Dominion (24 page)

He had a little time before his train, so he went into the garden and stood smoking a cigarette. It was cold, a light rime of frost on the grass, the sky milky-white. His eyes felt sore and
gritty. He had lain awake most of the night. David admitted to himself that he was frightened. He knew he was not a physical coward, his service in Norway had shown him that, and it had needed
courage to spy at the Office. Yet in a curious way, although what he did there was treasonable, he had still somehow felt enfolded, even protected, by the Civil Service. What he was about to do now
was utterly different and he felt exposed. He looked at his watch. Time to go.

Natalia and Geoff were already in the car park when David arrived at Watford, waiting in the front of a big black Austin. Church bells sounded somewhere nearby as he went up to
the car. Natalia wore a white trenchcoat with a scarf, a jumper underneath. For the first time since David had met her, her face was carefully made up; she looked like an ordinary middle-class
woman driving her boyfriend and his friend on a weekend mission of mercy.

‘Is everything all right?’ Her manner was even more practical and direct than usual.

David answered a brusque yes. ‘Sarah believed the story about my great-uncle. I left her asleep.’

‘Remember both your identity cards?’ Geoff asked, with heavy-handed humour. He, too, was dressed quietly and formally.

‘Yes, the false one for the hospital and the real one for anything else. Though no-one’s likely to stop us, are they?’

‘You never know,’ Natalia said. David saw now that she, too, was tense, perhaps even afraid.

‘There’s going to be fog in the Midlands later,’ Geoff said. ‘According to the forecast.’

Natalia said, ‘After we visit your friend remember that we are going on to Birmingham to look at his flat, see if there is anything of interest to us there, any papers. Our man at the
hospital is getting the key.’

David didn’t answer. He felt uncomfortable at the thought of breaking into Frank’s flat.

They pulled out onto the new M1 motorway to the North, modelled on the German autobahns. Natalia drove smoothly, maintaining a steady pace. There was little traffic, a few family cars and some
lorries. Outside Welwyn Garden City an army truck passed them. The tarpaulin flaps at the rear were open, a row of khaki-clad soldiers looking back. Seeing a woman driving the Austin they made
obscene gestures, then the truck, moving fast, sped away.

‘I wonder where they are going,’ Natalia said.

‘Up to one of the army camps in the North, I expect,’ David answered. ‘They say there’s another miners’ strike coming.’

She looked at him in the mirror. ‘You were in the army yourself in 1939–40, I think?’

‘Yes. In Norway.’

‘What was it like?’ She smiled but her eyes were sharp.

‘For the first few months nothing happened, and I spent the winter in a camp in Kent.’ He turned to Geoff and said jokingly, ‘You were all right, nice and warm out in
Africa.’

‘They wouldn’t let District Officers like me join up. I wanted to.’

David continued, ‘Then the Germans invaded Denmark and Norway out of the blue. My regiment got sent to Namsos, up in the north.’

‘I heard it was a chaotic campaign,’ Natalia said.

‘All the 1940 campaigns were.’ David remembered after they finally set sail, the troopship ploughing through massive, heaving seas, all the soldiers seasick, then blizzards that
turned the decks white. Their first sight of Norway, giant white peaks rising from the water. ‘When we arrived we disembarked and marched out immediately to meet the Germans. We had on thick
army greatcoats, you’d get covered with sweat inside and then during the night it would freeze. Our boots just sank into the snow as soon as you stepped off the roads. But I heard at other
landing points the soldiers didn’t even have winter clothing.’

‘The Germans must have had the same disadvantages, yet they just smashed their way through,’ Geoff said.

‘They’d planned for it. We hadn’t. It was the same in France.’ David remembered marching down a Norwegian road, mountains and forests and snow on a scale he could never
have imagined. He saw again German bombers and fighters roaring down on them, the fighters coming so low he could see the pilots’ set faces; gunfire smashing into the column, fallen men lying
on snow that turned red. The picture in Natalia’s flat had reminded him of that. ‘The Germans seemed invincible,’ he said quietly. ‘I got frostbite, I was back home
recovering when they served up the same medicine in France. I didn’t see how we could fight on after that.’

‘Nor me,’ Geoff agreed. ‘I remember thinking, if we don’t surrender London will just be bombed to annihilation, like Rotterdam or Warsaw was.’ He frowned, a guilty
look.

‘They are not invincible,’ Natalia said, her tone certain. ‘Russia has shown us that. In many places there they do not even have a front line, the Germans control one village
and the partisans the next, and it all changes from season to season. They are completely bogged down.’

‘But Russia hasn’t beaten the Germans either,’ David replied. ‘It’s a stalemate. I think it’s going to boil down to who runs out of men first,’ he added
bitterly.

‘Not just through the fighting,’ Geoff added, ‘if what we hear about the cholera and typhus epidemics on both sides of the line is true.’

Natalia shook her head. ‘There are more Russians than Germans. And they have General Winter on their side, Russians deal with the climate better than the Germans. They know what to wear,
how to survive in the forests, what seeds and mushrooms you can eat.’

David thought the remark cold. ‘I expect you have hard winters too where you come from.’

Natalia nodded. ‘Yes, long winters with a lot of snow.’

They passed an ancient country church where the service had just ended, the warmly dressed congregation talking in groups beside the porch. A red-faced vicar in his white surplice was shaking
people’s hands. David said, ‘They look a contented bunch.’

‘Yes,’ Geoff agreed. ‘They’ll be with Headlam’s lot.’ The Church of England had split two years ago – a large minority opposed to the government forming
their own church as the German Confessing Church had – but this prosperous-looking congregation was more likely to have stayed with the pro-German Archbishop Headlam.

‘Were you brought up an Anglican, Geoff?’ Natalia asked.

‘My uncle was a vicar. I believed for a long time, that’s partly why I joined the Colonial Service, going out to help the poor benighted natives.’ He gave his sharp little bark
of laughter and ran a finger quickly over his fair moustache in an oddly cross, peremptory gesture. ‘David and I used to argue about religion at university. He won the argument in the end, so
far as I’m concerned.’

‘You would have been brought up a Catholic, David, with your Irish family.’

‘My parents had had enough of religion in Ireland.’ He turned to Natalia. ‘What about you?’

‘I was brought up a Lutheran, though most people in Slovakia are Catholics. But I also became disillusioned with religion. Did you know that our little dictator, Tiso, is a Catholic
priest? His Slovak nationalists were glad to help Hitler break up Czechoslovakia, and now we have our own little Catholic Fascist state, just like Croatia and Spain. Our Hlinka guard, the
equivalent of your Blackshirts, loaded the Jews onto trains when the Germans wanted them deported in 1942.’

There was an anger in her voice David had never heard before. Geoff said, ‘I thought all Czechoslovakia had been occupied by Germany.’

‘No. We are a satellite state with our own government, like Britain and France.’ She looked away, concentrating on the road as a little sports car passed them, a young couple out on
a Sunday drive.

Geoff asked, ‘Are your paintings of your home town?’

‘Mostly of Bratislava, the Slovak capital, where I lived before I came here.’

‘And the battle scenes?’ David asked.

‘Slovakia sent soldiers into Russia with the Germans when Hitler invaded. We were the only Slav country to join the invasion. Only a token force.’ She hesitated, then added,
‘My brother was with them on the Caucasus front. He was badly wounded. Later he died.’

‘I’m sorry,’ David said.

‘It was ironic, because in the thirties he was a Communist. He went to Russia for a while, full of hope, but came back disillusioned. Russia was the graveyard of his hopes and then it took
his life, too.’

‘And then you came to England?’

‘A few years later, yes. And here I am,’ she added, a note of finality in her voice.

Beside the motorway they passed one of the agricultural settlements for the unemployed. The government’s propaganda preached that the countryside represented the British soul, that the
people needed to be brought back in touch with it. David saw shabby prefabricated huts set in mud, plots all around marked off with chicken wire and sagging little fences, like a city allotment on
a larger scale.

‘Recreating our glorious medieval past,’ Geoff said with angry sarcasm.

People were working there, bent double, planting spindly trees. A tired-looking woman in coat and headscarf carried a muddy toddler between the shacks.

‘It is the same all over Europe,’ Natalia said. ‘Countryside worship. The heart of the nationalist dream. Look at it.’

Geoff suggested they put the radio on, and for a little while they listened to
Two-Way Family Favourites
, records requested by soldiers’ families for their loved ones serving in
India and Aden, Malaya and Africa. After a request from a mother for her boy in Kenya, Geoff asked Natalia to turn it off, the programme was depressing him.

The place where they stopped for lunch was an old coaching-house, but the interior had been modernized, all black-painted oak beams and whitewashed walls gleaming with
horse-brasses, a shield and crossed swords nailed above the fireplace. There was a television set at one end of the bar, showing a display of morris dancing. During the week it would have been full
of travelling salesmen but today there were only a few elderly people at the tables, a couple of retired military types propping up the bar. David went to get drinks and order lunch.

‘The problem with the British working man,’ one of the old men at the bar was saying, ‘is that frankly he just doesn’t like work, he’s too bloody
lazy
.’ He jabbed a finger at his friend. ‘The answer’s to put them under military discipline, give the slackers a damn good flogging in front of the others. And shoot some
more of these demonstrating trade unionists, like they did in Bradford in the summer.’

‘I don’t know if they’ll go in for
public
floggings, Ralph. Beaverbrook’s still a bit soft for that.’

‘Mosley’s calling the shots now. He’ll get the shirkers working properly, then our industry can maybe match the Germans and the bloody Yanks.’ He laughed. ‘Same
again?’

As he walked back to the table David remembered that talk of shooting trade unionists had once been a joke among some of his father’s lawyer friends; but now it was actually being done and
people like those old barflies were happy about it. They had taken a table by the window with a view out over brown frosty fields. Geoff had lit his pipe. He said with a self-deprecating bark of
laughter, ‘I’ve been talking about life out in Kenya again. Boring poor Natalia.’

She smiled at Geoff; David felt an odd pang of jealousy. ‘It is not boring,’ she said. ‘It sounds like another world, Africa. Like the Garden of Eden.’

‘It’s hot and full of disease.’

‘The White Man’s grave.’

‘That’s West Africa. But it’s hard work. Out where I was in the tribal areas there were just a few of us running an area half the size of Wales. Well, the chiefs ran it really,
but they had to defer to us. We pushed a road through while I was there. I thought it was a good thing, would help them develop some commerce, but it was just used to ferry black labour to the
white settler areas.’ His mouth set hard.

Natalia said, ‘It must have been very lonely if you were the only white man.’

‘Yes, their way of life’s so different. They don’t really trust us. Can’t blame them, I suppose, we just arrived and took things over.’ He gave his bitter laugh.
‘Sometimes among them I felt like a man stumbling about in the dark with a dim lantern.’

David said, ‘We used to have black visitors at the Dominions Office sometimes. I remember not long after I started, I had to meet a South African student who was stranded here without any
money, and didn’t want to go home. I thought I had liberal ideas about race but when he came in all I could do was sit and stare at him because he looked so different. He must’ve
thought I was mad. Spoke to me in perfect Oxford English.’ He shook his head. ‘Of course, Africans and Indians aren’t allowed to come to England to study any more.’

Geoff pulled at his pipe. ‘If I was honest I was always happy to see other white officers, veterinarians and forestry people. And I’d go down to Nairobi often.’ A shadow
crossed his face and he fell silent. David thought, he still hasn’t got over that woman he knew out there, though it was years ago. It was a strange sort of fidelity, admirable but somehow
frightening. He wondered if Natalia knew Geoff’s story. She probably did, she probably knew everything about them.

She met his eye briefly, then glanced out of the window. ‘Winter has come early this year. It reminds me of my country.’ She smiled sadly, in her self-contained way.

The men at the bar were becoming drunk and loud-voiced. ‘During the Great War, if a man wouldn’t go over the top and fight you gave him a quick court-martial, then took him out and
shot him. I’ve seen it done. Why should it be any different with people who won’t bloody work?’ David remembered something Sarah had said once, that the Great War had made mass
slaughter ordinary, that was why Stalin and Hitler could commit murder on a scale inconceivable before 1914. It was why these old men could talk like Soviet Commissars or SS men.

The barman had turned the television up. Everyone looked round. The background of a turning globe, the BBC initials underneath, was showing; they heard the announcer say, ‘. . . special
broadcast from the Minister for India, the Right Honourable Enoch Powell MP.’ Powell’s ascetic face with the black moustache and fierce, passionate eyes appeared. Everyone was looking.
He began to speak, in his ringing voice with its Birmingham accent; unsmiling – Powell never smiled. ‘I wish to broadcast to you today about our most important Imperial possession,
India. You will all be aware of the seditious rebellion and terrorism there. It has even infected native regiments within the Indian army. But I want to tell you today that we shall not, will
never, give in. We know that the majority of the Indian people support us; the ordinary people to whom we have brought railways and irrigation and a measure of prosperity, the rulers of the
princely states, our loyal allies. The Muslim League, who fear Hindu domination. For two hundred years we have governed India, firmly and fairly. Ruling it is our destiny.’