Mandrake

by Susan Cooper

  At once his head was full of the high ringing note of a continuous call-sign, eerie and unbodied. Then, as suddenly, it stopped. There was the prickling silence of the live air, and a voice said unemotionally: ‘This is the b.b.c. Home Service. Here is the one o’clock news. The Prime Minister, Sir Michael—’

  An appalling crackle broke in, drowning the words. ‘Blast!’ Queston said furiously, surprised by the violence of his disappointment. He thwacked impotently at the dashboard, but the noise did not clear for several minutes. It was a curiously deliberate sound, rising and falling in regular waves.

  He came in again at the tail-end of a sentence elliptically describing the end of a trade agreement, and a national appeal for reliance on home resources. Home resources? What kind? The announcer went on, his voice deepening a semi-tone in the regulation greeting for disaster, with an account of two accidents, oddly simultaneous that morning, in the country’s two deepest coal mines. In one, a fall of rock had trapped sixty men, all now presumed dead. In the other, an underground riot of some kind seemed to have broken out; the description was vague and guarded, but here too several men had died.

  The cool voice went on: ‘The Minister of Planning, Mr Mandrake, has issued a special order closing all pits which descend below a hundred feet. The Minister said at a press conference this morning that owing to the ban on coal and oil imports, this new order will make further domestic economies imperative. Special cooperatives are to be set up for the distribution of shallow-mined coal from area depots of the Coal Board. Representatives of the steel and forestry industries will be meeting the Minister this afternoon.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Evacuation of the Harwell and Trawsfynydd areas is now complete,’ said the voice off-handedly. ‘A spokesman for the Ministry of Planning said last night that dismantling will begin as soon as possible.’

  Another pause. Queston sat motionless. Then he jerked in alarm at the words that followed: ‘That is the end of the news. This is the b.b.c. Home Service. We are now closing down until six o’clock. Please switch off your sets.’

  Silence. Incredulous, he turned the knob to the short wave, to find a local station, but there was nothing. He found no voice or signal on any waveband, except, once, the distant sound of accordion music; and very faint on the short waveband a voice which appeared to be reciting the history of Roman London. He turned the switch off, and sat still. However sinister the implications of the strange, allusive news bulletin, that seemed after his years of remoteness to be speaking of another country, another time—however deeply that disturbed him, this silence of the air was worse. It was worse than an immediate isolation, it turned the world cold. He felt childishly resentful towards the b.b.c. for leaving him alone.

  From that moment, he took refuge in childishness; in simple reactions, as if he were conscious only on one superficial level, and the rest of his mind asleep. He looked angrily round at the smug silent shop-fronts, impossible and deserted and dead. He was hungry. And where was he to sleep that night? He remembered a hotel he had passed near the centre of the town; a gloomy, red-brick building with two sad cigar-shaped trees in pots outside the door. Well, he would stay there. He would force back normality that far, in this strange lifeless town.

  He drove back to the hotel and parked the car in its narrow forecourt. Grey concrete, neatly swept; blank white curtains looping the windows; a solid, silent, locked door. In a sudden fear of embarrassment, unable to believe that a live town could turn into a vacuum, he hammered at the door with his fist. But the place was not inhabited. No one came.

  He made his way round to the back, and climbed over a fence; the wood left a lick of green lichen on his sleeve. Inside he found a small garden: a patch of grass, a rusting wrought-iron seat and some dispirited clumps of Michaelmas daisies. And a pair of french windows, leading into the hotel. He hesitated, and called: ‘Hallo! Hallo!’ The sound was startling, and suddenly absurd. Decisively he pulled off his jacket, wrapped it round his hand and punched his fist through the window. The small tinkle of falling glass was instantly exhilarating, and an end of his backward groping for reality. It was as if he punched his reason through at last into accepting the impossible new world.

  Inside, the hotel was all solid, middle class, one-night-stop comfort, with grazed leather armchairs and thick drab carpets. He walked through to the reception desk. The register lay open on the counter; everything everywhere was neat and clean. The people of this town had left with ordered speed, expecting to come back.

  He unlocked one of the doors, and fetched his suitcase from the car. Walking the empty corridors of the hotel, alert to the seventh sense that was growing more watchful in him every hour, he could feel nothing but a despondent fatalism in the place. The room he chose was the same; tidy and depressed, a harmless box without power or emotion. He thought of all the hotel rooms he had ever slept in, and knew why. The necessary link was not there. People passed through, without lingering to grow attached to the place. And it was the same, perhaps, with the town itself. Slough; he tried to remember it. An industrial dormitory, shallow-rooted; a twentieth-century town, too raw to be able to hold those who had lived there. Or to be able to make use of them, to control their minds.

  There must be other towns like this in Britain; he would be able to live in those. Other places that were empty. The dead lands.

  There were no sheets on the bed. Confident now in the uncomplaining hotel, he went hunting for a maid’s room, and took an armful of linen stiff and shiny as white wood. When he had made the bed he looked at the printed tariff card pushed threateningly under the glass top of the dressing table. Bed and breakfast, one pound eighty cents, dinner, table d’hôte, one pound… Solemnly he took four pound notes from his wallet, put them in an envelope from the drawer, and addressed it to the manager.

  Downstairs again, slipping the envelope into the post-rack criss-crossed with wire behind the reception desk, he suddenly grinned, took out his pen, and signed the register. The last entry was dated ten days before. He wrote: ‘David Queston, British,’ and paused over the space left for an address. What address for a man without roots? He wrote, facetiously, ‘No fixed abode.’

  The kitchen, when he found it, was underground; a bleak, antiseptic expanse of metal tables, forbidding ovens and stoves and sinks, with grey light slanting down from ground-level windows set barred high in the walls. He tried a tap; the water coughed, then ran in a faltering stream. A cup of tea, he thought with ridiculous longing, and filled a kettle.

  Waiting for it to boil, he foraged for food; the deep freeze was empty, but in the cupboard he found shelves stacked with vast foot-high tins of peaches, apricots, orange juice; butter, chicken, ham. There was no bread, or milk, or anything perishable; and no tea or coffee. In any case, when he went back to the stove, his kettle was still cold.

  He tried a light switch; the bulbs remained dark. At least they had left the water turned on. In a corner he saw a solitary gas stove, and moved hopefully across; but the gas too had been cut off at the main.

  Queston pondered, initiative edged by hunger. No heat, not even a tin opener. And no light when the dark came. ‘Well,’ he said aloud, cheerfully, ‘we’ll just have to go shopping.’ He wished, as he said it, that the dog was there.

  He drove up the street, peering vaguely, until he caught sight of a shop window where camping equipment hung festooned, bright, new and improbable, round a tent set on green baize grass. The door was locked. He contemplated the window, already hearing its satisfying crash, but something held him back. He thought afterwards that it was nothing but the prissy, upright voice of the b.b.c.; the world, that voice told him, is still civilized—if insane. Breaking and entering has been known, among the—ah—less educated classes. But looting… no.

  Queston went down an alley to the back of the shop, in a small paved dustbin-cluttered yard, and broke a window there.

  At first, remembering the mechanics of his life at the cottage, he had intende
d to take only a primus stove and a tin opener. But when he had found these, he looked round thoughtfully. What kind of world was it to be now? Other towns might lie mute and empty like Slough, but for how long would there be unguarded, available houses and hotels? His instinct was for independence.

  Solemnly he toured the cluttered little shop making a Boy Scout collection that, as he went, he began to enjoy: cans of paraffin, blocks of solid fuel, kettle, frying pan, billycan, sleeping-bag, rucksack, candles, rope, sheath-knife, water-bottle, a selection of enigmatic packets of dehydrated emergency rations. Before taking them out to the car he laid the whole rattling pile on the floor, tore a bill from a pad on the counter, and made a list of everything that he had taken, with his guesses of the cost of each. He left the bill, and money, inside the till; the b.b.c. voice still murmured in his head.

  He thought: food. Two doors away from the camping shop he broke into a supermarket; how defenceless shops were from behind, he reflected, when there was no one to hear the crash of glass. With two of the rough wire baskets that still stood stacked, oddly forlorn, at the front of the store, he walked up and down the ranks of bright shelves. Here too the deep freeze had been cleared, and he found no meat or cheese or bread. He took as many tins of soup, meat, fish and vegetables as he could carry, with sugar, tea and coffee, and piled them into the boot of the Lagonda, again leaving money behind. It took a long time.

  It was only when he came out into the street for the last time that the full unreality of it all closed over his head. For two hours he had been enjoying his foray like a game, as he always enjoyed the methodical business of planning a life alone. But as he was getting into the car he paused, and looked up and down the silent street once more, and the loneliness of the place was suddenly not a game at all. The light was beginning to fade, and the end of the street merged already into a grey, formless mist. Queston knew again that he was frightened.

  He drove quickly back to the hotel in the growing dusk, and took some food, the primus and his torch down to the kitchen, through the shadowed corridors. He found himself deliberately trying to avoid noise.

  He sat on a table near the stove while the kettle hissed towards boiling, waiting to replace it with a pan of soup. The small light from the flame was a comforting illusion of life; all the rest of the long kitchen was cold and dark now. His mind began finding nightmare reasons for the emptiness of the town. Perhaps an epidemic had broken out; even now he might be breathing some monstrous hovering disease. Perhaps the town had been evacuated for use as some kind of target… his reason rebelled at that one, but only to replace it with another. Perhaps attack was imminent from outside: America, emerged from behind that granite isolationist wall; Russia and China come to the inevitable struggle at last, dragging the world after them. Perhaps the sense of doom about the town, about all towns, was simply the mortal fear of fifty million people made distinct and tangible, a terrible paralysis of waiting. Perhaps—

  And all the while the knowledge of the real reason, that made nonsense of all these, fretted at the back of his mind: and he turned away from it and would not let it free.

  He made coffee, opened a tin of milk and one of chicken, and piled it all on a tray with the soup and some biscuits. He turned out the stove. At once the kitchen was black and limitless, and he groped hastily for the torch.

  He had told himself that he would eat at a table in the dining-room. Bang in the middle, with great panache: candles for light, a civilized, cooked meal, and a bottle from the cellar. Wherever the cellar was. The idea of a drink made him wish he had found a bar before darkness fell. But the night was too much for him. His imagination was shrieking already with the hours of silence, and he stumbled upstairs to his bedroom with the tray, clutching the torch between two fingers. Once he dropped it, the beam leaping crazily round as it hit the floor, and at the noise he started so violently that he nearly dropped the tray as well.

  Inside the room he locked the door, and felt at once, irrationally, more secure. He sat down to eat rapidly by the light of the torch. Then, in a sudden flooding exhaustion, he fell across the bed and into sleep. His last conscious thought was of relief that his mind had stopped.

  The morning was better. With the light—a grey, cold light, but anything was better than darkness—he was confident again, rational, focused only on the immediate problems of existence. He grimaced at the remains of his supper congealed messily on the tray, and went into the bathroom to duck under a cold shower. Hopping on the tiled floor as he towelled his back, he began to feel exhilarated. He fetched his one spare shirt, and promised himself an expedition after breakfast to buy more.

  He unlocked the bedroom door, with contempt for the impulse that had locked it, and went out into the silent hotel. It was just as it had been. Breakfast, which he ate in the kitchen, was a semi-satisfying meal of porridge, coffee, and a tin of pilchards from the supermarket. Afterwards he found the hotel switchboard, behind the foyer, to try reaching his last hope of friendly refuge: Gilchrist, in Chiswick. But the telephones gave his ear only a dull hiss; all the lines were dead.

  Very well then, he would drive to London. One direction was as good as another. At least he would find out what might happen to him on the way. He wondered if Brunner’s men had found the burned-out cottage yet, and whether they would come after him. He thought of the manuscript in Brunner’s Ministry desk, and was angry again. Damn them, what were they trying to do?

  He stowed everything into the boot of the car, and on a last impulse went back into the hotel bar. The shelves were still stocked; his reflection danced at him from the mirrored wall behind the rows of bottles. He helped himself to 500 cigarettes and five bottles of whisky, leaving the usual payment in the till. It was almost becoming a routine; though not one that could last very much longer. He had never kept more than about thirty pounds in the cottage, and he had only a few notes left.

  But enough for some clothes. He eased the Lagonda out of the hotel yard; and then, looking up automatically as he turned into the road, he saw that the town had come alive again.

  A hundred yards away, four enormous black vans were parked on either side of the street; he could see men moving along the pavements beside them. Too late to turn back now. In any case, why should he? He drove slowly towards them, and stopped beside the first. It was outside the supermarket; the shop doors were open wide, and five or six men were busily clearing everything from the shelves, trundling trolleys out to load tins and boxes and bottles into the van. The immense pantechnicon towered black over him; he looked up, and saw ‘Ministry of Planning’ inscribed in neat gold letters on the side.

  He might have known.

  The men glanced at him incuriously, without pausing. Queston leaned out of his window and called to the nearest; a burly, middle-aged man in blue overalls, standing beside the van’s open doors with a list in his hand.

  ‘Hey! Excuse me!’

  The man turned, slowly, and came across.

  Queston said foolishly, as he had said to the woman on the Windsor road: ‘Where is everybody?’

  ‘Gone.’

  ‘Gone where?’

  ‘Gone home, of course, mate.’ The Cockney voice was slow, dragging, as if the man were drugged; but he eyed Queston carefully.

  ‘But—wasn’t Slough their home?’

  ‘Home is where your heart is,’ the man said heavily, like a child reciting.

  Queston said, in experiment: ‘Where your roots are.’

  He brightened as if at a signal. ‘That’s it, mate. You got it in one. Slough, this is, see. Didn’t properly exist till the Depression. You wouldn’t remember that—back in the thirties. It grew up full of Taffies and such, come up to get jobs. So now they’ve all gone back home.’

  ‘Guard thine own,’ Queston said gravely.

  The big Cockney positively beamed. ‘ ’S right.’ He looked at the car, wary and admiring. ‘Nice job. Official?’

  ‘No. Mine. I’m just going through.’

  T
he man looked surprised, then serious, then knowing. He nodded, with deep mysterious meaning. Then he jerked his head confidentially towards the big van, where his band still moved methodically up and down the ramp, loading. ‘Like a nice case of tinned stuff, cheap, eh? Going to be scarce soon, you know. All going back to the owners, but one or two’s bound to get lost on the way.’ He winked enormously and grinned, showing yellowing broken teeth. ‘Tell you what, two pound for a twenty box. Take your choice what kind.’

  ‘No thanks,’ Queston said, trying not to laugh. He might have saved himself the trouble of his surreptitious shopping the day before.

  The man stopped grinning, and looked at him suspiciously. ‘What’s the matter, then? You sure you aren’t official? ’ He laid his arm along the top of the car, with vague menace.

  Queston said hastily: ‘Got anything except food? I could do with a couple of shirts.’

  Friendliness returned; the man closed one eye, made a neat circle with finger and thumb and disappeared into the bowels of the van. He returned with three cellophane-packed shirts balanced triumphantly on one palm.

  ‘There you are, chum. Medium-large, should fit you. From one of the London chains, that lot. They’ll never miss them. Three pound shirts those are, last a lifetime. And that’s a good bit of material.’ He was the complete salesman. ‘To you—’ he handed them over with a flourish ‘-three quid the lot.’

  Queston gave him four pounds. The men loading the van took no notice. It was probably a familiar sight.

  ‘Well thanks, guv. Thanks.’ The big foreman touched a non-existent cap, and beamed.

  Queston started the car.

  ‘You off now, then? ’ He lingered, almost affectionate.

  ‘I’m off. Thanks for the shirts.’