She sank wearily down on to the bed of blankets and stretched. Slowly she removed her battered shoes, massaged her feet, and then stretched full length with her hands under her head. She regarded Greybeard, whose bald pate glowed as he crouched by the fire.
“What are you thinking, my venerable love?” she asked.
“I was wondering if the world might not slip – if it hasn’t already – into a sort of insanity, now that everyone left is over fifty. Is a touch of childhood and youth necessary to sanity?”
“I don’t think so. We’re really amazingly adaptable, more than we give ourselves credit for.”
“Yes, but suppose a man lost his memory of everything that happened to him before he was fifty, so that he was utterly cut off from his roots, from all his early achievements – wouldn’t you classify him as insane?”
“It’s only an analogy.”
He turned to her and grinned. “You’re a bugger for arguing, Martha Timberlane.”
“After all these years we can still tolerate each other’s fat-headed opinions. It’s a miracle!”
He went over to her, sitting on the bed beside her and stroking her thigh.
“Perhaps that’s our bit of madness or consolation or whatever – each other. Martha, have you ever thought -” he paused, and then went on, screwing his face into a frown of concentration. “Have you ever thought that that ghastly catastrophe fifty years ago was, well, was lucky for us? I know it sounds blasphemous; but mightn’t it be that we’ve led more interesting lives than the perhaps rather pointless existence we would otherwise have been brought up to accept as life? We can see now that the values of the twentieth century were invalid; otherwise they wouldn’t have wrecked the world. Don’t you think that the Accident has made us more appreciative of the vital things, like life itself, and like each other?”
“No,” Martha said steadily. “No, I don’t. We would have had children and grandchildren by now, but for the Accident, and nothing can ever make up for that.”
Next morning, they were roused by the sound of animals, the crowing of cocks, the pad of reindeer hooves, even the bray of a donkey. Leaving Martha in the warm bed, Greybeard rose and dressed. It was cold. Draughts flapped the rug on the floor, and had spread the ashes of the fire far and wide during the night.
Outside, it was barely daylight and the puddingy Midland sky rendered the quad in cold tones. But there were torches burning, and people on the move, and their voices sounding – cheerful sounds, even where their owners were toothless and bent double with years. The main gates had been opened, and many of the animals were going forth, some pulling carts. Greybeard saw not only a donkey but a couple of horses that looked like the descendants of hunters, both fine young beasts and pulling carts. They were the first he had seen or heard of in over a quarter century. One sector of the country was now so effectively insulated from another that widely different conditions prevailed.
The people were on the whole well-clad, many of them wearing fur coats. Up on the battlements, a pair of sentries clouted their ribs for warmth and looked down at the bustle below.
Going to the lodge, where candles burned, Greybeard found the treble-chinned man off duty. His place was taken by a plump fellow of Greybeard’s age who proved to be a son of the treble chins; he was as amiable as his father was fossilized, and when Greybeard asked if it would be possible to get a job for the winter months, he became talkative.
They sat over a small fire, huddled against the chill blowing in through the big gate from the street.
Speaking against the rumble and clatter of the traffic passing his cabin, the plump fellow chatted of Oxford.
For some years, the city had possessed no central governing body. The colleges had divided it up and ruled it indifferently. Such crime as there was was treated harshly; but there had been no shooting at Carfax for over a twelve-month.
Christ Church and several of the other colleges now served as a cross between a castle, a hostel, and a manor house. They provided shelter and defence when defence was needed, as it had been in the past. The bigger colleges owned most of the town about them. They remained prosperous, and for the past ten years had lived peaceably together, developing agriculture and rearing livestock. They did what they could to provide drainage to fight the nearby floods that rose higher every spring. And in one of the colleges at the other end of the town, Balliol by name, the Master was looking after three children who were shown ceremonially to the population twice a year.