Sixty Days to Live (28 page)

As they strolled side by side down a steep, hedge enclosed lane, Hemmingway suddenly realised with a little shock that he was holding Lavina’s hand. He did not let go, however, because he felt that that might draw attention to the fact that he had been holding it; and it was a very nice firm little hand with long, graceful fingers, as he had previously noticed. They were heading for Tadworth but Hemmingway had not consulted his map for some time and evidently they had taken the wrong turning somewhere as, on entering a village, which sprawled along a wider road, they found that it was called Burgh Heath.

Roused now from his pleasant lethargy Hemmingway saw that it was nearly eight o’clock and his map showed him that although they had covered fourteen miles since lunch time, having gone out of their way, they still had another eight to do. That meant that, even if they did the last lap of the journey without resting at all, they could not hope to get in before eleven; but if they didn’t rest it was certain that Lavina would crack up, so it looked now as though they would not reach their destination before midnight.

As it was, when he suggested that they ought to try and make up time by increasing their pace she insisted that they must find somewhere in the village where she could sit down for a little, and pointed to a cake shop, some distance down the broad street
which appeared to be open. When they reached the shop they found that it had been broken into and the dozen or so people who were in it were mostly refugees like themselves who were snatching a free meal from such food as remained there.

The behaviour of the people in the shop was, to say the least of it, peculiar. One man was gobbling down stale buns as though he was trying to win a bet. Another had apparently raided the till and was counting the money in it over and over again. On the floor in one corner a couple were lying sound asleep in a most affectionate embrace; and, strangest of all, a cadaverous-looking man, dressed in women’s clothes but with his trouser-ends projecting beneath a short skirt, was preening himself before a mirror. These antics did not strike Lavina and Hemmingway with quite so much surprise as they would have done normally and their only reaction was to laugh uproariously.

Hungry again after their long tramp since luncheon, they seized on a Madeira cake, hacked it in pieces and began to eat it almost ravenously. Between mouthfuls they exchanged remarks with some of the other people, which mainly concerned the distance each of them had tramped that day, where they were making for, whether the comet would kill them all, and wild rumours about an impossible invention with which the scientists intended to attempt blowing the comet up before it got much nearer.

They had just finished the Madeira cake when a nice-looking young man entered the door. No sooner did his eye light upon Lavina than he rushed at her, seized her in his arms and began to kiss her violently.

Hemmingway grabbed him by the neck and hauled him off; upon which he turned and struck out like a maniac. He was a well-built, powerful fellow and obviously dangerous, so Hemmingway, who was doing all he could to protect himself from a spate of blows, was compelled to snatch up his loaded crop and knock his attacker over the head with it.

Instantly the whole place was in confusion. The young man now lay spreadeagled, unconscious, on the floor and some of the people began to shout that Hemmingway had murdered him, while others declared that he had been perfectly right to protect his girl-friend; upon which they all joined issue with fists, chairs, cups, saucers, cakes and anything else that came handy.

Hemmingway managed to push Lavina behind the counter
and, filled with a fighting spirit which suddenly seemed to have got hold of him, lashed out right and left with his crop. But the riot was brought to a sudden and unexpected conclusion.

Without the least warning a ‘quake shook the floor beneath their feet. They staggered, lost their balance and righted themselves. But the tremor came again. The woodwork of the counter creaked, some lumps of plaster dropped from the ceiling and the whole building trembled.

At the first shock the fighting had ceased. White-faced and scared the whole party rushed out into the street, Hemmingway and Lavina among them. Gripped by panic, the little crowd scattered, shouting with terror as they ran. The shocks continued; a chimney-pot leaned crazily, hovered a second, and fell; glass was tinkling down from some of the windows; the inhabitants of the village were tumbling helter-skelter out of their doorways. Grabbing Lavina by the wrist Hemmingway dragged her along after him towards the outskirts of the village, but they had not covered a hundred yards when she screamed and fell.

He pulled up with a jerk and lifted her from the gutter. She was not badly hurt, only having bruised her knees, but the heel of her shoe had caught in a grating, causing her to trip, and in her fall she had wrenched it right off.

The tremors eased as she sat on the roadside lamenting her ruined stockings but, actually, the tearing off of the heel was a far more serious matter as they had no means of nailing it on again and there was still an eight-mile walk before them. The only thing to do was to look for a shoe shop or the village cobbler.

With Lavina hobbling beside him Hemmingway turned back along the village street. It had been emptied as though by magic of the panic-stricken crowd and the people who had rushed out of their houses, but the village did not appear to boast a shoe shop and it was some time before Hemmingway could find anyone to ask where the cobbler lived.

In the churchyard a black-clad man was digging as though his life depended on it. He had already turned up three mould-covered coffins and was furiously shovelling away the earth from round a fourth. At Hemmingway’s question the man turned towards them a haggard face down which the sweat was pouring in rivulets, shook his head angrily, and returned to his gruesome task.

A hundred yards farther on a skinny, middle-aged woman who was seated on a grassy bank busily plaiting a daisy chain, directed them; and they found the cobbler’s cottage just outside Burgh Heath on the Epsom Road. As they turned in at its gate a fat, freckle-faced woman came rushing out of it.

‘Go away! Go away!’ she shouted excitedly, waving them off with her hands.

‘What’s the matter?’ Hemmingway asked.

‘My ‘usband,’ panted the woman, ‘ ’e’s got a screw loose, poor dear. ‘E’s orl right with us but ‘e’s started shootin’ at strangers. It’s this filthy sky that’s done it.’ She pointed upwards at the heavens which were now a deep reddish-orange and added pathetically: ‘It’s got us all one way or another. Round five o’clock I started pickin’ the flowers in the garden and I just can’t stop.’

They noticed then that although she had a well-filled herbaceous border there was hardly a flower in it. Lupins, delphiniums, Canterbury bells, sweet-william, stock—all were gone—and, suddenly kneeling down, she began to pluck a few pinks that had escaped her previous forays.

At that moment a wiry, red-haired little man popped out of the cottage. Waving an old sporting gun he cried wildly:

‘Enemy spies! Enemy spies! They can’t deceive me. I know them,’ and he proceeded to level his fowling piece at the intruders.

Hemmingway thrust Lavina before him through the gate and pulled her down under a bank at the roadside just as the gun went off with a loud bang.

The shot rattled through the hedge above them. Fearing that the mad cobbler might give chase before he blazed off with his other barrel, they jumped up and ran a couple of hundred yards to put a bend of the road between the cottage and themselves.

‘Phew!’ Lavina exclaimed, coming to a halt. ‘That was a nasty one!’ But suddenly they began to laugh uproariously and for minutes on end they stood there rocking with mirth, absolutely unable to control themselves.

Their laughter ceased only from lack of breath, and when they had at last recovered Hemmingway said:

‘I can’t think why we’re laughing; it’s no joke really because you can’t possibly walk another eight or nine miles with the heel off one of your shoes.’

‘I don’t think I could anyhow.’ Suddenly she leant against him. ‘Oh, God! I’m tired.’

‘I’ know, darling—I know.’ He used the endearment quite unconsciously and she did not seem to notice it. ‘But we’ve got to try and make Stapleton somehow. Come on, we’ll go slowly.’

With her arm through his and their hands clasped again, they set off back through Burgh Heath to the main Reigate road. They were now moving south, about half-way between those two great southern traffic arteries, the Brighton and the Portsmouth roads, and the country had remained unspoilt except for an occasional row of modern dwellings.

When they passed through Burgh Heath again it was just on nine o’clock and they still had another eight miles to go. Both of them were incredibly foot-sore and weary, yet both were still buoyed up by the extraordinary mental exhilaration which came from the red glow in the sky and it was without any horror, but rather with an excited interest, that they came upon the body of a dead man at the forked roads half a mile south of the village.

He was lying on his back on the grass at the side of the road and his battered head showed that he had been attacked and murdered. His clothes were good but flashy and he was wearing a pair of lemon-coloured shoes.

As Hemmingway’s eye fell upon the body he suddenly had an idea. The shoes would be much too big for Lavina but wearing them, stuffed with grass, might be more comfortable for her than hobbling along with one heel-less shoe.

Kneeling down, he took the dead man’s shoes off and told her his idea. The shoes were so big round the instep that even stuffed with grass they were by no means comfortable; yet they certainly made an improvement as she was at least able to take even steps again.

A weird, uncanny light lit the scene and, glancing down, he caught his breath at the exquisite contours of her face, the splendid but easy poise of her head upon her shoulders, her supple, beautifully-modelled limbs. A frightful craving seized him to take her in his arms and press her to him; to hold her next to his beating heart so that he might protect her with his body and his life blood. She was not looking at him and he brushed a hand across his eyes, knowing that he, too, was going mad from that eerie red radiance that was all about them. Next moment they
entered the shelter of a tree-lined stretch of road and his sanity returned to him.

It was just before they reached Tadworth that they noticed a new change in the heavens. Before them to the south the clouds had broken, revealing patches of livid sky. By the time they had passed the crossroads south of Tadworth, leading on the right to Walton-on-the-Hill and on the left to Kingswood, nearly half the sky was clear. But as they mounted the hill a little farther on Lavina’s strength began to fail her. She staggered on for a little along the open road across a desolate heath sprinkled with clumps of gorse and silver birch; then suddenly she turned, clutched at Hemmingway and burst into tears.

‘I can’t go on—I can’t,’ she wept. ‘I can’t go another step.’

They had walked over twenty-one miles that day; a splendid effort at any time for people unused to walking. Coming on top of the strain they had previously undergone it had been too much; they were both now at the end of their tether. During the previous night Hemmingway must have walked an additional ten miles while he was searching for Lavina so he was almost as exhausted as she was; yet they now had only five miles to go to be safe among their friends and he still hoped that with frequent rests they might get in, even if they only covered a little over a mile an hour and reached their destination about two o’clock in the morning.

Among the heather beside the road there was a pile of last year’s bracken. Picking up the sobbing Lavina in his arms, he scrambled with her over the ditch and, laying her down on the heap of dried fern, collapsed beside her.

After a few minutes she stopped crying and asked in a small voice:

‘Must we go on? Can’t we possibly stay here tonight?’

He sighed. ‘I wish we could, but Sam will have been half out of his wits about you. We’re on the last lap now and we’ll rest a lot, but I think we must do our damnedest to make it.’

It was just as he had finished speaking that the full glory of the setting sun and its strange, malevolent neighbour burst upon them.

The reddish clouds had drifted northwards and the whole world was suffused with radiant light. The comet now looked as big as the moon and its red rays, mingling with the yellow
ones of the sun, lit the whole landscape with a strange, unearthly glory, changing the colours of the trees and moorland so that they looked like the work of some mad artist.

Both of them felt a sudden renaissance of their strength. Their tiredness was forgotten. Their veins were filled with fire instead of blood.

They turned on the bracken and stared at each other hungrily. Hemmingway stretched out a hand and grasped Lavina’s shoulder. Her voice came huskily:

‘I’m sorry about Sam, but he’s old and I’m young. I love you darling, and I’ve never really loved a man before.’

As he took her in his arms she was still choking: ‘I love you—oh, I love you.’

Hemmingway lay on his back among the bracken, Lavina’s golden head pillowed on his chest; clasped in a tight embrace they both slept the sleep of utter exhaustion, but they were not destined to sleep out the night.

Shortly after three in the morning a violent tremor shook the earth, the pile of bracken wobbled, the leaves of the trees rustled loudly, and there was a dull explosion somewhere in the distance. Instantly they both started up wide awake.

Two more tremors followed in quick succession, making them feel sick and giddy, then the earth was still again.

Lavina sat up and stared down at Hemmingway. He was lying on his side propped on one elbow, gazing up at her. Each could glimpse the outline of the other but the starlight was too dim for them to see each other’s features.

Suddenly Lavina brought her hand up to her mouth to smother a little cry.