Rule Britannia (30 page)

“The trouble is,” said her grandmother, taking not the slightest notice of Emma, “the Americans also speak the tongue that Shakespeare spoke, so the point has rather gone. Unless, of course, one followed it up with something ironic and pretended to be Martha Hubbard at one of her Cultural-Get-Together meetings. And even that would be lost on the inhabitants of the Welsh valleys.”

Mr. Willis had taken off his headphones and was beckoning her to his side. “If you think you’d just be talking to the Welsh valleys you’d be mistaken,” he said. “Those who listen are in high places, many of them, you’d be surprised, on county councils, professors and students, indeed I would say a cross section of the entire population throughout Scotland and Wales and the west country. They are only waiting for a rallying call, and who better than yourself to kindle the flame?”

Mr. Willis, flushed with his own eloquence, seemed to have mixed his metaphors a little, but Mad did not appear to mind. She was evidently enjoying the experience, and even looking forward to hearing herself speak in an unknown language to an audience she could not see and who were unable to applaud.

She smiled down at Mr. Willis from the rickety chair, and he isn’t playing with her at all, thought Emma suddenly, she is playing with him. They’re both seeing who can hoodwink the other longest, and neither of them really believes a word they’re saying.

“One moment, please.” Taffy held up his hand. “Quoting the whole poem would be very effective. It would reach out to a wide circle.” He glanced at Emma, then reached for the pencil and pad. “Scribble down what you remember, and then your grandmother can read it aloud over the air,” he said.

“That’s no good,” shrugged Mad. “I haven’t got my specs.”

“Borrow mine, lady, borrow mine.” He whipped off his glasses and handed them to her with a flourish. The blue eyes without them looked naked, pale.

Mad placed them upon her own face, frowned, and was instantly transformed into another being, someone older, evil, alien. That is what happens to people, Emma thought, bewildered, when they lose their identity, when they stop being themselves; it happens to individuals when they fall in love with the wrong person, the personality doesn’t develop, it gets swamped, and it happens to communities, to villages, to countries under invasion, however benign the intention, however all-embracing the ultimate design.

“Take them off,” said Emma quickly. “You look ghastly.”

Mad turned her head and stared at her through the borrowed spectacles, and it was as though she, Emma, had become a child again, about the age of Ben, and the grandmother she knew and loved, by putting greasepaint on her face and wearing a wig, had damaged or even destroyed the self within. Mad laughed, removed the offending glasses and gave them back to the Welshman.

“I don’t mind what I look like,” she said. “The trouble is I can’t see through them. They were completely blurred.”

And yet, Emma thought as Mr. Willis replaced them, on his face they are right, they somehow protect him, his eyes just now without them were like an animal, trapped.

“You’ll have to teach me the poem,” said Mad. “Is it very long?”

“Much too long,” Emma replied, “and not really appropriate. We did it for A level at school, and I can only remember lines here and there.”

“Such as?”

Such as… Emma tried to think. Written in London, 1802, what was Wordsworth doing in London, and was it something to do with the Peace of Amiens or war breaking out again or what? All the lines were jumbled together in memory. Aloud, she quoted,

She paused, concentrating hard. Blank, blank, blank in her mind. Wait a minute.

And there was something later on, in another sonnet, about a tyrant, how did it go?

Free… Yes, but the bit about freedom came from an earlier sonnet.

It was something to do with the Napoleonic wars, must have been, because there was that Anticipation sonnet which came later on:

Yes, that was the bit which she used to enjoy when they had to recite it in class, because of the grandames’ pleasure in your noise, it always suggested Mad laughing at the boys.

Phew! It was no good. The whole thing was hopelessly jumbled. No wonder Mr. Willis was exchanging glances with Mad and trying to hide his smile.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I was simply quoting at random from various sonnets.” She turned to her grandmother. “You’d best give up the idea anyway,” she added.

“I have,” replied Mad briefly. “You’ve done my work for me.”

“What do you mean?”

Mad nodded at Mr. Willis. “Show her.”

The Welshman laid bare the floorboard close at hand. There was a small tape-recorder among the rest of the paraphernalia. The tape was still running. He switched it off.

“You may have thought yourself back in the schoolroom,” he told her, “but I did not. You were staring at the ceiling in such concentration that you never noticed when I signaled to your grandmother and pointed to my little box of tricks, and she gestured in the affirmative. Now we have your voice recorded, and no one will ever be the wiser when they listen except that it is a young voice transmitting the stirring message. I shall send it out on the air later tonight.”

Wizard and witch looked at her, and laughed.

“You can’t,” exploded Emma. “It wouldn’t be fair, I never agreed to it, and the lines are all mixed up, they didn’t make sense.”

“On the contrary, they made great sense. They were very inspiring,” he said. “Would you like me to play it back?”

“No.” Emma rose to her feet and paced up and down the wooden floor. “Mad,” she pleaded, “you must prevent it. Please make him give you the tape and we can destroy it.”

“Nonsense,” said Mad firmly. “Taffy’s perfectly right, the lines were most inspiring, and all the better for the purpose by being quoted out of order.” She rose from the rickety chair and straightened her Chairman Mao cap. “You were very good, darling,” she said generously, “far better than I should have been. I never could speak verse. You must let us know, Taffy, what sort of effect it has upon your Celtic masses and all the other people underground. Come on, Em, Dottie will be wondering where on earth we’ve got to.”

She made a move towards the door. Mr. Willis, however, had once more placed the headphones over his ears. His expression was intent, he was listening hard.

“Wait one moment,” he said hastily. “There is something coming through. It’s a little confusing…”

His face changed to astonishment. He tilted the headphones and Emma could hear the muffled voice coming through. Whoever it was spoke rapidly, seeming excited, and then as suddenly it faded, was cut. All was silent again. Mr. Willis turned to his visitors, genuine bewilderment in the bright eyes behind the spectacles.

“It wasn’t expected,” he said, “no one was warned. But on the whole, all things considered, it must work to our advantage and puzzle the enemy, which is what we are after, isn’t it?”

“If we knew what you were talking about, we might agree,” Mad replied.

Mr. Willis stared. The news had evidently so dumbfounded him that he had forgotten he was one step ahead with information.

“Why, the boyos have landed,” he said, “one in Scotland, the other in Wales.”

Now it was the turn of Emma and her grandmother to stare, first at Mr. Willis and then at one another. How could Joe and Terry have possibly escaped from the Isles of Scilly and be landing in the west and north? Did it mean there had been some sort of mass escape, and their many companions were free as well?

“Who helped them, how did it happen?” asked Emma.

Mr. Willis shook his head. “No details,” he said. “Later, perhaps. Just the bare facts that both boys have landed, and want nothing for themselves, no titles, no honors, no pushing themselves forward, they just want to serve, and band themselves together with other youngsters throughout the country to keep the land free. It’s time, after all, they showed some activity and let us older folk sit back.” He looked across at Emma. “Your tape may be heard by princes, think of it,” he said. “Young Andrew in Scotland and Charlie boy in Wales. You must find it distinctly encouraging, to say the least of it. Put fire into both their bellies, that it will.”

Mr. Willis insisted on walking back with them through the wood. He would take no denial. He carried an old ship’s lantern which glowed and flickered as he swung it from side to side, plodding a few steps ahead of them all the while. He parted from them at the far end of the wood, where the hedge bordered on their own domain.

“The transmission will go out at 21:30 hours,” he told Emma. “First your own voice speaking, then the translation I shall make in the two languages, for it’s a pity, after all, not to send it out in all three. I have a busy night ahead of me. Sleep soundly, ladies.”

Looking back over her shoulder Emma watched the flickering lantern disappear, engulfed, all of a sudden, by the ghostly line of trees. She put out her hand and clung to her grandmother’s arm.

“Is it true?” she whispered.

“Is what true?” countered Mad.

“Everything. Transmissions on the radio, voices on the air, the princes landing. Or was it all a hoax just to impress?”

Mad opened the garden gate and they passed inside. “I don’t know,” she said. “But when we looked through the window he had the earphones over his head and a gun by his side. He didn’t expect us. It wasn’t rehearsed.”

The house stood out before them, dependable, solid, everything about it homely and safe, lacking only Joe and Terry to give final assurance.

“Then you do believe him?” Emma asked.

“I neither believe nor disbelieve,” Mad answered. “Taffy’s a mountebank, so am I. Rogues, vagabonds, strolling players, we’re all alike. Politicians too. The original mountebank was the Pied Piper, who first of all led the rats out of town, and then the children. Who follows depends upon the tune.”

She slid the doors into the porch and walked up the steps through to the hall. Everything was as they had left it. Only Folly had moved and was waiting on the mat, tail slowly wagging, tongue hanging from a salivary jaw.

“I think,” said Emma, “that’s the most immoral thing I’ve ever heard you say. You imply that nothing is ever true, that we are all misled, that each one of us, guilty or innocent, follows some will o’ the wisp and then vanishes off the face of the earth forevermore?”

“That’s right,” Mad replied, patting Folly’s sleek head and submitting to a wet caress.

“In that case…” Emma looked about her, the one candle, left by the faithful Dottie, throwing a doubtful light on familiar things, “why do any of us bother, what’s the point of living, why… why…” she searched desperately for an answer to questions never before put, “why didn’t you just go on acting until you dropped, instead of living here in retirement and adopting the six boys?”

“Ah,” said Mad, kicking off her boots, “that was just a sop to appease my ego. Haven’t I told you I always wanted seven sons? Listen…”

She lifted her head. The silence was broken, as it had not been for several days and nights, by the sound of aircraft passing overhead.

Something was happening. Above them in the air, and out at sea. Gunfire, explosions, depth-charges, all of these things or none of them, they couldn’t tell. Lights flashing on the horizon, lights in the sky. A stench of chemical or oil. No brewing of cocoa this time, no sitting chatting round the kitchen table. They dragged mattresses to the basement and spread them out over the flags, not seeking to rekindle the ashes in the old grate because smoke might attract attention, and the only thing anybody wanted was to stay hidden. Dottie, her back to the wall, a pillow between her and the cold plaster, rocked Ben to sleep. Colin, who at first had shaken from head to foot like someone with high fever, calmed down when Sam hit upon the right solution, which was to stuff his ears with cotton wool and tie a scarf around his eyes.

“It works with animals,” Sam explained. “If a stable catches fire you bandage the horse’s eyes, so it must work with humans too.”

The practical measure diverted attention from the terror outside, and after a while imagination brought its own reward. “I’m a very old man,” said Colin. “I’m a very old man starving in a city where they’ve just had an earthquake,” and he smiled as Emma wrapped a blanket round his shoulders, and took off the bandage covering his eyes, but kept the cotton wool in his ears. Sam himself was preoccupied with the needs of Folly, the squirrel, the pigeon, and a new addition, a very old and quarrelsome rook which had tumbled down the chimney of his and Andy’s room. Andy was on duty at the cellar door, bow in hand, a sheaf of arrows slung across his shoulder. Mad had given him permission.

“If we’re attacked I’ll stand by your side and fight with you,” she said, “and anyway, we’re all together. What a good way to go!”

The thundering of aircraft flying low overhead, the explosions out at sea, and at times the shaking of the walls themselves seemed to threaten not only the roof and the upper floors but the foundations themselves. When this happened Ben stirred in his sleep and clung to Dottie, Colin trembled again, and Andy, with a grinding of teeth and a sigh of exasperation, fixed an arrow at the ready, pointing it at the cellar door and the non-existent foe without. The transistor radio brought no news: the battery was not yet dead, but no voice came from the regional station, nor from any other. Someone spoke from a German source, but nobody understood what he was saying, and a French voice, caught for an instant with the words “
On dit que les associés de l’USUK sont maintenant
…” was instantly jammed.

“The associates of USUK are now”… what?

Emma looked at her grandmother. Mad was asleep. The night wore on, the children creeping closer to the adults, the adults creeping closer to one another, and even Andy finally slumped to his knees and lay with his bow beside him, the arrow-sheaf for pillow.

Ben was the first to awake, belly empty, demanding food. “He’s not meek,” Emma thought, wrenching open her reluctant eyes, “he won’t inherit the earth.” Ben, indeed, was the only one to look round about him with an air of cheerful confidence, having slept well, and because he was black he showed little outward sign of strain or weariness, whereas his white companions looked like little old men, gray with fatigue, bags beneath their eyes. And the adults… Poor Dottie, poor Mad. Old women with no future, humped, chins dropping. And myself, Emma thought, I know how I look too, and how I feel, a jaundiced yellow, streaky hair, a furry tongue, and frightened still.

She glanced at her watch. It had stopped just after three, she had forgotten to wind it. The light was gray, seeping in through the small basement windows. It must be seven, perhaps later. Ben, fumbling with his brief shorts, looked enquiringly at her. She put her fingers to her lips. It didn’t matter about the boys, but Mad and Dottie must sleep on. Ben grinned, and scrambling to the far end of the cellar made water onto a pile of logs. This is what we shall all be doing, she thought, if it continues, if the rumbles in the distance never cease, for, although the house no longer shook, somewhere, higher than it had been during the night, aircraft were flying, but in what direction, whether inland or out to sea, it was impossible to tell.

Ben pottered to and fro, chewing an apple he had found on the shelf where Joe had stored them, yet keeping silent, intuition warning him, perhaps, that this was no ordinary morning, when he could joke and play with Colin, adding new words to his vocabulary. If we none of us had woken up, Emma thought, but only Ben, he would have fed himself on apples and raw beetroot, and played alone, and somehow got through the day on his own until he felt sleepy again, when he would have yawned and tumbled down in a heap by Dottie’s side, the very fact that she was there bringing security. Looking at the sleeping figures, Mad, Dottie, the three boys, the morning light so slowly invading the dark room, she thought that this was how a chamber of the dead must look when discovered by archaeologists after centuries, the only difference being that those who lay buried would be priests or kings or queens, with jewels upon them, and anyone who ventured into the basement of Trevalan after a thousand years would think they had stumbled upon the skeletons of peasants. Folly too, her muzzle between her paws, might be the guardian hound that, cast in gold, guarded Egyptian tombs.

The curious smell, half-chemical, half-oily, which she had noticed the night before seemed more obtrusive now. She got up silently and peered into the narrow court beyond the cellar. In winter abandoned because it had no sun, in summer Dottie used to hang washing out to dry between two posts. A robin was lying dead on the cobbled stones. Something for Sam to bury, she thought with pity, and then… the night had not been cold, why had it died? The light became more gray, more pallid, and wiping the streaky window she saw the sea mist drifting into the court, masking the trees above, and with each passing vapor the smell of oil became stronger, more pungent, coming inland from the sea. Had it happened? Had it started? Had it come at last, the chemical warfare people had warned one another about for years? Was the robin lying there one of the victims? Why were Mad and Dottie and the boys sleeping so heavily? Why did the air itself seem more oppressive in the old basement kitchen than it had been when they all descended to it the night before?

This was it. Not nuclear power but something more silent, more insidious, set loose upon the air from pilotless planes and coming in vaporous form to fall upon the land, to seep into cracks between windows, cracks in walls, down chimneys, up through drains, until breathing was stifled, the good air turned to poison, the heart burst…

“Mad…” Her cry was panic-stricken, beyond control, and Ben, in the midst of his second apple, turned and stared, his eyes rolling. Everybody stirred. Colin sat up as if shot, throwing off his blanket. Andy grasped his bow. Dottie opened her mouth, not to scream, but to let forth a gigantic yawn. Sam stretched out a hand to Folly, who stood on three shaking legs, the fourth tucked up by her haunch, useless as always after hours of immobility. Only Mad slept on, indifferent to the waking world, peaceful, happy, an oilskin under her head for pillow, a car rug, riddled with moth and unseen since the previous winter, across her knees.

“Madam’s worn out,” whispered Dottie, “and no wonder. Let her sleep on.”

The boys were yawning too, stretching themselves, rising to their feet, looking curiously and rather disdainfully at Emma, who had awakened them with her panic cry.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It was the smell of oil, the smell of chemicals. Don’t you notice it? For a moment I thought…”

She didn’t finish her sentence. The smell had gone, or, if not entirely vanished, was no longer strong. The boys sniffed, shrugged. Andy went to the cellar door and opened it. The vapory mist still clung to the trees above and drifted inward, but the air was fresh.

“No sound of aircraft,” he informed them, “no sound of anything. It must be over. Let’s go upstairs and see.”

“Be careful,” warned Emma. “Don’t open doors or windows, we don’t know what’s happened, it might be dangerous.”

She ran after them up the stairs, but they were too quick for her. They had sped through the kitchen and into the hall, and had thrown open the front door and the porch as well. The morning mood was too strong for discipline. Cramped through the night in the basement, hungry, stiff with fear, morning had brought release, the day had come, and a day like any other day, foggy, still, without explosions, without bangs and crashes and other ominous sounds.

“Come back,” Emma called, “come back.”

They disregarded her, running out into the garden, laughing down the garden path, flinging wide the gate.

“Let’s go to the lookout,” shouted Andy. “Let’s see if all those explosions meant more wrecks.”

Emma followed them, with the vain thought that if there should be chemicals there on the plowed field the earth would have turned black, and this would prove to them her fears had been well-founded, but when they came to the wall and looked out across the bay they could see nothing but the drifting mist, harmless, odorless, damp as the stems of grass under their feet. A vehicle came looming across the field towards them and Emma gripped the shoulders of the nearest boy, preparing to turn and run back to the house, for this could be the first of ten, of twenty, of heaven knows how many motorized enemy units, even tanks, and then something familiar about the sound of the engine, about the shape, brought reassurance.

“It’s the Land Rover!” shouted Andy. “It’s the Land Rover from the farm, and Mr. Trembath is driving it.”

The relief, the wonder of it, the snapping of unbearable tension! And as the boys jumped down over the wall, shouting and laughing, she jumped with them, and there was Jack Trembath himself, climbing out of his seat, setting down a crate of milk bottles and a great basket of eggs. The boys were leaping up and down and he was laughing too, although surely greyer, thinner, with stubble all over his chin, and Emma stumbled over the plowed furrow in the ground and threw her arms round him, as if she were Myrtle.

“There, my dear, there,” he said. “You’ve had it rough, we all have, but I put down we’re over the worst of it, things are on the mend. Did you get your windows broken, any slates gone from the roof?”

So many questions to answer, but more important to ask hers first.

“When did you get back, Mr. Trembath? Did you escape? Won’t they be after you again?”

“Escape?” He shook his head. “No suggestion of escape, they were letting us go regular, forty or fifty at a time, no reason given, just dumped out on the road and told to hoof it.”

“They flew you in, then, by helicopter, to the mainland?”

He stared at her. “Mainland? We were never off it. They had us packed like peas in a pod inside Lanhydrock, guarded, of course, but I don’t know what the National Trust will say when they go inside the mansion to clean up after us.” He grinned, and began handing out the milk bottles to the four boys. “Mixed bunch we were, I can tell you that. Farmers, dockers, lawyers, clay-workers, the odd parson or two, doctors—yes, your Dr. Summers was there—each one of us hauled in to be questioned and saying nothing, I can tell you. It was the good humor that broke the buggers, nothing else. If we’d turned nasty they’d have had us there still.”

The boys were drinking the milk, spilling half of it, the creamy froth running down Ben’s chin.

“I don’t understand,” said Emma, bewildered. “We were told all the prisoners were being held on the Scilly Isles.”

“Not us, my dear, not us. There may have been others, I wouldn’t know about that. Anyway, they let us go last evening, as I was saying, and your two were in fine fettle. The doctor is only waiting for transport to get Terry to hospital to have his plaster off, and something put in the heel of a shoe. You’ll have ’em home today.”

He gave Emma a bottle of milk. “Go on,” he said, “drink it, you’ve been living on short commons for the past day or two, according to what Peggy and Myrtle told me when I got back. And what old boy Willis told me too this morning when he arrived to give a hand, not knowing I’d be there. Ah, that reminds me.” He fumbled in his pocket and brought out a small object sealed in an envelope. “For you,” he said, “with his compliments. It seems he’s had enough of it for the time being and is packing up and moving on. Wouldn’t say where, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s off and out of his shack by this evening. Peggy told me he’d been very helpful, she and Mick and Myrtle couldn’t have managed without him, and yet… Well, it doesn’t sound kind, but he made her feel uncomfortable, she said.”

Uncomfortable, yes. But we couldn’t have done without him… Emma looked at Andy, who was tilting his head back, and like Ben the milk was running down his chin. He was standing on the plowed furrow where he had shot the corporal dead.

“Mr. Trembath,” she said, one hand clutching the packet he had given her and the other holding the milk bottle, “if the commandos have let everyone go and aren’t holding men in detention any longer, what was going on last night? Why all the gunfire and aircraft and explosions?”

“Submarine in the bay, so Mr. Willis said. Unidentified. The Yanks were letting off depth charges. He got this off his homemade radio.”

Emma handed the milk bottle to Ben, who was grabbing for it. “I rather doubt,” she said, “if you can believe everything Mr. Willis tells you.”

“Pinch of salt? I reckon you’re right. But submarine or no submarine, something’s shifted them. They’ve stripped the camp and gone to St. Mawgan to take off. It seems what we started down here in Cornwall is spreading all through the country, and into the cities, and the ordinary folk digging in their toes and saying they don’t want to be Yankee-ridden or government-ridden, so the troops will be needed further up the line, I reckon—London and the Midlands, I shouldn’t wonder. Maybe we in the west are too small beer for them to bother with right now. Anyway, we’re free of ’em. No more roadblocks, no more barbed wire, no more rules and regulations. You’ll find your water will have been turned on, and your electricity too, and the telephone back. How long for we don’t know, but at least it’s a breathing space. Tell me, is your grandmother all right? How did she stand the strain?”