Mandrake by Susan Cooper Read Free Book Online

London, but he wouldn’t listen. If only we’d stayed at home… he was so determined to have a farm.’
    ‘It always surprised me,’ the man’s voice said. ‘Geoffrey was so much the city man.’
    ‘Of course he was. We belonged in London. He was a real Cockney, you know—born in the sound of Bow Bells. He always used to be proud of saying so. And then all of a sudden this mad idea about being a farmer, and leaving the Exchange. And I couldn’t talk him out of it. O God—’
    The voice broke. The man’s hand left its glass, and moved across to grip her wrist reassuringly. It stayed there. ‘You must try to forget it all, Sheila. You mustn’t brood. I knew it wasn’t a good idea for you to go to the funeral.’
    ‘I wouldn’t have minded so much if I’d been able to think of his body in there.’
    ‘Hush,’ the man said.
    ‘I can’t help it, Tom. All in little bits like that, my Geoffrey—’
    Queston choked, feeling a mouthful of beer in his throat like a fist, and caught the eye of the barman. The man raised an eyebrow reprovingly, and began filling a dish with peanuts.
    The woman’s arm remained on the bar with the man’s fingers clasped round it; her other hand came out and the glass disappeared again. She said, gulping: ‘Everything went wrong from the beginning, you know? The weather was wrong all year, and nothing grew properly, and we both hated the country really, it’s so damn dull. Geoff did too, though he wouldn’t admit it. It was the country that killed him in the end, I know it was. They shouldn’t have been harvesting then, or something. He didn’t really understand that combine, it was like a horrible great animal. O Tom, imagine the moment when he slipped—’
    The fingers tightened. ‘Darling, stop it!’
    There was a pause, and then her voice was lower, unemotional. Queston could hardly catch the words. ‘They tried to stop me going out in that field the next day, but I went. There was blood all over the straw. It was dark, not red. I was surprised it wasn’t red. But you could tell it was blood. Like a sort of sacrifice. That’s what I seriously believe, Tom. The land taking a sort of sacrifice, because we shouldn’t have been there. We should have stayed where our roots were.’
    ‘Now you’re going back to London you must stop dreaming up things like that…’ The man’s voice began a long soothing monologue, and Queston finished his sandwiches and went away. Poor little bitch, he thought repentantly as he drove over the Hog’s Back, glancing on either side at the sweeping gold-brown harvested fields. He thought of the dark blood on the stubble. Poor little bitch. ‘A sort of sacrifice—’
     
    The blood seemed at first to be the only connecting link. It was in London, the day before his final departure for the cottage; the builders there had finished rapid over-paid alterations, the furniture was in, he had sent down his clothes and a crate of books. He had settled into his work, and was about to shut the door behind him.
    He spent too long, that last London morning, vainly hunting the memoirs of an eighteenth-century Jesuit whose sharp-eyed meanderings through British Guiana he remembered, dimly, as having once sparked the beginnings of his own ideas. No one had heard of the book; perhaps he had imagined it. Coming out of the last bookshop he was suddenly irritated by the pressing crowds and the cliff-like cold walls of the ubiquitous blocks of flats, still unfinished here and deeply echoing with pile-drivers and drills. Charing Cross Road was a roaring mass of people and cars; the Plan, he reflected, had not been as successful as all that. Reluctantly, he made for the nearest Tube station. It was the simplest means of getting home, though he did not like to be underground.
    He threaded his way to the end of the platform. A train had just hummed and rumbled out, and few people stood round him there. Queston waited, fidgeting. Beside him, a voice said: