The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [31]
They looked at me and I turned quickly away. If they knew who Phelps was, they might quite conceivably know who I was as well. I looked around the empty pickup point. I had spoken on the phone to Victor Analogy—the head of the Swindon LiteraTecs—and he had offered to send a car to pick me up. It hadn’t arrived. It was hot, so I removed my jacket. A looped recording came over the Tannoy exhorting nonexistent drivers not to park in the deserted white zone, and a bored-looking worker came by and returned a few trolleys. I sat down next to a Will-Speak machine at the far end of the concourse. The last time I was in Swindon the airship park had been simply a grass field with a rusty mast. I guessed that much else had changed too.
I waited five minutes, then stood and paced impatiently up and down. The Will-Speak machine—officially known as a Shakespeare Soliloquy Vending Automaton—was of Richard III. It was a simple box, with the top half glazed and inside a realistic mannequin visible from the waist up in suitable attire. The machine would dispense a short snippet of Shakespeare for ten pence. They hadn’t been manufactured since the thirties and were now something of a rarity; Baconic vandalism and a lack of trained maintenance were together hastening their demise.
I dug out a ten-pence piece and inserted it. There was a gentle whirring and clicking from within as the machine wound itself up to speed. There had been a Hamlet version on the corner of Commercial Road when I was small. My brother and I had pestered our mother for loose change and listened to the mannequin refer to things we couldn’t really understand. It told us of “the undiscovered country.” My brother, in his childish naé¯veté, had said he wanted to visit such a place, and he did, seventeen years later, in a mad dash sixteen hundred miles from home, the only sound the roar of engines and the crump-crump-crump of the Russian guns.
Was ever woman in this humor wooed? asked the mannequin, rolling its eyes crazily as it stuck one finger in the air and lurched from side to side.
Was ever woman in this humor won?
It paused for effect.
I’ll have her, but I’ll not keep her long . . .
“Excuse me?—”
I looked up. One of the students had walked up and touched me on the arm. He wore a peace button in his lapel and had a pair of pince-nez glasses perched precariously on his large nose.
“You’re Next, aren’t you?”
“Next for what?”
“Corporal Next, Light Armored Brigade.”
I rubbed my brow.
“I’m not here with the colonel. It was a coincidence.”
“I don’t believe in coincidences.”
“Neither do I. That’s a coincidence, isn’t it?”
The student looked at me oddly as his girlfriend joined him. He told her who I was.
“You were the one who went back,” she marveled, as though I were a rare stuffed parakeet. “It was against a direct order. They were going to court-martial you.”
“Well, they didn’t, did they?”
“Not when The Owl on Sunday got wind of your story. I’ve read your testimony at the inquiry. You’re antiwar.”
The two students looked at one another as if they couldn’t believe their good fortune.
“We need someone to talk at Colonel Phelps’s rally,” said the young man with the big nose. “Someone from the other side. Someone who has been there. Someone with clout. Would you do that for us?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
I looked around to see if, by a miracle, my lift had arrived. It hadn’t.
. . . Whom I, continued the mannequin, some three months hence, stabbed in my angry mood at Tewkesbury?
“Listen, guys, I’d love to help you, but I can’t. I’ve spent twelve years trying to forget. Speak to some other vet. There are thousands of us.”
“Not like you, Miss Next. You survived the charge. You went back to get your fallen comrades out. One of