Mandrake (8 page)

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 world. 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.’

The constable reached for a notepad, and began to scrawl. ‘Now, if you’ll give me the number of that cab… and your name and address, please.’ He wrote with laborious care, but looked up sharply when he heard where Queston lived. ‘You’re not a Londoner, then, sir. Could I see your pass?’

‘Pass? ’ Queston blinked at him. ‘O yes.’ He reached for the slip of paper the ticket inspector had given him at Waterloo, remembering wryly how startled he had been at the suggestion that he might need it for the police.

The policeman looked at it, licked it, held it up to the light, and wrote down a number. ‘I think that’ll do, thank you.’ He managed obscurely to give the impression that Queston, as an outsider, was somehow responsible for the robbery.

‘We’ll have your local police contact you if there’s any news of your—er—book, though frankly I don’t think there’s much hope. The man would just have hopped into the cab and hopped out again a few streets away.’

Queston said sharply: ‘It’s important.’ But he turned, then, and went out, with the beginning of a sense of defeat. Behind the constable’s head, on the bare plaster wall, he had seen a notice-board covered with posters and notices about registration of aliens, checking of passes, movements within the London Plan. They had all been headed ‘Ministry of Planning’. There were beginning to be too many coincidences in the way he was constantly reminded of England’s newest bureaucratic machine.

The roads were dark as he drove back from Micheldever. The Lagonda’s lamps thrust a yellow path before him, and briefly lit the rushing trees on either side. There had been no one on the station, not even the old man, and he passed no one on the way.

At the cottage, colourless and unfamiliar in the glare as he swung the car off the road, he left the headlamps blazing in through the window. He stumbled into the room through white light and black shadow; found the lamp, and lit it. The dog was not there. Her food and water bowls had been licked clean.

He went out again to turn off the car lights, then stood blinking and helpless in the sudden dark. Gradually he grew aware of the shape of the trees, looming around and above. He found himself wishing the dog would crash out of the bushes as she always did, leaping and barking in welcome and relief.

He pulled the soundless whistle from his pocket, and blew it, but she did not come. He shouted: ‘Dog! ’ He wondered why he had never given her a name.

He shouted again. Round him the sounds of the night cracked and whispered and squeaked; the stillness and silence of the long heat were gone. The darkness was more alive, suddenly, with insistent, unidentified noise than he had ever known in an English night, and the air was cold.

He drove to the village the next day, to buy food. The shopkeepers seemed silent and preoccupied. Queston felt restless. The cottage had seemed so secure a refuge when he was away, but there was no welcome in it, or harbour. It was only a place like any other: four walls, and a roof. It had been there before, it would be there when he had gone; he was a tenant, it had nothing to do with him. And it was empty; the dog had not come back.

And the dog at least was his. He missed her. She was the only thing that had made any demands upon him. He went out into the fields to look for her, and found that he was carrying his shot-gun. He frowned, then shrugged his shoulders; perhaps he had thought without realizing it that he might see a rabbit at the same time. Why else go out into a peaceful countryside with a gun?