Greybeard

by Brian W Aldiss

  “I heard them speak of it in Oxford,” Charley said. “They say it’s still spreading, but there are fewer folk to chart it now.”

  Pitt wore two old jackets and a pair of trousers. He felt in one of the pockets of the inner jacket and produced a square of paper, which he unfolded and handed to Greybeard. Greybeard recognized the paper; it was one of the broadsheets distributed during the last exhibition of the Balliol children. On its back, a map was drawn in ink.

  “It shows you what this region’s like now, according to these pals of mine, who explored most of it,” Pitt said. “Can you understand it?”

  “It’s a good map, Jeff. Although there are names missing here, it’s easy to identify the old features. Barks must be a corruption of the old Berkshire.”

  Martha and Charley peered at the map with him. Marked on the southern tip of the Sea of Barks was Goring. There, on either side of the old river, two ranges of hills, the Chilterns and the Berkshire Downs, met. The river had become blocked at that point and, rising, had flooded all the land north of it, where a sort of triangular trough was formed between the two ridges of hills and the Cotswolds.

  Charley nodded. “Although it’s far from being a sea, it’s easily twenty miles across from east to west, and perhaps fifteen the other way. Plenty of room to get lost on it.”

  Martha traced the edge of the so-called sea with a finger and said, “A lot of towns must have been submerged in it, Abingdon and Wallingford among them. This makes Meadow Lake appear a mere pond! If the water level is still rising, I suppose in time the two stretches of water will meet, and then Oxford itself will sink.”

  “Don’t things change fast when they’re under God’s care rather than man’s,” Charley said. “I’ve been reckoning up. It must be about fourteen years since I arrived at Sparcot, and before then the country was getting a bit run-down and tatty — but now it’s a different country altogether.”

  “Now it’s only us that’s getting tattier,” Pitt said. “The land’s never looked better. I wish I were younger again, Charley, don’t you? Both of us young rips of eighteen, say, with a couple of nice young bits of stuff to keep us company! I’d see I had a better life than the one I have had.”

  As Pitt expected, Charley would not agree to the young bits of stuff. “I wish I had my sisters with us, Jeff. They’d be happier in this place than they were, poor things. We’ve lived through desperate times! Now you can’t call this England anymore — it’s reverted to God. It’s His country now, and it’s the better for it.”

  “Nice of Him to put up with us,” Pitt said sarcastically. “Though He won’t have to do that much longer, will He?”

  “It’s terribly anthropocentric of me, but I can’t help feeling He’ll find it the slightest bit dull when we’ve all gone,” Martha said.

  They moved off after their meal. As they had done a couple of years before, they all travelled in the dinghy and towed Pitt’s boat. The wind was hardly strong enough to move them over the silent waters.

  They had been travelling only a brief while before they saw in the hazy distance the spires and roofs of a half-drowned town. The church steeple stood out cleanly, but most of the roofs were concealed by plants that had taken root in their blocked gutters. This vegetation would presumably be an important factor in causing the buildings to slide beneath the surface. For a while the steeple would remain; then the slow crumbling of its foundations would cause it too to disappear, and the finger of man would no longer be evident on the scene.

  Pitt hung over the side of the dinghy, and peered into the “sea.”

  “I was wondering what happened to the people that used to live down there,” he said uneasily, “and wondering if they might perhaps still be carrying on their life under the water, but I don’t see any of them looking up at us.”

  “Here, Jeff, that reminds me,” Charley said. “What with you arriving, it went clean out my mind, but you know you used to reckon there was goblins in the woods.”

  “Goblins and gnomes,” said Pitt, regarding him unblinkingly. “What of it? Have you been seeing them too, a religious man like you, Charley?”

  “I saw something.” Charley turned to Greybeard. “It was first thing this morning, when I was going to see if there was anything in our snares. As I knelt over one of them, I looked up, and there were three faces staring at me through the bushes.”

  “Ah, I told you — gnomes without a doubt! I seen ’em. What did they do?” Pitt asked.

  “Fortunately, they were across a little brook from me and couldn’t get at me. And I stuck my hand out and made the sign of the cross at them and they disappeared.”

  “You ought to have loosed an arrow at them — they’d have gone faster,” Pitt said. “Or p’raps they thought you were going to give ’em a sermon.”

  “Charley, you can’t believe they really were gnomes,” Greybeard said. “Gnomes were things we used to read about as children, in fairy tales. They didn’t really exist.”

  “P’raps they come back like the polecat,” Jeff Pitt said. “Those books were only telling you what used to be in the times before men grew so civilized.”

  “You’re sure these weren’t children?” Greybeard demanded.

  “Oh, they weren’t children, though they were small like children. But they’d got — well, it was difficult to see, but they seemed to have muzzles like old Isaac’s, and cat’s ears, and fur on their heads, though I thought they had hands like us.”

  There was silence in the boat.

  Martha said, “Old Thorne, with whom I worked in Christ Church, was a learned man, though a bit soft in the head. He used to claim that as man was dying off, a new thing was coming up to take his place.”

  “A Scotsman, perhaps!” Greybeard said, laughing, recalling how Towin and Becky Thomas had believed that the Scots would invade from the north.

  “Thorne was vague as to what this new thing would be, though he said it might look like a shark with the legs of a tiger. He said there would be hundreds of it, and it would be very grateful to its creator as it moved in and discovered all the little people provided for its fodder.”

  “We’ve got enough trouble from our own Creator without worrying about rival ones,” Pitt said.

  “That’s blasphemy,” Charley said. “You’re getting too old to talk like that, Jeff Pitt. Anyhow, if there was a thing like that, I should think it would prefer to eat duck to us lot. Look at us!”

  That evening, they took care to select a site for the night where they would not be too easily taken by surprise.

  Next day saw them sailing south, rowing when the freshets failed. The wooded hills that had been visible all the previous day sank slowly out of sight, and the only landmark was a two-humped island ahead. They made this by late afternoon, when the shadow of the boat hung away to one side, and tied up beside a boat already moored in a crudely made inlet.

  Much of this land bore signs of cultivation, while farther up the slopes they saw poultry and ducks confined in runs. Some old ladies who had been standing among the poultry came down to the water to inspect the new arrivals, told them this was called Wittenham Island, and grudgingly agreed that they could stay where they were for the night if they made no trouble. Most of the women had tame otters with them, which they said they had trained to catch fish and fowl for them.

  They became slightly more friendly when they realized that Greybeard’s party had only peaceful intentions, and proved eager to gossip. It soon emerged that they were a religious community, believing in a Master who appeared among them occasionally and preached of a Second Generation. They would have tried to make converts had not Martha tactfully changed the subject by asking how long they had lived on the island.

  One woman told Martha that they came from a town called Dorchester, retreating to these hills with their menfolk when their homes and land were besieged by the rising waters some seven years earlier. Now their old home lay completely under the Sea of Barks.

  Much of what this old
woman had to say was difficult to understand. It was as if the mist that spread over the water at this season had also spread between human comprehensions; but it was not hard to understand that small groups cut off from their neighbours should increasingly develop an accent and a vocabulary peculiar to themselves. What was surprising was the rate at which this process operated.

  Martha and Greybeard discussed the phenomenon when they were between their blankets that night.

  “Do you remember that old fellow we met on our way to Oxford, the one that you said had a badger for a wife?” Martha asked.

  “It’s a long time ago. Can’t say I do.”

  “I remember we slept in a barn with him and his reindeer. Whatever his name was, he was getting treatment from that weird man at that fair — oh, my memory!”

  “Bunny Jingadangelow?”

  “That’s it, your friend! The old man talked some nonsense about the years speeding by; he reckoned he was two hundred years old, or some such age. I’ve been thinking about him lately, and at last beginning to understand how he felt. There’s been so much change, Algy, I begin to wonder quite seriously if we haven’t been living for centuries.”

  “It’s a change in pace. We were born into a fevered civilization; now there’s no civilization left, and the pace has slowed.”

  “Longevity’s an illusion?”

  “Man’s the thing that’s stopped, not death. Everything else but us — the whole bag of tricks — goes on unabated. Now let’s get to sleep, sweet. I’m tired after the rowing.”

  After a moment she said, “I suppose it’s not having any children. I don’t mean just not having them myself, but not seeing any around me. It makes a life terribly bare...and terribly long.”

  Greybeard sat up angrily.

  “For God’s sake, woman, shut up about not having kids. I know we can’t have kids — we’re too old for it anyhow, by now. It’s the cardinal fact of my life as much as it is yours, but you don’t have to go on about it!”

  “I don’t go on about it, Algy! I doubt if I mention it once a year.”

  “You do mention it once a year. It’s always about this time, late summer, when the wheat’s ripening. I wait for you to say something.”

  In a moment he had repented his anger, and took Martha in his arms.

  “I didn’t mean to snap,” he said. “Sometimes I’m scared at my own thoughts. I wonder if perhaps the dearth of children hasn’t caused a madness we don’t identify because it’s unclassified. Is it possible to be sane in a world where only your own senility greets you on every side?”

  “Darling, you’re young yet, young and strong. We still have many years together.”

  “No, but you see what I mean: you should be able to renew your youth in the generation that follows yours. In your thirties your Sons keep you nimble and laughing. In your forties they keep you worried and attached to the world. In your fifties you may have grandchildren to play with. You can live till your grandchildren come along to see your creaking smiles and your card tricks... They replenish you. If everyone’s cut off from all that — who’s to wonder if time goes wrong, or if poor old Charley gets some crazy idea about seeing gnomes?”

  “Perhaps a woman looks at it differently. What I regret most is the reservoir of something in me — love, I suppose — that I sense has never found its object.”

  He stroked her hair tenderly and answered, “You’re the most loving person who has ever lived. Now, do you mind if I go to sleep?”

  But it was Martha who slept. Greybeard lay there for a while, listening to the distant sounds of night-feeding birds. Restlessness took him. He pulled the end of his beard gently from under Martha’s shoulder, slipped his shoes on, unlatched the tent flap, and climbed stiffly outside. His back was not so flexible these days.

  Because of its impenetrability, the night seemed more stifling than it was. He could not explain his unease. He seemed to hear the sound of an engine — he could only visualize the steamer that his mother had taken him on from Westminster Pier in his early childhood, before his father had died. But that was impossible. He indulged himself by thinking about the past and about his mother. It was wonderful how vivid some of the memories seemed. He wondered if his mother’s life — she must have been born — so long ago! — in the nineteen-forties — had not been more thoroughly ruined by the Accident than was his own. He could hardly recall the days before the Accident happened, so that he existed only within the context of the Accident and its aftermath, and was adapted to it. But how could a woman adapt? He thought rather owlishly, as if it were a discovery: Women are different.

  The steamer’s engine was heard again; the sound might have been sailing to him across time and probability.

  He went and woke Charley, and they stood together down by the water’s edge, listening.

  “It’s some sort of steamer right enough,” Charley said. “After all, why not? There must still be supplies of coal lying about here and there.”

  The sound faded. They stood there thinking, waiting, peering at blankness. Nothing else happened. Charley shrugged and went back to bed. After a little while, Greybeard climbed back into his blankets too.

  “What’s the matter, Algy?” Martha asked, wakening.

  “There was a steamer somewhere out on the pond.”

  “We may see it in the morning.”

  “It sounded like the ones Mother used to take me on. Standing there looking out into nothing, I thought how I’ve wasted my life, Martha. I’ve had no faith — “

  “Sweetie, I don’t think this is a good time for an inquest on your life. Daylight in say twenty years’ time would be more suitable.”

  “No, Martha, listen, I know I’m an imaginative and an introspective sort of chap, but — ”

  Her small laugh stopped him. She sat up in bed, yawned, and said, “You are one of the least introspective men I ever knew, and I have always rejoiced that your imagination is so much more prosaic than mine. May you always have such illusions about yourself — it’s a sure sign of youth.”

  He leaned over towards her, feeling for her hand.

  “You’re a funny creature, Martha. Sometimes you make me wonder how much two people can ever know each other, if you know me so little. It’s amazing how you can be so blind when you’ve been such a wonderful companion for thirty years or three hundred years or however long it really is. You’re so admirable in many ways, whereas I’ve been such a flop.”

  She lit the lamp by their bed and said gravely, “At the risk of getting chewed to death by mosquitoes, I must put on a light and look at you. I can’t stomach disembodied miseries. Love, what is this you’re saying about yourself? Let’s have it before we settle down.”

  “You must have seen clearly enough. It is not as if I chose to marry a foolish woman, as some men chose to do. I’ve been a flop all through my life.”

  “Examples?”

  “Well, look at the way I’ve got us more or less lost now. And far bigger things. Like the war. I ought to have refused to go — you know I was morally convinced of its wrongness. But I compromised, and joined the Infantop. Then there was the business of joining DOUCH. You know, Martha, I think that was the slobbiest thing I ever did. Those DOUCH fellows, old Jack and the others, they were dedicated men. I never believed in the project at all.”

  “You’re talking nonsense, Algy. I remember how hard you worked, in Washington and London.”

  He laughed. “Know why I joined? Because they offered to fly you out to Washington to join me! That was it! My interest in DOUCH was purely subsidiary to my interest in you.

  “It’s true I did the job fairly well during the after-war years, when the government collapsed and the United National Government made peace with the enemy. But look at the chance I missed when we were in Cowley. If I hadn’t been so concerned about us, we could have been in on an important bit of history.

  “Instead, we nipped off and vegetated all those dreary years at Sparcot. And what did I do there? W
hy, I flogged the DOUCH truck just because our bellies were a bit empty. And when I might have redeemed myself at Christ Church by retrieving the truck, I just couldn’t bear to stick out another couple of years’ hard work. Hearing that engine throb out there on the pond, I thought of that bloody truck, and how it stands for all I might have been or had.”

  Martha hit at a moth that circled around her face and turned gleamingly to him.

  “People who have been betrayed often see themselves as betrayers. Don’t do that, Algy. You’re thinking rubbish tonight. You’re too big a man to puddle about in silly self-deception. Don’t you see that what you’ve just told me is a potted history of your integrity?”

  “The lack of it, you mean.”

  “No, I don’t. You spent the war first trying to save children, then trying to do something constructive about the future. You married me, when you might have been having the sort of debauches most men of your age were enjoying all over the world. And I suspect you have remained faithful to me ever since. I don’t think that shows any lack of character.

  “As for your feebleness at Cowley, you can go and ask old Jeff what he thinks to that one! You sold the DOUCH(E) truck after infinite painful debate with yourself, and saved the whole community at Sparcot from starving. As for getting it back again, why should you? If there is a future for any humans, they’ll be looking ahead, not back. DOUCH was a great idea when it was conceived in the year two thousand. Now we can see it’s irrelevant.

  “But what’s never been irrelevant to you is other people — me, among others. You’ve always put me first. I’ve seen it; as you say, I’m not a fool. You put me before your job in Washington and in Cowley. Do you think I minded? If more people had put their fellow human beings before abstractions last century, we shouldn’t be where we are now.” She stopped abruptly. “That’s all, I think. End of lecture. Feeling better, Greybeard?”

  He pressed his lips to her veined temple.

  “Darling, I tell you we’re all suffering from some form of madness. After all this time — I’ve discovered yours!”