Empty World (7 page)

“Say, I knew there was something else I had to show you!”

He brought it from a shelf: an old book, calf-bound, with silver corners and a silver clasp.

“Look at this!”

Neil was getting bored with that cry of triumph. Clive undid the clasp and opened up the book. The pages were of yellowed parchment, lettered and coloured by hand. The text was in Latin, the script not easy to make out, but Neil realized it was religious, perhaps a bible.

“I don't go for books much,” Clive said, “but this one's got some great pictures.”

He turned the pages and displayed a picture of an odd-looking ship, with even odder animals staring in pairs across the high gunnels: giraffes, elephants, lions, a couple of woolly sheep. Sea and sky
were different blues, both sharp and bright, and the sun was a disk of real gold leaf.

“Noah's Ark,” Clive said. “I like that. I really do.”

• • •

That evening, while they ate together, the talk was wild again. He had not only gone to dinner with the Queen, but stayed with her as a house-guest. It wasn't easy to work out if this had been at Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle or Balmoral—perhaps all three. He spoke of the Royal Family as though they were old friends.

“I've been thinking about the Crown Jewels,” he said. “Maybe I ought to go to the Tower and get them. For safe keeping. Her Majesty would have wanted me to do that.”

At least the food was good. With the pheasant he served potatoes, asparagus and peas, and afterwards produced a tin containing a rich fruit cake. They drank the wine out of silver goblets. It had a slightly sour taste which Neil did not care much for, and he refused a refill, but Clive drank a good deal. One of the best wines from his father's cellar, he proclaimed, ignoring the fragment of label which had carried the wine merchant's price tag. They finished off with
coffee—the Blue Mountain this time—and Clive told a rambling tale about his father taking the family to Switzerland: they had occupied the entire top floor of the biggest hotel, and he and his father had climbed the Matterhorn.

It was dusk and Clive got up to switch on the lights. He had become so amiable that Neil was anticipating being asked to stay on, and trying to find a good reason for refusing. He did not fancy spending the night here. But Clive said:

“We'd better look you out a place to sleep. I'll lend a hand.”

Relieved, Neil said: “That's all right. I'll find somewhere.”

Clive insisted, though, on accompanying him. They found a bedroom in a large Victorian house behind the row of shops. A comfortable bed, Clive pointed out, bouncing on it, and with a bathroom next door.

“But you can come over to the caravan and shower in the morning,” he added. “And breakfast with me. I've got some American bacon and I can make an omelette from powdered egg. Mushroom omelette—you like that?”

It was a relief to see him depart; Neil decided that in the morning he would definitely go his own way. He hung up his anorak, pausing to listen to a cry he recognized as that of a fox. There was no distinction between town and country now that men had gone. He was full from the meal, and tired. It did not take him long to drop off.

• • •

He awoke in the night with the impression of having heard a movement close by. He remembered he was no longer alone in the world, and called out: “Clive?” There was no answer, but his nerves remained taut. Mad, he had thought, but harmless—but could he be certain of that?

There was moonlight outside; sufficient for him to be sure there was no-one in the room. The door, though, was opened wider than it had been. A gust of wind, perhaps, but the night was still. He got out of bed, closed the door, and tugged a chest-of-drawers across to block it. As he did so he heard a sound again, outside and going away. An animal, he guessed.

He went back to bed and after a time slept soundly: it was bright day when he awoke again. He did not bother washing—the thought of the shower
was tempting even if Clive's company was not—but threw on his clothes and left the house.

It was only about fifty yards to the main street, and he could see the Jaguar before he got there. The sleek shape hugged the road. It looked lower somehow. He came to the road junction and stared in disbelief. There was a reason for it looking lower: the tyres were flat.

Neil walked, frowning, towards the car. The tyres had been slashed savagely. He looked inside. The upholstery had been slashed as well, and the leather hung in strips.

It made no sense. Clive? It could scarcely be anyone else. He began to get angry. Mad or not, this was something to answer for. He found his fists clenching as he walked round the bend in the road to where the caravan was parked. The pedestrian crossing was there; but the two vehicles which had been immediately beyond it were gone.

The sounds in the night. . . . He was certain now that it had been Clive, but could not think why. Presumably he had been carrying a knife, since he had slashed the tyres and upholstery. Had he been planning to stick it into him, too? Neil shook his
head, pushing his hands deep into his anorak pockets. He still could not envisage him as a murderer.

Gradually, as he brooded on it, he became aware of something—or aware, rather, of something missing. His right hand should be feeling the small round hardness of his mother's ring, but there was nothing there. It had been in the pocket when he hung up the anorak the night before. He had touched it before he went to bed, as he always did.

Neil understood at last. It explained the determination to have him stay, and the solicitude in helping him find a place for the night. A place Clive knew, and into which he could creep while Neil slept. He must have been slipping out again when Neil called, but not before he had got what he came for.

But why? What did he want with an ordinary ring when he had a chest stuffed with jewels? But even as he framed the question, Neil realized how pointless it was. You might as well ask why a jackdaw stole.

He was still angry, but he pitied him as well. To be driven by that sick frantic greed, and to live in a world where, with almost infinite possibilities for
indulging it, it could never be satisfied. It was miserable, really.

Neil turned and walked back slowly towards the Jaguar. He stared at the ripped seats. Not so miserable that he wouldn't cheerfully boot him, if he ever got the chance.

7

N
EIL MOVED SEVERAL TIMES DURING
his first week in London, before settling into a big house facing Hyde Park, not far from Wellington Barracks. He learned from papers in a desk that it had been the home of a foreign diplomat. It was very luxurious, with heavy brocade curtains and thick pile carpeting. The furnishings were to match, and he recognized some of the oil paintings on the walls as the work of famous artists.

The luxury was not his main reason for choosing it as a permanency. More important was the park in front, which meant he had a wide landscape rather
than a narrow street to scan hopefully for an approaching figure; and the fact that the Serpentine was one of the nearer features of the landscape. Water ran from the taps still, but he felt happier with a broad expanse of fresh water within sight and reach.

Additionally the house was strategically placed, halfway between Knightsbridge and Kensington High Street, for access to shops; and shops that had served a markedly affluent population. The supplies were just about inexhaustible. And these considerations, he thought, were likely to attract other survivors, if they had not already done so.

His hopes for that varied. Immediately after the encounter with Clive he had felt optimistic. The world was empty no longer: there was a prospect of finding someone around every next corner. Even while he was searching for a replacement for the Jaguar he felt there was a chance of it happening. Now and then he stopped to halloo, and once half-fancied he heard a call in reply. He stopped and listened, and shouted and listened again, but only silence answered him.

Optimism remained as he continued the journey into London, in a blue Cortina. (There wasn't much
in the tank, but he was in an almost continuously built-up area now, with abandoned cars on every side.) Wherever the road offered anything of a vantage point, he stopped the car and scanned the horizon. Once he saw a plume of smoke rising in the distance, and set out to track it down. It involved a long detour, and he lost his way and had to re-locate the smoke from the upper room of a house, but he found it in the end. A whole row of houses had burned down, and the plume rose from a still smouldering section in the middle.

The sort of fire which had sent Rye up like a torch was unlikely here, of course. This was late twentieth, not seventeenth century London, its buildings more widely separated and built not of wood but brick and concrete and steel. Fires were self-limiting. In some places the area of devastation was quite large, but in general the city looked untouched.

And the stillness, the absence of movement, gave him a new understanding of the vastness of the place. As street succeeded empty street, Neil could not believe that he would not find someone soon. He stopped at Bromley to search more thoroughly
and spent the night there. He made prolonged searches again in Clapham and Brixton. He drove for long periods with his thumb on the horn button, halting now and then with it still blaring to give anyone who heard it a chance to reach him.

Despondency, when it finally set in, was deeper than before. He reminded himself that nothing Clive had told him could be relied on. If the Earl of Blenheim had been a figment of imagination, might not the survivors he had spoken of be equally so? He knew one other person had lived through the Plague, but that did not mean two had. He and mad Clive might well be the total remaining population of Britain.

He came across indications, too, which suggested that, as far as the recent past was concerned, he had been quite wrong in his view of London as likely to attract people. It was not the fires, though they might well have driven people away; there were signs that the rat menace here had been appalling. Plenty were still about, by day as well as night, and at the height of their population expansion they must have become a brown tide of devastation. Everywhere heaps of bones lay bleaching in the streets. There were skeletons looking like those of cats or dogs,
and once what had probably been a horse. Twice he found human skeletons; there was no way of telling whether they had succumbed to the Plague, or rats had pulled them down.

By the time he got to Princes Gate he had given up the idea of actively looking for others, and decided to stay put. He felt something like he had done as a child in Hampton Court maze, except that this maze was a million times more vast. He and the others, if there were any others, could be boxing and coxing in a hopelessly self-defeating fashion: the very morning he was away searching might be the morning someone came through here. He remembered a saying of his grandfather: that if you took up a position at Piccadilly Circus, sooner or later you would meet everyone you knew. He had thought it absurd, but saw the force of the argument now.

He did make one expedition, though. Increasingly, as the days went by, his thoughts of Clive became less hostile. Mad or not, he was a human being. Even fantasies and kleptomania might be preferable to being alone. He thought of his remark about the Crown Jewels, and set off for the Tower of London.

The thing that amazed him was that the ravens
were still there, strutting on the green beside the White Tower. But no Beefeaters, no milling crowds of tourists, no guides lecturing on the dramas of the past. These buildings which had known the tread of feet for over a thousand years did so no more. The only traces of humanity were the initials carved on the walls, and the rows of empty armour in the museum.

The heavy door leading to the Wakefield Tower was closed, and would not yield when he tried to open it. Locked, he supposed, before the end came—the last of the Beefeaters performing a final duty. It had been a fruitless errand. There was no way of knowing whether or not Clive had come here. And what difference would it have made, if he had? He would have taken his baubles and gone his way.

Neil went up on the battlements and looked across the river. Tower Bridge was lowered, and there was no tall ship demanding passage. The tide lapped aimlessly against the pillars. Further up in the Pool he could see the masts of ships, but as deserted and decaying as the silent roofs all round. He thought of the old days, and the constant busy traffic: barges, tugs, river boats, police launches. A
few seagulls soared and swooped, with hoarse mewing cries. Not many, though. There was no never-­failing supply of human refuse to support the vast army of scavengers of yore.

Gazing at the river, the focus of trade since before the Romans came, Neil had the shattering realization that what had happened had happened not just here but all over the world. He had been thinking of himself as lost and alone in the vastness of England; but it was not just one small island, it really was the whole planet. The thought was unbearable: he turned and quickly went away.

• • •

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: