Mandrake Page 6

  He lay on his back on the bed, looking out. Downstairs he could hear the dog whimpering restlessly in her sleep. There was no sound outside. No sound at all. For a long time now the noises of the night had been still. He could not get used to that silence. No scrape of crickets, no bats squeaking, or hooting owls, no sudden chatter of a night-jar. Even the cottage had ceased to mutter and creak. It was as if the whole countryside waited, holding its breath. Waited for what?

  Queston turned on his side. A cold runnel of sweat trickled down his bare chest. He felt oppressed, uneasy, and troubled at his uneasiness. For two years he had felt no sensation unconnected with the determined pattern of his days: to work, eat, sleep. Perhaps the breaking of the pattern, with the end of the book, had beaten down the barricades, and the arrival of the stranger only linked him again to the reactions he should have felt before. Perhaps this overwhelming sense of doom was natural to other men when they were alone.

  He lay listening to the silence, and did not sleep.

  The important thing now was for the book to be published. Fantasy or not, it might strike home. He had found it developing strangely as he wrote; the long analysis of man’s two-way relationship with place, interwoven with a great unexpected diatribe against those who manipulated it for their own ends (he thought of the indignation Thorp-Gudgeon would splutter at him, and grinned). But both those were straightforward enough. It was when he had come to write of the deeper implications of it all—of the fate of the cave people, and all others who surrendered, without knowing it, to a force they had unleashed and could not now control—that he began to frighten even himself. He was not sure even now whether he had produced fantasy or prophecy; whether he would present the book as a fictional exercise or a solemn warning backed by all the force of his name and reputation. The more he thought about his curious visitor, the more he leaned towards the second of these. It might at least show Mr Mandrake what he was playing with. Unless he would simply laugh.

  He had written to his publishers, but now he decided to go to London without waiting for their reply. He could deliver the manuscript, at any rate.

  He stripped the car of its plastic covering, and inspected the engine. Better play safe; it hadn’t seen much use, and no one had looked at it for a long time. He worked on it all the morning, checking the battery and cleaning the single sparking plug with infinite care. At midday, admiring the purring turbine, he decided it was too late to set out.

  The next morning, very early, he topped up the tank with petrol from the cans he had stacked in the cellar when he first came—there was no garage in the village, and he had been determined never to go farther away than that. Then he looked critically at the Lagonda again, and decided it needed polishing. He had turned to fetch a clean rag from the cottage when he realized with a peculiar shock what he was doing. The engine could have been checked within half an hour. The car could be washed down far more easily at a garage. All these things were excuses.

  He was making excuses for delaying the journey to London. Something in his mind was struggling to produce reasons why he should stay at home. Just one more hour, just one more day.

  The early mist was fading, and the sun growing warm. Queston looked round at the cottage, and the soft light on the reddening trees. A humming silence lay over it all; suddenly he was stirred by the beauty of the place that had housed him for two years. You never liked London, said the thing in his mind, gently insistent: a pity to go on a day like this, a pity to leave home…

  It was like pushing against gravity. Queston shook his head violently; went to fill the dog’s water-bowl and leave her a day’s meal; threw the brown-paper parcel of his manuscript on the back seat of the car, and drove away.

  On the way, brooding over his reactions, he decided to go by train; there could be no wandering off the route then, or freak decisions to turn back for home. He made for Micheldever, a small station on the London line, and left the Lagonda in the yard. The station was deserted, and he had to shout before an ancient, creaking little man, surly and muttering, emerged from some hidden depths; even then, before he could buy a ticket, the old man had to shuffle away to fetch the booking-office key. When the ticket was handed over at last, suspicion trickling out with it through the grimy window, it cost at least three times as much as Queston remembered for journeys of that length two years before.

  A train was due in half an hour. ‘You’re in luck,’ the old man said obscurely, and vanished, coughing with a childish, painful noise.

  Queston walked slowly up and down the long platform, listening to his own steps. A nightingale was bubbling somewhere in the green, dark wall of fir-trees that grew close on the other side of the track; he could smell the resinous warmth of the air. It was like a ghost station, where nothing so vibrantly mechanical as a train would ever come. Even the old familiar holiday posters were missing from the walls; the poster-frames were still there, but gaping empty. Only in the waiting-room, with its bare wooden benches forlorn round the walls, did he find one poster glaring down at him. It carried no picture; no purple Highland loch or pneumatic beauty queen: but three lines of bold black type on a white ground.

  IS YOUR JOURNEY

  REALLY

  NECESSARY?

  Queston stared. The words woke a vague echo in his mind; there had been such posters when he was a child, he thought, shackling the worried country during the Second World War. Thirty-five years ago.

  But this poster was quite clearly brand new.

  Twenty minutes late, the train came in: a diesel car with one coach. There were only three other passengers beside himself, and every station platform where they stopped was as bare as Micheldever had been.

  Even the platforms at Waterloo were half empty. At the barrier, a uniformed inspector peered closely at his ticket.

  ‘You’ll be coming back today, sir?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Queston said. ‘It’s a day return ticket, isn’t it?’

  ‘Just checking,’ the man said. He held out a slip of green paper. ‘Here’s your pass.’

  ‘Pass? ’ Queston looked down at the slip. It was printed, in neat black type: London Regional Council: admit bearer for twenty-four hours: and overstamped with the date. He said, incautiously: ‘What’s this for?’

  ‘Not been here for some time, have you? ’ The man glanced up at him with a faint patronizing grin; the tolerance of the cockney for the provincial. ‘You hang on to that, mate, and give it up when you get on your train tonight. You’ll need it if you happen to get stopped by a bobby for anything, too.’

  ‘Good God,’ said Queston; but a woman behind him was impatiently clicking her tongue, and he moved on out of the way. As he passed, he caught sight of the letters ‘ m.o.p.’ on the ticket inspector’s cap.

  He crossed the deserted station. Although it was midday, the snack bars and restaurants were closed. They looked as though they had been closed for a long time. There were no taxis in the station approach. Queston set out to walk.

  At once he was startled by the altered horizons of London. From the middle of Waterloo Bridge, with the wind catching at his hair, he looked up and down the Thames at a great bristling fringe of the blocks of flats whose beginnings he had seen two years before. They were everywhere, in clusters and groups. He found it difficult to believe that in England they could have been built so quickly. As he watched, one of the helicopters whirring overhead on the river route turned suddenly over the south bank and rose to land on the roof of one of the tallest blocks.

  But he did not really feel the change until he came to the other side of the bridge; and then London hit him with the vicious force of a hard, tight fist. He told himself afterwards that it was the unaccustomed noise: the traffic and the rushing crowds; that what he took for hostility was only the contrast of a busy city with his long lone seclusion. But no reason that he invented could explain the peculiar disquiet that flooded over him: the sense of being small and buffeted like a child plunged into an uninterested adult w
orld. Unmistakably, he felt unwanted.

  He imagined strange sideways glances on the faces of people he passed. He wondered if he bore some kind of distinguishing mark. ‘I am not a Londoner.’ For the first time in his life he thought: I have been away from cities too long.

  He caught the monorail to Holborn, and walked to the offices of the University Press in Southampton Row. They were closed. No sign or message hung outside the locked doors; the place was dead, and silent. Only the streets were alive. People walked hurriedly: he had forgotten London’s continual hurry. He stood unobtrusively in the porch at the top of the steps, beside the locked door, and looked down at the passing faces. They all seemed to wear an abstracted, listening expression, as if dazed by some mild drug.

  No one paused, except to buy an evening paper from an old woman on the corner; there was no motionless figure on the horizon, except the old woman—and one man, on the other side of the street, gazing earnestly into the window of another publishing house whose name Queston remembered dimly for its textbooks.

  With the aimless attentiveness of those who wait, Queston stood watching the man’s back: a dark head with two curious round bald spots at its centre; a raincoat hanging loose from the shoulders; trousers whose ends drooped too low over the backs of the shoes. What was the man gazing at so intently? He looked the kind more likely to be standing furtively over a bookstall in the Tottenham Court Road, not examining dull and highly respectable educational works. A down-at-heel academic, perhaps, taking a breather from the British Museum Reading Room.

  When the man had stood immobile for ten full minutes, Queston’s curiosity became intolerable; it was as if he were taking refuge in it from the bewilderment of the new London. He had to see what was in that window. Rather than cross the street directly towards the man, he came down the silent steps of the University Press and walked a few yards up on his own side of the road; then turned to cross. But as he turned, he saw that the man had disappeared. Apparently the spell had broken. He walked on towards the intriguing window; looked in, and then stopped short. Three books were displayed there, propped upright, facing forward, with only their covers visible. One was titled Higher Calculus, another Geometry for Schools, Volume One and the third Geometry for Schools, Volume Two. There was nothing else in the window at all, and even these were not easy to see. The glass was so grimy that Queston had to peer hard at them through an obstinate reflection of the street, and of his own face. How could those three lure a man to ten minutes’ fascinated study? He chuckled at the anti-climax, and turned away. London had always been full of amiable crackpots.

  Opposite him, the University Press was as dead as before. Somewhere a clock struck, and he looked at his watch: half past two. He was hungry, and the thick wad of manuscript clutched beneath his arm seemed heavier than before. No point in waiting any longer. He had promised himself a large and expensive lunch in Soho, but now it was too late. And in any case he knew, watching the grim passing crowds, that he flinched from the idea of walking alone into a staring restaurant, before the remote unwelcome of faces that accused him of belonging elsewhere.

  He bought an Evening News from the woman on the corner, walked down to Theobalds Road and found a coffee bar. He remembered the place; he had come there often for lunch when he was young, working on research in the University Library before going abroad. It had been run by Italians then. He used to sit listening to the Milanese babble over the shrieking espresso machine, imagining himself part of their isolation: aboard a foreign ship on a coastless English sea.

  But there were no Italians now. The name of the place had changed from Capri to the Instant Grill, and both waitresses and menu were very English. Queston ate bacon and eggs with a sense of defeat. All the time at the cottage he ate bacon and eggs.

  He flicked through the paper as he ate. The front page was full of London Regional Council election results, and most of the rest devoted to small local news; it was a more in-grown production than he ever remembered before. Then his eye was caught by an editorial headed ‘Homesight’: an odd combination of reporting and comment which he read with mounting alarm.

  The story described, laconically, a murder trial in North Wales. In a remote slate-quarrying community, after a drunken brawl, a villager had killed a man who was passing through the place on his way to Ireland. The man had stopped only for a meal; neither had seen the other before. At the assize court, the villager gave one terse excuse for the murder he had done: the dead man had been pobol dwad, a stranger, and not plant y lle, a man of the place. And the verdict had been Not Guilty.

  Queston looked again at the editorial comment that followed. ‘The verdict, we are sure, would have been the same had this been a London affair. There can be no evil in the oldest right and instinct of man; his guardianship of his home. Where a man’s roots are, there is his heart, and there his first duty. As the Ministry of Planning spokesman said in evidence: “Guard thine own” is no light cry.’

  The Ministry of Planning? He stared at the words, his mind suddenly full of a loud discordant noise. What was happening in this country? There must be more to the story than they had here, clearly: the stranger must have attacked the villager’s home, or family; done something, at any rate, to balance the business out. But what connexion had Mandrake’s men with a criminal trial? And how could this crazy, obsessive comment get into a reputable newspaper?

  He found himself thinking, with new urgency: the book is vital now. It has to be published, to make people think about what may be happening. There’s no knowing what else the Ministry can stop, but they can’t stop that yet. Everyone can’t have gone mad. There must still be men objective enough to see the dangers of this fantastic deliberate policy of tying people to place, even if they don’t yet know the dreadful force to which they are being made so vulnerable.

  And they would have a chance to know that, too, if they could read his book.

  He sat for a long time gazing into space, counting the lines in the pattern of the wallpaper and trying not to think; until the waitress said in his ear: ‘Can I get you anything else, duck?’

  Queston jumped. ‘What? O—no thanks.’ He paid his bill and went out, still preoccupied. Ten paces away he felt an uneasiness in his hands, a reminder that they had not been empty before; and he realized that he had left the bulky brown-paper package that was his manuscript in the coffee bar. He turned back at once; but at the door he staggered as someone coming out cannoned into him. The man pushed him aside roughly, without pause or apology; his coat whipped at Queston’s legs as he thrust past.

  Queston said protestingly: ‘Hey—’ Then his voice changed, as he saw in the same moment two things: the man, running now, wore a grubby flapping raincoat and had two bright strange bald patches on the top of his head. And under his arm he was carrying a heavy brown-paper package.

  ‘Stop thief!’ Queston yelled; and before he knew what he was doing he was running in pursuit, dodging through startled pedestrians, trying to keep sight of the weaving rain-coated back. Faces turned to him in alarm or disapproval or vacant wonder, but none moved except a fat young man who swung round from a shop window and at once joined the chase, adding his ‘Stop thief! ’ to Queston’s in a shrill bark.

  The man in the raincoat, twenty yards ahead, darted suddenly across the road, leaving a bus screeching unsteadily to a halt and the driver heaving white-faced at his wheel. Through a gap in the traffic they saw the flapping figure grasp at the door of a taxi, and jump inside. The taxi swung out and away, and Queston slowed to a gasping walk.

  The young man puffed up at his side. ‘I say, bad luck.’ His round, pink face was glinting with sweat and excitement; he tore off a pair of heavy black spectacles and began to polish them. ‘Not another cab in sight, either. I got the number, though—did you?’

  Queston looked at him with respect. There was something to be said after all for the generation reared on television thrillers. ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘One-two-seven-six-nine.’


  ‘Thanks a lot.’ He fumbled for a pencil.

  ‘Pleasure,’ said the young man cheerfully. ‘Had my first bit of exercise for weeks. There’s a police station up on the corner of Gray’s Inn Road, you know, if you want to report the fellow. What did he get—your wallet?’

  ‘No,’ Queston said bitterly. ‘The halfwit’s gone off with a book manuscript of mine. I think he expects it to be all about geometry.’ But even as he spoke he knew that it had not been textbooks that the man in the raincoat had been watching in the publisher’s window.

  ‘O.’ The young man’s interest became merely polite. No glamour attached to a stolen book. ‘Got another copy?’

  ‘Yes, I have one at home. But all the same—’

  ‘Ah well then, not so bad.’ Brimming with Boy Scout zeal, he smiled benevolently at Queston and departed.

  ‘Thank you,’ Queston called after him. Then he stood still on the pavement and swore, once, aloud, causing two tight-skirted young women to turn and giggle. ‘Naughty naughty,’ said one.

  At the coffee bar, when he went back, the waitress was tearful with apology. The man in the raincoat had jumped up as Queston went out, and called that the gentleman had left a parcel behind. ‘He said he’d catch you, and he went rushing out with it, sir. It’s an old trick, but no one had a chance to stop him. I’m terribly sorry…’

  He found the police station, beside the green oasis of Gray’s Inn, and told his story to a stolid young constable. The smooth, earnest face did not flicker. ‘You say this man followed you from Southampton Row, sir?’

  ‘He must have done. Can’t think why.’