Free Mandrake by Susan Cooper Page A

passing crowds, that he flinched from the idea of walking alone into a staring restaurant, before the remote unwelcome of faces that accused him of belonging elsewhere.
    He bought an Evening News from the woman on the corner, walked down to Theobalds Road and found a coffee bar. He remembered the place; he had come there often for lunch when he was young, working on research in the University Library before going abroad. It had been run by Italians then. He used to sit listening to the Milanese babble over the shrieking espresso machine, imagining himself part of their isolation: aboard a foreign ship on a coastless English sea.
    But there were no Italians now. The name of the place had changed from Capri to the Instant Grill, and both waitresses and menu were very English. Queston ate bacon and eggs with a sense of defeat. All the time at the cottage he ate bacon and eggs.
    He flicked through the paper as he ate. The front page was full of London Regional Council election results, and most of the rest devoted to small local news; it was a more in-grown production than he ever remembered before. Then his eye was caught by an editorial headed ‘Homesight’: an odd combination of reporting and comment which he read with mounting alarm.
    The story described, laconically, a murder trial in North Wales. In a remote slate-quarrying community, after a drunken brawl, a villager had killed a man who was passing through the place on his way to Ireland. The man had stopped only for a meal; neither had seen the other before. At the assize court, the villager gave one terse excuse for the murder he had done: the dead man had been pobol dwad , a stranger, and not plant y lle, a man of the place. And the verdict had been Not Guilty.
    Queston looked again at the editorial comment that followed. ‘The verdict, we are sure, would have been the same had this been a London affair. There can be no evil in the oldest right and instinct of man; his guardianship of his home. Where a man’s roots are, there is his heart, and there his first duty. As the Ministry of Planning spokesman said in evidence: “Guard thine own” is no light cry.’
    The Ministry of Planning? He stared at the words, his mind suddenly full of a loud discordant noise. What was happening in this country? There must be more to the story than they had here, clearly: the stranger must have attacked the villager’s home, or family; done something, at any rate, to balance the business out. But what connexion had Mandrake’s men with a criminal trial? And how could this crazy, obsessive comment get into a reputable newspaper?
    He found himself thinking, with new urgency: the book is vital now. It has to be published, to make people think about what may be happening. There’s no knowing what else the Ministry can stop, but they can’t stop that yet. Everyone can’t have gone mad. There must still be men objective enough to see the dangers of this fantastic deliberate policy of tying people to place, even if they don’t yet know the dreadful force to which they are being made so vulnerable.
    And they would have a chance to know that, too, if they could read his book.
    He sat for a long time gazing into space, counting the lines in the pattern of the wallpaper and trying not to think; until the waitress said in his ear: ‘Can I get you anything else, duck?’
    Queston jumped. ‘What? O—no thanks.’ He paid his bill and went out, still preoccupied. Ten paces away he felt an uneasiness in his hands, a reminder that they had not been empty before; and he realized that he had left the bulky brown-paper package that was his manuscript in the coffee bar. He turned back at once; but at the door he staggered as someone coming out cannoned into him. The man pushed him aside roughly, without pause or apology; his coat whipped at Queston’s legs as he thrust past.
    Queston said protestingly: ‘Hey—’ Then his voice changed, as he saw in the same moment two things: the man,