Cloud Walker, All Fools' Day, Far Sunset (36 page)

‘So I’m right, then,’ she murmured. ‘Does it frighten you that somebody else knows?’

Greville hit her again. ‘Now shut up and go to sleep. Remember you can’t dial 999 anymore. I can do what the hell I like with you.’

‘Good night,’ said Liz.

‘Good night.’

Neither of them slept. For an hour or more, Greville tossed and turned, trying, as he thought, to find a comfortable position. Liz just lay there in the dark, wide-eyed and waiting.

Presently, he grabbed hold of her roughly. There were no preliminaries.
‘Serves you right, doesn’t it?’ he shouted. ‘All you want to do is be flat on your back with your legs wide open.’

But he had to turn her on her back and open her legs himself.

Liz said nothing. There was nothing to say. Besides, it was very painful and she felt that if she used her voice at all she would scream or cry out.

Mercifully, Greville didn’t take long to reach a climax. And when he had finished, when his body became slack and relaxed, when Liz knew that she had conquered the impulse to scream, she cradled him, holding his head to her breast as if he were a small child. She soothed him and whispered meaningless words to him. And so they lay together – each feeling tired and lonely and lost – until daybreak.

The day was a most unusual one: it rained from before dawn till after dusk. Greville found later that he could not recall whether it was months or years ago when it had last rained all day. He lay on his back in bed with Liz at his side – doubtless pretending to be asleep – and gazed in delight at the raindrops running down the grey dawn window.

He concentrated and tried to remember what he had been doing during the last downpour. The memory wouldn’t come, and because it wouldn’t come it annoyed him. It continued to annoy him throughout the rest of the day; for as the rain showed no signs of ceasing, he realised that it was a rather special occasion. There must have been other similar occasions, but they were lost in the fuzz of transnormal happenings in a wholly transnormal world. It was the fact that he couldn’t remember the last time it rained all day that caused him, in the end, to start a diary.

But meanwhile he lay in bed and watched the rain make patterns on the window, and wondered for perhaps the ten thousandth time why he was still alive.

He looked at Liz and saw her face in the grey light – a face without cares or wrinkles, frozen by time. The face of a child. A dead child … There was something in him that wanted to cry …

Liz stirred. The child was resurrected as a woman.

‘I’m sorry about last night,’ he said. ‘It must have hurt you.’

‘Not much. Besides, I belong to you for the time being. You can do what you like, can’t you?’ The words were hard but the voice was soft. Liz felt she was only stating the fact.

But the statement triggered off an internal explosion for Greville. ‘Nobody belongs to anybody,’ he snapped. ‘And especially you don’t belong to me. Now if you can divest yourself of the puppy mentality, we’ll get up and see about breakfast.’

Liz was not perturbed. ‘What’s that scar on your stomach?’

‘An old bayonet wound. The only way I could get out of a coal mine was to play dead. Somebody prodded me just to make sure. It didn’t work … Now, breakfast.’

Breakfast was a lavish affair. Greville managed to produce ham, eggs and home-made bread. He even had a bottle of coffee extract.

Liz was delighted. ‘Where did you get all this stuff?’

‘I have connections,’ he said briefly. ‘I told you things weren’t too hard yet in this part of the world.’

Much to his surprise the rain was still coming down when breakfast was over.

‘What would you like to do today?’ he asked.

‘Nothing much.’

‘That suits me fine. There are one or two things I have to do, but they won’t take long. While I’m doing them, you can tidy this place up.’

He put on oil-skins and went out into the rain to feed the half-dozen hens that he had caught and partially tamed. When he had done that he poured some petrol with miserly care into the fuel tank of his petrol-paraffin powered generator. Then he topped up the car batteries that provided his illumination. By the time he got back to the folly, the bed was made and the pots had been washed. Liz had found out how to work the two-stroke pump in the kitchen.

‘Go easy with the detergent,’ warned Greville, noticing the legacy of suds in the sink. ‘That is one of the things that is very hard to come by.’

The rain continued, and he didn’t know what to do. If he had been by himself the answer would have been simple. He would have settled down with a book and would probably have lost himself in it till hunger called. Greville was a great one for books. Other people’s books. Books he would like to have written himself. He read them with enthusiasm, delight, disgust, guilt, ecstasy, impatience and envy. But whether they were good, bad or indifferent he always read them with envy. For they were the children that he had never had.

Chiefly he read novels – stories of a world that no longer existed and that almost seemed now as if it could never have existed. His favourite dislike was an old-fashioned novel called
Room At The Top
. He felt somehow that it was a kind of photographic negative of certain aspects of his own early life. A negative because, basically, he had never wanted to occupy room at the top. But Pauline had wanted it, and so he had masqueraded for a while as an ambitious go-getter.

Greville collected and hoarded books the way some transies still collected and hoarded money. Neither were going to be much use, he thought, in a transnormal world. But the compulsion was obsessional. Besides, books were almost as good as brandy. They provided an avenue of escape, and the hangover was less noticeable. Also they were considerably easier to come by than brandy. Pretty soon the supply of brandy would give out. But the supply of books would last for a long time yet. Only the rats ate them; and although they were good for lighting fires they were not satisfactory as a basic fuel …

Greville was tempted to ignore Liz, settle himself with a book, and treat her as if she didn’t exist. The only flaw in the proposition was the last bit. He
couldn’t treat her as if she didn’t exist. He had lived alone too long not to be acutely and painfully conscious of someone else’s presence. Besides, he had virtually added to her quota of the previous day’s rapes.

‘I’d better show you where things are,’ he said at length. ‘Then you won’t need to keep running to me for every little thing you want.’

Liz had already discovered the larder, which was surprisingly well stocked with tinned food, bacon, eggs and even fresh butter. Greville took her into the living-room, threw back a rug, and lifted a trap-door.

‘The wine cellar of one Augustus Rowley, visionary, philosopher and man of letters,’ he announced.

Liz laughed. ‘Who died of languishment and a profound melancholy.’

Greville was surprised. ‘Who told you that?’

‘You did – yesterday morning when we were having breakfast by Cleopatra’s Needle … It’s funny. It already seems about a year ago.’

Oddly Greville didn’t remember. But he was pleased that she had remembered. ‘Time is subjective,’ he announced drily. ‘I thought you would have defined it as several screws ago.’

‘I thought you didn’t like me to talk about screwing.’

‘Touché. Now come and see what the cellar holds.’

The cellar held an incongruous store of goods that Greville had collected patiently and sometimes at great risk over a long period. There were piles of canned goods – mostly soup, vegetables and fruit. But there were also some tins of corned beef.

And there were two .45 revolvers, a small .38 and an ancient .303 rifle together with boxes of ammunition. There were also several hand-grenades and a stack of perhaps thirty five-gallon cans of petrol together with a very large drum of paraffin. There were also trousers and jackets of varying shapes and sizes, shirts, shoes, socks, bottles of beer, wine and spirits, rat traps, a tin of strychnine, a small astronomical telescope, reels of cotton, balls of wool, a few bales of printed cloth, more books, a first-aid kit and a bottle of chloroform, a sack of potatoes (some of which were sprouting), two violins, a box of soap tablets and a few tins of cigarettes.

‘It’s wonderful,’ breathed Liz, surveying the treasures. ‘You must have had a hard job getting this lot together.’

‘The squirrel mentality,’ said Greville. ‘You won’t believe it, but the only thing I had to shoot anybody for was the telescope. I took it from what was left of a junk-shop in Norwich. An old man saw me and started popping off with a shotgun. I couldn’t get out of the place unless I shot back. He peppered me and it hurt so much and I got so mad that I damn near blew his head off … People die for the oddest things, you know. And the joke is I didn’t really want the telescope anyway. It was just something to carry.’

‘Have you ever used it?’ she asked.

‘No.’

‘Then we shall use it some night when the sky is clear. And you’ll set it up and I can look at the moon.’

‘What the hell for?’

‘To give an old man in Norwich a reason for dying,’ she said simply.

It did not take long to complete the tour of inspection of Greville’s cottage. Liz looked at his books and at his large collection of records and at the twelve-volt record player that had been a major prize of an early scrounging expedition.

‘Will it really work?’ she asked, fingering it in obvious delight.

‘Try it and see.’

Liz chose a Strauss record – the Emperor Waltz – and the music seemed to fill the cottage, briefly shutting out time, transnormality and all the bitter memories of recent years. After the Strauss she tried another record, a song, this time, which she remembered having heard as a child. The name of the singer, Marlene Dietrich, meant nothing to Liz; but the song, Where
Have All The Flowers Gone
, brought tears to her eyes.

Greville remained unmoved – or gave the appearance of remaining unmoved. He did not want Liz to think that he was a push-over for such sentimental nonsense.

The morning wore on. They both became hungry. Because it was too wet to go out shooting and because there was no fresh meat or vegetables in the larder, Greville permitted himself the luxury of opening cans.

For lunch they had soup and baked beans and pineapple. And because it was somehow a special sort of day, Greville went really reckless and opened one of his three remaining bottles of
Asti Spumante
.

The wine relaxed them. Greville yawned and looked through the window at the low grey sky and the smooth curtain of rain. It fascinated him.

‘A raindrop,’ he said suddenly and disconcertingly, ‘is like a glass cathedral. It’s a place for worship. One ought to be small enough to walk inside and drown in liquid prayer.’

‘Raindrops fall,’ Liz pointed out. ‘They get destroyed.’

Greville hiccupped and shook his head. ‘They change, that’s all. Then somehow or other they get back to the ocean and back again into the sky … Perpetual motion … Perpetual prayer … Let’s go to bed. I’m tired.’

A flicker of apprehension passed over Liz’s face. She was remembering the soreness between her legs, and she was also remembering the previous night.

Greville laughed. ‘Not for that,’ he said. ‘Enough is as good as a feast. We’ll be chaste little children taking our after-lunch naps. Hell, what else is there to do? We can’t bloody well go out and save the world.’

‘I’ll clear the table first,’ said Liz.

‘You’ll come to bed. Suburban efficiency doesn’t suit you.’

‘Do I strip?’

‘Do what the hell you like. I’m stripping. I feel better that way.’

‘Can we listen to some music?’

‘No. I want to sleep.’

‘Oh, well,’ said Liz, eyeing the record player. ‘I suppose there’s plenty of time.’

Greville pretended to be irritated. ‘Put some bloody music on, then, if that’s what you want. But turn the volume down.’

Liz looked through the records as she took off her clothes. She found the Italian Symphony and put it on. Then she went into the bedroom. Greville had already closed his eyes. But when she got into bed he put his hand on her breast and let it lie there lightly.

‘Maybe it’s as well I didn’t let the dogs have you,’ he murmured drowsily. ‘Just possibly you might teach me how to become human.’

Liz said nothing. She was lost in the strangely sad gaiety of Mendelssohn. She didn’t so much listen to the music as inhale it, each breath drawing her deeper into a sea of unbeing with the insistence of an anaesthetic.

She was asleep long before the record ended. So was Greville. Despite the rain and the proximity of each other, they both slept profoundly. Greville was the first to wake, by which time it was already growing dark. He looked at Liz in the dim light and was suddenly and unaccountably afraid. He wanted to kill her or run away from her – or both. His hand was still on her breast; but the impulse to let it slide up and fasten tightly round her neck was sudden and fierce.

He tried to control it and couldn’t.

Of its own volition, apparently, the hand started to move.

Liz woke. She looked at him. The hand had already reached her neck.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said softly. ‘You can do what you like.’ There was no fear in her voice.

Greville laughed shakily. The spell was broken. ‘It’s still raining,’ he said. ‘Damned if I can remember when it last rained as long as this … Let’s get up.’

The first entry in Greville’s diary was written late that evening when the rain had stopped and when Liz, having satiated herself with an orgy of music, was indulging in such domestic activities as remaking the bed and clearing away the remains of a late meal. The diary itself was an old school exercise book that Greville had found in a deserted cottage. The uneven and faded writing on the cover proclaimed it to be the English Book of one Robert Andrew Cherry, age 11. Robert Andrew Cherry, who was doubtless long since dead, had also obligingly supplied the date on which he had received his English Book: 30 April 1972.