no shames like social shames, suffered before people who would always try to smile. He was pathetic to think that naming the truth altered it in any way.
“Are you listening, Pat?” Arthur said. He still leant against the door, as if trying to keep something trapped inside. “You don’t seem to listen to me these days. You know I love you. What I’m trying to say is this — we can’t buy Mayburn, not at present. Business is too bad. It would be unwise. I saw my bank manager today, and he said it wouldn’t be wise. You know we have an overdraft already. He said times were going to be worse before they were better. Very much worse.”
“But it was all arranged! You promised!”
“The bank manager explained—”
“Damn the bank manager, and damn you! What did you do, show him a new card trick? You promised me when Frank died that we—”
“Patty, dear, I know I promised, but I just can’t. We’re not children. Don’t you understand, we haven’t got the money?”
“What about one of your life insurances—” she began, then checked herself. He had moved towards her and then stopped, afraid he would be repulsed if he came nearer. His suit looked shabby and needed pressing. The set of his face was unfamiliar to her. Her anger left her. “Are you telling me we’re bankrupt?”
He wetted his lips. “It’s not as bad as that, of course. You know we have Moxan looking into matters. But last month’s figures are very poor indeed.”
At this she looked angry. “Well, are things bad or aren’t they, Arthur? Why not come out with it and tell me the truth? You treat me like a child.” He looked painfully at her, his face puffy, wondering which of half a dozen things would be best to say to her. That he loved her for her streak of childishness? That although he wanted her to share his troubles, he did not want her hurt? That he needed her understanding? That it made him miserable to quarrel in this ugly strange garden?
As always, he had a sense of missing in what he said the complexity he felt. “I’m just saying, Pat, last month’s figures are very bad — very bad indeed.”
“Do you mean nobody is buying Sofftoys any more?”
“That’s about it, yes.”
“Not even Jock Bear?”
“No, my dear, not even little Jock Bear.”
She took his arm, and they walked together towards the empty house without speaking. When they found Algy was not in the house, other troubles were temporarily forgotten as they began to worry about the boy. They called continuously through the bare and echoing rooms. No answer came back. Patricia ran out from the house, still calling, running through the bushes, down towards the river, full of a fright she dared not name. She was level with the summer-house when a voice called, “Mummy!” As she swerved towards it, Algy was standing there in the gloom with the door half open; like a small projectile, he came flying to her, weeping.
Clutching him tightly, she asked him why he had remained in hiding when they had looked for him before.
He had no way of explaining, though he blurted out something about a girl and a game of hide-and-seek. It had been a game; when his father opened the summerhouse door and looked in, it remained a desperate game. He wanted his father to find him and embrace him. He did not know why he crouched behind the garden chairs, half- fearing discovery.
Stiff with pins and needles, he remained where he was when the door closed again. He had overheard the conversation between his parents, a secret conversation more terrible for being mainly incomprehensible. It told him that there existed a tremendous threatening world with which no one — not even his father — could come to terms; and that they lived not among solid and certain things but in a crumbling pastry world. Guilty and afraid, he hid from his knowledge behind the chairs, anxious to be found, scared of the finding.
“It was naughty and cruel of you, Algy, do you hear? You knew I would be worried with the river so near. And you are not to play with strangers — I told you before, they sometimes have sicknesses about which you know nothing. You heard us calling you — why didn’t you come out immediately?”
He answered only with sobs.
“You frightened Mummy very much, and you are a naughty boy. Why don’t you say something? You’re never going to play here again, do you understand? Never!”
“I shall see Martha Broughton again, sha’n’t I?”
“No. We’re not going to live here, Algy. Daddy’s not going to buy the house, and you’re coming home and going straight to bed. Do you understand?”
“It was a game, Mummy!”
“It was a very nasty game.”
Only when they were in the car and driving back to Twickenham did Algy cheer up and lean over from the back seat to stroke his father’s head. “Daddy, when we get home, would you do some of those card tricks to cheer us up with?” he asked.
“You’re going to bed as soon as you get home,” Arthur Timberlane said, unmoved.
While Patricia was upstairs, seeing that Algy got into bed as soon as possible, Arthur walked moodily about before the television. The colour reception was bad this evening, giving the three gentlemen sitting round a BBC table the genial hues of apoplectics. They were all, one of them with considerable pipemanship, being euphoric about world conditions.
Their bland voices only infuriated Arthur. He had no faith in the present government, though it had replaced, less than a year ago, the previous pro-bomb government. He had no faith in the people who supported the government. The shuffle only demonstrated people’s fatuous belief in a political cure for a human condition, Arthur thought.
Throughout the nineteen sixties and seventies, a period representing most of his adult life, Arthur had prided himself on remaining unscared by the dangers of nuclear warfare. “If it comes to the point — well, too bad, but worrying isn’t going to stop it coming”: that had been his commonsense man-in-the-street approach to the whole thing. Politicians, after all, were paid to worry about such matters; he was better occupied fighting his way up Sofftoys Ltd., which he joined in the sixties as a junior traveller.
The bomb tests were on and off in turn, as the Communist countries and the Western ones played their incomprehensible game of ideology; nobody kept count of the detonations, and one grew bored with the occasional scares about increasing radiation in the northern hemisphere and overdoses of strontium in the bones of Lapp reindeer or the teeth of St. Louis schoolchildren.
With a sort of rudimentary space travel developing in the sixties and seventies, and Mars, Venus, Mercury, and Jupiter being examined, it had seemed only natural that the two leading powers should announce that they were conducting a series of 46 “controlled” nuclear detonations in space. The American “rainbow bomb” in the early sixties proved to be the first of many. People — even scientists — grumbled, but the grumbles went unheeded. And most people felt it must be safer to activate the bombs beyond Earth’s atmosphere.
Well, it had not been safer. Man had acted in ignorance before; this time the ignorance exacted a high price. The van Allen belts, those girdles of radiation encircling the Earth, and in some parts much wider than the diameter of the Earth, were thrown into a state of violent activity by the nuclear blasts, all of which were in the multimegaton range. The belts had pulsated, contracting and then opening again, and then again contracting to a lesser degree. Visually, the effect of this perturbation was small, apart from some spectacular displays of aurora borealis and australis down into even equatorial latitudes. Vitally, the disturbance was much greater. The biosphere received two thorough if brief duckings in hard radiation.
Long-term results of this ducking could not as yet, barely a year later, be predicted. But the immediate results were evident. Although most of the world’s human population went down with something like a dose of influenza and vomiting, most of them recovered. Children suffered most severely, many of them — depending on how much they had been exposed — losing their hair or their nails, or dying, as Frank Timberlane died. Most of the women pregnant at the time of the disturbance had borne miscarriages. Animals, and in particular those mammals most exposed to an open sky, had suffered similarly. Reports from the dwindling game reserves of Africa suggested that the larger wild animals had been severely hit. Only the musk ox of Greenland and the hardy reindeer of Scandinavia’s north (where earlier generations of the creature had presumably reached some sort of immunity to cosmic and other fast-travelling particles) seemed to be almost entirely unaffected. A high percentage, some
