Brian Aldiss: Greybeard

“We can shut ourselves in the barns and houses if they come,” Greybeard said. “We can defend ourselves without deserting the village. We’re safer staying put.”

Mole turned at him savagely, baring his teeth in a gaping snarl. “How many stoat-proof buildings have we got? You know they’ll come after the cattle if they’re really hungry, and then they’ll be all over us at the same time. Who gives orders here anyhow? Not you, Greybeard! Come on, Trouter, what are you waiting for? Let’s get our boat brought out!”

Trouter looked momentarily disposed to argue. Instead, he turned and began shouting orders in his high-pitched voice. He and Mole brushed past Greybeard and ran towards the boathouse, calling, “Keep calm, you bloody cripples, and we’ll ferry you all across.”

The place took on the aspect of a well-stirred anthill. Greybeard noticed that Charley had vanished. The cruiser with the fugitives from Grafton was well down the river now and had negotiated the little weir safely. As Greybeard stood by the bridge and watched the chaos, Martha came up to him.

His wife was a dignified woman, of medium height though she stooped a little as she clutched a blanket about her shoulders. Her face was slightly puddingy and pale, and wrinkled as if age had bound her skull tightly round the edges; yet because of her fine bone structure, she still retained something of the good looks of her youth, while the dark lashes that fringed her eyes still made them compelling.

She saw his far-away look.

“You can dream just as well at home,” she said.

He took her arm.

“I was wondering what lay at the end of the river. I’d give anything to see what life was like on the coast. Look at us here — we’re so undignified! We’re just a rabble.”

“Aren’t you afraid of the stoats, Algy?”

“Of course I’m afraid of the stoats.” Then he smiled back at her, a little wearily. “And I’m tired of being afraid. Cooped up in this village for eleven years, we’ve all caught Mole’s sickness.”

They turned back towards their house. For once, Sparcot was alive. They saw men small in the meadowland, with anxious gestures hurrying their few cows in to shelter. It was against just such emergencies, or in case of flood, that the barns had been built on stilts; when the cattle were driven into them and the doors shut, ramps could be removed, leaving the cattle safe above ground.

As they passed Annie Hunter’s house, the desiccated figure of Willy Tallridge slipped from the side door. He was still buttoning his jacket, and paid them no attention as he hurried towards the river as fast as his eighty-year-old legs would take him. Annie’s bright face, heavy with its usual complement of rouge and powder, appeared at her upper window. She waved a casual greeting to them.

“There’s a stoat-warning out, Annie,” Greybeard called. “They are getting ready to ferry people across the river.”

“Thanks for the warning, darling, but I’ll lock myself in here.”

“You have to hand it to Annie, she’s game,” Greybeard said.

“Gamey too, I hear,” Martha said drily. “Do you realize, Algy, that she’s about twenty years older than I? Poor old Annie, what a fate — to be the oldest professional!”

He was searching the tousled meadow, looking despite himself for brown squibs of life riding through the grass, but he smiled at Martha’s joke. Occasionally a remark of hers could bring back a whole world to him, the old world of brittle remarks made at parties where alcohol and nicotine had been ritually consumed. He loved her for the best of reasons, because she was herself.

“Funny thing,” he said. “You’re the only person left in Sparcot who still makes conversation for its own sake. Now go home like a good girl and pack a few essential belongings. Shut yourself in, and I’ll be along in ten minutes. I ought to help the men with the cattle.”

“Algy, I’m nervous. Do we have to pack just to go across the river. What’s happening?”

Suddenly his face was hard. “Do what I ask you, Martha. We aren’t going across the river; we’re going down it. We’re leaving Sparcot.”

Before she could say more, he walked away. She also turned, walking deliberately down the hollow-cheeked street, and in at her door, into the dark little house. She did it as a positive act. The trepidation that had filled her on hearing her husband’s words did not last; now, as she looked about her at walls from which the paper had peeled and ceilings showing their dirty bare ribs, she whispered a wish that he might mean what he had said.

But leave Sparcot? The world had dwindled until for her it was only Sparcot…

As Greybeard went towards the stilted barn, a fight broke out farther down the street. Two groups of people carting belongings down to the river’s edge had collided; they had lapsed into the weak rages that were such a feature of life in the village. The result would be a broken bone, shock, confinement to bed, pneumonia, and another mound in the beggarly greedy graveyard under the fir trees, where the soil was sandy and yielded easily to the spade.

Greybeard had often acted as peacemaker in such disputes. Now he turned away, and made for the cattle. They were as valuable — it had to be faced — as the rabble. The cattle went protestingly up the ramp into the barn. George Swinton, a one-armed old heathen who had killed two men in the Westminster Marches of 2008, darted among them like a fury, hurting them all he could with voice and stick.

A noise like the falling of stricken timber stopped them. Two of the barn’s wooden legs split to ground level. One of the knot of men present called a word of warning. Before it was through his lips, the barn began to settle. Splinters of wood showed like teeth as joists gave. The barn toppled. It slid sideways, rocked, and collapsed in a shower of ruptured planks. Cattle stampeded from the wreckage, or lay beneath it.

“To hell with this shoddy shower! Let’s get ourselves in the boats,” George Swinton said, pushing past Greybeard. And none of the others cared more than he. Flinging aside their sticks, they jostled after him. Greybeard stood where he was as they rushed past: the human race, he thought, sinned against as well as sinning.

Stooping, he helped a heifer free herself from under a fallen beam. She cantered away to the grazing land. She would have to take her chance when and if the stoats came.

As he turned back towards his house, a shot — it sounded like Mole’s revolver — came from the direction of the stone bridge. It was echoed by another. Starlings clattered up from the roof-tops and soared for safety in the trees across the river. Greybeard quickened his pace, doubled through the straggling plot that was the garden of his house, and peered round the corner of it.

By the bridge, a group of villagers was struggling. A low afternoon mist tinted the scene, and the towering trees behind dwarfed it, but through a gap in a collapsing garden wall Greybeard had a clear enough view of what was going on.

The second boat from Grafton floated down the river just as the Sparcot boat was launching itself across stream. It was laden with a motley collection of white-heads, most of whom were now waving their arms with gestures that distance rendered puppet-like. The Sparcot boat was heavily overloaded with the more aggressive members of the community, who had insisted on being on the first ferry trip. Through incompetence and stupidity on both sides, the boats collided.

Jim Mole stood on the bridge, pointing his revolver down into the melee. Whether or not he had hit anyone with his first two shots it was impossible for Greybeard to see. As he strained his eyes, Martha came up beside him.

“Mole ever the bad leader!” Greybeard exclaimed. “He’s brutal enough, but he has no sense of how to restore discipline — or if he had, he’s in his dotage now and has forgotten. Firing at people in the boats can only make matters worse.”