to her mirror and sat down before it. How the hollows crept on in her cheeks! She felt stronger today, but the thought of the trials and heat that lay before them gave her no reassurance. She felt in the springs of her menstruation a dull pain, as if her infertile and unfertilizable ovaries protested their own sterility. Laboriously, from her pots and tubes, she endeavoured to conjure into her face a life and warmth she felt she would never again in actuality possess.

As she worked, she studied Pitt in the glass. Was that nervous manner simply a result of sudden promotion, or was there another reason for it?

“I am taking you and Mrs. Timberlane out on a mission in ten minutes,” he told Timberlane. “Get yourself ready. We shall proceed to your old flat in Iffley Road. There we shall pick up your recording van, and go up to the Churchill Hospital.”

“What for? I have an appointment with Commander Croucher. He said nothing to me about this yesterday.”

“He told me he did tell you about it. You said you wanted documentary evidence of what has been going on up at the hospital. We are going up there to get it.”

“I see. But my appointment -”

“Look, don’t argue with me, I’ve got my orders, see, and I’m going to carry them out. You don’t have appointments here, anyway - we just have orders. The Commander is busy.”

“But he told me -“ Captain Pitt tapped his newly acquired revolver for emphasis.

”Ten minutes, and we are going out. I’ll be back for you. You are both coming with me to collect your vehicle.” He turned on his heel and marched noisily out. The other guard, a big slack-jawed fellow, moved ostentatiously to stand by the door.

“What’s it mean?” Martha asked, going to her husband. He put his arms about her waist and gave her a worried frown.

“Croucher must have changed his mind in some way. Yet it may be perfectly okay. I did ask to see the Churchill records, so perhaps he is trying to show he will co-operate with us.”

“But Pitt is so different, too. Last night he was telling me about his wife, and how he had been forced to take part in this massacre in the centre of Oxford…”

“Perhaps his promotion has gone to his head…”

“Oh, it’s the uncertainty, Algy, everything’s so - nothing’s definite, nobody knows what’s going to happen from day to day… Perhaps they are just after the truck.” She stood with her head against his chest, he stood with his arms round her, neither saying more until Pitt returned. He beckoned to them and they went down into the square, the new captain leading and the slack-mouthed guard following.

They climbed into a Windrush. Under Pitt’s control, the motor faltered and caught, and they moved slowly across the parade ground and through the gates with a wave at the sentries.

The new day had brought no improvement in Oxford’s appearance. Down Hollow Way, a row of semi-detacheds burned in a devitalized fashion, as though a puff of wind might extinguish the blaze; smoke from the fire hung over the area. Near the old motor works, there was military activity, much of it disorganized. They heard a shot fired. In the Cowley Road, the long straggling street of shops which pointed towards the ancient spires of Oxford, the façades were often boarded or broken. Refuse lay deep on the pavements. By one or two of the shops, old women queued for goods, silent and apart, with scarves round their throats despite the growing heat. Dust eddying from the underthrust of the Windrush blew round their broken shoes. They ignored it, in the semblance of dignity that abjection brings.

Throughout the journey, Pitt’s face was like brittle leather. His nose, like the beak of a falcon, pointed only ahead. None of the company spoke. When they arrived at the flat, he settled the machine to a poor landing in the middle of the road. Martha was glad to climb out; their Windrush was full of stale male odours.

Within twenty-four hours their flat had become a strange place. She had forgotten how shabby and unpainted it looked from outside. They saw a soldier sat at what had been their living-room window. He commanded a line of fire on to the garage door. At present, he was leaning out of the flat window shouting down to a ragged old man clad in a pair of shorts and a mackintosh. The old man stood in the gutter clutching a bundle of newspapers.

“Oxford Mail!”, the old man croaked. As Timberlane went to buy one, Pitt made as if to stop him, muttered, “Why not?”, and turned away. Martha was the only one to see the gesture.

The paper was a single sheet peppered with literals. A prominently featured leader rejoiced in being able to resume publication now that law and order had been restored; elsewhere it announced that anyone trying to leave the city boundaries without permission would be shot; it announced that the Super Cinema would give a daily film show; it ordered all men under the age of sixty-five to report within forty-eight hours to one of fifteen schools converted into emergency military posts. Clearly, the newspaper had fallen under the Commander’s control.

“Let’s get moving. We haven’t got all day,” Captain Pitt said. Timberlane tucked the paper into his hip pocket and moved towards the garage. He unlocked it and went in. Pitt stood close by his side as he squeezed along the shuttered DOUCH(E) truck and fingered the combination lock on the driver’s door. Martha watched the captain’s face; over and over, he was moistening his dry lips.

The two men climbed into the truck. Timberlane unlocked the steering column and backed slowly out into the road. Pitt called to the soldier in the window to lock up the flat and drive his Windrush back to the barracks. Martha and the slack-mouthed guard were told to climb aboard the truck. They settled themselves in the seats immediately behind the driver. Both Pitt and his subordinate sat with revolvers in their hands, resting them on their knees.

“Drive towards the Churchill,” Pitt said. “Take it very slowly. There’s no hurry at all.” He cleared his throat nervously. Sweat stood out on his forehead. He rubbed his left thumb up and down the barrel of his revolver without ceasing.

Giving him a searching glance, Timberlane said, “You’re sick, man. You’d better get back to barracks and have a doctor examine you.”

The revolver jerked. “Just get her rolling. Don’t talk to me.” He coughed, and ran a hand heavily over his face. One of his eyelids developed a nervous flutter and he glanced over his shoulder at Martha.

“Really, don’t you think -”

“Shut up, woman!” With Timberlane hugging the wheel, they crawled down a little dead side street. Two Cowley Fathers in black habits were carrying a woman between them, moving with difficulty under her weight; her left hand trailed against the pavement. They stood absolutely still as the truck came level with them and did not move until it had gone past. The dead vacant face of the woman gaped at Martha as they growled by. Pitt swallowed spittle audibly.

As if coming to a resolution, he raised his revolver. As the point swung towards Timberlane, Martha screamed. Her husband trod on the brake. They rocked back and forth, the engine died, they stopped.

Before Timberlane could heave himself round, Pitt dropped the gun and hid his face in his hands. He was weeping and raving, but what he said was indistinguishable.

The slack-mouthed fellow said, “Keep still! Keep still! Don’t run away! We don’t none of us want to get shot.”

Timberlane had the corporal’s revolver in his hand. He knocked Pitt’s arms down from his face. Seeing how his weapon had changed owners sobered Pitt.

“Shoot me if you must - think I’d care? Go on, better get it over with. I shall be shot anyhow when Croucher finds I let you escape. Shoot us all and be done with it!”

“I never done no one any harm - I used to be a postman. Let me get out! Don’t shoot me,” the slack-mouthed guard said. He still nursed his revolver helplessly on his lap. The sight of his captain’s breakdown had completely disorganized him.

“Why should I shoot either of you?” Timberlane asked curtly. “Equally, why should you shoot me? What were your orders, Pitt?”

“I spared your life. You can spare mine. You’re a gentleman! Put the gun away. Let me have it again. Shut it in a locker.” He was recovering again, still confused, but cocky and casting his untrustworthy eye about. Timberlane kept the gun aimed at his chest.

“Let’s have that explanation.”

“It was Croucher’s orders. He had me in front of me - I mean in front of him, this morning. Said that this vehicle of yours should be in his hands. Said you were just an intellectual troublemaker, a spy maybe, from London. Once you’d got the truck moving, I was to shoot you and your lady wife. Then Studley here and me was to report back to him, with the vehicle. But I couldn’t do it, honest, I’m not cut out for this sort of thing. I had a wife and family - I’ve had enough of all this killing - if my poor old Vi -“

“Cut out the ham acting, Mr. Pitt, and let us think,” Martha said. She put an arm over her husband’s shoulder. “So we couldn’t trust friend Croucher after all.”

“He couldn’t trust us. Men in his position may be fundamentally liberal, but they have to remove random elements.”

“You got that phrase from my father. Okay, Algy, so we’re random elements again; now what do we do?” To her surprise, he twisted round and kissed her. There was a hard gaiety in him. He was the man in command. He removed the revolver from the unprotesting Studley, and slipped it into a locker. “In the circumstances we have no alternatives. We’re getting out of Oxford. We’ll head west towards

Devon. That would seem to be the best bet. Pitt, will you and Studley join us?”

“You’ll never get out of Oxford and Cowley. The barricades are up. They were put up during the night across all roads leading out of town.”

“If you want to throw in your lot with us, you take orders from me. Are you going to join us? Yes or no?”

“But I’m telling you, the barricades are up. You couldn’t get out of town, not if you were Croucher you couldn’t,” Pitt said. “You must have a pass or something to permit you to be driving round the streets. What was that thing you flashed at the guard as we left the barracks?” Pitt brought a pass sheet out of his tunic pocket, and handed it over. “I’ll have your tunic, too. From now on you are demoted to private. Sorry, Pitt, but you didn’t exactly earn your promotion, did you?”

“I’m no murderer, if that’s what you mean.” His manner was steadier now. “Look, I tell you we’ll all get killed if you attempt to drive through the barricades. They’ve established these big concrete blocks everywhere. They stop traffic and tip up GEM’s.”

“Get that tunic off before we talk.” The Cowley Fathers came level with the truck. They stared in before labouring into a public house with their burden. As Timberlane passed his jacket over to Martha and slipped on Pitt’s tunic - it creaked at its rotten seams as he struggled into it - he said, “Food must be still coming into the town, mustn’t it? Food, stores, ammunition - God knows what. Don’t tell me Croucher isn’t intelligent enough to organize that. In fact he’s probably looting the counties all round for his supplies.”

Unexpectedly, Studley leant forward and tapped Timberlane on the shoulder. “That’s right, sir, and there’s a fish convoy coming up from Southampton due here this morning, ‘cos I heard that Transport Sergeant Tucker say so when we signed for the Windrush earlier on.”

“Good man! The barriers will have to go down to let the convoy through. As the convoy enters, we go out. Which way will it be coming from?”

As they trundled south through the devouring sunlight, the sound of an explosion came to them. Farther up the road, they saw by a pall of smoke to their right that Donnington Bridge had been blown up. A way out of the city had been cut off. Nobody spoke. Like the cholera, the desolation in the streets was contagious.

At Rose Hill, the blocks of flats set back from the road were as blank as cliffs. The only alleviation to the stark nudity of the the thoroughfare was an ambulance that crawled from a service road, its blue light revolving. All its windows were blanketed. It mounted the grass verge, crossed the main road only a few yards ahead of the DOUCH(E) vehicle, and stopped on the opposite verge with a final shudder. As they passed it, they caught sight of the driver sprawled across the wheel…

Farther on, among private houses, it was less like death. In several front gardens, old men and women were burning bonfires. And what superstition did that represent? Martha wondered.

When they reached a roundabout, soldiers with slung rifles came out from a check point to meet them. Timberlane leant out of the window and flashed the pass without stopping. The soldiers waved him on.

“How much farther?” Timberlane asked. “We’re nearly there. The road block we want is at Littlemore railway bridge. Beyond that it’s just country,” Pitt said. “Croucher has a long boundary to defend.”

“That’s why he wants more men. This blocking of roads was a bright idea of his. It helps keep strangers out, as well as us in. He doesn’t want deserters getting away and setting up in opposition, does he? The road takes a right bend here towards the bridge, and there’s a road joins it from the right. Ah, there’s that pub, the Marlborough - that’s on the corner!”

“Right, do what I told you. Take a tip from that ambulance we passed. All right, Martha, my sweet? Here we go!”

As they rounded the bend, Timberlane slumped over the wheel, trailing his right hand out of the window. Pitt slumped beside him, the other two lolled back in their seats. Steering carefully, Timberlane negotiated their vehicle in a drunken line towards the public house Pitt had mentioned. He let it mount the pavement, then twisted the wheel and released the clutch while remaining in gear. The truck shuddered violently before stopping. They were facing Littlemore Bridge, a mere two hundred yards up the road.

“Good, keep where you are,” Timberlane said. “Let’s hope the Southampton convoy is on time. How many vehicles is it likely to consist of, Studley?”

“Four, five, six. Hard to tell. It varies.”

“Then we ought to aim to get through after the second truck.” As Timberlane spoke, he was scanning ahead. The railway line lay hidden in its cutting. The road narrowed into two traffic lanes by the bridge. It was concealed beyond the bridge by the rise of the land but, fortunately, the road block had been set up on this side of the bridge, and so was visible from where they waited. It consisted of a collection of concrete blocks, two old lorries, and wooden poles. A small wooden building near by had been taken over by the military; it looked as if it might house a machine-gun. Only one soldier could be seen, leaning by the door of the building and shading his eyes to look down the road at them.

A builder’s lorry stood near the barrier. A man was standing in it, throwing bricks down to another man. They appeared to be strengthening the defences, and to judge by their clumsy movements they were unused to the job.

Minutes passed. The whole scene was nondescript; this dull stretch of road was neither town nor country. Not only did the sunlight drain it of all its pretensions; it had perhaps never been surveyed as purposefully as Timberlane surveyed it now. The slothful movements of the men handling bricks took on a sort of dreamlike persistence. Flies entered the DOUCH(E) track, droning their way fruitlessly about the interior. Their noise reminded Martha of the long summer days of her girlhood, when into her happiness, to become an inseparable part of it, had entered the realization that a wrong like a curse hung over her and over her parents and over her friends - and over everyone. She had seen the effects of the curse spread wider and wider, like the sand in a desert sandstorm that erodes the sky. Wide-eyed, she stared at the hunched back of her husband, indulging herself in a little horror fantasy that he was dead, really dead of the cholera. She succeeded in frightening herself.

”Algy -”

“Here they come! Watch it now! Lie flat, Martha; they’re bound to shoot as we go through.” He sent them rolling forward, bumping back on to the road. A first lorry, a big furniture lorry plastered in dust, humped itself over the narrow bridge from the other side. One soldier came to attend to it; he drew back part of the wooden barricade to allow the lorry through. It growled forward through the narrow opening. As it moved down the road towards the DOUCH(E) vehicle, a second lorry - this one an army lorry with a torn canopy - appeared over the bridge.

Their timing had to be good. Rolling steadily ahead, the DOUCH(E) truck had to pass that second lorry as close to the bridge as possible. Timberlane pressed his foot down harder. Elms by the roadside, tawdry from dust, scattered sunlight red and white across his vision. They passed the first lorry. The driver called something. They sped towards the army lorry. It was coming through the concrete blocks. The driver saw Timberlane, gestured, accelerated, swung his wheel to the near side. The sentry ran forward, swinging up his rifle. His mouth flapped. His words were lost in the sound of engines. Timberlane drove straight at him.

They roared past the army lorry without touching it, all four of them instinctively watching and yelling. Their offside headlight struck the soldier before he could turn. His rifle went flying. Like a bag of cement, he was flung against one of the concrete blocks. Something screamed as they scraped past the barrier: steel on stone. As they lurched across the bridge, the third vehicle in the convoy loomed up ahead of them.

From the wooden sentry post they had passed, a machine-gun woke into action. Bullets clattered against the grating across the back of their truck, making the inside ring like a steel drum. The windscreen of the vehicle ahead shattered, new rips bloomed sharp across its old canvas. With a whistle of tyres, it slewed off to one side. The driver flung open his door, but fell back into the cab as it canted to the other side. Bumping and jarring, it smashed through railings down the embankment towards the railway line below.

Timberlane had swerved in the other direction to avoid hitting the lorry. Only the accident that overtook it enabled him to get past it. They lurched forward again, and the road was clear ahead. The machine-gun was still barking, but the lie of the land sheltered them from it.

If Studley had not collapsed at that point, and had not needed to be rested in a deserted village called Sparcot, where other refugees were gathering, they might have made it down to Devon. But Studley had the cholera; and a paranoiac called Mole arrived to turn them into a fortified outpost; and a week later severe rains washed out a host of opportunities. The halt at Sparcot lasted for eleven long grey years.

Looking back to that time, Martha reflected on the way in which the nervous excitement of their stay at Cowley had embalmed it in memory, so that it all came back easily. The years that followed were less clear, for they had been dulled by misery and monotony. The death of Studley; the deaths of several others of that original bunch of refugees; the appearance of Big Jim Mole, and the quarrels as he distributed them among the deserted houses of the village; the endless struggle, the fights over women; the abandonment of hope, convention, and lipstick; these were now like figures in a huge but faded tapestry to which she would not turn again.

One event in those days (ah, but the absence of children had been a sharper wound in her mind then!) remained with her clearly, because she knew it still fretted her husband; that was their bartering of the DOUCH(E) truck, during the second winter at Sparcot, when they were all light-headed from starvation. They exchanged it for a cart-load of rotting fish, parsnips and vitamin pills belonging to a one-eyed wandering hawker. She and Algy had haggled with him throughout one afternoon, to watch him in the end drive away into the dusk in their truck. In the darkness of that winter, their miseries had reached their deepest point.

Several men, among them the ablest, had shot themselves. It was then that Eve, a young girl who was mistress to Trouter, bore a child with no deformity. She had gone mad and run away. A month later her body and the baby’s were found in a wood near by.

In that vile winter, Martha and Greybeard had organized lectures, not entirely with Mole’s approval. They had spoken on history, on geography, on politics, on the lessons to be learnt from life - but as all their subject matter was necessarily drawn from an existence that died even as they spoke, the lectures were a failure. To the hunger and deprivation had been added something more sinister: a sense that there was no longer a place on earth for mind.

Someone had invented a brief-lived phrase for that feeling: the Brain Curtain. Certainly the brain curtain had descended that winter with a vengeance.

In January, the fieldfares brought their harsh song of Norway to Sparcot. In February, cold winds blew and snow fell every day. In March, the sparrows mated on the crusted and dirty piles of ice. Only in April did a softer air return.

During that month, Charley Samuels married Iris Ryde. Charley and Timberlane had fought together in the war, years earlier, when both had formed part of the Infantop Corps. It had been a good day when he arrived at the motley little village. When he married, he moved his bride into the house next to Martha and Algy. Six years later, Iris died of cancer that, like sterility, was an effect of the Accident.

That had been an ill time. And all the while they had laboured under Mole’s fears, hardly aware of the imposition. To get away was like a convalescence, when one looks back and sees for the first time how ill one has been. Martha recalled how eagerly they had conspired with nature, encouraging the roads to decay, sealing them off from the dangerous world outside, and how anxiously they guarded Sparcot against the day when Croucher’s forces moved to overwhelm them.

Croucher never came to Sparcot. He died from the pandemic that killed so many of his followers and converted his stronghold into a morgue. By the time the disease had run its course, large organizations had gone the way of large animals; the hedges grew, the copses heaved their shoulders and became forests; the rivers spread into marshland; and the mammal with the big brain eked out his dotage in small communities.

III. The River: Swifford Fair

Both human beings and sheep coughed a good deal as the boats sailed downstream. The party had lost its first sense of adventure. They were too old and had seen too much wrong to entertain high feeling for long. The cold and the landscape also had a hand in subduing them: bearded with rime like the face of an ancient spirit, the vegetation formed part of a scene that patently had come about and would continue without reference to the stray humans crossing it.

In the sharp winter’s air, their breath steamed behind them. The dinghy went first, followed by Jeff Pitt rowing his little boat, with two sheep in a net lying against his tattered backside. Their progress was slow; Pitt’s pride in his rowing was greater than his ability.

In the dinghy, Charley and Greybeard rowed most of the time, and Martha sat at the tiller facing them. Becky and Towin Thomas remained sulkily at one side; Becky had wished to stay at the inn where the sheep were until the liquor and the winter ran out, but Greybeard had overruled her. The rest of the sheep now lay between them on the bottom of the boat.

Once, tired of having a man sit idle beside her, Becky had ordered Towin to get into Jeff Pitt’s boat and help him row. The experiment had not been successful. The boat had almost capsized. Pitt had cursed continuously. Now Pitt rowed alone, thinking his own thoughts.

His was, in its sixty-fifth year of existence, a strange spiky face. Although his nose still protruded, a gradual loss of teeth and a drying of flesh had brought his jawline and chin also into prominence.

Since his arrival at Sparcot, when he had been happy enough to get away from Greybeard, the ex-captain of Croucher’s guard had led a solitary life. That he resented the existence into which he was forced was clear enough; though he never confided, his air was the air of a man long used to bitterness; the fact remained that he, more effectively than anyone else, had taken to a poacher’s ways.

Though he had thrown in his lot with the others now, his unsocial disposition still lingered; he rowed with his back to the dinghy, gazing watchfully back at the ruffled winter landscape through which they had journeyed. He was with them, but his manner suggested he was not necessarily for them.

Between low banks scourged tawny and white by the frost, their way crackled continuously as ice shattered under their bows. On the second afternoon after they had left the inn where they found the sheep, they smelt wood smoke and saw its haze ahead of them, heavy over the stream. Soon they reached a place where the ice was broken and a fire smouldered on the bank. Greybeard reached for his rifle, Charley seized his knife, Martha sat alertly watching; Towin and Becky ducked out of sight below the decking. Pitt rose and pointed.

“My God, the gnomes!” he exclaimed. “There’s one of them for sure!” On the bank, dancing near the fire, was a little white figure, flexing its legs and arms. It sang to itself in a voice like a creaking bough. When it saw the boats through the bare shanks of a bush, it stopped. Coming forward to the edge of the bank, it clasped hands over the black fur of its crutch and called to them. Though they could not understand what it was saying, they rowed mesmerized towards it.

By the time they reached the bank, the figure had put on some clothes and looked more human. Behind it they saw, half hidden in an ash copse, a tarred barn. The figure was jigging and pointing to the barn, talking rapidly at them as he did so.

He was a lively octogenarian, judging by appearance, a sprightly grotesque with a tatter of red and violet capillaries running from one cheekbone to another over the alp of his nose. His beard and top-knot formed one continuous conflagration of hair, tied bottom and top below jaw and above crown, and dyed a deep tangerine. He danced like a skeleton and motioned to them.

“Are you alone? Can we put in here?” Greybeard called. “I don’t like the look of him - let’s press on,” Jeff Pitt called, labouring his boat up through the panes of ice. “We don’t know what we’re letting ourselves in for.” The skeleton cried something unintelligible, jumping back when Greybeard climbed ashore. He clutched some red and green beads that hung round his neck. “Sirrer vine daver zwimmin,” he said. “Oh - fine day for swimming! You have been swimming? Isn’t it cold? Aren’t you afraid of cutting yourself on the ice?”

“Warreryer zay? Diddy zay zomminer bout thize?”

“He doesn’t seem to understand me any better than I can understand him,” Greybeard remarked to the others in the boats. But with patience, he managed to penetrate the skeleton’s thick accent. His name appeared to be Norsgrey, and he was a traveller. He was staying with his wife, Lita, in the barn they saw through the ash trees. He would welcome the company of Greybeard and his party.

Like Charley’s fox, the sheep were all on tethers. They were made to jump ashore, where they immediately began cropping the harsh grasses. The humans dragged their boats up and secured them. They stood stretching themselves, to force the chill and stiffness from their limbs. Then they made towards the barn, moving their legs painfully. As they became used to the skeleton’s accent, what he had to say became more intelligible, though in content his talk was wild.

His preoccupation was with badgers. Norsgrey believed in the magical power of badgers. He had a daughter, he told them, who would be nearly sixty now, who had run off into the woods (“when they was a-seeding and a-branching themselves up to march forth and strangle down the towns of man”) and she had married a badger. There were badger men in the woods now who were her sons, and badger girls her daughters, black and white in their faces, very lovely to behold.

“Are there stoats round here?” Martha asked, cutting off what threatened to be a long monologue. Old Norsgrey paused outside the barn and pointed into the lower branches of a tree. “There’s one now, a-looking down at us, Mrs. Lady, sitting in its wicked little nest as cute as you like. But he won’t touch us ‘cos he knows as I’m related to the badgers by matterrimony.” They stared and could see only the pale grey twigs of ash thrusting black-capped into the air. Inside the barn, an ancient reindeer lay in the half-dark, its four broad hooves clumped together. Becky gave a shriek of surprise as it turned its ancient sullen face towards them. Hens clucked and scattered at their entrance.

“Don’t make a lot of row,” Norsgrey warned them. “Lita’s asleep, and I don’t want her wakened. I’ll turn you out if you disturb her, but if you’re quiet, and give me a bite of supper, I’ll let you stay here, nice and warm and comfortable - and safe from all those hungry stoats outside.”

“What ails your wife?” Towin asked. “I’m not staying in here if there’s illness.”

”Don’t you insult my wife. She’s never had an illness in her life. Just keep quiet and behave.”

“I’ll go and get our kit from the boat,” Greybeard said. Charley and the fox came back to the river with him. As they loaded themselves, Charley spoke with some show of embarrassment, looking not at Greybeard but at the cool grey landscape.

“Towin and his Becky would have stayed at the place where the dead man sat in his kitchen,” he said. “They didn’t care to come any further, but we persuaded them. That’s right, isn’t it, Greybeard?”

“You know it is.”

“Right. What I want to ask you, then, is this. How far are we going? What are you planning? What have you got in mind?” Greybeard looked at the river. “You’re a religious man, Charley. Don’t you think God might have something in mind for us?” Charley laughed curtly. “That would sound better if you believed in God yourself. But suppose I thought

He had in mind for us to settle down here, what would you do? I don’t see what you are aiming on doing.”

“We’re not far enough from Sparcot to stop yet. They might make an expedition and catch us here.”

“You know that’s nonsense as well as I do. Truth of the matter is, you don’t really know where you want to go, or why, isn’t that it?” Greybeard looked at the solid face of the man he had known for so long. “Each day I become more sure. I want to get to the mouth of the river, to the sea.” Nodding, Charley picked up his equipment and started to trudge back towards the barn. Isaac led the way.

Greybeard made as if to add something, then changed his mind. He did not believe in explaining. To Towin and Becky, this journey was just another hardship; to him, it was an end in itself. The hardship of it was a pleasure. Life was a pleasure; he looked back at its moments, many of them as much shrouded in mist as the opposite bank of the Thames; objectively, many of them held only misery, fear, confusion; but afterwards, and even at the time, he had known an exhilaration stronger than the misery, fear, or confusion. A fragment of belief came to him from another epoch: Cogito ergo sum. For him that had not been true; his truth had been, Sentio ergo sum. I feel so I exist. He enjoyed this fearful, miserable, confused life, and not only because it made more sense than non-life. He could never explain that to anyone; he did not have to explain it to Martha; she knew; she felt as he did in that respect.

Distantly he heard music. He looked about him with a tingle of unease, recalling the tales Pitt and others told of gnomes and little people, for this was a little music. But he realized it came to him over a long distance. Was it - he had almost forgotten the name of the instrument - an accordion?

He went thoughtfully back to the barn, and asked Norsgrey about it. The old man, sprawling with his back to the reindeer’s flank, looked up keenly through his orange hair.

“That would be Swifford Fair. I just come from there, done a bit of trading. That’s where I got my hens.” As ever, it was hard to make out what he was saying.

“How far’s Swifford from here?”

“Road will take you quicker than the river. A mile as the crow flies. Two miles by road. Five by your river. I’ll buy your boat from you, give you a good price.” They did not agree to that, but they gave the old man some of their food. The sheep they had killed ate well, cut up into a stew and flavoured with some herbs which Norsgrey supplied from his little cart. When they ate meat, they took it in the form of stews, for stews were kindest to old teeth and tender gums.

”Why doesn’t your wife come and eat with us?” Towin asked. “Is she fussy about strangers or something?”

“She’s asleep like I told you behind that blue curtain. You leave her alone - she’s done you no harm.” The blue curtain was stretched across one corner of the barn, from the cart to a nail on the wall. The barn was now uncomfortably full, for they brought the sheep in with them at dusk. They made uneasy bedfellows with the hens and the old reindeer. The glow of their lamps hardly reached up to the rafters. Those rafters had ceased to be living timber two and a half centuries before. Other life now took refuge in them: grubs, beetles, larvae, spiders, chrysalises slung to the beams with silken threads, fleas and their pupae in swallows’ nests, awaiting their owner’s return in the next unfailing spring. For these simple creatures, many generations had passed since man contrived his own extinction.

“Here, how old was you reckoning I was?” Norsgrey asked, thrusting his colourful countenance into Martha’s face.

“I wasn’t really thinking,” Martha said sweetly. “You was thinking about seventy, wasn’t you?”

“I really was not thinking. I prefer not to think about age; it is one of my least favourite subjects.”

“Well, think about mine, then. An early seventy you’d say, wouldn’t you?”

“Possibly.” Norsgrey let out a shriek of triumph, and then looked apprehensively towards the blue curtain. “Well, let me tell you that you’d be wrong, Mrs. Lady - ah, oh dear, yes, very wrong. Shall I tell you how old I am? Shall I? You won’t believe me?”

“Go on, how old are you?” Towin asked, growing interested. “Eighty-five, I’d say you were. I bet you’re older than me, and I was born in 1945, the year they dropped that first atomic bomb. I bet you were born before 1945, mate.”

“They don’t have years with numbers attached any more,” Norsgrey said with immense scorn, and turned back to Martha. “You won’t believe this, Mrs. Lady, but I’m close on two hundred years old, very close indeed. In fact you might say that it was my two hundredth birthday next week.”

Martha raised an ironical eyebrow. She said, “You look well for your age.”

“You’re never two hundred, no more than I am,” Towin said scornfully. “That I am. I’m two hundred, and what’s more I shall still be be knocking around the old world when all you buggers are dead and buried.” Towin leant forward and kicked the old man’s boot angrily. Norsgrey brought up a stick and whacked

Towin smartly over the shin. Yelping, Towin heaved himself up on his knees and brought his cudgel down at the old man’s flaming cranium. Charley stopped the blow in mid-swing.

“Give over,” he said sternly. “Towin, leave the poor old chap his delusions.”

“ ‘Tisn’t no delusion,” Norsgrey said irritably. “You can ask my wife when she wakes up.” Throughout this conversation and during the meal, Pitt had said hardly a word, sitting withdrawn into himself as he so often did in the Sparcot days. Now he said, mildly enough, “We’d’a done better if you’d listened to what I said and stayed on the river rather than settle down in this madhouse for the night. All the world to choose from and you had to choose here!”

“You can get outside if you don’t like the company,” Norsgrey said. “Your trouble is you’re rude as well as stupid. Praise be, you’ll die! None of you lot know anything of the world - you’ve been stuck in that place wherever-it-was you told me about. There are strange new things in the world you’ve never heard of.”

”Such as?” Charley asked. “See this red and green necklace I got round my neck? I got it from Mockweagles. I’m one of the few men who’ve actually been to Mockweagles. I paid two young cow reindeer for it, and it was cheap at half the price. Only you have to call back there once every hundred years to renew, like, or one morning as you open your eyelids on a new dawn - phutt! you crumble into dust, all but your eyeballs.”

“What happens to them?” Becky asked, peering at him through the thick lampglow. Norsgrey laughed. “Eyeballs never die. Didn’t you know that, Mrs. Taffy? They never die. I seen them watching out of thickets at night. They wink at you to remind you what will happen to you if you forget to go back to Mockweagles.”

“Where is this place Mockweagles?” Greybeard asked. “I shouldn’t be telling you this. There aren’t any eyeballs looking, are there? Well, there’s this place

Mockweagles, only it’s secret, see, and it lies right in the middle of a thicket. It’s a castle - well, more like a sort of skyscraper than a castle, really. Only they don’t live on the bottom twenty floors; those are empty. I mean, you’ve got to go right up to the top floor to find them.”

“Them, who are them?”

“Oh, men, just ordinary men, only one of them has got a sort of second head with a sealed up mouth coming out of his neck. They live for ever because they’re immortals, see. And I’m like them, because I won’t ever die, only you have to go back there once every hundred years. I’ve just been back there now, on my way south.”

“You mean this is your second call there?”

“My third. I went there first of all for the treatment, and you have to go to get your beads renewed.” He ran his fingers through the orange curtain of his beard and peered at them. They were silent. Towin muttered, “You can’t be that old. It isn’t all that time since things fell apart and no more kids were born. Is it?”

“You don’t know what time is. Aren’t you a bit confused in your mind? Mind you, I’m saying nothing. All

I’m saying is I just come from there. There’s too many vagabonds wandering round like you lot, moving about the country. It’ll be better next time I go there, in another hundred years. There won’t be any vagabonds then. They’ll all be underground, growing toadstools. I shall have the whole world to myself, just me and Lita and those things that twitter and fry in the hedges. How I wish they’d stop that bloody old twittering and frying all the time. It’s going to be hell with all them in a few thousand years or so.” Suddenly he put his paws over his eyes; big senile tears came spurting through his fingers, his shoulders shook. “It’s a lonely life, friends,” he said.

Greybeard laid a hand on his shoulder and offered to get him to bed. Norsgrey jumped up and cried that he could look after himself. Still snivelling, he turned into the gloom, scattering hens, and crawled behind the blue curtain. The others sat looking at each other.

“Daft old fool!” Becky said uncomfortably. “He seems to know a lot of things,” Towin said to her.”In the morning, we’d better ask him about your baby.” She rounded angrily on him. “Towin, you useless clot you, letting our secrets out! Didn’t I tell you over and over you wasn’t to mention it till people saw the state I’m in? Your stupid old clacking tongue! You’re like an old woman -”

“Becky, is this true?” Greybeard asked. “Are you pregnant?”

”Ah, she’s gravid as a rabbit,” Towin admitted, hanging his head. “Twins, I’d say it is, by the feel.” Martha looked at the plump little woman; phantom pregnancies were frequent in Sparcot, and she did not doubt this was another such. But people believed what they wanted to believe; Charley clasped his hands together and said earnestly, “If this be true, God’s name be praised! It’s a miracle, a sign from Heaven!”

“Don’t give us any of that old rubbish,” Towin said angrily. “This was my doing and no one else’s.”

“The Almighty works through the lowest among us, Towin Thomas,” Charley said. “If Becky is pregnant, then it is a token to us that He will after all come down in the eleventh hour and replenish the Earth with his people. Let us all join in prayer - Martha, Algy, Becky -“

“I don’t want any of that stuff,” Towin said. “Nobody’s praying for my offspring. We don’t owe your God a brass farthing, Charley boy. If he’s so blessed powerful, then he was the one that did all this damage in the first place. I reckon old Norsgrey was right - we don’t know how long ago it all happened. Don’t tell me it was only eleven years we was at Sparcot! It seemed like centuries to me. Perhaps we’re all a thousand years old, and -“

“Becky, may I put my hand on your stomach?” Martha asked. “Let’s all have a feel, Beck,” Pitt said, grinning, his interest momentarily roused. “You keep your hands to yourself,” Becky told him. But she allowed Martha to feel beneath her voluminous clothes, looking into space as the other woman gently kneaded the flesh of her stomach. “Your stomach is certainly swollen,” Martha said. “Ah ha! Told you!” Towin cried. “Four years gone, she is - mean, four months. That’s why we didn’t want to leave that house where the sheep were. It would have made us a nice little home, only Clever Dick here would shove off down his beloved river!”

He bared his stubbly wolf visage in a grin towards Greybeard. “We will go to Swifford fair tomorrow, and see what we can fix up for you both,” Greybeard said. “There should be a doctor there who will examine Becky and give her advice. Meanwhile, let’s follow the ginger chap’s example and settle down for some sleep.”

“You mind that old reindeer don’t eat Isaac during the night,” Becky told Charley. “I could tell you a thing or two about them animals, I could. They’re crafty beasts, reindeer.”

“It wouldn’t eat a fox,” Charley said. “We had one ate our cat now, didn’t we, Tow? Tow used to trade in reindeer, whenever it was they first came over to this country - Greybeard’ll know, no doubt.”

“Let’s see, the war ended in 2005, when the government was overthrown,” Greybeard said. “The Coalition was set up the year after, and I believe they were the people who first imported reindeer into Britain.” The memory came back like a blurred newspaper photo. The Swedes had discovered that, alone among the large ruminants, the reindeer could still breed normally and produce living fawns. It was claimed that these animals had acquired a degree of immunity against radiation because the lichen they ate contained a high degree of fall-out contamination. In the 1960’s, before Greybeard was born, the contamination in their bones was of the order of 100 to 200 strontium units - between six and twelve times above the safety limit for humans.

Since reindeer made efficient transport animals as well as providing good meat and milk, there was a great demand for them throughout Europe. In Canada, the caribou became equally popular. Herds of Swedish and Lapp stock were imported into Britain at various times.

“It must have been about ‘06,” Towin confirmed. “ ‘Cos it was then my brother Evan died. Went just like that he did, as he was supping his beer.”

”About this reindeer,” Becky said. “We made a bit of cash out of it. We had to have a licence for the beast - Daffid, we called it. Used to hire it out for work at so much a day.

“We had a shed out the back of our little shop. Daffid was kept in there. Very cosy it was, with hay and all. Also we had our old cat, Billy. Billy was real old and very intelligent. Not a better cat anywhere, but of course we wasn’t supposed to keep it. They got strict after the war, if you remember, and Billy was supposed to go for food. As if we’d give Billy up!

“Sometimes that Coalition would send police round and they’d come right in - not knock nor nothing, you know. Then they’d search the house. It’s ungodly times we’ve lived through, friends!

“Anyhow, this night, Tow here comes running in - been down the boozer, he had - and he says the police are coming round to make a search.”

“So they were!” Towin said, showing signs of an old discomfiture. “So he says,” Becky repeated. “So we has to hide poor old Billy or we’d all be in the cart. So I run with her out into the shed where old Daffid’s lying down just like this ugly beast here, and tucks Billy under the straw for safety.

“Then I goes back into our parlour. But no police come, and Tow goes off fast asleep, and I nod off too, and at midnight I know the old fool has been imagining things.”

“They passed us by!” Towin cried. “So out I went into the shed, and there’s Daffid standing there chewing, and no sign of Billy. I get Towin and we both have a search, but no Billy. Then we see his tail hanging out bloody old Daffid’s mouth.”

“Another time, he ate one of my gloves,” Towin said. As Greybeard settled to sleep by a solitary lantern, the last thing he saw was the gloomy countenance of

Norsgrey’s reindeer. These animals had been hunted by Paleolithic man; they had only to wait a short while now and all the hunters would be gone.

In Greybeard’s dream, there was a situation that could not happen. He was in a chromium-plated restaurant dining with several people he did not know. They, their manners, their dress, were all very elaborate, even artificial; they ate ornate dishes with involved utensils. Everyone present was extremely old - centenarians to a man - yet they were sprightly, even childlike. One of the women there was saying that she had solved the whole problem; that just as adults grew from children, so children would eventually grow from adults, if they waited long enough.

And then everyone was laughing to think the solution had not been reached before. Greybeard explained to them how it was as if they were all actors performing their parts against a lead curtain that cut off for ever every second as it passed - yet as he spoke he was concealing from them, for reasons of compassion, the harsher truth that the curtain was also barring them from the seconds and all time before them. There were young children all round them (though looking strangely grown up), dancing and throwing some sticky substance to each other.

He was trying to seize a strand of this stuff when he woke. In the ancient dawn light, Norsgrey was harnessing up his reindeer. The animal held its head low, puffing into the stale cold. Huddled under their wrappings, the rest of Greybeard’s party bore as much resemblance to human forms as a newly-made grave.

Wrapping one of his blankets round him, Greybeard got up, stretched, and went over to the old man. The draught he had been lying in had stiffened his limbs, making him limp.

“You’re on your way early, Norsgrey.”

“I’m always an early mover. Lita wants to be off.”

“Is she well this morning?”

”Never mind about her. She’s tucked safe under the canopy of the cart. She won’t speak to strangers in the mornings.”

“Are we not going to see her?”

“No.” Over the cart, a tatty brown canvas was stretched, and tied with leather thongs back and front so that nobody could see within. The cockerel crowed from beneath it. Norsgrey had already gathered up his chickens. Greybeard wondered what of their own equipment might not be missing, seeing that the old fellow worked so quietly.

“I’ll open the door for you,” he said. Weary hinges creaked as he pushed the door forward. He stood there scratching his beard, taking in the frost-becalmed scene before him. His company stiffed as cold air entered the barn. Isaac sat up and licked his sharp muzzle. Towin squinted at his defunct watch. The reindeer started forward and dragged the cart into the open.

“I’m cold and stiff; I’ll walk with you a minute or two to see you on your way,” Greybeard said, wrapping his blanket more tightly about him.

“As you will. I’d be glad of your company as long as you don’t talk too much. I like to make an early start when the frying’s not so bad. By midday, it makes such a noise you’d think the hedges were burning.”

“You still find roads you can travel?”

“Ah, lots of roads still open between necessary points. There’s more travelling being done again lately; people are getting restless. Why they can’t sit where they are and die off in peace, I don’t know.”

“This place you were telling us about last night…”

“I never said nothing last night; I was drunk.”

“Mockweagles, you called it. What sort of treatment did they give you when you were there?” Norsgrey’s little eyes almost disappeared between folds of his fibrous red and mauve skin. He jerked his thumb into the bushes through which they were pushing their way. “They’re in there waiting for you, my bearded friend. You can hear them twittering and frying, can’t you?

They get up earlier than us and they go to bed later than us, and they’ll get you in the end.”

“But not you?”

“I go and have this injection and these beads every hundred years -”

“So that’s what they give you… You get an injection as well as those things round your neck. You know what those beads are, don’t you? They’re vitamin pills.”

“I’m saying nothing. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Any case, you mortals would do best to hold your tongues. Here’s the road, and I’m off.” They had come out at a sort of crossroads, where their track crossed a road that still boasted traces of tarmac on its rutted surface. Norsgrey beat at his reindeer with a stick, goading it into a less dilatory walk. He looked over his shoulder at Greybeard, his misty breath entangled with the bright hairs of his cheeks.

“Tell you one thing - if you get to Swifford Fair, ask for Bunny Jingadangelow.”

“Who’s he?” Greybeard asked. “I’m telling you, he’s the man you should ask for at Swifford Fair. Remember the name - Bunny

Jingadangelow.” Wrapped in his blanket, Greybeard stood looking at the disappearing cart. He thought the canvas at the back stirred, and that he glimpsed - no, perhaps it was not a hand but his imagination. He stood there until the winding track carried Norsgrey and his conveyance out of sight.

As he turned away, he saw in the bushes close by a broken-necked corpse pinned to a post. It had the cocky, grinning expression achieved only by those successfully long dead. Its skull was patched with flesh like dead leaves. Thin though the corpse’s jacket was, its flesh had worn still thinner, had shrivelled and parted like moisture drying off a stretch of sand, leaving the bars of rib salt beneath.

“Left dead at the crossroads as a warning to wrongdoers… like the Middle Ages… The old-aged Middle Ages…” Greybeard muttered to himself. The eye sockets stared back at him. He was overtaken less by disgust than by a pang of longing for the DOUCH(E) truck he had parted with years ago. How people had underestimated the worth of mechanical gadgetry! The urge to record was on him; someone should leave behind a summary of Earth’s decline, if only for visiting archeologists from other possible worlds. He trotted heavily back down the track towards the barn, saying to himself as he went, “Bunny Jingadangelow, Bunny Jingadangelow…”

Nightfall came that day to the sound of music. They could see the lights of Swifford across the low flood. They rowed through a section of the Thames that had burst its banks and spread over the adjoining land, making water plants of the vegetation. Soon there were other boats near them, and people calling to them; their accents were difficult to understand, as Norsgrey’s had been at first.

“Why don’t they speak English the way they used?” Charley asked angrily. “It makes everything so much harder.”

“P’raps it isn’t only the time that’s gone funny,” Towin suggested. “P’raps distances have gone wrong too. P’raps this is France or China, eh, Charley? I’d believe anything, I would.”

“More fool you,” Becky said. They came to where a raised dyke or levee had been built. Behind it were dwellings of various kinds, huts and stalls, most of them of a temporary nature. Here was a stone bridge built in imposing fashion, with a portly stone balustrade, some of which had tumbled away. Through its span, they saw lanterns bobging, and two men walked among a small herd of reindeer, tending them and seeing they were watered for the night.

“We shall have to guard the boats and the sheep,” Martha said, as they moored against the bridge. “We don’t know how trustworthy these people are. Jeff Pitt, stay with me while the others go to look about.”

“I suppose I’d better,” Pitt said. “At least we’ll be out of trouble here. Perhaps you and I might split a cold lamb cutlet between us while the others are gone.”

Greybeard touched his wife’s hand. “I’ll see how much the sheep will fetch while I’m about it,” he said. They smiled at each other and he stepped up the bank, into the activity of the fair, with Charley, Towin and Becky following. The ground squelched beneath their feet; smoke rolled across it from the little fires that burned everywhere. A heartening savour of food being cooked hung in the air. By most of the fires were little knots of people and a smooth talker, a vendor offering something for sale, whether a variety of nuts or fruits - one slab-cheeked fellow offered a fruit whose name Greybeard recalled only with difficulty from another world: peaches - or watches or kettles or rejuvenation elixirs. The customers were handing over coin for their acquisitions. In Sparcot, currency had almost disappeared; the community had been small enough for a simple exchange of work and goods to be effective.

“Oooh, it’s like being back in civilization again,” Towin said, rubbing his wife’s buttocks. “How do you like this, eh, missus? Better than cruising on the river, wouldn’t you say? Look, they’ve even got a pub! Let’s all get a drink and get our insides warm, wouldn’t you say?”

He produced a bayonet, hawked it to two dealers, set them bidding against each other, and handed over the blade in exchange for a handful of silver coin. Grinning at his own business acumen, Towin doled some of the money out to Charley and Greybeard.

”I’m only lending you this, mind. Tomorrow we’ll flog one of the sheep and you can repay me. Five per cent’s my rate, lads.”

They pushed into the nearest liquor stall, a framework hut with wooden floor. Its name, Potsluck Tavern, stood above the door in curly letters. It was crowded with ancient men and women, while behind the bar a couple of massive gnarled men like diseased oaks presided over the bottles. As he sipped a mead, Greybeard listened to the conversation about him, insensibly letting his mood expand. He had never thought it would feel so good to hear money jingle in his pocket.

Impressions and images fluttered in on him. It seemed as if, in leaving Sparcot, they had escaped from a concentration camp. Here the human world went on in a way it had not managed at Sparcot. It was fatally wounded perhaps; in another half century, it would be rolled up and put away; but till then, there was business to be made, life to be transacted, the chill and heat of personality to be struck out. As the mead started its combustion in his blood, Greybeard rejoiced to see that here was humanity, rapped over the knuckles for its follies by Whatever-Gods-May-Be, but still totally unregenerate.

An aged couple sat close by him, both of them wearing ill-fitting false teeth that looked as if they had been hammered into place by the nearest blacksmith; Greybeard drank in the noisy backchat of their party. They were celebrating their wedding. The man’s previous wife had died a month before of bronchitis. His playful scurries at his new partner, all fingers under the table, all lop-sided teeth above, had about it a smack of the Dance of Death, but the earthy fallen optimism of it all went not ill with the mead.

“You aren’t from the town?” one of the knotty barmen asked Greybeard. His accents, like those of everyone else they met, were difficult to understand at first.

“I don’t know what town you mean,” Greybeard said. “Why, from Ensham or Ainsham, up the road a mile. I took you for a stranger. We used to hold the fair there in the streets where it was comfortable and dry, but last year they reckoned we brought the flu bugs with us, and they wouldn’t have us in this year. That’s why we’re camped here on the marsh, developing rheumatics. Now they walk down to us - no more than a matter of a mile it is, but a lot of them are so old and lazy they won’t come this far. That’s why business is so bad.”

Although he looked like a riven oak, he was a gentle enough man. He introduced himself as Pete Potsluck, and talked with Greybeard between serving.

Greybeard began to tell him about Sparcot; bored by the subject, Becky and Towin and Charley, the latter with Isaac in his arms, moved away and joined in conversation with the wedding party. Potsluck said he reckoned there were many communities like Sparcot, buried in the wilderness. “Get a bad winter, such as we’ve not had for a year or two, and some of them will be wiped out entirely. That’ll be the eventual end of all of us, I suppose.”

“Is there fighting anywhere? Do you hear rumours of an invasion from Scotland?”

“They say the Scots are doing very well, in the Highlands anyhow. There was so few of them in the first place; down here, population was so high it took some years for plagues and famines to shake us down to a sort of workable minimum. The Scots probably dodged all that trouble - but why should they bother us? We’re all getting too long in the tooth for fighting.”

“There are some wild-looking sparks at this fair.” Potsluck laughed. “I don’t deny that. Senile delinquents, I call them. Funny thing, without any youngsters to set the pace, the old ones get up to their tricks - as well as they’re able.”

“What has happened to people like Croucher, then?”

“Croucher? Oh, this Cowley bloke you mentioned! The dictator class are all dead and buried, and a good job too. No, it’s getting too late for that sort of strong-arm thing. I mean, you just find laws in the towns, but outside of them, there is no law.”

”I didn’t so much mean law as force.”

“Well now, you can’t have law without force, can you? There’s a level where force is bad, but when you get to the sort of level we are down to, force becomes strength, and then it’s a positive blessing.”

“You are probably right.”

“I’d have thought you would have known that. You look the kind who carries a bit of law about with him, with those big fists and that bushy great beard.” Greybeard grinned. “I don’t know. It’s difficult to judge what one’s own character is in unprecedented times like ours.”

“You haven’t made up your mind about yourself? Perhaps that’s what’s keeping you looking so young.” Changing the subject, Greybeard changed his drink, and got himself a big glass of fortified parsnip wine, buying one for Potsluck also. Behind him, the wedding party became tuneful, singing the ephemeral songs of a century back which had oddly developed a power to stick - and to stick in the gullet, Greybeard thought, as they launched into:

“If you were the only girl in the world, And I were the only boy…”

“It may come to that yet,” he said half-laughing to Potsluck. “Have you see any children around? I mean, are any being born in these parts?”

“They’ve got a freak show here. You want to go and look in at that,” Potsluck said. Sudden bleakness eclipsed his good-humour, and he turned sharply away to arrange the bottles behind him. In a little while, as if feeling he had been discourteous, he turned back and began to talk on a new tack.

“I used to be a hairdresser, back before the Accident and until that blinking Coalition government closed my shop. Seems years ago now - but then so it is - long years, I mean. I was trained up in my trade by my Dad, who had the shop before me; and I always used to say when we first heard about this radiation scare that as long as there were people around they’d still want their hair cut - as long as it didn’t all fall out, naturally. I still do a bit of cutting for the other travelling men. There are those that still care for their appearance, I’m glad to say.”

Greybeard did not speak. He recognized a man in the grip of reminiscence; Potsluck had lost some of his semi-rustic way of speech; with a genteel phrase like “those that still care for their appearance”, he revealed how he had slipped back half a century to that vanished world of toilet perquisites, hair creams, before- and after-shave lotions, and the disguising of odours and blemishes.

“I remember once, when I was a very young man, having to go round to a private house - I can picture the place now, though I daresay it has fallen down long since. It was very dark going up the stairs, and I had to take the young lady’s arm. Yes, that’s right, and I went there after the shop had shut, I remember. My old Dad sent me; I can’t have been more than seventeen, if that.

“And there was this dead gentleman laid out upstairs in his coffin, in the bedroom. Very calm and prosperous he looked. He’d been a good customer, too, in his lifetime. His wife insisted that his hair was cut before the funeral. He was always a very tidy gentleman, she told me. I spoke to her downstairs afterwards - a thin lady with ear-rings. She gave me five shilllings. No, I don’t remember - perhaps it was ten shillings. Anyhow, sir, it was a generous sum in those days - before all this dreadful business.

“So I cut the dead gentleman’s hair. You know how the hair and the finger-nails keep on growing on a man after death, and his had got rather straggly. Only a trim it needed really, but I cut it as reverently as I could. I was a churchgoer in those days, believe it or not. And this young lady that showed me upstairs, she had to hold his head up under the neck so that I could get at it with my scissors; and in the middle of it she got the giggles and dropped the dead gentleman. She said she wanted me to give her a kiss. I was a bit shocked at the time, seeing that the gentleman was her father… I don’t know why I should be telling you this. Memory’s a rare funny thing. I suppose if I’d had any sense in those days, I’d have screwed the silly little hussy on the spot, but I wasn’t too familiar with life then - never mind death! Have another drink on me?”

“Thanks, I may come back later,” Greybeard said. “I want to have a look round at the fair now. Do you know of anyone called Bunny Jingadangelow?”

“Jingadangelow? Yes, I know of him. What do you want with him? Go over the bridge and up the road towards Ensham, and you’ll come to his stall; it’s got the words ‘Eternal Life’ above it. You can’t mistake it. Okay?”

Looking round at the party of singers, Greybeard caught Charley’s eye. Charley rose, and they walked out together, leaving Towin and Becky singing “Any Old Iron” with the wedding party.

“The fellow who’s just got married again is a reindeer breeder,” Charley said. “It seems they’re still the only big mammal unaffected by the radiation. Do you remember how people said they’d never do over here when they were first imported, because the climate was too wet for their coats?”

“It’s too wet for my coat too, Charley… It’s less cold than it was, and by the look of the clouds there’s rain about. What sort of shelter are we going to find ourselves for the night?”

“One of the women back in the bar said we might get lodgings up this way, in the town. We’ll look out. It’s early yet.”

They walked up the road, taking in the bustle at the various pitches. Isaac yipped and snuffled as they passed a cage of foxes, and next to it a run full of weasels. There were also hens for sale, and a woman wrapped in furs tried to sell them powdered reindeer antler as a charm against impotence and ill health. Two rival quacks sold purges and clysters, charms against rheumatism, and nostrums for the cramps of age; the few people who stood listening to them seemed sceptical. Trade was dropping off at this time of evening; people were now after entertainment rather than business, and a juggler drew appreciative crowds. So did a fortune-teller - though that must be a limited art now, Greybeard thought, with all dark strangers turned to grey and no possible patter of tiny feet.

An old bent man was masturbating in a ditch and drunkenly cursing his seed before they came to the next stall. It was little more than a wooden platform. Above it fluttered a banner with the words ETERNAL LIFE on it.

“This must be Jingadangelow’s pitch,” Greybeard said. Several people were here; some were listening to the man speaking from the platform, while others jostled about a fallen figure that was propped against the platform edge, with two aged crones weeping and croaking over it. To see what was happening was difficult in the flapping light of unguarded torches, but the words of the man on the platform made things clearer.

This speaker was a tall raven figure with wild hair and a face absolutely white except for quarries of slatey grey under his eyes. He spoke in the voice of a cultured man, with a vigour his frame seemed scarcely able to sustain, beating time to his phrases with a pair of fine wild hands.

“Here before us you see evidence of what I am saying, my friends. In sight and hearing of us all, a brother has just departed this life. His soul burst out of his ragged coating and left us. Look at us - look at us, my dearly loved brethren, all dressed in our ragged coating on this cold and miserable night somewhere in the great universe. Can you say any one of you in your hearts that it would not be better to follow our friend?”

“To hell with that for a lark!” a man called, clasping a bottle. He drew the speaker’s accusing finger. “For you it might not be better, I agree, my friend - for you would go as our brother here did, loaded before the Lord with liquor. The Lord’s stood enough of our dirty nonsense, brethren; that’s the plain truth.

He’s had more than He call stand. He’s finished with us, but not with our souls. He’s cut us off, and manifestly He will disapprove if we persist till our graves in perpetuating the follies we should have left behind in our youth.”

“How else are we to keep warm on these mucking winter’s nights?” the jolly man asked, and there was a murmur of approval about him. Charley tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Would you mind keeping quiet while this gentleman speaks?”

The jolly man swung round on Charley. Though age had withered him like a prune, his mouth was spread red and large across his face as if it had been plastered there by a fist. He worked this ample mouth now, realized that Charley was stronger than he was, and relapsed into silence. Unmoved, the parson continued his oration.

“We must bow before His will, my friends, that’s what we must do. Soon we shall all go down on our knees here and pray. It will be fitting for us all to go together into His presence, for we are the last of His generations, and it is meet that we should bear ourselves accordingly. What have we to fear if we are righteous, ask yourselves that? Once before He swept the Earth clean with a flood because of the sins of man. This time He has taken from our generative organs the God-given power to procreate. If you think that to be a more terrible punishment than the flood, then the sins of our century, the Twenty-First Century, are more terrible sins. He can wipe the slate clean as many times as He will, and begin again.

“So we do not weep for this Earth we are to leave. We are born to vanish as the cattle we once tended have already vanished, leaving the Earth clean and new for His further works. Let me recall to you, my brethren, before we sink upon our knees in prayer, the words of the scriptures concerning this time.”

He put his fluttering hands together and peered into the darkness to recite: “ ‘For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth the beasts - yea, even one thing befalleth them. As the one dieth, so dieth the other, and they have but one breath. So that a man hath no pre-eminence above a beast, for all is vanity. All go unto one place, all are of the dust, and all turn again to dust. Wherefore I perceive that there is nothing better than that a man should rejoice in the Lord’s works, for that is his portion. And who shall bring him to see what shall be after him?”

“My old missus will be after me, if I don’t get home,” the jolly man said. “Good night to thee, parson.” He began to straggle up the road, supported by a crony. Greybeard shook Charley’s arm, and said, “This man isn’t Bunny Jingadangelow, for all that he advertises eternal life. Let’s move on.”

“No, let’s hear a bit more yet, Greybeard. Here’s a man speaking truth. In how many years have I heard someone so worth listening to?”

“You stay here then, I’ll go on.”

“Stay and listen, Algy - it’ll do you good.” But Greybeard moved up the road. The parson was again using the dead man by his platform for his text.

Perhaps that had been one of the ineradicable faults of mankind - for even a convinced atheist had to admit there were faults - that it was never content with a thing as a thing; it had to turn things into symbols of other things. A rainbow was not only a rainbow; a storm was a sign of celestial anger; and even from the puddingy earth came forth dark chthonian gods. What did it all mean? What an agnostic believed and what the willowy parson believed were not only irreconcilable systems of thought: they were equally valid systems of thought because, somewhere along the evolutionary line, man, developing this habit of thinking of symbols, had provided himself with more alternatives than he could manage, more systems of alternatives than he could manage. Animals moved in no such channel of imagination - they copulated and they ate; but to the saint, bread was a symbol of life, as the phallus was to the pagan. The animals themselves were pressed into symbolic service - and not only in mediaeval bestiaries, by any means.

Such a usage was a distortion, although man seemed unable to ratiocinate without it. That had been the trouble right from the beginning. Perhaps it had even been the beginning, back among those first men that man could never get clearly defined (for the early men, being also symbols, had to be either lumbering brutes, or timid noble savages, or to undergo some other interpretation). Perhaps the first fire, the first tool, the first wheel, the first carving in a limestone cave, had each possessed a symbolic rather than a practical value, had each been pressed to serve distortion rather than reality. It was a sort of madness that had driven man from his humble sites on the edges of the woods into towns and cities, into arts and wars, into religious crusades, into martyrdom and prostitution, into dyspepsia and fasting, into love and hatred, into this present cul-de-sac; it had all come about in pursuit of symbols. In the beginning was the symbol, and darkness was over the face of the Earth.

Greybeard abandoned this line of thought as he came to the next pitch along the road. He found himself looking at another banner that said “Eternal Life”.

The banner hung across the front of a garage standing drunkenly beside a dilapidated house. Its doors had fallen off, but were propped inside to screen off the back half of the garage. A fire burned behind this screen, throwing the shadows of two people across the roof. In front of the screen, nursing a lantern in chilled hands, was a shrivel-gummed old girl perched on a box. She called to Greybeard in a routine fashion, “If you want Eternal Life, here’s the place to find it. Don’t listen to the parson! His asking price is too high. Here, you don’t have to give anything, you don’t have to give anything up. Our kind of eternal life can be bought by the syringe-full and paid for without any trouble over your soul. Walk in if you want to live for ever!”

“Shot in the arm or shot in the dark, I don’t know that I entirely trust you or the parson, old lady.”

“Come in and get reborn, you bag of bones!” Not relishing this mode of address, even if delivered by rote, Greybeard said sharply, “I want to speak to

Bunny Jingadangelow. Is he here?” The old witch coughed and sent a gob of green phlegm flapping towards the floor. “Doctor Jingadangelow ain’t here. He’s not at everyone’s beck and call, you know. What do you want?”

“Can you tell me where he is? I want to speak to him.”

“I’ll fix you an appointment if you want a rejuvenation or the immortality course, but I tell you he ain’t here.”

“Who’s behind the screen?”

“My husband, if you must know, and a client, as if it’s any of your business. Who are you, anyway? I never seen you before.” One of the shadows flopped more widely across the roof, and a high voice said, “What’s the trouble out there?” Next moment, a youth appeared. The effect on Greybeard was like a shock of cold water. Through the toils of the years, he had arrived at the realization that childhood was now no more than an idea interred within the crania of old men, and that young flesh was an antiquity in the land. If you forgot about rumours, he was himself all that the withered world had left to offer in the way of a youngster. But this - this stripling, dressed merely in a sort of tunic, wearing a red and green necklace like Norsgrey’s, exposing his frail white legs and arms, regarding Greybeard with wide and innocent eyes…

“My God,” Greybeard said. “They they are still being born!” The youth spoke in a shrill impersonal voice. “You see before you, sir, the beneficial effects of Dr.

Jingadangelow’s well-known combined Rejuvenation and Immortality course, respected and recommended from Gloucester to Oxford, from Banbury to Berks. Enrol yourself here for a course, sir, before you are too late. You can be like me, friend, after only a few trial doses.”

“I believe you no more than I believed the parson,” Greybeard said, still slightly breathless. “How old are you, boy? Sixteen, twenty, thirty? I forget the young ages.”

A second shadow flapped across the roof, and a shabby grotesque with a plantation of warts on his chin and forehead hobbled into view. He was bent so double that he could scarcely peer up at Greybeard through his tangled eyebrows.

“You want the treatment, sir? You want to become lovely and beautiful again like this fine young attractive fellow?”

“You’re not a very good advertisement for your own preparation, are you?” Greybeard said, turning again to regard the youth. He stepped forward to peer at him more closely. As the stunning first effects wore off, he saw the youth was in fact a flabby and poor specimen with a pasty countenance.

“Doctor Jingadangelow developed his wonderful treatments too late to help me, sir,” said the grotesque. “I run up against him too late in life, you might say, but he could help you, as he did our young friend here. Our young friend is actually one hundred and ninety-five years old, sir, though you’d never think it to see him. Why, bless him, he’s in the full bloom of youth, as you could be.”

“I never felt better in my life,” the youth said, in his curious high voice. “I’m in the full bloom of youth.” Suddenly Greybeard grasped his arm and swung him so that the light from the crone’s lantern gleamed direct on to the boy’s face. The boy cried out in sudden hurt. The innocence in his eyes was revealed as vacancy. Thick powder on his face furrowed up into tracks of pain, he opened his mouth and exposed black fangs behind a frontal layer of white paint. Slipping away, he kicked Greybeard fiercely on the shin, cursing as he did so.

“You rogue, you filthy little swindler, you’re ninety years old - you’ve been castrated!” Greybeard swung angrily on the ancient man. “You’ve no right to do such a thing!”

“Why not? He’s my son.” He shrank back with raised arm in front of his face. He showed his twisted and pocked jaw, champing with fury. The “boy” started to scream. As Greybeard turned, he shrieked, “Don’t touch my Dad! Bunny and I thought of the idea. I’m only earning an honest living. Do you think I want to spend my days haggard and starved like you? Help, help, murderer! Thieves! Fire! Help, friends, help!”

“Shut your -“ Greybeard got no further. The crone moved, leaping from behind him. She swung her lantern down across the side of his face. As he twisted round, the old man brought a thick stick down on his neck, and he tumbled towards the crumbling concrete floor.

Again for him a situation that could not happen. There were young women sitting at tables, scantily clad, entertaining antique men with physiognomies like ill-furled sails. Their lips were red, their cheeks pink, their eyes dark and lustrous. The girl nearest Greybeard wore stockings of a wide mesh net that climbed up to the noble eminence of her crutch; here they met red satin knickers, frilled at the edges, as though to conceal a richer rose among their petals, and matching in hue the brief tunic, set off with inviting brass buttons, which partially hid a bosom of such splendour that it made its possessor’s chin appear undershot.

Between this spectacle and Greybeard was a number of legs, one pair of which he identified as Martha’s. The act of recognition made him realize that this was far from being a dream and he near to being unconscious. He groaned, and Martha’s tender face came down to his level; she put a worn hand to his face and kissed him.

“My poor old sweetheart, you’ll be all right in a minute.”

“Martha… Where are we?”

“They were mobbing you for laying hands on that eunuch at the garage. Charley heard them and fetched

Pitt and me. We came as soon as we could. We’re going to stay here for the night, and you’ll be all right by morning.”

Prompted by this remark, he recognized two of the other pairs of legs now; both sprouted mud and marsh grass; one pair was Charley’s, one Jeff Pitt’s. He asked again, more strongly, “Where are we?”

”Lucky you didn’t get yourself killed,” Pitt grunted. “We’re next door to the garage where they attacked you,” Martha said. “It’s a house - to judge by its popularity - of rather good repute.” He caught the fleeting smile on her face. His heart opened up to her, and he pressed her hand to show how he cherished a woman who could make even an unpleasant pleasantry. Life flowed back into him. “Help me up, I’m mended,” he said. Pitt and Charley took a hold of him under his arms. Only a pair of legs he had not recognized did not move. As he rose, his gaze travelled up these solid shanks and up the extravagant territory of a coat fashioned from rabbit skins. The skins preserved the heads of these lagomorphs, teeth, ears, whiskers, and all; the eyes had been replaced with black buttons; some of the ears, improperly preserved, were decaying, and a certain effluvium - probably encouraged by the warmth of the room - was radiated; but the effect of the whole was undeniably majestic. As Greybeard’s eyes came level with those of the coat’s wearer, he said, “Bunny Jingadangelow, I presume?”

“Doctor ‘Bunny’ Jingadangelow at your service, Mr. Timberlane,” the man in the coat said, flexing his sacrolumbar regions sufficiently to indicate a bow. “I’m delighted that my ministrations have had such excellent and speedy effect on your injuries -but we can discuss the state of your indebtedness to me later. First, I think you should exercise your circulation by taking a turn about the room. Allow me to assist you.”

He took a purchase on Greybeard’s arm, and began to walk him between the tables. For the moment, Greybeard offered no opposition, as he studied the man in the rabbit-skin coat. Jingadangelow looked to be scarcely out of his fifties - perhaps no more than six years older than Greybeard, and a young man as men went these days. He wore a twirling moustache and sideburns, but the rotundity of his chin attained a smoothness now seldom seen or attempted. There was over his face such a settled look of blandness that it seemed no metoposcopy could ever decide his true character.

“I understand,” he said, “that before you tried to attack one of my clients you were seeking me out to ask my help and advice.”

“I did not attack your client,” Greybeard said, freeing himself from the man’s embrace. “Though I regret that in a moment of anger I seized hold of one of your accomplices.”

“Tosh, man, young Trotty is an advertisement, not an accomplice. The name of Dr. Jingadangelow is known throughout the Midlands, you understand, as that of a great humanitarian - a human humanitarian. I’d give you one of my bills if I had one on me. You should realize before you start feeling pugilistic that I am one of the great figures of the - er, where are we now? of the Twenty Twenties.”

“You may be widely known. I’m not arguing about that. I met a poor mad fellow, Norsgrey, and his wife, who had been to you for treatment -“

“Wait, wait-Norsgrey, Norsgrey… What kind of name is that? Not on my books…” He stood with his head raised and one finger planted in the middle of his forehead. “Oh, yes, yes, yes, indeed. Mention of his wife had me baffled for a moment. Strictly between you and me…” Jingadangelow manœuvred Greybeard into a corner; he leant forward and said confidentially, “Of course, the complaints of one’s patients are both private and sacred, but poor old Norsgrey hasn’t really got a wife, you know, any more than this table has; it’s a she-badger that he’s rather too fond of.” He tapped his forehead again with an ample finger. “Why not? Thin blood needs a little warmth abed these chilly nights. Poor fellow nutty as a walnut tree…”

“You are broadminded.”

“I forgive all human faults and follies, sir. It’s part of my calling. We must mitigate this vale of tears what way we can. Such understanding is, of course, part of the secret of my wonderful curative powers.”

“Which is a way of saying you leech a living out of old madmen like Norsgrey. He is under the delusion that you have made him immortal.”

During this conversation, Jingadangelow seated himself and beckoned to a woman who hobbled over and set down two drinks before them. The doctor nodded and waved a pair of plump fingers at her in thanks. To Greybeard he said, “How strange to hear ethical objections again after all these years - quite takes me back… You must lead a secluded life. This old chap Norsgrey, you understand, is dying. He gets noises like frying in his head; it’s a fatal dropsy. So - he mistakes the hope I have given him for the immortality I promised him. It’s a comfortable error, surely? I travel, if I may for a moment indulge in a personal confidence, without any such hope; therefore Norsgrey - and there are many like him, luckily - is more fortunate than I in spirit. I console myself by being more fortunate in worldly possessions.”

Greybeard set down his drink and looked about. Although his neck still ached, good humour filled him. “Do you mind if my wife and friends join us?”

“Not at all, not at all, though I trust you are not bored with my company already. I hoped some talk of this and that might precede any business we might do together. I thought I had recognized a kindred spirit in you.”

Greybeard said, “What made you think that?”

“Mainly the intuitive feeling with which I am richly endowed. You are uncommitted. You don’t suffer as you should in this blighted time; though life is miserable, you enjoy it. Is this not so?”

“How do you know this? Yes, yes, you are correct, but we have only just met -”

“The answer to that is never entirely pleasing to the ego. It is that although all men are each unique, all men are also each much the same. You have an ambivalence in your nature; many men have an ambivalence. I only have to talk with them for a minute to diagnose it. Am I making sense?”

“How do you diagnose my ambivalence?”

“I am not a mind reader, but let me cast about.” He expanded his cheeks, raised his eyebrows, gazed into his glass, and made a very judicious face indeed. “We need our disasters. You and I have weathered, somehow, the collapse of a civilization. We are survivors after shipwreck. But for us two, we feel something deeper than survival - triumph! Before the crash came, we willed it, and so disaster for us is a success, a victory for the raging will. Don’t look so surprised! You’re not a man, surely, to regard the recesses of the mind as a very salubrious place. Have you thought of the world we were born in, and what it would have grown into had not that unfortunate little radiation experiment run amok? Would it not have been a world too complex, too impersonal, for the likes of us to flourish in?”

“You are doing my thinking for me,” Greybeard said. “It is a wise man’s role; but so is listening.” Jingadangelow quaffed his drink and leant forward over the empty glass. “Is not this rag-taggle present preferable to that other mechanised, organized, deodorized present we might have found ourselves in, simply because in this present we can live on a human scale? In that other present that we missed by a neutron’s breadth, had not megalomania grown to such a scale that the ordinary simple richness of an individual life was stifled?”

“Certainly there was a lot wrong with the twentieth-century way of life.”

“There was everything wrong with it.”

“No, you exaggerate. Some things -”

“Don’t you think that if everything spiritual was wrong with it,everything was wrong with it? It’s no good getting nostalgic. It wasn’t all drugs and education. Wasn’t it also the need for drugs and the poverty of education? Wasn’t it the climax and orgasm of the Machine Age? Wasn’t it Mons and Belsen and Bataan and Stalingrad and Hiroshima and the rest? Didn’t we do well to get flung off the roundabout?”

“You only ask questions,” Greybeard said. “They are themselves answers.”

”That is double talk. You are giving me double talk. No, wait - look, I wish to talk more with you. I can pay you. This is an important conversation… Let me get my wife and friends here.”

Greybeard rose. His head ached. The drink had been powerful, the room was noisy and hot, he was over-excited. It was seldom anyone talked about anything but toothache and the weather. He looked about for Martha and could not see her.

He walked through the room. There were stairs leading to the rooms above. He saw that the painted women were neither so voluptuous nor so busy as he had at first imagined. Though they were padded and painted, their skins were stamped with the liver marks and whorls of age, their eyes were rheumy. Bizarrely smiling, they reached out hands to him. He stumbled through them. They were full of liquor, they coughed and laughed and trembled as he went by. The room was full of their motions, like a cage of captive jackdaws.

The women waved - had he once dreamed of them? - but he took no notice. Martha had gone. Charley and old Pitt had gone. Seeing that he was all right, they must have returned to guard the boats. And Towin and Becky - no, they had not been here… He remembered what he had been seeking Bunny Jingadangelow for; instead of leaving, he turned back to the far corner, where another drink awaited him and the doctor sat with an octogenarian hussy on his knee. This woman sat with one hand about his neck and with the other stroked the rabbit heads on his coat.

“Look, Doctor, I came here to seek you not for myself, but for a couple who are of my party,” Greybeard said, leaning over the table. “There’s a woman, Becky; she claims that she is with child, though she must be over seventy. I want you to examine her and see if what she says is true.”

“Sit down, friend, and let us discuss this expectant lady of yours,” Jingadangelow said. “Drink your drink, since I presume you will be paying for this round. The delusions of elderly ladies is a choice topic for this time of night, eh, Jean? No doubt neither of you would recall that little poem, how does it go now? - ‘looking in my mirror to see my wasted skin’, and - yes -

“But time, to make me grieve, Part steals, part lets abide, And shakes my fractured frame at eve With throbbings of noontide.

“Touching, eh? I fancy your lady has a few throbbings left, nothing more. But I shall come and see her, of course. It is my duty. I shall naturally assure her that she is in the family way, if that is what she desires to hear.” He folded his fleshy hands together and frowned.

“There’s no chance she might really be about to bear a child?”

“My dear Timberlane - if you will pardon my not using your somewhat inane sobriquet - hope springs as eternal to the human womb as to the human breast, but I am surprised to find you seem to share her hope.”

“I suppose I do. You said yourself that hope was valuable.”

“Not valuable: imperative. But you must hope for yourself - when we hope for other people we are invariably disappointed. Our dreams have jurisdiction only over ourselves. Knowing you as I do, I see that you really come to me for your own sake. I rejoice to see it. My friend, you love life, you love this life with all its blemishes, with all its tastes and distastes - you also desire my immortality cure, do you not?”

Resting his throbbing head on his hand, Greybeard quaffed down more drink and said, “Many years ago, I was in Oxford - in Cowley to be accurate - when I heard of a treatment, it was just a rumour, a treatment that might prolong life, perhaps for several hundred years. It was something they were developing at a hospital there. Is it possible this could be done? I’d want scientific evidence before I believe.”

”Of course you do, naturally, undeniably, and I would expect nothing less of a man like you,” Jingadangelow said, nodding so vigorously that the woman was almost dislodged from his lap. “The best scientific evidence is empirical. You shall have empirical evidence. You shall have the full treatment - I’m absolutely convinced that you could afford it - and you shall then see for yourself that you never grow a day older.”

Squinting at him cunningly, Greybeard said, “Shall I have to come to Mockweagles?”

“Ah ha, he’s clever, isn’t he, Ruthie? He’s prepared the way for himself nicely. That’s the sort of man I prefer to deal with. I -”

“Where is Mockweagles?” Greybeard asked. “It’s what you might call my research headquarters. I reside there when I am not travelling the road.”

“I know, I know. You have few secrets from me, Doctor Jingadangelow. It’s twenty-nine storeys high, more like a castle than a skyscraper…”

“Possibly your informants have been slightly exaggerating, Timberlane, but your general picture is of course amazingly accurate, as Joan will tell you, eh, my pet? But first we should get a few details straight; you will want your lovely wife to undergo the treatment too?”

“Of course I will, you old fool. I can quote poetry too, you know; to be a member of DOUCH(E) you have to be educated. ‘Let me not to the marriage of two minds omit impediment…’ How does it go? Shakespeare, Doctor, Shakespeare. Ever make his acquaintance? First-class scholar… Oh, there is my wife! Martha!”

He staggered to his feet, knocking over his glass. Martha hurried towards him, anxiety in her face. Charley Samuels was close behind, carrying Isaac in his arms.

“Oh, Algy, Algy, you must come at once. We’ve been robbed!”

“What do you mean, robbed?” He stared stupidly at her, resenting the interruption of his train of thought. “While we were bringing you in here after you were attacked, thieves got into the boats and took everything they could lay their hands on.”

“The sheep!”

“They’ve all been taken, and our supplies.” Greybeard turned to Jingadangelow and made a loose gesture of courtesy. “Be seeing you, Doctor. Got to go - den of thieves - we’ve been robbed.”

“I always mourn to see a scholar suffer, Mr. Timberlane,” Jingadangelow said, bowing his massive head towards Martha without otherwise moving. As he hurried into the open with Martha and Charley, Greybeard said brokenly, “Why did you leave the boats?”

“You know why! We had to leave them when we heard you were in trouble. We heard they were beating you up. Everything’s gone except the boats themselves.”

“My rifle!”

“Luckily Jeff Pitt had your rifle with him.” Charley put the fox down, and it pulled on ahead. They pushed through the dark, down the uneven road.

There were few lights now. Greybeard realized how late it was; he had lost the idea of time. Potluck’s Tavern had its single window boarded up. The bonfires were mere smouldering cones of ash. One or two stalls were being shut by their owners; otherwise, the place was silent. A thin chip of moon, high overhead, shone on the expanse of flood water that threaded its way through the darkness of the land. Breathing the sharp air steadied the pulse in Greybeard’s head.

”That Jingadangelow’s behind all this,” Charley said savagely. “He has these travelling people in the power of his hand, from what I’ve seen and heard. He’s a charlatan. You shouldn’t have had anything to do with him, Greybeard.”

“Charlatans have their ambivalences,” Greybeard said, recognizing the preposterousness of the words as soon as they were out. Hurriedly, he said, “Where are Becky and Towin?”

“They’re down by the river with Jeff now. We couldn’t find them first go off, then they turned up. They were busy celebrating.”

As they came off the road and padded over soggy ground, they saw the trio huddled by the river bank near by the dinghy, carrying a couple of lanterns. They all stood together, not saying much. The celebration was over. Isaac padded unhappily in the mud, until Charley took pity on him and lifted him into his arms.

“It would be best if we leave this place straight away,” Greybeard said, when examination proved that though the two boats were indeed all that was left to them, they were intact. “This is not the place for us, and I am ashamed of my part in this evening’s events.”

“If you’d taken my advice, you’d never have left the boat in the first place,” Pitt said. “They’re just a lot of crooks here. It’s the loss of the sheep that grieves me.”

“You could have stayed by the boat as you were told,” Greybeard pointed out sharply. Turning to the others, he said, “My feeling is that we’ll be better off on the river. It is a fine night, I have alcohol in my system to row off. By tomorrow, we can reach Oxford and get work and shelter there. It will be a very different place from what it was when Martha and I were last there, however many years ago that was. Do you all agree to leaving this thieves’ den now?”

Towin coughed, shiffing his lantern from hand to hand. “Actually, me and the missus was thinking of staying here, like. We made some great friends, see, called

Liz and Bob, and we thought we’d join forces with them - if you had no particular objection. We aren’t much set on this idea of going down the river, as you know.” In the moonlight, he smiled his injured wolf’s grin and shuffled his feet.

“I need rest in my condition,” Becky said. She spoke more boldly than her husband, glaring at them through the sickly light. “I’ve had enough of being in that little leaking boat. We’d be better off with these friends of ours.”

“I’m sure that’s not true, Becky,” Martha said. “Why, I should catch my death of cold in that boat, me in my condition. Tow agrees with me.”

“He always has to,” Pitt observed. There was a silence as they stood together but separate in the dark. Much lay between them they could never express, currents of liking and resentment, affinity and aversion: vague but not the less strong for that. “All right, if you’ve decided, we’ll continue without you,” Greybeard said. “Watch your belongings, that’s all I say.”

“We don’t like leaving you, Greybeard,” Towin said. “And you and Charley can keep that bit of money you owe me.”

“It’s entirely your choice.”

“That’s what I said,” Becky said. “We’re about old enough to take care of ourselves, I should reckon.” As they were shaking hands all round, bidding each other good-bye, Charley started to hop about and scold. “This fox has picked up all the fleas in Christendom. Isaac, you’re letting them loose on me, you villain!”

Setting the fox down, he ordered it towards the water. The fox understood what was required of it. It moved backwards into the flood, slowly, slowly, brush first and then the rusty length of its body, and finally its head. Pitt held a lantern so that they could see it better.

“What’s he doing? Is he going to drown himself?” Martha asked anxiously. “No, Martha, only humans take their own lives,” Charley said. “Animals have got more faith. Isaac knows fleas don’t like cold water. This is his way of getting rid of them. They climb right up his body on to his muzzle, see, to avoid a soaking. You watch him now.”

Only part of the fox’s head was above the water. He sank down until his muzzle alone was showing. Then he ducked under completely. A circle of little fleas was left struggling on the surface. Isaac came up a yard away, bounded ashore, shook himself, and raced round in circles before returning to his master.

“I never saw a smarter trick,” Towin said to Becky, nodding his head, as the others climbed into the boats. “It must be something like that that the world’s doing to human beings, when you work it out - shaking us off its snout.”

“You’re taking a lot of rubbish, Towin Thomas,” she said. They stood waving as the boats moved slowly away, Towin with his cheeks screwed up to see the particular outline merge with the general gloom. “Well, there they go,” Charley said, pulling on his paddle. “She’s a sharp-tongued one, but I’m sorry to leave them in such a thieves’ den.” They were towing Jeff Pitt’s little boat, so that he could be in with them. He said, “Who’s the thieves? It might have been Jingadangelow’s men took our property. On the other hand, I reckon it might just as well have been old Towin. I never did trust him, crafty old blighter.”

“Whoever it was, the Lord will provide for us,” Charley said. He bent his back and guided his paddle deeper into the sedgy waters.

Prev Next

I. The River: Sparcot

II. Cowley

III. The River: Swifford Fair

Greybeard