Greybeard

“After all these years we can still tolerate each other’s fat-headed opinions. It’s a miracle!” He went over to her, sitting on the bed beside her and stroking her thigh. “Perhaps that’s our bit of madness or consolation or whatever — each other. Martha, have you ever thought -“ he paused, and then went on, screwing his face into a frown of concentration. “Have you ever thought that that ghastly catastrophe fifty years ago was, well, was lucky for us? I know it sounds blasphemous; but mightn’t it be that we’ve led more interesting lives than the perhaps rather pointless existence we would otherwise have been brought up to accept as life? We can see now that the values of the twentieth century were invalid; otherwise they wouldn’t have wrecked the world. Don’t you think that the Accident has made us more appreciative of the vital things, like life itself, and like each other?”

“No,” Martha said steadily. “No, I don’t. We would have had children and grandchildren by now, but for the Accident, and nothing can ever make up for that.”

Next morning, they were roused by the sound of animals, the crowing of cocks, the pad of reindeer hooves, even the bray of a donkey. Leaving Martha in the warm bed, Greybeard rose and dressed. It was cold. Draughts flapped the rug on the floor, and had spread the ashes of the fire far and wide during the night.

Outside, it was barely daylight and the puddingy Midland sky rendered the quad in cold tones. But there were torches burning, and people on the move, and their voices sounding — cheerful sounds, even where their owners were toothless and bent double with years. The main gates had been opened, and many of the animals were going forth, some pulling carts. Greybeard saw not only a donkey but a couple of horses that looked like the descendants of hunters, both fine young beasts and pulling carts. They were the first he had seen or heard of in over a quarter century. One sector of the country was now so effectively insulated from another that widely different conditions prevailed.

The people were on the whole well-clad, many of them wearing fur coats. Up on the battlements, a pair of sentries clouted their ribs for warmth and looked down at the bustle below.

Going to the lodge, where candles burned, Greybeard found the treble-chinned man off duty. His place was taken by a plump fellow of Greybeard’s age who proved to be a son of the treble chins; he was as amiable as his father was fossilized, and when Greybeard asked if it would be possible to get a job for the winter months, he became talkative.

They sat over a small fire, huddled against the chill blowing in through the big gate from the street. Speaking against the rumble and clatter of the traffic passing his cabin, the plump fellow chatted of Oxford.

For some years, the city had possessed no central governing body. The colleges had divided it up and ruled it indifferently. Such crime as there was was treated harshly; but there had been no shooting at Carfax for over a twelve-month.

Christ Church and several of the other colleges now served as a cross between a castle, a hostel, and a manor house. They provided shelter and defence when defence was needed, as it had been in the past. The bigger colleges owned most of the town about them. They remained prosperous, and for the past ten years had lived peaceably together, developing agriculture and rearing livestock. They did what they could to provide drainage to fight the nearby floods that rose higher every spring. And in one of the colleges at the other end of the town, Balliol by name, the Master was looking after three children who were shown ceremonially to the population twice a year.

“What age are these children? Have you see them?” Greybeard asked. “Oh, yes, I’ve seen them all right. Everyone’s seen the Balliol children. I wouldn’t miss them. The girl’s a little beauty. She’s about ten, and was born of an imbecile woman living at Kidlington, which is a village away in the woods to the north. The two boys, I don’t know where they come from, but one had a hard time before he got here, and was displayed by a showman in Reading, I heard tell.”

“These are genuine normal children?”

“One of the boys has got a withered arm, a little arm that finishes off with three fingers at his elbow, but you wouldn’t call that a proper disfigurement, and the girl has no hair and something a bit funny with her ear, but nothing really wrong, and she waves very pretty to the crowd.”

“And you’ve actually seen them?”

“Yes, I’ve seen them in ‘The Broad’, where they parade. The boys don’t wave so much because they’re older, but they’re nice fresh young chaps, and it’s certainly good to see a bit of smooth flesh.”

“You’re sure they’re real? Not old men disguised, or anything like that?”

“Oh no, no, no, nothing like that. They’re small, just like children in old pictures, and you can’t mistake young skin, can you?”