And I heard a car horn.
When I turned I saw a Rolls, bright yellow, bouncing over the grass. It made a sharp turn and skidded to a halt. The driver leaned out, doffed a leather cap and goggles, and grinned at me. A new scar on his face was livid.
It was Frank, my former husband.
‘Parp, parp!’ he called. My ears were ringing; I could barely hear him. ‘But you never were one for Grahame, were you, Julie? Never mind. Welcome to Darkest England. Anyone need a lift?’
17
INSIDE THE CORDON
Frank told me that when word had got to him that I was on the way in, he had insisted on meeting me in person, ahead of a better equipped force, and here he was. And, if he was to drive me off to some shelter, Ted Lane insisted on accompanying me.
So Lane and I sat in the car side by side, covered in dust and mud, even splashed with blood. I felt extraordinary, grotesque, as if I did not belong. My ears rang too, adding to the sense of unreality. We left the surviving sappers with promises of transport as soon as it could be arranged. Still, I felt my heart would break as we drove away from those men, all so young, so many injured, who had seen their companions die in order that I should fulfil my own mission: a mission of whose nature they could have no clear idea.
Frank told us there was a medical bag in the back of the car. We found it, opened it, drank from a flask of water, wiped our faces and hands, and applied antiseptic to our cuts. Concrete dust scattered from my hair when I shook my head. ‘I must a look a sight.’
‘You look just fine, Miss,’ Ted Lane told me.
It was still very early morning; the countryside was bright and innocent. ‘Is this real, Ted? Was that real? The handlingmachine, the men who fell – Ben Gray—’
He took my hand. ‘It will pass. It always does. But we’re not out of the woods, Miss. This is Martian country. Put it aside for later. Like in a box, tucked deep inside.’
‘Is that how you—’
‘Keep thinking, Miss. Just keep thinking.’
I nodded.
Frank did not look around. I had been married to him; I knew he would understand, without needing details until I was ready. He, for one, was concentrating on the job, of driving.
And meanwhile the Rolls fair rattled along a potholed road, leading us away from the heaped-up war zone behind us – and into a scene that was astonishing for its mundanity, all things considered, given what I had gone through to get this far. This was the English countryside, and on that early May day it was clad in that thick moist sun-drenched green you see nowhere else in the world. I glimpsed dogwood hedges, and houses of ancient-looking stone, and poppies and pimpernels, and thought I saw a yellowhammer, sat on a low twig and lording it over the world. Compared to Berlin – compared to London – it all seemed so old, and unplanned too, with field boundaries that might go back to Celtic times or earlier, buildings that might once have been barns or woodsmen’s shelters now turned into garden stores or gazebos for a new generation of commuters. This was what you got when you had centuries of peace, so many slumbering generations. I had a sudden sense of age, of continuity, from Wat Tyler through Shelley to Darwin, to mention three of my own heroes – an England with a history that had nothing to do with these Martians – and I had a sudden determination that she had to be saved.
But if you looked closer things were far from ordinary. There was no other traffic to be seen on the road along which we sped, for a start. Here and there one would see wreckage – cars driven off the road and abandoned to rust. The most startling sight of that sort, which we saw from a level crossing, was a smashed train. It looked to me as if the locomotive’s boiler had been disrupted by the caress of a Heat-Ray, and then there had been a derailment. The train lay along the line that had carried it; passenger coaches were smashed to matchwood, and freight coaches lay on their backs, rusting wheels in the air, like tremendous cockroaches, upended. It was not the train’s destruction that affected me so much as the fact that it had never been cleared away.
A little later we passed at speed through an area that looked, from afar, as if it had been burned out, for a black dust, like soot, lay over everything, the road itself, the houses, the fields. I would learn from a grim-faced Frank that this was the aftermath of a Black Smoke attack. In the First War the Martians had rendered whole swathes of Surrey lifeless with the stuff. But that substance, evolved on an arid Mars, had been too easily laid by water and rendered into harmless dust. The Martians had tweaked the design – the stuff they had now was still more deadly – and the poison lingered, even in the English damp. The Martians had used that deadly substance sparingly in this war, Frank said, only as a ‘punishment measure’ when they encountered resistance. It was not their aim to exterminate us, after all.
And then, to add to the oddness of the day, there was the peculiar way in which Frank continually inspected the sky.
I noticed detaiclass="underline" the way his shirt collar was worn, the elbows of his jacket rather crudely patched with scraps of leather. That was not Frank’s style; he was a professional man who preferred smartness. And his manner had changed; those upward glances told of a furtiveness, an inner tension. It was only later that he told me in detail of his experiences with the Army during the Martian landings – experiences that inevitably left scars. Still, looking over his shoulder, I could see my exhusband was enjoying the way the car handled.
‘And since when did you own a Rolls Royce?’ I demanded of him. My voice felt muffled in my own shock-blown ears, but I ignored the effect.
‘Ah, if only I did,’ he replied. ‘Not mine; it belongs to the Dowager Lady Bonneville – the big cheese in this neck of the woods, you’ll meet her – or more strictly it passed to her after the death of her husband some years back. Part of a collection.’
We were coming into a small village, unprepossessing, a row of shut-up shops and workers’ cottages surrounded by fields. But it had a rail station, surrounded by rather boxy villas. The rail line itself was lost in green weeds.
‘The widow kept the cars under wraps, so to speak, for some months. The Martians smashed up just about every vehicle they could see in the first hours or days, but these beauties were kept out of sight. Now, of course, they’re proving remarkably useful – although one always has to be discreet.’ We pulled up before a rather dilapidated station-house. ‘Give me a hand.’ He bundled out of the car, glancing again at the sky.
I followed him, as did Ted, sweating, blood smeared on his face and dust staining his crumpled uniform, staying steadfastly at my side.
I saw that the rear wall of the station house had been cut away, to be replaced by a hanging tarpaulin. Frank pulled on a rope, and the tarpaulin lifted, like a stage curtain. ‘Help me, man.’ Ted hurried over to take another length of rope, and I helped too, and we all pulled away.
The tarpaulin lifted to reveal a gutted interior. The window for ticket sales was still there, and a door to a lavatory gaped open, but otherwise the station house had become an impromptu garage. Half of it was occupied by one more vehicle, a small tractor, and there were tool sets, oily rags, and cans of oil and petrol lying around.
Frank waved us out of the way, briskly drove in the Rolls, and hustled out, dragging the tarpaulin down after him.
‘Abracadabra,’ he said dryly. ‘As if it had never been. Looks rather strange, I know, but I think we can rely on the Martians not being au fait just yet with the fine particulars of latenineteenth-century English railway architecture. It’s footslogging it from here to Abbotsdale, I’m afraid, but it’s not very far. Well – nowhere is very far from anywhere else in the Cordon, it’s only twenty miles across, as you’ll know…’