by C. J. Carey
The furniture was cheap. Like food and clothing and everything else, it was made of the least valuable materials. The best cuts of wood – the oak, ash and cherry – were needed elsewhere on the mainland, together with the highest quality food and building materials. Citizens of the Alliance had to make do.
Rose didn’t care. This was a room of her own, and she knew how lucky she was to have it.
Retrieving the teabag she had left out that morning to dry, she set a kettle on the stove. Once she had made a cup of tea, she fed an Alliance mark into the gas meter, kicked off her heels, and drew her legs beneath her in the armchair.
It was only when she was gazing into the cracked bars as they flickered violet, then gently glowed, that she finally allowed her mind to focus on the question that had been haunting her like an ill-concealed shadow.
What did the Cultural Commissioner want with her?
Fat, florid, fifty and prone to random acts of spite, Commissioner Hermann Eckberg’s foul temper was partly the gift of genes and partly the legacy of a horse-riding accident in Hyde Park that had wrecked his back and for which he held the whole of England responsible.
As Cultural Commissioner for the Protectorate, Eckberg reported directly to Joseph Goebbels, the Controller of all Culture back in Berlin. Since SS-Reichsführer Himmler had been promoted to deputy Leader, following the defection of the traitor Goering to Russia in 1945, the Culture Ministry was seeded with SS men, and they were not a natural fit. Eckberg in particular loathed his job. As an unashamed Philistine, he detested art and music, let alone literature or theatre, and like the Romans before him viewed England as a distant outpost of empire. The food was disgusting, the weather worse, and the political circumstances surrounding the Alliance meant that employees had to be treated with a veneer of respect that was not accorded to the citizens of other subjugated nations.
All of which was enough to put Eckberg in a perennially bad mood.
Rose had a deep, panicky urge to call Martin. She imagined his handsome face reassuring her, like a kind family doctor. His smooth tones and his husky voice with its attractive German edge. So, she had been summoned for a meeting? Why worry about that? It was not as if she had been stealing paperclips, for God’s sake. What possible grounds could an innocent person have to fear?
She lifted a hand towards the telephone, then immediately dropped it. Not only had Martin forbidden her from contacting him by telephone, but he was away on a trip abroad and not back for two days.
Besides, something told her that the summons concerned Martin himself.
CHAPTER THREE
Adultery.
Of all the double standards practised so fervently among the upper echelons of the regime, the favourite concerned their approach to sex. Unofficially, adultery was rampant. Most senior men had a girlfriend and they had their pick of the Gelis, married or not. Officially, however, it was taboo, and recently the disapproval of adulterous relationships had intensified at the highest levels. As he aged, the Protector’s already monkish tendencies hardened, and he had publicly declared that he would not feel comfortable dining with any woman other than his wife. Despite his name, Rosenberg was not Jewish, but the aura of Jewishness that had dogged him throughout his life only intensified his obsession with blood purity and fortified his conviction that adultery deserved the death sentence. The regime was all for increasing the birth rate, but the sanctity of marriage was paramount.
Rose didn’t like adultery either, but that was no help on the day, almost a year ago, when she first came to the notice of Assistant Cultural Commissioner Martin Kreuz.
Subliminally she must have detected the ripple of interest before she saw him. An almost imperceptible current of turned heads and whispers as he strode through the clatter of typewriters and the ping of telephones as he approached her place in the typing pool. His smart uniform with its perched eagle above the breast pocket and armband with the black letter A on its red background drew glances and giggles from all sides. What was a VIP doing at the desk of a lowly young Ministry staffer? Especially the handsome Martin Kreuz, whose smiling, suntanned face was so different from the potato-faced Bavarians and humourless, thin-lipped Prussians, with their wire-rimmed glasses and efficiency targets, who dominated the upper ranks of every Government ministry. With his imposing height and muscular frame, Kreuz had a rugged masculinity and a touch of the Italian about him. If he enjoyed opera, it would be Verdi, not Wagner.
To add to the mystery, unlike other Ministry officials, who made a point of conducting all conversations in German, Kreuz addressed her in English. While nobody was attempting to erase the native tongue, German was the language of officialdom, of school and workplace, and most Government staff stuck to it rigorously.
‘Could I have a word, Miss Ransom? In private, please.’
‘Shall I bring my . . . ?’ She held up the stenographer pad for dictation.
‘What? Oh no. Nothing like that.’
He led her down the dingy marble corridor, past the uniformed secretary outside his office, Ludwig Kohl, a porcine Saxon with closely shaven hair who failed to contain his obvious curiosity when Kreuz ushered Rose through the door and closed it firmly behind him.
Martin’s office was one of the most luxurious in the building. It was thickly carpeted, with a drinks trolley, a monumental mahogany desk and a sweeping view of the Thames. A Renoir bust stood on a side table and the walls were decorated with a selection of Old Masters – Constable, Vermeer, Titian, Rembrandt – picked out from the National Gallery. It was a perk offered to all senior officials, but this charming arrangement was not without its drawbacks. Inspiring though it was to be surrounded by the master works of Western civilization, Ministry rules stipulated that each office wall must also be hung with a regulation picture of the Leader, and the latest version, in which he appeared stumpy, putty-skinned and badly aged, looked all the more ridiculous juxtaposed with a Bronzino portrait of a young man, whose delicate features and Renaissance gaze were as ravishing as the day they were painted four hundred years ago.
Steepling his fingers beneath his chin, and crossing his jackbooted legs, Kreuz gave her a quizzical look.
‘Do sit down, Miss Ransom. Cigarette?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘Mind if I do?’
She shook her head, still mystified, and pulled her tweed skirt down further over her knees. Kreuz lit a cigarette with a heavy silver lighter, inset with a gold Alliance emblem, then replaced it thoughtfully.
‘I’ve asked you here because I have a task that involves books. I wonder, are you the kind of person who likes books?’
Did she like books? She certainly had once.
She had grown up in a rambling house in south London, with a father whose wartime injuries precipitated unpredictable outbursts of anger and a mother whose life’s work was to placate him. Whenever a row erupted, and until their father’s rage had burned itself out, Rose and her elder sister would escape – Celia to her bedroom to play with her dolls, and Rose into the orchard to climb the boughs of a pear tree with a book. She could still hear the soft call of the wood pigeons as they rustled in the branches around her. The drowsy hum of bees. The tiny plop of a pear falling to the grass. At that age, the books she read concerned adventures and animals and hearty girls in boarding schools who turned detective and solved crimes. But they were her refuge and her sanctuary.
‘I used to like books,’ she admitted. ‘When I was young.’
‘I guessed so. I thought that about you.’
Rose blushed at the idea that he had thought anything about her at all. She had certainly never thought anything about him. Other than his name and the fact that he was the Commissioner’s deputy, she had registered absolutely nothing about Martin Kreuz. She had certainly never looked past the uniform to the man who wore it. Now, regarding him more closely, she saw a man in his early fifties, sturdy and fit, with an expression of benign jocularity. Yet behind the smile, there was worry, and sadness
too. His face was as craggy as a mountain range and stress had carved a ravine between his eyes. She had the fleeting conviction that the bump on the nose had been obtained in a fight. A jagged slash of scar ran diagonally down one cheek. The aura of inner turmoil that haunted him, however, was overlaid by a surface of impeccable grooming. Kreuz’s hair was combed back from his forehead, his nails were buffed and he exuded the faint smell of a masculine pomade. On his desk she noticed a picture of a woman and four children: the woman – Frau Kreuz, she assumed – square-jawed and handsome, the little girls with flaxen plaits, and the boys in lederhosen.
‘And do you still read?’
‘I’m far too busy,’ she replied blandly. All citizens knew to be guarded about their personal lives. Reading was not expressly forbidden – indeed, a list of ‘educationally beneficial’ books was issued by the Ministry every year – but too much private reading, outside of a school or institution, was transgressive for a woman. It smacked of subversion. It was the kind of thing that raised eyebrows and got you talked about.
‘If I have any spare time, I tend to run up clothes on my sewing machine.’
He shrugged.
‘Sure. We’re all busy. Berlin has just sent a crateload of new instructions to be put in place and I can’t imagine how I’m going to find time to do it. They want to relocate half of the Foreign Office archive to London with no extra provision for it. I’m to find space for hundreds of boxloads of documents, as if I can magic up staff and shelving space with a snap of my fingers.’
A short laugh.
‘But you don’t want to hear about my personal troubles.’
Rose remained sitting rigidly, alert yet unjudgemental.
‘All this bureaucracy. But it’s what we poor pen-pushers have to work with. Stick to the rules and don’t question them. There’s a line from an English poet, Tennyson, about some disastrous Russian battle where the soldiers say, “Ours not to reason why . . .”’
‘“Ours but to do and die,”’ she murmured, before she could stop herself.
‘Precisely!’ A triumphant gleam in his eye. ‘You told me you weren’t a reader, but you are!’
Rose cursed herself. Kreuz had been testing her. His jokey complaint about bureaucracy was a trap into which she had neatly fallen.
‘I’m not. It’s my father. He loved poetry. He used to recite it. I didn’t understand most of it, but the words stuck.’
‘I see. Anyway . . .’ Kreuz stretched backwards and smoothed his hair with the flat of his hand. ‘I’m sure you know that literature is a great interest of the Protector.’
‘I don’t know much about him,’ she said, erring on the safe side.
It was a plausible response. The Protector was rarely seen. Sometimes it was possible to catch a glimpse of him, in tan fedora and trench coat, climbing into a Mercedes in Downing Street, and those who did found it hard to believe that this was the most powerful man in the land. An academic, architect and a keen believer in homeopathy, Alfred Rosenberg was sixty, but looked a decade more. With his sickly complexion, perpetual scowl and deep-set dark eyes, the Protector was more mortician than politician. It was difficult to credit that such a frigid temperament should nurse warm feelings for anything, let alone this land, yet Rosenberg’s passionate love affair with England was said to have begun in 1933, when he first set foot on English soil.
Possessed of a long-standing obsession with the story of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, the English, Rosenberg saw at once, were fellow beings with Germans. Both nations were Anglo-Saxons, bred of the same blood and bone and ancestrally intertwined in the mists of the Dark Ages. Only an accident of history had separated them, and back in the 1930s Rosenberg saw a chance to put that history right. When the opportunity arose, he asked the Leader for the gift of the Protectorate, and the Leader was only too pleased to oblige.
Martin smiled at Rose’s caution. He understood.
‘Not to worry. But I assure you, the Protector is a deeply literary man. He’s a bestselling author himself, as I hardly need point out.’
Rosenberg’s masterwork, The Myth of the Twentieth Century, was second only to the Leader’s autobiography in sales. It had sold ten million copies in Europe alone. It was displayed in every bookshop window. It lay open on a lectern at the entrance to Westminster Abbey.
‘So I don’t have to remind you about the Rosenberg Regulations regarding books.’
Along with the wide-ranging changes to every aspect of British existence, the creation of the Protectorate had brought an avalanche of regulations. Average citizens had found themselves bombarded with a blitz of rules and strictures on every conceivable area of daily life.
Including books.
On the mainland, back in 1933, when the Leader had come to power, degenerate books had been burned on pyres. Jubilant people danced as the evening air was lit with flakes of fire, and the words of Jews, Slavs, communists, liberals, homosexuals, freemasons, Catholics and every kind of subversive turned to ash.
The English, however, prided themselves on doing things a little differently. Native academics and librarians winced at the melodrama of their mainland allies. Although the regulations stipulated an outright ban on all the same categories of books, these degenerate texts were not burned on public bonfires, but loaded into industrial incinerators. Teams of civil servants combed libraries and archives, professionally cleansing them of problematic texts and disposing of them hygienically.
This wasn’t the Middle Ages.
And this was England, after all.
‘Actually, it might interest you to see this.’
Kreuz pulled back a drawer of the desk, extracted a small volume and held it up. It bore the title Informationsheft GB. Gestapo Handbook for the Invasion of Britain.
‘Ever heard of it?’
She shook her head. ‘No, sir.’
‘Bit of a museum piece now. But back in 1939 it was drawn up by the head of counter espionage, Walter Schellenberg, in the event that England might have to be forcibly invaded. That never happened, thank God, but this little book outlined detailed plans on establishing an occupation administration. How to run the economy, transport, language and so on. Who to arrest.’
He frowned and continued flipping through.
‘Yes. Here’s what I was looking for. The Sonderfahndungsliste GB. Special Wanted List. To be handed over to department IV B4 of the Central Reich Security Office. The arrest operations to be headed by Colonel Professor Dr Frank Six. Two thousand, eight hundred and twenty people.’
Another list. The Alliance liked lists. There were lists for everything.
‘Noël Coward, Vera Brittain, Aldous Huxley, J. B. Priestley, Sylvia Pankhurst, Stephen Spender, Rebecca West, Virginia Woolf. Have you heard of these characters?’
‘A couple,’ Rose said cautiously.
‘Virginia Woolf?’
‘Don’t think so.’
‘Me neither. Nor Schellenberg either, I daresay. Still, what does Herr Schellenberg need with Virginia Woolf when he’s married to Coco Chanel and has a ski chalet in Switzerland, lucky devil.’
Kreuz broke off from this musing to unlock his legs and swing himself to his feet.
‘But that’s not the point.’
Crossing the office, he paused at the drinks trolley to pour himself a generous whisky and gazed down at the Thames below.
‘If I can speak to you frankly, the reason many of these reprobates featured on Schellenberg’s list is because they wrote novels. And their novels are dangerous.’
‘Dangerous, sir?’
‘Sure. Our Protector believes that books are every bit as dangerous as bombs. Words are weapons, aren’t they? They’re a conduit for spreading propaganda against the Alliance. Back in the beginning, as you know, we tackled this problem with a fairly blunt instrument. We banned them.’
He remained at the window, shoulders hunched, staring absently downwards.
‘Personally, I have never been a fan of the bro
ad-brush approach, and nor, it now seems, is the Protector. He prefers something a little more nuanced. Say what you like about him – though I advise you not to . . .’ Here he turned and gave her a wink. ‘But the man’s a genius.’
‘Is he?’
‘Without doubt. Now recently, his people have been working on ways of addressing the “woman question”.’
‘I see.’
‘The whole woman question is a far-reaching issue, but the part that’s landed in my in-tray concerns fiction. Obviously, you know that novels portraying a subversive view of females are outlawed. Unruly women, those who challenge male authority, degenerate sexual preferences, all that.’
‘Yes.’
‘But we can’t make all books illegal, can we?’
‘Can’t we?’
He glanced sharply to check for insubordination and Rose returned a polite gaze.
‘No, we can’t. Rosenberg accepts that there are some texts that cannot be banned. Famous novels. Stories that are woven too deeply into the popular imagination. Unfortunately, a very high proportion of these novels are written by or about women. You must know what I’m talking about. Name one.’
Her mouth dried. Was this another trap? To name a famous title was to admit to having read it, or at the very least having heard of it.
‘I’m not sure.’
‘Come on now, Miss Ransom. I’m talking to you as an employee of the Culture Ministry. This is official business, not an interrogation. Nothing you say will go beyond these walls.’
‘Pride and Prejudice?’
‘Good example. Jane Austen. One of England’s most cherished writers. Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy, am I right?’