The army’s doing what it can, but the troops are no more immune to the infection than anyone else.”
“The army! You mean Croucher’s men!”
“You could have worse men ruling the Midlands than Croucher. He’s keeping order. He understands the necessity for running some sort of public service, he’s got hygiene men out. Nobody could do more.”
“You know he’s a murderer. Algy, how can you speak well of him?”
They went upstairs. Timberlane flung his jacket into a corner. He sat down with a glass and a bottle of gin. He added a little water, and began to sip at it steadily. His face was heavy, the set of his mouth and eyes gave him a brooding look. Beads of sweat stood on his bald head.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said. His voice was tired and stony: Martha felt her own slip into the same cast. The shabby room was set solid with their discomfort. A fly buzzed fitfully against the window pane.
“What do you want to talk about?”
“For God’s sake, Martha, I don’t want to talk about anything. I’m sick of the stink of death and fear, I’ve been going round with my recorder all day, doing my bloody stuff for DOUCH(E). I just want to drink myself into a stupor.”
Although she had compassion for him, she would not let him see it. “Algy — your day has been no worse than mine. I’ve spent all day sitting here doing these jigsaw puzzles till I could scream. I’ve spoken to no one but a woman at the fish shop. For the rest of the time, the door has been locked and bolted as you instructed. Am I just expected to sit here in silence while you get drunk?”
“Not by me you’re not. You haven’t got that amount of control over your tongue.” She went over to the window, her back to him. She thought: I am not sick; I am vital in my senses; I can still give a man all he wants; I am Martha Timberlane, born Martha Broughton, forty-three years of age.
She heard his glass shatter in a far corner.
“Martha, I’m sorry. Murdering, getting drunk, dying, living, they’re all reduced to the same dead level…”
Martha made no answer. With an old magazine, she crushed the fly buzzing against the window. She closed her eyes to feel how hot her eyelids were. At the table, Timberlane went on talking. “I’ll get over it, but to see my poor dear silly mother panting for years, recalling how I loved her as a kid… Ah… Get me another glass, love — get two. Let’s finish this gin. Sod the whole rotten system! How much longer are people going to be able to take this?”
“This what?” she asked, without turning round.
“This lack of children. This sterility. This creeping paralysis. What else do you think I mean?”
“I’m sorry, I’ve got a headache.” She wanted his sympathy, not his speeches, but she could see that something had upset him, that he was going to have a talk, and that the gin was there to help him talk. She got him another glass.
“What I’m saying is, Martha, that it’s finally sinking in on people that the human race is not going to produce any more young. Those little bawling bundles we used to see outside shops in prams are gone for good. Those little girls that used to play with dolls and empty cereal packets are things of the past. The knot of teenagers standing on corners or bellowing by on motor bikes have had it for ever. They aren’t coming back. Nor are we ever going to see a nice fresh young twenty-year-old girl pass us like a blessing in the street, with her little bum and tits like a banner. Where are all your young sportsmen? Remember the cricket teams, Martha? Football, eh? What about the romantic leads of television and the cinema? They’ve all gone! Where are the pop singers of yesteryear? Sure, there are still games of football going on. The fifty-year-olds creak round as best they can…”
“Stop it, Algy. I know we’re all sterile as well as you do. We knew that when we got married, seventeen years ago. I don’t want to hear it once more.”
When he spoke again, his voice was so changed that she turned and looked at him. “Don’t think I want to hear it again, either. But you see how every day reveals the wretched truth all over again. The misery always comes hot and new. We’re over forty now, and there’s scarcely anyone younger than we. You only have to walk through Oxford to see how old and dusty the world is getting. And it’s now that youth is passing that the lack of replenishments is really being felt — in the marrow.”
She gave him another measure of gin, and set a glass down on the table for herself. He looked up at her with a wry smile, and poured her a measure.
“Perhaps it’s the death of my mother makes me talk like this. I’m sorry, Martha, particularly when we don’t know what’s become of your father. All the while I’ve been so busy living my life, Mother’s been living hers. You know what her life’s been like! She fell in love with three useless men, my father, Keith Barratt, and this Irishman, poor woman! Somehow I feel we should have done more to help her.”
“You know she enjoyed herself in her own way. We’ve said all this before.”
He wiped his brow and head on a handkerchief and grinned more relaxedly. “Maybe that’s what happens when the mainspring of the world snaps: everyone is doomed for ever to think and say what they thought and said yesterday.”
“We don’t have to despair, Algy. We’ve survived years of war, we’ve come through waves of puritanism and promiscuity. We’ve got away from London, where they are in for real trouble, now that the last authoritarian government has broken down. True, Cowley’s far from being a bed of roses, but Croucher is only a local phenomenon; if we can survive him, things may get better, become more settled. Then we can get somewhere permanent to live.”
“I know, my love. We seem to be going through an interim period. The trouble is, there have been a number of interim periods already, and there will be more. I can’t see how stability can ever be achieved again. There’s just a road leading downhill.”
“We don’t have to be involved in politics. DOUCH(E) doesn’t require you to mix in politics to make your reports. We can just find somewhere quiet and reasonably safe for ourselves, surely?”
He laughed. He stood up and looked genuinely amused. Then he stroked her hair with its grey and brown streaks and drew his chair closer.
“Martha, I’m mad about you still! It’s a national failing to think of politics as something that goes on in Parliament. It isn’t; it’s something that goes on inside us. Look, love, the United National Government has broken apart, and thank God for it. But at least its martial law kept things going and wheels turning. Now it has collapsed, millions of people are saying, ‘I have nothing to save for, no sons, no daughters. Why should I work?’, and they’ve stopped work. Others may have wanted to work, but you can’t carry on industry like that. Disorganize one part effectively, and it all grinds to a halt. The factories of Britain stand empty. We’re making nothing to export. You think America and the Commonwealth and the other countries are going to go on sending us food free? Of course not, especially when a lot of them are harder hit than we are! I know food is short at present, but next year, believe me, there’s going to be real famine. Your safe place won’t exist then, Martha. In fact there may only be one safe place.”
“Abroad?”
“I mean working for Croucher.”
She turned away frowning, not wishing to voice again her distrust of the local dictator. “I’ve got a headache, Algy. I shouldn’t be drinking this gin. I think I must go and lie down.”
He took her wrist. “Listen to me, Martha. I know I’m a devil to live with just now and I know you don’t want to sleep with me just now, but don’t stop listening to me or the last line of communication will be cut. We may be the final generation, but life’s still precious. I don’t want us to starve. I have made an appointment to see Commander Croucher tomorrow. I’m offering to cooperate.”
“What?”
“Why not?”
“Why not? How many people did he massacre in the centre of Oxford last week? Over sixty, wasn’t it? — and the bodies left lying there for twenty-four hours so that people could count and make sure. And you—”
“Croucher represents law and order, Martha.”
“Madness and disorder!”
“No — the Commander represents as much law and order as we have any right to expect, considering the horrible outrage we have committed on ourselves. There’s a military government in the Home Counties centred on London, and one of the local gentry has set up a paternalistic sort of community covering most of Devon. Apart from them and Croucher, who now controls the South Midlands and down to the South Coast, the country is slipping rapidly into anarchy. Have you thought what it must be like farther up in the Midlands, and in the North, in the
