Greybeard

“I’m only telling you what he said. I’m not responsible for him. I just reckon old Boss Mole ought to know the Scotsmen are coming, that’s all.” Sam’s voice relapsed into the irritable whine they all used at times. Betty turned back to her stove. She said, “Everyone who comes here brings rumours. If it isn’t the Scots, it’s herds of savage animals. Rumours, rumours… It’s as bad as the last war, when they kept telling us there was going to be an invasion. I reckoned at the time they only done it to scare us, but I was scared just the same.”

Sam cut off her muttering. “Rumours or not, I’m telling you what the man said. I thought I ought to come up here and report it. Did I do right or didn’t I?”

“Where had this fellow come from?” Greybeard asked.

“He hadn’t come from anywhere. He was going to Faringdon.” He smiled his sly doggy smile at his joke, and picked up a reflected smile from Towin. “Did he say where he had been?” Greybeard asked patiently. “He said he had been coming from up river. Said there was a lot of stoats heading this way.”

“Eh, that’s another rumour we’ve heard before,” Betty said to herself, nodding her head. “You keep your trap shut, you old cow,” Sam said, without rancour. Greybeard took hold of his rifle by the barrel and moved into the middle of the room until he stood looking down at Sam. “Is that all you have to report, Sam?”

”Scotsmen, stoats — what more do you want from one patrol? I didn’t see any elephants, if you were wondering.” He cracked his grin again, looking again for Towin Thomas’s approval.

“You aren’t bright enough to know an elephant if you saw it, Sam, you old fleapit,” Towin said. Ignoring this exchange, Greybeard said, “Okay, Sam, back you go on patrol. There’s another twenty minutes before you are relieved.”

“What, go back out there just for another lousy twenty minutes? Not on your flaming nelly, Greybeard! I’ve had it for this afternoon and I’m sitting right here on this stool. Let it ride for twenty minutes. Nobody’s going to run away with Sparcot, whatever Jim Mole may think.”

“You know the dangers as well as I do.”

“You know you’ll never get any sense out of me, not while I’ve got this bad back. These blinking guard duties come round too often for my liking.” Betty and Towin kept silent. The latter cast a glance at his broken wrist watch. Both he and Betty, like everyone else in the village, had had the necessity for continuous guard drummed into them often enough, but they kept their eyes tracing the seamed lines on the board floor, knowing the effort involved in thrusting old legs an extra time up and down stairs and an extra time round the perimeter.

The advantage lay with Sam, as he sensed. Facing Greybeard more boldly, he said, “Why don’t you take over for twenty minutes if you’re so keen on defending the dump? You’re a young man — it’ll do you good to have a stretch.”

Greybeard tucked the leather sling of the rifle over his left shoulder and turned to Towin, who stopped gnawing the top of his cudgel to look up.

“Strike the alarm gong if you want me in a hurry, and not otherwise. Remind old Betty it’s not a dinner gong.”

The woman cackled as he moved towards the door, buttoning his baggy jacket. “Your grub’s just on ready, Algy. Why not stay and eat it?” she asked. Greybeard slammed the door without answering. They listened to his heavy tread descending the stairs. “You don’t reckon he took offence, do you? He wouldn’t report me to old Mole, would he?” Sam asked anxiously. The others mumbled neutrally and hugged their lean ribs; they did not want to be involved in any trouble.

Greybeard walked slowly along the middle of the street, avoiding the puddles still left from a rainstorm two days ago. Most of Sparcot’s drains and gutters were blocked; but the reluctance of the water to run away was due mainly to the marshiness of the land. Somewhere upstream, debris was blocking the river, causing it to overflow its banks. He must speak to Mole; they must get up an expedition to look into the trouble. But Mole was growing increasingly cantankerous, and his policy of isolationism would be against any move out of the village.

He chose to walk by the river, to continue round the perimeter of the stockade afterwards. He brushed through an encroaching elder’s stark spikes, smelling as he did so a melancholy-sweet smell of the river and the things that mouldered by it.

Several of the houses that backed on to the river had been devoured by fire before he and his fellows came to live here. Vegetation grew sturdily inside and outside their shells. On a back gate lying crookedly in long grass, faded lettering proclaimed the name of the nearest shell: Thameside.