Other Earths (24 page)

“No,” our patient said. “I was outside, coming down the ladder from the pickup tube, when some shells hit the dish. Got knocked off the ladder by a couple of splinters. Dashed my head on the side of the hut and grazed my arm.”

Ralph gave him a severe look. “You were outside during a shelling? You silly old fool, Butterworth.”

“The pickup tube needed adjustment. You know how it is—someone had to do it.”

“But not you, George—not you of all people. Well, better get you back to Cranbrook, I suppose. The fellow outside said we can expect flying wings. Don’t expect you’ll be too sorry to miss them, will you?”

“That’s always how it happens,” George said. “Berthas take out our listening posts, then the planes can come in and pick their targets at leisure. You’re right, Ralph, you chaps had best be moving. But you can leave me here—I’ll mend.”

“Not a chance, old man. Can you stand up?”

“Honestly, I’m fine.”

“And we have a duty to look after you, so there’s no point in arguing—right, Wally?”

“Right, sir,” I said.

Ralph offered him a hand, and the seated man moved to stand up. Seeing that he didn’t like having to put weight on his forearm, I wondered if his injury was a bit more serious than just a graze.

Just at that moment there was a distant
whump
that made itself felt more through the ground than the air. It was followed in quick succession by another, a little closer and sharper sounding. Accompanying the sound of the bombs was a mournful droning sound.

“That’s your flying wings,” George said, standing on his own two feet. “They were quick about it this time—give ’em credit. Probably got U-boats watching the station from the sea.”

I heard the boom of our own antiaircraft guns—you can’t mistake a seventy-five millimeter cannon for anything else, once you’ve worked on them. But something told me they were just taking potshots, lobbing shells into the sky in the vain hope of hitting one of those droning, batlike horrors.

“Righty-ho,” said Ralph. “Let’s get you to the ambulance, shall we?”

I moved to the door and opened it again, just enough to admit a sliver of overcast daylight. At that moment another bomb fell, much closer this time. It was only twenty or thirty yards from the barbed wire on the other side of the road, and the blast launched a fan of sand and soil and rubble into the air. I felt as if someone had whacked a cricket bat against the side of my head—for a moment my good ear went pop, and I couldn’t hear anything at all. Suddenly the distance to the ambulance looked immense. My hearing came back in a muffled way, but even so the siren managed to sound more insistent than before, as if it were telling us:
Now you’ll believe me, won’t you?

I closed the door hard and looked back at the other two. “I think it’s a bit risky, sir. They seem to be concentrating the attack around here.”

“We’d best sit tight and hope it passes,” George said. “We’ll be safe enough in here—the hut’s a lot sturdier than it looks.”

“I hope you’re right about that,” Ralph said, sitting down in the other chair. Then he looked at me. “I don’t suppose you have the faintest idea what’s going on, Wally?”

“Not really, sir. I mean, I gather you two know each other, but beyond that . . .”

Ralph said, “George and I go back a long way, although we haven’t clapped eyes on each other in—what? Ten years, easily.”

“I should say,” George said.

“This is Wally Jenkins, by the way. He’s a good sort, although I don’t think he much cares for my driving.” Ralph leaned toward me with a knowing look in his eye, as if he were about to offer me a sweet. “George and I were both interested in music before the war. Very interested, I suppose you might say.”

“I heard you were a composer, sir,” I said.

“As was George here. Great things were expected of Butterworth.”

I racked my brains, but I didn’t think I’d ever heard of anyone called George Butterworth. But, then again, I’d never heard of Ralph Vaughan Williams, and I’d heard from the men at Cranbrook that he really
was
something, that people used to go to concerts of his music before the war.

“Actually,” Ralph went on, “there were three of us back then—George, me, and dear old Gustav.”

“Isn’t that a German name, sir?”

“Gussie was as English as you or I,” George said sternly.

“You did hear what they did to him, didn’t you?” asked Ralph. “Locked away by the Patriotic League for having latent Germanic sympathies. They say he hung himself, but I’ve never been sure about that.”

“It was just a name, for heaven’s sake. He’d stopped calling himself Von Holst. Wasn’t that enough for them?”

“Nothing was ever good enough,” Ralph said.

A brooding silence fell across the room, interrupted only by the occasional muffled explosion from somewhere outside. Ralph turned to me again and said, “George and I were both members of the Folk Music Society. Now, I don’t imagine that means very much to you now. But back then—this is thirty years ago, remember—George and I took to traveling around the country recording songs. We were quite the double act. We had an Edison Bell disc phonograph, one of the very few in the country at the time. A brute of a machine, but at least it provided a talking point, a way of breaking the ice.” He nodded at the equipment on the shelves. “Of course, it meant that we had some basic familiarity with recording apparatus—microphones, cables, that kind of thing.” He paused, and for the first time I saw something close to pain in his otherwise boyish face. “In twenty-three I was shellshocked while on ambulance duties in the Salient. I was no good for battlefield work after that, so I was transferred here, to Dungeness. I was one of the operators, listening to the sounds picked up by these dishes, straining to hear the first faint rumble of an incoming airplane. In the end, I was no good for it, and I had to go back to ambulance work; but I got to know some of the names in charge, and when I heard that dear old Butterworth had been shot . . .”

“I was wounded by a sniper,” George said. “Not the first time, either—took one in the Somme in sixteen. That second was my ticket out of the war, though. But do you know the funny thing? I didn’t want it. What was I going to do—go back to music, with all this still going on?” He shook his head, as if the very idea was as ludicrous as staging a regatta in the English Channel.

“I know how you felt,” said Ralph. “I had so many things unfinished when this all began and so many more things I wanted to do.
Lark Ascending
—that needed more work. That opera I keep talking about—I feel as if Falstaff’s been standing at my shoulder for twenty years, urging me to get
Sir John
down on paper. And another symphony . . . I’ve had the skeleton of the
Pastoral
in my head ever since I was in the Somme, all those years ago.”

“The bugle player,” George said, nodding—he must have heard the story several times.

“They still won’t understand it—they’ll think it’s all lambkins frolicking in meadows.”

“Give them time. They’ll work it out eventually.”

“If I ever write it, old man. That’s the clincher. Find myself a spare half hour here, a spare hour there, but if I’m not scribbling letters to Adeline, I’m filling out requisitions for bandages or spare tires, or organizing raucous singsongs around the mess piano. I
have
tried, but nothing good ever comes of it. Most of the time I can hardly hear the music in my head, let alone think about getting it down on paper.”

“How is Adeline now?” George asked.

“As well as can be expected, old man.”

After a silence George said: “At least we’re doing something useful. That’s what I keep telling myself. Music was a pleasant dream, but now we’ve grown up, and there are other things we have to do—proper, serious things, like listening for enemy airplanes or driving ambulances.” Something seemed to snap in him then, as if he had been waiting a very long time to unburden himself. “The damage is done, Ralph. Even if you gave me a year off to go and sit in some quiet country cottage and scribble, scribble, scribble, it wouldn’t achieve a blessed bit of good. There’s too much noise in my head, noise that won’t just go away because I’m not in France or not in earshot of the coastal guns. Why, there are times when I think the only place I can concentrate is
here
, in this cold little hut, listening to the noises across the sea.”

At that moment the red bulb, which had been dark when we came in, starting flashing on and off. There was a harsh buzzing sound from one of the black boxes on the shelf. Ralph looked at it worriedly.

“That’s torn it,” George said. “Gas detectors have gone off.”

“One of those bombs was carrying gas?” I asked.

“Mustard, phosgene or radium fragments—there’s no way of telling from here.” George looked at me with narrowed eyes. “Been in a gas attack, Wally?”

“Once, sir. But it’s not really gas in the radium shells. It’s little particles, but they get carried on the wind just as if they were a gas. They say there are parts of Woolwich no one will be able to live in for years, because that stuff can still get inside you.”

“Well, we’re better off than they were in Woolwich,” George said, with a kind of steely determination that told me he was going to take charge. “Now, the bad news is the seals on this hut aren’t going to help us much if the gas drifts our way. They’re old and perished, and we couldn’t spend long in here anyway before the air got stale.”

“What about the ambulance, sir?” I asked.

Ralph shook his head slowly. “No better, I’m afraid.”

“But the seals . . .”

“Aren’t what they used to be. If we ran into a thick cloud, we wouldn’t have much of a chance.”

“That’s not what they told us in Dorking, sir.”

“No, I don’t doubt that. But they can’t very well have ambulance drivers going around scared out of their wits, can they?”

“I don’t suppose so,” I said, without much conviction.

“Never you mind about the ambulance anyway,” George said. “There’s an underground shelter on the other side of the compound, just before the first mirror—you’d have driven past it on your way in. That’s safe, and it has its own air supply.”

“Will they still let us in?” Ralph asked.

“If we don’t dillydally. I see you’ve both got your masks—that’ll save us a jog back to the ambulance.” Still not quite steady on his feet, he went to one of the shelves and pulled down a regulation gas mask box. “Now, you two go ahead of me. You’ll find the shelter easily enough, and I won’t be far behind you.”

“You can come with us,” Ralph said.

“I can’t move very quickly—must have sprained my ankle when I fell off the ladder. Didn’t notice until now, what with the head wound and everything.”

“We’ll carry you,” I said. “We can even take you in one of the stretchers—that’ll be faster than all three of us hobbling along like a crab.” I opened my box and dragged out the gas mask. For some reason I didn’t feel as grateful to be carrying it as I usually did. I was wondering if what they had told us in Dorking also applied to the gas masks.

“Open the box, George,” Ralph said quietly.

“You two go ahead,” George said, as if we hadn’t heard him the last time.

“There’s no mask in that box, is there?”

George had his back to us, like a boy who didn’t want anyone to see his birthday present.

“The box,” Ralph said again, with a firmness I hadn’t heard before.

“All right, it’s empty,” George said, turning around slowly. He had the lid open, showing the box’s bare interior. “There was a mistake. I took the mask to the compound dressing station, then left it there by accident when I came back to the hut.”

“Why did you come back instead of going straight to the shelter?” Ralph asked.

“Because I still wanted to listen, all right? The sound mirror still works, even with those chunks taken out of it. I felt I could still be some use.” He gestured helplessly at the headphones. “I still wanted to listen,” he said again, more quietly this time.

“You hear it too,” Ralph said, wonderingly.

“Hear what?”

“The music. Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about, old man. You said this was the only place you could concentrate. You meant more than just that, didn’t you? This is the only place where it comes back—the music—as if this war weren’t standing between us and everything we ever thought mattered. It’s why I couldn’t work here any longer, why I had to go back to the ambulance service.”

George stared at him without saying anything. So did I.

“I thought I was going insane at first—a delayed effect of the shellshock,” Ralph said. “Well, perhaps I was, but that didn’t make the music go away. If anything, it just got stronger. It was like hearing someone hum a tune in the next room, a tune you almost recognized—you could pick out just enough of the melody for it to be maddening. I talked to some of the other chaps, thinking there must be some kind of interference on the wires . . . but when I got funny looks, I learned to keep my mouth shut.”

“What was the music like?” George asked.

“Beautiful beyond words—what I could hear of it. Enough to break your heart. Well, mine anyway. The
Pastoral
, how I always meant it would sound. I could hear it, as if it were being played to me by an orchestra, as if I were just a listener in the audience. But not just the
Pastoral
. . . there was also the
London
, done differently—I always did mean to take another stab at that one, you know . . .
Lark
. . . and music I don’t even recall intending to write but that seems to have
me
all over it.”

“It’s our music,” George said.

“I know, old man. That’s what I’ve been hardly daring to admit to myself, all this time. It’s all the music we would have made if this war weren’t in the way. I think we
did
write that music, in some weird way, and it’s making itself known to us here. No one else hears it, of course. But you and I . . . I think we’re like antennae, or microphones, ourselves. I hear the music I would have made, and I suppose you hear your own tunes.”