Greybeard

He leant over towards her, feeling for her hand. “You’re a funny creature, Martha. Sometimes you make me wonder how much two people can ever know each other, if you know me so little. It’s amazing how you can be so blind when you’ve been such a wonderful companion for thirty years or three hundred years or however long it really is. You’re so admirable in many ways, whereas I’ve been such a flop.”

She lit the lamp by their bed and said gravely, “At the risk of getting chewed to death by mosquitoes, I must put on a light and look at you. I can’t stomach disembodied miseries. Love, what is this you’re saying about yourself? Let’s have it before we settle down.”

”You must have seen clearly enough. It is not as if I chose to marry a foolish woman, as some men chose to do. I’ve been a flop all through my life.”

“Examples?”

“Well, look at the way I’ve got us more or less lost now. And far bigger things. All that miserable time after father died, when mother married that ass Barrett. It’s not enough to say I was only a child; I just never caught up with what was going on. I felt I was being punished for something, and didn’t know what the sin was, or even what the punishment was exactly. I loathed and dreaded Barrett, although when he flirted with other floosies I was miserable for mother’s sake. He went off with one of them on one occasion. Mother got picked up by an undertaker called Carter, and we lived with him for some weeks.”

“I remember about Carter. Your mother had a talent for picking men whose jobs were prospering.”

“She also had a talent for picking impossible men. Poor woman, I suppose she was very much a ninny.

Uncle Keith — Barrett — turned up one day and took us away from Carter. He and mother had rows for weeks after that. It was all so undignified… Perhaps that was what helped me in my teens to try and behave in a dignified way myself.

“Then there was the war. I ought to have refused to go — you know I was morally convinced of its wrongness. But I compromised, and joined the Infantop. Then there was the business of joining DOUCH. You know, Martha, I think that was the slobbiest thing I ever did. Those DOUCH fellows, old Jack and the others, they were dedicated men. I never believed in the project at all.”

“You’re talking nonsense, Algy. I remember how hard you worked, in Washington and London.” He laughed. “Know why I joined? Because they offered to fly you out to Washington to join me! That was it! My interest in DOUCH was purely subsidiary to my interest in you. “It’s true I did the job fairly well during the after-war years, when the government collapsed, and the

United made peace with the enemy. But look at the chance I missed when we were in Cowley. If I hadn’t been so concerned about us, we could have been in on a important bit of history.

“Instead, we nipped off and vegetated all those dreary years at Sparcot. And what did I do there? Why, I flogged the DOUCH truck just because our bellies were a bit empty. And when I might have redeemed myself at Christ Church, by retrieving the truck, I just couldn’t bear to stick out another couple of years’ hard work. Hearing that engine throb out there on the pond, I thought of that bloody truck, and how it stands for all I might have been or had.”

Martha hit at a moth that circled round her face, and turned gleamingly to him. “People who have been betrayed often see themselves as betrayers. Don’t do that, Algy. You’re thinking rubbish tonight. You’re too big a man to puddle about in silly self-deception. Don’t you see that what you’ve just told me is a potted history of your integrity?”

“The lack of it, you mean.”

“No, I don’t. When you were a child, your life was not under your control. Both your mother and Keith were idiots — I saw that even as a small girl — and they were quite disoriented by the crisis of their times. For that you cannot blame yourself.

“You spent the war first trying to save children, then trying to do something constructive about the future. You married me, when you might have been having the sort of debauches most men of your age were enjoying all over the world. And I suspect you have remained faithful to me ever since. I don’t think that shows any lack of character.

“As for your feebleness at Cowley, you can go and ask old Jeff what he thinks to that one! You sold the DOUCH(E) truck after infinite painful debate with yourself, and saved the whole community at Sparcot from starving. As for getting it back again, why should you? If there is a future for any humans, they’ll be looking ahead, not back; DOUCH was a great idea when it was conceived in the year 2000. Now we can see it’s irrelevant.