The Death of Grass Read online

  ‘I was talking about crops. I think the dairy cattle will have to go, anyway. They take up more land than they’re worth.’

  John shook his head. ‘I can’t imagine the valley without cows.’

  ‘The townie’s old illusion,’ David said, ‘of the unchanging countryside. The country changes more than the city does. With the city it’s only a matter of different buildings – bigger maybe, and uglier, but no more than that. When the country changes, it changes in a more fundamental way altogether.’

  ‘We could argue about that,’ John said. ‘After all…’

  David looked over his shoulder. ‘Here’s Ann coming.’ When she was in earshot, he added: ‘And you ask me why I never got married!’

  Ann put an arm on each of their shoulders. ‘What I like about the valley,’ she said, ‘is the high standard of courtly compliments. Do you really want to know why you never married, David?’

  ‘He tells me he’s never had the time,’ John said.

  ‘You’re a hybrid,’ Ann told him. ‘You’re enough of a farmer to know that a wife should be a chattel, but being one of the new-fangled university-trained kind, you have the grace to feel guilty about it.’

  ‘And how do you reckon I would treat my wife,’ David asked, ‘assuming I brought myself to the point of getting one? Yoke her up to the plough when the tractor broke down?’

  ‘It would depend on the wife, I should think – on whether she was able to master you or not.’

  ‘She might yoke you to the plough!’ John commented.

  ‘You will have to find me a nice masterful one, Ann. Surely you’ve got some women friends who could cope with a Westmorland clod?’

  ‘I’ve been discouraged,’ Ann said. ‘Look how hard I used to try, and it never got anywhere.’

  ‘Now, then! They were all either flat-chested and bespectacled, with dirty fingers and a New Statesman tucked behind their left ear; or else dressed in funny-coloured tweeds, nylons, and high-heeled shoes.’

  ‘What about Norma?’

  ‘Norma,’ David said, ‘wanted to see the stallion servicing one of the mares. She thought it would be a highly interesting experience.’

  ‘Well, what’s wrong with that in a farmer’s wife?’

  David said drily: ‘I’ve no idea. But it shocked old Jess when he heard her. We have our rough-and-ready notions of decorum, funny though they may be.’

  ‘It’s just as I said,’ Ann told him. ‘You’re still partly civilized. You’ll be a bachelor all your days.’

  David grinned. ‘What I want to know is – am I going to get Davey to reduce to my own condition of barbarism?’

  John said: ‘Davey is going to be an architect. I want to have some sensible plans to work to in my old age. You should see the monstrosity I’m helping to put up now.’

  ‘Davey will do as he wishes,’ Ann said. ‘I think his present notion is that he’s going to be a mountaineer. What about Mary? Aren’t you going to fight over her?’

  ‘I don’t see Mary as an architect,’ her father said.

  ‘Mary will marry,’ her uncle added, ‘like any woman who’s worth anything.’

  Ann contemplated them. ‘You’re both savages really,’ she observed. ‘I suppose all men are. It’s just that David’s had more of his veneer of civilization chipped off.’

  ‘Now,’ David said, ‘what’s wrong with taking it for granted that a good woman will marry?’

  ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if Davey marries, too,’ Ann said.

  ‘There was a girl in my year at the university,’ David said. ‘She had every one of us beat for theory, and from what I heard she’d been more or less running her father’s farm in Lancashire since she was about fourteen. She didn’t even take her degree. She married an American airman and went back with him to live in Detroit.’

  ‘And therefore,’ Ann observed, ‘take no thought for your daughters, who will inevitably marry American airmen and go and live in Detroit.’

  David smiled slowly. ‘Well, something like that!’

  Ann threw him a look half-tolerant, half-exasperated, but made no further comment. They walked together in silence by the river bank. The air had the lift of May; the sky was blue and white, with clouds browsing slowly across their azure pasture. In the valley, one was always more conscious of the sky, framed as it was by the encircling hills. A shadow sailed across the ground towards them, enveloped them, and yielded again to sunshine.

  ‘This peaceful land,’ Ann said. ‘You are lucky, David.’

  ‘Don’t go back on Sunday,’ he suggested. ‘Stay here. We could do with some extra hands for the potatoes with Luke away sick.’

  ‘My monstrosity calls me,’ John said. ‘And the kids will never do their holiday tasks while they stay here. I’m afraid it’s back to London on schedule.’

  ‘There’s such a richness everywhere. Look at all this, and then think of the poor wretched Chinese.’

  ‘What’s the latest? Did you hear the news before you came out?’

  ‘The Americans are sending more grain ships.’

  ‘Anything from Peking?’

  ‘Nothing official. It’s supposed to be in flames. And at Hong Kong they’ve had to repel attacks across the frontier.’

  ‘A genteel way of putting it,’ John said grimly. ‘Did you ever see those old pictures of the rabbit plagues in Australia? Wire-netting fences ten feet high, and rabbits – hundreds, thousands of rabbits – piled up against them, leap-frogging over each other until in the end either they scaled the fences or the fences went down under their weight. That’s Hong Kong right now, except that it’s not rabbits piled against the fence but human beings.’

  ‘Do you think it’s as bad as that?’ David asked.

  ‘Worse, if anything. The rabbits only advanced under the blind instinct of hunger. Men are intelligent, and because they’re intelligent you have to take sterner measures to stop them. I suppose they’ve got plenty of ammunition for their guns, but it’s certain they won’t have enough.’

  ‘You think Hong Kong will fall?’

  ‘I’m sure it will. The pressure will build up until it has to. They may machine-gun them from the air first, and dive-bomb them and drop napalm on them, but for every one they kill there will be a hundred trekking in from the interior to replace him.’

  ‘Napalm!’ Ann said. ‘Oh, no.’

  ‘What else? It’s that or evacuate, and there aren’t the ships to evacuate the whole of Hong Kong in time.’

  David said: ‘But if they took Hong Kong – there can’t be enough food there to give them three square meals, and then they’re back where they started.’

  ‘Three square meals? Not even one, I shouldn’t think. But what difference does that make? Those people are starving. When you’re in that condition, it’s the next mouthful that you’re willing to commit murder for.’

  ‘And India?’ David asked. ‘And Burma, and all the rest of Asia?’

  ‘God knows. At least, they’ve got some warning. It was the Chinese government’s unwillingness to admit they were faced with a problem they couldn’t master that’s got them in the worst of this mess.’

  Ann said: ‘How did they possibly imagine they could keep it a secret?’

  John shrugged. ‘They had abolished famine by statute – remember? And then, things looked easy at the beginning. They isolated the virus within a month of it hitting the rice-fields. They had it neatly labelled – the Chung-Li virus. All they had to do was to find a way of killing it which didn’t kill the plant. Alternatively, they could breed a virus-resistant strain. And finally, they had no reason to expect the virus would spread so fast.’

  ‘But when the crop had failed so badly?’

  ‘They’d built up stocks against famine – give them credit for that. They thought they could last out until the spring crops were cut. And they couldn’t believe they wouldn’t have beaten the virus by then.’

  ‘The American’s think they’ve got an angle on it.’

/>   ‘They may save the rest of the Far East. They’re too late to save China – and that means Hong Kong.’

  Ann’s eyes were on the hillside, and the two figures clambering up to the summit.

  ‘Little children starving,’ she said. ‘Surely there’s something we can do about it?’

  ‘What?’ John asked. ‘We’re sending food, but it’s a drop in the ocean.’

  ‘And we can talk and laugh and joke,’ she said, ‘in a land as peaceful and rich as this, while that goes on.’

  David said: ‘Not much else we can do, is there, my dear? There were enough people dying in agony every minute before; all this does is multiply it. Death’s the same, whether it’s happening to one or a hundred thousand.’

  She said: ‘I suppose it is.’

  ‘We’ve been lucky,’ David said. ‘A virus could have hit wheat in just the same way.’

  ‘It wouldn’t have had the same effect, though, would it?’ John asked. ‘We don’t depend on wheat in quite the way the Chinese, and Asiatics generally, depend on rice.’

  ‘Bad enough, though. Rationed bread, for a certainty.’

  ‘Rationed bread!’ Ann exclaimed. ‘And in China there are millions fighting for a mouthful of grain.’

  They were silent. Above them, the sun stood in a sector of cloudless sky. The song of a mistle-thrush lifted above the steady comforting undertone of the Lepe.

  ‘Poor devils,’ David said.

  ‘Coming up in the train,’ John observed, ‘there was a man who was explaining, with evident delight, that the Chinks were getting what they deserved for being Communists. But for the presence of the children, I think I would have given him the benefit of my opinion of him.’

  ‘Are we very much better?’ Ann asked. ‘We remember and feel sorry now and then, but the rest of the time we forget, and go about our business as usual.’

  ‘We have to,’ David said. ‘The fellow in the train – I shouldn’t think he gloats all the time. It’s the way we’re made. It’s not so bad as long as we realize how lucky we are.’

  ‘Isn’t it? Didn’t Dives say something like that?’

  They heard, carried on the breeze of early summer, a faint hallooing, and their eyes went up to it. A figure stood outlined against the sky and, as they watched, another clambered up to stand beside it.

  John smiled. ‘Mary first. Stamina told.’

  ‘You mean, age did,’ David said. ‘Let’s give them a wave to show we’ve seen ’em.’

  They waved their arms, and the two specks waved back to them. When they resumed their walk, Ann said:

  ‘As a matter of fact, I think Mary’s decided she’s going to be a doctor.’

  ‘Now, that’s a sensible idea,’ David said. ‘She can always marry another doctor, and set up a joint practice.’

  ‘What,’ John said, ‘– in Detroit?’

  ‘It’s one of the useful arts as David sees them,’ Ann remarked. ‘On a par with being a good cook.’

  David poked into a hole with his stick. ‘Living closer to the simple things as I do,’ he said, ‘I have a better appreciation of them. I put the useful arts first, second, and third. After that it’s all right to start messing about with skyscrapers.’

  ‘Now,’ John said, ‘if you hadn’t had engineers to build a contraption big enough to fit the Ministry of Agriculture into, where would all you farmers be?’

  David did not reply to the jest. Their walk had taken them to a place where, with the river on their left, the path was flanked to the right by swampy ground. David bent down towards a clump of grass, whose culms rose some two feet high. He gave a tug, and two or three stems came out easily.

  ‘Noxious weeds?’ Ann asked.

  David shook his head. ‘Oryzoides, of the genus Leersia, of the tribe Oryzae.’

  ‘Without your botanical background,’ John said, ‘it just doesn’t mean a thing.’

  ‘It’s an uncommon British grass,’ David went on. ‘Very uncommon in these parts – you find it occasionally in the southern counties – Hampshire, Surrey, and so on.’

  ‘The leaves,’ Ann said, ‘– they look as though they’re rotting.’ ‘So are the roots,’ David said. ‘Oryzae includes three genera. Leersia is one and Oryza’s another.’

  ‘They sound like names of progressive females,’ John commented.

  ‘Oryza sativa,’ David said, ‘is rice.’

  ‘Rice!’ said Ann. ‘Then…’

  ‘This is rice grass,’ David said. He pulled a long blade and held it up. It was speckled with patches of darker green centred with brown; the last inch was all brown and deliquescing. ‘And this is the Chung-Li virus.’

  ‘Here,’ John asked, ‘in England?’

  ‘In this green and pleasant land,’ David said. ‘I knew it went for Leersia as well, but I hadn’t expected it to reach so far.’

  Ann stared in fascination at the splotched and putrefying grass. ‘This,’ she said. ‘Just this.’

  David looked across the stretch of marsh to the cornfield beyond.

  ‘Thank God that viruses have selective appetites. That damn thing comes half-way across the world to fasten on this one small clump of grass – perhaps on a few hundred clumps like it in all England.’

  ‘Yes,’ John said, ‘wheat is a grass, too, isn’t it?’

  ‘Wheat,’ David said, ‘and oats and barley and rye – not to mention fodder for the beasts. It’s rough on the Chinese, but it could have been a lot worse.’

  ‘Yes,’ Ann said, ‘it could have been us instead. Isn’t that what you mean? We had forgotten them again. And probably in another five minutes we shall have found some other excuse for forgetting them.’

  David crumpled the grass in his hand, and threw it into the river. It sped away on the swiftly flowing Lepe.

  ‘Nothing else we can do,’ he said.

  2

  Ann, who was dummy, switched the wireless on for the nine o’clock news. John had landed in a three no-trumps contract which they could not possibly make, chiefly to shut out Roger and Olivia, who only wanted thirty for game and rubber. John frowned over his cards.

  Roger Buckley said boisterously: ‘Come on, old boy! What about finessing that nine?’

  Roger was the only one of John’s old Army friends with whom he had kept in close touch. Ann had not cared for him on first acquaintance, and longer experience had not moved her towards anything more than tolerance. She disliked his general air of school-boyish high spirits almost as much as his rarer moments of savage depression, and she disliked still more what she saw as the essential hardness that stood behind both aspects of his outward personality.

  She was reasonably sure that he knew what her feelings were, and discounted them – as he did so many things – as unimportant. In the past, this had added further to her dislike, and but for one thing she would have weaned John away from the friendship.

  The one thing was Olivia. When Roger, fairly soon after her first meeting with him, had brought along this rather large, placid, shy girl, introducing her as his fiancée, Ann had been surprised, but confident that this engagement – the latest of several by John’s report – would never end in marriage. She had been wrong in that. She had befriended Olivia in the first place in anticipation that Roger would leave her stranded, and subsequently so that she could be in a position to protect her when, after marriage, Roger showed his true colours. She had been humiliated to find, by degrees, not only that Olivia continued to enjoy what seemed to be an entirely happy marriage, but also that she herself had come to depend a great deal on Olivia’s warm quiet understanding in her own minor crises. Without liking Roger any more, she was more willing to put up with him on account of Olivia.

  John led a small diamond towards King – Jack in dummy. Olivia placidly set down an eight. John hesitated, and then brought down the Jack. With a triumphant chuckle, Roger dropped the Queen on top of it.

  From the radio, a voice said, in B.B.C. accents:

  ‘The United Nations Eme
rgency Committee on China, in its interim report published to-day, has stated that the lowest possible figure for deaths in the China famine must be set at two hundred million people…’

  Roger said: ‘Dummy looks a bit weak in hearts. I think we might try them out.’

  Ann said: ‘Two hundred million! It’s unbelievable.’

  ‘What’s two hundred million?’ Roger asked. ‘There’s an awful lot of Chinks in China. They’ll breed ’em back again in a couple of generations.’

  Ann had encountered Roger’s cynicism in argument before, and preferred not to do so at this moment. Her mind was engaged with the horrors of her own imagination.

  ‘A further item of the report,’ the announcer’s voice continued, ‘reveals that field tests with Isotope 717 have shown an almost complete control of the Chung-Li virus. The spraying of all rice fields with this isotope is to be carried out as an urgent operation by the newly constituted United Nations Air Relief Wing. Supplies of the isotope are expected to be adequate to cover all the rice fields immediately threatened within a few days, and the remainder within a month.’

  ‘Thank God for that,’ John said.

  ‘When you’ve finished the Magnificat,’ Roger said, ‘you might cover that little heart.’

  In mild protest, Olivia said: ‘Roger!’

  ‘Two hundred million,’ John said. ‘A sizeable monument to human pride and stubbornness. If they’d let our people work on the virus six months earlier, they would have been alive now.’

  ‘Talking of sizeable monuments to human pride,’ Roger said, ‘and since you insist on stalling before you bring that Ace of hearts out, how’s your own little Taj Mahal going? I hear rumours of labour troubles.’

  ‘Is there anything you don’t hear?’

  Roger was Public Relations Officer to the Ministry of Production. He lived in a world of gossip and whitewash that fostered, Ann thought, his natural inhumanity.

  ‘Nothing of importance,’ Roger said. ‘Do you think you’ll get it finished on time?’

  ‘Tell your Minister,’ John said, ‘to tell his colleague that he need have no fears. His plush-lined suite will be ready for him right on the dot.’