Mandrake (18 page)

She had answered everything, but as briefly as possible; he knew jealously that she had told him nothing except in answer to a question. What question had he not asked? ‘What do you mean,
not really
?’

‘O, nothing.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, you must have meant something.’

‘No I didn’t, I just said it without thinking.’

‘For Christ’s sake,’ Queston said, in exasperation and the beginning of anguish. ‘Don’t you know what they can do, these things you just say without thinking? Come on, let’s have it. What did you mean?’

She moved restlessly. ‘Well—for a little while there was someone who used to come round at peculiar times. It was because of his work. He turned up any hour of the day or night. That’s all.’

‘I thought so. Look, darling, don’t bother to assure me how different all this is when it’s not. I’d much rather you were honest.’

‘I am being honest. O David, don’t get angry. It wasn’t like this, it wasn’t like this at all. We weren’t living together.’ She added, with a touch of defiance, ‘At the time I used to wish we were.’

A nice plausible line, he thought. ‘Who was it—that old actor?’

‘He wasn’t old,’ Beth said mildly. ‘No. It was a writer. His name was Kit. He wrote plays.’

Queston lay still. ‘How many more are there you haven’t told me about?’

‘I did tell you. At least, I included him.’

‘In the grand total.’

She said quietly: ‘That’s right.’

He lay stone-still, hunting words that would hurt. ‘How long does it take you to get tired of us, Beth? How long will it last?’

She said nothing. Suddenly he was furious with her; blaming her for the hands that had touched her, for the others before him, and most of all for keeping one of them back. How much else did she keep to herself? When they first began talking that day, she had said with fear in her face: ‘You won’t want me when you know about me.’ But there would be no harm in anything, so long as he knew, and was sure of knowing all of her—instead of finding the darker corners covered with flattering half-lies. There had to be openness between them; it was even more vital in the ambiguity of a disintegrating world. No sooner had she become his reason for living, the stake of all his values, than she had shattered him back into uncertainty again. He knew that he wanted to channel away the unreasonable pain by hurting her in return.

She turned towards him. ‘David, I didn’t know you existed then. I can’t put right the past.’

‘You could have been honest about it.’

‘I have to think about the women you loved. But I don’t care, so long as you love me now.’

He said wearily: ‘That’s not the same.’

‘Darling, I love you.’

‘Of course you do. There isn’t much of a field to choose from now, is there? I can’t think why you didn’t want to stay in one of the towns. All that splendid variety, think—’ She sat up suddenly, staring at him. ‘What on earth’s the matter with you? Please stop. It was over long ago, finished. Why do you have to be jealous of things that are done with?’

‘Because I’ve got no proof this fellow Kit is done with, in your own mind. How can I be sure of you? You didn’t want to tell me about him, you wanted to keep the thing private. Nurse it where I couldn’t see.’

‘I didn’t. It just didn’t seem important. I loved him very much once, but people change.’

‘You change, yes. You loved him, but now I’m the only man available, so you love me. But if he turned up, or any one of them, how do I know you wouldn’t switch back again?’

‘You don’t know. But I do. I’ve never been so happy as this in my whole life before. Can’t you see? Darling, I’ve come home, I don’t want anyone else, ever. Please trust me.’ She turned close to him, and the anger was suddenly a different blaze as he felt the softness of her breasts, and the tears wet on her face. And then love and rage were wrenched away from both of them, and desire caught and killed in mid-wave by an alien shock outside them that brought with it a new fear.

The earth shivered. It was not the way that it would soon have moved for them; it was cold, tangible, real. They felt the strange, gentle jolt all round them, through the floor and bed of the caravan up from the ground beneath, and even in the air. On the table, cups rattled in their saucers, and then were still. There was a quick flick of movement in the spray of leaves that Beth had propped in a vase near the window. And then silence.

They lay close, hardly breathing, waiting. Out of the past Queston knew at once what it was; and that she did not know. There was no sound.

‘Twice more,’ he said softly. Beth whimpered, and he held her to him.

The quiver of the world came again, more insistent, as if the caravan were moving, crossing a bump in the road. And then again, as gentle as the first.

‘Then a wind blows.’

There was nothing. From outside the caravan they heard no movement, only a silence absolute as death. Then the trees stirred, rustling, and a growing wind breathed against the windows; muttered more loudly, and was gone. It was over.

‘What was it? ’ Beth whispered.

‘An earthquake. It must have brought buildings down in the towns.’ He touched her cheek. ‘It’s all right, love. All over. We were lucky, I think. That was a small shock, but there can’t have been anything like it in England for about two hundred years.’

‘It was horrible.’

‘They aren’t nice. Show you that life’s—precarious.’

‘What’s it trying to do? ’ It was the first time she had said anything of the kind, since the first day of all.

‘Help out its methods with physical force, I suppose. Speed things up a bit… Perhaps it’s gaining power from us all. At least, from the others. In some strange way.’

‘Let’s not stay here,’ Beth said suddenly. ‘Let’s take the caravan away. The place doesn’t want us any more, can’t you feel it? David, please let’s go.’

They took the caravan with them, hitched to the back of the Lagonda; he knew that it would hopelessly hinder them if the Ministry police ever caught up, but the risk seemed worthwhile. At least this gave them an illusion of home. He longed now for the chance of peace, to build certainty between them. Yet everywhere they went now he felt the militant uneasiness beating at him, as if the land were muttering. A sound that might at any moment rise to a howl.

He found himself thinking more and more of the past—Oxford, the caves, the cottage—and every time pulling his mind forward to rest gratefully in the thought and awareness of Beth.

They drove north. Within minutes, when they first left the field, they were forced to turn back and find another road; before them, a dark crack six inches wide zig-zagged diagonally across the asphalt. Queston had not expected to see much trace of the earthquake here, but soon they found more: clumps of trees uprooted or leaning sideways; a raw brown patch on a hillside where the earth and everything that grew on it had slipped away; a railway line buckled so that it stood up in a hoop. Not long afterwards they came on the first of the dead.

They were approaching a village; through the trees he could see chimneys, and a church tower that looked indefinably the wrong shape. Beth was sitting huddled against him, curled up on the seat. Suddenly she said, with the beginning of laughter: ‘Darling
look,
there’s a
hat.’
Then she gasped, and clutched his arm.

Slowing the car, he saw first the brown trilby hat lying in the middle of the road, and then the man. Feet on the road, a pair of splayed feet in patched black boots; face in the ditch, the arms outflung. There was something familiar about the attitude. He flinched when he remembered; it was like the grovelling farmer he had left beside Stonehenge.

‘Stay there,’ he said.

The man was dead, and cold. He had been middle-aged, with a weather-burned face and several days’ growth of stubbled beard. There was no sign of any wound. The thing that horrified Queston was the expression on the face. Instead of the blank, characterless calm of death it was contorted by fear; the eyes, glazed and fishlike, were wide open, staring, and the mouth drawn back over the teeth. He had died shouting. He had died of—what? Shock?

Nearer the village they found others the same. Queston forbade Beth to leave the car, but when they came to the body of a child she insisted on getting out; and the horror on the face of the child was worst of all.

The village itself was not badly damaged, but black wisps of smoke rose steadily out of the broken roofs, and they saw that it had been on fire. They found others dead, but no one alive; they called, but heard no answering voice. Most of the houses had been burned, and stood dark smoking shells, but only a few seemed to have felt the earthquake: lay crumbled, or sliced neatly in half so that their privacy gaped like a doll’s house opened by a child. In one, they could see an empty bed in an upper room, and the carpet hanging loose over the edge of the floor where half the house had fallen away.

The church tower was askew; it leaned towards the road from which they had come. The line of the shock had run past its base. As they watched, it creaked; a loose brick fell, and then the whole structure slowly toppled and crashed; a rumble, a cloud of dust, and then the silence as before, with no sound even of a bird.

The day was grey-bleak with low cloud, and very cold. Queston led Beth back to the car. He drove out of the village, and then stopped, and they sat gazing ahead at the bare road with the memory of what they had seen silent between them.

He said, to break the gap: ‘Fuel’s getting low.’

‘Perhaps there’ll be a gas station soon.’

‘Petrol station. Garage. Where do you get these Americanisms?’

‘Sorry.’

‘Are you hungry?’

‘Not very.’ She tried to smile. ‘Better not be, there’s only a few tins left. And they’re all soup.’

‘We’ll find some.’

‘I expect so.’ Suddenly she clenched her hands together. ‘O David, it was frightful. Those poor people. That little boy—’

‘Try not to think of them. I wish you’d stayed in the car.’

‘He looked so terrified. Ugly. It couldn’t have been just the earthquake. What was he frightened of?’

Queston said slowly: ‘I don’t know.’ He was trying to forget how vividly he had recognized the fear. Behind those faces, he knew what they had felt.

‘Where are we?’

‘Somewhere near Gloucester, I think. I’m not sure. We’d better go on.’ For the first time, he felt despair as he thought ahead. Fatalism was no answer now. There was Beth. How long could they spend running away, running from nothing to nothing, in a world with no refuge anywhere?

He started the car again, and drove on. The road was still intact, and the jagged, gaping windows of the houses they passed so familiar now that there was no way of telling whether the damage came from earthquake or long emptiness. They passed a lonely row of deserted shops, and the edge of a silent council estate. Then trees, groping bare over the fields.

Then the engine moaned, a long downward cadence, and died, flicking painfully at his memory, and when he pressed the starter there was only a peevish whine. He steered the-silent, crawling car into the kerb, and it stopped.

‘Well,’ he said flatly, ‘that’s it.’

‘No more paraffin.’

‘No. And I don’t see much hope of getting any other fuel.’

Beth took his hand, and held it tightly. ‘What shall we do?’

‘We can’t stay here.’

‘But what about the caravan?’

‘We shall just have to leave it.’

‘But it’s all we’ve got. O David—’ She began to cry.

Queston said roughly, turning his anxiety to anger: ‘What else can we do? Pull it along ourselves? For heaven’s sake, Beth. Do you want to stay here? ’ He took her by the shoulders and pulled her round to face him, pointing out at the fields. ‘Look at it. Listen to it. Remember that village. Do you want to stay here?’

Grey cloud hung low over the land; the rising Cotswolds were vague in mist, and there was only the dank, cheerless green of winter hedges and grass all around. Everything was silent; on a distant slope a farmhouse stood among a cluster of outhouses, but no smoke rose from its roof. There was an eeriness, a noiseless murmuring in the air, more ominous than the suburban limbo of dead homes. And the car, as if it had changed when it became no longer mobile, was no insulation now. Nothing could save them except to move.

He put his arm round her gently. ‘Do you want to stay?’

‘No.’

‘Come on, then. We must take all we can.’

They went behind to the caravan, the familiar miniature room that had been warmth, illusion, safety. Even now Queston thought, it had begun to change; there was the same sense of nakedness, of looming menace, that he had felt in the car.

He said suddenly: ‘It’s a good job it happened on the road.’

‘Why?’

‘They’re the only place we’re free.’
Keep to the open roads…

‘Not all of them,’ Beth said with a grimace.

‘No. Not that one. But outside the communities, where there’s no pull, there you can move. That’s our only defence. It puts us outside the laws. When you move, you command time and space.’

‘Shall we take blankets? ’ Her voice was flat and weary. He turned; she was sitting forlorn on the bed, hands loose at her sides. She said: ‘It’s no good, David. I daren’t start thinking. It’s all too horrible. Hopeless. There’s nothing. The two of us, and nothing.’

He thought how smooth and untouched her face was, even in despair. Her mouth was turned down, but the curve that he loved was still there. She seemed to him very beautiful.

She stared up at him, and her face changed, and he saw the hunger that made his mind and body leap always out of awareness into a bright blazing world where only she was. She put up her arms to him, in a movement so unconsciously graceful that he felt tears prickle at his eyes.

‘Darling. My darling. Please.’

It would be dark in an hour; already, in the grey afternoon, he could feel the strange indefinable power of the land insinuating fear into his mind. He fought it off. Beth was quiet, plodding at his side with her own blanket-wrapped bundle unwieldy on her back; he could read nothing in her face. She wore the scarlet coat that had been the first thing he ever saw of her. He had hoped, wildly, that the world might end as they lay there.