swung the rifle to cover him. Greybeard flung open the door and motioned the man in, stepping back to let him pass. The old poacher, Jeff Pitt, walked into the kitchen and lowered his arms.
“You still want to buy that otter, Greybeard?” he asked, grinning his old canine grin. Greybeard took his gun and put an arm round Martha’s frail shoulders. He kicked the door shut and surveyed Pitt unsmilingly.
“It must be you who stole the provisions from my boat. Why did you follow us? Have you a boat of your own?”
“I didn’t swim, you know!” Pitt’s gaze ran restlessly about the room as he spoke. “I’m better at hiding my little canoe than you were! I’ve watched you for weeks, loading up your boat. There isn’t much goes on at Sparcot I don’t know about. So today, when you did your flit, I thought I’d chance running into the gnomes and come and see how you were all getting on.”
“As you see, we survive, and you nearly got yourself shot. What are you planning to do now you’re here, Jeff?”
The old man blew on his fingers and moved over to the range, where some heat still lingered. As his custom was, he looked neither of them straight in the face.
“I thought I might come with you as far as Reading, if you were going that far. And if your good lady wife would have my company.”
“If you come with us, you must give any weapons you possess to my husband,” Martha said sharply. Cocking an eyebrow to see if he surprised them, Pitt drew an old service revolver from his coat pocket.
Deftly, he removed the shells from it and handed it across to Greybeard. “Since you’re so mad keen on my company, the pair of you,” he said, “I’ll give you some of my knowledge as well as my gun. Before we all settle down to a cosy night’s rest, let’s be smart and drive them sheep in here, out of harm’s way. Don’t you know what a bit of luck you’ve chanced on? Them sheep are worth a fortune apiece. Further down river, at somewhere like Reading, we should be little kings on account of them — if we don’t get knocked off, of course.”
Greybeard slipped the revolver into his pocket. He looked a long time at the wizened face before him. Pitt gave him a wet-chinned grin of reassurance.
“You get back into bed, sweet,” Greybeard said to Martha. “We’ll get the sheep. I’m sure Jeff has a good idea.”
She could see how much it went against the grain for him to acknowledge the worth of an idea he felt he should have thought of himself. She gave him a closed eye look and went through into the other room as the men left the house. The mutton fat spluttered in the lamp. Wearily, as she lay down again on the improvised bed — it might have been midnight, but she guessed that in an hypothetical world of clocks it would be accounted not yet nine p.m. — the face of Jeff Pitt came before her.
His face had been moulded until it expressed age as much as personality; it had been undermined by the years, until with its wrinkled cheeks and ruined molars it became a common face, closely resembling, say, Towin Thomas’s, and many another countenance that had survived the same storms. These old men, in a time bereft of proper medical and dental care, had taken on a facial resemblance to other forms of life, to wolves, to apes, or to the bark of trees. They seemed, Martha thought, to merge increasingly with the landscape they inhabited.
It was difficult to recall the less raggle-taggle Jeff Pitt she had known when their party first established itself at Sparcot. Perhaps he had been less cocky then, under the fever of events. His teeth had been better, and he wore his army uniform. He had been a gunman then, if an ineffectual one, not a poacher. Since then, how much he had changed!
But perhaps they had all changed in that period. It was eleven years, and the world had been a very different place.
II. Cowley
They had been lucky ever to get to Sparcot. During the last few days in Cowley, the factory suburb of Oxford, she had not thought they would escape at all. For that was the autumn of the dusty year 2018, when cholera lent its hand to the other troubles that plagued mankind.
Martha was almost a prisoner in the Cowley flat in which she and Greybeard — but in those days he was simply the forty-three-years-old Algernon Timberlane — had been forcibly installed.
They had driven to Oxford from London, after the death of Algy’s mother. Their truck had been stopped on the borders of Oxfordshire; they found martial law prevailing, and a Commander Croucher in charge, with his headquarters in Cowley. Military police had escorted them to this flat; although they were given no choice in the matter, the premises proved to be satisfactory.
For all the trouble sweeping the country and the world, Martha’s chief enemy at present was boredom. She sat doing endless jigsaws of farms at blossom time, trappers in Canada, beaches at Acapulco, and listening to the drizzle of light music from her handbag radio; throughout the sweltering days she waited for Algy to return.
Few vehicles moved along the Iffley Road outside. Occasionally one would growl by with an engine note that she thought was familiar. She would jump up, often to stand staring out of the window for a long time after she realized her mistake.
Martha looked out on an unfamiliar city. She smiled to think how they had been buoyed with the spirit of adventure on the drive down from London, laughing, and boasting of how young they felt, how they were ready for anything — yet already she was surfeited of jigsaws and worried by Algy’s increasingly heavy drinking.
When they were in America, he drank a lot, but the drinking there with Jack Pilbeam, an eager companion, had a gaiety about it lacking now. Gaiety! The last few months in London had held no gaiety. The government enforced a strict curfew; Martha’s father had disappeared into the night, presumably arrested without trial; and as the cholera spread, Patricia, Algy’s feckless old mother, deserted by her third husband, had died in agony.
She ran her fingers over the window-sill. They came away dirty and she looked at them. She laughed her curt laugh at an inner thought, and returned to the table. With an effort, she forced herself to go on building the sunlit beach of Acapulco. The Cowley shops opened only in the afternoon. She was grateful for the diversion they offered. To go into the street, she deliberately made herself unattractive, wore an old bonnet and pulled coarse stockings over her fine legs, despite the heat, for the soldiers had a rough way with women.
This afternoon, she noticed fewer uniforms about. Rumour had it that several platoons were being driven east, to guard against possible attack from London. Other rumour said the soldiers were confined to their barracks and dying like flies.
Standing in line by the white-tiled fishmonger’s shop in the Cowley Road, Martha found that her secret fears accepted this latter rumour the more readily. The overheated air held a taste of death. She wore a handkerchief over her nose and mouth, as did most of the other women. Rumour of plague becomes most convincing when strained through dirty squares of fabric.
“I told my husband I’d rather he didn’t join up,” the woman next to Martha told her. “But you can’t get Bill to listen if he don’t want to. See, he used to work at the garage, but he reckons they’ll lay him off sooner or later, so he reckons he’d be better in the army. I told him straight, I said, I’ve had enough of war if you haven’t, but he said, ‘This is different from war, it’s a case of every man for himself.’ You don’t know what to do for the best, really, do you?”
As she trudged back to the flat with her ration of dried and nameless fish, Martha echoed the woman’s words.
She went and sat at the table, folded her arms on it, and rested her head on her arms. In that position, she let her thoughts ramble, waiting all the while for sound of that precious truck which would herald Timberlane’s return.
When finally she heard the truck outside, she went down to meet Timberlane. As he opened the door, she clung to him, but he pushed her off.
“I’m dirty, I’m foul, Martha,” he said. “Don’t touch me till I’ve washed and got this jacket off.”
“What’s the matter? What’s been happening?” He caught the overwrought note in her voice. “They’re dying, you know. People, everywhere.”
“I know they’re dying.”
“Well, it’s getting worse. It’s spread from London. They’re dying in the streets now, and not getting shifted.
