Greybeard

“You’ve got an appointment with him this evening, mate. I don’t want any argument.” There seemed no point in arguing. As he turned to shut the door behind him, Martha appeared. She spoke direct to the guard. “I’m Mrs. Timberlane. Will you take me along too?” She was an attractive woman, with a rich line to her, and a certain frankness about her eye that made her appear younger than she was. The corporal looked her over with approval. “They don’t make ‘em like you any more, lady. Hop up with your husband.” She silenced Timberlane’s attempt at protest by hurrying ahead to climb into the Windrush. Impatiently, she shook off the corporal’s hand and swung herself up without aid, ignoring the man’s swift instinctive glance at the thigh she showed.

They toured by an unnecessarily long way to the Victorian pseudo-castle that was Croucher’s military headquarters. On the first part of the way, she thought in anguish to herself, “Isn’t this one of the archetypal situations of the last century -and the Twentieth really was the Last Century: the unexpected peremptory knocking at the door, and the going to find someone there in uniform waiting to take you off somewhere, for reasons unknown? Who invented the situation, that it should be repeated so often? Perhaps this is what happens after an outrage — unable to regenerate, you just have to go on repeating yourself.” She longed to say some of this aloud; she was generalizing in the rather pretentious way her father had done, and generalizing is a form of relief that gains its maximum effect from being uttered aloud; but a look at Timberlane’s face silenced her. She could see he was excited.

She saw the boy in his face as well as the old man. Men! She thought. There was the seat of the whole sickness. They invented these situations. They needed them — torturer or tortured, they needed them. Friend or enemy, they were united in an algolagnia beyond woman’s cure or understanding.

The instant that imperious knocking had sounded at the door, their hated little flat had turned into a place of refuge; the dripping kitchen tap, whistling into its chipped basin, had turned into a symbol of home, the littered pieces of jigsaw a sign of a vast intellectual freedom. She had whispered a prayer for a safe return to the fragmented beach of Acapulco as she hastened down to join her husband.

Now they moved three feet above ground level, and she tasted the chemistries of tension in her bloodstream.

In the September heat, the city slept. But the patient was uneasy in its slumber. Old cartons and newspaper heaved in the gutters. A battery-powered convertible lay with its nose nestling in a shattered shop front. At open windows, people lolled, heavy sunlight filling their gasping mouths. The smell of the patient showed that blood-poisoning had set in.

Before they had gone far, their expectation of seeing a corpse was satisfied, doubly. A man and woman lay together in unlikely attitudes on the parched grass of St. Clement’s roundabout. A group of starlings fluttered round their shoulders.

Timberlane put an arm about Martha and whispered to her as he had when she was a younger woman. “Things will be a lot worse before they’re better,” the beak-nosed corporal said to nobody in particular. “I don’t know what’ll happen to the world, I’m sure.” Their passage sent a wave of dust washing over the houses.

At the barracks, they sailed through the entrance gate and disembarked. The corporal marched them towards a distant archway. The heat in the central square lay thick; they pressed through it, in at a door, along a corridor, and up into cooler quarters. The corporal conferred with another man who summoned them into a further room, where a collection of hot and weary people waited on benches, several of them wearing cholera masks.

They sat there for half an hour before being summoned. Finally they were led into a spacious room furnished in a heavy way that suggested it had once been used as an officers’ mess. Occupying one half of it were a mahogany table and three trestle tables. Men sat at these tables, several of them with maps and papers before them; only the man at the mahogany table had nothing but a notebook before him; he was the only man who did not seem idle. The man at the mahogany table was Commander Peter Croucher.

He looked solid, fleshy, and hard. His face was big and unbeautiful, but it was the face of neither a fool nor a brute. His sparse grey hair was brushed straight back in furrows; his suit was neat, his whole aspect businesslike. He was little more than ten years older than Timberlane; fifty-three or four, say. He looked at the Timberlanes with a tired but appraising look.