Widowland

by C. J. Carey

  ‘Useless. They have no leads. And each time they erase one, another crops up. They’re throwing soldiers and police at it but they’ve got no trace of the perpetrators, and guess who’ll get the blame if this kind of embarrassment occurs during the Leader’s visit.’

  He cast a morose glance upwards, as if God himself had a personal hand in his vexation, then seemed to pull himself together.

  ‘Only theory they have is, the culprits are coming from Widowland.’

  Into her mind came the run-down, decrepit streets, the desolate fringes of towns inhabited by the Friedas. Useless old women fit only for cleaning or factory work. The lowest of the low.

  ‘The Friedas are known to be keen on reading. We regularly lock them up for flouting every goddamn regulation that exists regarding literature. You know the rule – books may not be discussed by groups of more than three, except under regulated conditions. We’ve picked plenty of them off for that. Not to mention discussion of subversive texts. If this is where it’s coming from, it makes sense. Trouble is, the Gestapo have already gone in hard but they’ve found nothing, despite their most persuasive methods.’

  Eckberg ran a finger around his collar. Even at this time in the morning it was damp with sweat.

  ‘The fact is, these old Friedas fear nothing. And without husbands or children, it’s hard to get a lever on them. They’re difficult to crack.’ He scratched the place where an angry shaving rash was spreading across his neck, as though his personality was erupting from within in physical form. ‘That’s where you come in.’

  Rose recoiled. Images flashed before her of an elderly woman in an interrogation cell, the policemen by turns persuasive and threatening, with the prospect of torture hanging always behind their dead smiles.

  ‘Sir . . . ?’

  Eckberg flattened a cigarette stub beneath his boot and spat on the ground for good measure.

  ‘Listen, would you. I have a plan. It’s to do with the Protector’s history. You know about that, of course.’

  Everyone knew. Protector Rosenberg had for some years been toiling away on a vast history of England that would prove beyond doubt that the English and German nations stemmed from the same blood and bone. Geographers, biologists, historians, anthropologists and even fairy tale experts had been roped into the venture, which had its very own office in London and a dedicated academic staff. The book was Rosenberg’s private obsession and he was said to devote far more time to it than he spent administrating the Protectorate. Its central contention was that several centuries ago the two peoples had been one, until war and conquest took the Germanic tribes east, and the English receded to the safe boundaries of their small island. The most profound, motivating quest of Rosenberg’s life was to discover the evidence that proved his theory.

  ‘From what I know,’ ventured Rose, ‘the Protector believes that the nations of the Alliance—’

  ‘I’m not asking what you know. I’m telling you what I want. The Protector needs some research done and he’s asked me to send some of my people out to question citizens about their heritage, that sort of thing. Folklore. An insight into the ancestral traditions of this miserable country.’

  They had reached the pavement where the Mercedes stood, engine idling. A chauffeur sprang out to open the door and Rose climbed reluctantly in after Eckberg, who was still speaking rapidly.

  ‘So here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to go into the Widowlands posing as a researcher for the Protector’s book. You will assemble a group of Friedas and question them about their lives, their experiences and their memories. Family traditions, local folklore, superstitions. Harmless stuff. Old women love gossiping about their pasts. It’s all they have.’

  He blew out his cheeks and cast a filthy glance at a milk cart whose horse had inconsiderately caused the Mercedes to slow down. A policeman on a motorcycle who had been escorting them sped towards the milkman and began shouting, but the horse gave only a languid, insolent flick of its tail.

  Eckberg pivoted his bulk towards her with effort.

  ‘The Leader arrives in exactly two weeks’ time so I want your answers on my desk before then. Effectively, you’re my spy. And you tell no one. That includes Kreuz. You report directly to me. I suggest you start in the Widowlands outside Oxford. There have been a couple of incidents there and the Bodleian Library is the first stop on the Leader’s itinerary.’

  ‘But, Commissioner—’

  ‘Don’t Commissioner me.’ He brought his face close to her, so that she could almost taste its sweaty sheen and breathe the rank odour of his breakfast sausage.

  ‘Listen. I don’t give a damn what you and Kreuz get up to in your squalid little lives. The Protector may believe in beheading for adultery, but I couldn’t care less, so long as you keep your fornication to yourselves. However, I do care about my career and anything that might affect my chances of ever leaving this godforsaken rain-soaked dump, so if you don’t want to end up in a camp, it’s in your interests to make this work. Go to the Widowlands. Root them out. Bring me the names of the culprits and I will deal with them. We’ve got an entire nation wanting to see a beautiful queen and her king being crowned. Let everyone see what happens to old crones who try to get in the way.’

  A trace of a smile flicked across his florid countenance but was over before it had begun.

  ‘Those people in the Amt Moralische have a touch of the mediaeval about them. Apparently they’re launching a fresh drive on public purity and moral pollution to coincide with the Coronation. They’re longing to make an example. Who better than the Assistant Commissioner and his little courtesan to encourage the others?’

  Rose could barely breathe. Would the Commissioner really subject Martin to public disgrace? Was it perhaps an act of pre-emptive envy, against a deputy so much more vital and talented than himself?

  His lizard tongue licked its lips.

  ‘Any questions?’

  Hundreds. No end of them.

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Get out then.’

  The car pulled to a sharp halt. Eckberg gave her a little push and Rose was unceremoniously ejected onto the Tottenham Court Road.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Monday, 19th April

  Westwards from Paddington, through the city’s stained, concrete outskirts and rows of drab streets, the train ran. Rose stared out. This was England: flat, denuded, grey. The high streets were all alike. Each had their grocer’s shop whose windows were stacked with fake goods to disguise the shortages: loaves made of cardboard, milk bottles filled with salt, cereal packets with nothing in them. Each had a police station where citizens must register and report to have their identities checked on a regular basis. Each had a pub, with spittle and sawdust on the floor and tankards of mild Alliance ale. Each had a post office with a back room where Alliance officers would sift and censor mail. And in every town was a church which, since Rosenberg’s Drive to Eliminate Christian Influence, rang not with hymns but the hubbub of sturdy female parishioners fundraising for the Alliance Winter Festival.

  It was the kind of anonymous English morning that was blanketed by bone-grey cloud. Traffic was light, only the odd bus and tram passed in the streets beyond the track. She caught a glimpse of a road sweeper shifting dirt from one end of the curb to the next. There were no park railings anymore, just as there were no stair rods or brass plates outside doctors’ offices, because all kinds of metal were required on the mainland. Everything was monochrome. Even the sparrows seemed to have dust on their wings. The only unusual aspect was the strings of pastel bunting draped across the Victorian terraces in anticipation of the Coronation.

  A tattered poster of the Leader flapped on a hoarding, torn at the edges and dampened by rain. His was the face that everyone knew, hung in schools and shops, theatres, swimming pools and community halls. It was more familiar than family and greater than God, both instantly recognizable yet strangely evanescent. If you tried to focus on it, the image slipped away, like a malig
n Mona Lisa, as though it could never quite be captured. In this poster, he stood against a mountain backdrop, mouth downturned, eyes averted to an idealized distant land that, while unknown, seemed unlikely to be the English territories. It was hard to guess what he was thinking.

  Advertising hoardings flashed by – Rowntrees Fruit Gums, Chesterfield Cigarettes: Man-size Satisfaction. Once, between towns, Rose caught sight of concentric rings of barbed wire surrounding a series of high walls with watchtowers, and electric searchlights fixed to them. There were all kinds of detention centres – Correction Centres, Re-education Centres, Enlightenment Centres – but most people just called them camps. She shuddered, and the Commissioner’s threat throbbed in her mind like a physical pain.

  If you don’t want to end up in a camp . . .

  What went on in a camp? She had never seen inside one and she knew nobody who had either, though there were always stories. Of people who disappeared from the workplace, or their home, and never came back. Or of those who did return, hollow-eyed and silent, and never talked about it. Sometimes, walking along the street, or shopping, you might see a collection truck pass, and glimpse terrified faces staring from the grille of a window. Yet most people turned away, as though even to look was forbidden. More often, the security forces deployed disguised vehicles, done up to look like bread or milk or grocery vans with a steel floor and a cramped cell space in the back, so as not to disturb citizens unduly.

  She picked up a newspaper that had been left on the opposite seat and read through it in a desultory way. With newsprint restricted, the papers had all grown leaner in the past decade, both physically and in content. Just as radio journalists were assessed for ideological bias, broadcasting transmitters guarded and monitored and foreign stations jammed, so newspapers were obliged to run the gamut of the censors, and most editors operated by a motto of ‘If in doubt, cut’.

  The People’s Observer, a red-top, with large, shouty font, was the sister publication to Germany’s most popular daily, the Völkischer Beobachter, and Rose knew the kind of stories she would see even before she had read them. It was news by the yard, as cardboard as the bread in the shops, as cheap and garish as gummy bear sweets, produced in reams in the Press Ministry located directly below her own office.

  On the mainland, journalists would be summoned to the Propaganda Ministry in Berlin for the morning news conference and be told what to write. Any deviation merited instant punishment. The system worked so well that after the Alliance was formed it was swiftly transferred to England. Every day journalists from all the daily papers – the Express, the Mail, the News Chronicle, the Echo, the Manchester Guardian, The Times – would queue up to enter the conference room and be briefed by officials, or if it was important, the Commissioner himself, on what the news was, what it wasn’t, and how it should be reported.

  It was like making a cake, Bridget Fanshaw said. First you took the raw materials. A man had discovered that his wife, a Leni, was carrying on with a Hauptsturmführer in her office. He comes home from the factory and stabs her with a bread knife. The body of a woman is fished from the Thames, identifiable only as a Gretl by the tattered remnants of her brown clothing. Police are appealing for witnesses. Two Gelis have been killed in a car driven by a Sturmbannführer. A new musical, A Girl in Every Port, is opening at the London Palladium.

  These ingredients are sifted to remove the grit – the details of the Leni’s lover, for example, the name of the Sturmbannführer driving the crashed car, any impropriety in the musical that might offend the Morality Office – then sliced, diced and blended to the tastes of individual readers. A little more spice for readers of the Daily Mail, a dryer mix for The Times.

  Today was no different. The splash concerned the country’s record munitions production. Three new factories had been opened and thousands of relocated Gretls and Friedas drafted in to staff them. The good news was illustrated by a picture of the women, turbans on their heads and their shapeless forms draped in workers’ overalls, bent over their machinery, making bullets. Rose had given up wondering what or who the bullets were for. Apart from some skirmishes in the Far East, the Alliance was not at war, but as the Government repeated with wearying regularity, Defence is the backbone of a strong and stable society. For anyone who didn’t know, the motto was regularly emblazoned on boards in the lobby of every ministerial building, even Culture.

  Plenty of newsprint was given over to the Coronation, including blurry shots of the royal families of Denmark and Romania arriving at Heston Aerodrome, and a feature on two of the grey geldings, Donner and Blitzen, who would pull the four-ton gold state coach.

  Before the Coronation a dinner was to be held at Clarence House with celebrated socialites invited, including the Mitford sisters, Unity and Diana, not to mention Diana’s husband Oswald Mosley, the former Prime Minister. The Londonderrys and assorted aristocrats would also be in attendance, along with a selection of faceless MPs who presided over Alliance business in the House of Commons. A set of new stamps had been issued to mark the Coronation, the Leader’s disembodied profile floating gothically above the happy couple.

  Rose turned the page, flicked through the horoscopes, and her eye ranged casually across the advertisements.

  Come to Clacton, Britain’s Gold Coast! Sea and sun at all-inclusive Alliance resort. (Class III females and above)

  Celia had been to Clacton the previous year and was entranced. She returned telling Rose she couldn’t care less about the foreign travel ban when the English seaside offered that kind of attraction.

  Felixstowe. Gateway to Glamour.

  In the midst of the classifieds was the dating column, the doomed hunting ground of Magdas and Gretls who of all the castes had the hardest job finding a man. These women brought fewer rations with them and were restricted as to where they could live and the places they could frequent. No smart restaurants or cafés for them. Their clothes were drab and their looks frequently ruined by hard physical work.

  One thing they did come with, however, was a womb.

  Blonde female (Class IV b), energetic, considered attractive, seeks man, any age, for love and reproduction.

  Beautiful, blue-eyed, healthy Class III a girl, excellent cook, nursing skills, wishes to bear children for a male companion.

  Respectable young woman hopes to produce a son for the Alliance.

  Rose scanned the lumpen prose with a cool, professional eye. What might Jane Austen or Emily Brontë have made of these desperate advertisements? How might they have viewed these guileless pleas?

  Alongside the classifieds, in almost mocking proximity, was a photograph of a beautiful woman, with a heart-shaped face, high-arched brows and implausibly milk-white skin buffed to a dewy studio sheen. The caption said that the American film star Sonia Delaney was visiting London to present a documentary movie about the Coronation of Wallis Windsor called American Queen. There followed a few paragraphs about Miss Delaney, some lines in which she explained why Queen Wallis had ‘a special place in every American heart’ and a list of the actress’s most recent movies – two spy capers, a couple of thrillers and a romantic comedy.

  Rose’s attention quickened.

  Not because she had any interest in Sonia Delaney or her films, but because Martin had recently mentioned that the Culture Ministry was to host a reception for a delegation of American film-makers and the authorities were cock-a-hoop. Relations with America had been cool over the past thirteen years, despite Ambassador Kennedy’s initial enthusiasm for the Alliance, so the prospect of a posse of Hollywood powerbrokers, ready to discuss a slate of proposed co-productions, had prompted the Culture Ministry to roll out the red carpet. Queen Wallis was widely credited with these friendly overtures, which was, Martin said, just one more reason to love her.

  Rose didn’t care why the Americans were coming. All she wanted was the chance to meet them.

  Americans were a byword for worldly sophistication and as most people had no chance of ever encountering one,
this legendary status was never dispelled. Everything British citizens knew about America came from the movies. America was a Shangri-La, full of impossible quantities of food; it was the home of Coca Cola, milkshakes and glistening cocktail bars with mirrors and black marble. Of gleaming Chevrolets and good-looking young men. Dean Martin. Eddie Fisher. Perry Como. The regime itself did not encourage this vision. America was not an ally, after all, but a neutral country, and Jews there were allowed a quite disproportionate influence on government. Yet the very adjective American had come to signal sophistication and chic in the way that once, incredibly, Parisian had been used.

  As the train travelled further, the towns fell away and they entered the countryside proper. Spring fields stretched out in corduroy furrows and kestrels hovered high above. A herd of russet cows lay in the shade of a tree and a haze of young green tipped the distant woodland. Willows trailed leafy fingers into streams. Lush banks of bluebells, cowparsley, the clotted cream of hawthorn and saucers of elder blossom fringed the train track. After the drab homogeneity of the towns, this landscape was like another England, an ancient, sleeping land that lay deep and undisturbed just below the surface.

  A line ran like a ribbon of music through her head.

  When that Aprille with his shoures soote/The droghte of March hath perced to the roote

  Where did that strange incantation come from? Those enchanting, archaic words? Faintly, into her mind floated a poem about a pilgrimage. It must be something Dad had told her. Dad loved to recite poetry; he knew acres of it by heart. He had an ‘office’ – in fact, a converted garage at the side of the house – overflowing with books, papers, jam jars of pens and nibs and pencil sharpeners, all rich with the smell of pipe tobacco and a faint, lingering tinge of motor oil. He would sit there, one hand stroking his chin, occasionally leaning towards her with a spark in his eye.

  Do you see, Rosie? Do you see what the poet is doing there?