Chapter Ten

An Englishman's Home

The Doctor had lit a fire, shaking the match until it went out.

Benny and the Brigadier sat in front of it, nursing the mugs of cocoa he had just made for them. It was getting dark outside, the sun was already dipping behind the orchard. For the moment, they kept the curtains open, watching the view. If Bernice had been in one of her periodic melancholy moods, or if she'd had something a bit stronger to drink than cocoa, she was pretty sure that she would see something deeply symbolic about the blood red sky. The Brigadier was sitting in the Doctor's favourite armchair, so the Time Lord sat down on the sofa, alongside her.

'Miss Waugh is late,' the Brigadier said, a gentle warning in his voice.

'If she was going to call the authorities, she would have done that already,' the Doctor replied.

Their journey to Allen Road had been along something of a scenic route, avoiding the motorways, A-roads and big towns. It hadn't helped that the Doctor had got them lost somewhere south of Maidstone. Tempers had become frayed, but they'd ended up in Adisham just before three o'clock. The Doctor had stopped off at Mrs Darling's shop to buy some milk and bin bags, and to make a quick phone call. Then they'd driven up to the House and parked Bessie safely undercover in the garage. Only then had the Doctor revealed that he'd just told Eve Waugh, the American journalist, and anyone tapping her line, exactly where they were.

'Why did you call her?' Benny asked.

He had looked puzzled. 'We need allies. Help. She's a talented young lady, and people in America will listen to what she has to say.'

She and the Brigadier had looked at each other, unsure whether to trust the Doctor's judgement or to run to the hills. After half an hour of cheerful domesticity away from the rioting and alien devastation, they had become more relaxed. The landscape here was peaceful, unchanged by the Martian Invasion. From here it was easy to believe that the spacecraft over London was a mass hallucination or purely a local difficulty for the capital to deal with.