The double-edged compliment was quite lost on Pezulu, as she was sure it would be, and he continued complacently:
‘Well, it did show my organisation was sound. I had two men just behind her …’
‘A woman? How could she? What was she like?’
‘Fine looking creature in her way. Good legs, too! My agents whipped her out of the crowd the moment she had fired …’
‘Couldn’t they have done it the moment before?’
‘That’s too much to expect of security men, Miss Thea. They must have eyes everywhere, you see.’
‘What will be done with her, my father?’
‘Just deported to Africa for correction. The fanatics are very few and we must avoid turning them into martyrs.’
‘The masses are all with us, but they daren’t say so,’ Pezulu added.
‘And they know that the economic position of a self-governing Britain would be impossible.’
Parrot talk? Theodosia was about to say that no excitable populace had ever given two hoots for its economic position, when Julian Cola entered and confirmed it for her.
‘The result of the special session of the Town Assembly is through, sir.’
‘Thank you, Julian. We’ll send them the usual kind message this evening.’
‘I’m afraid the left wing carried an amendment against the Executive.’
‘That’s what left wings are for, dear Julian. What was the final motion?’
‘That this House repudiates the use of violence in the pursuit of self-government, while solemnly warning the Federation that its policy must inevitably result in violence.’
‘So now at last we know!’ Pezulu said, putting on his hat at its most dashing angle. ‘State of Readiness, sir?’
‘No! Not yet!’ The High Commissioner hesitated and then more firmly repeated: ‘Not yet! Julian, you will accompany the Chief of Police as my personal representative and report directly to me.’
When they had left, Theodosia tried to reassure her father. She knew only too well how he resented his own images of himself: both the strong man and the too tolerant.
‘If you couldn’t prevent it, nobody could.’
‘Whatever those damned policemen say, I won’t believe that if we treat the immigrants graciously they will not be gracious. Perhaps that is a sort of tyranny – to force affection on them.’
‘Because they are already in love.’
‘What on earth do you mean, Thea?’
‘It’s hard to put into words. They love Britain just as if it were a person.’
‘But Units can’t love a country. They can feel a cordial respect for a government or system, but not for a slab of geography.’
‘What do you feel about our villa in Agadir?’
‘I love it.’
‘Well, there you are!’
‘But that’s a very small individual possession like Pezulu’s hat.’
‘I can’t help it – that’s what they feel for their island. All that stuff about chancellors and cricket dances and Nelson is because they have to back up love with legend.’
‘You ethnologists dig up the most far-fetched theories.’
‘Because we do dig, darling. I’m learning a lot from the natives.’
‘The natives and the new immigrants have nothing whatever in common, Thea.’
‘Mists. Slow rivers. The anthology.’
‘I do wish your mother had not gone back to Africa. But that asthma of hers …’
‘Humphrey says she didn’t wrap up properly.’
‘What barbarous names they have!’
‘Humphrey of Middlesex – it’s no more comic than Tito Pezulu when one gets used to it.’
She noticed herself lingering over the name. Well, why not? You couldn’t do research into a primaeval culture without perceiving and perhaps exaggerating the strange components of its charm. It was perhaps the silent world of the forest which had been disturbing her, certainly not Humphrey. The fellow was a magnificent physical specimen but he had probably never had a hot bath in all his life. About this remnant of Britons there was something unchanging – or which defied change – entirely due to the millennium of isolation. It was impossible to contrast life as it was before the Age of Destruction with the Federal life of today, and ask the question: what of any value had been preserved? A pointless question. The abolition of the nation state and its venomous patriotism had saved humanity from death after death and the real threat of extinction as suffered by so many of man’s fellow animals.
‘Does this Humphrey of yours love Britain in the way you tried to explain?’ Pretorius asked.
‘He doesn’t talk about it.’
‘What the devil does it matter to Silvia Brown where she lives? Industrial estates are the same everywhere.’
‘She can watch the waves of the wind across the emptiness between Thames and Severn.’
‘Thea, I really cannot pick up a slice of landscape and shove it in Silvia Brown’s bed.’
‘The only times you are ever coarse, father, is when you don’t want to understand.’
‘Blah! You’ve heard your mother say that.’
In the High Commissioner’s pocket his personal receiver chirped discreetly, and he put on the headphones. Julian Cola appeared to be reporting. Thea could only hear her father’s replies.
‘No, no violence! My orders are to be strictly obeyed … Yes, I understand perfectly … Let them talk themselves out and then shepherd them back to their estates. No arrests! … Very well then, if you want me to see for myself relay the police cameras to my screen!’
Pretorius pushed papers to one side as the smooth top of his desk lit up and the calm shrine of sovereignty was profaned by the harsh roaring of the horde.
‘The police are nervous,’ Thea observed.
‘I wish I could see Tito with them. He has his points at a near riot like this. Their pink and grey faces – how unpleasant they are in the mass!’ Pretorius exclaimed.
‘I like them when they are happy.’
‘So do I – officially.’
The crowd shifted, eddying around a loud-speaker, and the roar gave place to muttering and cheering, followed by appeals for silence. A voice, clear in its cold anger, spoke from some unknown retreat.
‘What do we get for good behaviour? What will they give their slaves for keeping quiet? Self-government when we are dead. Perhaps. Self-government when our children are dead. Only perhaps! But I say – NOW. Are you afraid of the Federation? Are you afraid? A hundred thousand of us against five hundred police and a gutless, idle garrison! Yes, we can deal with them, but what about the whole force of Euro-Africa? Well, what about it? Think! They will have to recruit men to shoot you down, to train the poor fools, transport them, drive them into the forest where we and our native brothers will wait for them in the darkness of the trees. I tell you that by the time one tenth of us have given our lives, the rest will have freedom because it is too much trouble to give them anything less.’
‘Do you see much of your love in that?’ Pretorius demanded bitterly above the roar of applause. ‘I know that voice. A fellow calling himself Smith. The police tell me they can’t identify him.’
A voice started the proscribed song, ‘Landa Fope’, instantly taken up by the crowd.
‘That song is punishable by immediate transportation to Africa. They know it and they don’t care.’
‘And they don’t understand half of it,’ Thea added with disgust. ‘It’s such garbled old English. And then there’s some nonsense about “Glory”. A colleague of mine believes it’s a sort of portmanteau word meaning to kill twice as many enemies as the number of your own men lost.’
‘Damn what it means, Thea! This is serious.’
Seeing the agony which he was trying to suppress, she reached out and caught his hand.
‘It shouldn’t matter,’ she said, trying to comfort him. ‘It shouldn’t.’
‘Then what does? To you futile scientists, what does?’
>
‘Truth.’
‘Truth is a thing of ink and paper.’
‘And of the trained observer in the field.’
‘The forest. Yes. After what we’ve heard I’d rather you didn’t go there, Thea.’
‘What worries you?’
‘Mounds. Those mounds of dead cities. I hate to think of oak roots underground groping to form a roof over what has no roof. And are those primitive natives so content and peaceful?’
‘They have charming manners. You would feel at home with them.’
‘Perhaps. But my world is this. My world is duty. I’ve no use for a people waiting for something in the dusk without knowing what it is or if it is. What do their manners hide, Thea?’
Chapter III
Thea was impressed as never before by the isolation of the native British, originally due to the official myth that their wilderness was radioactive: a myth cherished by both parties though no longer believed by either. She tried to assure herself that flying over blank forest on a compass course to the invisible was no more alarming than flying over the sea. The sea, too, was full of life and never a sign of it. Here, except for the darting wisps of birds, only vegetable life seemed to exist, sometimes as a lagoon of low, utterly impenetrable growth, sometimes as waves and domes of tree tops beneath which must be the two- and four-legged creatures she had come to visit.
The rare visitors from the Federation – historians, archaeologists, philologists – were usually met at the edge of the trees by their reluctant hosts, or might be permitted, if in possession of a formidable sheaf of licences, to divert one of the bantam aircraft normally used to carry mail or a distinguished passenger up from the port. It was one of these little bantams that Thea had taken, flown by the High Commissioner’s personal pilot. Accustomed only to the well-marked flight path to and from the coast, he was looking anxiously around him for the narrow strip of the Middlesex landing ground, to be distinguished by stiffened red flags in the tree tops and nothing else. To Thea’s relief, at last the red flags showed up against the unending green. The pilot, underestimating the length of runway, sneaked in under the great yardarm of a giant beech rather than over it. As soon as he saw Thea safely received at the end of the grass, he turned thankfully and took off like a frightened pigeon from a trap.
Humphrey and a groom were waiting with a light high-wheeled cart drawn by a pair of horned animals. The two were dressed alike in leather breeches and heavy smocks of home-spun wool with irregular patterns of green and brown. This was an unfamiliar Humphrey, for when he left the trees for Avebury he wore the plastic tunic and trousers of the ordinary immigrant, disliking, he said, to look conspicuous. He was bareheaded except for a narrow gold circlet with a small badge on the front representing an owl within a wreath of leaves, and could not be mistaken for anything but a great chieftain fully conscious of his archaic world and its relationship with the Federation.
He fussed protectively over his somewhat nervous visitor, ensuring her comfort and safety on the front seat beside him. The groom handed him the reins and jumped in the back as he drove away.
‘I never knew that horses could have horns,’ she said. ‘They don’t show in the pictures of them.’
‘Oh, these aren’t horses, Miss Pretorius. They are racing bullocks. Much cleverer than horses in rough country. They know where to put their feet.’
Evidently the track was newly made. By its sides were the felled trees and the stacks of grass and undergrowth cleared by the scythes. Sometimes it dipped into short, steep valleys; sometimes made complicated circuits through a labyrinth of shapeless mounds and little hills, covered by elder and thorn.
‘I thought the land under the trees was flat,’ she said.
‘It is to the north and east. But this was London.’
In her expeditions she had seen many relics of the Age of Destruction, but this grave of a great city had a sinister peace all of its own. The rainfall and fertility of Britain had shrouded the land with forest, whereas in the drier plains of the continent walls and pinnacles still stuck up from the ground like the half-buried bones of a skeleton.
The sudden noise of an animal alarmed her. So far as instinct allowed any opinion the cry was not that of a startled or ferocious creature, but neutral like the bark of a dog which could be welcoming or aggressive.
‘A horse neighing,’ Humphrey explained. ‘We’re nearly home.’
‘Shall I be able to speak with your family? My Old English is not very fluent.’
‘Of course. We all speak Federal. Old English is taught in the schools, but we use it only for ceremonies, festivals and incantations.’
Schools? A first example of the remarkable tribal culture. While the immigrants were attempting to revive an extinct language in the name of patriotism, speaking it badly and with a horrible accent, the forest tribes saw no object whatever in using such an inferior means of communication. Yet she found in herself a vague wish to defend the wretched efforts of immigrants from North Africa, whatever their motives, to recover something of their history and language.
‘They have some bits of lost chronicles which they love and treasure,’ she said.
‘Do they? Well, if we are ever closer than now they can read the originals. We have an immense store of manuscripts copied and recopied.’
‘Do you know what the word “Glory” means? They have a prohibited song about it called “Landa Fope”.’
‘It’s hard to define, Miss Pretorius. We speak of the Glory of the Purpose. My brother George can explain that to you better than I. Here we are!’ he added, pulling up the steaming bullocks in a flagged courtyard.
They walked in silence over the grass down an avenue of magnificent trees of which one rank suddenly opened to reveal a jumble of the red roofs of low, barn-like buildings surrounding a garden on three sides. In the centre were a sunlit pool and a fountain. On the parapet sat a lady in the flower of her age wearing a sack-like woollen garment and working the treadle of a spinning wheel with resolute energy.
Close to her, kneeling on the ground, was a fine-looking man in his middle twenties, resembling Humphrey but without his elegance. His face was burnt red by sun and wind, his fair hair needed a wash, and he was dressed in scruffy working clothes. In his hand he held a human leg bone, and was busy wiring the ankle to the shin.
Thea examined the pair of them with the delight of an ethnologist who has the luck to catch natives unawares.
‘This is my mother, the Dowager of Middlesex,’ Humphrey announced. ‘Mamma, Miss Theodosia Pretorius, daughter of the High Commissioner.’
The Dowager got off the parapet, gave a heave to her shapeless skirt and swept an impressive court curtsey. Theodosia bowed, extended an uncertain hand and found it grasped in a hearty shake.
‘And this is my brother, George.’
George put down the gruesome leg bone and greeted her like a courteous old friend. Evidently he had no use for traditional etiquette. His eyes were shamelessly admiring.
‘Nothing mass-produced about this one, Humphrey,’ he said. ‘We’ll make sure she enjoys her researches.’
The Dowager interrupted mutual compliments to yell for Guelph, who promptly appeared from the house. He was dressed much as the two brothers except that his coat was black and round his waist was a broad belt with a long sheathed knife in it.
‘Bust the thread again?’ he asked.
‘It’s a very delicate thread, and I’d like to see you spin it, Guelph! There’s a capercaillie cock in the pine over there. Get your bow if it’s handy!’
Guelph vanished. It was evident to Thea that the eyes of the family were following his progress through the undergrowth which hedged the garden, but she could spot neither Guelph nor the presumably dangerous creature he was ordered to exterminate. A large bird of black and green speckled with white came fluttering vainly out of the pine and crashed at her feet with an arrow through its breast. She was half shocked, half relieved.
‘But why did he kil
l it?’ she asked Humphrey.
‘To eat.’
‘You eat something as beautiful as that?’
‘But its taste, when well hung, is as beautiful as its plumage.’
‘What an original idea! I must make a note of that for the Board of Education.’
‘You should. I’m all for educating them.’
‘But if you have to kill things why don’t you use a gun?’
George answered her:
‘We do if we want a lot of game in a hurry. But the gun is very cruel. All animals hate sudden noises. It frightens them.’
‘Doesn’t an arrow frighten them just as much?’
‘It’s part of their lives. It pounces like a hawk or a wildcat. Out of silence and back to silence.’
That sinister note again! She glanced nervously at the infinities of the forest and excused her moment of uneasiness, if it should be noticed, by saying she was so used to seeing farther. It was true. This crushing vegetable life contrasted so violently with the planned landscapes of the Federation where man controlled the environment. Here the monster environment controlled man.
‘George, you are frightening Miss Pretorius,’ the Dowager said, ‘when we all want her to feel part of us. What does your mother call you, girl?’
‘Thea. All my friends do. And I wish you would.’
‘What a pretty name: Thea. It just suits you,’ Humphrey said.
It sounded sincere coming from that deep and sensitive voice.
‘Names are so important,’ she remarked in the tone proper to a scientist. ‘Do the areas of forest have separate names or are they all nameless?’
‘Too vast for names,’ Humphrey replied, ‘but some seem to have carried on through the centuries. We call this Hendon Wood. And the landing strip I made for the Federation is on hard ground which was a road. Guelph’s aunt says it was named MI. You must meet her. She’s a mine of traditions if you keep her mug full.’
‘And what is Guelph?’
‘Black Rod.’
‘What does he do?’
‘He speaks for the forest; and it’s an old custom that he must walk backwards when he does.’
‘Tradition – is that all you have of the early days when the island was abandoned?’
Arrows of Desire Page 3
