A Wrinkle in the Skin Read online

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  A WRINKLE IN THE SKIN

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  A WRINKLE IN THE SKIN

  JOHN CHRISTOPHER

  * * *

  COSMOS BOOKS

  An Imprint of Wildside Press

  New Jersey • New York • California • Ohio

  A WRINKLE IN THE SKIN

  Copyright © 1965, 2000 by John Christopher.

  Cover design copyright © 2000 by Julia Lindroos

  All rights reserved.

  No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, electronic or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

  For more information, contact::

  Wildside Press P.O. Box 45 Gillette, NJ 07933 www.wildsidepress.com

  First Cosmos Books edition: December, 2000

  ISBN: 1-58715-235-5

  1

  A POPULAR NEWSPAPER called it “the quaking spring.”

  The first disaster, in New Zealand, killed upwards of thirty thousand people, leaving Christchurch badly shattered and Dunedin almost destroyed. Two weeks after that there were tidal waves in Malaya and North Borneo, and a chain of volcanoes rose, steaming and smoking, out of the South China Sea. A fairly severe quake took place in the Bolivian Andes, and a milder one in Jamaica. Russia reported a quake in the Turkmen, and China, according to the seismologists, concealed a very big one that happened shortly afterwards in Tibet.

  The vagaries of nature with which Matthew Cotter was most concerned, though, were nearer and more ordinary. A series of cold fronts rolled in from the Atlantic, bringing squally winds and unseasonable chill rain to the island. It was the crucial time of year, when the trickle of early tomatoes was turning into a more profitable flood, and his fuel consumption in keeping the greenhouses hot enough was dismaying. Matters were not helped when, on successive weekends, the squalls blew up into gales which damaged the glass. On the second of these, after a day spent patching, he remembered with mixed feelings that he had been asked to supper by the Carwardines. He did not look forward with any pleasure to making his own supper, but the prospect of putting on a suit and a social face was not tempting, either.

  The Carwardines lived a couple of miles from him, in Forest. John Carwardine, who was in his early sixties, had retired five years before from a post as geologist with a Middle East oil company. Matthew and he got on quite well, playing snooker together at the club once or twice a week. They were good-natured people, but that in itself did not, he thought, account for their persistence in hospitality to a solitary male. As he had expected, Meg Ashwell’s blue Mini was in front of the house when he drove up.

  Meg Ashwell and Sylvia Carwardine were old friends; it was largely because of this that the Carwardines had retired to Guernsey. They were much the same age—Sylvia was a good twenty years younger than her husband—and had similarly sanguine and easygoing temperaments. Physically they were in contrast, Sylvia being small and blond and rather plump, and Meg tall and dark with a springy gait. She had been married to an advocate who had died three years previously, leaving her with two children. She was attractive and capable, and clearly would make a very good wife for a divorced grower, whose daughter had grown up and gone to the mainland. Sylvia was tactful about this, not pointing up the obvious but putting the two of them in each others path so that they might recognize it. Matthew thought that occasionally he detected a touch of humorous complicity in Meg’s glance, an invitation to be amused by the whole thing. He supposed that if he were to start taking it seriously, so might she, but that at present she was unconcerned. She seemed to lead a full and satisfying life with her home and children.

  The sitting room had a roaring fire in the grate. The climate, after the gulf, was the only drawback the Carwardines had found to the island. John poured him a powerful whisky, and Sylvia asked him about Jane. He must, she said, as she had said before, feel lonely without her.

  Matthew agreed. “But she’s a good correspondent, and she telephones every week. And its a good thing for her to get away.”

  Meg said, “Yes. Very important, I think. A wonderful place for children, but narrowing for a late teen-ager. I’m determined mine will go to the mainland after school, whether they make university or not.”

  Her boy was sixteen, the girl twelve, handsome and likable children.

  Sylvia said, “You will find it worse than Matthew, I should think. After all, he has the vinery. An empty house, for a woman, is much emptier.”

  Meg said briskly, “I don’t worry about that. There are plenty of things one can find to do, if one looks for them. I don’t imagine I shall find time hanging heavy.”

  She spoke honestly, not trying to make an effect, and Matthew admired her for it. She was, he saw again, an admirable woman altogether, and Sylvia’s project was clearly a sensible one. He doubted, though, if he would ever bring himself to cooperate in it. He was contented as he was.

  Sylvia was a good cook. She served them a rich lobster bisque, followed by a daube of beef with celery and spring greens from their garden and floury buttered potatoes. They drank a claret, which John imported by the cask. Afterwards there was a flan, made with damsons bottled from the previous summer, and then they went back and had coffee by the fire. It was all very satisfying and comfortable, an eminently suitable time and place, Matthew thought, to discuss the world’s disasters. They were talking about the latest earthquake. Rumors had begun to reach the west, chiefly through Hong Kong, that it had been a spectacular one, more destructive even than the one in South Island.

  Sylvia said, “I can’t think why the Chinese want to keep quiet about it. There’s nothing to be ashamed of in an earthquake, surely—not like a crop failure. It isn’t an indictment of socialist planning.”

  “Habit, probably,” Matthew suggested. “And a reluctance to admit any kind of weakness.”

  Meg nodded. “People do that, too. It must be a terrifying thing—to find the earth no longer solid beneath you. And there have been so many of them. Might it happen here? I suppose there’s no reason why not.”

  She looked at John, who said, “It’s unlikely.”

  “Why? Because we haven’t had earthquakes in the past?”

  “It amounts to that. Most quakes come in two specific areas—in the great circle round the Pacific, or along the Caribbean-Alps-Himalaya axis. Those are the unstable regions. We’re quite a bit outside them.”

  “There was a small one about ten years ago,” Meg said. “I remember being wakened by it. Helen was in a cot still, and at first I thought she was shaking the bars, and then I realized the whole house was shaking.”

  “Three or four on the Mercalli scale,” John said. “We do get little shocks occasionally—there’s a place in Scotland that has them quite regularly—but not the big stuff.”

  “What’s the Mercalli scale?” Matthew asked. “Something like the Beaufort?”

  “Yes. It’s done on a one to twelve basis, at any rate. One is imperceptible, except by instruments. At the top end, ten’s Devastating, eleven’s Catastrophic, and twelve’s Major Catastrophe, with just about everything flattened. The South Island one rated eleven.”

  “Thirty-five thousand dead,” Meg said. “I should think that would qualify as a major catastrophe.”

  “What causes earthquakes?” Sylvia asked. “I’ve never understood.”

  “Nor will you now
,” her husband said. “Most of them are due to slipping along faults, and the faults themselves are due to stresses and strains which may have been building up for thousands of years. Those two regions I mentioned are unstable because they are the relics of the last period of mountain-building, which is a long time ago. The earth still settling down.”

  “But so many of them lately,” Sylvia said.

  “I don’t think that means anything. Coincidental, probably.” Meg said, “What if the mountain-building starts all over again? It would make life pretty uncomfortable, wouldn’t it?” “Very. I don’t see any reason why it should, though. There’s nothing in what’s happened this year to make one apprehensive. It’s been catastrophic enough for the poor devils who’ve been caught up in it, but on a global view it doesn’t add up to much. One or two wrinkles in the skin of an orange —the orange very big and the wrinkles very small.”

  “Have some more coffee,” Sylvia said. She busied herself with the Cona. “Well, as long as our bit of orange doesn’t wrinkle. It would be awful if it did. For Matthew, especially.” “For me?” He smiled. “All the glass, you mean. Yes, I must say things are bad enough, without earthquakes.”

  “Mind you,” Sylvia said, “I’m not sure a shock of some kind might not be a good idea as far as Matthew’s concerned. He’s a little bit complacent.”

  “More indifferent than complacent, I think,” Meg said. “lie’s a very self-contained person.”

  The two women watched him, smiling.

  John said, “They’re gunning for you, Matthew. I think you’d better have a brandy with that coffee.”

  On the way home, Matthew reflected that it had been a pleasant evening, and that it was pleasant, too, to be going back to his home and his own company. It would, of course, have been even more pleasant if Jane had been there, but her going away was something he had accepted as inevitable long ago. To some extent he had schooled himself against it in advance. Because he loved her, he had let her go—encouraged her to go. In his life he had known, by normal standards, relatively few people, and loved only one. For her own sake he was ready to lose her—it would not be long before she was married—and he did not expect to make that sort of contact with anyone again. Not complacent, he thought, but resigned. And self-contained? Possibly. He had independence, and the memory of good times. Not many had as much.

  Moving on to the crown of the road to avoid an ambling hedgehog, he considered the charge of indifference. He was, he knew, more detached from his fellow human beings than most people appeared to be. There was something of a case history there, of course. A happy early childhood that ended, at five, with his mothers death. Her funeral was the first thing he could remember well—she was no more than a hazy image, a warm laughing thin face and comforting hands—the clucking aunts and the minister groaning his way through incomprehensible prayers. And the long cold winter after that, with Mrs. Morris looking after the house in which his father spent less and less time. In the spring had come the sudden change— his father whistling before breakfast, stomping cheerfully into the house in the evening, even visiting his room at bedtime. And the summer of Miss Arundel, who became Aunt Helen and who would next, he realized before he was told, become Mummy. A tall woman with cold delicate fingers and warm scented breath.

  After the wedding there was the move to North Wales— Helen’s country, and beautiful, he thought, but harsh and unfriendly after Kent. In the years that followed he grew to love the place, but with an austere, almost fearful love. And there were the children: Angela and Rodney, and Mary, born when he was twelve. Matthew had gone away to school the following year, and from school, the war having started the previous autumn, to the army. His contacts with the family had been brief and infrequent, and after his father died while he was in France in 1944, they ceased almost entirely.

  Demobilized, he had drifted to London and to a series of not very well-paying jobs in journalism. Also into marriage with Felicity, a colleague in the first of them. It was very hard, looking back, to see what had motivated either of them. He had not thought, after the first few months, that it could last long, but it had lasted twelve years before she left him for another, more successful journalist, and took Patrick with her. Patrick, from the beginning, had been Felicity’s child in every way. Matthew’s chief feeling had been one of relief, at being able to keep Jane.

  The legacy from his uncle came between the nisi and the absolute. It was more substantial than he had expected; thousands where he had thought there might be hundreds. He took Jane on holiday to the Channel Islands, and realized, while they were there, that there was no need for him to go back. He found what he wanted in Guernsey, in St. Andrew’s: fifteen hundred feet of glass attached to a granite farmhouse tucked into the side of a hill. He paid his deposit, and resigned his newspaper job two days later.

  And the good years had followed the bad, nine of them by now. Jane had gone to school on the island, and so to university in London. Pie, for his part, had made mistakes as a grower, bad ones at the beginning, and had had his share of natural disasters—one whole crop ruined by fusarian wilt— but on the whole had modestly prospered. He had made no real friends, but he was happy in his work; and reading, or snooker and whisky at the club, gave him the relaxation he needed.

  He was, he thought, a reasonably contented man. Indifferent? Well, he knew the limitations of happiness, the penalties attaching to human affections. Because, he admitted to himself as he put the car away, he missed her, missed her badly. He was grateful for what there had been, and what was left. But he would not want to put his reasonable contentment further in hazard.

  The weather improved during the week that followed. There was quite a lot of rain still, but the temperature shot up ten degrees, and between showers the sun came out strongly enough for Matthew to be able to cut the boilers out altogether. Prices at Covent Garden were staying quite high, and the new soil additive which the fertilizer company had talked him into buying appeared to be justifying its cost. The trusses were heavy and the fruit had a good color. It seemed also that the Dutch growers were concentrating their main effort in the German market. It might be a good year, after all.

  Jane telephoned early on Friday evening. The operator said, “Will you pay for a call for Miss Jane Cotter,” and he said, “Gladly. Put her through.”

  She sounded cheerful, a little breathless. Matthew asked her if she had been running.

  “Not exactly, Daddy. Moving fairly fast, though. I’m at Charing Cross, on my way down to Aunt Mary’s.”

  Mary, the younger of his half sisters, was the only one of the family he kept in touch with. She had been in London, trying to be an actress, during the latter years of his marriage, and had visited them at the high-ceilinged gloomy flat off Cromwell Road. Although she had not said so, he had known that she disliked Felicity and sympathized with him. She had also been fond of Jane, and had several times had her down since she had gone to university. Married six years to an East Sussex farmer, she had no children of her own.

  “That’s good,” Matthew said. “Much better than a weekend in London, I should think.”

  My God, yes. One of the chaps is writing a novel—about, you know, life here. He couldn’t think of a title, and Mike suggested one for him: ‘Bugger Sunday.’ He thinks its terrific —its really got him past the block.”

  Matthew laughed. “How is Mike?”

  He knew of him as a boy, reading chemistry, who had begun to figure fairly largely, though innocently, in her accounts of university life.

  “Oh, pretty fair.”

  “And work?”

  “Ghastly, darling. How about the tom-toms?”

  “Mustn’t grumble.”

  “Which means things must be pretty good. We may be able to get that winter sports trip after all.”

  “Might manage it for you. I’m not going.”

  “Oh yes, you are. Even if you only sit and sozzle. You’re getting too dull on that island.”

  He wa
s pleased by her insistence, and said mockingly, “Well, there speaks the cosmopolitan. One’s allowed a bit of dullness in middle age.”

  “Not while I’m around. Uncle Harry’s meeting me at St. Leonard’s. In the new Jaguar. Do you think he’ll let me drive?” “No. And you’re not to pester him.”

  “As if I would. But there’s nothing wrong with being terribly admiring, and then looking a bit sad. I mean, is there?”

  “I think I’ll ring Harry and warn him.”

  “You wouldn’t do that. Damn! The pips.”

  “I can afford another three minutes.”

  “Darling, I can’t. My train’s due off in two. Tell you what— I’ll ring again in the morning.”

  “Good. Bye, love.”

  “Bye.”

  Matthew got himself supper, a casserole of pork steak which had been simmering all afternoon in the Aga oven, watched television for an hour and, after making a final round of the vinery, went early to bed. He read for a time, and fell asleep easily. In the early hours he was awakened by a dog barking, and sat up and switched on the light.

  He kept a couple of dozen hens on free range, to provide a supply of non-battery eggs, and there had been trouble with a dog disturbing them at night. It was apparently a small dog which got into the henhouse and chivvied them off their perches. Matthew had got up one night and heard it dash away as he approached. That had been over a week ago, and since then he had kept a shotgun in his bedroom. It would do no harm, he thought, to give it a peppering. He put on socks and shoes, and trousers and a guernsey over his pajamas. Then he loaded the gun and, picking up a torch, went out quietly in the direction of the henhouse.

  It was a clear, fairly cold night—no clouds, a quarter moon, and light sifting out across the sky from the great arc of the Milky Way. He heard the dog again as he went down the path, and stopped short. It was not barking any longer but howling, and he could tell that it was not in with the hens. It sounded like the crossbred collie on the Margy farm. But there was a disturbance among the hens, all the same, a nervous clucking which was, at this time of night, more unsettling than a positive sound of outrage would have been. Matthew tightened his grip on the gun, and went on toward them.