grimmer and blacker for lingering on out of context. The dinghy bore them to a small railway station, which a board still announced as Yarnton Junction. Its two platforms stood above the flood, while the signal-box, perched on its brick tower, served as a look-out across the meads.
In the broken and ruined waiting-room, they found a reindeer and calf. In the look-out lived a hideously deformed old hermit, who kept them covered with a home-made bomb, held menacingly above his head, while he spoke to them. He told them that the lake was formed by a conflux of overflowing streams, among them the Oxford Canal and the Evenlode. Only too keen to get rid of them, the old fellow gave them their general direction, and once more the party moved forward, aided by a light and steady wind. It was after some two hours that Charley got up excitedly and pointed ahead, crying, “There they are!”
The others rose and stared towards the reassuring spread of Oxford’s spires through the trees. The spires stood as many of them had stood for centuries, beckoning towards the traditions of learning and piety, now broken at their feet, that had given them birth. The sun rolled from behind rain cloud and lit them. There was no one in the boat who did not feel his heart beat faster at the sight.
“We could stay here, Algy — at least for the rest of the winter,” Martha said.
He looked at her face, and was touched to find tears in her eyes. “I’m afraid it’s mainly an illusion,” he said. “Oxford too will have changed. We may find only deserted ruins.”
She shook her head without speaking.
“I wonder if old Croucher has still got a warrant out for our arrest,” Pitt said. “I wouldn’t want to get shot as soon as we stepped ashore.”
“Croucher died of the cholera, and I don’t doubt that Cowley then proceeded to turn itself first into a battleground and then a cemetery, leaving only the old city,” Greybeard said. “Let’s hope we get a friendly welcome from whoever’s left. A roof over our heads tonight would be a change for the better, wouldn’t it?”
The scenery became less imposing as they drifted south towards the city. Rows of poor houses stood in the flood, their desolation only emphasized by the sunlight. Their roofs had caved in; they resembled the carcasses of enormous crustacea cast up on a primaeval beach. Dwarfed by them, an ancient creature swathed in furs watered a couple of reindeer. Further on, the stir they made on the water threw wavering reflections into the roofs of empty timber yards. The heavy silence was broken a little later by the crunch of a vehicle. Two old women, as broad as they were long, bundled together to drag a cart behind them, its wheels grinding up the sunlight as they pulled it along a quayside. The quayside ended by a low bridge.
“This I recognize,” Greybeard said, speaking in a hushed voice. “We can tie up here. This is Folly Bridge.”
As they climbed ashore, the two old women came up and offered the hire of their cart. As always when it met strangers, Greybeard’s party had difficulty in understanding their accent. Pitt told the crones they had nothing worth carrying, and the crones told them they would find shelter for the night at Christ Church, “up the road”. Leaving Charley behind with Isaac, to guard the boat, Martha, Greybeard, and Pitt set out along the broken track that led over the bridge.
The fortress-like walls of the ancient college of Christ Church loomed over one of the southern approaches of the city. From the top of the walls, a knot of bearded men watched the newcomers walk up the road. They approached warily, half-expecting a challenge, but none came. When they reached the great wooden gates of the college, they paused. Untended, the college walls were crumbling. Several windows had fallen out or were boarded up, and the shattered stone lying at the foot of the walls spoke of the action of heat and frost and the elements. Greybeard shrugged his shoulders and marched under the tall archway.
In contrast to the ruination through which they had passed, here was habitation, the bustle of people, the colour of market stalls, the smell of animals and foods. The spirits of the three newcomers rose within them. They found themselves in a great quad, which had housed many past generations of undergraduates; wooden stalls had been set up, several of them forming small enclosed buildings from which a variety of goods were being sold. Another part of the quad was railed off, and here reindeer stood, surveying the scene from under their antlers with their customary look of morose humour.
A bald-headed shred of manhood with a nose as thin as a needle skipped out of the lodge at the gate and asked them, as they were strangers, what they wanted. They had a deal of difficulty making him understand, but eventually he led them to a portly fossil of a man with three chins and a high complexion who said they could rent, for a modest fee, two small basement rooms in Killcanon. They entered their names in a register and showed the colour of their money.
Killcanon turned out to be a small square within Christ Church, and their rooms a larger room subdivided. But the needle-nosed messenger told them they might burn firewood in their grates and offered them fuel cheap. Mainly from weariness, they accepted the offer. The messenger lit the fires for them while Jeff Pitt walked back to collect Charley and the fox and make arrangements for the boat.
Once the fire was burning cheerfully, the messenger showed signs of lingering, squatting by the flame and rubbing his nose, trying to listen to what Martha and Greybeard said to each other. Greybeard stirred him with a toe.
“Before you go out, Chubby, tell me if this college is still used for learning as it used to be.”
“Why, there’s nobody to learn any more,” the man said. It was plain he intended his verb to be transitive, whatever a legion of vanished grammar books might have said. “But the Students own the place, and they seem to learn each other a bit still. You’ll see them going about with books in their pockets, if you watch out. Students here is what we mean by what lesser colleges calls Fellows. For a tip, I’d introduce you to one of them.”
“We’ll see. There may be time for that tomorrow.”
“Don’t leave it too long, sir. There’s a local legend that Oxford is sinking into the river, and when it’s gone under, a whole lot of little naked people what now live under the water will come swimming up like eels and live here instead.”
Greybeard contemplated the ruin of a man. “I see. And do you give this tale much credence?”
“You what you say, sir?”
“Do you believe this tale?”
The old man laughed, casting a shuffling side glance at Martha. “I ain’t saying I believe it and I ain’t saying I don’t believe it, but I know what I’ve heard, and they do say that for every woman as dies, one more of these little naked people is born under water. And this I do know because I saw it with my own eyes last Michaelmas — no, the Michaelmas before last, because I was behind with my rent this Michaelmas — there was an old woman of ninety-nine died down at Grandpont, and very next day a little two-headed creature all naked floated up at the bridge.”
“Which was it you saw?” Martha asked. “The old lady dying or the two-headed thing?”
“Well, I’m often down that way,” the messenger said confusedly. “It was the funeral and the bridge I mainly saw, but many men told me about all the rest and I have no cause to doubt ’em. It’s common talk.”
When he had gone, Martha said, “It’s strange how everyone believes in something different.”
“They’re all a bit mad.”
“No, I don’t think they’re mad — except that other people’s beliefs always seem mad, just as their passions do. In the old days, before the Accident, people were more inclined to keep their beliefs to themselves, or else confide only in doctors and psychiatrists. Or else the belief was widespread, and lost its air of absurdity. Think of all the people who believed in astrology, long after it was proved to be a pack of nonsense.”
“Illogical, and therefore a mild form of madness,” Greybeard said.
“No, I don’t think so. A form of consolation, rather. This old fellow with a nose like a knitting-needle nurses a crazy dream about little naked things taking over Oxford; it in some way consoles him for the dearth of babies. Charley’s religion is the same sort of consolation. Your recent drinking companion, Bunny Jingadangelow, had retreated into a world of pretence.”
She sank wearily down on to the bed of blankets and stretched. Slowly she removed her battered shoes, massaged her feet, and then stretched full length with her hands under her head. She regarded Greybeard, whose bald pate glowed as he crouched by the fire.
“What are you thinking, my venerable love?” she asked.
“I was wondering if the world might not slip — if it hasn’t already — into a sort of insanity, now that everyone left is over fifty. Is a touch of childhood and youth necessary to sanity?”
“I don’t think so. We’re really amazingly adaptable, more than we give ourselves credit for.”
