Well, he muttered, half-aloud, all would be unbearable if it weren’t for her… Martha… And that thought was no new one.
He turned away, to where a crumbling brick wall stood, bearded with fern. Once the wall had marked the boundary of a private estate. Now there were no private estates, the wall indicated the limits of the village of Sparcot, and the limits of Greybeard’s patrol.
Sliding the rifle from his shoulder, he looked across the wall. His sense of danger was dulled by repetition. Twice a week for many a year, rain or shine, he had patrolled this flimsy border, had discovered snowdrops under the shelter of the wall, had seen the hedges thick with shining blackberries, had found the whole scene bright and barren under snow… Somewhere in the direction he was observing lay Grafton Lock, ruled by the fierce Gipsy Joan; but her tribe posed little threat. Men of the village said of Joan that she wore no knickers. He smiled to himself at the thought. Even to an ageing population, sex remained of perennial interest.
Then there was the possibility of another invasion by stoats, foraging along the river bank, such as had happened three times of recent years. But nothing moved on this peaceful day. Of animal life, he saw only a feral cat, motionless on a dead tree stump.
He waited to see the cat pounce, but it remained unmoving. He turned back at last. A slight haze lay over Sparcot and its grazing land. To his nostrils came the sardonic stone age smell of wood smoke.
All was as it had been. And would be again.
He knew not what the day of the week was called. But one thing was certain: in two days’ time, he would be on patrol again, treading the same paths, watching the same vistas. And waiting.
The days were closing in towards the time people still called Christmas.
Four stoats swam a brook. Climbing from the chill water, they worked their way through dead reed and up the bank. Their bodies were low to the ground, their necks outstretched, the young ones imitating their mother. Keeping to cover, they looked out hungrily at rabbits seeking food only a few feet beyond their noses.
Where the rabbits frisked was once wheatland, cropping regularly under a farmer’s care. Neglect had set in. Early one year, tractors had not arrived. Taking advantage of their opportunity, weeds had risen up, choking the cereal crops. Later, fire spread across the deserted farmland, burning down thistles and bindweed. Rabbits, preferring low growth, moved in to nibble the green shoots which thrust through the ash.
The shoots that survived this natural thinning process found themselves with ample space in which to grow. Many were now full-sized trees. In consequence, the numbers of rabbits had declined. Rabbits prefer open land. So grass had a chance to return to an old habitat. Now the grass, in its turn, was growing sparse under a spread of beech branches. The few rabbits ekeing out existence there were thin of flank.
They were also wary. When one rabbit saw the stoat eyes watching, it turned up its tail and bolted for cover. The other rabbits followed. The stoats were immediately on the move, brown flashes rippling across open space. The rabbits shot into their burrows. The stoats followed unhesitatingly. They could go anywhere. This world was theirs. In no time, their muzzles were bloody and they were feasting.
A day or two later, an old man was making a routine patrol of the same ground. He wore a coarse canvas shirt of red, green, and orange stripes which rendered him clearly visible in the tawny winter landscape.
Near the banks of the river, the wilderness had been cleared by corporate effort to allow space for cattle to graze. In the wilderness beyond, a pattern was still discernable to an educated eye. Large trees — to some of whose branches a raddled leaf still clung — marked the lines of what were hedges long ago. The trees enclosed entanglements of vegetation which had once been arable land. Brambles lacerated their way into the centre of the fields, in competition with elders, thorns, thistle and other sturdy growths.
Along the edge of one line of trees, a stockade had been thrown up, protecting an area of several acres which had the river on its longer side. It was by this stockade that the old man patrolled, whistling to himself as he went. His shirt, which furnished the only spash of colour in the landscape, was made from the canvas of an old deckchair.
In the branches above his head, rooks perching there did not bother to fly off at his approach.
Since the village was close, the barrier of vegetation was punctuated by narrow paths trodden into the undergrowth. These paths led to latrines, holes dug in the ground and sheltered from the weather by roofs of wood or plastic. Such were the sanitary arrangements of Sparcot.
The village itself lay on the river in the midst of its clearing. It had been built, or rather had accumulated in the course of centuries, in the shape of a capital H, the crossbar being formed by a stone bridge which spanned the river. Though the bridge still threw its humpbacked span sturdily across water, it led only to a ruinous street, still known as Oxford Road or Oxfroad, and a dense thicket where the villagers gathered firewood, or attempted the gymnastics of antique passion.
Of the two roads forming the legs of the H, the one nearest the river, known as the High Street, had been designed originally as a quiet community street fringed by humble dwellings and a public house. One leg of this thoroughfare led to an ancient watermill, where lived Big Jim Mole, the boss of Sparcot. The other road, on the other side of the river, subject to spring floods, had once been a main road, leading to towns and cities, the very names of which were forgotten. Even before the line of houses petered out, in came the vegetation, stern and invasive as an army. The last house of all had been devoured by the weight of a rampant ivy.
All the houses in Sparcot bore the stigmata of neglect. Many were ruined. Some ruins were still inhabited. One hundred and twelve people lived here. None had been born in the village.
Where roads joined on the higher bank of the river stood a stone building which had served originally as a post office. These days, no post survived, no mail was ever delivered, nobody wrote letters. The upper windows of this building commanded a view of the bridge and river in one direction and the cultivated land in the other. Here was the village guard room. Since all the earlier frivolities which Sparcot had once enjoyed — video, bingo, car boot sales, church fetes — had become part of history, this room functioned as the centre of village life. And, since Big Jim Mole insisted that a guard be continually kept, it was occupied now.
There were three people sitting or lying in the old barren room. A venerable woman, past her eightieth year, sat by a wood stove, humming to herself and nodding her head. She held out thin hands to the stove, on which stew was warming in a tin platter.
Of the two men keeping her company in the room, one was extremely ancient, although his eye was bright. Towin Thomas lay on a paliasse on the floor, staring up at the ceiling as if trying to puzzle out the meaning of the cracks there. His face, sharp as a stoat’s beneath its stubble, wore an irritable look. Old Betty’s humming jarred his nerves.
Only the third occupant of the guard room was properly alert. He was cleaning the rifle with the leather strap, running a piece of rag on a string through the barrel and then squinting up it to see that the rifling was perfectly clean. Greybeard was a well-built man in his middle fifties, without a paunch but not so starveling as his companions. He sat in a creaking chair by the window, occasionally glancing alertly out through the panes.