Matthew cupped his hands round his mouth and called in reply, Tm here I”
His voice echoed round him: “Here … here … here …” diminishing to nothing.
Billy was gasping for breath when he came up with him, and had been sobbing; his face was stained with dirt and the tracks of tears. He looked at Matthew, full of guilt and trust.
Matthew asked him, “What are you doing here, Billy? You followed me. Why?”
“I want to come with you.”
Matthew shook his head. “It’s too far, and a bit too hard. You’d better go back.”
Billy said, “I knew you would go, after youd said you would. And then this morning you went out of the tent, and I saw you had the gun with you, so I knew it was today. I kept as far behind as I could, and then I lost sight of you and I didn’t know what to do. But I went up on the cliffs and watched, and I saw you moving, a long way off. So I ran down and tried to follow you. But I couldn’t tell where I was going, and I got lost. That’s when I yelled out.” He looked guilty again. “I didn’t want to, in case Miller and the others heard, but I was lost.”
Matthew sat down on a ledge of rock, easing the pack from his back, and Billy sat beside him.
Matthew said, “I must go alone, Billy, and you must go back to the camp. They can look after you, and I can’t. You must see that’s sensible.”
“I don’t want to, Mr. Cotter.”
“Who’s going to look after Cobweb if you come away?”
“She belongs to them, anyway. They make her work all the time.”
Matthew pointed to the rucksack. “I’ve got my rations in there. For one, not two.”
“I wouldn’t want to eat much.” He fumbled in the pockets of his jacket and produced a couple of slabs of chocolate, grubby-looking but intact. “I saved these up.”
Matthew looked at him silently. There were so many objections, but none of them, he knew, would convince the boy. The only way was to be stern: to put on an angry face and order him to go back. By the time he reached the camp, it would be too late for Miller to do anything except, perhaps, beat him for not raising the alarm when he saw Matthew going. And he could not get lost on the way back; the island bulked large enough.
All this was sensible. It was impossible to tell what dangers or hardships lay ahead. He had allowed a good margin in food and water and could hope to find more on Alderney; but it was not a chance to risk a boys life on. He had only the clothes he was wearing, a single pair of shoes which the rocks might cut to ribbons before they were halfway across the Channel.
But he knew he could not send him back alone through this scarred and savage landscape.
He said, “All right, Billy. We’ll see how it goes. Perhaps we’ll both turn back, if it gets too difficult.”
7
THERE was cloud in the middle of the day, but in the afternoon the sun came out again, stronger than before. The home islands of the bailiwick were hazy hills behind them, Alderney a shimmering cliff-hung fortress ahead. Matthew was very glad of the company of the boy, of the chatter to which he could reply or not as he fancied. He had still not made up his mind whether they should turn back or not. So far the going had been very good, with long stretches on which they could keep up a fair walking pace. They had only one extensive detour, round a long pool of water hemmed in by jagged weed-encrusted rocks. The water in the pool was very clear and blue, and they saw fish swimming far down; it was at least twenty or thirty feet deep, Matthew calculated.
Since there was no particular urgency, they rested from time to time. Late in the afternoon they halted by a rocky formation which held dozens of small pools, ranging from a foot to ten or twenty yards across. Billy clambered over the reef like any child at the seaside. He would tire himself, Matthew thought, and called to him to come and sit down.
Billy shouted back, “I will, in a minute. But I’ve got …”
“What?”
Billy held it up in triumphant demonstration-a lobster, about nine inches in length, its tail snapping furiously.
“That’s a fine one,” Matthew said, “but you’d better put him back before I start feeling hungry.”
Billy jumped down, his right hand firmly grasping the lobster behind the head.
“That’s what I thought, Mr. Cotter! We could have him for supper.”
“Even then, I don’t think I could tackle raw lobster. And I don’t know any way of cooking it.”
“There’s dry wood.”
This was true: They were still in the area of scatter from the wave that had ripped off the east coast of the island. Within sight at the moment there were bricks, a huge chunk of shaped granite, the hose of a vacuum cleaner, a piece of a kitchen sink, and various bits of wood—a chair back, a smashed window frame, and the twisted frame of a bed. Not very much farther back, hidden fortunately by a crest of rock, there had been two twined and naked bodies which might have been connected with the bed frame; he had not looked at them very closely.
He said, “I didn’t bring any matches. Even if I had done, I doubt if we could have got a fire going. And nothing to cook it in.”
“There’s my glass.”
Feeling awkwardly with his free hand—the arm had knit and the splints and sling had been abandoned, but he still had difficulty with it—Billy brought from his pocket the magnifying glass which Matthew had picked up undamaged in the ruins of the chemist’s shop and brought back to the boy as a kind of toy.
“I could make a fire with this, Mr. Cotter. And can’t we just roast it in the embers? That’s what they do in the South Seas, isn’t it?”
Matthew looked at him with respect. He said, “Billy, the greatest chef in the world that used to be never had a bigger stroke of genius than that.”
Billy looked happy at what he recognized as a compliment. ‘‘What’s the best way of killing him?” he asked. “Can you break his neck, do you think?”
They gathered wood and Matthew broke it up into as convenient pieces as he could. They produced a rough attempt at a field kitchen with a couple of bricks and an outcrop of rock, and piled the wood onto it. Then Billy squatted beside it and focused the sun’s rays through the glass. The light dazzled, pure white against the weathered surface of the wood, and then the spot of brilliance began to smoke. It was a moment of shared excitement. The smoke spread into a whorl and then, with a little quick dance, flame caught and moved hungrily across the wood.
They put the dead lobster in while the fire was still blazing; it hissed and crackled with the heat. As the fire died into embers it was encrusted with ash and looked unappetizing; but the smell was delicious. The embers glowed pale in the last rays of the sun. They waited with anxious greed for them to cool.
Matthew had thought that they would take the lobster with them and eat it cold when they stopped for their evening meal, but it was not humanly possible to resist temptation so long. He broke it open, burning his fingers on the hot shell, and split it down the middle with a knife. They sat side by side and ate it; Matthew had to hold himself back from gobbling the sweet white meat. When they had eaten the body meat, they cracked the claws on the rock and sucked them. Matthew remembered dusk on a summer evening, the window overlooking the harbor thronged with bobbing boats … Thermidor, washed down with Montrachet … or cold, with a delicate mayonnaise, thin brown bread and butter, a bottle of Chablis … The occasions were unreal, the experiences, he was sure, inferior.
They made a few more miles before they halted for the night. Uneasiness, which had retreated during the spreading normality of the day, came back with the evening shadows, which, softening the harsh outlines of the rocks, only emphasized the utter strangeness of the terrain through which they were passing. He stopped while it was still light enough to see the distant hills that were Herm and Jethou and Guernsey, and would have wished himself back there if there had been any point in wishing. When they lay down, in a patch of loose yellow sand still holding a little of the sun’s warmth, he thought he could hear, a
s if listening to a shell, the faraway roar of the ocean, and was afraid again. He should have taken the boy back. In the morning …
They slept close together, and uneasily. There were a couple of minor tremors during the night, and just before daylight the wind freshened. They rose to a gray cloudy dawn, feeling stiff and uncomfortable. Matthew had thought, the night before, that they might be able to cook some sort of breakfast, but one look at the sky was enough to banish the idea. Clouds moved fast and low over it, and he felt a spot or two of rain.
As he opened a tin of corned beef, he said to Billy, “What about it? Shall we turn back?”
“Why, Mr. Cotter?”
“Perhaps this isn’t very sensible. What happens if it rains? We’ve only got one mack between us.”
“I don’t mind rain.” He added, with an almost adult thoughtfulness, “After all, it is summer.”
“We don’t know where we’re going. Or why. Probably be better to go back.”
“We’re nearer Alderney than Guernsey now.” Billy pointed toward the cliffs straddling the northern horizon. “We might as well go that far, at any rate.”
He looked at the boy and laughed. “1 suppose we might. Have you ever been to Alderney?”
“No.”
“Nor have I. We’ll go and see what it’s like. We might find people alive there. If there was a survivor on Sark … There were a lot more living on Alderney.”
They did not see the fault until they were within a mile of the island: It ran southeast and northwest and was not easily apparent from the line on which they were approaching. Matthew saw that the cliffs were torn by a jagged cleft and that the cleft ran away from them, a huge rip in the seabed. As they got nearer, he could see that the same chasm ran inland, splitting the island, which, behind the seeming security of the southern heights, was riven in two unequal parts. He had been hopeful of finding someone alive because Alderney, like Sark, was a raised plateau—St. Anne would not have been swept away by the wave as St. Peter Port had been. But now, seeing the island torn in two, the hope went. It was difficult to imagine that any living thing could have survived the violence as the earth heaved and divided itself.
Nevertheless, having come so far, he felt that he had to make sure. They climbed the slope of the harbor bed—built in the flush of Victorian power to house the Grand Fleet—and went on up the hill. The rubble seemed to be even more finely pulverized than that which he had seen in Guernsey, but perhaps the impression was derived from the yawning gap to the north. It was as though a gigantic meat ax had slammed down across the island; the eye shuddered from it but continually returned. It would have looked better, he thought, if the sea had still been there. The waves would have covered the raw nakedness of the lower part of the cleft.
They hunted around the larger half of the divided island, and went to the edge of the ravine and stared across to the north, but there was no sign nor sound of humanity. They saw one dog—a yellow cur which barked and ran off—and quite a number of rabbits. Otherwise there was only death—the gleam of bones through rotted flesh, the residual stench, all the features of that horrors head which they knew so well. But they had one stroke of good fortune: They found a store of tinned foods that barely required digging for—some of the tins were actually at the surface. It was an oddly luxurious selection, including truffled pat6, artichoke hearts, sliced smoked salmon, and turkey and pheasant in exotic wine sauces.
While the sun shone briefly in the late afternoon, Billy managed to get a fire going. They found plenty of wood and built up quite a blaze. It would attract attention, Matthew said, if there were anyone alive on the island, but he was sure there could not be. Nevertheless, it was comforting to see the fire burning fiercely, smoke streaming away in the still-strong wind. He punched holes in the top of the tin of turkey and set it upright in a low part of the fire. Juice bubbled out of the holes, hissed over the depressed top of the tin, ran steaming down the sides. The smell mingled with the smell of wood-smoke. Idly, in the temporary comfort and pleasure of it, Matthew opened a small tin which had lost its label. It was in a class with the others: smoked quails in some kind of oil. The two small carcasses were pale and naked-looking. He had a sudden wave of nausea as he stared at them. Billy was busy with something on the other side of the fire. He threw the tin away from him, as far as he could down the slope. With hopeless misery, he drought, If only death could put on its disguise again.
They slept better for the security of height, the awareness of being away from the seabed. In the morning the wind was blustery, but there was sunshine as well as cloud. Matthew found a stream at which they washed—Billy perfunctorily but Matthew himself more thoroughly. Billy wandered away during this, and disappeared. Matthew was not worried. There was no danger here, and scarcely enough room for anyone to get lost. He dried himself partly on a small towel he carried in the pack and let the sun and wind do the rest. After that he put on his clothes and walked up the hill to the place where they had camped.
Billy came toward him, brandishing a black leather bag. It was a bicycle saddle bag. He said, “Look what I found, Mr. Cotter! It will do for me carrying things, wont it?”
“On your back? You’d need a harness as well.”
“I found these, too.” He held up a pair of braces. They looked as though they had been expensive: broad silk elastic, midnight-blue with a scarlet motif, the heavy clips having the dull sheen of what might be gold plate. “I thought we could make something out of them.”
“It probably isn’t worth it, if we’re going back. I can carry more than enough food.”
“Are we going back?” There was disappointment in the boy’s face. “Do we have to?”
“You’d rather go on?”
“Oh, yes!”
For the boy’s sake, he ought to go back. To the south, less than two days’ journey, lay the safety and comparative security of Miller’s little band. To the north all was unknown—sixty miles of seabed to cross even on the most direct route, and with no knowing what obstacles or forced detours might present themselves. There could well be other faults like the one which had shattered Alderney; perhaps bigger. And he hadn’t even got a compass. He would have to rely on the sun for his direction. What would happen if there were days, a whole week, of heavy cloud?
The idea, he saw, was foolhardy—now that he had the boy with him, irresponsible. It had been inspired by a wild hope, and he had thought—seeing the fantastic destruction here— that the hope was dead. He had been prepared, he thought, to go back, to live out his life with the few others who had survived on Guernsey. But the hope was not dead, and nothing else mattered beside it. He looked at the boy: nothing, and nobody.
“Well,” he said, “we’d better see about getting ourselves organized.”
8
THEY set out again late in the morning. Matthew had replenished the water from a stream well away from any of the polluted ruins; there might be contamination in the spring itself below ground, but that had been true in Guernsey, too, and no harm seemed to have come. He had rigged up a harness for Billy’s haversack and filled it with tinned food, and also filled up the spaces in his own. They walked off through grass that stood high and luxuriant and wasted; it was more than ready for the first cutting of the summer.
For some time they were forced to follow the cleft on its southern bank. It was forty or fifty feet deep, the sides precipitous. They were walking parallel with the line, eight miles away, of the French coast. After about an hour, though, they came to a place where the cleft, going through sand and mud, had fallen in on itself. They were able to scramble down and, with a good deal of sliding back, to clamber up the opposite side and set their course for the north. There was still a strong breeze, but it was a help now. The sky was almost cloudless, and without the wind it would have been too hot for comfort.
The strangeness of the landscape wore off more quickly this time, and Matthew became increasingly conscious of its monotony. Rock, sand and drying stretches
of mud alternated with patches of water. On the whole, the ground sloped down toward the north, but here and there they had to climb. There were reefs and individual rocks which rose quite high, one so tall that he thought its tip must have been above water in the old days. The sun moved down the sky, and he kept it behind his left shoulder. They were making at least a couple of miles an hour, he thought, perhaps more.
The first wreck they encountered provided a corrective shock. Billy glimpsed it first, away on their right, and they altered course to look at it. It was the drowned hulk of a cargo boat, or rather most of it. It lay on its side, decks pointing west, encrusted with weed and barnacles. It had not been a very big ship—less than a thousand tons—and Matthew judged that it must have been under water ten years at least, and possibly a good deal more. Around the stem there had been lettering, but RO was all that could be made out now. Matthew felt the fear he had felt earlier, the awareness of hostility and somehow of menace. They were in the deeps of the country whose horror touched all seafaring peoples: the land of drowned sailors. Billy did not seem affected by it. He raced round the wreck, peering at it from all angles, and wanted to climb up on it. Matthew told him no, and he came away reluctantly.
“There’s nothing there but rust and rotting weed, Billy,” he told him. “And we don’t want to waste any time. We ought to get on.”
There was no material for making a fire, so they carried on until the stars were beginning to come out before stopping for the night. Matthew had made sure the boy rested at intervals, but all the same he was dog-tired. They opened tins of Spam and ate them, and Matthew had a wave of hunger for starches. His stomach was full, but his appetite still clamant. Billy broke a few squares off his bar of chocolate, and offered Matthew them.
He hesitated, and said, ‘Til take one, Billy. You eat the rest.”
A Wrinkle in the Skin Page 9
