Greybeard. Chapter 2. Cowley
II. Cowley
They had been lucky ever to get to Sparcot. During the last few days in Cowley, the factory suburb of Oxford, she had not thought they would escape at all. For that was the autumn of the dusty year 2018, when cholera lent its hand to the other troubles that plagued mankind.
Martha was almost a prisoner in the Cowley flat in which she and Greybeard – but in those days he was simply the forty-three-years-old Algernon Timberlane – had been forcibly installed.
They had driven to Oxford from London, after the death of Algy’s mother. Their truck had been stopped on the borders of Oxfordshire; they found martial law prevailing, and a Commander Croucher in charge, with his headquarters in Cowley. Military police had escorted them to this flat; although they were given no choice in the matter, the premises proved to be satisfactory.
For all the trouble sweeping the country and the world, Martha’s chief enemy at present was boredom. She sat doing endless jigsaws of farms at blossom time, trappers in Canada, beaches at Acapulco, and listening to the drizzle of light music from her handbag radio; throughout the sweltering days she waited for Algy to return.
Few vehicles moved along the Iffley Road outside. Occasionally one would growl by with an engine note that she thought was familiar. She would jump up, often to stand staring out of the window for a long time after she realized her mistake.
Martha looked out on an unfamiliar city. She smiled to think how they had been buoyed with the spirit of adventure on the drive down from London, laughing, and boasting of how young they felt, how they were ready for anything – yet already she was surfeited of jigsaws and worried by Algy’s increasingly heavy drinking.
When they were in America, he drank a lot, but the drinking there with Jack Pilbeam, an eager companion, had a gaiety about it lacking now. Gaiety! The last few months in London had held no gaiety.
The government enforced a strict curfew; Martha’s father had disappeared into the night, presumably arrested without trial; and as the cholera spread, Patricia, Algy’s feckless old mother, deserted by her third husband, had died in agony.
She ran her fingers over the window-sill. They came away dirty and she looked at them.
She laughed her curt laugh at an inner thought, and returned to the table. With an effort, she forced herself to go on building the sunlit beach of Acapulco.
The Cowley shops opened only in the afternoon. She was grateful for the diversion they offered. To go into the street, she deliberately made herself unattractive, wore an old bonnet and pulled coarse stockings over her fine legs, despite the heat, for the soldiers had a rough way with women.
This afternoon, she noticed fewer uniforms about. Rumour had it that several platoons were being driven east, to guard against possible attack from London. Other rumour said the soldiers were confined to their barracks and dying like flies.
Standing in line by the white-tiled fishmonger’s shop in the Cowley Road, Martha found that her secret fears accepted this latter rumour the more readily. The overheated air held a taste of death. She wore a handkerchief over her nose and mouth, as did most of the other women. Rumour of plague becomes most convincing when strained through dirty squares of fabric.
“I told my husband I’d rather he didn’t join up,” the woman next to Martha told her. “But you can’t get Bill to listen if he don’t want to. See, he used to work at the garage, but he reckons they’ll lay him off sooner or later, so he reckons he’d be better in the army. I told him straight, I said, I’ve had enough of war if you haven’t, but he said, ‘This is different from war, it’s a case of every man for himself.’ You don’t know what to do for the best, really, do you?”
As she trudged back to the flat with her ration of dried and nameless fish, Martha echoed the woman’s words.
She went and sat at the table, folded her arms on it, and rested her head on her arms. In that position, she let her thoughts ramble, waiting all the while for sound of that precious truck which would herald Timberlane’s return.