“Oooh, it’s like being back in civilization again,” Towin said, rubbing his wife’s buttocks. “How do you like this, eh, missus? Better than cruising on the river, wouldn’t you say? Look, they’ve even got a pub! Let’s all get a drink and get our insides warm, wouldn’t you say?”
He produced a bayonet, hawked it to two dealers, set them bidding against each other, and handed over the blade in exchange for a handful of silver coin. Grinning at his own business acumen, Towin doled some of the money out to Charley and Greybeard.
“I’m only lending you this, mind. Tomorrow we’ll flog one of the sheep and you can repay me. Five per cent’s my rate, lads.”
They pushed into the nearest liquor stall, a framework hut with wooden floor. Its name, Potsluck Tavern, stood above the door in curly letters. It was crowded with ancient men and women, while behind the bar a couple of massive gnarled men like diseased oaks presided over the bottles. As he sipped a mead, Greybeard listened to the conversation about him, insensibly letting his mood expand. He had never thought it would feel so good to hear money jingle in his pocket.
Impressions and images fluttered in on him. It seemed as if, in leaving Sparcot, they had escaped from a concentration camp. Here the human world went on in a way it had not managed at Sparcot. It was fatally wounded perhaps; in another half century, it would be rolled up and put away; but till then, there was business to be made, life to be transacted, the chill and heat of personality to be struck out. As the mead started its combustion in his blood, Greybeard rejoiced to see that here was humanity, rapped over the knuckles for its follies by Whatever-Gods-May-Be, but still totally unregenerate.
An aged couple sat close by him, both of them wearing ill-fitting false teeth that looked as if they had been hammered into place by the nearest blacksmith; Greybeard drank in the noisy backchat of their party. They were celebrating their wedding. The man’s previous wife had died a month before of bronchitis. His playful scurries at his new partner, all fingers under the table, all lop-sided teeth above, had about it a smack of the Dance of Death, but the earthy fallen optimism of it all went not ill with the mead.
“You aren’t from the town?” one of the knotty barmen asked Greybeard. His accents, like those of everyone else they met, were difficult to understand at first.
“I don’t know what town you mean,” Greybeard said.
“Why, from Ensham or Ainsham, up the road a mile. I took you for a stranger. We used to hold the fair there in the streets where it was comfortable and dry, but last year they reckoned we brought the flu bugs with us, and they wouldn’t have us in this year. That’s why we’re camped here on the marsh, developing rheumatics. Now they walk down to us — no more than a matter of a mile it is, but a lot of them are so old and lazy they won’t come this far. That’s why business is so bad.”
Although he looked like a riven oak, he was a gentle enough man. He introduced himself as Pete Potsluck, and talked with Greybeard between serving.
Greybeard began to tell him about Sparcot; bored by the subject, Becky and Towin and Charley, the latter with Isaac in his arms, moved away and joined in conversation with the wedding party. Potsluck said he reckoned there were many communities like Sparcot, buried in the wilderness. “Get a bad winter, such as we’ve not had for a year or two, and some of them will be wiped out entirely. That’ll be the eventual end of all of us, I suppose.”
“Is there fighting anywhere? Do you hear rumours of an invasion from Scotland?”
“They say the Scots are doing very well, in the Highlands anyhow. There was so few of them in the first place; down here, population was so high it took some years for plagues and famines to shake us down to a sort of workable minimum. The Scots probably dodged all that trouble — but why should they bother us? We’re all getting too long in the tooth for fighting.”
“There are some wild-looking sparks at this fair.”
Potsluck laughed. “I don’t deny that. Senile delinquents, I call them. Funny thing, without any youngsters to set the pace, the old ones get up to their tricks — as well as they’re able.”
“What has happened to people like Croucher, then?”
“Croucher? Oh, this Cowley bloke you mentioned! The dictator class are all dead and buried, and a good job too. No, it’s getting too late for that sort of strong-arm thing. I mean, you just find laws in the towns, but outside of them, there is no law.”
“I didn’t so much mean law as force.”
“Well now, you can’t have law without force, can you? There’s a level where force is bad, but when you get to the sort of level we are down to, force becomes strength, and then it’s a positive blessing.”
“You are probably right.”
“I’d have thought you would have known that. You look the kind who carries a bit of law about with him, with those big fists and that bushy great beard.”
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:
“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.