Oh, my legs — I thought I’d die, Algy…” As she hobbled across the dirty floor on Timberlane’s arm, Fat Choy sirens began to scream across the city. Their hollow voices came distantly, but from all round. The world was making itself felt again. Mingling with them came the lower note of police car sirens. They got to the window, cobwebbed behind narrow bars. Timberlane wrestled it open and peered out, his face tight between twin lances of iron.
He was in time to see two police cars slide up to the sidewalk below. Doors opened, uniformed men poured out. Among them, stepping from the rear car, was Jack Pilbeam. Timberlane shouted and signalled. The men looked up.
“Jack!” he bellowed down. “Can you put off your travels for twenty-four hours? Martha and I need a best man!”
Right thumb raised above his head, Pilbeam disappeared from view. Next moment, the sound of his footsteps came echoing up the forsaken stairwell.
V. The River: Oxford
Charley Samuels stood up in the dinghy and pointed towards the south-east. “There they are!” he said. “The spires of Oxford!”
Martha, Timberlane, and old Jeff Pitt rose too, peering where Charley pointed across the lake. Isaac the fox paced up and down the tiller seat. They had raised a mast and a sheet, and were carried forward by a light wind. Since their night flight from Swifford Fair, their progress had been slow. They had been hindered at an old and broken lock; a boat had foundered there and blocked the navigable stream, and no doubt would continue to do so until the spring flood water broke it up. They unloaded the boats there, pushing or carrying them and their few possessions to a point where they could safely launch them again.
The country here was particularly wild and inhospitable. Pitt thought he saw gnomes peering at them from bushes. All four of them thought they saw stoats climbing in the trees, finally deciding that the animals were not stoats but pine martens, an animal hardly ever seen in these parts since the Middle Ages. With bow and arrow they killed two of the creatures that afternoon, eating their flesh and preserving their fine pelts, when they were forced to make a camp in the open, under trees. Wood for burning lay about in plenty, and they huddled together between two fires, but it was an ill night for them all.
Next day, when they were under way again, they were fortunate enough to see a pedlar fishing on the bank. He bought Pitt’s little rowing boat from them, for which he gave them money and two sails, one of which they used that night to make themselves a tent. The pedlar offered them tinned apricots and pears, but since these must have been at least a dozen years old, and were very expensive, they did not buy. The little old man, made garrulous by solitude, told them he was on his way to join Swifford Fair, and that he had some medicines for Doctor Bunny Jingadangelow.
After they left the pedlar, they came to a wide sheet of water, patched with small islands and banks of rushes. Under the drab sky, it appeared to stretch on for ever, and they could not see their proper course through it. This lake was a sanctuary for wild life; dippers, moorhens, and an abundance of duck moved over or above its surface. In the clear waters beneath their centreboard, many shoals of fish were visible.
They were in no mood to appreciate the natural attractions. The weather had turned blustery, they did not know in which direction they should sail. Rain, galloping over the face of the water, sent them scurrying for shelter under the spare sail. As the showers grew heavier and the breeze failed, Greybeard and Charley rowed them to one of the islands, and there they made camp.
It was dry under the sail, and the weather had turned milder, but a sense of depression settled on them as they watched shawls of water and cloud embrace the landscape. Greybeard husbanded a small fire into life, which set them all coughing, for the smoke would not disperse. Their spirits only recovered when Pitt appeared, shrunken, withered, weathered, but triumphantly bearing a pair of fine beaver on his back. One of the beavers was a giant, four feet long from whiskers to tail. Pitt reported a colony of them only a hundred yards away; the few that were about had shown no fear of him.
“I’ll catch another pair in the morning for breakfast,” he said. “If we’ve got to live like savages, we may as well live as well as savages.”
Although he was not a man ever to grumble extensively, Pitt found few consolations in their way of life. Whatever his success as a trapper of animals — and he derived satisfaction from outwitting and slaying them — he saw himself as a failure. Ever since he had proved himself unable to kill Greybeard, a dozen years before, he had lived an increasingly solitary life; even his gratitude to Greybeard for sparing him was tempered with the thought that but for him he might now be controlling his own body of soldiers, the remains of Croucher’s command. He nourished this grievance inside himself, though he knew there was no real substance in it. Earlier experience should have convinced him that he could never fulfil the proper duty of a soldier.
As a child, Jeff Pitt used to make his way through the outskirts of the great city in which he lived to a stretch of common land beyond the houses. This land merged with moorland, and was a fine place for a boy to roam. From the tops of the moors, where only an occasional hawk rode the breezes, you could look down on to the maze of the city, with its chimneys, its slaty factory roofs, and the countless little millipedes that were its houses. Jeff used to take his friend Dicky on to the common; when the weather was fine, they would go there every day of their school holidays.
Jeff owned a large rusty bike, inherited from one of his elder brothers; Dicky had a white mongrel dog called Snowy. Snowy enjoyed the common as much as the boys did. All this was in the early 1970’s, when they were in short trousers and the world was at peace.
Sometimes Jeff and Dicky played soldiers, using bits of stick for rifles. Sometimes they tried to capture lizards with their cupped hands; these were little brown lizards that generally escaped, leaving their wriggling bloody tails in the boys’ palms. Sometimes they wrestled.
One day, they wrestled so absorbedly that they rolled down a bank and into a luxuriant bed of nettles. They were both badly stung. However much it hurt, Jeff would not cry before his friend. Dicky blubbered all the way home. Even a ride on Jeff’s bike could not silence him completely.
The boys grew up. The steel-cowled factories swallowed young Jeff Pitt, as they had swallowed his brothers. Dicky obtained a job in an estate office. They found they had nothing in common and ceased to seek each other’s company.
The war came. Pitt was conscripted into the air force. After some hazardous adventures in the Middle East, he deserted, together with several of his fellows. This was like a token to other units in the area, where dissatisfaction with the cause and course of the war was already rife. Mutiny broke out. Some of the mutineers seized a plane on Tehran airport and flew it back to Britain. Pitt was on the plane.
In Britain, revolution was gathering momentum. In a few months, the government would collapse and a hastily established people’s government sue for peace with the enemy powers. Pitt found his way home and joined the local rebels. One moonlit night, a pro-government group attacked their headquarters, which was in a big Victorian house in the suburbs. Pitt found himself positioned behind a concrete bench, his heart hammering dreadfully, firing at the enemy.
One of his mates in the house brought a searchlight into play. Its beam picked up Dicky, wearing the government flash and coming towards Pitt’s position at a run. Pitt shot him.
He regretted the shot even before — as if by magic — a wound burst over Dicky’s shirt and he spun round and pitched on to the gravel. Pitt crawled forward to him, but the shot had been a true one; his friend was almost dead.
Since that time, he could never nerve himself to kill anything much bigger than a beaver. Cramped in the tent, they ate well and slept well that night, and sailed throughout the next day. They saw no living person. Man had gone, and the great interlocking world of living species had already knitted over the space he once occupied. Moving without any clear sense of direction, they had to spend another two nights on islands in the lake; but since the weather continued mild and the food plentiful, they raised very little complaint, beyond the unspoken complaint that beneath their rags and wrinkles they regarded themselves still as modern man, and modern man was entitled to something better than wandering through a pleistocene wilderness.
The wilderness was punctuated now and again by memorials of former years, some of them looking all the
