Here, next morning, Greybeard and Martha stood over their fire poaching fish with mint and cress when a voice behind them said, “I’m inviting myself in for breakfast!”
Floating towards them over the water, his oars raised and dripping water from the rowlocks, was Jeff Pitt in a much-mended rowing-boat.
“Fine friends you turn out to be,” he said across the intervening water. “I go out on a little hunting expedition with some friends. When I come back to Oxford, I find old Charley’s gone and his landlady’s heart-broken. I go up to Christ Church, and you two have disappeared. It’s a fine way to treat me!”
Embarrassed by the sense of grievance they felt behind his words, Martha and Greybeard went to the water’s edge to greet him. When he found they had actually left Oxford, Pitt had guessed the direction they would take; he told them that as a sign of his own cleverness as they helped secure his boat. He climbed stiffly out and shook them both by the hand, which he managed to do without looking them straight in the face.
“You can’t leave me behind, you know,” he said. “We belong together. It may be a long time ago, Greybeard, but I’ve not forgotten you could have killed me that time when I was supposed to shoot you.”
Greybeard laughed.
“The idea never even entered my head.”
“Ah, well, it’s because it didn’t that I’m shaking your hand now. What you cooking there? Now I’m with you, I’ll see you don’t starve.”
“We were intending to fob off starvation with salmon this morning, Jeff,” Martha said, hitching her skirt to squat over the open stove. “These must be the first salmon caught in the Thames for two hundred years.”
Pitt folded his tattered arms and looked askance at the fish. “I’ll catch you bigger ‘uns than that, Martha.
You need me about the place – older we get, more we need friends. Where’s old Holy Joe Samuels, then?”
“Just taking a morning walk. He’ll be back, and horrified to see you standing here, no doubt.”
When Charley returned and finished slapping Pitt on the back, they sat down to eat their meal. Slowly the heat mist thinned, revealing more and more of their surroundings. The world expanded, showing itself full of sky and reflections of sky.
“You see, you could be lost here easy enough,” Pitt said. Now the first pleasure of reunion was over, he lapsed into his customary grumbling tone. “Some of the lads I know back in Oxford used to be free-booters and sort of water-highwaymen around this region, until they became too old and turned to a bit of quiet poaching instead. They still talk about the old days, and they were telling me that there was a lot of fierce fights went on here some years back. They call this the Sea of Barks, you know.”
“I heard them speak of it in Oxford,” Charley said. “They say it’s still spreading, but there are fewer folk to chart it now.”
Pitt wore two old jackets and a pair of trousers. He felt in one of the pockets of the inner jacket and produced a square of paper, which he unfolded and handed to Greybeard. Greybeard recognized the paper; it was one of the broadsheets distributed during the last exhibition of the Balliol children. On its back, a map was drawn in ink.
“It shows you what this region’s like now, according to these pals of mine, who explored most of it,” Pitt said. “Can you understand it?”
“It’s a good map, Jeff. Although there are names missing here, it’s easy to identify the old features. Barks must be a corruption of the old Berkshire.”
Martha and Charley peered at the map with him. Marked on the southern tip of the Sea of Barks was Goring. There, on either side of the old river, two ranges of hills, the Chilterns and the Berkshire Downs, met. The river had become blocked at that point and, rising, had flooded all the land north of it, where a sort of triangular trough was formed between the two ridges of hills and the Cotswolds.
Charley nodded. “Although it’s far from being a sea, it’s easily twenty miles across from east to west, and perhaps fifteen the other way. Plenty of room to get lost on it.”