Brian Aldiss: Greybeard

Someone was shouting hoarsely to get the boat to the bank. Nobody obeyed and, abandoning all discipline, the two crews fought each other. Senile anger had overwhelmed them again. The Grafton boat, a capacious old motor launch, tipped dangerously as the villagers piled in upon its unlucky occupants. To add to the clamour, others were running up and down the bank, crying advice or threats.

“We’re all mad,” Martha said, “and our bag is packed.”

He flashed her a brief look of love.

With three overlapping splashes, three ancient Graftonites fell or were knocked overboard into the water. Evidently there was some half-formed scheme to appropriate their boat for use as a second ferry; but as the two craft drifted downstream, the motor launch capsized.

White heads bobbed amid white water. A great stupid outcry went up from the bank. Mole fired his revolver into the confusion.

“Damn them all to hell!” Greybeard said. “These moments of unreason — they overcome people so easily. You know that that packman who was through here last week claimed that the people of Stamford had set fire to their houses without cause. And the population of Burford cleared out overnight because they thought the place had been taken over by gnomes! Gnomes — old Jeff Pitt has gnomes on his brain! Then there are all these reports of mass suicides. Perhaps this will be the end — general madness. Perhaps we’re witnessing the end!”

On the stage of the world it was rapidly growing darker. The average age of the population already stood high in the seventies. Each succeeding year saw it rise higher. In a few more years… An emotion not unlike exhilaration filled Greybeard, a sort of wonderment to think he might be present at the end of the world. No: at the end of humankind. The world would go on; man might die, but the earth still yielded up its abundance.

They went back into the house. A suitcase — incongruous item in pigskin that had made a journey down the years to a ruined world — stood on the dry side of the hall.

He looked round him, looked round the room at the furniture they had salvaged from other houses, at Martha’s roughly drawn calendar on one wall, with its year, 2029, written in red, at the fern she grew in an old pot. Eleven years since they arrived here from Cowley with Pitt, eleven years of padding round the perimeter to keep the world out.

“Let’s go,” he said, adding as an afterthought, “Do you mind leaving, Martha?”

“I don’t know what I’m letting myself in for, do I? You’d better just take me along.”

“At least there’s a measure of safety here. I don’t know what I’m letting you in for.”

“No weakness now, Mr. Greybeard.” On impulse, she added, “May I get Charley Samuels if he is in? He’d miss us most. He ought to come with us.”

He nodded, reluctant to have anyone share his plan, yet reluctant to say no to Martha. She was gone. He stood there, heavy, feeling the weight of the past. Yes, Charley ought to come with them, and not only because the two of them had fought side by side almost thirty years ago. That old battle brought back no emotion; because it belonged to a different age, it cauterized feeling. The young soldier involved in that conflict was a different being from the man standing in this destitute room; he even went by a different name.

A log of wood still smouldered in the grate; but in the hall and on the stairs, that creaked in the long nights as if gnomes were more reality than legend, the smell of damp was as thick as twilight. They would leave this dwelling, and soon it would all decompose like a man’s body, into its separate glues and dusts.

Now he could understand why people set fire to their own homes. Fire was clean, cleanliness was a principle that man had otherwise lost. An angry pleasure roused in him at the thought of moving on, though as ever he showed little of what he felt.

He went briskly to the front door. Martha was stepping over the bricks that marked the old dividing line between their garden and the next. With her was Charley Samuels, his muffler of grey wool round his head and throat, his coat tied tight, a pack on his back, the fox Isaac straining at its leash. His face was the scaly yellow colour of a boiled fowl, but he looked resolute enough. He came up to Greybeard and gripped his hand. Frosty tears stood in his eyes.

Anxious to avoid an emotional scene, Greybeard said, “We need you with us, Charley, to deliver sermons at us.”

But Charley only shook his hand the harder.

“I was just packing. I’m your man, Greybeard. I saw that criminal sinner Mole shoot poor old Betty from the bridge. His day will dawn — his day will dawn.” The words came thickly. “I vowed on that instant that I’d dwell no more in the tents of the unrighteous.”

Greybeard thought of old Betty, nodding over the guardroom fire so recently; by now her stew would be spoilt.

The fox whined and pranced with impatience.

“Isaac seems to agree with you,” Greybeard said, with something of his wife’s attempt at humour. “Let’s go, then, while everyone’s attention is distracted.”

“It won’t be the first time we’ve worked together,” Charley said.

Nodding in agreement, Greybeard turned back into the hall; he did not particularly want any sentimentalizing from old Charley.

He picked up the suitcase his wife had packed. Deliberately, he left the front door of their house open. Martha shut it. She fell into step behind him, with Charley and the dog-fox. They walked down the relapsed road eastwards, and out into the fields. They marched parallel with the river bank, in the general direction of the horns of the old ruined bridge.

Greybeard took it at a good pace, deliberately not easing up for the older Charley’s sake; Charley might as well see from the start that only in one aspect was this an escape; like every escape, it was also a new test. He drew up sharply when he saw two figures ahead, making for the same break in the thicket as he was.

The sighting was mutual. The figures were those of a man and a woman; the man knotted up his face, snaring his eyes between brow and cheek to see who followed him. Recognition too was mutual.

“Where are you off to, Towin, you old scrounger?” Greybeard asked, when his party had caught up. He looked at the wispy old man, cuddling his cudgel and wrapped in a monstrous garment composed of blanket, animal hide, and portions of half a dozen old coats, and then regarded Towin’s wife, Becky. Becky Thomas, in her mid-seventies, was possibly some ten years younger than her husband. A plump birdlike woman, she carried two small sacks and was dressed in a garment as imposingly disorganized as her husband’s. Her ascendancy over her husband was rarely disputed, and she spoke first now, her voice sharp. “We might ask you lot the same thing. Where are you going?”

“By the looks of things, we’re off on the same errand as you,” Towin said. “We’re getting out of this mouldy concentration camp while we’ve still got legs on us.”

“That’s why we’re wearing these things we’ve got on,” Becky said. “We’ve been preparing to leave for some time. This seemed a good opportunity, with old Mole and the Major busy. But we’d never thought you might be hopping it, Greybeard. You’re well in with the Major, unlike us folk.”

Ignoring the jibe, Greybeard looked them over carefully.

“Towin’s about right with his ‘concentration camp’. But where are you thinking of going?”

“We thought we might sort of head south and pick up the old road towards the downs,” Becky said.

“You’d better join us,” Greybeard said curtly. “We don’t know what conditions we may meet. I’ve got a boat provisioned and hidden below the weir. Let’s get moving.”