‘Internal stresses were worst for the first week or two after our announcement. Several of the husbands were awkward to handle, but once we got it out of their heads that it was some elaborate system of whitewashing or spoofing, and when they discovered that none of the others was in a position to make a butt of them, they became more reasonable, and less conventional.
‘The Lamb-Latterly breach was mended after a few days, when Miss Latterly got over the shock, and Miss Lamb is now being cosseted with a devotion scarcely to be distinguished from tyranny.
‘Our leading rebel for some time was Tilly … Oh, you must have seen Tilly Foresham – jodhpurs, roll-neck, hacking-jacket, dragged hither and thither by the whim of fate in the form of three golden retrievers … She protested indignantly for some time that she would not mind much if she happened to like babies; but, as she much preferred puppies, the whole thing was particularly hard on her. However, she seems now to have given in, though grudgingly.’
Zellaby rambled on for a time with anecdotes of the emergency, concluding with the one in which Miss Ogle had been narrowly headed off from making the first payment, in her own name, for the most resplendent perambulator that Trayne could offer.
After a pause, Alan prompted:
‘You did say that about ten who might be expected to be involved actually are not?’
‘Yes. And five of those were in the bus on the Oppley road, and therefore under observation during the Dayout – that has at least done something to dispel the idea of a fertilizing gas which some seemed to be inclined to adopt as one of the new scientific horrors of our age,’ Zellaby told him.
CHAPTER 11
Well Played, Midwich
‘I AM really sorry,’ Bernard Westcott wrote to me early in May, ‘that circumstances preclude well-deserved official congratulations to your village on the success of the operation to date. It has been conducted with a discretion and communal loyalty which, frankly, has astonished us; most of us here were of the opinion that it would prove necessary to take official action well before this. Now, with only some seven weeks to go before D-day, we are hopeful that we may get through without it.
‘The matter which has given us the greatest concern so far was in connexion with Miss Frazer, on Mr Crimm’s staff, and so, one might say, not the fault of the village proper – nor even of the lady herself.
‘Her father, a naval commander, retired, and a fire-eater of some truculence, was bent on trouble – all set to get questions asked in the House about loose-living and orgiastic goings-on in government establishments. Anxious, apparently, to make a Fleet Street holiday of his daughter. Luckily we were able to arrange for suitably influential people to have a few effective words with him in time.
‘What is your own opinion? Do you think Midwich will last it out?’
That was far from easy to answer. If there were no major upset, I thought it might stand a good chance: on the other hand, one could not fail to be anxiously aware of the unexpected, lurking round any corner – the small detonator that might set things off.
We had had our ups and downs, though, and managed to get through them. Sometimes, they seemed to come from nowhere and spread like an infection. The worst, which looked at one time like becoming a panic, was allayed by Dr Willers who hurriedly arranged X-ray facilities and was able to show that all appeared to be quite normal.
The general attitude in May one could describe as a bracing-up, with here and there an impatient desire to let battle commence. Dr Willers, normally an ardent advocate of having one’s baby in Trayne hospital, had reversed his usual advice. For one thing, it would, particularly if there should be anything untoward about the babies, render all attempts to keep the matter quiet utterly useless. For another, Trayne did not have the beds to cope with such a phenomenon as a simultaneous application by the whole female population of Midwich – and that alone would certainly have been fuel for publicity – so he went on wearing and flogging himself to make the best local arrangements he could. Nurse Daniels, too, was tireless, and it was a matter for thanksgiving by the whole village that she had happened to be away from home at the critical time of the Dayout. Willers, it was understood, had a temporary assistant booked for the first week in June, and a sort of commando of midwives signed-up for later on. The small committee-room in the Village Hall had been requisitioned as a supply-base, and several large cartons from firms of manufacturing chemists had already arrived.
Mr Leebody was working himself dead tired, too. There was much sympathy for him on account of Mrs Leebody, and he was more regarded in the village than he ever had been before. Mrs Zellaby was holding resolutely to her solidarity line, and, aided by Janet, continued to proclaim that Midwich would meet whatever was to come with a united front, and unafraid. It was, I think, chiefly on account of their work that we had come so far with – except in the matter of Mrs Leebody and one or two others – so little psychosomatic trouble.
Zellaby had operated, as might be expected, in less definable capacities, one of which he described as chief liquidator of the all-my-eye-and-crystal-balls division, and he had shown a pretty knack of causing nonsense to wilt, without putting backs up. One suspected that he was also supplying quite a little help where there was need and hardship.
Mr Crimm’s worries with his Establishments Branch continued. He had been making increasingly urgent appeals to Bernard Westcott, and reached the point of saying that the only thing that would save a scandal throughout the Civil Service soon would be for his research project to be switched, and quickly, from ministerial to War Office control. Bernard, it seemed, was trying to achieve that, insisting the while that the whole affair must be kept quiet for just as long as it was possible to hold it.
‘Which, from the Midwich point of view,’ said Mr Crimm, with a shrug, ‘is all to the good. But what the devil it can matter to MI I still don’t begin to see …’
*
By mid-May there was a perceptible change. Hitherto, the spirit of Midwich had been not ill-attuned with that of the burgeoning season all around. It would be too much to say that it now went out of tune, but there was a certain muting of its strings. It acquired an air of abstraction; a more pensive mien.
‘This,’ remarked Willers to Zellaby, one day, ‘is where we begin to stiffen the sinews.’
‘Some quotations,’ said Zellaby, ‘are greatly improved by lack of context, but I take your meaning. One of the things that isn’t helping is the nattering of stupid old women. What with one thing and another, it is such an exceptionally good wicket for beldames. I wish they could be stopped.’
‘They’re only one of the hazards. There are plenty more.’
Zellaby pondered glumly for a little, then he said:
‘Well, we can only keep on trying. I suppose we have done pretty well not to have more trouble with it some time ago.’
‘A lot better than one thought possible – and nearly all of it due to Mrs Zellaby,’ the doctor told him.
Zellaby hesitated, and then made up his mind.
‘I’m rather concerned about her, Willers. I wonder if you could – well, have a talk with her.’
‘A talk?’
‘She’s more worried than she has let us see. It came out a bit a couple of nights ago. Nothing particular to start it. I happened to look up and found her staring at me, as though she were hating me. She doesn’t you know … Then, as if I had said something, she broke out: “It’s all very well for a man. He doesn’t have to go through this sort of thing, and he knows he never will have to. How can he understand? He may mean as well as a saint, but he’s always on the outside. He can never know what it’s like, even in a normal way – so what sort of an idea can he have of this? – Of how it feels to lie awake at night with the humiliating knowledge that one is simply being used? – As if one were not a person at all, but just a kind of mechanism, a sort of incubator … And then go on wondering, hour after hour, night after night, what – just what it may be that one is being forced to incubate. Of course you can’t understand how that feels – how could you! It’s degrading, it’s intolerable. I shall crack soon. I know I shall. I can’t go on like this much longer.” ‘