Greybeard

Of the two men present, one was extremely ancient in appearance, although his eye was bright. He lay on a palliasse on the floor, restlessly looking about him, staring up at the ceiling as if to puzzle out the meaning of the cracks there, or at the walls as if to solve the riddle of their damp patches. His face, sharp as a stoat’s beneath its stubble, wore an irritable look, for the old woman’s humming jarred his nerves.

Only the third occupant of the guardroom was properly alert. He was a well-built man in his middle fifties, without a paunch, but not so starveling thin as his companions. He sat in a creaking chair by the window, a rifle by his side. Although he was reading a book, he looked up frequently, directing his gaze through the window. With one of these glances, he saw the patrol man with the colourful shirt approaching over the pastures.

“Sam’s coming,” he said. He put his book down as he spoke. His name was Algy Timberlane. He had a thick grizzled beard that grew down almost to his navel, where it had been cut sharply across. Because of this beard, he was known as Greybeard, although he lived in a world of greybeards. But his high and almost bald head lent emphasis to the beard, and its texture, barred as it was with stripes of black hair sprouting thickly from the jawline and fading out lower down, made it particularly noticeable in a world no longer able to afford other forms of personal adornment.

When he spoke, the woman stopped her humming without giving any other sign she had heard. The man on the palliasse sat up and put a hand on the cudgel that lay beside him. He screwed his face up, sharpening his gaze to peer at the clock that ticked noisily on a shelf; then he squinted at his wristwatch. This battered old souvenir of another world was Towin Thomas’s most cherished possession, although it had not worked in a decade.

“Sam’s early coming off guard, twenty minutes early,” he said. “Old sciver. Worked up an appetite for lunch, strolling round out there. You better watch that hash of yours, Betty — I’m the only one I’m wanting to get indigestion off that grub, girl.”

Betty shook her head. It was as much a nervous tick as a negation of anything that the man with the cudgel might have said. She kept her hands to the fire, not looking round.

Towin Thomas picked up his cudgel and rose stiffly to his feet, helping himself up against the table. He joined Greybeard at the window, peering through the dirty pane and rubbing it with his sleeve.

“That’s Sam Bulstow all right. You can’t mistake that shirt.” Sam Bulstow walked down the littered street. Rubble, broken tiles and litter lay on the pavements; dock and fennel — mortified by winter — sprouted from shattered gratings. Sam Bulstow walked in the middle of the road. There had been no traffic but pedestrians for several years now. He turned in when he reached the post office, and the watchers heard his footsteps on the boards of the room below them.

Without excitement, they listened to the whole performance of his getting upstairs: the groans of the bare treads; the squeak of a horny palm on the hand rail as it helped tug its owner upwards; the rasp and heave of lungs challenged by every step.

Finally, Sam appeared in the guardroom. The gaudy stripes of his shirt threw up some of their colour on to the white stubble of his jaws. He stood for a while staring in at them, resting on the frame of the door to regain his breath.

“You’re early if it’s dinner you’re after,” Betty said, without bothering to turn her head. Nobody paid her any attention, and she nodded her old rats’ tails to herself in disapproval.

Sam just stood where he was, showing his yellow and brown teeth in a pant. “The Scotsmen are getting near,” he said.

Betty turned her neck stiffly to look at Greybeard. Towin Thomas arranged his crafty old wolf’s visage over the top of his cudgel and looked at Sam with his eyes screwed up.

“Maybe they’re after your job, Sammy, man,” he said. “Who gave you that bit of information, Sam?” Greybeard asked. Sam came slowly into the room, sneaking a sharp look at the clock as he did so, and poured himself a drink of water from a battered can standing in a corner. He gulped the water and sank down on to a wooden stool, stretching his fibrous hands out to the fire and generally taking his time before replying.

“There was a packman skirting the northern barricade just now. Told me he was heading for Faringdon. Said the Scotsmen had reached Banbury.”

“Where is this packman?” Greybeard asked, hardly raising his voice, and appearing to look out of the window.

“He’s gone on now, Greybeard. Said he was going to Faringdon.”

“Passed by Sparcot without calling here to sell us anything? Not very likely.”