[Brenda & Effie 01] - Never the Bride Read online

  I was straining new potatoes and green beans over the sink when Katherine crept up behind me. I jumped when she spoke. ‘I’m so sorry about Gerald,’ she said. She looked drawn and upset.

  ‘Never mind,’ I said mock-heartily. ‘Boys can be a handful.’ I reminded myself that he had been catching and killing my squirrels. That wasn’t normal, was it? And the thought formed itself and amazed me: What kind of monster is this child?

  ‘I saw you,’ Katherine said, ‘watching from the window when we were in the garden and Gerald was throwing his tantrum.’ Katherine gazed into my face steadily. ‘You saw, didn’t you, Brenda?’

  ‘Hm?’ I said. What was the use in pretending? ‘Yes, I did, I’m afraid. I wasn’t quite sure what was going on. I was alerted by the noise. I’m sure he deserved a little smack, whatever he was up to . . .’ I gave a fake laugh.

  ‘I mean,’ she said, ‘you saw his eye. Under his cap. His third eye.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, popping the potatoes into an earthenware bowl, ‘I did, really. Yes.’

  Katherine sighed. ‘We’ll explain everything. You deserve to know. You’ve been good to us.’

  ‘No, really,’ I said. ‘You needn’t explain anything to me . . .’

  Katherine held up her hands. She was looking at me as if she knew they could trust me. She knew there were secrets on all sides. Now she seemed older: much older than her years. ‘You deserve to know what we’re running from.’

  Up the street a little way, Susan Green was enjoying her freedom. She was dizzy with it. She traipsed down to the sea front, with no money, no desire to do anything in particular. She could do anything, she realised. She didn’t have to ask anyone. She hugged herself with excitement and moved along, past the chip shops and the arcades. She was a pretty girl and drew glances. Susan was oblivious to them, a broad grin plastered across her face, her hair streaming out behind her. But where to go? What to do?

  I laid the table with the best tureens and serving dishes, with silver for the first time in a while. I was making it into a proper occasion. Salmon poached in wine and dill. All set for their revelations.

  I wondered if they would say grace again. When I asked, Ted looked more serious and careworn than usual. He screwed up his face. ‘I don’t think so. I don’t think any of us believes in it. Not any more.’

  ‘Sssh,’ Katherine said. ‘Let’s just eat.’

  ‘Where’s Susan?’ he asked sharply.

  ‘She was in her room,’ said Katherine. ‘I called to her on my way up. She said she would follow . . .’

  Gerald was hunched in his chair, sulking under his baseball cap. ‘She said she was sick of all the shouting and the paranoia. That’s what she said. She went out.’

  ‘Out?’ said Katherine, hollowly. ‘By herself?’

  Ted bit his lip. ‘She’ll be all right. She’s old enough. She won’t get into any trouble.’

  Katherine looked as if she didn’t believe that for a second. ‘She promised. She said she’d not leave our sight without telling us,’ she sobbed, a despairing note in her voice. ‘What’s the use? We try to do things . . . to get away. But they both act up. Gerald, and now Susan. They won’t listen. They’ll never listen to us. They don’t understand what’s at stake . . .’

  ‘They’re only children,’ Ted said gently.

  ‘She’ll be fine,’ I put in. ‘Susan’s almost a grown woman. I’m sure she only went out to get some air.’

  ‘She’s no right to,’ Katherine sighed, ‘and it’s very rude, too. After you’ve cooked dinner for us again.’

  I started to serve. ‘Hers will keep till she comes back.’

  We ate in silence. I wondered when their revelations would begin.

  Ted was thoughtful, solemn, as he ate. He and his family might have been worried about Susan, and everything else that was playing on their minds, but none of it affected their appetites. The three Greens present ate concentratedly until nearly everything I’d provided was gone.

  Ted took a deep swig of wine and said, ‘Brenda, we can’t thank you enough for everything you’ve done this week. Your care and your discretion.’

  I spread my hands. ‘My pleasure.’

  They seemed so anxious. They seemed to want to get up and dash out into the streets now and start searching for Susan. They resisted the impulse, though.

  ‘You need to know at least some of our secrets,’ Ted announced. ‘We’ve decided that much.’

  I nodded. Now I didn’t want them to tell me. I felt as if I was being pulled somewhere I didn’t want to go . . .

  ‘We’re never going back to our village,’ he said. He said it with gravity and resolve, his wife smiling sadly at him. Gerald was no longer sulking: he seemed rather cowed by his father’s tone. ‘We will never return to Norfolk. We will do everything in our power to stay away from that place, and make a decent life for ourselves elsewhere.’

  He paused then to let me absorb this.

  ‘It might seem like nothing to you, Brenda. People move about, change towns and alter their lives all the time. It happens every day. Or so we have recently learned. Here, in the outside world, people think nothing of changing their lives, homes, jobs and even partners. Imagine! Out here, in the wide world, things change all the time.’

  I nodded, listening.

  ‘To us, Brenda, this is heresy. It’s shocking and new. Nothing in our own lives has changed. Ever. Everything was laid down for us, the rules and parameters of our ideas and future. Everything was dictated to us by the Elders.’

  ‘Who . . . are these people?’ I asked. ‘You mentioned them in your grace the other evening . . .’ I didn’t like the sound of this. I was imagining all sorts, I can tell you. Villages so remote and untouched by modernity that ancient rites and barbaric practices survived.

  ‘The Elders are simply the oldest, most venerable and, as they would have it, the purest people in the village,’ Ted said. ‘Our great-grandparents. Now that the Old Man is dead and gone, his children are in charge of us. They care for all our needs, monitor our well-being . . . and they see to it that the Old Man’s will is done, down to the last letter. We have always been under his thumb.’

  That night Ted told me the whole story. He obviously felt I was owed complete candour, and I appreciated that. Of course, the story was pretty hard to swallow.

  ‘In our village, on the green, there’s a sort of monument, a twisted metal three-legged statue. Odd-looking thing. It’s no statue, though. And it ain’t no climbing frame for the kiddies. That used to belong to our great-great-granddad. The Old Man. It was his walking frame, those rusted struts, all buckled, bent and scabbed with fatigue.

  ‘You see, he had three legs, our great-great-granddad. Each was twenty feet long. When he died his walking frame was left out as a monument, among the grass and daisies, to remind the village of how he ruled round there, throughout the twentieth century.

  ‘The invasion, all that effort . . . and all they ended up owning was that tiny little place, an obscure corner of our world.

  ‘England’s been invaded many times. Strangers come and strangers go. Warriors and village girls fall in love. Easy sometimes. People stay behind in the tidal to and fro. They become part of the flat, endless landscape.

  ‘You see, it’s always been a very small, close-knit, quite remote village, and that’s why no one ever said anything about the affair. That’s why word never got out into the wider world and none of the scientists, photographers or newspeople ever came sweeping in by helicopter and motorcar to scoop an exclusive. For a century and more the village had been quiet and life went on - as is its wont - and the last survivor of the invading force found himself part of things. He married a nice girl who worked in the local pub and they had children - strange-looking children, perhaps, but the villagers were kindly and accepted them. Tolerant, insular, sufficient unto themselves - and, what’s more, they were terrified of my great-great grandfather. So the village ambled and idled through the twentieth century and,
meanwhile, the great cities of the rest of the world were rebuilding themselves, rumbling, groaning, picking up the pieces after the invasion.

  ‘As the decades went by he felt like he’d always been there. The villagers had built a barn at the back of the village pub and that was where he lived. Under extra tall ceilings. He kept himself out of sight, mostly.

  ‘The villagers were kind to him. They acted on his every whim. Scared, I suppose.

  ‘It’s an obscure part of England. He was safe from prying eyes. He considered it a miracle to have survived the invasion and to continue living on what was, essentially, enemy soil. He had acclimatised. He was safe. He was a very old man by the end, a century or so.

  ‘All of his comrades, the ones he still remembered, had fallen for the fatal bacteria and somehow he had made it. They paraded through his nightmares and he thanked his lucky stars for his kinder fate. Sneezing warriors, phlegmy invaders, death-rattling, rheumy soldiers from afar marched in his dreams. Sniffles had taken them off in the end, and left him stuck behind, to live a sedentary, rural afterlife in Norfolk.

  ‘Those who’d travelled so far to trample their horrid spiky legs all over this world, all they had left behind, besides a few monuments, was my great-great grandfather.

  ‘Maybe some of us younger ones think it’s time the tale was told. We are the great-grandsons and great-grand-daughters of the stranger in our village. It’s a hundred years later or more, a different century again. Enough time has gone by. Enough seclusion and enough secrets.

  ‘The Old Man and his wife are dead. The old paterfamilias is long gone into the ground. He shouldn’t exercise a tentacular hold on the sons of his sons now. But he did, while he was here. He was a stern task-master - he made them all learn his native tongue and gave them the sharp end of it when he was riled. He made us all know a little of our history, though it seemed to us like fantasy.

  ‘Of all of his family, perhaps I was the closest. I don’t know why. I was the quietest, the runt of the litter. He knew, perhaps, that I’d be the one eventually to tell the tale - he knew someone would have to. So he described his dreams to me. Only there could he gambol and kick about in his natural atmosphere, and I was privy to his fantasies. My grandfather told me how he would hover in the thin atmosphere and float weightlessly above the scarlet crags and dunes. He felt unencumbered - no family, no ties, a young warlord once more. He felt delicate and free, flicking his gorgeously suckered and bejewelled tentacles in the spicy, dusky atmosphere he remembered from home. Honestly, this is what my grandfather told me of his dreams. And I - wide-eyed - listened to it all.

  ‘At first my granddad wondered why he’d been spared. There was no God where he came from, so he couldn’t claim anything divine. All of his comrades in arms - comrades in multiple arms - sneezed, trembled, were racked with spasms and finally died of the common cold, but he was untouched by it all, remaining hale and hearty. In the end he put it down to his dalliance with the landlord’s daughter, Gloria. She had made sure that the tender-hearted invader in the villagers’ midst had a good time. In doing so, she’d passed on some of her earthbound immunities. Glo - my great-great-grandmother - gave him the gift of life. A life on earth. Along with her peaches-and-cream complexion, the not-so-delicate sweat of her brow, and the startling ampleness of her charms.

  ‘Gloria’s father wouldn’t stand for it at first. She was mixing - collaborating. She was a disgrace to the family, to the whole human race.

  ‘What you must remember is that at the end of the nineteenth century this was a place that never had heard much from the wider world. Amazing to think it. Not even a wireless then. Not many whispers of the global calamity penetrated its gloom. This rank, dank, hard-bitten, incestuous old place. Not a rustle in the long grass, not a hint of singed metropolis carried on the evening breezes . . .

  ‘Until this lone Martian turned up, striding across the low horizon on attenuated metal legs. The villagers were flabbergasted. He stalked on to the village green and they all came out to greet him. They were assembled there, naive, insouciant, and oblivious to the danger that tripod creature represented. He glared down at them from his snug little cockpit . . .

  ‘. . . and decided he liked the look of the place. Elected not to raze it to the ground, as per instructions. Finally he realised - incredibly - that he liked the look of the landlord’s daughter, Gloria.

  ‘Don’t ask me how it happened. It was just love, I suppose. Amazing, really. And I should be glad. Without it I wouldn’t be here.

  ‘The landlord had his daughter horsewhipped in front of everyone on the village green. No one dared to intercede. But then the invader waded in to put a stop to it. And they all held their breath.

  ‘He told me the story many times. My grandmother died twenty years before he did, and he always wept when he remembered how her father had whipped her, bringing beads of blood to her back, everyone watching. He wept and I knew that this terrifying person - his single great eye all salty and wet - was soft-hearted under the carapace. Jelly-soft. Why else the armour?

  ‘That afternoon he declared his love for the landlord’s daughter in front of everyone. He strode into the public display.

  ‘They drew back.

  ‘A single laser blast sizzled loudly on the air. They stared in appalled silence. Gloria’s father lay blackened on the dead grass. A shadow of his former self.

  ‘And still no one knew that that had been the fate of all authority figures - the world over - who had stood in the way of the invaders. Priests, generals, heads of states. All lay like the landlord of the Bluebird Inn. The villagers knew only that they had a new patriarch in town.

  ‘The Martian loomed over the smouldering ashes of my great-grandfather in his battle-scarred silver armour. He was steady on his telescopic legs. The muzzle of his laser cannon smoked and his flashing red eye dimmed only slightly with remorse.

  ‘Gloria stared at him in disbelief - he had murdered her rancorous, side-whiskered dad. She gathered up her dignity. Staunched her wounds. And the Martian offered her his hand.

  ‘That is how the centuries turn. The blasting of the old and the ushering in of the new. With that dazzling cyborg, that devilish creature in his space armour with twenty-foot-long legs, lording it over the village.

  ‘After that no one dared oppose him.

  ‘Gloria continued to pull pints that glistened and frothed, a home-brewed ale with a green tinge. And she gave him children. Some said she would clamber up one of those silver legs, hand over hand, and a hatch would pop open on his shining dome. She would fling herself into his tight little carapace and there they would go about their conjugals. Obviously, my elderly grandfather never went into precise detail about it with me. But it was one rather large step for womankind anyway - into the close confines of the invader’s clasp.

  ‘She must have seen something in him that the rest of the world didn’t.

  ‘At their union the men of the village quailed, while the women blushed and speculated. Not many dared voice their thoughts. They decided that the mismatched couple must be in love, so they would live and let live.

  ‘Over the decades, we greenish children started to appear, went to the village school and learned our lessons with the ordinary kids from thereabouts. No one mentioned our oddity - several limbs. Or - in some notable cases - the single crimson eye in the centre of the forehead.

  ‘My grandfather never stopped watching the skies. Every night he’d peer up through the skylight in the tall barn at the back of the Bluebird and scrutinise the darkness, knowing where Home was. He would watch with a curious mixture of longing and fear. And I watched him do so until his dying day.

  ‘He looked for those sinister solar flares from Mars and the soft phosphorescence of their saucers. He knew that one day they would set off again. Earth was too rich, too green, and they’d have its spoils, one way or another.

  ‘Deep down my grandfather expected them to come back. One day they would dose themselves up with enoug
h new drugs and have another stab at genocide.

  ‘They would come to look at their descendants. And we had to be ready for them. The family has to be there, united, ready to greet them.’

  Effie received another visit from Frank the detective. Her junk shop was closed, but he was persistent. She went down to answer the door, and this time there was no messing about. ‘You know, don’t you?’ he said. There was something weird about his eyes, Effie said afterwards, about his whole demeanour. ‘You know where they are?’ And she nodded. She felt compelled to leave her home with him, just as she was. She didn’t even lock up.

  They came directly to my house, where Ted was just finishing his tale.

  His wife and son were staring at him, and Katherine reached across the table to grasp his hand. His son had removed the baseball cap. He didn’t have to hide his third, gleaming eye now.

  Then the knock came downstairs.

  ‘Susan?’ Ted asked.

  As I went down to answer it, I knew it wouldn’t be.

  Effie was shamefaced, but I could see she’d no choice. Frank the detective stood at her back, on the doorstep, pressing a stubby silver gun into her side. ‘Show me in,’ he said.

  I let him into my home.

  Upstairs, Ted rocketed out of his seat and Katherine cried out. They stared at me accusingly. ‘You’ve betrayed us.’ I could hardly meet her eye. ‘Brenda! How could you?’

  ‘He’ll take us back,’ Ted said. ‘He’ll make us go back with him.’

  I stood, helpless, as Frank advanced into the room. He was triumphant, sniggering horribly under his breath. He levelled the silver pistol at them, evidently relishing the moment. ‘You can’t leave our village,’ he said quietly. ‘Whatever made you think you could?’

  Ted stiffened. With some dignity, he said, ‘We want what’s best for our kids. That village has blighted our lives. Can’t you see how narrow and futile life is there, just waiting and living in suspense? Our children deserve more than that.’