Mandrake

  ‘Is it? ’ He spread his hand in the air, and took hold of one finger. ‘If I bend that back far enough, it snaps. I don’t choose whether it does. We are born, and we die—we don’t choose that. No. You’re doing what we always do, thinking in our own terms. Our scale of values has to be based on what we know. On ourselves. When we wonder if there’s life on another planet, we choose Mars, or one with conditions most like our own. When we scrape around for traces of life in meteorites, it’s organic life we’re looking for. Or we wonder if there’s some great mind somewhere, like our own only much bigger, outside all these manifestations of energy and governing them all. It never occurs to think that perhaps the physicists might be the theologians. That energy itself, the common denominator in all things, is the basic life and mind and intelligence. The nearest we get to it is talking about the music of the spheres, and the poetry of motion. Trying to turn the laws into intangibles. And when we sense that our own intelligence is a dim reflection of the whole intelligence of the universe, we give the elements our own attributes—our only small admission of the ruthlessness of the laws. We talk about the cruel sea, and the merciless sun. It’s a cover for something we daren’t think about.’

  ‘Nature red in tooth and claw,’ Beth said. ‘The rough winds. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May… all right. But what then?’

  ‘Then,’ Queston said, ‘we miss altogether the whole terrible significance of the elements, and the universe, and the earth. The intelligence that’s in all these things. We think we’ve learnt pretty well to control the earth. So we can’t see, now, that it’s controlling us.’

  ‘The earth?’

  ‘You’ve seen it. Gradually it’s been happening, this last ten years. You know as well as anyone the state it’s reached now.’

  ‘I’ve seen this insane Ministry of Planning getting a stranglehold,’ she said bitterly. ‘People like them. The peace-makers. The governors. That terrible kind of hypnosis they put on people. It wasn’t the earth that started shutting everyone up in boxes.’

  ‘Wasn’t it?’

  ‘But the earth’s not alive.’

  ‘Isn’t it? ’ Queston said, and the words had hold of him again. ‘Listen. For fifteen years I’ve been studying the relationship between men and their environment. Men and places. It’s always been a far stronger thing than anyone bothered to realize. Local loyalties, romantic feelings about mountains… and did you ever come across one of those little societies for preserving a railway branch line? No, of course not, you’re too young. But all that emotion—if anyone had been asked to define it they’d have said it was just a matter of attaching affection to an inanimate object. Very strong affection, but a one-way force. They wouldn’t have admitted the one great danger. The fact that any strong emotion makes you vulnerable. The lover is always vulnerable—the one he loves has such power over him. The force can work both ways.’

  She shifted inside the cocoon of blankets. ‘But to say the earth’s alive—’

  ‘The earth. Which is matter, which is energy, which is intelligence. Not just a big thinking ball—a form of existence, of life, which happens to have encountered rules that it had to obey, and that turned it into solid material.’ He leant forward earnestly, hunting to keep the words. ‘But it’s none the less alive, don’t you see, and capable of action. This is that action, everything that’s happening now. Suddenly it’s taken advantage of the power it has over man. It’s making him do the things he thinks he’s doing of his own free will. All this business of guard thine own, and peace through isolation, and the frightening wall of emotion you find round places now. It’s a beginning. I think it’s the beginning of the end.’

  ‘What will happen? ’ She spoke coolly, linking her hands behind her head so that she could look at him. She sounded as though she did not very much care.

  ‘Only one thing can happen,’ Queston said. ‘It’s out to destroy mankind.’

  ‘But why now? It’s put up with us for a long time.’

  Queston looked at her. ‘I dare say you think I’m very comic, don’t you? Poor old thing, gone off his head after all that wandering about.’

  ‘No,’ she said calmly. ‘I think you’re quite sane. And you aren’t old. Why now?’

  ‘The bomb, I suppose.’

  ‘Nuclear tests, you mean?’

  ‘O no. The first. Hiroshima. Thirty-five years ago.’

  ‘I don’t follow,’ she said. ‘We’ve disarmed, haven’t we?’

  ‘We have. Everyone hasn’t.’

  ‘All the more reason not to bother about destroying mankind, I should have thought. Mankind will do it himself fairly soon. I’ve never really believed in the year A.D. 2000—we’ll have blown the earth sky-high long before then.’ As she said it she stopped suddenly, wide-eyed.

  ‘Precisely,’ Queston said. ‘The earth doesn’t want to be blown sky-high.’

  ‘Are you trying to say that this—what’s happening is a kind of self-defence?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘But that’s impossible.’

  ‘I dare say. But it’s happening.’ He shifted wearily on the hard floor. ‘Think of this form of intelligence. Not organic—existing only in obedience to its rules. The laws of Nature, we called them. Somehow our own kind of intelligence developed alongside it, separate and independent, but living off it like a highly complex parasite. The Intelligence was quite content for us to coexist. We were harmless enough, scratching at the surface of the earth, enclosed in our small senses. But then we overreached ourselves. We discovered how to break one of the great laws.’

  ‘Splitting the atom?’

  He nodded. ‘We couldn’t affect the cosmic intelligence until then. We could have sprayed blood around with our little wars as much as we liked, that didn’t matter. But when we began monkeying with the energy of the nucleus… all the tests since the sixties haven’t been bomb tests as such, you know. Just refinements. The biggest bomb they could make now couldn’t be tested, the risk is too great. The force of it could affect the planet as a whole. And its satellite too, because if America and Russia want to blast at each other now they’ve got to blast those stations off the moon as well… But no one’s going to think about the risk in time of war. They’ll just press the button. And when they do that they’ll affect the whole solar system, and the whole cosmic intelligence—you can’t break one law without affecting the whole. Of at least that’s what I believe the Intelligence, or whatever it ought to be called, thinks. All it’s doing now is what we do when we find death-watch beetle burrowing into a house—get rid of it, before it brings the whole lot crashing down.

  We’re just as dangerous now, and not much more than particularly arrogant beetles. So it’s doing things its own way. Getting rid of us. Animal life can stay, it won’t evolve again in a form like us. The Intelligence is working just to paralyse the intelligence of man. And the appalling thing is, everything that it makes him do he thinks he’s doing of his own free will. Or else at the behest of a Ministry that’s even more unwittingly under the influence than he is. The earth’s taken over, and no one knows. Maybe all parasites live and die without knowing their host exists.’

  He stopped, and sat silent and very tired. Even in the dead night it seemed to be pressing in, shouting, all round him; the vast, inconceivable force against which there was no defence. A nightjar rattled outside the black window. He forgot the girl.

  She said, wriggling farther down into the blankets: ‘What shall we do in the morning?’

  Queston stared at her.

  Her voice came muffled out of the cocoon. ‘I’ve heard you. It fits with everything, I’m sure you’re right. But I mustn’t believe it… I mean, we’re alive, aren’t we? It doesn’t seem to have got at us. Someone once said to me that there was only one great crime, and that was a denial of life while you were still alive.’

  After a long pause, Queston said: ‘The first thing we’ll do is look for some breakfast.’ He was smiling. He
rolled himself in blankets and lay down.

  ‘Good night,’ she said.

  ‘Good night, Miss Summers.’

  She said sleepily: ‘My name’s Beth.’

  ‘Mine’s David.’

  He lay waiting for the sleep that rolled up towards him. He wondered, faintly jealous, who had presented her with the tired little aphorism. He thought again of the conviction that he had tried to turn into comprehensible words, and grinned again at her reaction. Trust a woman. If you introduced her to the Angel of Death, she’d invite him to stay to tea. And then he turned back to the greatest enigma of all, that he had glossed lightly over in his big words: the single figure whose part in it all was not what it appeared to be, who had a power of his own greater than any puppet could have, however strong a force manipulated him. Mandrake. Mandrake… He did not sleep for a long time.

  It happened very soon, and afterwards he wondered that it had not happened before.

  They decided that they would drive through the dead lands for as long as it was possible to drive, looking for others like themselves. It had not seemed important to him before; until she came, he had not thought any others could exist. He discovered, after a little while, why she was frightened of the Ministry police. If they found her, she said, they would take her back to the Guild of Women, Mandrake’s second brainchild: and she told him more about it than Lindsey had done. Like him, she described it vaguely as fostering all the old instincts that glorified the home. But she said too that any unattached woman found by the Guild now, in the enclosed towns, was forced either to marry or to take on another equally traditional function.

  ‘They aren’t exactly brothels,’ she said calmly. ‘The basic idea seems to be that if a man isn’t getting enough of it at home, he can go off to one of these without having an affair with someone and breaking up the family. But something else goes on there that’s really nasty… a sort of ceremony at set times of the year, like Midsummer and Christmas. They never managed to get me inside one of the houses, and I don’t know quite what goes on. But I heard enough. They make it all sound very moral and necessary… that’s why I was running away.’

  He knew, by his horror, what was happening to him. A month ago, the fate of these unhappy wandering females would have left him indifferent, even amused. But that it might have happened to her—

  He had known nothing like her before. She seemed able to forget in a moment the enormity of what had overtaken them, and lose herself in the details of living. Her gaiety dazed him, as if he had been a long time asleep. She bubbled with conspiratorial delight when they found a deserted garage or shop, and helped themselves to fuel, clothes and food; with the scarlet coat wrapped close round her, against the cold that grew more intense now every day, she moved gracefully across his horizons so that he set her tasks of her own for the pleasure of seeing her walk.

  She spoke to him with a grateful respect that made him feel worn and old. The smile that had first startled him lit her face often, but never brought her close. He wondered gloomily if she thought of him as a man at all, or at least as anything but a kind of benevolent uncle. His consciousness of her flared so much more vividly every day that it became a precious agony to have her beside him as they drove through the empty streets, or slept in deserted rooms. He took great care not to touch her. Only once, when he woke in the night and sat watching her for a long while as she slept, he put out his hand and touched the curious bronze hair that fell away from her face.

  The next day they were on the outskirts of Reading, where the dead lands of Berkshire stretched round in a wide circular belt. Something seemed to be drawing him westwards, gradually away from London. They were driving with a purpose now; Beth had cut her hand on a tin-opener the day before, leaving a wound that was clean but a dark, angry red; and Queston had decided, before something worse happened, on a search for some kind of medical supplies.

  In street after street of identical red-box houses they drew a blank; the places had been methodically stripped, and nothing remained. They drove farther into the country, and saw among the fields a cluster of houses and shops huddling on their own, away from the main road. From such a place, generally, a gun-shot or a stone from some unseen watchful source would drive them back even before they hit the familiar barrier of place, and they would know they had found one of the fierce, isolated little communities which astonishingly seemed to survive alone in every part. But this time nothing happened as they approached.

  Queston stopped the Lagonda a hundred yards from the first house and got out, carrying his shot-gun.

  ‘Turn the car round. I shouldn’t be long, it looks as if we’re lucky. But if there’s someone there, and they see me, I’ll fire a shot. If you hear that, drive back round the corner and wait, and if I’m not with you inside ten minutes then drive like hell back to the house where we were last night. And then I’ll get there somehow. All right?’

  She nodded, pushing her hair aside with one hand. Her face was strained; he thought suddenly that she looked much older than she had done. The childishness had gone. She had argued with him urgently, too, over the idea of trying small unpredictable villages like this one; it wasn’t worth it, she insisted, bandages and aspirin were a sophistication they could do without. But Queston had brusquely cut her short; her hand worried him, and he had a horror of the idea that something worse might overtake her and he be left unable to help. There was danger even in the water they drank: long boiled, but drawn from long-static tanks in houses where always he suspected disease might lurk.

  He left her, and walked gingerly up the road through the long wet grass that masked its kerb. The responsibility he felt for her was unfamiliar; he had never known anxiety on anyone else’s behalf, even when he was a child. But there was another difference; he had never secretly nursed any real emotion for a woman either, the plunder had always been easy. This time—

  He clung to his freedom now because it was hers; and it troubled him that his protection carried danger for her all the time. The Ministry were on the look-out for him, he knew now; twice in the last week, driving fast along unfamiliar roads, he had seen men shout in recognition after the car. Once another car had chased them, but fell back as it reached some invisible boundary line. He held his gun ready as he walked.

  But the village was empty. He saw the overgrown gardens as he approached; tiles loose on the roofs, a telegraph pole leaning wearily at an angle, pulling the wires taut. He smelt the first shop before he saw it, and then drew level with the rotting heap behind its broken window. ‘J. Pennyquick, Fruiterer’, said the notice above, in paint that had already peeled. At least, he thought, the stench meant that the place had not been cleared.

  In a general store near by he found bandages, cottonwool, antiseptic; and he filled a bag with tins of food. His spirits rose. Last time, the tins they foraged had been unlabelled, and they had been living on baked beans for two days now.

  He went out through the back of the shop and crossed a field towards the road. The grass was long and the hedges straggled. The fields everywhere still had the look of controlled land, the shape given them by farming, but their lines had begun to blur a little; so that at first sight always they gave an uneasiness, a sense that something was intangibly wrong.

  Within a few steps he put up a rabbit; the white tail bounced frantically ahead, and instinctively he dropped the bag, pulled up his gun and fired. He missed. The rabbit vanished. Remorse flashed into his mind as he remembered the signal for Beth; now she would have ten minutes unnecessary panic. And he would have to walk an extra quarter of a mile to find her. Serve him right.

  Then he heard the running footsteps, and her voice.

  ‘David! David!’

  Her face was plain with fright, and her hair tangled with running. She stumbled to a halt, staring at him, gasping for breath. She said indistinctly: ‘You’re all right!’ and burst into tears, and he put out his arms with no more passion than he would have done to a child, until the feel of her th
ere broke into him. He held her tightly, feeling the jerk of her gulps for breath, and rubbed his cheek against her hair. Her arms round his waist clutched as if they would never let go. ‘Darling,’ he said. ‘Beth, my darling love, it’s all right. It’s all right.’

  He drew her away from him at last, holding her by the shoulders, and she bent her head, sniffing, to hide her face. ‘I heard a shot.’ She gave a comic, hiccuping sob. ‘I thought they’d caught you.’

  ‘I told you to drive out of sight if they did.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  She looked up at him, with wet, flushed cheeks and reddening eyes, offering the plainness as penance.

  ‘O Beth,’ Queston said. ‘Beth. Beth.’

  Then he was kissing her, and the world was not the same as it had been before.

  That evening, driving westward a spiralling way to avoid towns, they came on a hillside north of Chippenham that rose smooth green before them with a dozen small square shapes clustered in one field. Beth stiffened.

  ‘David, look!’

  Queston had been driving only half-alert, rejoicing in the weight of her body curled against his side. He slowed the car, and kissed the top of her head.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why didn’t we think of it before? It’s the obvious thing to have. No roots, no ties. It need never stay in one place. A caravan.’

  The caravans were huddled together in a corner of the field, in a litter of crackling brown leaves from the two great elms that overshadowed them out of the hedge. He chose the largest that he thought the Lagonda could easily pull, and unscrewed the padlock on the door. Sheltered from the wind, the walls and roof were weathered but still sound; inside, to Beth’s delight, it was equipped as if the owner had left only five minutes before. She ran from one end to the other, burrowing in drawers and cupboards, like a child with a new toy.

  ‘Sheets. And china, and knives and forks. How long is it since you used a real fork? And a sweet little kitchen, and it’s even got a bathroom. How can a caravan have a bathroom? O David, it’s marvellous. The carpet’s so soft. And there’s a cupboard full of things like pate de foie and lobster, look’—she waved a tin at him. ‘And flour, I can make some bread.’