Brian Aldiss - Greybeard

Timberlane had swerved in the other direction to avoid hitting the lorry. Only the accident that overtook it enabled him to get past it. They lurched forward again, and the road was clear ahead. The machine-gun was still barking, but the lie of the land sheltered them from it.

If Studley had not collapsed at that point, and had not needed to be rested in a deserted village called Sparcot, where other refugees were gathering, they might have made it down to Devon. But Studley had the cholera; and a paranoiac called Mole arrived to turn them into a fortified outpost; and a week later severe rains washed out a host of opportunities. The halt at Sparcot lasted for eleven long grey years.

Looking back to that time, Martha reflected on the way in which the nervous excitement of their stay at Cowley had embalmed it in memory, so that it all came back easily. The years that followed were less clear, for they had been dulled by misery and monotony. The death of Studley; the deaths of several others of that original bunch of refugees; the appearance of Big Jim Mole, and the quarrels as he distributed them among the deserted houses of the village; the endless struggle, the fights over women; the abandonment of hope, convention, and lipstick; these were now like figures in a huge but faded tapestry to which she would not turn again.

One event in those days (ah, but the absence of children had been a sharper wound in her mind then!) remained with her clearly, because she knew it still fretted her husband; that was their bartering of the DOUCH(E) truck, during the second winter at Sparcot, when they were all light-headed from starvation. They exchanged it for a cart-load of rotting fish, parsnips and vitamin pills belonging to a one-eyed wandering hawker. She and Algy had haggled with him throughout one afternoon, to watch him in the end drive away into the dusk in their truck. In the darkness of that winter, their miseries had reached their deepest point.

Several men, among them the ablest, had shot themselves. It was then that Eve, a young girl who was mistress to Trouter, bore a child with no deformity. She had gone mad and run away. A month later her body and the baby’s were found in a wood near by.

In that vile winter, Martha and Greybeard had organized lectures, not entirely with Mole’s approval. They had spoken on history, on geography, on politics, on the lessons to be learnt from life — but as all their subject matter was necessarily drawn from an existence that died even as they spoke, the lectures were a failure. To the hunger and deprivation had been added something more sinister: a sense that there was no longer a place on earth for mind.

Someone had invented a brief-lived phrase for that feeling: the Brain Curtain. Certainly the brain curtain had descended that winter with a vengeance.

In January, the fieldfares brought their harsh song of Norway to Sparcot. In February, cold winds blew and snow fell every day. In March, the sparrows mated on the crusted and dirty piles of ice. Only in April did a softer air return.

During that month, Charley Samuels married Iris Ryde. Charley and Timberlane had fought together in the war, years earlier, when both had formed part of the Infantop Corps. It had been a good day when he arrived at the motley little village. When he married, he moved his bride into the house next to Martha and Algy. Six years later, Iris died of cancer that, like sterility, was an effect of the Accident.

That had been an ill time. And all the while they had laboured under Mole’s fears, hardly aware of the imposition. To get away was like a convalescence, when one looks back and sees for the first time how ill one has been. Martha recalled how eagerly they had conspired with nature, encouraging the roads to decay, sealing them off from the dangerous world outside, and how anxiously they guarded Sparcot against the day when Croucher’s forces moved to overwhelm them.

Croucher never came to Sparcot. He died from the pandemic that killed so many of his followers and converted his stronghold into a morgue. By the time the disease had run its course, large organizations had gone the way of large animals; the hedges grew, the copses heaved their shoulders and became forests; the rivers spread into marshland; and the mammal with the big brain eked out his dotage in small communities.

Both human beings and sheep coughed a good deal as the boats sailed downstream. The party had lost its first sense of adventure. They were too old and had seen too much wrong to entertain high feeling for long. The cold and the landscape also had a hand in subduing them: bearded with rime like the face of an ancient spirit, the vegetation formed part of a scene that patently had come about and would continue without reference to the stray humans crossing it.

In the sharp winter’s air, their breath steamed behind them. The dinghy went first, followed by Jeff Pitt rowing his little boat, with two sheep in a net lying against his tattered backside. Their progress was slow; Pitt’s pride in his rowing was greater than his ability.

In the dinghy, Charley and Greybeard rowed most of the time, and Martha sat at the tiller facing them. Becky and Towin Thomas remained sulkily at one side; Becky had wished to stay at the inn where the sheep were until the liquor and the winter ran out, but Greybeard had overruled her. The rest of the sheep now lay between them on the bottom of the boat.

Once, tired of having a man sit idle beside her, Becky had ordered Towin to get into Jeff Pitt’s boat and help him row. The experiment had not been successful. The boat had almost capsized. Pitt had cursed continuously. Now Pitt rowed alone, thinking his own thoughts.

His was, in its sixty-fifth year of existence, a strange spiky face. Although his nose still protruded, a gradual loss of teeth and a drying of flesh had brought his jawline and chin also into prominence.

Since his arrival at Sparcot, when he had been happy enough to get away from Greybeard, the ex-captain of Croucher’s guard had led a solitary life. That he resented the existence into which he was forced was clear enough; though he never confided, his air was the air of a man long used to bitterness; the fact remained that he, more effectively than anyone else, had taken to a poacher’s ways.

Though he had thrown in his lot with the others now, his unsocial disposition still lingered; he rowed with his back to the dinghy, gazing watchfully back at the ruffled winter landscape through which they had journeyed. He was with them, but his manner suggested he was not necessarily for them.

Between low banks scourged tawny and white by the frost, their way crackled continuously as ice shattered under their bows. On the second afternoon after they had left the inn where they found the sheep, they smelt wood smoke and saw its haze ahead of them, heavy over the stream. Soon they reached a place where the ice was broken and a fire smouldered on the bank. Greybeard reached for his rifle, Charley seized his knife, Martha sat alertly watching; Towin and Becky ducked out of sight below the decking. Pitt rose and pointed.

“My God, the gnomes!” he exclaimed. “There’s one of them for sure!”

On the bank, dancing near the fire, was a little white figure, flexing its legs and arms. It sang to itself in a voice like a creaking bough. When it saw the boats through the bare shanks of a bush, it stopped. Coming forward to the edge of the bank, it clasped hands over the black fur of its crutch and called to them. Though they could not understand what it was saying, they rowed mesmerized towards it.

By the time they reached the bank, the figure had put on some clothes and looked more human. Behind it they saw, half hidden in an ash copse, a tarred barn. The figure was jigging and pointing to the barn, talking rapidly at them as he did so.