“Possibly.”
Norsgrey let out a shriek of triumph, and then looked apprehensively towards the blue curtain.
“Well, let me tell you that you’d be wrong, Mrs. Lady – ah, oh dear, yes, very wrong. Shall I tell you how old I am? Shall I? You won’t believe me?”
“Go on, how old are you?” Towin asked, growing interested. “Eighty-five, I’d say you were. I bet you’re older than me, and I was born in 1945, the year they dropped that first atomic bomb. I bet you were born before 1945, mate.”
“They don’t have years with numbers attached any more,” Norsgrey said with immense scorn, and turned back to Martha. “You won’t believe this, Mrs. Lady, but I’m close on two hundred years old, very close indeed. In fact you might say that it was my two hundredth birthday next week.”
Martha raised an ironical eyebrow. She said, “You look well for your age.”
“You’re never two hundred, no more than I am,” Towin said scornfully.
“That I am. I’m two hundred, and what’s more I shall still be be knocking around the old world when all you buggers are dead and buried.”
Towin leant forward and kicked the old man’s boot angrily. Norsgrey brought up a stick and whacked Towin smartly over the shin. Yelping, Towin heaved himself up on his knees and brought his cudgel down at the old man’s flaming cranium. Charley stopped the blow in mid-swing.
“Give over,” he said sternly. “Towin, leave the poor old chap his delusions.”
” ‘Tisn’t no delusion,” Norsgrey said irritably. “You can ask my wife when she wakes up.”
Throughout this conversation and during the meal, Pitt had said hardly a word, sitting withdrawn into himself as he so often did in the Sparcot days. Now he said, mildly enough, “We’d’a done better if you’d listened to what I said and stayed on the river rather than settle down in this madhouse for the night. All the world to choose from and you had to choose here!”
“You can get outside if you don’t like the company,” Norsgrey said. “Your trouble is you’re rude as well as stupid. Praise be, you’ll die! None of you lot know anything of the world – you’ve been stuck in that place wherever-it-was you told me about. There are strange new things in the world you’ve never heard of.”
“Such as?” Charley asked.
“See this red and green necklace I got round my neck? I got it from Mockweagles. I’m one of the few men who’ve actually been to Mockweagles. I paid two young cow reindeer for it, and it was cheap at half the price. Only you have to call back there once every hundred years to renew, like, or one morning as you open your eyelids on a new dawn – phutt! you crumble into dust, all but your eyeballs.”
“What happens to them?” Becky asked, peering at him through the thick lampglow.
Norsgrey laughed.
“Eyeballs never die. Didn’t you know that, Mrs. Taffy? They never die. I seen them watching out of thickets at night. They wink at you to remind you what will happen to you if you forget to go back to Mockweagles.”
“Where is this place Mockweagles?” Greybeard asked.
“I shouldn’t be telling you this. There aren’t any eyeballs looking, are there? Well, there’s this place Mockweagles, only it’s secret, see, and it lies right in the middle of a thicket. It’s a castle – well, more like a sort of skyscraper than a castle, really. Only they don’t live on the bottom twenty floors; those are empty. I mean, you’ve got to go right up to the top floor to find them.”
“Them, who are them?”
“Oh, men, just ordinary men, only one of them has got a sort of second head with a sealed up mouth coming out of his neck. They live for ever because they’re immortals, see. And I’m like them, because I won’t ever die, only you have to go back there once every hundred years. I’ve just been back there now, on my way south.”
“You mean this is your second call there?”
“My third. I went there first of all for the treatment, and you have to go to get your beads renewed.” He ran his fingers through the orange curtain of his beard and peered at them. They were silent.