In the November of that second year Josella’s first baby was born. We called him David. My pleasure in him was at times alloyed with misgivings over the state of things we had created him to face. But that worried Josella much less than it did me. She adored him. He seemed to be a compensation to her for much that she had lost, and, paradoxically, she started to worry less over the condition of the bridges ahead than she had before. Anyway, he had a lustiness which argued well for his future capacity to take care of himself, so I repressed my misgivings and increased the work I was putting into that land which would one day have to support all of us.
* * *
—
It must have been not so very long after that that Josella turned my attention more closely to the triffids. I had for years been so used to taking precautions against them in my work that their becoming a regular part of the landscape was far less noticeable to me than it was to the others. I had been accustomed, too, to wearing meshed masks and gloves when I dealt with them, so that there was little novelty for me in donning these things whenever I drove out. I had, in fact, got into the habit of paying little more attention to them than one would to mosquitoes in a known malarial area. Josella mentioned it as we lay in bed one night when almost the only sound was the intermittent, distant rattling of their hard little sticks against their stems.
“They’re doing a lot more of that lately,” she said.
I did not grasp at first what she was talking about. It was a sound that had been a usual background to the places where I had lived and worked for so long that unless I deliberately listened for it I could not say whether it was going on or not. I listened now.
“It doesn’t sound any different to me,” I said.
“It’s not different. It’s just that there’s a lot more of it—because there are a lot more of them than there used to be.”
“I hadn’t noticed,” I said indifferently.
Once I had the fence fixed up, my interest had lain in the ground within it, and I had not bothered about what went on beyond it. My impression on my expeditions was that the incidence of triffids in most parts was much the same as before. I recalled that their numbers locally had caught my attention when I had first arrived, and that I had supposed that there must have been several large triffid nurseries in the district.
“There certainly are. You take a look at them tomorrow,” she said.
I remembered in the morning, and looked out of the window as I was dressing. I saw that Josella was right. One could count over a hundred of them behind the quite small stretch visible from the window. I mentioned it at breakfast. Susan looked surprised.
“But they’ve been getting more all the time,” she said. “Haven’t you noticed?”
“I’ve got plenty of other things to bother about,” I said, a little irritated by her tone. “They don’t matter outside the fence, anyway. As long as we take care to pull up all the seeds that root in here, they can do what they like outside.”
“All the same,” Josella remarked with a trace of uneasiness, “is there any particular reason why they should come to just this part in such numbers? I’m sure they do—and I’d like to know just why it is.”
Susan’s face took on its irritating expression of surprise again.
“Why, he brings them,” she said.
“Don’t point,” Josella told her automatically. “What do you mean? I’m sure Bill doesn’t bring them.”
“But he does. He makes all the noises, and they just come.”
“Look here,” I said. “What are you talking about? Am I supposed to be whistling them here in my sleep or something?”
Susan looked huffy.
“All right. If you don’t believe me, I’ll show you after breakfast,” she announced, and withdrew into an offended silence.