Greybeard

“Martha, I’ve done my last day’s reed-cutting. I’ve been mad this last year and a half, just slaving my life away. And what for? To earn enough money to buy that bloody obsolete truck stuck in the cathedral.” His voice broke. “I’ve expected so much of you… I’m sorry, Martha, I don’t know why I did it — or why you didn’t hit me for it, but now I’ve forgotten the crazy idea — I’ve withdrawn my money from the Bursar, the best part of two year’s savings. We’re free to go, to leave this dump altogether!”

“Oh, Algy, you… Algy, I’ve been happy here. You know I’ve been happy — we’ve been happy, we’ve been quiet together. This is home.”

“Well, now we’re going to move on. We’re still young, aren’t we, Martha? Tell me we’re still young! Let’s not rot here. Let’s complete our old plan and sail down the river and go on until we get to its mouth and the clean sea. You would like to, wouldn’t you? You can, can’t you?”

She looked beyond him, through the dazzling light at the window to the roofs of the stables visible beyond, and the blue evening sky above the roofs. At last in a grave voice she said, “This is the dream in your heart, Algy, isn’t it?”

“Oh, my love, you know it is, and you will like it too. This place is like — oh, some sort of a materialist trap. There will be other communities by the sea which we can join. It will be all different there… Don’t weep, Martha, don’t weep, my creature!”

It was almost dusk before their possessions were packed and they slipped through the tall college gateway for the last time, heading back down the hill towards the boat and the river and the unknown.

VI. London

To her surprise, Martha found her limbs tremble with delight in the freedom of being once more upon the river. She sat in the dinghy clutching her knees, and smiled and smiled to see Greybeard smiling. His decision to move on was not so spontaneous as he represented it. Their boat was well provisioned and fitted with a better sail than previously. With deep pleasure, Martha found that Charley Samuels was coming along too; he had aged noticeably during their time in Oxford; his cheeks were shrunken and as pale as straw; Isaac the fox had died a couple of months before, but Charley was as much a dependable man as ever. They did not see Jeff Pitt to say good-bye to; he had vanished into the watery mazes of the lake a week before, and nobody had seen him since; whether he had died there, or gone off to seek new trapping grounds, remained a mystery.

For Greybeard, to have river water flowing beneath his keel again was a liberation. He whistled as they sailed downstream, passing close to the spot where, back in Croucher’s day, Martha and he had shared a flat and bickered and worried and been taken to Cowley barracks. His mood was entirely different now, so much that he had difficulty in remembering the person he then was. Much nearer to his heart — ah, and clearer in the memory! — was the little boy he had been, delighting in trips on the sunny Thames, in those months of 1982 when he was recovering from the effects of radiation illness.

As they sailed south, the new freedom took him back to that old freedom of childhood. But it was only memory that represented that time as freedom. The child he had been was less free than the sunburnt man with bald head and grey beard who sat by his wife in his boat. The child was a prisoner, a prisoner of his weakness and lack of knowledge, of his parents’ whims, of the monstrous fate unleashed so recently on the world that the world had yet to grasp its full power. The child was a pawn.

Moreover, the child had a long road of sorrow, perplexity, and struggle before him. Why then could the man look back down the perspective of forty-nine years and regard that little boy boxed in by events with an emotion more like envy than compassion?

As the car stopped, Jock Bear, the teddy bear in tartan pyjamas, rolled off the rear window ledge and on to the car seat. Algy picked him up and put him back.

“Jock must be sick too, Mummy. He’s rolling about like anything back here.”

“Perhaps he’ll feel better when we’ve looked at the house,” Patricia Timberlane said. She raised what was left of her eyebrows at her friend Venice, who was sitting in the front with her. “I know I shall,” she said. She climbed out and opened the rear door, helping her son to the ground. He was tall for a boy of seven, but the sickness had left him thin and lifeless. His cheeks were sallow, his skin rough. With nursing him and being ill herself, she felt as bad as he looked. But she smiled encouragingly, and said, “I suppose Jock wouldn’t like to look round the new house?”

“I just told you, Mum, he’s sick. Gosh, when you’re sick, you don’t want to do a thing except die, like the way Frank did. So if it’s all the same to you, he’ll hang around in the car.”

“As you wish.” It still hurt to be reminded of the death of her older boy Frank after many months of the sickness.