Mandrake

  He needed no more than that. He was shaking as he sat there, looking at them both. Masochism seared into his imagination, so that the two sleeping figures lying apart beside the fire came together in his mind; and he did not know which was worse, the pictures he drew of them from years before or the hundred possible spectres that rose sneering at him out of the time since Gloucester. And he had convinced himself so soon that Oakley and Beth had become lovers again, since then, that the shaking turned from selfhurt to blind rage.

  Suddenly unable to watch them any longer, he stumbled up and went out of the room; up the bare, creaking wooden stairs and into the room above. Through the rain-streaked windows the road below lay grey and empty, as dead as the bleak garden. Queston paced to and fro, trying in black misery not to think, not to guess and imagine; but it was no good. His one hope swept away from him, he was on the edge of an abyss whose existence he had never known before. Before he loved Beth, he had been a solitary; but in committing himself to her, he had changed that for ever. If she had betrayed him, there could be no going back to solitude; there could only be loneliness.

  When the empty cold became worse even than his jealousy, he went back downstairs. Oakley sat upright, and grinned at him, scratching his head so that the hair stood up in fair spikes. ‘Jeeze, you sounded like a herd of elephants up there. You look pooped, come and get some sleep. I’ll take over for a bit.’

  ‘I’m all right,’ Queston said coldly. A sense of martyrdom was some comfort, at least.

  Beth said sleepily: ‘O come and lie down, darling. You do need rest.’

  So she was awake too. Of course. They would have made the most of his absence.

  ‘Come over here.’ Oakley got to his feet. ‘I think I’ll keep an eye out upstairs too, the view must be wider. Hell, it’s cold, though, away from the fire. Didn’t you freeze up there? I’m taking this.’

  He went out, clutching his blanket round him, and they heard his feet clump up the echoing stairs.

  Beth extricated one arm and held it out to him, lying smiling upwards in the firelight. He thought, dispassionately: she’s beautiful, I’ve never seen her look so beautiful.

  He said, his voice flat: ‘He was your lover, wasn’t he? He’s the man you lived with,’ He longed for her to laugh at him; to deny it even though it might be true.

  Something in Beth’s face died, and she drew back her arm slowly and lay very still, looking up at him. It seemed a long time before she said: ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’ve both been acting very well. It never even crossed my mind.’

  ‘It was all over years ago, darling.’

  ‘O, sure,’ Queston said.

  ‘Truly it was.’ She sat up, wide-eyed. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, but there didn’t seem any point. We thought it would be more sensible all round not to.’

  An immense bitter anger spurted up in him as she said ‘we’. She looked very young, her hair rumpled and her skin shining, and for a moment he felt as helpless as though he were talking to a child. He said: ‘I thought We were as close as two people can be. Obviously my standards aren’t the same as yours. You like to keep things hidden, you like to live secret. Haven’t you ever heard of lying by omission?’

  ‘What good would it have done to tell you? You know what happened when I did before. You’d only have been hurt, the way you are now.’ She stood up, tugging awkwardly at her sweater like a schoolgirl, and came towards him; but then stopped a few feet away.

  ‘I shan’t touch you, don’t worry,’ he said in disgust. ‘I’ll leave that to our friend from now on. First thing to-morrow we’ll drive back to Milward and his people, and I’ll join up with them. Then you two can have the car and go off together.’ Somewhere in his mind the small objective censor was showing him his own vehemence, the pitch of his voice and the cold lines of his face; he could see them as if he were acting, and yet not control them.

  Beth said patiently: ‘You’re being foolish. I promise you nothing’s happened.’

  ‘How am I to believe that, when you don’t tell me until I force you to?’

  ‘Look,’ she said. ‘In love, you don’t wait until somebody’s proved their honesty before you start trusting them. The trust has to come first. Then if you trust them enough, they’ll be honest with you—as a kind of reward, if you like.’

  ‘My God,’ he said, appalled. ‘Do you really believe that?’

  ‘Yes, I do. David, please, I love you. I don’t feel anything at all for Kit Oakley. Can’t you even try to trust me?’

  The fire spluttered again behind her; outside, the wind and rain were beating at the house more savagely than before. Out of the black sea of his rage. Queston surfaced into a great weariness. Nothing would ever come to any good; no one would ever act in any way but this, the way she took. Faith would always be blurred by suspicion; honesty always hedged about with some kind of precaution. Mandrake, Beth: they perpetuated one another.

  But it had to stop somewhere. He said slowly: ‘I can try. I haven’t much choice.’

  Overhead there was a hollow thump, and the sound of Oakley’s feet scraping the floor.

  Beth jerked at the noise. ‘Don’t tell him you know. Things would be impossible. We can’t afford to have everyone under an even bigger strain. Not now.’

  He laughed abruptly, and thought the sound was like a groan. ‘Covering things up to the end. My open, straightforward girl.’ He stared sneering at the appeal in her eyes; and then suddenly everything was gone from their faces, to leave only a fierce communion of loving. Or so it seemed to Queston. She came towards him, tentatively, and he took both her hands; even now, he thought, he saw his own life in her face. He did not kiss her, but held her hands so tightly that he felt his nails sink into the skin.

  Then they heard Oakley running down the stairs, and he burst into the room, dishevelled and urgent.

  ‘Outside. Look.’

  Queston contemplated him coldly, bleak with exhausted jealousy; but when he turned to look outside, everything that was in his mind fell away. He dropped Beth’s hands.

  It was moving slowly past the house: a shadowy shape through the trees. A black Ministry car. He crossed to the window; then ducked hurriedly as two other cars followed it, faster, and vanished up the road. Suddenly the house seemed restless, uneasy.

  ‘They’re after us.’

  ‘Thank God for the rain. No tyre tracks.’ Oakley came to join him, and looked out at the bare garden; dark, hanging clouds held down the afternoon, and thunder was rumbling again overhead. Rain hissed down the windows in malicious gusts.

  ‘Jesus, look at it. Well—do we go or stay?’

  Queston looked at Beth, standing tousled and anxious. She said: ‘They mustn’t catch you.’

  ‘Come on.’ Oakley began piling blankets and tins together.

  ‘We shouldn’t get Beth out again in this. Perhaps they’ve gone straight through.’

  ‘I’ll have another look from upstairs.’

  He was down again swiftly. ‘They’re searching every house in the road. Two cars parked up the far end, and they’re working down this way. Great thugs in Ministry uniform, and one man in a raincoat. We have to get out, David, quick.’

  ‘How the devil did they know we were here?’

  ‘Second sight, maybe. Or your friends in the field.’

  ‘It wasn’t them,’ Queston said. ‘Anything else, but it wasn’t them.’

  ‘Have it your way. I just don’t have your touching faith in people.’

  ‘I haven’t had it long either.’ Deliberately he looked across at Beth. ‘But there doesn’t seem to be much else left to have faith in, now.’

  ‘There’s always luck,’ Oakley said, his pale eyes glinting. ‘Sweet simple luck, which is what the world rims on. And brother, do we need it now. Come on.’

  They bundled into the car, Queston and Beth at the front. The rain drove in at the broad back window, through the open garage doors; great blurring streaks of water broken into drops on
ly by the gusting wind. The roar of it was all round them, and the deeper growl of thunder overhead. A white branch of lightning split the sky above the trees, and the electric snarl of it cracked and rumbled down. Beth said shakily, and they understood her: ‘I wonder which is worse?’

  ‘Now,’ Queston said. The engine howled up through his fingers, bringing a kind of delight; he let power flare into the car, and swung it backwards out of the gates, round in a shrieking tight turn and away up the empty road, towards an east unbroken black as the sky all around.

  ‘Caught them with their pants down,’ Oakley shouted, behind him. ‘Inside a house. Driver’s gone tearing in after them. No sign. We’ll have a good start. Ah, here they come—’

  Queston skidded round a bend, and houses cut off their view of the road behind. The air was growing dark, as the muffled afternoon light died behind the clouds; there was a ghostliness already round the edges of buildings and trees. Lightning flashed suddenly round them with a vicious simultaneous crack, and Beth flinched against him. He heard somewhere through the din of the storm the clattering thud of bricks falling to the road.

  Rain whipped at the car; the windscreen-wipers flicked desperately under streaming arcs. Queston clenched his teeth as he forced the car through the juddering wind that tore and strained at the wheel. He was driving diagonally into an easterly gale.

  Through the gloom he saw a turning ahead. Oakley yelled: ‘I think I can see them. Go south!’

  ‘No. The coast.’ He was certain of it, but there was no reason at work; only an instinctive mastering mechanism that drove him as he drove the car. He fought the wind with his hands and wrists, throwing the car recklessly forward but never quite into the skid that would hurl them off the road.

  The land was low now all round, through the blur of rain and dying light. For an instant Queston gasped under a complete convinced sense of familiarity: I have been here before, I have been here before… Then it vanished. In a long flicker of lightning he glimpsed on the horizon two rounded shadows, unidentifiable, flashing into sight and out again; they were the mysterious shapes he had seen from the field where Milward and his group had worked, but nearer and bigger now.

  Lightning came again, dancing behind them; the two shadows were great spheres, like dark new planets towering over the earth, or the impossible domes of a dream city. ‘In Xanadu…’ His mind groped as he struggled to head the car into the gale. Thunder roared and bellowed round them, the air shook with it; he was conscious of being very small. Anything could happen, anything was possible. Where were they?

  Beth had seen the strange shapes too, she touched his arm.

  ‘David, look! What is it? Out there!’

  Oakley called through the noise: ‘Coming up behind us. Got their lights on. About a mile back.’

  ‘Need ours soon.’ Queston was peering into the murk. The sky flared, and the two dark spheres jumped into sudden sight again, ahead, to the left of the road. This time Oakley saw.

  ‘Jesus!’

  Beth’s voice rose, and cracked. ‘What are they? O David, they’re horrible. Don’t go near them, don’t—’

  ‘Take your choice—Martians or the Ministry.’

  ‘Martians nothing,’ Oakley shouted, gripping the back of the seat between them. The car was pitching and swaying like a boat. ‘It’s the Bradwell warning station. The laser. And damned dangerous if it’s still switched on.’

  ‘Bradwell?’

  ‘Built around 1972. Covers Europe and the Channel. Mandrake was behind it, in his early days. Peace through watchfulness, that was his line then. They moved about three thousand people to build it there—Christ-awful row at the time. And some nasty things happened when the back to your roots game began.’

  ‘D’you think Mandrake got back to Oxford, when we left him?’

  ‘Before the place caved in—or afterwards?’

  The sky raged and thundered over them; blue-white light flashed on wet roofs, and houses silent and dark.

  ‘This is some kind of town.’

  ‘Maldon.’

  The word rang through Queston’s spinning brain like a trumpet, and suddenly the emptiness that had always been a part of him was peopled, and everything was there clear, clearer than it had ever been. Mandrake had been right in one thing: ideas could come true. But not only new ideas; ideas that had been conceived a dozen centuries ago. Maldon… Maldon… ‘There was a battle there once—’

  ‘They’re catching up! ’ Beth was staring over her shoulder. Queston wrenched himself out of his mind, glanced in his mirror, and saw swaying points of yellow light like two pairs of eyes. The sky was almost dark now; he could not make out the shapes of the cars. He slowed slightly, saw a turning on his right and skidded down it, rocking the car hard down on one side. Twisting round two more corners, he came out on an open road sweeping south through fields flat as the sea. Towering over them, on the horizon, flickering light and dark in the lightning crashing continuously now out of the sky, the two dark spheres of the laser station loomed bigger still. It was a poor road, and he had to switch on his lights; the car leapt and jerked. He looked in his mirror, and saw the yellow eyes reappear.

  ‘We passed a danger notice.’ Beth stared back out of the rear window. ‘I couldn’t see what else it said.’

  ‘Faster than light,’ Oakley said softly. Through the thunder, Queston could hear his voice, and the words seemed meaningless. But he thought they had the intimate allusiveness of a private joke; and he heard Beth laugh. He gripped the wheel harder.

  The headlamps caught a board, and staring red letters: danger.

  ‘There again.’ Oakley peered swiftly. ‘It’s the edge of the radar field. They leave a terrific margin, of course, and there’s no danger from the laser in this direction. Maybe the radar isn’t working now, anyway—you can’t tell whether the scanners are moving.’

  ‘It’ll be working all right. That’s what’s caused all the trouble since the beginning.’ Queston’s lights picked up another notice: bradwell ioo yards. Suddenly he was swept with rage at the monstrous, devastating suspicion that had become both power and paralysis; and the furtive, watchful bulk of the radar station seemed one vast symbol of everything that had woken the earth into violence. He said abruptly: ‘I’m going in there.’

  ‘David, no!’

  Ahead of them he saw the main gate of the station, and the rough side road leading in; and he saw that the entrance was clear. Broken by the storm, or by some other violence, the fence lay flattened for several yards, and the gate hung deserted and open at one side. He turned hard to the left, switching off his lights, and plunged down through the entrance to an uneven causeway of rough stones. The sense of familiarity grew stronger: how did he know this place?

  He wound down the window as he drove, and put his head out; the wind lashed full into his face with icy, whipping rain, and he drove as fast as he dared down the bumpy road, watching its dark edge. Oakley shouted at him; he caught the word ‘tunnel’ but nothing more. He could feel Beth’s hand nervously gripping his knee, her fingers tight and afraid.

  Then suddenly there was an iron gate before them; no fence, only a gate alone, barring the road between towering posts. He thrust his foot at the brake, and heard a tyre burst, and the car slewed giddily round and stopped.

  He looked back. The yellow eyes of light were turning towards them off the main road.

  ‘Stay there.’

  He ran through the raging rain to the gate, but it was locked. In a flare of lightning he saw that it barred an entrance where the road tilted down into the earth, and he remembered Oakley’s shout. This tunnel was the only way into the station: the only safe way.

  He stood under the storm, and before him there was only the gate that reared up alone, with nothing on either side, barring a road that vanished under the earth, and beyond that nothing again. Only the open fields stretching all round, shining wet in the flash of lightning, white under a black sky.

  He knew there could no
t be much time now, and he knew he was glad. He went back to the car. ‘The gun there, love, quick.’ Beth handed him the revolver. Oakley was already out in the rain with his own.

  ‘Stay inside,’ Queston said to her. Exhilaration had hold of him, he could feel his lips wanting to stretch into a smile. But she must stay safe. His voice whipped out curt in the wind. ‘Get down on the floor. Curl up. And don’t move.’ He wished he could see her face.

  The first car drew up ten yards away; their own lay sideways, blocking the road. Oakley pulled him down behind the bonnet, and a spotlight leapt out from the other car. But the beam shone harmlessly over their heads, lighting the rain into swift slanting lines, and did not move.

  The lightning snapped in jagged streaks now, and the sky roared, as if all the elements bore down to batter at them. It was a storm more violent than anything Queston had ever seen, and they stood at its centre. And the place was alive, the flat dead beaten fields and the marshes beyond: under the rage of the rain and wind, they hummed with a life and a controlled menace that he could sense like an animal smelling death. He dug his fingers into the hard rubber of the car tyre.

  Behind the spotlight, figures moved.

  ‘Queston!’

  The voice was faint, shouting into the wind, with a strain in it more than the effort to be heard.

  ‘Queston! Come out, you and the other, and the girl will be safe.’

  It was impossible, but there could be no mistake.

  ‘My God,’ Queston said. ‘It’s Mandrake!’

  ‘It can’t be. Not here—’

  ‘It’s Mandrake, I tell you.’

  ‘Was he shamming? Hell no, the man was nearly dead. We took him less than a mile from Oxford, from his roots, and he nearly died—’