There was quite a guest list for dinner, I learned as we sat down: a mayor or two, a priel of town councillors, a senior bobby with his jacket unbuttoned, the Vicar whose broken spectacles had been fixed by a bit of tape, Frank who had become the local doctor. Bob Fairfield German friend, the Feldwebelleutnant already forgotten – local potentates all. The most significant absentees, with places set for them at the farmhouse’s long table, were the Dowager Lady Bonneville, lady of the manor, but she sent a boy with a note to say that her gout was troubling her, and the postmaster, a fellow called Cattermole, who sent no note, and whose empty place, I noticed, went unremarked.
The meal was a kind of buffet, essentially cold meat – rabbit – and potatoes, washed down with a couple of bottles of the village’s diminishing communal stock of wine, and there was some chatter about how a Zepp might be persuaded to drop a crate or two to replenish the cellars – but none of that Teutonic hock, thank you! – and our tame German soldier laughed politely. But anyhow the consensus seemed to be that if any luxury were to be dropped it ought to be cigarettes; the lack of tobacco was a persistent theme of the conversation.
The guests talked business of a sort, of progress on various communal projects. I spoke a little to Lieutenant-Colonel Fairfield. He was interested in details of the Trench and other military works, of which he had heard by wireless, but none of which, of course, he had seen for himself, having been stranded inside the Cordon since the day the Martians had landed.
Ted Lane seemed to be doing all right in this company. His Mersey accent alone was a curiosity here. For myself I felt oddly bewildered, oddly out of place – as if none of this was real – as if the only reality, in fact, was that peculiarly empty place at the table where the postmaster should have been sitting.
At dessert, Mrs Tritton somewhat bossily rearranged our seating places to mix up the conversation, and I found myself was there with his whose name I had sitting next to the hostess herself, as I struggled to fork down stewed summer fruit.
There had been mention of a blood bank which Frank was maintaining with the help of his friend Verity Bliss, who turned out to be a VAD. ‘Now Mrs Tritton brought this up. ‘You must call by in the morning, my dear,’ she told me. ‘We all make our donations – you get such a feeling of satisfaction to know you may help save someone’s life…
‘You’ll find things aren’t so bad here – well, I suppose you’re as stuck here as the rest of us, aren’t you? I was surprised how many of the soldiers are the urban sort – maybe I should have expected it. They have had trouble fitting in. Some of them, you know, they’ve seen men killed, but slaughter a sheep or a cow in front of them… Of course we have these Martians stomping around. Oddly, they seem to be amused to watch the soldiers when they drill, as if we’re clever animals. Like trained monkeys…
‘And it’s still England, of course. In some ways it’s been something of a pleasure to discard some of the new ways and go back to our roots. There’s no government interference – no income tax! And with no foreign imports we’ve been thrown back on the way it was for our grandfathers. Why, we’ll probably start speaking the old dialect again…’
As Mildred rambled on in this way, and as I half-listened to other conversations at the table, I gathered glimpses of life within the Cordon. There was a regular trickle of suicides; not everyone was so jolly, it seemed, as these dinner-party guests. There could be visitors, some welcome – like doctors, parachuted in from outside or sent through the Trench as I had come – and some not. There had even been adventurers, mostly from overseas, out to ‘bag a Martian’ as one might bag a lion in the Congo. They were rarely seen again. And crime and punishment, ever necessary, was run on a ‘common sense’ basis, according to Mildred, in the absence of the usual ‘chain of command’ of the police and the courts. Later I heard of a case of a man, a would-be rapist, left staked out for the Martians. I had no way of verifying the story; it struck me as authentic… ‘Do you hunt?’
The non sequitur threw me; I had no chance to reply. ‘You must come,’ she said. ‘Especially in the winter. There’s nothing like it. You’re up in the morning mists, and off on the gallop. The cries of the hounds echoing, and then the hard riding, the eager horse under you – and then back home, hot and exercised, for a bath, a nap, and an evening of convivial conversation at a decent dinner party…’ She seemed lost in memories. Then she grinned. ‘Better than life as a clerk in some office, eh?’
As soon as I could I made my apologies, pleading tiredness – which was half the truth, at least.
But Frank caught me on the way out. ‘Well, now you’ve met the Vigilance Committee, or most of ‘em.’
‘Local worthies, all self-selected. Not much democracy, I imagine?’
‘Somebody has to do it, Julie. Implement the rationing, for instance. There were cases of cannibalism, you know, in the aftermath of the First War. Can’t have that. Oh! I recognise that expression. I can see your scepticism. Typical reaction from you, Julie! I can’t admit there aren’t a few of us who don’t enjoy the chance to lord it over the rest. I’m just doing my best. But you must try to fit in.’
‘“Fit in”?’
And he urged me to visit Verity in the morning for my blood donation; she had been given the use of one of the pubs to run the operation, for it had a cool cellar.
‘A blood bank,’ I said mildly. ‘I’m surprised it’s a priority in a population as small as this. It’s not a war zone – not an active one…’
He mumbled something about needing to cope with infrequent but traumatic injuries, then rather stumbled to a halt. Maybe he saw the suspicions gathering in my head before I was sure of them myself. ‘Just do it,’ he said, more harshly. ‘It’s rather the rule. We have to live with these people, Julie. We have no choice.’
‘I need to see Albert Cook,’ I said bluntly. ‘Frank, it’s vitally important.’
‘So is survival.’ And he returned to the party.
20
VERITY BLISS
The next morning I called early at the blood bank pub, the White Hart – open for business in the legal hours, a sign claimed, but no beer!
Verity Bliss was there, opening up and giving the step a perfunctory sweep. She wore a kind of coverall, sturdy and practical in drab green, perhaps a farm worker’s garment. Her hair was cut even shorter than mine.
She eyed me frankly. I introduced myself, offered a hand which was shaken.
She said, ‘Your ex-husband told me you were here – warned me you might be coming to see me.’ She smiled, but it was a wary expression. ‘He said I needed to drag you from your bed if you didn’t volunteer.’
‘I thought it was expected. What one does in this village.’
She looked at me openly. I immediately sensed there was a communication between us, under the surface. ‘Look – no matter what our blessed Vigilance Committee says, whether you donate or not is up to you.’
‘Why don’t you show me this blood bank?’
She thought that over, and nodded.
The pub’s cellar was reached by a trapdoor and shallow wooden steps; Verity turned on an oil lamp which gave flickering light. With walls of flint, and I guessed that the use of those glistening nodules here was a sign of age and not affectation, the place was indeed cool, even in midsummer. Much of the space was given over to racks that looked as if they might have once held wine bottles. Now they held flasks, slim, tall – each about the size of a wine bottle, in fact, but without the neck – and fashioned of a silvery metal.