Widowland

by C. J. Carey

  Overseeing the whole system was the Alliance Security Office, which dealt with all types of espionage, terrorism, subversion and insurgency. The ASO was famed as the best in Europe, more efficient even than the one established in the 1930s in Berlin, and its chief officer, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, had been installed when the Alliance was formed. Kaltenbrunner, a thin-lipped Austrian with a long, brutal face and a scar that lifted his mouth to a perpetual snarl, had risen up the ranks in Austria, where he ran the SS and assisted in the annexation of the country, before moving over to Berlin and, in a dazzling ascendancy, rising to Security Chief. It was said that his favourite place was still the interrogation cell.

  Universal Surveillance was Kaltenbrunner’s creation and his genius. It made some citizens edgy, but most shrugged off surveillance like weather, a natural phenomenon no more or less ubiquitous than rain.

  Rose was about to hasten down the steps of the underground when a voice floated from behind.

  ‘Enjoy the film?’

  Out of the vapour emerged the figure of Oliver Ellis. He was wearing a trench coat with an upturned collar and a hat tilted down over his face, and in the harsh light of the tube station his blanched features reminded her of some ancient Athenian bust from a museum gallery.

  He was as cool as marble, too. As ever, he was alone.

  There was always, if not loneliness, then a suggestion of solitude about Oliver Ellis. If you thought about it, which Rose didn’t, he was something of an enigma. Few enough young men of marriageable age remained in England, so how come he was still single? He was good-looking enough to draw the glances of women in the office, yet he always deflected their interest. Bridget Fanshaw had spent many months flirting energetically with Oliver, to no avail.

  ‘Not wasting any more time on him,’ she had vowed. ‘He’s obviously not interested in women.’

  Could that be true? Was Oliver Ellis one of those men whose desires could get them locked up?

  Now, she forced a smile onto her face.

  ‘I thought it was a lovely story. Very touching.’

  ‘Really?’ His eyes seemed to dance with suppressed amusement, as though he was trying not to laugh, and as usual, she got the impression he was laughing at her. ‘I thought it was a disgraceful mishmash of anodyne schmaltz that sounded like it had been translated from Chinese.’

  ‘Kristina Söderbaum’s always good,’ said Rose automatically. The film had melted from her mind like the candyfloss she remembered from childhood, the kind that vanished in seconds leaving only a sickly-sweet residue.

  ‘What did you make of the newsreel? Stalin’s funeral?’

  She gave a slight shrug, concealing her astonishment. Nobody ever discussed international events in the street. She wondered if he was drunk.

  ‘I wasn’t watching actually. Too busy chatting.’

  ‘Ah. So you went with Helena Bishop.’

  ‘She was checking the film for anything politically offensive.’

  A grin flitted across Oliver’s lean, sardonic face.

  ‘Don’t think she needs to worry about that. Aesthetically offensive, certainly. And not suitable for anyone under twenty-one.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘Not suitable for anyone over twenty-one either.’

  Rose laughed guardedly. Oliver’s flippancy made her cautious, even though Helena was just as irreverent, and she was one of the Ministry’s rising stars.

  ‘Did you see the kerfuffle?’ he asked. ‘Over in the square? The police?’

  The drizzle had lent an unexpected intimacy to their encounter, bringing them close and muffling their senses. Rose glanced from side to side. The ‘Alliance Look’, it was called. A gesture familiar to every citizen who made conversation in a public place, as automatic as breathing.

  ‘I must have missed it. Too busy avoiding the rain.’

  Why had she not noticed him in the cinema? The elite section was only thinly populated, and a man of Oliver’s height was not hard to make out.

  ‘Looks like they arrested another one.’

  Pointedly, Rose checked her watch.

  ‘Are you going home on the tube?’ he asked.

  She toyed with saying no, in case he was too, but she realized she had no idea where he lived. The southwest of the capital, she vaguely believed. Obviously, it would be an elite area. Knightsbridge perhaps?

  Sensing her hesitation, he added, ‘I’m walking. I need the exercise. See you in the morning, I suppose.’

  Turning on his heel, he vanished abruptly into the misty air.

  When Rose reached her block, she entered the hall as silently as possible and crept up the stairs. It was late, but judging by the trace of cigarette smoke and mothballs that lingered on the landing, the occupant of the next-door flat, Elsa Bottomley, had only recently returned. Elsa Bottomley was a squat Geli with hair dyed the colour of mahogany furniture, and a selection of shapeless wool skirts. She had a husband who worked abroad, a wall-eyed son in the Alliance armed services who came and went, and a job in the Transport Ministry. Maybe it was her work with timetables and punctuality that made Elsa so particularly attuned to the tiniest details of Rose’s routine. ‘Not late for work, I hope!’ she would observe, as they passed in the hall. Or in the evening, eyes flickering across Rose’s dress or shoes, ‘Going out again, Miss Ransom? I’m sure I’d be exhausted with all the socializing you do. I don’t know how you manage it!’ When Rose was editing the Grimms’ fairy tales, she had come across descriptions of witches with hearing as keen as animals and the image of Elsa Bottomley’s suspicious, twitching face had sprung irresistibly to mind.

  Shutting her door, she stood still and assessed the quality of the silence. Filtering out the distant rumble of the street outside, she could hear only the occasional creak of timber that was to be expected in a tall, Bloomsbury terrace, and the flap of slippers on floorboards, followed by the metallic clink of a teaspoon stirring late-night tea that signalled Elsa Bottomley’s ironclad routine. Still motionless, Rose surveyed the furniture around her minutely, as though it had been moved in her absence. She had started doing this occasionally when she returned, though she had no idea why. Habit, she supposed.

  Going over to the sink, where her breakfast teacup stood upended, she touched the kettle. Then, moving across to the table, she checked that its leg still covered the same knot of wood in the floorboard, before shifting her bed from the wall, removing the flap of green wallpaper and reaching into the cavity where she kept her notebooks.

  The current notebook was made of thin, cheap paper that tore easily. Paper was increasingly scarce in the Alliance, and it had lately been announced that newspapers would be reduced in size to account for the shortage. Nobody in the Ministry could decide if this was an attempt by the authorities to reduce the flow of information, or a genuine reaction to the fact that increasing quantities of raw materials were diverted to the mainland. Yet the notebook was good enough for its purpose. Rose had a fresh story in mind and was keen to get the outline down, so she settled herself at her table, lit the lamp, and stared down at the treetops in the darkened square.

  Normally, the act of writing was an immediate salve. It created a distance between the hurry of her day and the stillness of her mind. It seemed the antidote to everything: magical in its ability to transport her to different worlds and surround her with other beings whose lives and loves she had conjured from her own mysterious depths.

  Yet now, bent in the pool of light, pen in hand, the encounter with Oliver Ellis refused to dissipate.

  There was no avoiding it. Something about him troubled her.

  It had started at work – not only in the office, but in the canteen, in the pub after work, and at official functions. Although Oliver’s job concerned the correction of history, rather than literature, they both had privileged access to the same library stacks of degenerate texts, and often, when she looked up from browsing the shelves, she noticed Oliver Ellis close by.

  She sifted through her mem
ories of the recent past, panning for glimpses of the inscrutable, bespectacled face and the brush of dark hair that he never oiled properly out of his eyes. Unlike some of the other men in the Ministry, who wore patterned braces and brightly coloured ties to signify the cultured nature of their employment, Oliver’s grey suits were nondescript, as though he went out of his way to avoid attracting attention. He seemed to possess the ability to merge into any crowd, and in every crowd she could think of, there he was. Whether at departmental staff meetings, or gatherings in the pub, his enigmatic figure was never far away. Was that because he enjoyed the company? Or was it, as everyone said, because he was ambitious? Martin himself had commented that Oliver Ellis was ‘going places’ and everyone knew his work was highly thought of. As she pondered, another recollection rose to the surface of her mind: a moment during the recent reorganization of the office, when the Correction team had moved to a new floor and Oliver Ellis had arrived at the adjacent desk. The tight, compressed smile he gave her as he arranged his pens and files. Did he ask to be seated right next to her, or had he been ordered? Was he, in fact, a watcher?

  Someone, after all, had informed the office of her minute infractions of behaviour. She had received an official reprimand for wearing lipstick to work – an old tube of Max Factor Sweet Cherry that had belonged to her mother. Someone had reported the joke she told about the Alliance’s ideal man: ‘He’s as slender as the Commissioner, as handsome as the Protector, as blond as the Leader.’

  Yet even as the thought arose, she dismissed it. Oliver Ellis probably was a watcher. After all, every office worker was encouraged to spy on their colleagues as part of the job. But as she had told Bridget and Helena, there was nothing much about her that anyone could discover.

  The slam of a door outside and the tramp of feet on the pavement distracted her. She was tired, and the least she could do to prepare for the next day’s meeting with the Commissioner was to try to get some sleep. She shut the notebook and put it away.

  Hannah’s new story would have to wait.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Friday, 16th April

  He was on the phone when she entered. A conversation consisting of short, impatient barks. ‘Ja . . . Ja . . . Jawohl.’

  A few moments later he replaced the receiver with an aggressive sniff and turned to face her.

  The Commissioner of All Culture in the Anglo-Saxon Alliance had the girth to match his inflated title. In another life he might have been a butcher heaving sides of ham and splintering bones with a thwack of his meaty forearm. He had a shiny bald pate, with strands of ginger connecting the distant outposts of scrub on either side and a roll of flesh bulging over his collar. He spoke solely in German. In thirteen years he had not bothered to learn more than a couple of English words, the chief one being ‘fuck’.

  ‘Fräulein Ransom. Komm.’

  There followed no invitation to sit down, so she straightened her shoulders attentively. She had barely slept. Her face was as scrubbed as a kitchen floor and she had chosen her dullest, most conservative worsted suit for the occasion, a plain blouse underneath and no jewellery. If the Commissioner noticed, however, he wasn’t showing it. He continued to sift through a series of papers on his desk, occasionally tossing one aside like a bad hand of cards.

  Rose glanced around her. The walls were free of Old Masters because Eckberg was proudly ignorant, rejecting most culture as pretentious claptrap and liable to take against anyone purely on the grounds that they liked music or sculpture. God forbid that any of his subordinates nursed an enthusiasm for theatre. The sole decorations were a photograph of himself, looking absurd in lederhosen, and one of his family Schloss, a turreted monstrosity in Bavaria, hanging above the desk as if a mocking reminder of where he would rather be.

  After a short pause, the bloodshot eyes swivelled towards her and he uttered a single word.

  ‘Kreuz.’

  So she was right. Her stomach lurched. Knowledge of her relationship with Martin had reached the Commissioner’s ears and she was here to face the music. How had she ever expected otherwise? Official penalties for adultery were harsh. Imprisonment. A camp. The rules were so widely flouted that people had grown complacent, but still the authorities could choose to invoke them at any moment.

  Eckberg, however, was still speaking.

  ‘Kreuz is much given to talking about you. He admires you, it’s clear. What is also clear . . .’ – here he allowed a pause to stretch, freighted with the knowledge that she was terrified of what he knew, and feared some retribution – ‘is that you’re a discreet woman. Able to keep your head down and your thoughts to yourself. You’re of good family, I gather. You have a sister? And a niece?’

  Rose understood. This was entry level procedure. A polite, seemingly courteous enquiry, disguised as small talk and designed to establish a vulnerability. Your family could always be used against you. Not even the most hardened dissident wanted to see their loved ones come to harm.

  ‘She’s called Hannah, sir,’ Rose said, adding pointlessly, ‘Six years old.’

  Eckberg could not care less what age Hannah was. He couldn’t care if she lived or died.

  ‘Very nice, but forget all that. It’s your discretion I’m interested in. I have a task for you. Somewhat beyond your usual remit. It’s to do with vandalism.’

  ‘Vandalism, sir?’

  ‘That’s what I said, isn’t it? I hope your language is up to scratch, girl. Now, this vandalism has arisen in the past month. There have been sporadic outbreaks around the country. In fact, the call I just had was notification of another one. In London, this time. Come with me. I’ll show you what I mean.’

  Eckberg’s car, a tank of a Mercedes that had once belonged to the traitor Goering and had been shipped over from the mainland after a departmental haggle, cruised through the streets with unchallenged ease. People tended to look away when a ministerial car passed and the dearth of petrol meant very few private cars were around, so it took no more than five minutes to make the short trip from Whitehall to Great Russell Street, where the Portland stone facade of the British Museum gleamed palely in the morning air.

  Designed in Greek revival style, the nineteenth-century south entrance of the museum celebrated the civilization of man, and from its pediment the muses of science, geometry, architecture, drama, music and poetry had for a hundred years gazed impassively down, inspiring those who passed beneath to cherish the highest ideals that mankind could attain.

  Now, between the monumental ionic columns, arc lights had been strung, lending a theatrical air to the scene, as though it was the set of a UFA movie, and a gaggle of workmen in heavy duty clothes moved around the portico industriously, wielding hoses, nozzles and plastic piping.

  Across the top of the pediment in violent red paint a single sentence stretched.

  Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it and there will be an end to blind obedience

  A shiver ran through Rose. It was the kind of electric thrill that she could not explain, as though something deep within her had momentarily stirred. As though the words had reached inside and kindled there, as hot and as urgent as flames.

  ‘Who was it?’

  Beside her, Eckberg snorted.

  ‘That’s what we’re trying to find out.’

  ‘I mean, who wrote it, sir? Who wrote those words originally?’

  ‘Christ. What kind of question is that? Nobody. A woman called Mary Wollstonecraft.’

  Woll Stone Craft. Rose repeated the name silently, letting the syllables sink deep into her brain.

  ‘Dead,’ he added. ‘And if she wasn’t, she would be.’

  ‘How did it get there?’

  ‘The vandals climbed up last night apparently. Using ropes. I’ll be using ropes on them when we catch them. I’ll hang them here, right in front of their pathetic stunt.’

  She didn’t doubt it. A shudder at the forthcoming atrocity seemed to carry up through the soles of Rose’s feet, but Eckberg was already on the
move, the exertion of mounting the museum steps causing his breath to come in laboured, asthmatic grunts.

  ‘This has cropped up in different areas of the country over the past few weeks. At first, we took them for unrelated incidents, but now our esteemed Gestapo chief has concluded that they’re linked. A co-ordinated insurgency pattern, he called it. It could be a co-ordinated fucking knitting pattern for all I care. I wouldn’t give a fuck if it wasn’t my Ministry being targeted.’

  ‘Culture, sir?’

  A frown creased Eckberg’s meaty brow, as though the very word made him want to reach for his gun.

  ‘Unfortunately. Every incident has taken place in or near a library.’

  Rose stared, astonished.

  ‘This used to be a library, apparently. The Jew Marx wrote Das Kapital here. That should have been enough to qualify it for demolition.’

  ‘And it’s just graffiti?’

  That was a mistake. Eckberg cast her a vicious look.

  ‘Graffiti not enough for you? Did you want something more? Well, sometimes they scribble inside too. On corridor walls.’

  ‘What do they scribble?’

  ‘Rubbish. Degenerate rubbish.’

  The foreman of the building squad approached unctuously, fingers twisting in apologetic knots. While Eckberg delivered a bad-tempered harangue, Rose watched the sentence being erased with a chemical wash, the letters bleeding pinkly down the stone. There were no other onlookers. The roads around the museum had been closed off with police tape to prevent the offending words being seen more widely and in a matter of minutes, it would be as though they had never been written.

  Woll Stone Craft.

  Eckberg strode back towards her, scowling, brushing past the parts of the courtyard that had been roped off in order that policemen on their hands and knees could grub for microscopic fragments in the cobbles.