The World in Winter Read online

  There was a murmur of assent. Zigguri, a Yoruba like Abonitu and the majority of the expedition, had held the highest military rank after Mutalli, and should have been named by him as deputy leader. He was a tall thin man with a pointed beard and a sober, watchful look. He nodded slightly towards Abonitu, a gesture of recognition and, Andrew felt, of loyalty. It was the best, the only possible choice. At the same time, Abonitu had taken care of the Ibos. Two of them had been put in charge of Hovercraft; and those two, Andrew suspected, the ones who would have been most likely to cause trouble if left together.

  ‘Some regulations,’ Abonitu went on. ‘At every halt one man will be detailed on each craft as look-out. No one will leave his craft until instructed by the captain in charge, and the captain will not give this instruction until signalled by me. Captains will be obeyed by crew members without argument or protest. Anyone feeling he has a complaint against his captain will report it to Colonel Zigguri. But first he will obey the order he has been given.’

  He looked at them in mild but authoritative surveillance.

  ‘That is all for now. Later I will talk to the captains.’

  He dismissed them with a wave, and descended from the Hovercraft. They made way for him. He stopped, and looked back.

  ‘Andrew, come with me.’

  They walked together through the assembly and out, beyond the circle of Hovercraft, into the open country. They had halted in the lee of a hill, overlooking what was either a road or a frozen river. The white skeletons of trees guarded its flanks; from the way they hairpinned in the distance, outlining a narrow curve, it seemed more likely to be a river. It was difficult to believe that any Roads Committee in the Home Counties would have sanctioned or tolerated a bend like that. Some way beyond the curve, a long straight embankment more plainly marked the past existence of a railway line.

  Abonitu settled his spectacles more firmly on his nose; the cut on his face had been high up by the right ear, and the adhesive plaster pressed against the spectacle arm.

  He said: ‘I shall have to be careful of these, Andrew. My only spare pair. It will not do to break them.’

  Andrew said: ‘Do you think it’s a good idea – talking privately to me? I’ve been keeping out of your way.’

  ‘Yes. That was thoughtful of you; but not necessary, I think. I have them now, and it would be a mistake to compromise in anything. They will not turn against me because I talk to you privately. They would, if they thought I was afraid to do so.’

  ‘You may be right. I had my fingers crossed for you this morning.’ He looked at his companion. ‘I didn’t think you were going to make it, Abo.’

  ‘Nor did I, at one time. But my family has always been lucky in battle. There is a story that one of my ancestors was lying on the ground, waiting to be speared, when the man who stood over him was struck by lightning.’

  He smiled, as he said this. He was calm, unruffled, urbane. It was difficult to remember him kicking Mutalli on the face, gasping and groaning as he butchered the struggling man with his knife.

  Andrew asked: ‘What are you going to tell Lagos?’

  Their link with Nigeria was through a powerful short-wave transmitter, previously kept on Mutalli’s Hovercraft. Abonitu had had the set and the operator transferred to his own craft. A coded report was transmitted each evening.

  ‘I shall tell them he has been accidentally killed, and that the expedition has elected me as his successor. That will meet their needs. They are proud of their democracy.’

  ‘And when we get back?’

  Abonitu shrugged. ‘If we get back safely, it will not matter.’

  Andrew said: ‘What kind of a man are you?’

  Abonitu turned to look at him. ‘A black man. Some years ago, in your Parliament, one of your leaders said that all Africans are liars.’ He smiled. ‘But for Epimenides’ paradox, I would say that also. Abonitu, an African, says that all Africans are liars. There is no paradox, really, of course. To be a liar is not to lie with every word one speaks. And we are murderers, too, and cheats and tyrants. Some of the time. It is just that you do not understand us, Andrew.’

  ‘Why save me?’

  ‘I did not save you. I saved myself.’ He looked out over the white waste. ‘Carlow and Prentice – I wonder where they are, if they are still alive.’

  ‘Probably regretting it,’ Andrew said. ‘It must be lonely out there.’

  ‘Then you will not follow them, Andrew?’

  ‘Didn’t you vouch for my reliability this morning? Wasn’t that what the trouble was about?’

  ‘Partly that. Will you follow them?’

  ‘No. Why should I expose myself to the probability of freezing or starving to death, or being murdered by one of the surviving savages?’

  ‘That is not an answer.’

  ‘Then put it this way: I’ve made my choice. They hadn’t, but I have. From that point, every action confirms the decision. Every day buries it deeper.’

  Abonitu said briskly: ‘Good. We reach London tomorrow. I shall need you for a guide.’ He grinned. ‘And you are the only one left to turn the cameras now; it would be undignified in a leader.’

  ‘I should like to have had them turning this morning.’

  ‘So should I. For my descendants – to go with the stroke of lightning.’

  ‘London,’ Andrew said, ‘tomorrow … What approach will you use? Up river?’

  ‘It is the only sensible one, perhaps the only possible one. Andrew?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How do you feel about returning to London like this?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Moved? Excited?’

  ‘No. Numb, rather. A feeling of wanting to get it over and done with.’

  ‘I am excited by the idea,’ Abonitu said. ‘And disgusted with myself, a little. When the princesses and queens of ancient Egypt died, they used to keep the bodies until putrefaction set in, before handing them over to the embalmers. That was because they found that otherwise the embalmers used them for their lust. London is a dead queen.’

  ‘But not putrefying. Preserved in a deep freeze. There are no obstacles to your necrophilia, Abo. In any case, they had an easier and less unpleasant solution, surely – why not eunuchize the embalmers?’

  ‘Because even eunuchs have some passions. Probably they hired the bodies out, to more complete men. For some sicknesses there are only unpleasant remedies. Do you not agree?’

  ‘I agree entirely,’ Andrew said.

  Abonitu put his hand on Andrew’s arm; it was a frank and open gesture, and although they were apart from the rest, they were in view of them. He said:

  ‘I need you, Andrew. Not as a guide, nor for the cameras. I need you as a friend. If you leave me with my own people, I am lost. You will stay?’

  ‘Yes,’ Andrew said, ‘I’ll stay.’

  The locks on the upper reaches of the Thames caused some delays; they had to be bypassed and at times this involved circuitous detours. Doing this near Teddington they found themselves crossing a battlefield, or a place of massacre. The snow was dotted with humps and larger mounds which here and there gaped to show frozen limbs thrust out in the agony of death. As the Hovercraft moved slowly on its way, Abonitu said to Andrew:

  ‘You see that?’

  A nearby mound showed signs of activity, of having been quarried almost. Bodies were freshly exposed. An arm had been hacked from one, a leg from another.

  Andrew found he could look at it with no more than a tremor of nausea. He said:

  ‘Yes. I expected that.’

  ‘I, too. But to see it is something else. And there.’

  He pointed. Andrew said: ‘He was surprised. Something scared him – or her.’

  A severed arm lay on the snow. It looked young, delicate. There was a gold-banded lady’s watch on the wrist.

  ‘He must have been very frightened,’ Abonitu said, ‘to abandon it. Can we head back for the river yet?’

  ‘I think so. Hea
ding north-east, through that gap in the trees.’

  ‘Good,’ Abonitu said. ‘This place is unclean.’

  They found human life again at Chiswick. At first there were odd figures on the banks of the frozen river, some retreating, as the Hovercraft approached, into the hinterland of buildings, others – bolder or more curious – staring and gesticulating. The noise of the engines blanketed any sound that might be coming from them, but one man was plainly appealing, in some terms, for help. As the Hovercraft continued up river, he began to run along the tow-path, trying to keep up with it. The crew watched him with interest and amusement, shouting encouragement and then, when he collapsed in defeat, jeering at him.

  By Chiswick Bridge the activity was greater and more purposive. A mob that had gathered on the left bank spilled out on to the bridge itself. There were thirty or forty people, Andrew estimated; most of them male but with a few young and rough-looking females. The reaction was unmistakable here, too, but markedly different. They shook their fists and howled inaudible curses. Some stooped down and rummaged in the snow, looking for stones which they threw at the Hovercraft.

  Abonitu said, smiling: ‘The natives seem unfriendly.’

  There was a whine in the air above them. Andrew said:

  ‘One of them has a rifle.’

  Ali, a Hausa and a Moslem who had been made captain of Abonitu’s Hovercraft, said:

  ‘We should go in, sir – give them a few bursts of fire.’

  ‘To teach them a lesson, eh, Ali?’ Abonitu said. ‘They may go where they please, they may shin up the trees, but they won’t get away from the guns. It is an old tradition. But here it would not work. They have too much cover and they can reach it too easily. We must press on, and take our chance on stray bullets. I do not think there will be many fired at us under such circumstances. They will be too precious to be wasted on folly of this kind.’

  The river widened; Battersea Power Station lifted its quartet of chimneys, smokeless now, against the sky ahead of them. Abonitu said to their driver:

  ‘Reduce speed. To five, and keep it there.’ He looked at Andrew. ‘A barrier? Alongside the river?’ He raised his field glasses and stared through them. ‘But it is not new.’

  ‘We’ve reached the edge of the London Pale,’ Andrew said. ‘There were no fortifications there before I left, but I suppose they put them up afterwards. There had been attacks across the river. I suppose they got worse.’

  ‘I see no signs of life.’

  ‘No,’ Andrew said. ‘Nor do I.’

  He felt the old misery invade him as he said it. How long, he wondered, could there be fresh recognitions of hopelessness?

  They cruised along the broad reach of the Thames, flanked by empty silent cliffs of white. Behind them the western sky was lurid, with heavy banks of cloud lit by the declining sun. Andrew mounted the camera’s tripod on its floating base, and panned from the frozen city into the sunset. It would be less effective, he reflected ironically, on television’s black and white than on the colour film with which the camera was loaded, but effective enough to drive the unsubtle point home.

  They passed the Tate Gallery. Under the usual anonymity of white, there were signs of the ravages of fire; broken windows showed glimpses of a gutted interior. The more important canvases had been removed before the crash – flown out to the southern countries for sale at knock-down prices to glean what foreign currency they could. There had been a boom, he remembered, in the Chantrey pictures, whose detail and magnificence had appealed to the African buyers: they had been brought up from the cellars and dusted over, and sold for figures which, while less than those they might have commanded in their Victorian and Edwardian heyday, compared very favourably with the revised values of Picasso and Braque and Matisse. But these had, at least, brought something: the abstracts had been impossible to sell. They had been put back on the walls, for the edification of the chilly survivors in the Pale. Presumably, after the final breakdown, someone had started a fire with some of them, and it had got out of control. He wondered about the sculptures. The small bronzes had been offered, but had not fetched anything that would justify their air freight. The larger pieces, of course, had been immovable. Presumably they still stood there, decked with ashes and snow drifted in through the broken windows: the Hepworths and the Epsteins and the Moores. Would they ever mean anything again? The Africans, even if the colonization project worked, had their own primitivism, a deeper, less artificial one, and too close for comfort.

  Rounding the bend in the river, they saw the new skyline, the foreground dominated by the towers and traceries of the Houses of Parliament.

  ‘Big Ben,’ Abonitu said. ‘There is irony for you, Andrew. Stands the church clock at ten to three – or nearly. Twenty to three, isn’t it?’

  ‘But of a winter night,’ Andrew said, ‘not a summer afternoon. It stopped in the February blizzards. The cold cracked a main driving shaft and they couldn’t repair it.’

  ‘And is there honey still for tea? This is worse than I expected, Andrew.’ He turned towards the driver. ‘Take her inshore, to the left bank. Just short of the bridge.’

  ‘Here?’ Andrew asked. ‘Are you halting here?’

  ‘Where else?’

  ‘There are places that might be more easily defensible. The Tower, for instance.’

  ‘The heart of England was here, when it stopped beating. What are you smiling at?’

  ‘The poetic phrase. You have too much colour in your imagination.’

  Abonitu shook his head. ‘No. Not enough. This was London. To us, Rome was nothing by comparison, and Rome did not fall as this city fell.’

  The expedition still suffered from the difficulty in communicating between Hovercraft in motion, but Abonitu had given orders before starting that the two rearmost vessels should take up a covering position whenever the remainder put in to shore. These now formed up in the lee of the Palace of Westminster and, again as prearranged, a landing party was disembarked and made for the steps. They moved quickly, purposefully, under their captains.

  Andrew said: ‘You’ve wreaked an astonishing change, astonishingly quickly. One wouldn’t know them for the same men.’

  ‘It has nothing to do with me,’ Abonitu said. ‘Or very little, at least. It is not what has been done to them, but what they believe they are. You have heard stories of the witch-doctors pointing a piece of bone at a man, telling him he will die – and he dies? I saw it once, when I was a small boy. The British told us we were simple ignorant niggers, and for generations we believed them. Then you brought our young men to England, and your liberals told them they were the white man’s equal, and had human rights, and we believed them instead.’

  ‘Was it as simple as that?’ Abonitu shrugged, smiling. ‘And now – with these?’

  ‘Mutalli was a big man, but soft: afraid of making enemies, afraid of the possibility of rivals. Disorder and anarchy fed his vanity; order and discipline would have threatened it. So no deputy was appointed, no captains. As for the men, he wanted them to be a mob, and they were a mob.’

  ‘All the same, the transformation is remarkably sudden.’

  ‘All our transformations are.’

  ‘But not lasting.’

  ‘They may last. It depends.’

  ‘In this case,’ Andrew said, ‘it depends on you, doesn’t it?’

  ‘In a sense, yes.’ He turned his head, and his eyes, behind their spectacles, stared at Andrew. ‘Or on you.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Mutalli had another fear: of this country, of the ice and snow and desolation, and of all the things its name stands for. I know what that fear is, and one’s fellow Africans are no help against it. There is a temptation to turn back into the ignorant savage, frightened by ghosts and white devils.’ He smiled. ‘With you here, I do not think I will fall to that temptation; and the others will not if I don’t.’

  ‘If anything happened to you now, what would become of the expedition?’

 
; ‘Who knows?’

  He spoke with indifference and confidence. Above them, on the terrace, a head appeared over the parapet. Zigguri looked down, and waved.

  ‘All clear up here,’ he called.

  Abonitu nodded. ‘Right. We’re coming up.’

  3

  As the winter evening deepened, various sightings were reported by the look-outs. A man was seen at the other side of Parliament Square, and another some distance off along the Embankment; then three figures were seen, in the direction of Charing Cross, making their way slowly across the river from south to north. It seemed certain that these, at least, must have seen the Hovercraft, drawn up in a flattened arc beneath the terrace, but they gave no sign. Looking through Abonitu’s glasses, Andrew saw that one of them was limping. Two of them carried what looked like rough wooden clubs; the limping man had a bow fastened on his back and a form of quiver at his side containing arrows.

  That night, Abonitu placed a strong guard, both on the building and the Hovercraft. Andrew had a watch himself, and in the small hours stood gazing eastwards over the moonlit roofs of the city. He had looked that way before, and at such a time of night, and the differences were not great. The streets had been quiet and empty then, the street lamps scarcely visible under the moon’s overarching brightness. But great enough: nothing could hide the desolation and death. The soft lambent light, falling on the harshness of snow and ice, magnified rather than diminished them.

  The morning came peacefully. That day Abonitu consolidated their position, erecting barricades where necessary, and sent two of the Hovercraft on patrol down river. They reported some signs of life among the wharves alongside the Pool of London, where three or four ships, one of them gutted by fire, were frozen into the ice, and the sight of smoke in various places, both north and south of the river. From time to time, during the day, figures were seen from the camp, but their movements had no apparent purpose. Inside the camp, the atmosphere was peaceful and relaxed. But Abonitu did not relax the strict security arrangements, and mounted the same heavy guard at night. It passed without incident.