Cloud Walker, All Fools' Day, Far Sunset (30 page)

They were tough, they were short of weapons and women, and they had no intention of going away empty-handed.

Johnny Blue Fur laid on a lavish party for their benefit. The wine was passed around freely, and so were the women – among them Liz and Jane who, being twins, seemed to be especially favoured. The party did not break up until about a couple of hours before dawn.

An hour later, when most of the Richmond Lot were deep in their boozy slumbers and even The House guard was dozing, the Northerners came very
much to life. Evidently they had only appeared to drink a lot, or else their capacity was quite remarkable.

There was very little shooting. In the dark it was difficult to tell friend from enemy, and there was neither the time nor the opportunity to light oil lamps.

For about five minutes sheer pandemonium existed. Johnny Blue Fur distinguished himself by throwing three men (one of them his own) through a second-storey window before he was felled by a rifle butt. And one of the guards in the grounds managed to cut down four of the raiders with a burst from his sub-machine gun as they ran to their trucks. Then he himself was shot.

But the Northerners managed to get away with six of the women (some of whom were probably too drunk or too exhausted to care), eight rifles and about two hundred rounds of ammunition. Liz might also have been taken as well as Jane, for she had had to spend what was left of the night with one of the visitors. But when he snatched her up, she began to scream and struggle. Then he panicked and tried to strangle her into submission, but somehow she managed to kick him in the stomach; and while he was recovering from that, she crawled away and was lost in the darkness and confusion.

Apparently she and Jane had been almost literally inseparable. They had been ‘requisitioned’ by the Richmond Lot – and saved from probable death by starvation or transnormal causes – in the summer of 1979. Prostitution, defined grandly by Johnny Blue Fur as free love, turned out not to be quite as repulsive as either of them had feared. At least they had enough food and were relatively safe. And when things could be shared, they did not seem quite so bad. But with Jane’s forced departure – which had taken place several days ago – a curious feeling of deadness came over Liz. It was as if she had been given a tremendous dosage of local anaesthetic in mind and body. Nothing mattered any more. Nothing, that is, except finding Jane somehow and finding a way of being together again. She decided to escape from the Richmond Lot at the first opportunity.

Greville had listened to the rest of her recital for the most part in silence. It did not surprise him. There was very little that could surprise him these days.

When she had finished, he said: ‘So now you are my problem.’

‘Not if you don’t want me to be,’ said Liz simply.

‘I saved your life, didn’t I?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then it seems reasonable for me to have a controlling interest in it.’

‘Have you got a woman?’ she asked bluntly.

‘No.’

‘Do you want one?’

‘I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about it.’

‘Well, you’d better think about it,’ she said practically. ‘But if you just want a good screw, make up your mind and let’s get it over with. Then we can go our own ways.’

Her calmness annoyed him. Once more Greville inspected her critically – this time as if he was mentally undressing her. She remained unembarrassed.

‘I never make love before noon,’ he remarked humourlessly.

‘Who said anything about love?’ she retorted. ‘It’s something people like me have to do to stay alive.’

Greville refused to let himself show any pity, because pity was nothing more than placing a weapon in the hands of an opponent. ‘I suppose even people like you develop a taste for it.’

‘Especially people like me,’ said Liz. ‘And especially if we get screwed about twice a day for a year or two. We either jump in the river or develop a taste for it.’ She returned his critical inspection with interest. ‘Mind you,’ she added, ‘there are times when it’s repulsive anyway, but I’ve learned to put up with them.’

Greville slapped her. It was not a very hard blow, but surprisingly she began to cry.

Despite the implications of her last remark, he didn’t know why he had slapped her – just as he didn’t know why he was now putting his arm round her shoulder and trying to comfort her.

‘It wasn’t you. It wasn’t you,’ she sobbed. ‘It was those horrible dogs … Oh, hell, I want to be sick.’

Greville opened the car door and helped her out. She retched, but very little came up. When she had finished, she began to shiver violently. With the shotgun in his hand and keeping an alert eye for dogs, he made her walk up and down until the shivering stopped.

‘Thanks,’ she said at last. ‘I seem to be thanking you for everything, don’t I?’

‘It’s a habit you’ll grow out of.’

‘Yes … I don’t even know your name.’

‘Call me Greville.’

‘Is that all of it?’

‘It’s enough.’

Liz sighed. ‘Well, what are you going to do with me, Greville?’

‘I don’t know. I shall have to think about it.’

‘Don’t think too long. If you don’t want your pound of flesh, I’m going to try and get a bit nearer Jane.’

He laughed. ‘You’ve got about as much chance of finding Jane as of finding a needle in the proverbial but now obsolete haystack.’

‘What’s that to you?’ demanded Liz wearily. ‘We’re all nut-cases together.
Besides, I have a sort of built-in direction-finding apparatus. And, anyway, it doesn’t matter how I waste my time, does it?’

‘It matters to me,’ said Greville. And suddenly he was amazed to realise that it did. ‘It’s quite a long time since I talked to anybody,’ he said, as if that explained everything. ‘I think I might take you home with me. You might even be useful.’

‘I’m no good for anything but screwing,’ said Liz flatly.

‘For all I know you might not even be any good at that. Incidentally, while we’re on the subject, try to find another word for it.’

‘Does it offend your modesty?’

‘No,’ he said evenly. ‘Only my aesthetic sense. Now, if you have got over having the vapours, let’s think in terms of breakfast.’

Breakfast consisted of very salty ham, coarse home-made bread and bottled beer. They ate it near Cleopatra’s Needle, on the Embankment. It was a long time since Liz had been in London, and she wanted to see what time, transnormals, and the reign of cats and dogs had done to it. She was not haunted by ghosts as Greville was, and she was fifteen years younger. Also she had never really known the normal world, for all her growing and most of her exploring had been done during the terrible decade of Omega radiation. So she could not experience the perspective of sadness that Greville experienced, nor could she be aware as he was aware of the immense tragedy in the passing of a great city. If she did not seem to notice the desolation so much it was simply because experience had taught her that this kind of desolation was natural: it was just a part of life.

They ate their meal sitting in the car and watched the sun climb slowly with the bright golden promise of another warm day. The food was part of the rations Greville had brought with him on his obsessional anniversary visit to Chelsea Bridge. There had, of course, been a practical excuse for the long – and hazardous – expedition from his cottage in Norfolk to the great city. He was on the scrounge – for guns, ammunition, shoes, clothing, tools, books, and almost anything.

He had been living in East Anglia for about eighteen months. He had drifted there and found the cottage that he had made into his private lair purely by chance. When the Leicester Volunteer Force disintegrated in 1979 – along with practically every other quasi-social organisation in the country – he had almost instinctively made his way south. On his wanderings he had become entangled, and rapidly disentangled, with several small groups of one kind or another. But he had not attached himself or allowed himself to become personally involved for the very simple reason that he knew that most of the groups he had encountered were doomed. Some of them had been no more than amateur brigands, others were small tribes based loosely on the family and recognising only the ties of real or symbolic kinship, yet others were fanatical do-gooders trying with a few dozen hands to resurrect the body and spirit of an entire civilisation. But none of them had staying power because they were either living on the past or trying to rebuild it. They could not understand that, in the broad sense, they were nothing more than grave-robbers – like Egyptian peasants looting from the Valley of the Tombs of Kings.

Greville was disgusted with failure, his own and everyone else’s. So he recoiled from membership of a group – any group – and determined to lead a fairly solitary existence. Above all, he needed time to think, time to come to terms with a mad world, time to come to terms with his own private madness.

He had discovered the cottage in Norfolk as he struggled vaguely towards London. It was more than a cottage: it was a citadel, for it stood on an island less than an acre in size in Ambergreave Lake, about twenty miles south of Norwich. There had once been an Ambergreave Manor, a rambling sixteenth-century mansion, that had been burned down in 1976 when the owner poured two gallons of petrol over himself and struck a match. The cottage on the island had originally been built as a folly at a time when such architectural extravagances were popular attractions in the grounds of large English country houses. But a nineteenth-century Lord of Ambergreave, who took a serious and considerably optimistic view of his qualities as a poet, had the folly converted to a retreat where he could live in splendid isolation for weeks at a time while churning out an abundance of sonnets that would surely establish a considerable niche for him in English literary history.

Unfortunately, it did not occur to him that English Literature itself was subject to mortality. Nor could he have possibly entertained the notion that within five years of his death his poems would be forgotten by everyone but the printer to whom he had paid in the course of time more than a thousand guineas for the publication of various slim volumes.

Such, however, proved to be the case. Greville had discovered his effigy in marble above a substantial-looking vault in the churchyard of the village of Ambergreave, which was about three miles away from the remains of the manor house. The grave – and, in fact, the entire churchyard – was rapidly disappearing under a mass of weeds and shrubs. But he had been sufficiently interested in the man who had provided his ideal retreat to find out something about him. The inscription below the statue read:
To the undying memory of Augustus Rowley, visionary, philosopher and man of letters. Born
1833:
died
1873
of languishment and a profound melancholy. He here awaits the vindication of time and circumstance, secure in the belief that he accurately interpreted the call of his Maker
.

Greville had been amused by the wordy epitaph, which he suspected had been written by Augustus Rowley himself. And, indeed, he had reason to be grateful to that obscure and pathetic dilettante, for the cottage on the island in a lake that was itself the creation of some previous Rowley had proved to be an ideal lair for a solitary transnormal in the transnormal world of the late twentieth century.

Indulging a whim, Greville had cut down the weeds that were scrambling
vigorously round the grave of Augustus. Occasionally he would visit the churchyard and indulge in one-sided conversations with the extinct visionary, philosopher and man of letters. He took especial pleasure in trying to explain to the mute and invisible Augustus the present state of a world that, in the nineteenth century, must then have seemed to be the still point, the fixed centre of a turning universe. He had a happy feeling that if Augustus could really have appreciated the catastrophe that had overtaken his secure and well-ordered cosmos, it would have been quite enough to make that man of letters turn from the exquisite sculpture of his deathless sonnets to the quarry-like blastings of free verse.

Now, as Greville sat in the car with Liz and gazed at the battered lines of Waterloo Bridge, one span of which had been almost demolished by unknown causes and about which there lay a wreckage of small craft, and some quite sizeable pleasure boats, he was reminded of Augustus Rowley’s certain conviction of immortality.
Sic transit gloria mundi
… This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.

‘You are miles away,’ said Liz. ‘Where the hell are you?’

He looked at her with a start and realised that she had finished eating. She had also emptied her bottle of beer.

‘Sorry,’ said Greville. He lifted his own bottle to his lips and drank from it gratefully. He suddenly felt very thirsty. ‘Would you like another bottle? There’s a crate in the back of the car.’

‘No, thank you … What were you thinking about? Were you wondering what to do with me?’

‘No. That problem’s settled, at least. I’m taking you back to Norfolk. If you make yourself agreeable, I might even eventually let you go chasing off after your sister Jane.’

‘And if I don’t make myself agreeable?’

‘Then I might toss you back to the dogs.’

‘Oh, well,’ said Liz equably and obscurely, ‘while there’s a choice, life is not without interest … Now, what were you thinking about? You had a sort of sad, faraway look in your eyes.’

‘Augustus Rowley,’ he said, ‘and mortality.’

Then he told her about the cottage on the island and about Augustus Rowley’s grave and the tiny ghost-like village of Ambergreave.

‘It sounds all right,’ remarked Liz noncommittally, when he had finished, ‘and Norfolk’s on the way to Lancashire, so maybe I’m not doing too badly.’

‘You could have done considerably worse about an hour ago,’ Greville reminded her. ‘So don’t take anything too much for granted.’

‘When are we going back?’ she asked.

‘Today. Now, in fact.’

‘I thought you were on the scrounge.’

He pointed to the untidy heap of assorted goods in the back of the station wagon. ‘I did quite a bit of scrounging yesterday. I’ve got enough to be going on with.’