Empty World

  • • •

  His life developed into a routine again. He rose about seven, washed and dressed and made breakfast. In the morning he walked in the Park when the weather was fine, and found himself automatically following the same route every day—past the Albert Memorial, along to the Round Pond, back to the bridge and across it to the Serpentine’s north bank, over to Marble Arch for a glance, soon desultory, down deserted Oxford Street; then a return parallel with the mausoleum hotels of Park Lane, and along the tree-lined avenue of Rotten Row.

  In the afternoon he visited the shops, or prepared fuel for his fire. The house was well supplied with central heating radiators, but the upstairs sitting room also had a hearth recessed under a white ­marble mantel, with an old-fashioned metal-basket fireplace. Neil had found saws and choppers, and he raided surrounding houses for wood. At first he did his best to take only valueless stuff—kitchen chairs and tables and such—but as he used up those within easy reach he grew less scrupulous. On a day which had dawned wet and during which rain soaked down without a break, he felt the house next door was as far as he wanted to venture. He staggered back with the remains of a pretty Pembroke table and several strips of panelling from the library.

  He read a lot during bad weather. Some books he kept, against the possibility of wanting to read them again, but most went on the fuel pile. He found an old copy of The Swiss Family Robinson, which he started with fascination. The events were improbable and the characters fairly unbelievable, but he felt a morbid interest in the situation of people stranded on a desert island without resources. His own position was almost exactly the reverse. He had got used to not having electricity, radio and television, things like that. What remained was an incredible surplus: more food than he could ever eat and the whole of a metropolitan city for shelter. If he chose he could sleep in a different bed every night and die of old age—normal old age—with more than ninety-nine percent of them unused.

  The Robinsons, on the other hand, had each ­other’s company—voices, the sight of a smiling face, the touch of hands. He found the book too much for him in the end, and it went on the fire half-read.

  The days were beginning to draw in, and the air at times had an autumnal touch. One day a gale blew up and raged for three days almost without let-up. Neil stayed indoors; fortunately he had laid in a good supply of fuel beforehand. He had food and books, and an ample supply of batteries for a splendid cassette player he had acquired. He told himself things could be a great deal worse.

  It was good, all the same, to get out again into the fresh air. There was a brisk breeze still, gusting strongly, but only a few clouds chased across the blue sky. He felt exhilarated, and took deep breaths as he walked along the gravel path through what had once been the carefully tended gardens at the foot of the Memorial. Weeds grew thickly in them, and were pushing through the path as well. Further off what had been lawn was long lush grass, almost knee high.

  A few flowers survived to provide splashes of brighter colour, but the prevailing hue was green. Because of this the unexpected patch of red stood out. It was snarled in a tall briar—a standard rose that had already reverted to the primitive—and his first thought was that it was a late-flowering rose blossom. On closer view he saw it was a child’s balloon. It was sagging, more than half deflated, and he was continuing on his walk, uninterested, when he saw it had something white attached to it, a small square of card. There was writing on it.

  The briar was tall and protected by other tangled growth. Neil had to force his way in, and pull the briar down to get at the balloon. The small piece of pasteboard was limp, its edges soggy from rain, but Scotch tape had been stuck across the part carrying the message. The message itself was short and very simple:

  I am at 34 Heath Avenue,

  Hampstead. Where are you?

  Passing through Piccadilly Circus, Neil thought again of his grandfather’s remark. Anyone who waited here now in the hope of seeing a friend would be likely to have a long vigil. But one did not look for friends any more—any human being was a friend. There had been no name on the card and it had crossed his mind that it might have come from Clive. That did not bother him, either. All that mattered was that it was someone alive, and seeking contact.

  He had looked up Heath Avenue in a London street guide, and had mapped out the best route before he set off. Despite that he lost his way a ­couple of times. Once the road was blocked by debris, where fire had caused a large building to collapse outwards. Backtracking, he found himself confronted by a No Entry sign. He thought, driving past it, of the innumerable rules and regulations men had had to devise to enable them to live together on an overcrowded planet. There was only one rule left: find someone.

  He wondered about the sender of the message. He doubted if it could have been Clive. It was not the sort of thing Clive would do, and the actual message seemed too simple and straightforward to have come from him. The writing had been neat and attractive, well-formed without being ornate. Someone about his own age, he guessed.

  The sense of anticipation was beyond anything he could remember. It was like waiting for Christmas when he was little, but no Christmas Eve had ever been like this. It occurred to him, starting up the long slope of Haverstock Hill, that he did not know what sex the stranger was: the writing could have been either. That was unimportant, too. Soon, very soon, there would be a meeting, an end to being alone.

  He made a conscious effort to cut down the mounting excitement he felt, deliberately seeking difficulties and objections. He had no idea, for instance, how long the balloon and its card had been blowing about London—for weeks or months possibly. Whoever had sent it might have grown tired of waiting for a reply and moved on. This could be a wild goose chase.

  But his mood of expectancy and optimism easily withstood that particular cavil. The message itself was real, beyond doubt. Even if the person sending it had moved, there would be another message saying where. Having made that attempt at communication, he was scarcely likely to leave a blank trail for someone responding to it.

  It was more likely, Neil thought with increasing animation, that he might find not one survivor but several. Probably quite a number of balloons had been launched, hundreds maybe, and others discovered sooner. There might be a whole group of people in Heath Avenue when he got there.

  He found open country surrounding him and realized he had missed his way again and gone through Hampstead to the Heath. It was annoying but at least he knew he was very close to his objective. He swung the car round in an arc that ran it over the pavement, barely missing a fence, and drove back. He wondered if they might have heard the noise of the engine, and come out to look for him.

  Heath Avenue was a broad road, flanked by trees whose branches bore yellowing leaves that floated down in the path of the car, and by tall red brick houses. No-one had turned out, but the slight feeling of let-down went as he caught sight of No 34. He had no need to check the number: a sheet spread across the front, each end secured to a window, carried in bold black paint the single word:

  WELCOME.

  A sports car was standing outside, its relatively clean windscreen evidence of recent use. Neil parked behind it, and got out. He ought to have put up a sign outside his own house, he realized. For that matter, he should have thought of something like the balloons. The inhabitant of No 34 was obviously more enterprising.

  The front door was latched but not locked. He opened it and stepped into the hall. He called out:

  “Hi, there! Anyone home?”

  There was no reply. He had a moment’s disappointment, but only that. At this time of day, he himself would have been more likely to be out than in. The stranger would have his own routine of walks and foraging.

  A residue of old habits and etiquette suggested that he ought not to make himself free of someone else’s house without the owner’s invitation: he should wait on the step or outside in the ca
r. But he realized how silly that was. The old ways were gone; ownership no longer had a meaning.

  All the same, his exploration was tentative. The hall, he observed, was quite tidy, and he ventured further to find a kitchen with pots neatly stacked and working surfaces much cleaner than those he had left in Princes Gate. Cupboards were well stocked with food, and a Calor gas stove had been imported into an otherwise all-electric set-up. Crates of beer stood in a pile against one wall. The whole scene had an organized look.

  He went upstairs, noting that the carpet on stairs and landing had been recently swept. An open door led to a large sitting room, equally clean and with the stamp of daily use. On a desk were two piles of heavy white cartridge paper, one blank, the other consisting of pencilled sketches. They must have been done by the person living here, because they were post-Plague. That showed not only in the emptiness of the streets he had drawn, but in particular things—a shattered shop window with goods in disarray, a skeleton at a road junction. The sketches were neat and realistic, the work of a draughtsman. Near the window, though, stood an easel, with a half-finished oil painting. That was a frenzy of colours and shapes; Neil could not tell what it was meant to represent.

  There was a bowl with apples, something Neil had not seen for a long time. There must be an orchard nearby. The bowl stood on a table, which also held a ledger-type book. He opened it to see writing—the handwriting that had been on the card—and to recognize it as a diary. He closed it, and went on looking round the room. On the mantel an atmospheric clock spun its circular brass weight to and fro, half a minute to each spin. Someone who wanted to keep track of time, an interest he had long abandoned.

  He continued with his exploration. There was a bathroom across the way, again very clean, with a ­kettle in which hot water had presumably been carried up from the kitchen. The best solution, he decided, would be for both of them to abandon their present dens—to join in finding a place where a full hot water system, perhaps central heating as well, could be run off Calor gas. He was pleased with himself for the thought: he could be enterprising as well.

  The door of the next room was ajar. Neil pushed it open and saw that the curtains were drawn and it was in shadow. He saw a bed made up, the whiteness of sheets . . . then the darker vertical shadow that hung in the centre of the room. The rope was secured to an old-fashioned brass light fitting; a chair was overturned on the carpet.

  He just managed to reach the bathroom before being sick.

  8

  AFTERWARDS NEIL RETAINED NO RECOLLECTION of the drive back to Princes Gate, and only a blurred impression of the evening that followed. He remembered lethargy and chill and a headache. He went early to bed, wondering if he were getting a cold.

  In the morning, though his thoughts were clearer, the headache and the weariness—a leaden feeling dragging down mind and body—were still present. He had not bothered to stock up with medicines—he had been in good health so far and there was a chemist’s shop within easy reach. His father had been a great believer in massive doses of Vitamin C for aborting head-colds. He had just about made up his mind to get up and go out to get some when the thought struck him: whatever was wrong was not the common cold, or any other disease harboured by man. The whole brave company—not just the cold, but measles, chicken pox, poliomyelitis, glandular fever and the rest—had found oblivion along with the creature who for millenia had been their host and victim.

  He stayed in bed all that day and most of the next. It had not been an illness at all, he realized later, but shock: arising not only from the sight of the hanging body, the head slumped to one side, but from the shattering of hopes. Along with that went a bitter awareness of the narrowness of the margin by which the hopes had failed. Hours—certainly no more than twenty-four. A watch had been ticking on the dangling wrist when he touched the cold flesh. If he had found the balloon a day sooner—if he had set out sooner from Princes Gate. . . .

  Despair and self-recrimination ran their course and were superseded by another emotion: curiosity. In his mind there was the image of death, a horror that could still shock for all that he had seen since the Plague came. He had a desperate need for something more than that. This had been a boy like himself, who had survived as he had, and tried to go on living in the deserted world. He felt he must know more about him, be able to think of him as something other than a dangling corpse.

  The notion of going back there was unthinkable, but in the moment of revulsion at the thought he remembered something. Before he fled the house he had picked up the diary. It must still be in the pocket of his anorak.

  • • •

  Neil read it that evening, by candlelight.

  The style of writing was clear, simple and neat like the sketches, and the thoughts expressed had a similar clarity. He had been in the middle of reading Daniel Defoe’s “Journal of the Plague Years” when the new Plague struck; and that had decided him to keep a journal.

  He had been at a boarding school in the west country which had been one of the earliest to close down and send its pupils home. And home, Neil realized with surprise, had been the place where he had found him. His father had been something to do with shipping, and apart from his parents he had an elder brother at University and a sister who was a photographic model.

  It appeared to have been a warm, close family. When disaster struck, they stayed together. They too had rejected the mass burials. His mother had died first, and they had buried her in the garden. The others had gone in their turn: he had buried his brother last. It was set down calmly, with no show of emotion.

  Yet the sense of gradual but inexorable destruction was chilling. Neil compared it with his own case—the sharp numbing impact of total disaster. He saw how much less bearable the other might be; and for the first time realized how what had happened that rainy Saturday afternoon had been a shield against subsequent events. He had thought he understood the horror of it all, but it had not really been so. Certain things had made an impact—his grandparents’ death and the death of Tommy and Susie in particular—but even there the pain had been blunted for him. They had been reefs looming out of a mist, with the mist rapidly closing again to obliterate them.

  For Peter Cranbell on the other hand—the name was written inside the cover of the journal—there had been a steady progression into grief and misery. A page was left blank after the entry that recorded his brother’s death. The next entry stood on a page by itself:

  “I want to die, but can’t.”

  After that the recording of events was resumed, carefully written and dated. He had fled from the stench of death to live in a tent on the Heath; but returned before the rat explosion. He had barricaded himself in for a couple of weeks when that was at its height and wrote of watching them from his window, listening to their high-pitched squeaking—eventually witnessing the carnage when they turned on one another. He had stayed inside for some time after, only venturing out again when a shortage of food forced him to do so.

  Peter Cranbell, obviously, had put a lot of thought and effort into coping with the situation following the Plague. He had been more practical and methodical than Neil; more imaginative, too. That was illustrated by his scheme for sending the balloons out. He had picked a windy day, the wind from the north-west quarter, and launched them from the top floor of the house, watching them bob away and vanish over the massed roofs of London.

  The entry was dated August 29th. Neil would not have known how long ago that had been—he himself had made no attempt to keep track of dates—but for the remainder of the journal. Day followed day with brief but precise accounts of his activities. Having written of the launching of the balloons, there was no further reference to them; until the last item but one. It read:

  “Two months exactly since I sent off the balloons. There is no point in thinking anyone will come now. I suppose I could try again with another batch, but I can’t summon up the enthusiasm.” br />
  In the final entry he referred, for the first time, to his sketching:

  “I remember the answer some writer gave to the question: would a true writer still go on writing, marooned on a desert island? He said probably yes, but only provided he had a guarantee the ink wouldn’t fade and the hope, however slim, that some day a ship would come, bringing people who could read.

  “He meant you can do without an audience but not without the hope of an audience, some time, somehow. I took my sketch pad with me as usual when I went for a walk this morning, but brought it back unopened. There’s no point in going on drawing things.

  “There’s no point in going on.”

  Neil closed the book, and sat looking at it. Peter Cranbell had organized his new life efficiently—much more efficiently than Neil had done. The candle flames flickered in a draught from a crack in the window he had been meaning to see to for more than a week. Peter Cranbell would have fixed it. Peter Cranbell, for that matter, had not made do with candles: he had found lamps, and oil to burn in them.

  Then, with the same calm efficiency, he had decided the life he had organized was not worth continuing; and had practically set about organizing his death.

  Neil looked up with a shudder at the light fitting above his head. The rope carefully noosed round the neck, the chair kicked away . . . he could never nerve himself for that. But there were other, easier methods. A chemist’s shop—finding the pills and swallowing them, and just going to sleep. He felt very tired and the idea of sleep was attractive—sleep going on and on, with no new days of loneliness to face. He stumbled towards his bed, pulling off his clothes and dropping them as he went.

  He slept heavily and woke in the morning with a sense of depression that at first had no particular focus. It was a moment or two before he remembered Peter Cranbell, and the resolve he had reached, or thought he reached. In the grey light he saw his clothes scattered on the floor, where he had let them fall. Peter Cranbell, he thought, would have hung them up tidily, however tired he was.