A bald-headed shred of manhood with a nose as thin as a needle skipped out of the lodge at the gate and asked them, as they were strangers, what they wanted. They had a deal of difficulty making him understand, but eventually he led them to a portly fossil of a man with three chins and a high complexion who said they could rent, for a modest fee, two small basement rooms in Killcanon. They entered their names in a register and showed the colour of their money.
Killcanon turned out to be a small square within Christ Church, and their rooms a larger room subdivided. But the needle-nosed messenger told them they might burn firewood in their grates and offered them fuel cheap. Mainly from weariness, they accepted the offer. The messenger lit the fires for them while Jeff Pitt walked back to collect Charley and the fox and make arrangements for the boat.
Once the fire was burning cheerfully, the messenger showed signs of lingering, squatting by the flame and rubbing his nose, trying to listen to what Martha and Greybeard said to each other. Greybeard stirred him with a toe.
“Before you go out, Chubby, tell me if this college is still used for learning as it used to be.”
“Why, there’s nobody to learn any more,” the man said. It was plain he intended his verb to be transitive, whatever a legion of vanished grammar books might have said. “But the Students own the place, and they seem to learn each other a bit still. You’ll see them going about with books in their pockets, if you watch out. Students here is what we mean by what lesser colleges calls Fellows. For a tip, I’d introduce you to one of them.”
“We’ll see. There may be time for that tomorrow.”
“Don’t leave it too long, sir. There’s a local legend that Oxford is sinking into the river, and when it’s gone under, a whole lot of little naked people what now live under the water will come swimming up like eels and live here instead.”
Greybeard contemplated the ruin of a man. “I see. And do you give this tale much credence?”
“You what you say, sir?”
“Do you believe this tale?”
The old man laughed, casting a shuffling side glance at Martha. “I ain’t saying I believe it and I ain’t saying I don’t believe it, but I know what I’ve heard, and they do say that for every woman as dies, one more of these little naked people is born under water. And this I do know because I saw it with my own eyes last Michaelmas — no, the Michaelmas before last, because I was behind with my rent this Michaelmas — there was an old woman of ninety-nine died down at Grandpont, and very next day a little two-headed creature all naked floated up at the bridge.”
“Which was it you saw?” Martha asked. “The old lady dying or the two-headed thing?”
“Well, I’m often down that way,” the messenger said confusedly. “It was the funeral and the bridge I mainly saw, but many men told me about all the rest and I have no cause to doubt ’em. It’s common talk.”
When he had gone, Martha said, “It’s strange how everyone believes in something different.”
“They’re all a bit mad.”
“No, I don’t think they’re mad — except that other people’s beliefs always seem mad, just as their passions do. In the old days, before the Accident, people were more inclined to keep their beliefs to themselves, or else confide only in doctors and psychiatrists. Or else the belief was widespread, and lost its air of absurdity. Think of all the people who believed in astrology, long after it was proved to be a pack of nonsense.”
“Illogical, and therefore a mild form of madness,” Greybeard said.
“No, I don’t think so. A form of consolation, rather. This old fellow with a nose like a knitting-needle nurses a crazy dream about little naked things taking over Oxford; it in some way consoles him for the dearth of babies. Charley’s religion is the same sort of consolation. Your recent drinking companion, Bunny Jingadangelow, had retreated into a world of pretence.”
She sank wearily down on to the bed of blankets and stretched. Slowly she removed her battered shoes, massaged her feet, and then stretched full length with her hands under her head. She regarded Greybeard, whose bald pate glowed as he crouched by the fire.
“What are you thinking, my venerable love?” she asked.
“I was wondering if the world might not slip — if it hasn’t already — into a sort of insanity, now that everyone left is over fifty. Is a touch of childhood and youth necessary to sanity?”
“I don’t think so. We’re really amazingly adaptable, more than we give ourselves credit for.”
“Yes, but suppose a man lost his memory of everything that happened to him before he was fifty, so that he was utterly cut off from his roots, from all his early achievements — wouldn’t you classify him as insane?”
“It’s only an analogy.”
He turned to her and grinned. “You’re a bugger for arguing, Martha Timberlane.”
“After all these years we can still tolerate each other’s fat-headed opinions. It’s a miracle!”
He went over to her, sitting on the bed beside her and stroking her thigh.
“Perhaps that’s our bit of madness or consolation or whatever — each other. Martha, have you ever thought—” he paused, and then went on, screwing his face into a frown of concentration. “Have you ever thought that that ghastly catastrophe fifty years ago was, well, was lucky for us? I know it sounds blasphemous; but mightn’t it be that we’ve led more interesting lives than the perhaps rather pointless existence we would otherwise have been brought up to accept as life? We can see now that the values of the twentieth century were invalid; otherwise they wouldn’t have wrecked the world. Don’t you think that the Accident has made us more appreciative of the vital things, like life itself, and like each other?”
“No,” Martha said steadily. “No, I don’t. We would have had children and grandchildren by now, but for the Accident, and nothing can ever make up for that.”
Next morning, they were roused by the sound of animals, the crowing of cocks, the pad of reindeer hooves, even the bray of a donkey. Leaving Martha in the warm bed, Greybeard rose and dressed. It was cold. Draughts flapped the rug on the floor, and had spread the ashes of the fire far and wide during the night.
Outside, it was barely daylight and the puddingy Midland sky rendered the quad in cold tones. But there were torches burning, and people on the move, and their voices sounding — cheerful sounds, even where their owners were toothless and bent double with years. The main gates had been opened, and many of the animals were going forth, some pulling carts. Greybeard saw not only a donkey but a couple of horses that looked like the descendants of hunters, both fine young beasts and pulling carts. They were the first he had seen or heard of in over a quarter century. One sector of the country was now so effectively insulated from another that widely different conditions prevailed.
The people were on the whole well-clad, many of them wearing fur coats. Up on the battlements, a pair of sentries clouted their ribs for warmth and looked down at the bustle below.
Going to the lodge, where candles burned, Greybeard found the treble-chinned man off duty. His place was taken by a plump fellow of Greybeard’s age who proved to be a son of the treble chins; he was as amiable as his father was fossilized, and when Greybeard asked if it would be possible to get a job for the winter months, he became talkative.
They sat over a small fire, huddled against the chill blowing in through the big gate from the street. Speaking against the rumble and clatter of the traffic passing his cabin, the plump fellow chatted of Oxford.
For some years, the city had possessed no central governing body. The colleges had divided it up and ruled it indifferently. Such crime as there was was treated harshly; but there had been no shooting at Carfax for over a twelve-month.