Greybeard

“Not at all, not at all, though I trust you are not bored with my company already. I hoped some talk of this and that might precede any business we might do together. I thought I had recognized a kindred spirit in you.”

Greybeard said, “What made you think that?”

“Mainly the intuitive feeling with which I am richly endowed. You are uncommitted. You don’t suffer as you should in this blighted time; though life is miserable, you enjoy it. Is this not so?”

“How do you know this? Yes, yes, you are correct, but we have only just met -”

“The answer to that is never entirely pleasing to the ego. It is that although all men are each unique, all men are also each much the same. You have an ambivalence in your nature; many men have an ambivalence. I only have to talk with them for a minute to diagnose it. Am I making sense?”

“How do you diagnose my ambivalence?”

“I am not a mind reader, but let me cast about.” He expanded his cheeks, raised his eyebrows, gazed into his glass, and made a very judicious face indeed. “We need our disasters. You and I have weathered, somehow, the collapse of a civilization. We are survivors after shipwreck. But for us two, we feel something deeper than survival — triumph! Before the crash came, we willed it, and so disaster for us is a success, a victory for the raging will. Don’t look so surprised! You’re not a man, surely, to regard the recesses of the mind as a very salubrious place. Have you thought of the world we were born in, and what it would have grown into had not that unfortunate little radiation experiment run amok? Would it not have been a world too complex, too impersonal, for the likes of us to flourish in?”

“You are doing my thinking for me,” Greybeard said. “It is a wise man’s role; but so is listening.” Jingadangelow quaffed his drink and leant forward over the empty glass. “Is not this rag-taggle present preferable to that other mechanised, organized, deodorized present we might have found ourselves in, simply because in this present we can live on a human scale? In that other present that we missed by a neutron’s breadth, had not megalomania grown to such a scale that the ordinary simple richness of an individual life was stifled?”

“Certainly there was a lot wrong with the twentieth-century way of life.”

“There was everything wrong with it.”

“No, you exaggerate. Some things -”

“Don’t you think that if everything spiritual was wrong with it,everything was wrong with it? It’s no good getting nostalgic. It wasn’t all drugs and education. Wasn’t it also the need for drugs and the poverty of education? Wasn’t it the climax and orgasm of the Machine Age? Wasn’t it Mons and Belsen and Bataan and Stalingrad and Hiroshima and the rest? Didn’t we do well to get flung off the roundabout?”

“You only ask questions,” Greybeard said. “They are themselves answers.”

”That is double talk. You are giving me double talk. No, wait — look, I wish to talk more with you. I can pay you. This is an important conversation… Let me get my wife and friends here.”

Greybeard rose. His head ached. The drink had been powerful, the room was noisy and hot, he was over-excited. It was seldom anyone talked about anything but toothache and the weather. He looked about for Martha and could not see her.

He walked through the room. There were stairs leading to the rooms above. He saw that the painted women were neither so voluptuous nor so busy as he had at first imagined. Though they were padded and painted, their skins were stamped with the liver marks and whorls of age, their eyes were rheumy. Bizarrely smiling, they reached out hands to him. He stumbled through them. They were full of liquor, they coughed and laughed and trembled as he went by. The room was full of their motions, like a cage of captive jackdaws.

The women waved — had he once dreamed of them? — but he took no notice. Martha had gone. Charley and old Pitt had gone. Seeing that he was all right, they must have returned to guard the boats. And Towin and Becky — no, they had not been here… He remembered what he had been seeking Bunny Jingadangelow for; instead of leaving, he turned back to the far corner, where another drink awaited him and the doctor sat with an octogenarian hussy on his knee. This woman sat with one hand about his neck and with the other stroked the rabbit heads on his coat.

“Look, Doctor, I came here to seek you not for myself, but for a couple who are of my party,” Greybeard said, leaning over the table. “There’s a woman, Becky; she claims that she is with child, though she must be over seventy. I want you to examine her and see if what she says is true.”

“Sit down, friend, and let us discuss this expectant lady of yours,” Jingadangelow said. “Drink your drink, since I presume you will be paying for this round. The delusions of elderly ladies is a choice topic for this time of night, eh, Jean? No doubt neither of you would recall that little poem, how does it go now? — ‘looking in my mirror to see my wasted skin’, and — yes—