The Campbells

‘Damn it, Susan, what’s wrong with you?’

Susan Campbell shook her head, hardly believing that they were having this same argument over again. ‘David, what’s always wrong with me?’ she demanded. Why couldn’t he understand?

He came to stand behind her as she stared into her dressing‐table mirror. It had been thirty‐odd years now since they had married, back in the ruins of a London that had been virtually destroyed by the Daleks. Now, if she looked out of the window, she’d see only new buildings, a pleasant walkway beside the same Thames as had held bloated bodies of resistance workers and slaughtered Robomen – and the occasional Dalek. The horrors had gone, leaving everyday life to continue as it must.

And it was everyday life that had now become a horror to her.

She loved David. She had done almost from the first time she’d seen him, gun in hand, in the wreckage of the city. And he’d been attracted to her, too. In a world where he could trust so little, he’d come quickly to trust and love her.

And that was when their troubles had begun.

Susan looked at his image in the mirror. He’d been twenty‐two when she’d first met him, and now he was fifty‐four. She could still see the shadows of the man she’d met and fallen in love with, but they were overlaid with thirty years of work, hardship and struggles. His hair was thinning and grey. He was getting fat – no, that was unfair. He was getting stout. But he was still David, in many ways the same man.

But not in all ways.

And she? Well, that was the real problem. There was no fault to be found in her man. The fault was within her.

Despite his anger, David was as restrained as ever. He laid a hand gently on her shoulder. ‘Susan, shouldn’t you get over this by now?’

‘Get over it?’ she demanded, glaring at him. She knew she was wrong, that she was being foolish, but she couldn’t help it. ‘Look at me, David!’

‘I am looking at you,’ he said, quietly. ‘I love to look at you.’

‘And I at you.’ Susan felt the tears beginning again, and she fought them back. She stood up and turned to face him. She didn’t need the mirror to tell her what she always knew. ‘David, I can’t take it.’

His face froze. ‘Do you want a divorce? I know they’re strict about them these days, with the need to rebuild the population and all, but –’

‘No!’ she yelled, furious. This was his nastiest barb, the one she hated. ‘David, you know that’s not what I mean. I love you, and I always will. But that’s the problem, isn’t it? I always will.’ She turned away from him and looked at her own image in the mirror.

She looked eighteen – if that. Her elfin face stared back at her in disgust, the hair cropped close to her head. She was in truth so much older, but she wouldn’t look that way for several more centuries. It was part of the blessing, and curse, of not being a human, no matter how intimately she might pass for one.

Not having children was another curse. It wasn’t impossible, of course. Her species – who called themselves Time Lords – and humans could interbreed at times. But this wasn’t guaranteed. She’d tried to give David children, and failed miserably at it, as she had failed at so very much in her life. Their three children had all been Dalek war orphans, adopted and raised as their own. She had loved – and still did love – Ian, Barbara and David Junior.

And they all looked older now than she did.

All of them had moved out as soon as they could. None of them had ever said it was her fault, of course. But Susan knew the truth that they could never hide from her. They could hardly bear to be around her, a permanent testament to their own humanity and fragility. Unlike her, they would age and die in less than sixty years. If she was lucky, in sixty years she’d look like she was in her early twenties.

Susan had not thought this through. When she’d fallen in love with David Campbell, she had assumed that love was enough, even though they were of different species. In some ways, that was true. She didn’t regret a single day of their life together, really. But love wasn’t enough when one person aged and decayed, and the other stayed eternally young.

‘You’re making too much of this,’ David insisted. He didn’t add ‘as always’, but she knew he meant it. ‘I love you, Susan.’

‘David.’ She turned back to him. ‘I love you, too, and that’s the problem. I want to be what you need. And what you need isn’t a teenage wife right now. These silly dinner parties want David Campbell and middle‐aged, greying wife.’ She gestured at the make‐up on her table. ‘Oh, I can apply it again, David. I can add lines and wrinkles. I can wear a greying wig. I can look like I’m fifty. But I can’t be fifty, David. Not a human fifty. And I can’t keep doing this. I can’t keep living a lie. It’s bad enough that I have to do this each day for work. I don’t want to have to do it in the evening for another silly function, where everybody’s talking about their age and the good old days when we were killing Daleks, not trying to run a world. I just can’t take it any more.’

He glanced at his watch. As always, that human preoccupation with time! Well, they had so little of it. ‘Susan, I promised the Brewsters I’d be there. We’d be there. Do I have to make excuses for you?’ Once more, he didn’t say ‘again’, but it was there, unspoken.

‘I can’t face them,’ Susan answered. She couldn’t. Tammy Brewster was a nice enough person, but she was obsessed with her health. Or, rather, her un‐health. She was a hypochondriac of the worst kind, constantly discovering new diseases that she was dying from. And yet she was grimly determined to hang on to her fading youth in the worst possible way. Her husband didn’t know that she’d taken two lovers in a desperate attempt to convince herself she was still desirable. It was terrible to watch someone she’d known most of her life face her own mortality and crumble under the impact.

It was something she’d probably not know for several centuries yet. It terrified her to think that one day she might act like these humans. Would she, too, snatch at whatever she could to try to pretend she was still the way she always had been? Would she struggle to stave off encroaching time? Were these frantic flailings for some measure of peace her own eventual destiny?

The thought scared her to death.

‘Susan, I don’t want to argue with you,’ David said, trying hard to keep his temper in check. She appreciated this, even if it didn’t help much.

‘Yes you do,’ she replied. ‘That’s exactly what you want. You want to argue with me, batter me down, convince me I’m a fool, and force me into my ageing make‐up for yet another asinine gathering. David, I’m sorry; I can’t go through with it.’

‘Fine!’ he yelled, yielding at last to his anger. He threw up his hands. ‘Sit here and sulk the whole damned evening! I’ll go on alone, as always.’ He stormed towards the door.

‘David,’ she called desperately. ‘I love you. I do. Never forget that.’

He hesitated, and glared back at her. ‘If you really loved me,’ he snarled, ‘you’d do this for me. But you don’t, so you won’t.’ He left their bedroom, slamming the door behind him.

Susan wanted to collapse and cry herself to sleep, as she had so often before. It was no use, really. No matter how many times she tried to explain herself to him, David never understood. She knew what would happen now: he would go to the party, make some excuse for her absence, drink and eat too much, and come home feeling dreadfully sorry for himself.

Well, as always, she’d be here, waiting. One of the advantages of barely ageing was that she still had the body and desires of a human teenager. He wouldn’t want to be cheered up after spending an evening getting thoroughly depressed, but she could do it. Put on a revealing outfit, play up to one of his fantasies, and then bed him before he had the time to remember he was supposed to be furious with her and not aroused by what she was doing.