Greybeard

“I don’t drink.” He had long since learned to deliver the phrase without apology; he added now, with a sour smile, “I kill people, but I don’t drink.” Something — perhaps the mere fact that Jack Pilbeam was American, and Charley found Americans easier to talk to than his own countrymen — made him add the explanation that carried its own apology. “I was eleven when your nation and mine detonated those fatal bombs in space. When I was nineteen, shortly after my mother died — it was a sort of compensation, I suppose — I got engaged to a girl called Peggy Lynn. She wasn’t in good health and she had lost all her hair, but I loved her… We were going to be engaged. Well, of course, we got medically examined and were told we were sterilized for life, like everyone else… Somehow that killed the romance.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Perhaps it was just as well. I had two sisters to look after anyway. But from then on, I started not to want anything…”

”Religious?”

“Yes, though it’s mainly a sort of self-denial.” Pilbeam’s were clear and bright eyes that looked more attractive than his rather tight mouth. “Then you should get through the next few decades okay. Because there’s going to be a lot of self-denial needed. What happened to Peggy?”

Charley looked at his hands. “We lost touch. One fine spring day, she died of leukaemia. I heard about it later.”

After drinking deep, Pilbeam said, “That’s life, as they always say about death.” His tone robbed the remark of any facetiousness it might have had.

“Although I was only a kid, I think the — Accident sent me quietly mad,” Charley said, looking down at his boots. “Thousands — millions of people were mad, in a secretive way. Some not so secret, of course. And they’ve never got over it, though it’s twenty years ago. I mean, though it’s twenty years ago, it’s still present. That’s why this war’s being fought, because people are mad… I’ll never understand it: we need every young life we can get, yet here’s a global war going on… Madness!”

With a sombre face, Pilbeam saw that Charley drew out a cigarette and lit it; it was one of the tobacco-free brands and it crackled, so fiercely did Charley draw on it.

“I don’t see the war like that,” Pilbeam said, ordering up another Kentucky Bourbon. “I see it as an economic war. This may be because of my upbringing and training. My father — he’s dead now — he was senior sales director in Jaguar Records Inc., and I could say ‘consumer rating’ right after I learnt to say ‘Mama’. The economy of every major nation is in flux, if you can have a one-way flux. They are suffering from a fatal malady called death, and up till now it’s irremediable — though they’re working on it. But one by one, industries are going bust, even where there’s the will to keep them going. And one day soon, the will is going to fail.”

“I’m sorry,” Charley said. “I don’t quite grasp what you mean. Economics is not my field at all. I’m just -”

“I’ll explain what I mean. God! I may as well tell you: my old man died last month. He didn’t die — he killed himself. He jumped from a fifty-second floor window of Jaguar Records Inc. in up-town L.A.” His eyes were brighter; he drew down his brows as if to hood them, and put one clenched fist with slow force down on the table before them. “My old man… he was part of Jaguar. He kept it going, it kept him going. In a way, I suppose he was a very American sort of man — lived for his family and his job, had a great range of business associates… To hell with that. What I’m trying to say — God, he wasn’t fifty! Forty-nine, he was.

“Jaguar went bust; more than bust — obsolete. Suddenly wilted and died. Why? Because their market was the adolescent trade — they sold Elvis and Donnie and Vince, and the other pop singers. It was the kids, the teens, that bought Jaguar records. Suddenly — no more kids, no more teens. The company saw it coming. It was like sliding towards a cliff. Year after year, sales down, diminishing returns, costs up… What do you do? What in hell can you do, except sweat it out?

“There are other industries all round you just as badly hit. One of my uncles is an executive with Park Lane Confectionery. They may hang on a few more years, but the whole lot is going unstable. Why? — Because it was the under-twenties consumed most of their candies. Their market’s dead — unborn. A technological nation is a web of delicately balanced forces. You can’t have one bit rotting off without the rest going too. What do you do in a case like that? You do what my old man did — hang on for as long as you can, then catch a down draught from the fifty-second floor.”

Charley said gently, envying Pilbeam his slight drunkenness as he sipped his Bourbon. “You said something about someone’s will going to fail.”