Greybeard

“No, my dear, not even little Jock Bear.” She took his arm, and they walked together towards the empty house without speaking. When they found Algy was not in the house, other troubles were temporarily forgotten as they began to worry about the boy. They called continuously through the bare and echoing rooms. No answer came back. Patricia ran out from the house, still calling, running through the bushes, down towards the river, full of a fright she dared not name. She was level with the summer-house when a voice called, “Mummy!” As she swerved towards it, Algy was standing there in the gloom with the door half open; like a small projectile, he came flying to her, weeping.

Clutching him tightly, she asked him why he had remained in hiding when they had looked for him before.

He had no way of explaining, though he blurted out something about a girl and a game of hide-and-seek. It had been a game; when his father opened the summerhouse door and looked in, it remained a desperate game. He wanted his father to find him and embrace him. He did not know why he crouched behind the garden chairs, half-fearing discovery.

Stiff with pins and needles, he remained where he was when the door closed again. He had overheard the conversation between his parents, a secret conversation more terrible for being mainly incomprehensible. It told him that there existed a tremendous threatening world with which no one — not even his father — could come to terms; and that they lived not among solid and certain things but in a crumbling pastry world. Guilty and afraid, he hid from his knowledge behind the chairs, anxious to be found, scared of the finding.

“It was naughty and cruel of you, Algy, do you hear? You knew I would be worried with the river so near. And you are not to play with strangers — I told you before, they sometimes have sicknesses about which you know nothing. You heard us calling you — why didn’t you come out immediately?”

He answered only with sobs.

”You frightened Mummy very much, and you are a naughty boy. Why don’t you say something? You’re never going to play here again, do you understand? Never!”

“I shall see Martha Broughton again, sha’n’t I?”

“No. We’re not going to live here, Algy. Daddy’s not going to buy the house, and you’re coming home and going straight to bed. Do you understand?”

“It was a game, Mummy!”

“It was a very nasty game.” Only when they were in the car and driving back to Twickenham did Algy cheer up and lean over from the back seat to stroke his father’s head. “Daddy, when we get home, would you do some of those card tricks to cheer us up with?” he asked. “You’re going to bed as soon as you get home,” Arthur Timberlane said, unmoved.

While Patricia was upstairs, seeing that Algy got into bed as soon as possible, Arthur walked moodily about before the television. The colour reception was bad this evening, giving the three gentlemen sitting round a BBC table the genial hues of apoplectics. They were all, one of them with considerable pipemanship, being euphoric about world conditions.

Their bland voices only infuriated Arthur. He had no faith in the present government, though it had replaced, less than a year ago, the previous pro-bomb government. He had no faith in the people who supported the government. The shuffle only demonstrated people’s fatuous belief in a political cure for a human condition, Arthur thought.

Throughout the nineteen sixties and seventies, a period representing most of his adult life, Arthur had prided himself on remaining unscared by the dangers of nuclear warfare. “If it comes to the point — well, too bad, but worrying isn’t going to stop it coming”: that had been his commonsense man-in-the-street approach to the whole thing. Politicians, after all, were paid to worry about such matters; he was better occupied fighting his way up Sofftoys Ltd., which he joined in the sixties as a junior traveller.

The bomb tests were on and off in turn, as the Communist countries and the Western ones played their incomprehensible game of ideology; nobody kept count of the detonations, and one grew bored with the occasional scares about increasing radiation in the northern hemisphere and overdoses of strontium in the bones of Lapp reindeer or the teeth of St. Louis schoolchildren.

With a sort of rudimentary space travel developing in the sixties and seventies, and Mars, Venus, Mercury, and Jupiter being examined, it had seemed only natural that the two leading powers should announce that they were conducting a series of 46 controlled” nuclear detonations in space. The American “rainbow bomb” in the early sixties proved to be the first of many. People — even scientists — grumbled, but the grumbles went unheeded. And most people felt it must be safer to activate the bombs beyond Earth’s atmosphere.