Greybeard

“You see, you could be lost here easy enough,” Pitt said. Now the first pleasure of reunion was over, he lapsed into his customary grumbling tone. “Some of the lads I know back in Oxford used to be free-booters and sort of water-highwaymen around this region, until they became too old and turned to a bit of quiet poaching instead. They still talk about the old days, and they were telling me that there was a lot of fierce fights went on here some years back. They call this the Sea of Barks, you know.”

“I heard them speak of it in Oxford,” Charley said. “They say it’s still spreading, but there are fewer folk to chart it now.”

Pitt wore two old jackets and a pair of trousers. He felt in one of the pockets of the inner jacket and produced a square of paper, which he unfolded and handed to Greybeard. Greybeard recognized the paper; it was one of the broadsheets distributed during the last exhibition of the Balliol children. On its back, a map was drawn in ink.

”It shows you what this region’s like now, according to these pals of mine, who explored most of it,” Pitt said. “Can you understand it?”

“It’s a good map, Jeff. Although there are names missing here, it’s easy to identify the old features. Barks must be a corruption of the old Berkshire.”

Martha and Charley peered at the map with him. Marked on the southern tip of the Sea of Barks was Goring. There, on either side of the old river, two ranges of hills, the Chilterns and the Berkshire Downs, met. The river had become blocked at that point and, rising, had flooded all the land north of it, where a sort of triangular trough was formed between the two ridges of hills and the Cotswolds.

Charley nodded. “Although it’s far from being a sea, it’s easily twenty miles across from east to west, and perhaps fifteen the other way. Plenty of room to get lost on it.”

Martha traced the edge of the so-called sea with a finger and said, “A lot of towns must have been submerged in it, Abingdon and Wallingford among them. This makes Meadow Lake appear a mere pond! If the water level is still rising, I suppose in time the two stretches of water will meet, and then Oxford itself will sink.”

“Don’t things change fast when they’re under God’s care rather than man’s,” Charley said. “I’ve been reckoning up. It must be about fourteen years since I arrived at Sparcot, and before then the country was getting a bit run down and tatty — but now it’s a different country altogether.”

“Now it’s only us that’s getting tattier,” Pitt said. “The land’s never looked better. I wish I were younger again, Charley, don’t you? — Both of us young rips of eighteen, say, with a couple of nice young bits of stuff to keep us company! I’d see I had a better life than the one I have had.”

As Pitt expected, Charley would not agree to the young bits of stuff. “I wish I had my sisters with us, Jeff. They’d be happier in this place than they were, poor things. We’ve lived through desperate times! Now you can’t call this England any more — it’s reverted to God. It’s His country now, and it’s the better for it.”

“Nice of Him to put up with us,” Pitt said sarcastically. “Though He won’t have to do that much longer, will He?”

“It’s terribly anthropomorphic of me, but I can’t help feeling He’ll find it the slightest bit dull when we’ve all gone,” Martha said.

They moved off after their meal. As they had done a couple of years before, they all travelled in the dinghy and towed Pitt’s boat. The wind was hardly strong enough to move them over the silent waters.

They had been travelling only a brief while before they saw in the hazy distance the spires and roofs of a half-drowned town. The church steeple stood out cleanly, but most of the roofs were concealed by plants which had taken root in their blocked gutters. This vegetation would presumably be an important factor in causing the buildings to slide beneath the surface. For a while the steeple would remain; then the slow crumbling of its foundations would cause it, too, to disappear, and the finger of man would no longer be evident on the scene.

Pitt hung over the side of the dinghy, and peered into the “sea”. “I was wondering what happened to the people that used to live down there,” he said uneasily, “and wondering if they might perhaps still be carrying on their life under the water, but I don’t see any of them looking up at us.”

“Here, Jeff, that reminds me,” Charley said. “What with you arriving, it went clean out of my mind, but you know you used to reckon there was goblins in the woods.”

“Goblins and gnomes,” said Pitt, regarding him unblinkingly. “What of it? Have you been seeing them too, a religious man like you, Charley?”

”I saw something.” Charley turned to Greybeard. “It was first thing this morning, when I was going to see if there was anything in our snares. As I knelt over one of them, I looked up, and there were three faces staring at me through the bushes.”