by Susan Cooper
‘What is it?’
‘The torch. Quick.’
Queston fumbled for the switch on the heavy rubber case, and the torch-beam flared out over Mandrake. He was not as they had left him. He was crouched, kneeling with his head twisted against the ground; his cheek flat against the grass, so that in the sudden light they could see his face.
It was white, ravaged, impassive, exactly as it had been before; but the eyes stared open, unblinking. He turned his head slowly away from the light like a sick man, and they watched astounded, without a word; and painfully and slowly the Minister moved forward, away from them, on his hands and knees, crawling back along the road.
‘Mandrake! ’ Oakley said, croaking.
The slow, degraded crawl paused, and the figure stumbled clumsily to its feet, and went on, step by gradual step, lurching away.
Oakley’s voice rose. ‘Mandrake!’
Beth said: ‘I don’t think he can hear you.’
‘Let him go,’ said Queston.
‘He’s dangerous.’
‘I doubt it, now. And what could we do with him?’
‘Kill him.’
Queston held the dwindling, sleep-stumbling figure in the spraying beam from the torch. ‘You can shoot him in the back. Or you can take him farther from Oxford. Which d’you prefer?’
Oakley shrugged. ‘He won’t rest till he finds you again. It’s your funeral.’
They watched the shambling, eerie shape of Mandrake disappear out of the end of the light.
‘It seems a funny thing to say,’ Beth said, ‘but will he be all right?’
Oakley laughed shortly. ‘With any luck the first car chasing us will run him down.’
‘They won’t chase us,’ Queston said. He felt very tired. ‘They have other things to worry about. He’s safe enough. He’s going home.’
They went back to the car, and sat in silence. Beth reached for Queston’s hand; he put his arm round her shoulders.
‘O love,’ she said softly.
He felt her hair like a breath against his neck. He looked down at her, and she turned her face to him, a featureless glimmer in the dark car; but when he kissed her their mouths met and clung, and the dark was not there, or the despair, but only a long singing white world that was all the endless ache of wandering dissolved into certainty. He cupped his hand round her cheek, and kissed her eyes.
Oakley said, from behind them: ‘I don’t want to break up the party, but—’
There was pain in the voice, but Queston did not notice; he felt Beth’s smile under his hand, and laughed. ‘Go ahead. I’ve got my girl back.’ He pulled his arm over to the wheel, ruffling Beth’s hair, and started the car. It was like waking to sunshine after long sleep; the world was as easy suddenly as when he was young. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said, ‘where would you like to go?’
‘Is there anywhere we can go? ’ Beth said.
The car stirred as Oakley moved suddenly. ‘Listen!’
‘What is it?’
‘I heard something. Switch off again.’
The engine died, the silence murmured in their ears.
‘Nothing there.’
‘It was some way away. It sounded like—damn, it couldn’t have been. Come on, let’s go. This road’s giving me the willies.’
Queston drove slowly, watching the road. ‘We’ll go up to Aylesbury. Tell me when you see a turning, Beth.’
‘Keep away from the big towns,’ Oakley said. ‘Apart from the Ministry and the great unknown, they’re getting dangerous.’
‘How?’
‘Gudgeon was trying to tell us how lucky we were to be in Oxford. He let something drop about typhoid.’
‘And smallpox in London,’ Beth said. ‘David, quick, there’s a turning here.’
He swung round, and they were in a narrower road, twisting between hedges; grey, unreal in the headlights.
‘We can cut east from Aylesbury into the dead lands.’
The car hummed on. Queston relaxed into his driving, awake and alert now, enjoying the easy power of the turbine. He felt Beth’s head droop on to his shoulder, and become heavy; in a moment he knew she was asleep. He said quietly: ‘Back there. Before we started again. What was it you heard? You said it sounded like—and then you stopped.’
‘It sounded like Gloucester,’ Oakley said. ‘And it came from Oxford. Or where Oxford used to be.’
He woke with a jerk of guilt, thinking himself still at the wheel, and then he felt Beth beside him, and saw Oakley’s head and shoulders outlined against the windscreen ahead. The windows were cold grey.
He looked out at the rushing road. They were in the dead lands again, the long bleakness of London’s suburbs: the decaying lines of empty houses, deserted factories, but worse than he remembered. The winter grass drooped lank beside the road; outside the houses, fences that had clasped at privacy leaned and gaped; here and there a roof had collapsed, and the house stood crumbling in its broken-windowed row. A dead England. How many people were left alive?
He moved gently away from Beth; she murmured, and curled into a corner of the seat. It was very cold. He leaned forward, propping his chin on the back of the seat beside Oakley. The journalist grunted. His hands rested easily on the wheel; his cheeks were hollow, and shadowed with red prickles of beard.
‘These damned automatics. I used to like English cars in the old days—they had gears to keep you awake.’
Queston said curiously: ‘How did you come to be in Gloucester when we met?’
‘The last of the great news stories. Not that I should ever have got it out of the country. I was tailing the Ministry men—Mandrake had sent observers down to that great ill-fated jamboree, because he apparently had his doubts about the woman who was running it. Dunno what they were going to do to her. That’s one little lot of thugs who won’t do very much any more, anyway.’
‘I’m surprised they didn’t make you stay in London, if you were born there.’
‘So was I, frankly. I guess I made such a nuisance of myself they decided it wasn’t worth it.’
‘And you didn’t feel the pull, even a little? No roots?’
‘No roots. None in England, either—or anywhere. That’s the job, to some extent. You find two sorts of pressmen, David—one has a pipe, and a garden, and three kids, his great domestic bastion against the rat race. Only the domesticity and the race between them grind him down, poor sod, and he ends up a bald worried old hack with an ulcer or a whisky nose. The other sort are the bastards. You know—bright young men, and it takes so much adrenalin to go on being bright that they have to use women as fuel. And they don’t put down roots, except in bars. The only thing about the bastards is, they’re the ones who can sometimes write.’
‘Could you write?’
‘No,’ Oakley said, and grinned. ‘O, I thought so. So bright it blinded you, I was. I wrote what was the definitive novel about newspapers, for six months until the next guy wrote one, and I had a couple of plays put on at scrubby little dives in Bayswater, and that was it. Not exactly an oeuvre. After that I stuck to newspapers. And campaigning against the Ministry, when anyone would let me.’ He yawned, and the car swerved.
‘I’ll take over in a minute. Where are we?’
‘I’m O.K. Edge of Chelmsford, I think. I kept straight on, more or less. We’re getting short of gas.’
They skidded through a roundabout; the cluster of lamp standards in its centre leaned on one another like tall thin loving drunks. Back on the main road, Oakley skidded to avoid a fallen telegraph pole, its wires hanging lazily looped from the next. Queston peered round, in the dull dead light of after-dawn.
‘What’s happened to this place? Not a quake.’
‘Bad storm, I guess. I was caught in the skirts of a hurricane called Connie once, way back. The morning after looked a bit like this.’
They passed a chicken-house upside-down on the pavement; a metal roof ripped and hanging from a factory; a lamp-post lying smashed into th
e window of a shop. Paper blew and bustled in the road.
‘We do need gas,’ Oakley was looking at the petrol gauge again. As he glanced up, he suddenly cursed, pushed his foot at the brake and lurched the car to a whimpering stop. Queston was nearly shot over the back of the seat.
‘What the hell—?’
‘Look.’
Ahead, the houses on the right of the road thinned, and gave way to fields. A low, dead horizon, stretching flat where land met sky; but against it, dark figures moving slowly in a field.
‘Who are they?’
‘I don’t get it. This is dead land. No one lives here, there’s no pull.’
‘They might be from Chelmsford.’
‘Out here? We’re as far from the place as we took Mandrake from Oxford.’
‘They might be something else,’ Queston said slowly. He felt excitement rise in him, at the stirring of an idea sown by something Mandrake had said. He pressed Oakley’s shoulder. ‘Drive up to them. Slowly.’
‘Are you crazy? We’ve made it out of one cage, I’m not chancing another.’
‘I tell you it’s all right. I think we’ve found—O, come on.’
Oakley was not listening. ‘I’m going to turn, before they spot us. Damn lucky they haven’t already, or heard the engine. We must be downwind.’
‘No.’ Queston was already opening the door. ‘I’m going to talk to them.’
‘You are crazy.’ Oakley stared at him. His voice rose: ‘David, for God’s sake—’
‘Shut up. You’ll wake Beth, she needs rest. Turn the car if you like, but I’ll be back.’
‘Well, at least take this with you.’ He held out his gun.
Queston shook his head. He said obscurely: ‘It’s got to start somewhere.’ Then he walked away from the car, down the dead road.
The wind was cold on his face, but it woke him; he realized suddenly that he was very hungry. The figures in the field were moving methodically, slowly; as he came nearer he thought they were picking things up. He began to hear voices indistinctly on the wind. He walked on, past the last houses. Fields stretched flat and open on either side; away from the car, he knew himself entirely defenceless and alone. But a certainty was growing in him. He walked on. He could see both men and women there now; beyond them, in the early grey sky, he thought he made out two curious rounded shapes on the horizon.
Then the figures saw him.
There was a strange sudden flurry of movement, and then they were not there. Queston paused in amazement, about fifty yards away. The field was empty. He peered at the dark soil, studded with rough hummocks of grass, but he could see no one. He began walking again, more warily.
As he drew level with the field, the hedge cut off his view. He stood irresolute, and then he heard a voice.
‘Who are you? ’ A strong, rough voice; he thought it came from inside the hedge.
He clenched his fists, and took the risk. ‘I’m a friend. I’m—’ he paused, feeling for the words to convince. ‘I’m wandering. I need help.’
‘Come over here,’ the voice said.
Queston walked towards the hedge, his heart jumping in his chest as if it tried to get out. The branches before him grew wild and straggling as all the hedges in England now; he wondered irrelevantly whether they would have grown right across the fields in ten years’ time. No men; the hedges are the masters now—
‘Stop there,’ said the voice.
Queston stopped. He said clearly: ‘We are all rootless. There’s no need to suspect me. I’m running from the Ministry. I am not armed.’ He spread both arms wide.
‘All right, mate,’ the voice said cheerfully. ‘Spare us the dramatics.’ A figure rose on the other side of the hedge: a big, battered man with long grey hair. Queston moved close and saw the broken nose and watery, half-closed eyes, and wondered why they should seem familiar.
The man half-turned back to the field. ‘All clear,’ he called. ‘Panic over.’ Other figures rose round him, men and women shaggy and tattered as tramps; and Queston realized that they had vanished, in the half-grown grey light over the hummocked field, simply by dropping flat on the earth.
He found the gate, and climbed over it; the big man came to meet him.
‘My name’s David Queston.’
‘Bill Milward. You on the road, then?’
‘Yes. With two friends. We managed to get out of Oxford.’ The man hissed through yellow, broken teeth. ‘Takes some doing. They after you?’
‘I dare say. There’s no sign of them yet.’ They were Maquis meeting in occupied territory; he was struck by the sense of comradeship against a common enemy, and realized how the balance could change. It had occurred to neither of them yet to mention the land.
He said: ‘What are you doing? ’ The others had moved away, back to their stooping and gathering.
‘Potatoes—this is a field they never bothered to clear. The frost’s got most of them, but there’s a few left. We scrounge what we can get, where we can find it. Can’t stay in one place, it wouldn’t be safe. Anyway we’re a fidgety lot.’ The sky behind him was beginning to glow cold-blue and red as the sun crept up towards the surface. The man called Milward blew on his big hands; he wore a heavy stained greatcoat over bulging layers of nameless garments, but his face was twisted with the pain of cold. He said: ‘Where you making for?’
‘I don’t know, really. Got any suggestions?’
‘Up to you, mate. We just keep moving. About this far from London, there’s a clear belt all round.’
‘Clear of what? ’ Queston said.
The man’s eyes slipped aside from him; he said evasively: ‘Them. The Ministry. People. You know.’
Queston looked at the scattered, slow-moving group. Some were young, some middle-aged, though it was difficult to tell through the long hair and muffling clothes. There were no children, and no one really old. ‘Who are you?’
‘Oddments,’ Milward said, and grinned. ‘We’ve met up on the road. My wife and I, we were in London, but we left. Didn’t like the way things were going. I did a few jobs for the Ministry, but I like being my own boss. Always moved around a lot. And we didn’t belong anywhere, so we just kept on moving. People were getting a bit nasty in the towns, anyway—you know? Then we met a young chap and his girl, and they was doing the same, so we teamed up. And so on. We get on all right. We’re all a bit independent-minded, you might say, but you’re with people you know you can trust, see? We’re O.K. Things have been tough, but it’ll be better when the winter’s over. We reckon we’ll go down along the coast, it’ll be clear then. Might even settle down.’
‘Why will it be clear then?’
‘Storms,’ the man said briefly.
Queston remembered Mandrake’s report of the tsunami. ‘You mean there’ll be no one left there.’
‘’Sright.’ He jerked his head at the workers. ‘One of our chaps comes from Dover. Said it’s shocking all along there. Great waves and gales bashing at the towns—and none of them’ll leave their homes, the stupid idiots. They just sit and wait for it. The drownings are something chronic.’
‘Bill!’ It was a woman’s voice, shrill and frightened. They saw her stand staring, pointing; and then they saw the car draw slowly up alongside on the road. Oakley’s fair head was at the window, peering at them.
Milward seized Queston’s wrist, twisting it angrily. ‘If you’ve been—’
‘I told you I had friends with me.’ Queston began to struggle, but relaxed, remembering Oakley’s gun. He might get the wrong idea. With his free arm he waved gaily towards the road.
‘Don’t kid me. That’s a Ministry car.’
‘Of course it is. We pinched it from Oxford.’
The word was like magic. Milward looked at him calculatingly through the furrows enfolding his eyes, and let him go. ‘Pinched it, eh? That’s good going.’ His voice was tinged with respect, and the echo in Queston’s mind suddenly rang clear.
‘Good God. In Slough last year. With a
Ministry van, clearing the shops.’
‘What?’
‘I knew I’d seen you somewhere before. You sold me three shirts once.’
The big man stared at him; then his face creased and split into the rows of broken teeth, and he thumped him on the shoulder. ‘Well stone me, so I did. Well, fancy that, now. Fancy seeing you. I thought you was a bit dodgy then, if I remember. Suspicious bastard, I am. But you got to be, up to a point, see? All right when you’re sure. I’m a bloke’s best friend when I’m sure about him. Hey, Shirl! ’ He shouted to one of the women.
Queston waved at the car again. ‘Stay there. Shan’t be long.’
Milward turned to him, alight like a gleeful child; it was the Maquis bond confirmed, Queston thought, smiling at him. The brotherhood of the fiddle; one of the few things to survive. Well, it was something.
‘This is the wife. Shirl, this is that chap I told you about. The one driving through Slough, when we was loading that time, that I flogged some shirts to. Mr Western.’
‘Queston.’
‘Pleased to meet you,’ the woman said. Under the dark woollen scarf her face was sharp-boned and shrewd, with a calculating Cockney toughness. She was about forty-five; wild strands of faded blonde hair wisped out over her fore-head. Her skin was veined with the cold, but she looked as if she could cope easily with Milward, or anyone else.
‘It was you did it,’ Milward said eagerly. ‘We talked about you, see? Well I dunno, fancy seeing you again.’ He bubbled with enormous schoolboy delight. ‘When we started thinking about going off, I remembered you. It was obvious you didn’t belong nowhere, see? And I thought, if one chap can manage on his own, so can we. And Shirl thought so too.’
Queston looked at the wife, wrapped against the bleak morning, her nose and eyes red with cold; and he thought of the life she must lead. ‘I hope you don’t regret it.’
‘We knew what we were doing.’ Unexpectedly, she grinned cheekily at him, and jerked her head at Milward. ‘They always get their own way. Let him go off without me and he’d be in trouble in no time. I know him. Anyway, London—lot of zombies they were, them and their old home town. Those bloody women with their slogans… what I say is, it’s the people you want to be with that matter. You know? Not the place you’re in.’
