Greybeard

When Greybeard and his wife Martha and Charley Samuels rose at this time, it was to find themselves on the edge of a widening Thames dissolved in mist. The new day drew from the land a haze into which a myriad ducks scattered. As the day advanced, the mist became orange-tinted before it thinned, to reveal the duck flying overhead or sailing in convoy on the burnished water.

Before the mists cleared, wings whispering overhead suggested the gathering of an invisible host. Geese, heading for their feeding grounds, moved over with a hollow sound that contrasted with the clat of flying swans. Smaller birds flew at higher levels. There were birds of prey too, eagles and falcons that were comparative strangers to the region.

Some of these birds had travelled over vast tracts of land to feed here, from the little teal to the sheld-duck, strutting with his striking plumage through the mud. Many of the migrants had been forced here by adamant necessity: their little warm-blooded morsels of fledgelings, with a high metabolic rate to sustain, would starve to death if left without food for eight hours; so their parents had flown to more northerly latitudes, where the hours of daylight at this time of the year lingered long over the feeding grounds.

The humans were of all the living things in this region of mist and water the least bound to such natural necessities. But they, unlike the proliferating bird-life about them, had no instinctual means of determining their direction, and within three days of leaving Oxford, their journey towards the river mouth was snared in a maze of waterways.

Their way might be difficult to find, but a sense of leisure filled them, and they felt no compulsion to get out of an area so abundantly stocked with food. Herons, geese, and duck went into a series of soups and stews at which Martha excelled herself. Fish seemed to ask only to be pulled from the river.

In these activities, they had few human rivals. Those few came mostly from the north side of the flood, from the settlements that still remained outside Oxford. They saw stoats hunting again — though not in packs — and an animal they took to be a polecat, making off through reeds with a mallard in its jaws. They saw otter and coypu and, at the place where they camped on the third night, the spoor of some sort of deer that had come down to the water’s edge to drink.

Here, next morning, Greybeard and Martha stood over their fire poaching fish with mint and cress when a voice behind them said, “I’m inviting myself in for breakfast!”

Floating towards them over the water, his oars raised and dripping water from the rowlocks, was Jeff Pitt in a much-mended rowing-boat.

“Fine friends you turn out to be,” he said across the intervening water. “I go out on a little hunting expedition with some friends. When I come back to Oxford, I find old Charley’s gone and his landlady’s heart-broken. I go up to Christ Church, and you two have disappeared. It’s a fine way to treat me!”

Embarrassed by the sense of grievance they felt behind his words, Martha and Greybeard went to the water’s edge to greet him. When he found they had actually left Oxford, Pitt had guessed the direction they would take; he told them that as a sign of his own cleverness as they helped secure his boat. He climbed stiffly out and shook them both by the hand, which he managed to do without looking them straight in the face.

“You can’t leave me behind, you know,” he said. “We belong together. It may be a long time ago, Greybeard, but I’ve not forgotten you could have killed me that time when I was supposed to shoot you.”

Greybeard laughed. “The idea never even entered my head.”

“Ah, well, it’s because it didn’t that I’m shaking your hand now. What you cooking there? Now I’m with you, I’ll see you don’t starve.”

“We were intending to fob off starvation with salmon this morning, Jeff,” Martha said, hitching her skirt to squat over the open stove. “These must be the first salmon caught in the Thames for two hundred years.” Pitt folded his tattered arms and looked askance at the fish. “I’ll catch you bigger ‘uns than that, Martha.

You need me about the place — older we get, more we need friends. Where’s old Holy Joe Samuels, then?”

“Just taking a morning walk. He’ll be back, and horrified to see you standing here, no doubt.” When Charley returned and finished slapping Pitt on the back, they sat down to eat their meal. Slowly the heat mist thinned, revealing more and more of their surroundings. The world expanded, showing itself full of sky and reflections of sky.