John Christopher - The Death of Grass

The air was warm, with hardly any breeze.

“Once again,” Roger said, “thank God it’s not winter.” He called to the three boys: “Come on, you lot You can snuggle round me and keep me cosy.”

The field lay just under the crest of a hill. John sat above the little group of reclining figures, and looked over them to the vista of moorland that stretched away westwards. The moon would soon be up; already its radiance had begun to reinforce the starlight.

The question of whether the weather held fair would make a lot of difference to them. How easy it would be, he thought, to pray—to sacrifice, even—to the moorland gods, in the hope of turning away their wrath. He glanced at where the three boys lay curled up between Roger and Olivia. They would come to it, perhaps, or their children.

And thinking that he felt a great weariness of spirit, as though out of the past his old self, his civilized self, challenged him to an accounting. When it sank below a certain level, was life itself worth the having any longer? They had lived in a world of morality whose lineage could be traced back nearly four thousand years. In a day, it had been swept from under them.

But were there some who still held on, still speaking the grammar of love while Babel {110} 110 Babel (tower of): In the Book of Genesis the people of Babylon tried to build a tower to reach Heaven. God did not wish this, so he destroyed the tower and confused their language so that they could not understand each other. rose all round them? If they did, he thought, they must die, and their children with them—as their predecessors had died, long ago, in the Roman arenas. For a moment, he thought that he would be glad to have the faith to die like that, but then he looked again at the little sleeping group whose head he now was, and knew their lives meant more to him than their deaths ever could.

He stood up, and walked quietly to where Ann lay with Mary in her arms. Mary was asleep, but in the growing moonlight he could see that Ann’s eyes were open.

He called softly to her: “Ann!”

She made no reply. She did not even look up. After a time he walked away again and took up his old position.

There were some who would choose to die well rather than to live. He was sure of that, and the assurance comforted him.

During her watch, Millicent had seen distant flashes towards the south, twice or three times, and had heard a rumble of noise long afterwards. They might have been atom-bomb explosions. The question seemed irrelevant It was unlikely that they would ever know the full story of whatever was taking place in the thickly populated parts of the country; and, in any case, it no longer interested them.

They began their march on a bright morning; it was cool but promised heat The objective John had set them was a crossing of the northern part of Masham Moor into Coverdale. After that, they would take a minor road across Carlton Moor and then strike north to Wensleydale and the pass into Westmorland. They found a farm-house not very far away from where they had slept, and Roger wanted to raid it for food. John vetoed the idea, on the grounds that it was too near Masham. It was uncertain how far the Mashamites proposed to protect their outlying districts. The sound of shots might easily bring a protecting party up from the town.

They therefore kept away from habitation, travelling in the bare fields and keeping close beside the hedges or stone walls which formed the boundaries. It was about half-past six when they crossed the main road north of Masham, and the sun had warmed the air. The boys were happy enough, and had to be restrained from unnecessary running about. The whole party had something of a picnic air, except that Ann remained quiet, withdrawn, and unhappy.

Millicent commented on this to John, when he found himself walking beside her across a patch of broken stony ground.

She said: “Ann shouldn’t take things too much to heart, Johnny. It’s all in a day’s work.”

John glanced at her. Neatness was a predominating characteristic of Millicent, and she looked now as though she were out for an ordinary country walk. Pirrie, with the rifle under his arm, was about fifteen yards ahead of them.

“I don’t think it’s so much what happened,” John said, “as what she did afterwards that’s worrying her.”

“That’s what I meant was all in a day’s work,” Millicent said. She looked at John with frank admiration. “I liked the way you handled things last night. You know—quiet, but no nonsense. I like a man to know what he wants and go and get it.”

Discounting her face, John thought, she looked a good deal more than a score of years younger than Pirrie; she was slim and tautly figured. She caught his glance, and smiled at him. He recognized something in the smile, and was shocked by it.

He said briefly: “Someone has to make decisions.”

“At first, I didn’t think you would be the kind who would, properly. Then last night I could see I was wrong about you.”

It was not, he decided, the concupiscence {111} 111 concupiscence: lust, sexual desire which shocked him in itself, but its presence in this context. Pirrie, he was sure, must have been a cuckold {112} 112 cuckold: man whose wife has been sexually unfaithful to him for some time, but that had been in London, in that warren of swarming humanity where the indulgence of one more lust could have no real importance. But here, where their interdependence was as starkly evident as the barren lines of what had been the moors, it mattered a great deal. There might yet be a morality in which the leader of the group took his women as he wished. But the old ways of winks and nudges and innuendoes were as dead as business conferences and evenings at the theatre—as dead and as impossible of resurrection. The fact that he was shocked by Millicent’s failure to realize it was evidence of how deeply the realization had sunk into and conditioned his own mind.

He said, more sharply still: “Go and take over that case from Olivia. She’s had it long enough.”

She raised her eyebrows slightly. “Just as you say, Big Chief. Whatever you say goes.”

On the edge of Witton Moor they found what John had been looking for—a small farm-house, compact and isolated. It stood on a slight rise, surrounded by potato fields. There was smoke rising from the chimney. For a moment that puzzled him, until he remembered that, in a remote spot like this, they would probably need a coal fire, even in summer, for cooking. He gave Pirrie his instructions. Pirrie nodded, and rubbed three fingers of his right hand along his nose; he had made the same gesture, John remembered now, before going out after the gang who had taken Ann and Mary.

With Roger, John walked up to the farm-house. They made no attempt at concealment, and strolled casually as though motivated by idle curiosity. John saw a curtain in one of the front windows twitch, but there was no other sign that they had been observed. An old dog sunned himself against the side of the house. Pebbles crunched under their feet, a casual and friendly sound.

There was a knocker on the door, shaped like a ram’s head. John lifted it and dropped it again heavily; it clanged dully against its metal base. As they heard the tread of feet on the other side, the two men stepped a little to the right.

The door swung open. The man on the other side had to come fully into the threshold to see them properly. He was a big man; his eyes were small and cold in a weathered red face. John saw with satisfaction that he was carrying a shot-gun.

He said: “Well, what is it you want? We’ve nought to sell, if it’s food you’re after.”

He was still too far inside the house.