The Wanderer

During the past thirty-six hours Richard had witnessed several rescues and reunions and numerous befriendments, and now he realized that he wanted very much to befriend someone himself. He was acutely anxious that no one but he should hear this girl’s soft sobs, or come upon them before her sobs had been stilled and at least the first gestures of comradeship made.

As he approached her he had the thought of how chilly it was getting and the memory of how warmly the couples had seemed to be sleeping last night under the straw, and also the thought of how this was the end of the world, or at least a very good imitation; yet at the same time it seemed to him that those thoughts did not fully describe his present motives.

He offered her fresh bread he had saved from a thrifty scatter of little loaves dropped near Cleeve from a helicopter, but it turned out that Vera’s chief discomfort was that she was thirsty. Getting water in the new tidal areas was no simple matter, with all the reservoirs and wells and springs salt-drowned. Some pipes held fresh water, but that was chancy.

He remembered a pub being looted two squares back, and as they went toward it past the watermarked, half-timbered houses and a hotel named the Royal Hop Pole, he discovered another of her griefs: she had lost a heel and in any case her tight, pointed slippers weren’t the best for walking.

There was quite a line of looters at the pub. Oh, we law-abiding Britons, Richard thought, we queue up even for looting. He remembered a shoe store just beyond it and broke into it determinedly — which was quite easy, since the tide had done that before him — and managed to find in the wet, reeking drawers a pair of tennis shoes for Vera and some heavy socks for both of them. All the articles were sopping, of course, but that was of no consequence.

By that time the queue was shorter, and soon he and Vera had received a bottle of beer apiece and one small flask of rum between them, under the fierce watchful eye of a brawny man who might even have been the actual proprietor, though he did not say so.

Outside, a fat man was pointing down the street and saying: “Ah, there’s the bastid now!”

It was the Wanderer, rising in its bloated-X face and ringed ahnost symmetrically by the white shards of the moon.

Vera glanced at it for a moment, then pressed her lips together and looked away. Richard felt a surge of approval at her reaction. She held her elbow out toward him just a little. He took it firmly and escorted her down the street in the way he’d originally been going, setting an easy pace at first as they drank their beer and munched some bread. He told her nothing about his Malvern Hills plan. Time enough for that when they’d crossed the roaring Severn by Telford’s old iron bridge — if it hadn’t been torn away.

Vera turned on her transistor wireless, and they listened all the way around the dial to a sound like bacon frying. Richard wanted to tell her to throw it away, but instead he asked her how her new shoes fitted, and she smiled at him and said: “They’re heavenly.”

Only an hour ago Richard had been tramping lonely in the midst of a mob, and thinking of all the millions or scores of millions of new dead there must be all over the world, and wondering if it really mattered at all.

He had thought, Does the world need so many people? Take the crowd around me now — winnowed by the flood, yet most of them still stupid stereotypes the world could well do without. How many people does it take to sustain a reasonably rich culture? Aren’t more than that a waste? And aren’t millions of stereotypes an overly high price to pay for a few exceptions? Isn’t there something utterly gross about the concept of an endlessly, planlessly multiplied humanity, perhaps eventually swarming like rats to the stars? Did having so many people ever matter, except to the people? The world needs and deserves this winnowing!

But now his thought was that if just one more person had been taken, that person might have been Vera. In theory there were tens of thousands of Veras, he supposed, but only one where this Richard Hillary could have found her. He gripped her arm a little more snugly.

Chapter Thirty-six