Quatermass by Nigel Kneale Page A

me now, he had said to himself. A responsibility I didn’t ask for, didn’t want, at my age stuck with a mere child. Give it time, we’ll get to know each other, she’ll have to fit in with my ways. He felt little in common with her. “She’s a close one, young lassie,” Maire had said, and he had agreed. She appeared not to grieve for her parents. Callous, he had thought. Only afterwards he recognized doing the same himself. Long years before when his wife died, Hettie’s mother’s mother. He had hidden himself in his work. But Hettie had no work to hide in so she turned stony. Perhaps she had cried on her own. Then one day she came to his room. She dawdled. She must have wanted to talk but he did not. He was in the middle of an argument. On paper. A fascinating dialogue with old colleagues. He couldn’t break off. He was impatient with her. Next morning she had gone.
    “She looks nice,” said Sarah.
    Debbie grabbed the photograph. “Can I have it?” she asked.
    Quatermass nodded.
    “Does she live in your house?”
    “Sometimes,” he said.
    Quatermass discovered a ravenous appetite. It was a long time since he had eaten.
    Barley bread and soup, potatoes and cabbage, some stewed fruit that Clare served from a rough pipkin. Probably she had made the pipkin too.
    Little Debbie was staring at him.
    “You eat a lot.”
    “Well, I’m hungry,” he said, “and it’s good.” He passed his bowl for another helping.
    “Are old men always greedy?” Debbie asked.
    He did not look at her parents’ faces, only at hers. Round eyes, wanting to know.
    “Always,” he said. “They’ve tasted so many things in their lives they know which are best.”
    Debbie nodded. She thought that was reasonable.
    A jar in the middle of the table kept catching his eye. There were flowers in it but there was something alien about it that the flowers could not overcome. It was a squat earthenware thing with an impressed pattern of zigzag lines.
    “That jar,” he said to Clare at last. “You didn’t make it?”
    “No,” she said, and smiled.
    “Mummy dug it up,” said Sarah.
    Then he knew. “It’s a beaker, isn’t it?”
    Clare nodded. “A beaker made by the Beaker Folk. Five thousand years old, give or take a few.”
    He stroked the ribbed surface. “It’s perfect.”
    “Not bad. Whoever made it must have been pleased,” she said. “It should have gone to a museum but they burned the museum down.”
    “Where did you find it?”
    “In the field behind here.” Then she laughed. “Oh, I wasn’t digging potatoes, not that time. I’m trained, you see. It was going to be my work but . . . the way things are.”
    The gone days.
    “I’m lucky,” she said. “I can keep my hand in. There’s a Neolithic burial ground out there. And our stone circle. Shall I show you?”
    Afterwards Kapp went back to the observatory for the equipment check. It might take many hours but it would have to be done. Quatermass could not help. Not yet.
    He went with Clare to the mound.
    The two little girls ran ahead with Puppy, playing a version of hide-and-seek round the standing stones. It seemed to be the dog’s invention as much as the squealing children’s.
    The stones were not large. There were less than a dozen altogether, and the biggest was not five feet high. They were tilted like crooked teeth in a mouth. One lay flat. Beneath the crusts of lichen most showed signs of ancient handiwork, some shaping and smoothing. A few had a touch of grotesquely human form, the merest suggestion of a head on a crooked body.
    “The locals used to call them the Stumpy Men,” said Clare.
    That was usual. Dancing Men, Seven Sleepers, knights, ladies, giants. The megalith legends nearly always credited them with having once been magically mobile.
    “They don’t look very athletic,” he said.
    “They go incredibly deep,” said Clare. “I made a test on one.”
    “Find anything?”
    She shook her head. “Some day I’ll do it properly.