Greybeard

5. The River: Oxford

Charley Samuels stood up in the dinghy and pointed towards the south-east.

“There they are!” he said. “The spires of Oxford!”

Martha, Timberlane, and old Jeff Pitt rose too, peering where Charley pointed across the lake. Isaac the fox paced up and down the tiller seat.

They had raised a mast and a sheet, and were carried forward by a light wind. Since their night flight from Swifford Fair, their progress had been slow. They had been hindered at an old and broken lock; a boat had foundered there and blocked the navigable stream, and no doubt would continue to do so until the spring flood water broke it up. They unloaded the boats there, pushing or carrying them and their few possessions to a point where they could safely launch them again.

The country here was particularly wild and inhospitable. Pitt thought he saw gnomes peering at them from bushes. All four of them thought they saw stoats climbing in the trees, finally deciding that the animals were not stoats but pine martens, an animal hardly ever seen in these parts since the Middle Ages. With bow and arrow they killed two of the creatures that afternoon, eating their flesh and preserving their fine pelts, when they were forced to make a camp in the open, under trees. Wood for burning lay about in plenty, and they huddled together between two fires, but it was an ill night for them all.

Next day, when they were under way again, they were fortunate enough to see a pedlar fishing on the bank. He bought Pitt’s little rowing boat from them, for which he gave them money and two sails, one of which they used that night to make themselves a tent. The pedlar offered them tinned apricots and pears, but since these must have been at least a dozen years old, and were very expensive, they did not buy. The little old man, made garrulous by solitude, told them he was on his way to join Swifford Fair, and that he had some medicines for Doctor Bunny Jingadangelow.

After they left the pedlar, they came to a wide sheet of water, patched with small islands and banks of rushes. Under the drab sky, it appeared to stretch on for ever, and they could not see their proper course through it. This lake was a sanctuary for wild life; dippers, moorhens, and an abundance of duck moved over or above its surface. In the clear waters beneath their centreboard, many shoals of fish were visible.

They were in no mood to appreciate the natural attractions. The weather had turned blustery, they did not know in which direction they should sail. Rain, galloping over the face of the water, sent them scurrying for shelter under the spare sail. As the showers grew heavier and the breeze failed, Greybeard and Charley rowed them to one of the islands, and there they made camp.

It was dry under the sail, and the weather had turned milder, but a sense of depression settled on them as they watched shawls of water and cloud embrace the landscape. Greybeard husbanded a small fire into life, which set them all coughing, for the smoke would not disperse. Their spirits only recovered when Pitt appeared, shrunken, withered, weathered, but triumphantly bearing a pair of fine beaver on his back. One of the beavers was a giant, four feet long from whiskers to tail. Pitt reported a colony of them only a hundred yards away; the few that were about had shown no fear of him.

“I’ll catch another pair in the morning for breakfast,” he said. “If we’ve got to live like savages, we may as well live as well as savages.”

Although he was not a man ever to grumble extensively, Pitt found few consolations in their way of life. Whatever his success as a trapper of animals — and he derived satisfaction from outwitting and slaying them he saw himself as a failure. Ever since he had proved himself unable to kill Greybeard, a dozen years before, he had lived an increasingly solitary life; even his gratitude to Greybeard for sparing him was tempered with the thought that but for him he might now be controlling his own body of soldiers, the remains of Croucher’s command. He nourished this grievance inside himself, though he knew there was no real substance in it. Earlier experience should have convinced him that he could never fulfil the proper duty of a soldier.

As a child, Jeff Pitt used to make his way through the outskirts of the great city in which he lived to a stretch of common land beyond the houses. This land merged with moorland, and was a fine place for a boy to roam. From the tops of the moors, where only an occasional hawk rode the breezes, you could look down on to the maze of the city, with its chimneys, its slaty factory roofs, and the countless little millipedes that were its houses. Jeff used to take his friend Dicky on to the common; when the weather was fine, they would go there every day of their school holidays.

Jeff owned a large rusty bike, inherited from one of his elder brothers; Dicky had a white mongrel dog called Snowy. Snowy enjoyed the common as much as the boys did. All this was in the early 1970’s, when they were in short trousers and the world was at peace.

Sometimes Jeff and Dicky played soldiers, using bits of stick for rifles. Sometimes they tried to capture lizards with their cupped hands; these were little brown lizards that generally escaped, leaving their wriggling bloody tails in the boys’ palms. Sometimes they wrestled.

One day, they wrestled so absorbedly that they rolled down a bank and into a luxuriant bed of nettles. They were both badly stung. However much it hurt, Jeff would not cry before his friend. Dicky blubbered all the way home. Even a ride on Jeff’s bike could not silence him completely.

The boys grew up. The steel-cowled factories swallowed young Jeff Pitt, as they had swallowed his brothers. Dicky obtained a job in an estate office. They found they had nothing in common and ceased to seek each other’s company.

The war came. Pitt was conscripted into the air force. After some hazardous adventures in the Middle East, he deserted, together with several of his fellows. This was like a token to other units in the area, where dissatisfaction with the cause and course of the war was already rife. Mutiny broke out. Some of the mutineers seized a plane on Tehran airport and flew it back to Britain. Pitt was on the plane.

In Britain, revolution was gathering momentum. In a few months, the government would collapse and a hastily established people’s government sue for peace with the enemy powers. Pitt found his way home and joined the local rebels. One moonlit night, a pro-government group attacked their headquarters, which was in a big Victorian house in the suburbs. Pitt found himself positioned behind a concrete bench, his heart hammering dreadfully, firing at the enemy.

One of his mates in the house brought a searchlight into play. Its beam picked up Dicky, wearing the government flash and coming towards Pitt’s position at a run. Pitt shot him.

He regretted the shot even before — as if by magic — a wound burst over Dicky’s shirt and he spun round and pitched on to the gravel. Pitt crawled forward to him, but the shot had been a true one; his friend was almost dead.

Since that time, he could never nerve himself to kill anything much bigger than a beaver.

Cramped in the tent, they ate well and slept well that night, and sailed throughout the next day. They saw no living person. Man had gone, and the great interlocking world of living species had already knitted over the space he once occupied. Moving without any clear sense of direction, they had to spend another two nights on islands in the lake; but since the weather continued mild and the food plentiful, they raised very little complaint, beyond the unspoken complaint that beneath their rags and wrinkles they regarded themselves still as modern man, and modern man was entitled to something better than wandering through a pleistocene wilderness.

The wilderness was punctuated now and again by memorials of former years, some of them looking all the grimmer and blacker for lingering on out of context. The dinghy bore them to a small railway station, which a board still announced as Yarnton Junction. Its two platforms stood above the flood, while the signal-box, perched on its brick tower, served as a look-out across the meads.

In the broken and ruined waiting-room, they found a reindeer and calf. In the look-out lived a hideously deformed old hermit, who kept them covered with a home-made bomb, held menacingly above his head, while he spoke to them. He told them that the lake was formed by a conflux of overflowing streams, among them the Oxford Canal and the Evenlode. Only too keen to get rid of them, the old fellow gave them their general direction, and once more the party moved forward, aided by a light and steady wind. It was after some two hours that Charley got up excitedly and pointed ahead, crying, “There they are!”

The others rose and stared towards the reassuring spread of Oxford’s spires through the trees. The spires stood as many of them had stood for centuries, beckoning towards the traditions of learning and piety, now broken at their feet, that had given them birth. The sun rolled from behind rain cloud and lit them. There was no one in the boat who did not feel his heart beat faster at the sight.

“We could stay here, Algy — at least for the rest of the winter,” Martha said.

He looked at her face, and was touched to find tears in her eyes. “I’m afraid it’s mainly an illusion,” he said. “Oxford too will have changed. We may find only deserted ruins.” She shook her head without speaking.

“I wonder if old Croucher has still got a warrant out for our arrest,” Pitt said. “I wouldn’t want to get shot as soon as we stepped ashore.”

“Croucher died of the cholera, and I don’t doubt that Cowley then proceeded to turn itself first into a battleground and then a cemetery, leaving only the old city,” Greybeard said. “Let’s hope we get a friendly welcome from whoever’s left. A roof over our heads tonight would be a change for the better, wouldn’t it?”

The scenery became less imposing as they drifted south towards the city. Rows of poor houses stood in the flood, their desolation only emphasized by the sunlight. Their roofs had caved in; they resembled the carcasses of enormous crustacea cast up on a primaeval beach. Dwarfed by them, an ancient creature swathed in furs watered a couple of reindeer. Further on, the stir they made on the water threw wavering reflections into the roofs of empty timber yards. The heavy silence was broken a little later by the crunch of a vehicle. Two old women, as broad as they were long, bundled together to drag a cart behind them, its wheels grinding up the sunlight as they pulled it along a quayside. The quayside ended by a low bridge.

“This I recognize,” Greybeard said, speaking in a hushed voice. “We can tie up here. This is Folly Bridge.”

As they climbed ashore, the two old women came up and offered the hire of their cart. As always when it met strangers, Greybeard’s party had difficulty in understanding their accent. Pitt told the crones they had nothing worth carrying, and the crones told them they would find shelter for the night at Christ Church, “up the road”. Leaving Charley behind with Isaac, to guard the boat, Martha, Greybeard, and Pitt set out along the broken track that led over the bridge.

The fortress-like walls of the ancient college of Christ Church loomed over one of the southern approaches of the city. From the top of the walls, a knot of bearded men watched the newcomers walk up the road. They approached warily, half-expecting a challenge, but none came. When they reached the great wooden gates of the college, they paused. Untended, the college walls were crumbling. Several windows had fallen out or were boarded up, and the shattered stone lying at the foot of the walls spoke of the action of heat and frost and the elements. Greybeard shrugged his shoulders and marched under the tall archway.

In contrast to the ruination through which they had passed, here was habitation, the bustle of people, the colour of market stalls, the smell of animals and foods. The spirits of the three newcomers rose within them. They found themselves in a great quad, which had housed many past generations of undergraduates; wooden stalls had been set up, several of them forming small enclosed buildings from which a variety of goods were being sold. Another part of the quad was railed off, and here reindeer stood, surveying the scene from under their antlers with their customary look of morose humour.

A bald-headed shred of manhood with a nose as thin as a needle skipped out of the lodge at the gate and asked them, as they were strangers, what they wanted. They had a deal of difficulty making him understand, but eventually he led them to a portly fossil of a man with three chins and a high complexion who said they could rent, for a modest fee, two small basement rooms in Killcanon. They entered their names in a register and showed the colour of their money.

Killcanon turned out to be a small square within Christ Church, and their rooms a larger room subdivided. But the needle-nosed messenger told them they might burn firewood in their grates and offered them fuel cheap. Mainly from weariness, they accepted the offer. The messenger lit the fires for them while Jeff Pitt walked back to collect Charley and the fox and make arrangements for the boat.

Once the fire was burning cheerfully, the messenger showed signs of lingering, squatting by the flame and rubbing his nose, trying to listen to what Martha and Greybeard said to each other. Greybeard stirred him with a toe.

“Before you go out, Chubby, tell me if this college is still used for learning as it used to be.”

“Why, there’s nobody to learn any more,” the man said. It was plain he intended his verb to be transitive, whatever a legion of vanished grammar books might have said. “But the Students own the place, and they seem to learn each other a bit still. You’ll see them going about with books in their pockets, if you watch out. Students here is what we mean by what lesser colleges calls Fellows. For a tip, I’d introduce you to one of them.”

“We’ll see. There may be time for that tomorrow.”

“Don’t leave it too long, sir. There’s a local legend that Oxford is sinking into the river, and when it’s gone under, a whole lot of little naked people what now live under the water will come swimming up like eels and live here instead.”

Greybeard contemplated the ruin of a man. “I see. And do you give this tale much credence?”

“You what you say, sir?”

“Do you believe this tale?”

The old man laughed, casting a shuffling side glance at Martha. “I ain’t saying I believe it and I ain’t saying I don’t believe it, but I know what I’ve heard, and they do say that for every woman as dies, one more of these little naked people is born under water. And this I do know because I saw it with my own eyes last Michaelmas — no, the Michaelmas before last, because I was behind with my rent this Michaelmas — there was an old woman of ninety-nine died down at Grandpont, and very next day a little two-headed creature all naked floated up at the bridge.”

“Which was it you saw?” Martha asked. “The old lady dying or the two-headed thing?”

“Well, I’m often down that way,” the messenger said confusedly. “It was the funeral and the bridge I mainly saw, but many men told me about all the rest and I have no cause to doubt ’em. It’s common talk.”

When he had gone, Martha said, “It’s strange how everyone believes in something different.”

“They’re all a bit mad.”

“No, I don’t think they’re mad — except that other people’s beliefs always seem mad, just as their passions do. In the old days, before the Accident, people were more inclined to keep their beliefs to themselves, or else confide only in doctors and psychiatrists. Or else the belief was widespread, and lost its air of absurdity. Think of all the people who believed in astrology, long after it was proved to be a pack of nonsense.”

“Illogical, and therefore a mild form of madness,” Greybeard said.

“No, I don’t think so. A form of consolation, rather. This old fellow with a nose like a knitting-needle nurses a crazy dream about little naked things taking over Oxford; it in some way consoles him for the dearth of babies. Charley’s religion is the same sort of consolation. Your recent drinking companion, Bunny Jingadangelow, had retreated into a world of pretence.”

She sank wearily down on to the bed of blankets and stretched. Slowly she removed her battered shoes, massaged her feet, and then stretched full length with her hands under her head. She regarded Greybeard, whose bald pate glowed as he crouched by the fire.

“What are you thinking, my venerable love?” she asked.

“I was wondering if the world might not slip — if it hasn’t already — into a sort of insanity, now that everyone left is over fifty. Is a touch of childhood and youth necessary to sanity?”

“I don’t think so. We’re really amazingly adaptable, more than we give ourselves credit for.”

“Yes, but suppose a man lost his memory of everything that happened to him before he was fifty, so that he was utterly cut off from his roots, from all his early achievements — wouldn’t you classify him as insane?”

“It’s only an analogy.”

He turned to her and grinned. “You’re a bugger for arguing, Martha Timberlane.”

“After all these years we can still tolerate each other’s fat-headed opinions. It’s a miracle!”

He went over to her, sitting on the bed beside her and stroking her thigh.

“Perhaps that’s our bit of madness or consolation or whatever — each other. Martha, have you ever thought—” he paused, and then went on, screwing his face into a frown of concentration. “Have you ever thought that that ghastly catastrophe fifty years ago was, well, was lucky for us? I know it sounds blasphemous; but mightn’t it be that we’ve led more interesting lives than the perhaps rather pointless existence we would otherwise have been brought up to accept as life? We can see now that the values of the twentieth century were invalid; otherwise they wouldn’t have wrecked the world. Don’t you think that the Accident has made us more appreciative of the vital things, like life itself, and like each other?”

“No,” Martha said steadily. “No, I don’t. We would have had children and grandchildren by now, but for the Accident, and nothing can ever make up for that.”

Next morning, they were roused by the sound of animals, the crowing of cocks, the pad of reindeer hooves, even the bray of a donkey. Leaving Martha in the warm bed, Greybeard rose and dressed. It was cold. Draughts flapped the rug on the floor, and had spread the ashes of the fire far and wide during the night.

Outside, it was barely daylight and the puddingy Midland sky rendered the quad in cold tones. But there were torches burning, and people on the move, and their voices sounding — cheerful sounds, even where their owners were toothless and bent double with years. The main gates had been opened, and many of the animals were going forth, some pulling carts. Greybeard saw not only a donkey but a couple of horses that looked like the descendants of hunters, both fine young beasts and pulling carts. They were the first he had seen or heard of in over a quarter century. One sector of the country was now so effectively insulated from another that widely different conditions prevailed.

The people were on the whole well-clad, many of them wearing fur coats. Up on the battlements, a pair of sentries clouted their ribs for warmth and looked down at the bustle below.

Going to the lodge, where candles burned, Greybeard found the treble-chinned man off duty. His place was taken by a plump fellow of Greybeard’s age who proved to be a son of the treble chins; he was as amiable as his father was fossilized, and when Greybeard asked if it would be possible to get a job for the winter months, he became talkative.

They sat over a small fire, huddled against the chill blowing in through the big gate from the street. Speaking against the rumble and clatter of the traffic passing his cabin, the plump fellow chatted of Oxford.

For some years, the city had possessed no central governing body. The colleges had divided it up and ruled it indifferently. Such crime as there was was treated harshly; but there had been no shooting at Carfax for over a twelve-month.

Christ Church and several of the other colleges now served as a cross between a castle, a hostel, and a manor house. They provided shelter and defence when defence was needed, as it had been in the past. The bigger colleges owned most of the town about them. They remained prosperous, and for the past ten years had lived peaceably together, developing agriculture and rearing livestock. They did what they could to provide drainage to fight the nearby floods that rose higher every spring. And in one of the colleges at the other end of the town, Balliol by name, the Master was looking after three children who were shown ceremonially to the population twice a year.

“What age are these children? Have you see them?” Greybeard asked.

“Oh, yes, I’ve seen them all right. Everyone’s seen the Balliol children. I wouldn’t miss them. The girl’s a little beauty. She’s about ten, and was born of an imbecile woman living at Kidlington, which is a village away in the woods to the north. The two boys, I don’t know where they come from, but one had a hard time before he got here, and was displayed by a showman in Reading, I heard tell.”

“These are genuine normal children?”

“One of the boys has got a withered arm, a little arm that finishes off with three fingers at his elbow, but you wouldn’t call that a proper disfigurement, and the girl has no hair and something a bit funny with her ear, but nothing really wrong, and she waves very pretty to the crowd.”

“And you’ve actually seen them?”

“Yes, I’ve seen them in ‘The Broad’, where they parade. The boys don’t wave so much because they’re older, but they’re nice fresh young chaps, and it’s certainly good to see a bit of smooth flesh.”

“You’re sure they’re real? Not old men disguised, or anything like that?”

“Oh no, no, no, nothing like that. They’re small, just like children in old pictures, and you can’t mistake young skin, can you?”

“Well, you have horses here. Perhaps you have children.”

They changed the topic then and, after some discussion, the porter’s son advised Greybeard to go and speak to one of the college Students, Mr. Norman Morton, who was responsible for employing people in the college.

Martha and he made a frugal meal of some tough cold beaver and a hunk of bread that Martha had bought from one of the stalls the previous evening; then she and Greybeard told Charley and Pitt where they were going, and headed for Norman Morton’s rooms.

In Peck, the furthest quadrangle of the college, a fine two-storey stable had been built, with room to house beasts and carts. Morton had his suite of rooms facing this stable. In some of these rooms he lived; in others, he kept animals.

He was a tall man, broad-shouldered and stooped, with a nervous nod to his head and a countenance so lined it looked as if it had been patiently assembled from bits of string. Greybeard judged him to be well into his eighties, but he showed no sign of intending to give up good living yet awhile. When a servant ushered Martha and Greybeard into his presence, Mr. Norman Morton was engaged with two cronies in sipping a hot spiced wine and demolishing what looked like a leg of mutton.

“You can have some wine if you talk interestingly,” he said, leaning back in his chair and pointing a patronizing fork at them. “My friends and I are always happy to be entertained by the tales of travellers, lies though they generally are. If you’re going to lie, have the kindness to make them big ’uns.”

“In my childhood,” Martha said, nodding gravely to the other gentlemen, whose mouths worked busily as they returned the gesture, “hosts were expected to entertain visitors, not vice versa. But in those days, seats of learning housed courtesy rather than cattle.”

Morton raised a pair of feathery eyebrows and put down his glass.

“Madam,” he said, “forgive me. If you dress like a cowherd’s woman, you must be used to being mistaken for a cowherd’s woman, don’t you know. To each his or her own eccentricity. Allow me to pour you a little of this negus, and then we will talk together as equals — at least until it is proved otherwise.”

The wine was good enough to take off some of the sharpness of Morton’s speech. Greybeard said as much.

“It drinks well enough,” one of the Fellows agreed carelessly. He was a tallowy man, addressed as Gavin, with a yellow face and a forehead from which he constantly wiped sebum. “It’s only a home-grown wine, unfortunately. We finished off the last of the college cellars the day the Dean was deposed.”

The three men bowed their heads in mock-reverence at mention of the Dean.

“What is your story, then, strangers?” Morton asked, in a more unbuttoned fashion.

Greybeard spoke briefly of their years in London, of their brush with Croucher in Cowley, and of their long withdrawal at Sparcot. However much the Fellows regretted the absence of palpable lies, they expressed interest in the account.

“I remember this Commander Croucher,” Morton said. “He was not a bad chap as dictators go. Fortunately, he was the sort of illiterate who preserves an undue respect for learning. Perhaps because his father, it was rumoured, was a college servant, his attitude to the University was astonishingly respectful. We had to be inside college by seven p.m., but that was no hardship. I recall that even at the time one regarded his régime as one of historical necessity. It was after he died that things became really intolerable. Croucher’s soldiery turned into a rabble of looters. That was the worst time in our whole miserable half-century of decline.”

“What happened to these soldiers?”

“Roughly what you’d expect. They killed each other, and then the cholera got the rest of them, thank heaven, don’t you know. For a year, this was a city of the dead. The colleges were closed. Nobody about. I took over a cottage outside the city. After a time, people started drifting back. Then, that winter or the next, the flu hit us.”

“We missed serious flu epidemics at Sparcot,” Greybeard said.

“You were fortunate. You were also fortunate in that the flu missed very few centres of population, by all accounts, so we were spared armed bands of starving louts roving the country and pillaging.”

The Fellow addressed as Vivian said, “At its best, this country could support only half the populace by home agriculture. Under worsening conditions, it might support under a sixth of the number. In normal times, the death rate would be about six hundred thousand per year. There are of course no accurate figures available, but I would hazard that at the time of which we speak, about twenty-two or a little earlier, the population shrank from about twenty-seven million to twelve million. One can easily calculate that in the decade since then the population must have shrunk to a mere six million, estimating by the old death rate. Given another decade—”

“Thank you, no more statistics, Vivian,” Morton said. To his visitors, he added, “Oxford has been peaceful since the flu epidemic. Of course, there was the trouble with Balliol.”

“What happened there?” Martha asked, accepting another glass of the home-made wine.

“Balliol thought it would like to rule Oxford, don’t you know. There was some paltry business about trying to collect arrears of rent from their city properties. The townspeople appealed to Christ Church for assistance. Fortunately we were able to give it.

“We had a rather terrible artillery man, a Colonel Appleyard, taking refuge with us at the time. He was an undergraduate of the House — ploughed, poor fellow, and fit for nothing but a military life — but he had a couple of mortars with him. Trench mortars, don’t you know. He set them up in the quad and began to bombard — to mortar, I suppose one should say, if the verb can be used in that application — Balliol.”

Gavin chuckled and added, “Appleyard’s aim was somewhat uncertain, and he demolished most of the property in between Balliol and here, including Jesus College; but the Master of Balliol ran up his white flag, and we have all lived equably ever after.”

The three Students were put in a good humour by this anecdote, and ran over the salient points of the campaign among themselves, forgetting their visitors. Mopping his forehead, Gavin said, “Some of the colleges are built like little fortresses; it is pleasant to see this aspect is to some extent functional.”

“Has the lake we sailed over to reach Folly Bridge any particular history?” Greybeard inquired.

“Particular meaning ‘pertaining to’? Why, yes and no, although nothing so dramatic — nothing so full of human interest, shall we say — as the Balliol campaign,” Morton said. “The Meadow Lake, as our local men know it, covers ground that was always liable to flood, even in the palmy days of the Thames Conservancy, rest their souls. Now it is a permanent flood, thanks to the work of undermining the banks carried out by an army of coypus.”

“Coypu is an animal?” Martha asked.

“A rodent, madam, of the echimyidae family, hailing from South America, now as much a native of Oxford as Gavin or I — and I fancy will continue to be so long after we are put to rest, eh, Gavin? You might not have seen the creature on your travels, since it is shy and conceals itself. But you must come and see our menagerie, and meet our tame coypus.”

He escorted them through several odorous rooms, in which he kept a number of animals in cages. Most of them ran to him, and appeared glad to see him.

The coypus enjoyed a small pool set in the stone slabs of a ground floor room. They looked like a cross between a beaver and a rat. Morton explained how they had been imported into the country back in the twentieth century to be bred on farms for their nutria fur. Some had escaped, to become a pest throughout much of East Anglia. In several concentrated drives, they had been almost exterminated; after the Accident, they had multiplied again, slowly at first and then, hitting their stride like so many other rapid-breeding creatures, very fast. They spread westwards along rivers, and it now seemed as if they covered half the country.

“They will be the end of the Thames,” Morton said. “They ruin any watercourse. Fortunately, they more than justify their existence by being both very good to eat and to wear! Fricasseed coypu is one of the great consolations of our senility, eh, Vivian? Perhaps you have observed how many people are able to afford their old bones the luxury of a fur coat.”

Martha mentioned the pine martens they had seen.

“Eh, very interesting! They must be spreading eastwards from Wales, which was the only part of Britain where they survived a century ago. All over the world, there must be far-reaching changes in animal behaviour and habitat; if only one could have another life in which to chart it all… Ah well, that’s not a fruitful thing to wish, is it?”

Morton finished by offering Martha a job as an assistant to his menagerie keeper, and advising Greybeard to see a farmer Flitch, who was wanting a man for odd jobs.

Joseph Flitch was an octogenarian as active as a man twenty years his junior. He needed to be. He supported a house full of nagging women, his wife, his wife’s two hoary old sisters, their mother, and two daughters, one prematurely senile, the other permanently crippled with arthritis. Of this unhappy crew of harridans, Mrs. Flitch was, perhaps because the rule in her household was the survival of the fiercest, undoubtedly the fiercest. She took an instant spite to Greybeard.

Flitch led him round to an outhouse, shook his hand, and engaged him for what Norman Morton had said would be a fair price. “Oi knows as you will be a good man by the way the missus took against you,” he declared, speaking in a broad Oxfordshire that at first barely escaped incomprehensibility.

He was — not unnaturally in the circumstances — a morose man. He was also a shrewd and enterprising man, as Greybeard saw, and ran an expanding business. His farm was at Osney, on the edge of Meadow Lake, and he employed several men on it. Flitch had been one of the first to take advantage of the changing natural conditions, and used the spreading reed beds as a supply of thatch materials. No brick or tile was made in the locality; but several of the better houses thereabouts were handsomely covered in a deep layer of Farmer Flitch’s thatch.

It was Greybeard’s job to row himself about the lake, harvesting armful after armful of the reeds. Since he used his own boat for this, Flitch, a fair dealer, presented him with a gigantic warm and waterproof nutria coat, which had belonged to a man who died in debt to him. Snug in the coat, Greybeard spent most of his daylight hours working slowly about the lake, feeling himself absorbed between the flat prospect of water and marsh and the mould of sky. It was a period of quiet punctuated by the startlements of water birds; sometimes he filled the dinghy with an abundance of reed, and could then spend half an hour fishing for his and Martha’s supper. On these occasions, he saw many different sorts of rodent swimming in and out the swampy places: not only water rats, but the larger animals, beaver, otter, and the coypu in whose skin he was clad. Once he saw a female coypu with young being suckled as they swam along.

He accepted that hard-worked time among the reeds; but he did not forget the lesson he had gained at Sparcot, that serenity came not from the external world, but from within. If he needed reminding, he had only to cut reeds in his favourite bay. From there he had a view of a large burial place, to which almost every day a grey knot of mourners came with a coffin. As Flitch drily remarked, when Greybeard commented on the graveyard, “Ah, they keep a-planting of ’em, but there ain’t any more of ’em growing up.”

So he would then go home to Martha, often with his beard coated with frost, back to the draughty room in Killcanon that she had succeeded in turning into a home. Both Charley and Pitt lived outside Christ Church, where they had secured cheaper and more tumbledown lodgings; Charley, whom they saw most days, had secured a job of sorts in a tannery; Pitt had returned to his old game of poaching and made little attempt to seek out their company; Greybeard saw him once along the south bank of the lake, a small and independent old figure.

On the darkest mornings, Greybeard was at the great college gate at six, waiting for it to be opened to go to work. One morning, when he had been working for Flitch for a month, a bell in the ruinous Tom Tower above his head began to toll.

It was New Year’s Day, which the inhabitants of Oxford held in festival.

“I don’t expect any work off you today,” Flitch said, when Greybeard showed himself at the little dairy. “Life’s short enough as well as being long enough — you’re a young man, you are, go and enjoy yourself.”

“What year is it, Joe? I’ve lost my calendar and forgotten where we are.”

“What’s it matter where we are? I barely keep the score of my own years, never mind the world’s. You go on home to your Martha.”

“I’m just thinking. Why wasn’t Christmas Day celebrated?”

Flitch straightened up from the sheep he was milking and regarded Greybeard with an amused look. “You mean why should it be celebrated? I can tell you’re no sort of a religious man, or you wouldn’t ask that. Christmas was invented to celebrate the birth of God’s son, wasn’t it? And the Students in Christ Church reckon as it aren’t in what you might call good taste to celebrate birth any more.” He moved his stool and pail to a nanny goat and added, “Course, if you were under tenancy to Balliol or Magdalen, now they do recognize Christmas still.”

“Are you a religious man, Joe?”

Flitch pulled a face. “I leaves that sort of thing to women.”

Greybeard tramped back through the miry streets to Martha. He saw by the look in her face that there was some excitement brewing. She explained that this was the day when the children of Balliol were displayed in ‘The Broad’, and she wanted to go and see them.

“We don’t want to see children, Martha. It’ll only upset you. Stay here with me, where it’s cosy. Let’s look up Tubby at the gate and have a drink with him. Or come and meet old Joe Flitch — you don’t have to see his womenfolk. Or—”

“Algy, I want to be taken to see the children. I can stand the shock. Besides, it’s a sort of social event, and they’re few and far enough between.” She tucked her hair inside her hood, eyeing him in a friendly but detached way. He shook his head and took her by the arm.

“You were always a stubborn woman, Martha.”

“Where you are concerned, I’m always as weak as water, and you know it.”

Along the path known as the “Corn”, presumably from a ploughed-up strip of wheatland along one side of it, many people were flocking. Their appearance was as grey and seamed as that of the ruined buildings below which they shuffled; they sucked their gums against the cold and did not chatter much. They gave way falteringly to a cart pulled by reindeer. As the cart creaked level with Martha and Greybeard, someone called her name.

Norman Morton, with a scholastic gown draped over a thick array of furs, rode in the cart, accompanied by some of the other Students, including the two Greybeard had spoken with already, the tallowy Gavin, the silent Vivian. He made the driver stop the cart, and invited the two pedestrians to climb up. They stepped up on the wheel hubs and were helped in.

“Are you surprised to find me participating in the common pleasure?” Morton asked. “I take as much interest in Balliol’s children as I do in my own animals. They make a pretty display as pets and reflect a little much-needed popularity on to the Master. What will happen to them when they are grown up, as they will be in a few years, is a matter beyond the power of the Master to decide.”

The cart trundled to a convenient position before the battered fortress of Balliol, with its graceless Victorian façade. The ultimate effectiveness of Colonel Appleyard’s mortar fire was apparent. The tower had been reduced to a stump, and two large sections of the façade were patched rather clumsily with new stone. A sort of scaffold had been erected outside the main gate and the college flag hung over it.

The crowd here was as large as Martha and Greybeard had seen in years. Although the atmosphere was more solemn than gay, hawkers moved among the numbers assembled, selling scarves and cheap jewellery and hats made of swans’ feathers and hot dogs and pamphlets. Morton pointed to one man who bore a tray full of broadsheets and books.

“You see — Oxford continues to be the home of printing, right to the bitter end. There is much to be said for tradition don’t you know. Let’s see what the rogue has to offer, eh?”

The rogue was a husky broken-mouthed man with a notice pinned to his coat saying “Bookseller to the University Press”, but most of his wares were intended, as Morton’s friend Gavin remarked, turning over an ill-printed edition of a thriller, for the rabble.

Martha bought a four-page pamphlet produced for the occasion and headed, HAPPY NEW YEAR OXFORD 2030!! She turned it over and handed it to Greybeard.

“Poetry seems to have come back into its own. Though this is mainly nursery-pornographic. Does it remind you of anything?”

He read the first verse. The mixture of childishness and smut did seem familiar.

“America…” he said. The names of everything had deserted him over almost thirty years. Then he smiled at her. “Our best man — I can see him so clearly — what was it he called this sort of stuff? ‘Slouch!’ By golly, how it takes you back!” He wrapped his arm round her.

“Jack Pilbeam,” she said. They both laughed, surprised by pleasure, and said simultaneously, “My memory is getting so bad…”

Momentarily, both of them escaped from the present and the festering frames and rotten breath of the crowd about them. They were back when the world was cleaner, in that heady Washington they had known.

One of Bill Dyson’s wedding presents to them was a permit for them to travel throughout the States. They took part of their honeymoon in Niagara, rejoicing in the hackneyed choice, pretending they were American, listening to the mighty fall of waters.

While they were there they heard the news. Martha’s kidnapper was found and arrested. He proved to be Dusty Dykes, the low comedian Jack Pilbeam had taken them to see. The news of the arrest made headlines everywhere; but next day there was a mighty factory fire in Detroit to fill the front pages.

That world of news and event was buried. Even in their memories, it lived only flickeringly; for they formed part of the general disintegration. Greybeard closed his eyes and could not look at Martha.

The parade began. Various dignitaries, flanked by guards, marched from the gates of Balliol. Some mounted the scaffold, some guarded the way. The Master appeared, old and frail, his face a dead white against his black gown and hat. He was helped up the steps. He made a speech as brief as it was inaudible, subsiding into a fit of coughing, after which the children emerged from the college.

The girl appeared first, walking pertly and looking about her as she went. At the cheer that rose from the crowd, her face lit; she climbed the platform and waved. She was completely hairless, the structure of her skull knobbly through her pale skin. One of her ears, as Greybeard had been warned, was swollen until it was no more than a confused mess of flesh. When she turned so that it was towards the spectators, she resembled a goblin.

The crowd were delighted by the sight of youth. Many people clapped.

The boys appeared next. The one with the withered arm looked unwell; his face was pinched and blueish; he stood there apathetically, waving but not smiling. He was perhaps thirteen. The other boy was older and healthier. His eye as he regarded the crowd was calculating; Greybeard watched him with sympathy, knowing how untrustworthy a crowd is. Perhaps the boy felt that those who cheered so easily today might by next year be after his blood, if the wind but changed direction. So he waved and smiled, and never smiled with his eyes.

That was all. The children went in amid cries from the crowd, among which were many wet cheeks. Several old women wept openly, and hawkers were doing a beneficial business in handkerchiefs.

“Extremely affecting,” said Morton harshly.

He spoke to the driver of their cart, and they began to move off, manœuvring with difficulty through the crowds. It was obvious that many of the spectators would hang about yet awhile, enjoying each other’s company.

“There you have it,” Gavin said, pulling a handkerchief from a pocket to mop his sebaceous brow. “So much for the miracle, the sign that under certain conditions the human race might renew itself again. But it is less easy for humans to build up from scratch than it is for most of our mammals. You only need a pair of Morton’s stoats or coypu or rabbits, and in five years, given moderate luck, you have a thriving little horde of them, eh, Morton? Human beings need a century to reach anything like similar numbers. And then they need more than moderate luck. Rodents and lesser animals do not kill each other as does homo sapiens. Ask yourself how long it is before that girl we’ve seen comes of rapeable age, or the older boy, out after a bit of fun, gets set on by a group of coffin-bearers and beaten to death with stinking crutches.”

“I suppose the purpose of this yearly exhibition is to make people familiar with the children, so that they are less likely to be harmed?” Martha said.

“The psychological effect of such actions is frequently the very opposite of that intended,” Gavin said severely.

After that, they rode silently down the Corn and St. Aldates and in through the tall gate of Christ Church. As they dismounted, Greybeard said, “Would you ban the demonstration outside Balliol, Student Morton, if it were within your power?”

The old man looked at him slyly.

“I’d ban human nature if I could. We’re a bad lot, don’t you know.”

“Just as you’ve taken it upon yourself to ban Christmas?”

The stringy old countenance worked into something like a smile. He winked at Martha.

“I ban what I see fit — I, and Gavin, and Vivian here. We exercise our wisdom, you see, for the common good. We have banned many things more important than Christmas, let me tell you.”

“Such as?”

“The Dean for one,” Student Vivian said, displaying false teeth in a rare grin.

“You ought to have a look in the cathedral,” Morton said. “We have converted it into a museum, where we keep a lot of banned things. How about it, gentlemen, shall we take a turn round our museum, since the day is fine?”

The other two Students, Gavin and Vivian, assenting, the little party made their way across to the east side of the market quad, where the cathedral formed a part of the college.

“Wireless — the radio, don’t you know — is one of the things we do not like in our quiet little gerontocracy,” Morton said. “It could not profit us, and might upset us, to have news of the outside world. Who wishes to learn the death rate in Paris, or the extent of famine in New York? Or even the state of the weather in Ireland?”

“You have a wireless station here, then?” Greybeard asked.

“Well, we have a truck that broadcasts—” he broke off, fiddling with a large key in the cathedral door. Pushing together, he and Vivian got the door open.

They entered together into the gloom of the cathedral.

There, standing close to the door, was their DOUCH(E) truck.

“This truck belongs to me!” Greybeard exclaimed, running forward, and pressing his gloved hands over the bonnet. He and Martha stared at it in a sort of amazed ecstasy.

“Forgive me, but it is not yours,” Morton said. “It is a possession of the Students of this House.”

“They’ve done no damage to it,” Martha said, her cheeks flushed, as Greybeard opened the driver’s door and looked in. “Oh, Algy, doesn’t this take you back! I never thought to see it again! How did it get here?”

“Looks as if some of the tapes on which we recorded have gone. But the film’s all here, filed as we left it! Remember how we hurtled across Littlemore Bridge in this bus? We must have been mad in those days. What a world ago it all is! Jeff Pitt will be interested.” He turned to Norman Morton and the other Students. “Gentlemen, this truck was issued to me as a solemn obligation by a group whose motives would immediately win your sympathy — a study group. I was forced to exchange it for food at a time when we and the rest of Sparcot were starving. I must ask you to be good enough to return it to me for my further use.”

The Students raised eyebrows and exchanged looks.

“Let us go through to my rooms,” Morton said. “There perhaps we can discuss the matter, and draw up agreements if need be. You understand there is no question of your receiving the truck as a gift?”

“Quite so. I am asking for its return as my right, Mr. Morton.”

Martha squeezed Greybeard’s arm as they made their way out of the cathedral and locked the door. “Try to be tactful, darling,” she whispered.

As they walked along, Gavin said, “You are newcomers here, but you will have observed the guard we keep posted along the walls. The guard is perhaps hardly necessary; certainly it is hardly efficient. But those old men are pensioners; they come here when there is nowhere else for them to go, and we are bound in all charity to take them in. We make them earn their keep by doing guard duty. We are not a charity, you understand; our coffers would not allow us to be; whatever our hearts said. Everyone, Mr. Greybeard, everyone would come here and live at our expense if we let them. No man wishes to labour once he is past his half-century, especially if he has no future generations who may profit by his labours.”

“Precisely so, Gavin,” Vivian agreed, tapping his stick along the worn flags. “We have to make this place pay its way in a manner quite foreign to our predecessors and our founders. Cardinal Wolsey would have died the death… that is why we run the place as a mixture of tavern, auction room, cattle market, and bawdy house. One cannot escape the cash nexus.”

“I get the message,” Greybeard said, as they turned into Morton’s chambers, where the same sharp-nosed fellow they had met on their first day in the college hurriedly put a stopper back in one of his master’s bottles and disappeared into the adjoining rooms. “You expect me to pay for what is mine.”

“Not necessarily,” Morton said, bending before a bright fire and stretching out thin hands towards it. “We could, if the point were conceded that it was your vehicle, charge you a parking fee… A garaging fee, don’t you know. Let me see — the Bursar would have a record somewhere, but we must have kept the vehicle in our luxurious ecclesiastical garage for seven or eight years now… Say a modest fee of three shillings per diem, er… Vivian, you are the mathematician…”

“My head isn’t what it was.”

“As we are aware…”

“It would be a sum of approximately four hundred pounds.”

“That’s absurd!” Greybeard protested. “I could not possibly raise that amount, or anything like it. How did you acquire the vehicle, I would like to know.”

“Your labouring pursuits are telling on you somewhat, Mr. Greybeard,” Morton said. “We raise glasses but never voices in this room. Will you drink?”

Martha stepped forward.

“Mr. Morton, we would be delighted to drink.” She placed a coin on the table. “There is payment for it.”

Morton’s lined face straightened and achieved such a considerable length that his chin was lost inside his coat.

“Madam, a woman’s presence does not automatically make of this room a tavern. Kindly pocket money you are going to need.”

He poked his tongue round his upper gum, smiled sourly, raised his glass, and said, in a more reasonable voice than he had used before, “Mr. Greybeard, it was in this manner that the vehicle in which you are so interested came into our possession. It was driven here by an aged hawker. As friend Gavin will remember, this hawker boasted one eye and multitudinous lice. He thought he was dying. So did we. We had him taken in, and looked after him. He lingered through the winter — which was something a good many stronger men failed to do — and recovered after a fashion in the spring. He had a species of palsy and was unfit even for guard duty. To pay for his keep, he handed over his truck. Since it was worthless to us, he got good value for his money. He died after a drinking bout some months ago, cursing — as I heard the story — his benefactors.”

Moodily, Greybeard swigged his wine.

“If the truck is valueless to you, why not simply give it to me?”

“Because it is one of our assets, we hope an asset about to be realized. Suppose the garaging dues to be roughly as Vivian has estimated, four hundred pounds; we would let you take it away for two hundred pounds. How’s that?”

“But I’m broke! It would take me… you know how little I earn with Joe Flitch… It would take me four years to put that amount by.”

“We could allow you reduced garage rates for the period, could we not, Gavin?”

“If the Bursar were agreeable we might, yes.”

“Precisely. Say a shilling a day for four years… Vivian?”

“My head is not what it was. An additional seventy-five pounds, do I make it?”

Greybeard broke into an account of DOUCH(E)’s activities. He explained how often he had reproached himself for letting the truck go to the hawker, although the exchange had saved half Sparcot from starving. The Students remained unmoved; Vivian, in fact, pointed out that since the vehicle was so valuable, and since he had not clearly established his ownership, they really ought to sell it to him for a thousand pounds. So the discussion closed, with the college men firm in their demand for money.

Next day, Greybeard went to see the venerable Bursar, and signed an agreement to pay him so much every week, until the garage fee was settled.

He sat in their room that night in a gloomy mood. Neither Martha nor Charley, who had come round with Isaac to see them, could raise his spirits.

“If everything goes well, it will take us all but five years to clear the debt,” he said. “Still, I do feel honour bound to clear it. You see how I feel, don’t you, Martha? I took on the DOUCH job for life, and I’m going to honour my obligations — when a man has nothing, what else can he do? Besides, when the truck is ours again, we can get the radio working and we may be able to raise other trucks. We can learn what has been happening all over the world. I care about what’s going on, if the old fools who rule this place don’t. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could get in touch with old Jack Pilbeam in Washington?”

“If you really feel that way, Algy,” Martha said, “I’m sure five years will soon go.”

He looked her in the eye.

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” he said.

The days yielded one to another. The months went by. Winter gave way to spring, and spring to summer. The summer gave way to another winter, and that winter to a second summer. The Earth renewed itself; only men grew older and were not replenished. The trees grew taller, the rookeries noisier, the graveyards fuller, the streets more silent. Greybeard embarked upon the Meadow Lake in most weathers, drawing the swathes of green reed into his boat, taking each day as it came, not fretting that a time would soon come when people would no longer have the energy to thatch or want thatch.

Martha worked on among the animals, helping Norman Morton’s assistant, the gnarled and arthritic Thorne. The work was interesting. Most mammals were now bringing forth normal young, though the cows, of which they possessed only a small herd, still threw miscarriages as often as not. As healthy beasts were reared, they were auctioned in the quad market alive, or slaughtered and sold as meat.

To Martha it seemed that a kind of eclipse overtook Greybeard’s spirit. When he came back from Joe Flitch’s in the evening, he rarely had much to say, though he listened with interest to her store of gossip about the college, acquired through Thorne. They saw less of Charley Samuels, and very little of Jeff Pitt. At the same time, they were slow to make new friends. Their putative friendship with Morton and the other Students withered directly the financial deal was struck.

Martha let this altered situation make no difference to her relationship with her husband. They had known each other too long, and through too many stresses. To strengthen her purpose, she thought of their love as the lake on which Algy laboured day in, day out; the surface mirrored every change of weather, but below was a deep undisturbed place. Because of this, she let the days run away and kept her heart open.

She returned to their rooms — they had moved to better rooms on the first floor in Peck — one golden summer evening, to find her husband there before her. He had washed his hands and freshly combed his beard.

They kissed each other.

“Joe Flitch is having a row with his wife. He sent me home early so that he could get on with it in peace, so he said. And there’s another reason why I’m back — it’s my birthday.”

“Oh, darling, and I’ve forgotten! I hardly ever think of the date — just the day of the week.”

“It’s June the seventh, and I am fifty-six, and you look as beautiful as ever.”

“And you’re the youngest man in the world!”

“Still? And still the handsomest?”

“Mmm, yes, though that’s a very subjective judgement. How shall we celebrate? Are you going to take me to bed?”

“For a change, I’m not. I thought you’d like a little sail in the dinghy, as the evening’s fine.”

“Darling, haven’t you had enough of that dinghy, bless you? Yes, I’d love to have a sail, if you want to.”

He stroked her hair and looked down at her dear lined face. Then he opened his left hand and showed her the bag of money there. She stared questioningly at him.

“Where did you get it, Algy?”

“Martha, I’ve done my last day’s reed-cutting. I’ve been mad this last year and a half, just slaving my life away. And what for? To earn enough money to buy that bloody obsolete truck stuck in the cathedral.” His voice broke. “I’ve expected so much of you… I’m sorry, Martha, I don’t know why I did it — or why you didn’t hit me for it, but now I’ve forgotten the crazy idea — I’ve withdrawn my money from the Bursar, the best part of two year’s savings. We’re free to go, to leave this dump altogether!”

“Oh, Algy, you… Algy, I’ve been happy here. You know I’ve been happy — we’ve been happy, we’ve been quiet together. This is home.”

“Well, now we’re going to move on. We’re still young, aren’t we, Martha? Tell me we’re still young! Let’s not rot here. Let’s complete our old plan and sail down the river and go on until we get to its mouth and the clean sea. You would like to, wouldn’t you? You can, can’t you?”

She looked beyond him, through the dazzling light at the window to the roofs of the stables visible beyond, and the blue evening sky above the roofs. At last in a grave voice she said, “This is the dream in your heart, Algy, isn’t it?”

“Oh, my love, you know it is, and you will like it too. This place is like — oh, some sort of a materialist trap. There will be other communities by the sea which we can join. It will be all different there… Don’t weep, Martha, don’t weep, my creature!”

It was almost dusk before their possessions were packed and they slipped through the tall college gateway for the last time, heading back down the hill towards the boat and the river and the unknown.