The Chalk Giants Read Online Free PDF

darkest. In the darkness came wisps and tendrils of mist. They thickened steadily, coiling up from the water in half-seen skeins. The amphitheatre, the level space between cliffs and sea, began to fill. Then the mist rose higher, lapping the tall rock, spilling across the undulating ground above. With the dawn a watery light-burst showed for a time, low down. Shadows were visible, for seconds together; but the fog was not dispelled. Nor did it clear on the following day, or the day after that.
    The colony, if such it had become, worked steadily. Latrine pits were dug, in the dry scree below the cliffs, the house rendered more habitable. Joyce, the artist, rigged movable screens for the windows, replacing the blankets that had hung there; the women cooked and rearranged the stores while Martin Jones made an expedition along the foreshore, God knew to where, returned rowing a boat. They heard his hail out in the mist, rushed down to admire the prize. He seemed well versed in nautical matters, running her up on to the beach and securing her with a rope fixed to a spike driven into a crack in the rock. Stan took his rod to a little spit of land, well out in the mist, where he could be away from the others; Maggie with her brilliant dark-fringed eyes, and Martine, trim in a chunky sweater and neat, tight-fitting jeans. He was unused to sea-angling, but at his second attempt he landed four fine silver fish, Jones pronounced them grayling, and showed how they could be scaled by rubbing a knife-blade from tail to nose. They ate them that night, grilled and fresh, and listened to a tranny blurt out its endlessly worsening news.
    Increasingly it seemed Jones had taken over the leadership of the group. He it was certainly who ordered their days, organizing rota systems for such chores as chopping wood. What little lay about the farmhouse and the barns was rapidly consumed; so he produced from somewhere a creaking handcart, with which he would set off for the headland that closed the bay to the west, return with load after load of bleached, brittle planks. Also he located a spring of fresh water, some half-mile from the farmhouse. It came welling and bubbling out of the cliffs, cold and crystal-clear; and it became Stan’s job to trudge forward and back each morning till the containers were refilled.
    A part of his mind was nearly happy with the turn events had taken. The other thing had, after all, bristled with difficulties. He had no practical experience of lovemaking, but doubted as an engineer whether two bodies would fit together as neatly and automatically as in the paperbacks he had read. Also, what did you say? What could you say to them? To lay one’s hands on the body of another seemed suddenly a monstrous thing; so he was glad in a way the problem was not his, he performed his duties with no complaint and spoke little to the rest. Martine in particular he avoided, lowering his eyes when she came near so as to give no cause for offence. He was realizing how narrow his escape had been. He remembered the rope, and what he had thought he might do, and blushed in the dark for shame.
    But the even pattern into which his days had fallen was not destined to last. It was Martin Jones who brought matters to a head, one pearly, still-grey afternoon. They had taken the boat out, into the drifting mist, to fish the deeper water a little offshore; now sky and land alike were hidden, the vessel slapped and drifted in the void while Stan sat patiently, head down over the butt of the rod, aware of the other’s stare. Jones lolled in the bows, in reefer jacket and an ancient, battered cap; he watched for a time, eyes narrowed, before flicking a cigarette butt overboard. ‘You know, Potts,’ he said pleasantly, ‘I’ve been thinking. The food’s getting a bit down; and there are loads of other places round about. I think it’s time one of us moved out’
    For an instant a thought, as wild as it was absurd, flickered in Stan’s mind. He