was lucky to be chosen, and that there was no need to be frightened. His boss had fallen in love with her, and would treat her well if she would live with him; the flowers had been sent to her as a token of the honesty of his intentions. Angry and frightened though she was, Martha kept quiet at this point.
She had then been taken to the “boss” in a third room. He wore a domino. His face was thin, and deficient in chin. His jaw looked grey in the bright light. He rose when Martha entered and spoke in a gentle husky voice. He told her he was rich and lonely, and needed her company as well as her body. She asked how many girls he required to overcome his loneliness; he said huffily that the other girl was for a friend of his. He and his friend were shy men, and had to resort to this method of introduction; he was not a criminal, and he had no intention of harming her.
Very well, Martha had said, let me go. She told him she was engaged to be married. The man sat in a swivel-chair behind a table. Chair and table stood on a dais. The man moved very little.
He looked at her for a long while in silence, until she became very sick and scared. What chiefly scared her was her belief that this man was in an obscure way scared of her, and would go to considerable lengths to alter this situation.
“You should not get married,” he said at last. “You can’t have babies. Women don’t have babies any more, now that radiation sickness is so fashionable. Men used to hate those beastly little bawling ugly brats so much, and now their secret dreams have been fulfilled, and women can be used for nice things. You and I could do nice things.
“You’re lovely, with those legs and breasts and eyes of yours. But you’re only flesh and blood, like me. A little thing like a scalpel could cut right into you and make you unfit for nice things. I often say to my friends, ‘Even the loveliest girl can’t stand up to a little scalpel.’ I’m sure you’d rather do nice things, a girl like you, eh?”
Martha repeated shakily that she was going to get married. Again he sat in silence, not moving. When he spoke again it was with less interest, and on a different tack. He said he liked her attractive foreign accent. He had a large bombproof shelter underground, stocked with two years’ supplies of food and drink. He had a private plane. They could winter in Florida, if she would sign an agreement with him. They could do nice things.
She told him he had ugly thumbs and fingers. She would have nothing to do with anyone with hands like that.
He rang a bell. Two men ran in and seized Martha. They held Martha while the man in the domino came down off his dais and kissed her and ran his hands under her clothes and over her body. She struggled and kicked his ankle. His mouth trembled. She called him a coward. He ordered her to be taken out. The two men dragged her back into the bedroom and held her down on the bed, while the other girl cried in a corner. In outrage, Martha screamed as loudly as she could. The men put her out with another chloroformed pad.
When she came back to her senses, it was the cold air of night that roused her. She was being hustled into the deserted Sufferance Press building and tied to the bench.
She had been frightened and sick all night. When she heard someone below, she had not dared to call out until Timberlane had uttered his name, fearing the kidnappers had come back for her.
“That vile, loathsome creature! I’d tear his throat out if I got hold of him… Darling — you’re sure that’s all he did to you?”
“Yes — in an obscure way, I felt he’d got the thrill he was after — something in my fear he needed — I don’t know.”
“He was a maniac, whoever he was,” Timberlane said, pressing her close to him, running his hands through her hair. “Thank God he was mad the way he was and did you no real harm. Oh my darling, it’s like a miracle to have you again. I’ll never let you go.”
“All the same, I shouldn’t stay too close, love, until I’ve had a bath,” she said, laughing shakily. Having told her tale, something of her normal composure was back. “You must have been in a state when you saw the taxi speeding away with me, poor darling.”
“Dyson and Jack were a great help. I left a note for Jack at the billet in case I ran into trouble. The police’ll get this slimy little pervert. The details you have should be enough to track him down.”
“Do you think so? I’m sure I’d be okay on an identification parade, if they’d let me look at their thumbs. I keep wondering — I’ve been wondering all night — whatever happened to the other girl. What happens if you give in to a man like that, I don’t know.”
Suddenly she burst into tears and wrapped her arms about Timberlane’s waist. He helped her to her feet, and they sat side by side on frames in which leaden sentences were set backwards on and upside down. He put his arm round her and wiped her face with his handkerchief. Her painted eyebrows had come off, smeared across her forehead; licking the handkerchief, he cleaned their remains away.
Having her so close, seeing her, helping her restore herself, he broke into a flurry of words. “Listen, Martha, when I was kicking my heels down at the police station last night, I put your question to Bill Dyson — you know, about why they had gone to the trouble of flying you over here from England. At first he tried to kid me that it was just because he and Jack were sentimentalists. I wouldn’t wear that, so he came out with the truth. He said it was a DOUCH regulation. At the end of this course, they’re going to put me back in England, and if things get as bad as they expect, I shall be on my own, cut off from their support.
“Currently, they’re predicting the rise of authoritarian regimes in Britain and America at the cessation of hostilities. They think international communications will soon be a thing of the past. Survival will be tough, and will grow steadily tougher, as Bill pointed out with some relish. So DOUCH require me — and the Japanese, German, Israeli and other operators in training — to be married to what they call ‘a native’ — a girl who has been brought up in the local ways, and will therefore have inbred knowledge of local conditions. As Dyson put it, ‘Environmental know-how is a survival factor’.
“There’s a lot more to it, but the essence of it is that they wanted you around so that I would not get too interested in any girl I met here and wreck my bit of the project. If I married an American girl, I would be dropped like a hot potato.”
“We always knew they were thorough.”
“Sure. While old Bill was talking, I saw what the future was going to be like. Have you ever really looked ahead, Martha? I never have. It’s a lack of courage, perhaps, just as I’ve heard mother say her generation never looked ahead when they heard more nuclear bombs were being made and detonated. But these Americans have looked ahead. They have seen how difficult survival is going to be. They have survival broken down into figures, and the figures for Great Britain show that if present trends continue, in between fifteen and twenty years’ time, only 50 per cent of the population will still be living. Britain’s particularly vulnerable because we are so much less self- supporting than the States. The point is — all my DOUCH training is directed towards setting me with the DOUCH truck in that doubtfully privileged 50 per cent. And in their materialistic way, they’ve grasped something that I’m sure my religious pal, Charley Samuels in Assam, would endorse — that the one possible thing that will make that funereal future tolerable is the right sort of partner.” He broke off.
Martha was laughing with a sound like suppressed sobs.
“Algernon Timberlane, you poor lost soul, this is a dickens of a place to propose to a girl!”
Nettled, he said, “Am I really so damned funny?”
“Men always have to spell things out to themselves. Don’t worry, it’s something I love. You remind me of father, honey, except that you’re sexy. But I’m not laughing at your conclusions, really I’m not. I came to the same conclusion long ago in my heart.”
“Martha, I love you desperately, I need you desperately. I want to marry you just as soon as possible, and I never want us to be apart again, whatever happens.”
“My sweet, I love you and need you just as much. Why else do you think I came out to America? I’ll never leave you, never fear.”
“I do fear. I fear mightily! When I thought I was alone in this morgue just now, I had a vision of what it will be like to grow old in a world grown old. We can’t stop growing old, but at least let’s do it together and make it tolerable.”
“We will, we will, darling! You’re upset. Let’s get out of here. I think I can walk now, if you give me your arm.”
He held away from her, grinning, with his hands behind his back. “Are you sure you don’t want a good look at my thumbs first, before you commit yourself?”
“I’ll take a rain check on them, as Jack would say. Walk me as far as the window just to see how I make out.
