Mandrake (6 page)

‘Say that again.’

The man misunderstood him, and his rosy face grew more flushed still. ‘O, there’s nothing wrong with it, I’m not criticizing. A beautiful city, for them that’s born here. It’s just that—well—London don’t like strangers. Prefers them to go home.’

To rescue him, Queston forced himself to smile and make a face. ‘O well—but not the people, eh?’

They exchanged polite smiles again, and looked away from each other. Something was spinning like a newly released top in Queston’s mind; the contents of what had seemed a distant South American nightmare suddenly brought close and ominous. The power of place; the power of the place over the mind of the man who feels he belongs to it—or who feels he does not. How long does it take for that to change to the second stage, the stage that overtook the people of the caves; when by some sea-change of energy does the place develop an independent, awful power of its own?

For heaven’s sake, no, forget it; you’re going off your head. He stood silent, trying to slow his brain down to normal speed. They waited. More people strolled to the end of the platform. The countryman walked up and down, glancing round in the same dazed, uneasy way. His shoes were very large and loud. Preoccupied, Queston gazed at nothing. When he became aware of the countryman again, the man was moving slowly along the edge of the platform, his suitcase in one enormous hand. Queston felt the air move against his cheek, and heard the train rumble deep and distant.

He never made up his mind, afterwards, whether the man heard it or not. He remembered only the violent shock of disbelief. The man had put down his case. His uneasiness seemed to have grown still more, and he shifted from foot to foot. He was a full yard from the edge of the platform. There was no one else near him. The train’s roar grew louder in the tunnel. And then, in an impossible moment that was to haunt him always in a kind of dreadful slow motion, Queston saw the man take a gradual, dragging step forward, and jerk into the air as if some invisible force had given him a great shove. He did not fall; there was no possibility that he could have fallen. He gave an immense ungainly leap towards the rails, at the exact moment that the train burst thundering out of its black cave a few yards away.

Queston remembered that blood more vividly. It was bright scarlet, and he had never seen so much suddenly in one place.

With it he remembered something else. Before it crushed him, the train had tossed the countryman like a bull. For a fraction of a second, as his body turned in the air, Queston had seen the expression on his broad sunburnt face. The eyes widened by horror held only resignation; there was no hint of surprise. As if they said: ‘I told you so.’

Queston lurched down the ladder, his shirt lifting gently in the cool morning draught from the open window. At the sound of his first footstep the dog was across the floor with a yelp, and standing to greet him, tongue dangling, tail waving. She was a Welsh collie, undemanding and intelligent; he had bought her in the second year, after he had realized quite how often he was talking to himself. It seemed less dotty to talk to a dog.

He ran a hand over her head and went to unbolt the door; the dog bounded out into the sunshine. Queston crossed to the battered sink in the one square room; splashed water over his face, dried it with the towel hanging from a nail, and buttoned his shirt. He combed his hair, frowning at the length of it bushing out grey-streaked behind his ears, and decided not to shave. So few people ever came near the cottage that there was no point in shaving more than twice a week.

He filled the kettle and put it on the stove; the flames flickered small and yellow-blue, he would need another cylinder of gas soon. Barefoot on the stone floor, cold and uneven to his skin, he opened cupboard doors, methodically took out cup, saucer, plate, knife, spoon. Breadboard, butter, jar of marmalade, tin of powdered coffee. It was an automatic routine; his senses always woke before his mind. Sleepily he set his breakfast on the scrubbed wooden table, groping at the strange sense of excitement which hovered round him that morning like a child’s anticipation of a treat. Long burial in work had made him absent-minded. Perhaps the feeling came only from the sunshine, the blue-white sky hazed with the promise of a fine day. But he knew the real reason. It was finished. The night before, he had finished the last draft of the book. The pattern of work which had carried one day into the next for almost two years would be different now.

With one foot he pushed aside the square of flat wood covering a hole in the floor, and took out a carton of milk. It was his private device to vanquish the souring summer heat; the milkman called at the cottage only every fourth day. From the clattering bread-bin he took half a loaf, its exposed surface dry and rusklike even when he had sawn off the exposed end. The baker called only once a week. He had ordered his isolation with care.

He refilled the dog’s water-bowl; she came padding back in, put down her head and lapped noisily.

‘What a noise,’ he said aloud. ‘Suppose I drank like that, now? ’ It would hardly matter, he reflected, if he did; in all his time in the cottage he had encountered no one but the tradesmen, and the village shopkeepers when he drove in to buy food and collect his infrequent post. He had never been so content in his life. He had no idea what Mandrake and his Ministry were up to; it was only from a chance remark of the baker’s that he knew their party was still in power. But his book would certainly shake their planning escapades. What had mattered was to write it. To cut himself off, and retire into the business of what he had to say. Since the village had not changed, there could be no great change in the world. No nuclear cataclysm, presumably, had yet arrived; and if it should be imminent, he would be no better off if he knew.

He made some coffee, cut himself a slice of bread and marmalade, and went to sit on the doorstep as he ate. The dog lay down at his feet, sniffing suspiciously round at the morning in some inscrutable wariness of her own. Queston watched her. He was not sentimental about animals; he had seen too many gaunt, half-wild dogs in the past, prowling round the fire where the scraps came thickest. So much, he thought, for loyalties. But he respected them; their perceptions covered a wider scale than his own, and that was reason enough. Out of an irrational dislike of calling her by any name, he carried a whistle to summon the dog which blew a high note inaudible to his own ear. And once or twice he had suspected her of seeing things that he did not see.

He poked at her with his foot, and stood up. Already he felt the sun warm on his skin, though it shone still through an early mist, glinting on spangled webs in the thicket of the garden. He had cleared a patch of ground among the trees behind the cottage, and planted vegetables there, but here in front he had left the brambles and wild roses as disordered as when he came. Although he had cut a way through for the car, resting now beside the cottage in its fabric cocoon, he seldom drove away. Except when his stores ran low, there was no need.

The stores were low again now, but he felt no enthusiasm at the thought of going to the village. He would go tomorrow. There would be new milk today, and bread; and he would go for a rabbit.

‘Rabbits! ’ he said to the dog. Her feathered tail rustled to and fro in the grass. Queston went in and up the ladder for his gun.

He came up through the floor of the room that he called his study. It was the least austere of the three. The kitchenliving-room below was primitive and functional; he had put in no more than rough wooden furniture, and a rush mat on the floor. And the bedroom was like a cell: bed, wardrobe, chair, white roughcast walls, but nothing else. No curtain at the window, even, since nothing was outside but the trees.

But in the room where he worked he had sanded and polished the floor, and covered it with bright rugs; brought in bookshelves, a couch, pressure lamps—everywhere else he had used candles, with a masochistic pleasure in the dim light. Here, he had worked; sitting at the big table with his back to the window, behind him the waving treetops that whistled in winter and in spring foamed in a pink-white sea. Two drawings hung on the walls: John Piper, Henry Moore. They had seemed to fit; to catch the ideas that he had been trying to mould. The one in rocks, the other in men and women carved as if excavated from rock. Looking inward at them and at the room, he had worked; remembering, interpreting, living in the fantasy-world of the ideas that grew and writhed and intertwined, now that he had at last given them release, like a rising pillar of smoke. The cottage was an irrelevance, an irritation, but less so than any other surroundings would have been. Writing of man’s attachment to place, he still found no smallest sign of it in himself.

He took the gun from a cupboard, with a packet of slugs. Below, the dog suddenly barked. Queston glanced at his watch; the milkman was early. Peering down through the trap, he saw the figure silhouetted in the doorway against the sunlight.

‘Morning, George. Got some eggs for me as well?’

The figure moved a step forward. ‘Mr Queston?’

Queston frowned, and climbed down the ladder. At its foot he stumbled over the dog; she stood there rigid, growling. ‘Shut up,’ he said to her.

The man was stocky and dark, with a round head. He was shorter than Queston. He wore a dark-grey suit that puckered at the shoulders where it did not properly fit, and he carried a briefcase. ‘Mr Queston?’

‘Yes. Sorry, I thought you were the milkman. Good morning.’

‘Good morning.’ The man did not move. Queston saw his downward glance, looked down at the gun, and laughed.

‘O—don’t be alarmed. Not my greeting for strangers.’ He propped it against the table. ‘I was going out for a rabbit.’

The man showed no trace of a smile, but stood there clutching the handle of his briefcase. He said stiffly: ‘You live off the country?’

‘To some extent,’ Queston said cheerfully. He sat on the edge of the table. ‘What can I do for you?’

The man fumbled with the straps of his case; gold initials glinted on its flap. ‘Our office in Winchester would like you to answer a few questions, if you will. I’ll leave a form with you, but there are one or two points we could clear up now, if you have a moment.’

‘All the time in the world. I’ve been meaning to write, but I didn’t get round to it.’ Queston remembered the three tax demands which had been waiting in his last batch of post, and felt an involuntary flicker of guilt. He waved at the single wooden chair. ‘Sit down. Have a cup of coffee?’

‘No, thank you.’ The man would not be thawed.

‘Well, I will.’ He moved round the table and spooned more coffee into his cup, whistling between his teeth; the elation of the morning still washed over him warm as the sunshine. He said: ‘I did fill in a return last year, you know.’

‘A return?’

‘Income tax.’

‘O,’ the man said, faintly pitying. ‘This is not to do with tax. You might call it a census.’ He sifted through his papers as if they were gold leaf. ‘Now, if you would confirm… your name is David Wayland Queston, you are forty-five years old, British by birth, and you are by profession an anthropologist and writer?’

Queston put the kettle back on the stove. ‘All correct.’

‘And this is your handwriting? ’ The man held out a piece of paper. Queston glanced at him curiously as he took it, noting the high colour and thick dark eyebrows of the Wessex Gelt. But for the solemnity, ill-fitting as his suit, he might have been of one family with all the men in the village.

He looked down at the paper. Then he put down his cup abruptly.

‘Copley Hotel, Bruton Street…’ Surely not. But it was his own writing. The form he had filled in a few years before, at the airport, when he came back from the States. He looked up. The man was gazing impassively at him, through him; Queston was suddenly aware of a nebulous uneasiness he had not felt for a long time. At the same moment he heard a low continuous noise in the room, soft and sinister. His imagination leapt in a frantic spasm, and then he saw the dog.

She was lying crouched beside the door, ears flat back against her head; her eyes were fixed on the stranger, and the long low rumbling came from her throat, an eerie unbroken growl like an incantation. He had never heard her make such a sound before.

‘For heaven’s sake, girl’ He went over to her, and caressed her head. The long warning did not waver. ‘Get outside, then,’ Queston said, and heaved at her collar. He had to drag her to the doorstep; her body was rigid and bristling, and all the while her head turned growling towards the man in the dark suit. As Queston pushed her over the step she gave one high snarling bark like a gun-shot, and slunk off into the garden.

Queston came back, clutching for common sense. ‘So sorry.’

He might never have moved. The man sat patiently waiting, his eyes on the form.

‘This is my handwriting, certainly. You’re pretty thorough with your census, aren’t you? It must be two years ago I filled this in.’

The man said: ‘We understand from one of your referees that you have not led a settled life in this country since childhood.’ The unwavering composure of his Hampshire burr began to be irritating; he spoke slowly, deliberately, with an air of detachment as if all the time he was listening for some other voice, looking through Queston for some other face.

‘I’ve been here for two years, writing,’ Queston said. ‘Before that my work took me all over the place. I came back to England to write a book—just finished it, as a matter of fact.’ He savoured the sound and feeling of the words, and felt less irritable.

The man had a notebook on his knee. ‘Where were you born?’

‘Yorkshire. I thought you had that on the airport form. Somewhere near Catterick, I think it was.’

‘You think?’

‘My father was in the army, we moved about a lot. And I never really knew my parents—they died when I was young.’

‘Your birth was registered in Darlington, according to our records.’

‘I shouldn’t be surprised. Anyway, if you’ve checked my birth certificate why ask?’