Other Earths Read online

  “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.”

  “I hope they’re mine. I couldn’t bear the idea of them being yours.”

  “That good, eh?”

  “Lovely. Lovely and sad and stirring . . . everything I ever wanted music to be.” He closed his eyes for a moment. “But it’s so terribly quiet. Some days I don’t hear it at all. Today it seemed to be coming through stronger than most. If I could only get it down . . .”

  “You mean on paper, sir?” I asked. Ralph gave me a blank look, and I said: “It’s just that when we came in, I thought I saw some papers in Mr. Butterworth’s log book. I didn’t make much of it the time, but now that I know about the music, I wondered if you’d been trying to write it down.”

  George gave a short, weary laugh. “You don’t miss much, Wally. I thought I was much too quick for you.”

  “Can I see?” Ralph asked.

  George slid the log book across the desk and opened it again, revealing the loose papers inside. He passed one of them to Ralph. It was a pink form with typewriting on one side. “Never was much good at transcription,” he said. “You’d be faster and more accurate. But then it wouldn’t be my music you’d be hearing, would it?”

  Ralph tapped his finger along the music, making a kind of low tum-te-tum noise. He wasn’t exactly singing along with it, but I could tell he was imagining it properly, just as if a band were playing in his head, with all the right instruments. “Well, it’s got the Butterworth stamp,” he said eventually. “No doubt about that.”

  George leaned forward a little. “What do you think?”

  “I think I’d like to hear the rest of it. This is obviously just a fragment, a few bars of a much larger work.”

  “I can only write what I hear. As you say, it’s as if a chap next door is humming a tune. You can’t dictate which tune he’ll hum, you just have to go along with him and hope for the best.” George paused and looked serious. “Did you ever write any of it down, old boy?”

  “Transcribe it, you mean?” Ralph shook his head slowly. “I was too scared to. Scared that if I wrote it down, the music might stop. And that if I put that music down on paper and convinced myself that it really was something I’d come up with, I’d have to admit to myself that I was going quite insane.”

  “Or that the music’s real,” George said quietly.

  “Now you know why I stopped working here, of course. No use to man nor boy if all I kept hearing was music instead of airplanes.”

  “I hear the airplanes as well. It’s just that the music comes through when they’re not there.” He turned to me sharply. “Well, Wally, what do you make of it? Are we both for the nuthouse?”

  “I don’t think so sir,” I said.

  But in truth I wasn’t sure. George might have been younger than Ralph, but they were still old men, and they had both had their share of unpleasant experiences in the war. So had I, in a smaller way, and I still felt that I had my marbles . . . but what kind of condition would m
y head be in twenty or thirty years from now if the war just kept on the way it had?

  Perhaps I would start hearing secret music as well.

  “Wally,” Ralph said to me, “I want you to listen very carefully. We’re Royal Army Medical Corps men. We have a patient here and a duty to protect him. Understood?”

  I nodded earnestly, just as if I were still taking ambulance classes in Dorking. “What are we going to do, sir?”

  “You’re going to take him to the shelter. George will use my gas mask, and you will use your own.”

  “And you sir?”

  “I shall wait here, until you can return with a second mask.”

  “But the seals, sir . . .”

  “Will hold for now. Be sharp about it—we don’t have all afternoon.”

  “No,” George said, more to me than Ralph. “He isn’t staying here. It’s his gas mask, not mine—he should be the one using it.”

  “And you’re thirteen years younger than me, old boy. One of these days, for better or for worse, this war is going to be over. When that day comes, I’m not going to be much good for writing music—I’m worn out as it is. But you’ve still got some life in you.”

  “No one’ll be writing much music if the Huns take over.”

  “We thought the world of German music before all this started—Bach, Brahms, Wagner—they all meant so much to me. It seems funny to start hating all that now.” Ralph nodded at the still-flashing red light. “But we can discuss this later—provided we keep our voices down. In the meantime, Wally’s going to take you to the shelter. Then he’ll come back for me, and we can all sit around and joke about our little adventure.”

  “I’m not sure about this, sir,” I said.

  “RAMC, lad. Show some spine.”

  “Sir,” I said, swallowing hard. Then I turned my attention to George. “I don’t think there’s much point arguing, sir. Perhaps it isn’t such a bad plan after all, anyway. I can sprint back with another gas mask pretty sharpish.”

  “Take the mask,” Ralph said.

  Something passed between them then, some unspoken understanding that was not for me to interpret. Time weighed heavily and then George took the mask. He said nothing, just fitted it over his head without a word. I put on my own mask, peering at the world through the grubby little windows of the mica eye-pieces.

  We left the hut, closing the door quickly behind us. George could not run, but with my bad knee I was not much better. We started making for the first dish, with the promise of the shelter beyond it. Through the mask all the colors looked as yellowy as an old photograph, but George looked back at me and pointed out something, a band of darker yellow lying in the air across our path. Phosgene, I thought—that was the yellow one, not mustard gas. Phosgene didn’t get you straight away, but if they mixed it with chlorine, it was a lot quicker. I pressed the mask tighter against my face, as if that were going to make any difference.

  It took an age to reach the shelter, with the distance between the sound mirrors seeming to stretch out cruelly. Just when it began to cross my mind that perhaps the shelter did not exist, that it was some figment of George’s concussion-damaged imagination, I saw the low concrete entrance, the steps leading down to a metal door that was still partly open. A masked guard, who might have been the same man Ralph and I had spoken to earlier, was urging us down the steps.

  When the door was tight behind me, I whipped off my mask and said, “Give me yours, George—it’ll do for Ralph.”

  George nodded and dragged the mask from his face, which was slick with sweat and dirt where the rubber had been pressing against his skin. “Good man, Wally,” he said, between breaths. “You’re a brave sort.”

  But the guard would not let me leave the shelter. The red light above the door was telling him that the gas concentration was now too high to risk exposure, even with a mask.

  “I have to go!” I said, shouting at him.

  The guard shook his head. No arguing from me was going to get him to change his mind. We had been lucky to make it before they locked the shelter from the inside.

  Looking back on it now, I’m sure Ralph knew exactly what would happen when I got to the shelter—or he had a pretty shrewd idea. What he said to George kept ringing in my head—about how the younger man would still be able to get some of that music down when the war was over. It was like one runner passing the baton to the other. I don’t think he would have said that if he had expected me to come back with another mask.

  Because there was no wind that day, the gas alert remained high until the middle of the evening. When it was safe, I went out with two masks and a torch, back to the hut, just in case there was still a chance for Ralph. But when I got to the hut, the door was open and the room empty. Everything was neat and tidy—the box back on the shelf, the headphones back on their hook, the chair set back under the desk.

  We didn’t find him until morning.

  He was sitting in one of the seats attached to the steerable locator we had driven past on our way in. He must have known what to do because he had the headphones on, and one of his hands was still on the wheel that adjusted the angle of the receiver. The other chair was empty. The flattened disk was aimed out to sea, out to France, a few degrees above the horizon.

  The thing was, they never did tell me what killed him—whether it was the gas, or being out all night in the cold, or whether he just grew tired and decided that was enough war for one lifetime. But what I do know is what I saw on his face when I found him. His eyes were closed, and there was nothing in his expression that said he’d been in pain when the end came.

  Now, I know people’ll tell you that faces relax when people die, that everyone ends up looking calm and peaceful, and as an ambulance man I won’t deny it. But this was something different. This was the face of a man listening to something very far away, something he had to really concentrate on, and not minding what he heard.

  It was only later that we found the thing he had in his hand, the little piece of pink paper folded like an envelope.

  Four days later I was able to visit George. He was in bed in one of the wards at Cranbrook. There were about five other men in the ward, most of them awake. George was looking better than when I’d last seen him, all messy and bandaged. He still had bandages on his head and arm, but they were much cleaner and neater now. His hair was combed, and his moustache had been trimmed.

  “I’m glad you’re still here, sir,” I said. “I was frightened you’d be transferred back to Dungeness before I could get to see you. I’m afraid we’ve been a bit stretched the last few days.” I had to raise my voice because Mr. Chamberlain was on the wireless in the corner of the ward doing one of his encouraging “one last push” speeches.

  “Pull the screens,” George said.

  I did as I was told and sat down on the little stool next to his bed. The screens muffled some of Mr. Chamberlain’s speech, but every now and then his voice seemed to push through the green curtains as if he were trying to reach me personally, the way a teacher might raise his voice to rouse a daydreaming boy at the back of the class.

  “You’re looking better, sir,” I offered.

  “Nothing time won’t heal.” He touched the side of his head with his good arm, the one that wasn’t bandaged. “I’ll be up on my feet in a week or two, then I’ll get my new posting. No use for me in Dungeness anymore, though—my hearing’s no longer tip-top.”

  “Won’t it get better?”

  “Perhaps, but that won’t make much difference in the long run. They’re getting rid of the sound mirrors. We always knew it was coming, but we thought we’d be good for another year. It turns out that the new system won’t need men listening on headphones. The new breed will stare at little screens, watching dots move around.”

  Mr. Chamberlain said something about “over by Christmas,” followed by “looking forward to a bright and prosperous Nineteen Thirty-Six.”

  “And the music, sir?” I asked.

  “There
won’t be any more music. Wherever it came from, whatever it was that let us hear it . . . it’s gone now, or it will be gone by the time they tear down the mirrors. Even if it’s still coming through to Dungeness, there won’t be anyone there who can hear it. Best to forget about it now, Wally. I’ve no intention of speaking about it again, and with Ralph gone, that only leaves you. If you’ve an ounce of common sense—and I think you’ve rather more than an ounce—you’ll say no more of this matter to any living soul.”

  “I’m sorry about Mr. Vaughan Williams, sir.” I’d called him Ralph all the time I had known him, but sitting next to George I found myself coming over all formal. “He was always kind to me, sir, when we were doing our ambulance duties. Always treated me like an equal.”

  “He was a good man, no doubt about that.” George said, nodding to himself. Then he patted the bedsheet. “Well, thank you for coming to visit, Wally. Knowing how busy you ambulance chaps are, I appreciate the gesture.”

  “There’s another reason I came, sir. I mean, I wanted to see that you were all right. But I had something for you as well.” I reached into my pocket and withdrew the folded piece of pink paper. “We found this on him. It’s one of your transcriptions, I think.”

  “Let me see.” George took the paper and opened it carefully. His eyes scanned the markings he had made on it, the scratchy lines of the staves and the little tadpole shapes of the notes. There were lots of blotches and crossings-out. “Did you see him do this?” he asked, looking at me over the edge of the paper.

  “See him do what, sir?”

  “He’s corrected me! You wouldn’t have noticed, but not all of those marks were made by me! The beggar must have sat down and taken the time to correct my transcription of my music!”

  “When we were on our way to the shelter, sir?”

  “Must have been, I suppose.” George shook his head in what I took to be a mixture of dismay and amusement. “The absolute bare-faced effrontery!” Then he laughed. “He’s right, though—that’s the galling thing. He’s bloody well right!”