Read Online The Crack by Emma Tennant - Free Book Online

– Waters gritted his teeth as he toiled on, putting the finishing touches to the vehicle which would carry them safely across.
    He had heard the news of the Crack from his son’s transistor radio. A sinister, chilling woman’s voice had announced after hours of vacuous pop music:
    The river is exhausted, the banks are wide,
A new life for women on the Other Side.
    And he had risen from his trance of fear at the foot of the new Nash Acropolis to find that his mission awaited him and he might well be too late for it!
    Not that Waters saw himself as a saviour. But after all his father had fought in the Spanish Civil War. His great-uncle had gone to Russia in 1919 and come back with an entirelynew life-style, freeing his butler and housemaids from serfdom. An ancestor on his mother’s side had been a Tolpuddle martyr. It was clearly Waters’s duty, as the revolutionary intellectual he had trained himself to be, to reach the masses and show them the light.
    The balloon was nearly ready. Life-jackets from the crashed Jumbo provided ballast. Dead stewardesses’ skirts, stitched together by the patient Mrs Waters, waited for the wind. The body of the vessel, which had caused the most trouble, was made up out of carefully assembled portions of fuselage. A kitbox in the pilot’s cabin had supplied glue and nails.
    â€˜It’s nice to think,’ Waters remarked as he worked happily, ‘that the simple necessity – the nail, the pot of glue – is still to be found on board one of these giants of a technological age. And, thanks to these early inventions, we shall soon be airborne.’
    â€˜There’s no wind,’ Waters’s son pointed out.
    Little enthusiasm had been shown by the family for the expedition. Even Waters’s wife, with all the blandishments of a new life for women on the other side, had shown a stubborn refusal to look optimistically into the future.
    â€˜Pessimism of the will, optimism of the intellect, darling,’ Waters breezed. ‘I only hope that when we get there we won’t find ourselves too hopelessly individualistic.’
    Waters refrained from voicing his real fears. After all, if they found fascism on the other side they could always get into the balloon and take off again. But he knew he had to fight the Robinson Crusoe in him. It would be only too easy to settle down here in Regent’s Park, welcome the odd lame duck who had failed to get there to join their commune, and be out of the main course of history altogether. And then who would remember him? Sweating, he worked on.
    It seemed as if providence was on their side. After twenty-four hours of a brown, windless sky, dispelled a little by the rays of the sun but sluggish and humid to the point of being unbearable, a delightful little breeze got up just as the balloon was completed.
    He lit a fire from driftwood and the Cardin skirts filled out with hot air and billowed proudly. As the wind grew in forcethe vehicle moved slightly on the ground, as if impatient to be off. Waters stood back and smiled. He turned to his family, who were sitting in attitudes of dejection amongst the crushed tulips. The wind tugged at their clothes and moaned in the fallen masonry of the Nash terraces.
    â€˜That’s what I heard before,’ Waters pronounced. ‘That great rushing sound. Remember?’
    He knew as he spoke that the rushing sound had been something terrible and supernatural, and not the wind at all – but again there was no point in encouraging despondency. Everything should seem as normal as possible.
    With resigned, defeated expressions the Waters family climbed aboard the balloon. The wind had reached gale force by now. Waters, with the gay air of a paterfamilias at a coconut stall, threw out a handful of life-jackets.
    The balloon rose with a sudden life of its own.
    Several of the children and step-children gave cries of delight. Waters smiled kindly. It was almost too