‘That, and the manuscripts which help to form a picture of what we were. As you know, the Federation believed it had transported all the British, but it hadn’t. A remnant escaped into the wildest parts of the country and were never rounded up. Almost all were city dwellers who had always longed for a natural life and didn’t realise what they were in for. There was no money and so no wages, and most died of starvation. Then somewhere – we don’t know where – a settlement learned to take the few wretched animals that were still alive and to breed from them. The knowledge spread and we began to grow our own food and to get meat and clothing from cattle and sheep and to use horses to pull ploughs and turn wheels.’
‘Is it true that you ride them?’
‘Often.’
‘Isn’t it appallingly dangerous?’
George, breaking in on Thea’s history lesson, remarked that it took courage to ride straight across country.
‘George, you know very well that in our territory it can’t be done at all,’ said the Dowager, who had no patience with heroics. ‘I expect this is all very exciting for you, Thea, but what would you like to drink?’
‘Tea, please.’
‘What? Tea?’
‘I thought all the British drank tea.’
‘You don’t enjoy it, do you?’
‘My father and I have to pretend we do.’
‘Well, you don’t have to pretend any nonsense here. Try our beer! You’ll like it.’
She was sure she would not – chiefly because Tito Pezulu praised it highly and too heartily. Since he visited Humphrey of Middlesex once or twice a year on the pretext of seeing that all was well – though she was prepared to bet that he never went far from Humphrey’s side – he had taken it upon himself to offer his advice before she went. He said that apart from physics and chemistry they were all a damned sight better educated than he was but warned her never to go into the darkness of the trees alone. When she asked why not, he referred obscurely to their religious beliefs. Like the usual atheists of the Federation he denied that human beings had any immaterial powers, but at the same time was afraid of them. She wondered if George had ever laced his beer with hallucinatory mushrooms.
It was Guelph who brought out the beer, pushing a keg which ran on polished wooden rollers instead of wheels. On each side, silver tankards were slotted into wooden wings upon which the grain and whorls formed a pattern as intricate as if it had been illuminated by a painter rather than by nature. Then she remembered that Guelph was no butler but spoke for the forest, whatever that meant. There was a suggestion of a time when wheels were clumsy and the only decoration was that provided by the trees themselves. Could it be that through Guelph the forest as well as the house was welcoming her?
Humphrey drew a tankard for Guelph first; then Guelph drew for him. They bowed to each other and drank. Thea asked if they were following a tradition to taste for poison.
‘Yes, in a way,’ Humphrey replied. ‘Once upon a time, when there was only water to drink, any source could be contaminated by fallout. We are saying that we take the risk together.’
Guelph drew for the rest. Thea sipped perhaps too cautiously, for the Dowager demanded whether the Federation allowed any alcohol at all.
‘Oh, yes. It’s distilled from coal and flavoured with any flower you choose. They are grown on special hot beds in the wine factories.’
‘Is it possible to drink too much of it, Miss Pretorius?’ Guelph asked.
‘It becomes distasteful after the correct dosage.’
‘And a good thing too!’ George exclaimed, ignoring his mother, Humphrey and Guelph, who were all about to protest. ‘And that reminds me. How’s old Sam’s knee this morning, Guelph?’
‘Bust not bruised, if you ask me.’
‘Not good for him, parties at his age! Woke up in the straw. Tried to wipe his filthy beard with the cow’s tail and got kicked. Well, I’d better have another look at it.’
George picked up the leg bone and waved it cheerfully at Thea by way of farewell.
‘But we should have this poor man flown out,’ she implored, overcome by the white and wagging bone and forgetting that the only means of calling up a bantam craft from Avebury was by at least three days of arduous travel. ‘Has George studied medicine?’
‘Enough for us and the animals. And there’s nothing like a small stable for learning the proper bedside manner,’ the Dowager assured her. ‘Lord bless us, I don’t see how you Euro-Africans stay alive at all when you get all hot and bothered about a stiff knee and grow your liquor on a manure heap!’
‘I know yours is made by the old – the senior women of the tribe,’ Thea said nervously.
‘Who the devil told you that?’
‘It’s in Schröder’s Manners and Customs of the Native English.’
‘Ass! I remember that fellow. Came here soon after the island was opened up and spent his time asking about pre-marital relationships. Just got engaged, I had, and you know, Humphrey, how that sort of thing embarrassed your poor father. He couldn’t even spit out what he wanted in plain language. Pre-marital relationships, indeed! The only one he ever got was with Black Rod’s aunt, moustache and all, and what did she tell us about that, Guelph?’
‘It was a little beyond me, Dowager. It appeared that the usual roles were reversed.’
Humphrey, fearing his mother’s further reminiscences, waved to the side door of the house as if answering an appeal.
‘I think cook wants to speak to you, mamma.’
‘Dam’ fellow always thinks he knows more than I do till he’s halfway through. Grub, Miss Thea, grub! That’s what’s made by the old women of the tribe. Pah!’
She marched off in dignified fury. Guelph followed with a nod to Humphrey indicating that he was prepared to act as lightning conductor.
‘I am so sorry I have offended her,’ Thea said.
‘You can’t offend the wind. Let it blow and be refreshed by it.’
She took the Dowager’s place on the low wall of the pool, played with the spinning wheel and sipped her beer. Humphrey was standing over her, and she lifted her head to hold his eyes before returning more primly to her notebook.
‘I think I like your beer.’
‘Yes, it grows on you. I get it from a little tribe in Kent.’
‘Do you use money to pay for it?’
‘No, a credit at our trading centres. They are very like your banks.’
‘But since yours is the richest tribe, how do you prevent all the rest being in debt to you?’
‘I just raise the value of what they have to sell until the account balances. Take this beer, now: since its quality is unique, its value is what I choose to pay for it, and no less.’
‘Less? Can you do what you like, then?’
‘Within reason. I tell my people what to make, and they see that it is made. They tell me what to plant and I see that is planted.’
‘But that is like the ancient feudal system.’
‘Is it? Pezulu Pasha said it was communism. Names aren’t so important as you think, Thea. If you give a system a name, people feel they ought to live up to it. But there can be orderly systems with no name. What about the twists and turns of a flight of starlings?’
‘But then it’s all instinctive,’ she replied, impatiently closing her notebook. ‘Don’t we have anything but a language in common?’
‘You and I?’
It was not, she felt, an occasion for another meeting of eyes with this fascinating barbarian.
‘You and the High Commissioner for example.’
‘Oh – er – mutual respect.’
Her father had asked, rather emotionally, what lay behind their manners. This might be an opportunity, if not too early, to find out.
‘Would you be on his side if the new immigrants revolted?’
‘Revolt? Them?’
‘But you know almost nothing of them. Since the Age of Destruction you and they have developed differently as two new species.’
That was true. But how wrong it had been to think of the forest British as a mere primitive tribe! Together with the men and women of courage and character seven hundred years ago who had created a viable agricultural society, they had another sort of wealth to be exploited: the remains of the libraries and the tales and manuscripts of those early heroes. Forgotten and left to themselves to die out, they owed nothing to the Federation but a common language recently acquired. Schroder, the missionary and explorer, had written that they were like the Romanised Britons who had adopted the language of the conquerors, but he was wrong. There had never been any conqueror, only a trickle of visitors from the mainland in the last hundred years. Those, however, had been enough for a people of astonishing vision to foresee a future when they, too, would inevitably be a part of the Federation; and so they had deliberately and by common consent – what a meeting of the chieftains there must have been! – chosen to teach themselves and their children to become bilingual.
‘Yet any of you could be licenced to live in the Federation if you wished,’ she said.
‘We should be unhappy anywhere but here.’
‘But you have such a lack of comfort living always in the darkness of the trees and the smell of the earth and the mist.’
‘There is a chalk stream running fast through the hazels. I must show you that when the mist lifts after sunrise.’
‘And what about streams which vanish and the fear of what may be underground?’
‘Why fear? Underground are just rats and otters.’
‘They never come out?’
‘Only for George.’
‘But if you so love the place you should understand the immigrants’ patriotism.’
‘I hate that futile patriotism!’ – he rose gracefully to his feet, growing from the wellhead, ‘Look, Thea, I stand here. So does the tree. On any other earth we couldn’t.’
‘It would not matter to me what earth I stood on.’
‘I am so glad of that.’
She revised her too casual statement in near panic:
‘I meant just that I am rootless.’
‘I am the roots.’
Chapter IV
Alfred Brown was quite ignorant that his house had been used as a secret rendezvous for leaders of the British freedom fighters. It had been Silvia who had offered it to them. She knew exactly the hours when her father would be engaged in public duties and her mother – whose simple morning was unchangeable – would be at the shops, to be followed by a visit to the Community Association for a restoring cup of tea. Silvia then had the house to herself and, being the respectable home of a member of the Assembly, it was most unlikely to be suspected.
In that living room where the assassination of the High Commissioner had been plotted, Smith and Green again sat in conference, accompanied now by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. There was no reason why they should not come openly as passive members of Silvia’s party to sympathise and discuss the future. Brown himself, repelled, powerless, forlorn, left them in that once peaceful room of fake antiques, deliberately avoiding controversy.
Among the immigrants public opinion was divided. After Smith’s inflammatory speeches and the singing of ‘Landa Fope’, there had been no arrests. The wise tolerance of Ali Pretorius had paid off. Avebury was a little ashamed of its mob hysteria.
Smith thumped the table. He never had more than one gesture: to raise his fist above his head and bring it down again.
‘Provocation! That’s what I need. Provocation before the people go off the boil.’
Green remarked that Pretorius would be careful not to give any, that he had been frightened out of his life.
‘Frightened? Pretorius hasn’t an emotion in him, only a smirk on his mongrel face! There’s no trick he won’t stoop to – even mercy.’
‘In my humble opinion, Pezulu will …’ Green began.
‘Pezulu will play right into our hands. There’s nothing he and I would like more than a dozen British corpses.’
The Chancellor had sat in silent meditation, piously absorbed in the contemplation of his finger nails.
‘If only they knew all,’ he said softly. ‘If only they knew.’
Green protested that ten thousand of his leaflets had been distributed the day before.
‘And what’s the good of them?’ Smith replied. ‘It’s time you intellectuals learnt practical politics. People can’t be warmed into revolt. They must be thrown into the flames before they see them.’
There was a knock at the door. Mrs Brown opened it to ask if the three visitors would like their tea now. She looked at them with a landlady’s stolid disapproval of, say, a noisy drunk who at the same time pays his rent regularly. The three faces were so different from those of her friends, genial in their simplicity and round as herself. She suspected that they might be leaders of the gang which had corrupted her Silvia, but perhaps now they could help.
She had been pressed by husband and daughter to join the British immigrants from Africa, but the move was all against her instinct for security and comfort. Everything in Britain was foreign. She had always been nervous about the strange people hidden in the forest, imagining that a hairy man might sneak out and kidnap her Silvia. She was equally disturbed by these dissidents who were not content with the peaceful, pleasant life within the Federation and were responsible for the childish propaganda which had inspired her daughter to shoot at that nice man, Ali Pretorius.
The fellow called Green rushed at her and put an unwelcome arm round her shoulders.
‘The true, heroic British mother!’ he cried. ‘Silvia’s sacrifice shall not be in vain. It shall echo round the world. Leave it to me, dear, broken-hearted Mrs Brown.’
While Green detained her with prattle and pawings, Smith whispered quickly to the Chancellor.
‘That story of yours – stretch it a bit! It doesn’t matter how. Get him all excited about what he’s going to write and he’ll believe it himself.’
Green closed the door behind Mrs Brown, still speaking of the martyrdom of Silvia. The Chancellor watched his gesticulations with interest; they were at least more tolerable than those of Smith, and should be noted for future use in any sentimental context.
‘Pretorius hasn’t made her a martyr yet,’ Smith said.
‘If only they knew!’ the Chancellor repeated. ‘If only they knew!’
‘Knew what?’
‘My lambs, I have had time to consider my duty. Am I to tell the truth or not? Alas, the incalculable effects! And yet to have seen the child helpless before those brutes!’
‘What is this? Green demanded. ‘Why haven’t I heard of it? Are my cell and I distrusted?’
‘Never! We should lose our way without your steadfast liberal minds. Chancellor, what, for God’s sake, did you see?’
‘They told her in my presence that they would soon cure her by doing to her what her husband would and threatened her with a rope. I could not tell whether they meant death or worse.’
‘Speak out, man!’ Smith charged him. ‘We’re not children.’
‘She was laid on the floor with her defenceless legs apart.’
‘And then?’
‘I could bear no more. I left. When I was outside I heard her screams. They still echo in my ears.’
Smith, seeing that his partner was not quite as impressed as he should have been, buried his face in his hands.
‘I know we cannot expect you intellectuals to feel as we do,’ he said. ‘We have never had your advantages, you see.’
‘Damn you, Smith! I am a man of the people, and what they feel, I feel.’
‘Then tell them what they feel!’
‘I shall publish this atrocity fearlessly.’
Mrs Brown returned with tea and a glowering husband. Alfred was a sturdy man in his middle forties, his tunic forming a slope above his too generous belly, but well framed in muscle. Though not a member of the first immigration, and as a speaker more forthright than eloquent, he had been ele
cted to the Assembly with a comfortable majority.
His greying hair and – normally – kindly smile proclaimed a character of competence and responsibility who would give his best to any cause in which he believed; but few realised what that ‘best’ was. It included a touch of youth and adventure which had carried his family to Britain, but since then had been unused for want of a society that could use it.
‘My lamb! My dear lamb!’ the Chancellor bleated.
‘Cut it out, cock! What I say is that it’s a dirty trick to use my house just because I’m above suspicion. You may have been at it for months for all I know.’
‘You will obey the action committee,’ Smith said.
‘All right! All right! I’m aware of it. You’ve outvoted your own executive and we can take it. You needn’t rub it in. What about my daughter?’
‘The people will free your daughter,’ Green trumpeted, ‘with their bare hands, if need be.’
‘Don’t talk bloody nonsense, mate! Is she all right, Smith?’
‘All right? After that? Ask your Chancellor!’
‘I left before it happened. I saw nothing.’
‘But he heard her screams,’ Smith added.
‘Always did when she couldn’t have her way.’
‘How can you say such a thing, Alfred?’ Mrs Brown reproached him.
‘Pezulu tied her down and raped her.’
‘In front of Pretorius? Stuff that for a yarn!’
‘My little Silvia! My little Silvia!’ Mrs Brown sobbed.
‘Now, now, mother! Have a bit of common sense!’
‘You call the Chancellor a liar?’ Smith demanded.
‘Wouldn’t dream of it! But fact is fact. And politics is politics.’
On the streets of Avebury, since distances were short and walking recommended for the health of the citizens, the only motorised transport was that of the police, ambulance and fire services; thus the engine which whispered up Alfred Brown’s street and stopped outside his house could only be that of a police car. Smith and Green had long been prepared for such an emergency. They dashed to the outer wall, pulled up two floorboards which had been lightly tacked down, and extracted two official caps and overalls with a bag of tools. By the time the Federal Police were knocking at the door, they had a loop of cable in their hands and had become anonymous servants of communal anonymity.
Arrows of Desire Page 4
