Mandrake

by Susan Cooper

  Oakley said, still looking out: ‘I do know there isn’t a field inside the city limit.’

  Queston looked up sharply. ‘Then where—? ’ He shivered. ‘God, it’s cold.’ He went back into the bedroom, ripped the blankets from the bed, and came back wrapping one round his shoulders. He tossed the other two to Oakley. ‘Here. We don’t seem to have any clothes.’

  ‘What!’ Oakley turned quickly, the pyjamas flapping round his thin shoulders; with his pale face and hair he looked like a wiry white bird. He shot into the bedroom and came back looking concerned. ‘God dammit, they’ve got my notebook.’

  ‘Is that bad?’

  ‘It won’t do me any good, if they can decipher it.’

  Queston’s head spurted with pain; he fingered it tenderly. ‘They were on the road…’

  ‘I saw you go down. Then someone slugged me.’

  ‘Did you see Beth?’

  ‘Struggling—someone had hold of her. Don’t know if they hit her.’

  Queston stood very still. Then he rushed at the locked door and crashed at it with his fists. ‘Hey!’ he shouted. ‘Hey!’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Oakley said flatly, but with compassion. ‘They can see us O.K.’

  ‘See us? ’ He let his hands drop, and clutched the blanket round him, feeling ridiculous. A middle-aged man in pyjamas, banging on a door.

  ‘The Ministry are very efficient,’ Oakley said. His bright pale eyes flicked round the room. ‘They showed me this game once, when they thought I was for them. A picture, usually. Or a ventilator.’ There were three large murky pictures on the walls, dismal landscapes in oils; he went from one to the other, peering closely. At the third he exclaimed in triumph, and pulled it down. The picture cracked and creaked and came away, revealing a network of wires and three dark protuberances jutting from a cavity in the wall. Queston blinked.

  ‘Three lenses,’ Oakley said. ‘Each angled slightly, to give a good field. The glass on the picture is whole, see? But three holes behind it where these babies fitted in to the landscape—it’s such a god-awful picture you wouldn’t notice. And the boys just sit at the other end waiting for us to wake up. The mike’s probably built in. Stand clear a minute.’

  He dragged a chair across and clambered on to it, with the picture in his arms; then thrust his face forward at the lenses with an enormous imbecilic grin. ‘Bye-bye,’ he said sweetly, flapping the fingers of one hand. Then he raised the picture at right angles to the wall and smashed at them savagely with a corner of the heavy frame, again and again, until glass splintered and metal snapped and wires hung loose. He climbed down, panting, and grinned at Queston; his hair was standing up in tufts, and he looked like a schoolboy after a dormitory fight. ‘I guess we’ll have visitors soon.’

  ‘I suppose it was the Ministry?’

  ‘Who else?’

  ‘I don’t know… ’ Queston wandered about uneasily. ‘Has it occurred to you how easy it would be, with the whole country hypnotized, for a detached outsider to come in and take over control?’

  Oakley stared at him, and grinned mockingly. ‘I suppose you mean the Soviets?’

  ‘Well—’

  ‘Can you really imagine them bothering, after all that?’

  ‘After all what?’

  ‘Jesus,’ Oakley said, and his smile widened, tilting his dark eyebrows up towards the pale hair. ‘What were you doing before Gloucester?’

  ‘We were on our own, for a couple of months. And I was roaming around alone for about six weeks before that.’ He ached for Beth again, and looked at the locked door. ‘And before that, two years.’

  ‘You were tucked away writing for two years?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you must have had some idea of what was going on in Britain.’

  ‘Well—’ Queston said, half-way between irritation and defensiveness. ‘I knew Mandrake was getting a lot of power. Obviously he wasn’t altogether popular, because when I first saw him someone had just tried to knock him off. That was at Kennedy. I never did find out who it was.’ He stopped, remembering the shout: Murderer! ‘I met him then, and he tried to get me to work for the Ministry. I said no, but it wasn’t because I thought there was anything sinister about him. I just didn’t want to be at all involved in politics… And the book wasn’t written about him, or about Britain. I didn’t care much what was happening here. All my ideas had grown out of the cave people, and that Tristan volcano back in 1962—things where you got the earth’s physical violence tied in with a community who had really fierce bonds with the place where they lived.’

  ‘And all that came out of that for you was concern over the earth’s basic motive,’ Oakley said bitterly. ‘The antibomb bit. The reasons why it would want to destroy us, and the methods it could use if it chose to. You just wanted to give us a warning for the future. You never once stopped to watch those methods being neatly built up all round you, ready for use.’

  ‘Was it so obvious?’

  ‘Jesus,’ Oakley said. ‘What a privilege. Showing the author of Time Will Say Nothing just how beautifully he was on the ball.’ He swung his blanket round him like a toga, and began walking up and down the room, treading delicately round the pieces of broken glass. ‘No, it wasn’t obvious to us. But it would have been obvious as all hell to you, with those ideas bubbling in your head. When all this so-called preservation started. When things like the Civic Trust and the National Parks Commission got merged into what began as a double Ministry of Housing and Transport, and ended as the Ministry of Planning. When strange things started happening to people on mountains, or at sea, only never hit the headlines because those were too much occupied with the screwy way Britain was backing off from the United States. That is, till one of the strange things happened to the Prime Minister, and he was killed in an accident on Scafell, and Mandrake took over.’

  ‘Good God,’ Queston said. ‘I didn’t know Mandrake was Prime Minister.’

  Oakley stopped pacing, and swung round on him. ‘Of course you didn’t! You were in hibernation, turning out your gentle academic tome, every detail four times digested.’

  ‘I suppose you’d have had me blast a lot of hot air through the press instead. Big black headlines and half the facts wrong. I’m not a journalist, Mr Oakley.’

  ‘You’re a human being. And an exceptional one. And you know it. Damn it, Queston, you knew something the whole world should have had shouted at it, even if everyone thought you were crazy. And instead of that you sat in a closet and wrote your little book, and it’s a damn good book, and it’s too damn late.’

  ‘If it hadn’t been doctored into a joke—’

  ‘Even without that it would have been too late. Things had begun to move well before you went into retreat. Out in the great big world of real people. Things like the Guild of Women, and the Ministry police—wardens, they called them at first. Traffic wardens, remember? Hundreds of them were recruited for all the so-called preserved cities, ostensibly to keep the streets clear. Then Mandrake really got going, I think, when the federal Europe treaty was signed. That’s when he decided, God help him, that if there were going to be four major armed camps to distrust, the only hope for Britain was to turn herself into some kind of isolated power-house, and presumably reconquer the world that way… I dunno. The man’s as mad as a hatter, of course. But that’s when things properly began here: the clamp-down on immigration, the great home-production drive, all the jingo-ist boloney about guarding thine own. People were so scared by the 1970 Berlin rumpus that he had them on a plate—for just long enough. If you’d been here you’d know what I mean. It really did look then as if there were going to be a war, a completely hopeless war. He got them throbbing with the love of the homeland the way they hadn’t since 1940. And that, I guess, is when what your book calls the Intelligence began to take over.’

  Behind his head, somewhere on the wall outside, Queston heard wood-pigeons burbling. Then he heard footsteps faintly outside the door, feet on wooden stairs rin
ging hollow. They passed the door without pausing, and went away, and he made no move.

  Oakley’s quiet voice went on: ‘I used to sit up in the Commons gallery shivering, watching all those poor mutts cheering Mandrake as if he were the Messiah. The Lobby men were almost as bad, with their soft soap. That was before the emergency closed all the papers down. The foreign pressmen had already left, of course, only the agencies could get news out of Britain—and they had to have besotted natives sending it. I nearly got flung out, but because I’m a British national they decided in the end that I could stay.’

  ‘You’re British?’

  ‘Sure. I was born in London—father British, mother American. We went to the States when I was three. I didn’t come back until after I went into newspapers and started roaming around. But my dad was one of those homeland buffs, standing up when they played My Country ’Tis of Thee, and all. Mandrake would have loved him. So I always kept my British passport. I don’t belong here. I guess I don’t belong anywhere. But it was enough to persuade the immigration boys to let me stay on. Mind you, whether they will now—’

  He stopped.

  ‘Go on,’ Queston said. ‘Go on filling me in.’

  Oakley shrugged. ‘There’s only two things worth the telling. I’m as much in the dark as you are—who knows what this country’s like outside this room, now? The only point is that Mandrake, all on his little lonesome, made the whole goddam nation think it was safe when in fact he’d made it as vulnerable as if the intelligence had been dictating every last word to him. He gave everyone such a superstructure of mistrust and isolationism that the actual take-over went like clockwork. Those regional councils of his, with their network of fall-out shelters and emergency food distribution plans—it was all terribly hush-hush ’—he made the phrase a sneer, in a clipped Noel Coward accent—‘but it made all the old U.S. air-raid precautions look like peanuts. Only you, tucked away, you never saw one single damn thing of that.’ Queston sat very still. At length he said: ‘Two things.’

  ‘What? ’ Oakley looked tired. His face was pinched, and his nose red; the room was full of sunshine, but very cold.

  ‘You said there were two things left worth the telling.’

  ‘So I did.’ He picked up a sliver of glass from the floor and stood turning it gently in his fingers. ‘The second thing, my old hermit,’ he said, ‘was the end of the world.’ Suddenly he flung the piece of glass into the fireplace and looked up. ‘There had to be something to light the fuse. Mandrake had prepared the Intelligence its channel—there had to be something to blow a hole so that it could get through. I’m a poor simple reporter, Queston, I don’t understand your equation between mental and physical energy. I don’t understand how one can merge into the other, and back again. All I know is that on the day that every last one of the official evacuations had been finished in this country, and Mandrake had everyone back to his emotional roots—on that day something happened outside. The Government and the official news-sheet announced that nuclear war had broken out. The Soviet Union, China and the United States, they said—all three, mark you, and everyone swallowed it—had crippled each other in one great big brief blast. They’d known this was going to happen, they said, and that was why they’d benevolently tucked everyone up safe in his little emergency hole. There wouldn’t be any trouble for Britain thanks to its isolation, they said; everyone was going to be just wonderfully safe, these had been nice clean bombs without any fall-out, all we had to do was sit and exist and do what we were told… Well, they were right in one thing. There was a blast all right. As a matter of fact there were two. I was in London then, just before the police had so politely removed me outside the boundary, and I talked to a man I knew at the university labs. Not one single damn piece of news of any kind was coming in from the outside world by then—the Ministry jams all radio reception beyond the local wavelengths. All my guy knew was that there had been two god-almighty shocks simultaneously from two directions—one somewhere in Central Asia, and one on the eastern seaboard of the United States. And whatever they were, they made the most fantastic jump on the seismograph needles that there’s ever been here. He said that in some places the thing could even be felt.’

  ‘When? ’ But already Queston knew: seeing again the flicker of a candle, and the white, strained face of the schoolmaster Lindsey in the dim light.

  ‘Three months ago. Thirteen weeks. The day Britain went back to its roots.’

  ‘There were no bombs,’ Queston said softly. ‘That was the trigger. A trigger for Tyrannosaurus. And Mandrake must have known, or he would never have gone to such trouble to discredit my book. For God’s sake, what’s he trying to do?’

  ‘Ask his henchmen.’ Oakley’s gaze was turned towards the door, and Queston heard the sound of the key in the lock. And then James Thorp-Gudgeon stood in the open doorway, smiling at them.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, James, stop playing this game of the shuttered imbecile don and tell me what they’ve done with her. I don’t want to know anything about your blasted Ministry, I just want to know where she is.’

  ‘She’s safe enough.’

  ‘But where?’

  ‘Look,’ Thorp-Gudgeon said, reproach on his fat face. ‘You’ve frightened that squirrel away. Red, did you notice? The indigenous species. They appear to have returned in some numbers.’ They were walking through Magdalen Deer Park, branches dripping overhead in the dank afternoon, and the deer huddled in distant grey groups. A squirrel scuttered up a tree. Thorp-Gudgeon said blandly:

  ‘She’s in one of the women’s colleges. Somerville, I believe. That place with the monstrous chapel.’

  ‘I’ve got to see her.’

  ‘All in good time. Don’t distress yourself, David. She’s being very well looked after. They must be glad of someone to talk to, poor dears. Women play little part in the life of the university now, thank God.’

  ‘You never did care for women much, did you? ’ Queston said offensively.

  The older man looked at him for a moment, and he felt a quiver of distaste at the flabby chin welling under the deep-curved mouth: a softness to the face, and behind the softness an unpleasantness, and something more. Thorp-Gudgeon smiled at him. ‘No,’ he said.

  They came to Addison’s Walk, past dull winter bushes in the neat bleak flower-beds, and through the cloistered main quadrangle. Thorp-Gudgeon said, in a new, flat tone as if he were reciting: ‘You will see your little girlfriend this evening. You have an appointment. Both of you. I suppose you realize now why this place suffers you to be here, and what this place has become.’

  ‘A museum, if you ask me. The priceless university of Oxford. Our national heritage.’

  ‘Our national capital.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘Save your astonishment for larger things. It’s happened before. Have you forgotten the ill-fated Charles? Not that I find him a particularly apt precursor of the Minister. Of course everything is centred here. It was obvious from the beginning. The Minister made Oxford his nerve-centre long ago. We were called the home of lost causes—we are the home now of a force that is changing the world.’ His voice rose shrill in the hollow cloister; his small eyes glittered; he glared at Queston in a kind of challenge as they turned towards the arch out of the quiet, darkening quadrangle.

  Queston paused, forcing him to stop, and looked back at the hooped grey walls, with their small stone heads carved to gaze in frozen laughing malice out into infinity. He said:

  ‘Someone told me a story here once. About Dr Ellerton.’

  ‘Ellerton? ’ Thorp-Gudgeon said indifferently.

  ‘When he was President of Magdalen. Funny I should remember it now, James. A sculptor was making those gargoyles, and an undergraduate bribed him to give one of them Ellerton’s face. When Ellerton found out, he was livid, and he forced the sculptor to hack bits off the face to destroy the likeness. The ruined face hung there for years. Then when Ellerton was a very old man, he found to his terror that he and the
gargoyle were identical again.’

  Inside the great gates that sealed off the end of the High Street at Magdalen Plain, a small boy was dropping stones into the river from the parapet of Magdalen Bridge. A swan glided out from under the bridge. The small boy threw a stone at the swan. Queston said, as they watched: ‘There’s the one kind of mind you can’t trap into your insane loyalties. That’s my hope for this perverted world of yours. So long as he has a bridge to throw stones from, don’t tell me he gives a damn where that bridge is. Or who crosses it.’

  Thorp-Gudgeon smiled. He moved up behind the small boy, and stood there. Presently he said softly: ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘John,’ the child said readily, bending for another stone. Then he straightened, and Queston felt sick with remembering as he saw the old spellbound look of listening to someone not present, the half-attention. ‘John,’ the boy said. The voice was rounded, Oxfordshire: he said: ‘Jarn.’

  ‘What bridge is this, John?’

  ‘Magdalen Bridge,’ the boy said.

  Thorp-Gudgeon’s voice was soft, coaxing. ‘Who does it belong to?’

  ‘Oxford. All of us, and Oxford.’

  ‘And you? Who do you belong to?’

  ‘Oxford, of course.’ The boy looked up at Magdalen Tower. He smiled; a strange, adult, complacent smile. ‘Oxford.’

  ‘Those stones you’re throwing—’

  The boy looked like a boy again, alert, defensive. ‘It’s only a bird.’

  ‘O yes. But the stones. They come from the bridge. They’re part of Oxford. You’re hurting Oxford.’

  Queston looked with contempt at Thorp-Gudgeon’s podgy, stooping form as he cooed insistently at the boy. He waited for the clear laughter, the derision. But the boy flinched his face clouded with alarm and horror and remorse; he said: ‘Oh. Oh. Oh,’ and looked down at the rough road-pebble in his hand. He bent down, crouching, and put the stone gently down in the angle between pavement and parapet.

  He did not get up again. He stayed there, crouching, uttering small soft noises like an animal whimpering in sorrow or pain, patting incessantly with both hands at the pavement and the road. They were not the movements of a child, or of consciousness; they were an abasement, ancient and horrifying.