Greybeard grinned. “I don’t know. It’s difficult to judge what one’s own character is in unprecedented times like ours.”
“You haven’t made up your mind about yourself? Perhaps that’s what’s keeping you looking so young.”
Changing the subject, Greybeard changed his drink, and got himself a big glass of fortified parsnip wine, buying one for Potsluck also. Behind him, the wedding party became tuneful, singing the ephemeral songs of a century back which had oddly developed a power to stick – and to stick in the gullet, Greybeard thought, as they launched into:
“If you were the only girl in the world,
And I were the only boy…”
“It may come to that yet,” he said half-laughing to Potsluck. “Have you see any children around? I mean, are any being born in these parts?”
“They’ve got a freak show here. You want to go and look in at that,” Potsluck said. Sudden bleakness eclipsed his good-humour, and he turned sharply away to arrange the bottles behind him. In a little while, as if feeling he had been discourteous, he turned back and began to talk on a new tack.
“I used to be a hairdresser, back before the Accident and until that blinking Coalition government closed my shop. Seems years ago now – but then so it is – long years, I mean. I was trained up in my trade by my Dad, who had the shop before me; and I always used to say when we first heard about this radiation scare that as long as there were people around they’d still want their hair cut – as long as it didn’t all fall out, naturally. I still do a bit of cutting for the other travelling men. There are those that still care for their appearance, I’m glad to say.”
Greybeard did not speak. He recognized a man in the grip of reminiscence; Potsluck had lost some of his semi-rustic way of speech; with a genteel phrase like “those that still care for their appearance”, he revealed how he had slipped back half a century to that vanished world of toilet perquisites, hair creams, before- and after-shave lotions, and the disguising of odours and blemishes.
“I remember once, when I was a very young man, having to go round to a private house – I can picture the place now, though I daresay it has fallen down long since. It was very dark going up the stairs, and I had to take the young lady’s arm. Yes, that’s right, and I went there after the shop had shut, I remember. My old Dad sent me; I can’t have been more than seventeen, if that.
“And there was this dead gentleman laid out upstairs in his coffin, in the bedroom. Very calm and prosperous he looked. He’d been a good customer, too, in his lifetime. His wife insisted that his hair was cut before the funeral. He was always a very tidy gentleman, she told me. I spoke to her downstairs afterwards –
a thin lady with ear-rings. She gave me five shilllings. No, I don’t remember – perhaps it was ten shillings.
Anyhow, sir, it was a generous sum in those days – before all this dreadful business.
“So I cut the dead gentleman’s hair. You know how the hair and the finger-nails keep on growing on a man after death, and his had got rather straggly. Only a trim it needed really, but I cut it as reverently as I could. I was a churchgoer in those days, believe it or not. And this young lady that showed me upstairs, she
had to hold his head up under the neck so that I could get at it with my scissors; and in the middle of it she got the giggles and dropped the dead gentleman. She said she wanted me to give her a kiss. I was a bit shocked at the time, seeing that the gentleman was her father… I don’t know why I should be telling you this.
Memory’s a rare funny thing. I suppose if I’d had any sense in those days, I’d have screwed the silly little hussy on the spot, but I wasn’t too familiar with life then – never mind death! Have another drink on me?”