‘You’re right, of course. I think I’m here to attach a kind of legitimacy to the enterprise. I’m a symbol of my husband. Silly fool,’ she said again, savagely. ‘I heard that Lady Stent, the Astronomer Royal’s widow, refused to have anything to do with it. But that may be just rumour. Few people refuse their duty these days.’
The matron returned and briskly told me I was free to go, though I might experience symptoms such as mild nausea for a while and I should ‘go easy’. There would be no more long distance travel that day.
Otherwise I was free to wander. After so many days in company that was mostly male and exclusively military, I could think of nothing better than to escape. It was a pleasant May evening, even if it was a Monday, and I itched to walk. Marina agreed to accompany me. But my night off took some negotiating by telephone with Lieutenant Gray – I still did not have the right papers. We worked out a kind of deal. Shortly afterwards a taxi-cab pulled up outside the hospital, with a single passenger: Ted Lane. The sergeant’s brief, from Gray, was to keep a discreet watch on us for the evening: ‘That man will do anything to get out of buying a round,’ Lane grumbled. But he was cheerful enough, and I trusted his competence as much as Gray evidently did.
Since the cab was paid for, we used it to take a tour of the city, seeing the dockyard and the harbour, which, as when I had seen it before with Philip Parris, bristled with fighting ships. Then we were dropped in the Commercial Road, and took a stroll, with Gray tailing us at a discreet distance. At that it was easy to lose him in the crowd, for there was plenty of khaki about, as well as Navy blue. The other predominant colour seemed to be black. Marina told me that black was something of a fashion now. ‘As if we’re all back in Victoria’s day,’ she said gloomily.
Another striking difference from Paris or Berlin was the lack of motor traffic on the streets: a few omnibuses and ambulances, police cars and military vehicles, only a handful of taxi-cabs and private motor-cars. On the other hand there was a flood of horse-drawn traffic, which brought with it the straw and manure and an earthy reek that had been lost from the streets of Britain since before the First Martian War. It was all down to a shortage of petrol, Marina said – that and a general discouragement to use motorised vehicles, which attracted Martians.
In the city itself we saw little of the defences of Portsmouth.
I did spot searchlights and gun emplacements; I learned that there were rings of guns five and ten miles from the city centre, and others placed around the docks area, with anti-aircraft installations and lamps. And I saw the mark of Martian activities past: the careless splash of brick and concrete and glass, the brush of the Heat-Ray.
Portsmouth’s busiest shopping street looked barren compared to Berlin’s meanest, I thought. Every food store had a queue outside it, a line of patient men and women and a few children, their clothes drab and well-worn, all clutching empty baskets and pink scraps of card that proved to be ration papers.
You would see servicemen in the lines– you could tell by the shabby greatcoats they wore or by their battered military caps.
Some were evidently wounded internally rather than externally, like poor Walter. You came to recognise a kind of nervousness, a shaking, a turning away of the head.
In search of happier sights I looked for bookshops, but there was a shortage of paper, among other essentials, and I found only second-hand stores, or rows of trashy American thrillers.
Burroughs’s sagas of human heroes biffing the Martians on their home soil seemed to be selling well – alongside, ironically, a new, cheap edition of Walter’s Narrative. The only newspaper widely available was the National Bulletin, a worthless government rag started in Marvin’s final days. We stopped at a small restaurant where I ordered an omelette with mushrooms and fresh-baked bread, accompanied by sweet tea. It was plain but nourishing food. Even so the prices were exorbitantly high, I thought. Then we went in search of entertainment: not easy to find.
Most posters you saw, rather than advertising the films or the shows, were of the uplifting, instructional or hectoring kind:
or
or
This last below a stern portrait of Churchill.
The theatres were running sentimental shows such as revivals of ‘Tommy Atkins’ and ‘In Time of War’. The audiences thronging outside the theatre doors seemed keen enough, but it all seemed a little desperate to us, and we wandered on, arm in arm. At about nine o’clock there was a new rush of people, and I gathered that a work shift had ended. Among them were munitions workers from the new factories, all women, their hair and skin discoloured orange and yellow from the toxic materials they habitually handled. These ‘canaries’ seemed intent on drinking as much as possible as rapidly as possible, and for all the moral strictures of our new England there seemed no shortage of cheap alcohol in the city that night.
Marina was amused to see them. ‘Funny how old Marvin always railed against the suffragettes. Now his successors need women to fight their war. Still haven’t given us the vote, however. Not that that means much nowadays – no elections since 1911—’
‘What about people’s rights?’
‘Responsibilities trump rights, for the time being. That’s the argument.’ She shrugged. ‘Who am I to argue? The Martians are here.’
The canaries deserved their entertainment, but we had had enough. We summoned Lane, our patient shadow, and the three of us took a horse-drawn chaise to our hotel.
Oddly enough I felt satisfied to be back in England, grim and war-obsessed as it was. Berlin, immersed in its eternal politicking and war-making as if the Martians had never come, and Paris, obsessing over its own humiliations, seemed irrelevant now, a distraction. As Marina had said, the Martians were here, in England; here was reality, here was where the history of all mankind pivoted. And here was I, engaged. A rare burst of idealism for me, you might think! And it was not to be rewarded.
I did not sleep well. I felt somewhat nauseous, and the sites of the various injections I had itched or ached. The vagueness of my mission concerned me, and occupied my waking thoughts.
I need not have wasted the brain power. For when the military car came in the morning to bring me, Marina Ogilvy, Ben Gray and Ted Lane to a poky office in HMNB Portsmouth, Eric Eden quickly disabused me of the notion that my mission had anything to do with communication at all.
9
A SECRET ASSIGNMENT
‘After all,’ Eric Eden said cheerfully as he poured us all some rather terrible coffee, ‘what would be the point, if you think about it? Would we have paused if the Tasmanians had insisted on telling us their theories of the universe as we worked them to extinction?’
Gray, Lane, Marina and I sat on uncomfortable upright chairs before a desk, behind which Eden sat at ease. This was a Royal Navy briefing room, if a small one; there were maps of seas and oceans on the walls, as well as the customary portrait of Lord Nelson – and, almost as an afterthought, a map of southern England with the Martian position overlaid in glaring red ink. The desk top was empty save for a clutter of stationery, and my own leather satchel.
Eden’s face bore scars. This was a relic of his heroism of Wormwood Scrubs, I would learn much later.
‘We used to debate all this at school,’ Gray said now. ‘The morality of empire.’