as Hathaway, arms outstretched, let out a cry of triumph and pain, and jumped.
‘But, Robert, what does it really matter?’ Judith asked as Franklin sat inertly in the lounge the next morning. ‘I know it’s tragic for his wife and daughter, but Hathaway was in the grip of an obsession. If he hated advertising signs so much why didn’t he dynamite those we can see, instead of worrying so much about those we can’t?’
Franklin stared at the TV screen, hoping the programme would distract him.
‘Hathaway was right,’ he said.
‘Was he? Advertising is here to stay. We’ve no real freedom of choice, anyway. We can’t spend more than we can afford, the finance companies soon clamp down.’
‘Do you accept that?’ Franklin went over to the window. A quarter of a mile away, in the centre of the estate, another of the signs was being erected. It was due east from them, and in the early morning light the shadows of its rectangular superstructure fell across the garden, reaching almost to the steps of the french windows at his feet. As a concession to the neighbourhood, and perhaps to allay any suspicions while it was being erected by an appeal to petty snobbery, the lower sections had been encased in mock-Tudor panelling.
Franklin stared at it, counting the half-dozen police lounging by their patrol cars as the construction gang unloaded the prefabricated grilles from a truck. He looked at the sign by the supermarket, trying to repress his memories of Hathaway and the pathetic attempts the man had made to convince Franklin and gain his help.
He was still standing there an hour later when Judith came in, putting on her hat and coat, ready to visit the supermarket.
Franklin followed her to the door. ‘I’ll drive you down there, Judith. I have to see about booking a new car. The next models are coming out at the end of the month. With luck we’ll get one of the early deliveries.’
They walked out into the trim drive, the shadows of the signs swinging across the quiet neighbourhood as the day progressed, sweeping over the heads of the people on their way to the supermarket like the blades of enormous scythes.
The Reptile Enclosure
‘They remind me of the Gadarene swine,’ Mildred Peiham remarked.
Interrupting his scrutiny of the crowded beach below the cafeteria terrace, Roger Peiham glanced at his wife. ‘Why do you say that?’
Mildred continued to read for a few moments, and then lowered her book. ‘Well, don’t they?’ she asked rhetorically. ‘They look like pigs.’
Peiham smiled weakly at this mild but characteristic display of misanthropy. He peered down at his own white knees protruding from his shorts and at his wife’s plump arms and shoulders. ‘I suppose we all do,’ he temporized. However, there was little chance of Mildred’s remark being overheard and resented. They were sitting at a corner table, with their backs to the hundreds of ice-cream eaters and cola-drinkers crammed elbow to elbow on the terrace. The dull hubbub of voices was overlaid by the endless commentaries broadcast over the transistor radios propped among the bottles, and by the distant sounds of the fairground behind the dunes.
A short drop below the terrace was the beach, covered by a mass of reclining figures which stretched from the water’s edge up to the roadway behind the cafeteria and then away over the dunes. Not a single grain of sand was visible. Even at the tide-line, where a little slack water swilled weakly at a debris of old cigarette packets and other trash, a huddle of small children clung to the skirt of the beach, hiding the grey sand.
Gazing down at the beach again, Peiham realized that his wife’s ungenerous judgment was no more than the truth. Everywhere bare haunches and shoulders jutted into the air, limbs lay in serpentine coils. Despite the sunlight and the considerable period of time they had spent on the beach, many of the people were still white-skinned, or at most a boiled pink, restlessly shifting in their little holes in a hopeless attempt to be comfortable.
Usually this spectacle of jostling, over-exposed flesh, with its unsavoury bouquet of stale suntan lotion and sweat looking along the beach as it swept out to the distant cape, Peiham could almost see the festering corona, sustained in the air by the babble often thousand transistor radios, reverberating like a swarm of flies — would have sent him hurtling along the first inland highway at seventy miles an hour. But for some reason Pelham’s usual private distaste for the general public had evaporated. He felt strangely exhilarated by the presence of so many people (he had calculated that he could see over 50 thousand along the five-mile stretch of beach) and found himself unable to leave the terrace, although it was now 3 o’clock and neither he nor Mildred had eaten since breakfast. Once their corner seats were surrendered they would never regain them.
To himself he mused: ‘The ice-cream eaters on Echo beach…’ He played with the empty glass in front of him. Shreds of synthetic orange pulp clung to the sides, and a fly buzzed half-heartedly from one to another. The sea was flat and calm, an opaque grey disc, but a mile away a low surface mist lay over the water like vapour on a vat.
‘You look hot, Roger. Why don’t you go in for a swim?’
‘I may. You know, it’s a curious thing, but of all the people here, not one is swimming.’
Mildred nodded in a bored way. A large passive woman, she seemed content merely to sit in the sunlight and read. Yet it was she who had first suggested that they drive out to the coast, and for once had suppressed her usual grumbles when they ran into the first heavy traffic jams and were forced to abandon the car and complete the remaining two miles on foot. Pelham had not seen her walk like that for ten years.
‘It is rather strange,’ she said. ‘But it’s not particularly warm.’
‘I don’t agree.’ Pelham was about to continue when he suddenly stood up and looked over the rail at the beach. Halfway down the slope, parallel with the promenade, a continuous stream of people moved slowly along an informal right-of-way, shouldering past each other with fresh bottles of cola, lotion and ice-cream.
‘Roger, what’s the matter?’
‘Nothing… I thought I saw Sherrington.’ Pelham searched the beach, the moment of recognition lost.
‘You’re always seeing Sherrington. That’s the fourth time alone this afternoon. Do stop worrying.’
‘I’m not worrying. I can’t be certain, but I felt I saw him then.’
Reluctantly, Pelham sat down, edging his chair fractionally closer to the rail. Depite his mood of lethargy and vacuous boredom, an indefinable but distinct feeling of restlessness had preoccupied him all day. In some way associated with Sherrington’s presence on the beach, this uneasiness had been increasing steadily. The chances of Sherrington — with whom he shared an office in the Physiology Department at the University actually choosing this section of the beach were remote, and Pelham was not even sure why he was so convinced that Sherrington was there at all. Perhaps these illusory glimpses — all the more unlikely in view of Sherrington’s black beard and high severe face, his stooped long-legged walk — were simply projections of this underlying tension and his own peculiar dependence upon Sherrington.
However, this sense of uneasiness was not confined to himself. Although Mildred seemed immune, most of the people on the beach appeared to share this mood with Pelham. As the day progressed the continuous hubbub gave way to more sporadic chatter. Occasionally the noise would fall away altogether, and the great concourse, like an immense crowd waiting for the long-delayed start of some public spectacle, would sit up and stir impatiently. To Peiham, watching carefully from his vantage point over the beach, these ripples of restless activity, as everyone swayed forward in long undulations, were plainly indicated by the metallic glimmer of the thousands of portable radios moving in an oscillating wave. Each successive spasm, recurring at roughly half-hour intervals, seemed to take the crowd slightly nearer the sea.
Directly below the concrete edge of the terrace, among the mass of reclining figures, a large family group had formed a private enclosure. To one side of this, literally within reach of Pelham, the adolescent members of the family had dug their own nest, their sprawling angular bodies, in their damp abbreviated swimming suits, entwined in and out of each other like some curious annular animal. Well within earshot, despite the continuous background of noise from the beach and the distant fair-grounds, Pelham listened to their inane talk, following the thread of the radio commentaries as they switched aimlessly from one station to the next.
‘They’re about to launch another satellite,’ he told Mildred. ‘Echo XXII.’
