The Ice Age

by Margaret Drabble

  The house that Callander had got out of his corrupt friendship had been impressive. Worth a tidy sum. Architect-built, swimming pool, tennis court, sauna, the lot. Len wondered if he dared go across and ask what had happened to it. Why not? He finished the game, laid down his cue, crossed, took the next seat. Callander looked up from his paper, nodded.

  “Evening, Len,” he said. His voice sounded croaky from disuse.

  “Not a very fine one,” said Len, as another clap shook the room.

  Callander nodded gravely, lowered his voice, leaned across to Len confidentially. “It’s not the thunder I mind,” he said. “But you know what the problem is, don’t you?”

  “What?” asked Len. He’s gone dotty, he thought. Not surprising.

  “It’s those airplanes,” he said. “They take them out specially, in this weather, you know. To test them.”

  “Surely not.”

  “Oh yes. Certainly they do. I have my information. And”—he leaned across still farther, portentously—“and just you tell me what would happen if one of them got struck by lightning, and came down in these grounds?”

  Len laughed.

  “What chance is there of that? It’s a chance in ten million.”

  “It’s a chance in ten million that I found myself in here. But here I am. No, you mark my words, they’re fooling about up there—” He gestured nervously, with his pipe, toward the ceiling. “There’ll be one of them down before the night is over, I’ve a feeling. And tell me, have you ever seen any notices in here about fire? What do we do, if there’s a fire?”

  “I can’t see what you’re worried about. There could hardly be a building easier to evacuate than this one. It’s all on the ground floor, practically. Anyway, there won’t be a fire.”

  “That’s what you think.”

  “Yes, that is what I think. A chance in ten million.”

  “I suppose you think it was a chance in ten million that killed Max Friedmann, do you?”

  Len stared at Tom Callander. He looked serious, even intent.

  “Yes, I do. Something like that.”

  “You listen to me,” said Callander. “You listen to me, and I’ll tell you something very interesting. Keep it to yourself, though, won’t you?”

  Len nodded. What else could he do?

  “Something has gone wrong,” said Callander, “with the laws of chance.” He said it with the portentous authority that such a statement required, and sat back, relighting his pipe with an air of doom and satisfaction.

  He’s as nutty as a fruitcake, thought Len.

  Nevertheless, the idea was quite striking, and worth pursuit.

  “How do you make that out?” he inquired, in a tone of careful neutrality.

  Callander proceeded to tell him how he made it out. His reasons were confused but interesting. He had been reading, he said, Arthur Koestler’s The Roots of Coincidence, which had shown him the light. His first suspicion had been roused by the remarkable number of disasters in his own immediate acquaintance: “You wouldn’t believe,” he said earnestly, “the number of people known to me personally who have suffered the most unexpected reverses.” (Len could well believe it: if jail was an unexpected reverse, Jackson and Callander between them must have been directly responsible for landing a few of their friends there.) Then, he said, there was the question of inflation: that, too, was surely an unpredictable phenomenon, unrelated to any previous known monetary laws. Len tried to suggest that this was not quite so, that they had all simply been a little slow off the mark about inflation in the building and property business, but Callander would not accept this. He added, as further proof, an account of some bridge hands that he had held on the night before he received the warrant for his arrest: they too had defied all known laws. With this, Len, who was no bridge player, could not argue.

  “And what do you think is the cause of this extraordinary situation?” Len asked, when the evidence had been presented.

  Callander thought it might be something to do with nuclear waste, though he was not sure. “I’m not a physicist,” he admitted, to Len’s relief.

  “Well, I find that very fascinating,” Len said, rising to his feet. Callander looked better, more cheerful, for having imparted his anxiety.

  And in bed, in the dark, he thought about it. It was obvious enough that old Tom was trying to find some way of explaining his own dramatic reversal which would exculpate him from all personal blame, and the idea was pretty ingenious. Indeed, it even had certain attractions. Len himself, like Anthony, had had a sense of late that things were going unnaturally, excessively wrong, and Max Friedmann’s death, administered from so unconnected a source, with such arbitrariness, had puzzled him too. But it was madness to think that way. Utter madness. Poor old Tom had gone mad. Why, there were more murders a day still in Detroit than in the whole of the U.K. in a year, including Northern Ireland. Or something like that. Did that mean that something had gone wrong with the law of averages in Detroit? It was all rubbish.

  Old Callander’s house had had a patio with a marble floor, and a fountain, and around it in marble niches had stood busts of Roman emperors. That had not been Len’s style. For all his energy, Len had never quite got around to acquiring a house. Or a wife to put in it. Just as well. He had been lucky, really. Let off lightly.

  Maureen Kirby watched the storm from a window of the Hallam Tower Hotel in Sheffield. She was dining with her employer; they had just got back from a visit to Thirsk, and Derek had insisted that she should eat with him. They sat over their kidneys flambé and watched the steep hillsides and valleys laid bare by the flashes of the lightning. The white blocks arose on the distant slopes like marble statues, like the pillars of Stonehenge, like resurrected souls, standing palely, elegantly, lifting their heads against the noisy wrath of the elements. “It’s a wonderful sight,” said Derek. “Wonderful,” agreed Maureen. The reclaimed hills, lit a lurid green, rose up to the sky’s edge. The dark Satanic smoke had gone forever, and Sheffield lay purified by the apocalyptic flames of a new Jerusalem. The white sisters stood, bearing witness to the shining urban dream of the sixties and early seventies. How forlornly they might stand there in the new darkness, who could say. They looked, now, wonderful.

  It is a good thing Auntie Evie moved out last week, thought Maureen. Her roof will surely come down in this.

  The storm died down, the bright flares vanished, and rain streamed down the huge plate-glass windows, obscuring the spectacular view. The whole dining room was sobered, hushed with admiration. Derek thought, I was lucky to have been born in such a time, in such a city, when there was still energy, when men could still build views and windows. Already windowless buildings were rearing themselves up, buildings with arrow slits like medieval fortresses, conserving heat, repelling invaders. The world has changed forever, thought Derek, and this is a moment of grace.

  Alison tried to ring Anthony again in the morning, and again failed, though this time she received confirmation that the wires were, in fact, down. Kitty tried to persuade her to stay another day, but she was determined to go, though not at first sure how she would get there. There was a little branch line train that went from Northam to Blickley: perhaps she should try that? And ring Anthony from Blickley, in case the wires were back (she had no idea how long such a job might take), or take a bus or a taxi. I must go, she told Kitty: it’s been so long since I saw Anthony, and he’s been so good, looking after Molly . . . .

  The Northam trains went from St. Pancras. As Victoria had appalled her the night before, so this morning the station appalled her. She told herself: it is the storm that has produced this vast quantity of garbage and newspaper and plastic bags, this sea of rubbish. But she had to pick her way. And she thought to herself: in Wallacia, it was clean. The streets were clean. There was no garbage. Cows’ heads with hair on in the butchers’, but no garbage.

  She looked up, at the crazy Gothic façade, at the impressive iron arches. Victorian England had produced them. She h
ad so loved England. A fear and sadness in tune with her own breathed out of the station’s shifting population: old ladies with bags, a black man with a brush and bin, pallid girls in jeans, an Indian with a tea trolley, a big fat man with a carrier bag, they all looked around themselves shiftily, uneasily, eyeing abandoned packages, kicking dirty blowing plastic bags from their ankles, expecting explosions. It can’t be like this, thought Alison: how can it have got to be like this? Who has so undermined, so terrified, so threatened and subdued us? How petty, how perky, how irrelevant, the few signs of improvement: the Shires Bar, the Buffet signs.

  The train was less dispiriting than the station: Inter-City, new stock, coffee brought round, albeit in plastic cups. But Alison had the misfortune to be sitting opposite a garrulous South African, an elderly man with a Hemingway beard, who ignored all her icy indications of reserved hostility, and insisted on pointing out to her that although the train was new and the seats not uncomfortable, there were no waste-disposal bins, so that one had no option but to nurse one’s plastic cup and paper plate for several hundred miles, or to throw them upon the floor. From this, he launched into an attack on the filth and porn of Soho, the wickedness of a musical called Let My People Come, which he had seen the night before, and the poor quality of council housing, particularly in the North of England, which they were by then approaching. Alison tried not to listen, tried to read her paper.

  Nevertheless, she could not help but recognize that some of his remarks echoed her own reflections. But it was for her, an Englishwoman, to voice them, she felt, not for him, a foreigner. She toyed with the idea of commenting on his own country’s political situation, but contented herself with remarking mildly that nobody had coerced him into going to see a pornographic musical, and that such musicals catered, as far as she could see, largely to the taste of tourists. “There was nothing to stop you going to the Royal Shakespeare instead, was there?” she said: to which he replied, “Shakespeare’s been dead for hundreds of years, it’s the here and now that interests me.” She thought of moving to another seat, but instead kept silence. Why argue? And it was true that Shakespeare was dead.

  The scenery outside the window altered, slowly, to the derelict Northern wastes and dump sites that nobody could now afford to landscape: was it true that the English had ransacked their riches for two centuries, had spent like lords, and were now bankrupt, living in the ruins of their own past grandiose excesses? Perhaps it was so. Fear constrained her. The spirit had gone out of the country, or so its hostile critics claimed: denunciations thundered from Uganda, from Russian exiles, from Australia, from men like this bearded South African. She did not respect their judgments, but she had to listen to them. The country was growing old. Like herself. The scars on the hillsides were the wrinkles around her own eyes: irremovable. How could one learn to grow old? Neither a country nor a person can stay young forever.

  The North of England, in itself, frightened her. She was a Southerner, brought up in Hampshire. These perspectives alarmed her. She had tried to love them for Anthony’s sake, but her nerve was failing her, ebbing away. The train made its way through a blackened cutting: the sheer stone slices on either side of her wept black, dank, perpetual tears. It emerged, in a wasteland—a canal, cinder-strewn patches of grass, slate-colored rubble. In a field full of heaps of bricks and rusted metal stood two dirty piebald ponies. To the right stood a strange stranded terrace of houses, oddly elevated, in the middle of nowhere, workmen’s houses with blue doors and steep stone steps, built of gray stone, unbelievably gray. Who could have built such human habitations? Those great Victorians, perhaps. Anthony and Len Wincobank must see something in these slopes and angles, this man-made dereliction, that she could neither see nor feel for.

  Though at times she suspected that even Anthony’s enthusiasm was a little forced: how could anyone like Anthony possibly like so raw, so ugly, so foul a prospect? True, it was no longer as filthy as it had once been; the air was cleaner than it had been for a century. But the pits, the buildings, the slag. Len Wincobank was another matter: she could believe that his passion was genuine enough, for to him this wasteland had spelled not muck but money. Len had had energy, ambition, vision, like those Englishmen of the past, who had shaken an armed fist at the insults of lesser nations. He had also been a crook. It was all too complicated for her. She sighed. It was unkind of history, to force a lightweight person like herself, who had surely suffered enough, in personal terms, to think of these weighty matters.

  The train arrived at Northam in the early afternoon. There was three quarters of an hour to wait before the first little diesel out to Blickley. She decided to leave the station, go to a bank, to a drugstore, stock up with bits and pieces, buy a present for Molly. (There had been no possible presents to purchase in Wallacia.) She tried to leave her suitcase at the Left Luggage place, but the man refused to accept it: because of bombs, he said. So she had to lug it with her. She did not know Northam well, but thought she remembered that there were shops near enough to the station entrance, but when she went out they had all disappeared. The developers had been at Northam since her last visit, and she was confronted by an enormous traffic circle, the beginning of an overpass, a road leading to a multistory car park, and an underpass. They had even pulled down the façade of the station: it had once been rather an imposing pile, but it had gone, and in its place were hardboard hoardings, advertisements for builders and contractors, huge flapping sheets of polyethelene, scaffolding. And no activity; nobody was doing any building. She could see some shops, far away, over the traffic circle, on the beginning of a shopping street that led into town: less than five minutes’ walk, as the crow flies, and easy enough to manage, even with a suitcase. But although accessible to cars and crows, the street seemed quite impossible to approach for a pedestrian. Maybe if one plunged under the underpass one would come up somewhere near it? It was impossible to tell. She would have abandoned the project, and bought Molly a rubbish object from the station bookstall, but she needed some more Tampax, and had a feeling that it was Blickley’s half day closing. The combination of obstacles was almost too much for her: she put her suitcase down, wondering if she dared leave it, then decided that if she left it in a corner the police would surely pick it up, even if a thief didn’t, so she set off with it, down the unpromising concrete tunnel.

  By the time she had struggled along for a few hundred yards, in the stink of exhaust fumes, shuffling through litter, walled in by high elephantine walls, deafened and sickened, she was feeling extremely cross with both Len and, alas, by association, Anthony. So this was what people complained about when they complained about the ruination of city centers. How right they were. It was monstrous, inhuman, ludicrous. It was just as well that the country had gone bankrupt, that property development had collapsed and that Len was in jail, and that fewer monstrous offenses of this nature could be perpetrated. This was no improvement: this was an environmental offense as bad as a slag heap. She would give Anthony a piece of her mind when she got home; she would tell him what she thought of his flirtation with these dangerous lunatics. Riverside walks, indeed! She must remember to ask him if their architects had considered the question of how the walkers were to reach the wonderful planning gain of a walk. They had probably made it inaccessible except to cars, sealed off from pedestrians at either end. Maybe, with any luck, one would be allowed to park one’s car at one end of the walk, sprint down, and rush back before one got a parking ticket. If it ever got built at all.

  The tunnel did not go on forever: it finally sloped upward, and Alison emerged. She could have wept. She was, in geographical terms, nearer the shops, but they were as inaccessible as ever, for the tunnel emerged on a kind of traffic island: she had four streams of traffic to cross, and a railing prevented her from stepping into the road at all. She put her suitcase down, and stared. She could backtrack, for several hundred yards, until the railings stopped; there were no traffic lights, but there was a gap, as though it had crossed som
ebody’s mind that a person might want to cross the road. Had she been younger, and without a suitcase, she might have risked jumping over and making a dash for it, between cars, but that seemed out of the question. Her arm ached so much that she could hardly face the extra walk. She stood, and rested, staring at the distant promised land: there was a drugstore, she could see, and a bank. Was it worth it? She looked around her, back at the plastic-fronted station: to her right, on another traffic island, an isolated church reared up, abandoned, a strange relic, a survivor from another age, another world. Piety had left it there, but what congregation could now ever gather in it? How could it be approached? It seemed a meaningless and ironic gesture, to have left it there, solitary, anachronistic, a pointing finger of ignored reproach.