Mandrake (15 page)

Before the little man could answer, there was suddenly an unsteadiness in the room. Queston knew he was not imagining it; he could see the awareness in the other’s face. The primus rattled on the table, and the flame of the candle beside it shivered violently, twitching its thread of black smoke into a coil. He felt for an instant as if his chair had disappeared and he were sitting on air, an undulating air like the sea; and he thought he caught the same distant sound of rumbling that he had heard far away in the night once or twice before.

Then the room was as it had been, with the silence, the comfortable smell of food, and the shadows dark over Lindsey’s small troubled face.

Lindsey said abruptly: ‘That’s happened before.’

‘I know.’

‘What d’you think it is?’

‘An explosion of some sort, I suppose. If we weren’t in England I should say it was an earthquake.’

‘What’s the difference? ’ Suddenly Lindsey jerked his head up and backwards; so far back that the larynx bounced as if to escape while he spoke, and the candlelight glinted yellow on his spectacles. ‘Bombs… earthquakes… it’s them. They’ve made something break loose. I knew something had to happen one day. The Ministry, the Guild of Women, they’re all one. We thought a miracle had happened, we were all mad, they were planning it all the time. I never thought. I marched to Aldermaston when I was a young man… and then when they came they seemed like saviours. I don’t know what went wrong, I don’t know what they’ve done… ’ He dropped his head forward again, and the light shone on his bald skull as it had done on the lenses over his eyes. ‘The world’s gone mad. Not just the people in it.
The world’s gone mad.’

Queston watched him. It was a private outburst; he felt he should not have been there.

Lindsey’s high, tremulous voice was muffled. ‘I’m a teacher. I taught at a prep school near Beaconsfield. Biology and French. The French was never up to much, but you have to double up a bit in these small schools. We never had any children of our own. I didn’t mind. Boys can be monstrous, I had enough of them at school. But Ellen was sorry, I think. Sorrier than I knew. Perhaps if I’d known… she’s Welsh, and Welsh-looking. Small, and cosy—you know? They like children. But she joined the Guild, and they took her away.’

‘The Guild?’

‘The Guild of Women.’

‘What’s that?’

‘I don’t know.’ Lindsey shrugged. Hunched inside his crumpled raincoat, he looked like a small bedraggled bird. ‘The Ministry started it. At the beginning, before anyone realized. It was part of their guard thine own, keep to your roots campaign. The idea that the family’s the most important thing there is, and the woman’s its focal point. Did you never come across it at all? It’s immense. And not… nice. We always saw a lot of Ellen’s family in Wales, but more after the Guild began—we spent every holiday there, and all the women going off all the time to meetings and what they called groups. They nearly spoke a language of their own. They’d never tell you what it was all for… Ellen changed… She kept on about living there, going home. I tried to get a job there, but they wouldn’t have me because I wasn’t Welsh. She didn’t seem to care. In the end she just upped and went.’

He stopped. His head was still bent. Queston thought he was crying. Then he looked up fiercely.

‘Life hadn’t altered, we weren’t any different as people. It all got too big for them, that’s what happened. It’s the thing they let loose that broke us up. They talked all that about contentment, and having your own roots being the only way to end war, but all they did was make places matter more than people. Make them more powerful than people. Let this—this thing break out. I tell you, that’s what’s happened. None of the old standards hold any more, something’s broken out.’

Queston sat still. He felt cold. The words were like an accusation; they turned his mind irresistibly in to look at itself, and it was like a dreadful blinding realization of guilt. He shouted silently to himself: it’s not my fault, I didn’t know—

The little teacher pulled himself up in his chair, as if he were drawing the whole of his body into a small upright space. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t generally talk very much. We never had many friends. Somehow we didn’t need them. These last weeks—well, I… I miss my wife.’

Queston said helplessly: ‘Surely you’ll be able to join her.’

‘O no.’ He shook his head. It was a very final gesture. ‘Personal relationships have no place in this kind of world. You are well off without them, Mr Queston. You are a very lucky man. I think perhaps you have found the only way to survive in this—in whatever it is.’

The candle flickered down. It was little more now than a melted stub. Out of his guilt, Queston felt an enormous resentment against a force that could so shatter this harmless, hapless little man. He tried to find some comfort, and it was as clumsy as a man holding a baby for the first time. He said: ‘I tell you what. We could go to Wales. I’ll take you. There’s the car, and enough fuel—you can still find garages with stacks of paraffin, and this car runs as well on that as on petrol. I’ll take you. I’ve nowhere else to go. We could find your wife. We’ll go tomorrow. It’s worth a try.’

He wondered always, afterwards, whether he had really meant it, or whether Lindsey had sensed no real involvement in the offer. But he could have sworn there were new tears in the bleak-bright eyes when the man put out his hand and gripped his for a moment, and said ‘Yes, that would be wonderful. Thank you. That would be wonderful. Yes, we’ll go.’

He could have sworn Lindsey had trusted him, then.

They had blocked the draughts under the doors as best they could, and drunk some whisky to pledge the journey to Wales, and gone to sleep rolled in blankets on the floor.

But suddenly, Queston had woken in the night, with nothing in his mind but the conviction that he had just heard a shattering noise.

He listened; there was nothing. The air was blowing cold on his face, and his back was stiff. He groaned, and sat up; then he saw that Lindsey was gone. The blanket lay in a neat folded heap on the floor: and the attaché case on top of it.

The window was a faint grey square. His mouth tasted foul and ancient; he felt terrible. He saw that the paper they had plugged underneath one door of the office was lying loose, and he went out on to the platform. Mist hung low over the railway line in the beginning light, and over the long stretch of concrete, but it was not difficult to see Lindsey. He lay at the far end of the platform, with one arm and the remains of his head dangling from the edge.

Queston jammed his finger-nails into his palms and went close. Lindsey hadn’t learned that from a biology textbook. He had come out into the dawn, put the barrel of the heavy revolver into his mouth, and fired.

Something tinkled at Queston’s feet. He picked it up; it was a round rimless lens from a pair of spectacles. He let it fall, and it bounced musically, and did not break.

It was as if the anger built a protective coating around his brain. All day it lasted. He broke into the garage of the nearest house for a spade, carried Lindsey’s blanket-wrapped body to the car, drove to the churchyard, and buried him. Somehow he had seemed the kind who would want to end up under a yew-tree. Neat and tidy and grass-hummocked, with a headstone: ‘Beloved husband of—’

He buried the attaché case with him. It had been full of letters twenty years old, from the Welsh wife.

Afterwards, it was the thought of going into the churchyard that astonished him most. They should have more pull, those places, than anywhere else. Inevitable; the emotional bond was there ready-made. Bodies under the earth, a bait to hold those above it. Churchyards were dangerous places, especially those outside the line of a town.

Yet he had felt nothing, with his seventh sense, from beginning to end. He knew he had been made safe by his cold fury against the earth, the Ministry, perhaps himself: against all the forces that had pulled Lindsey’s finger on the trigger. When that had gone, ebbed away, and he was driving alone again along an empty road, he began to shake until his teeth rattled in his head.

It was the fifth week, and still he had no idea what was going on in the towns and villages. The car radio had not worked since its one mysterious bulletin in Slough. The car itself was effective still, while he could find fuel. He drove to and fro within the dead lands of the empty suburbs, aimless, without any coherent thought except the daily business of finding food. More and more of the shops he passed had been methodically cleared; or lay jagged-windowed, rifled by the gangs of youths who roamed a little way out from the edges of every town. He no longer planned beyond the end of a day. Sometimes he thought Lindsey had found the best solution. Sometimes he thought he was looking for something that he could not recognize and would never find. Sometimes he thought he was going mad.

Then it was what he dimly reckoned to be the seventh week, and as he wrenched the car automatically round from the prickling warning of a place barrier in his path, he saw the three men, and the girl.

They were chasing her; lumbering, shouting towards him out of the town. The first he saw of her was the bright red coat, flapping like a cloak as she ran. There was terror in the running; she flung herself forward, stumbling with speed, and even from inside the car he could hear the fearful animal gasps for breath.

The men were whooping with a kind of ugly delight; he saw that they were young, not much more than boys, with the same vacuous vicious faces as all the gangs of the dead lands. Something flashed in the hand of the first: a razor, or a knife. Without stopping to reason, Queston reached behind him for his shot-gun and jumped out of the car as the girl drew level with the bonnet. He shouted to her: ‘Get in! ’ and without even glancing at him she wrenched at the doorhandle and crumpled into the front seat. Queston stood with the gun levelled from his hip at the three young men, and they slowed to a halt ten yards away.

‘Stay where you are!’ he called. Lindsey had said the same. What else did you say with a gun in your hand?

The three stood irresolute. The leader with the glint in his hand was ginger-haired, with a pale, pock-marked face; he yelled: ‘You mind your own business, mister. She’s ours. Leave ’er go.’

He moved forward. Queston promptly fired at the ground before his feet; shot sprayed up and caught the hand of one of the other two, and he leapt, squealing with pain and alarm. While they still paused Queston dived back into the car, skidded round to complete his turn, and drove fast away up the road. Everything seemed to happen to him on boundaries, beside those invisible lines of force. Border incidents. He grinned. Suddenly he was exhilarated, jolted out of his joyless daze; he felt better than he had for weeks. He glanced at the girl.

She sat beside him with the collar of the red coat drawn up round her face. He saw tangled brown hair and damp, flushed skin; he noticed, irrelevantly, that her eyelashes were very long. She was still breathing noisily.

He stopped the car a mile or so along the road, pulling into the verge beside flat, open fields, and reached behind him for the rucksack on the back seat. He poured some whisky into his one cup, and pushed it at the girl. ‘Here. Drink this. Steady you up.’

‘Thank you.’ She was almost inaudible.

‘Smoke?’

‘Yes, please.’

He lit her cigarette; it shook slightly as she held it. Those eyelashes were really absurd. She wasn’t pretty. Her nose was red, and her skin shiny; the face almost sullen. She looked very young; about twenty, he thought.

She finished the whisky, and took a deep breath. ‘O. Thank you. Thank you very much.’ She glanced quickly across at Queston, and away again. He sat smoking calmly, waiting for her to say something. Nothing came. The girl sat in silence, drawing cigarette smoke deep into her lungs and blowing it slowly at the car roof; appreciative, self-conscious, in a kind of defiance. His curiosity grew, but he determined to ask no questions. A patient Sir Lancelot. If she wants to be mysterious, let her. Well, but give her time, she’s had a shock. She’s very young. He began to feel paternal, and middle-aged, and depressed.

He threw his cigarette-end out of the window, and started the car. A thin, cold November rain had begun outside, and he switched the windscreen-wipers on. They flicked slowly to and fro with a gentle, hypnotic hiss. The girl gave him the same nervous half-glance as before.

‘Where are you taking me?’

‘I haven’t the slightest idea.’ Queston gazed vaguely out at the road ahead. ‘Somewhere with a roof. Preferably somewhere warm. We might risk a fire. I shouldn’t think the lads will stay out in this. Got any suggestions?’

He looked round; she was staring at him blankly. She said:

‘But aren’t you—I mean, I thought—the car—’

Suddenly he understood. ‘O, damn and blast the car. I beg your pardon. It is
not
official, I am
not
from the Ministry. I’m not from anywhere. I’m just a poor tramp who happens to drive a big black car.’

She looked like a child faced with the Christmas tree. ‘I thought you were from the Ministry police. You know—out of the frying-pan into the fire. O gosh. O, I’m sorry.’ She smiled at him delightedly. It was a child’s grin, not provocative, but under its impact Queston felt himself warmed and cherished and important. He smiled back, amused at his own reaction; but at the same time he knew that he was going to want very badly to see the grin again.

The girl began to talk, with the same urgent relief in which he and Lindsey had tumbled words out at one another. In an instant she seemed to have come to life. Only the red coat showed him that this was the same terrified waif he had rescued half an hour before.

The fire glowed red, orange, white; it gave no smoke. Queston had stopped to investigate the coal-bunkers of half a dozen houses until he had found the sack of egg-shaped, machine-pressed black objects he was looking for, and carried it out to the car; he was determined not to send up a beacon that might give them away. So they lit the fire carefully in the small house that they chose, and it gave them heat fanned white by the draughts over the empty floor, and an acrid-aching smell. But no smoke.