As they passed Annie Hunter’s house, the desiccated figure of Willy Tallridge slipped from the side door.
He was still buttoning his jacket, and paid them no attention as he hurried towards the river as fast as his eighty-year-old legs would take him. Annie’s bright face, heavy with its usual complement of rouge and powder, appeared at her upper window. She waved a casual greeting to them.
“There’s a stoat-warning out, Annie,” Greybeard called. “They are getting ready to ferry people across the river.”
“Thanks for the warning, darling, but I’ll lock myself in here.”
“You have to hand it to Annie, she’s game,” Greybeard said.
“Gamey too, I hear,” Martha said drily. “Do you realize, Algy, that she’s about twenty years older than I?
Poor old Annie, what a fate – to be the oldest professional!”
He was searching the tousled meadow, looking despite himself for brown squibs of life riding through the grass, but he smiled at Martha’s joke. Occasionally a remark of hers could bring back a whole world to him, the old world of brittle remarks made at parties where alcohol and nicotine had been ritually consumed. He loved her for the best of reasons, because she was herself.
“Funny thing,” he said. “You’re the only person left in Sparcot who still makes conversation for its own sake. Now go home like a good girl and pack a few essential belongings. Shut yourself in, and I’ll be along in ten minutes. I ought to help the men with the cattle.”
“Algy, I’m nervous. Do we have to pack just to go across the river. What’s happening?”
Suddenly his face was hard. “Do what I ask you, Martha. We aren’t going across the river; we’re going down it. We’re leaving Sparcot.”
Before she could say more, he walked away. She also turned, walking deliberately down the
hollow-cheeked street, and in at her door, into the dark little house. She did it as a positive act. The trepidation that had filled her on hearing her husband’s words did not last; now, as she looked about her at walls from which the paper had peeled and ceilings showing their dirty bare ribs, she whispered a wish that he might mean what he had said.
But leave Sparcot? The world had dwindled until for her it was only Sparcot…
As Greybeard went towards the stilted barn, a fight broke out farther down the street. Two groups of people carting belongings down to the river’s edge had collided; they had lapsed into the weak rages that were such a feature of life in the village. The result would be a broken bone, shock, confinement to bed, pneumonia, and another mound in the beggarly greedy graveyard under the fir trees, where the soil was sandy and yielded easily to the spade.
Greybeard had often acted as peacemaker in such disputes. Now he turned away, and made for the cattle.
They were as valuable – it had to be faced – as the rabble. The cattle went protestingly up the ramp into the barn. George Swinton, a one-armed old heathen who had killed two men in the Westminster Marches of 2008, darted among them like a fury, hurting them all he could with voice and stick.
A noise like the falling of stricken timber stopped them. Two of the barn’s wooden legs split to ground level. One of the knot of men present called a word of warning. Before it was through his lips, the barn began to settle. Splinters of wood showed like teeth as joists gave. The barn toppled. It slid sideways, rocked, and collapsed in a shower of ruptured planks. Cattle stampeded from the wreckage, or lay beneath it.
“To hell with this shoddy shower! Let’s get ourselves in the boats,” George Swinton said, pushing past Greybeard. And none of the others cared more than he. Flinging aside their sticks, they jostled after him.
Greybeard stood where he was as they rushed past: the human race, he thought, sinned against as well as sinning.
Stooping, he helped a heifer free herself from under a fallen beam. She cantered away to the grazing land.
She would have to take her chance when and if the stoats came.