Widowland

by C. J. Carey

  ‘Female castes, you mean.’

  ‘In this case, yes. Female castes were first envisioned by the Indian Brahmins, whom Protector Rosenberg admires very much. Indeed, he holds the Brahmins to be fellow Aryans. A caste system works perfectly in India. Gandhi himself called caste “the genius” of society.’

  ‘I’ve always wanted to ask. Why should it apply only to women? What about men?’

  ‘Because women are special! They do something that men can’t do. They produce children! How many times have you heard the Leader say the most important citizen in his society is the mother? If we want a pure-blooded nation, we need to focus on that. We need to regulate breeding. Ensure that we keep control of the national stock. The strength of any nation depends on its purity. That’s obvious, right?’

  ‘I suppose . . .’

  ‘Besides’ – he leaned across to cup her breast in his hand – ‘you, Rose Ransom, are an elite. You’re a Geli. And I don’t hear any complaints from you about that.’

  ‘Would you sleep with me if I wasn’t?’

  ‘Darling, if you weren’t a Geli, you wouldn’t be you. But as you mention our sleeping arrangements . . .’

  Martin was careful and tender in bed. He positioned himself above her and rearranged her limbs as though conducting an orchestra playing silently in his head. He engaged in diligent foreplay, paying scrupulous attention to her breasts and kissing the length of her body with mathematical precision, as if he worried about leaving an inch untouched. His approach to sex reminded her of the woodwork classes he talked about so fervently from his boyhood. He was meticulous, detailed, forensic almost. Acutely concerned for her pleasure. Keen to achieve a perfect result. Always asking, Is this good? And this?

  And yet she could never relax. Not for a second did she forget the power that he held over her.

  Every atom of her recoiled at his touch.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Outside, the light was fading over Oxford’s weathered steeples and domes. Rose sat up and pulled out her briefcase to study the list of questions she had compiled. She had brought a writing pad and pens to carry out the research for the Protector’s book, and some notes she had already made on Rosenberg’s views of a mythic past.

  The past had always been a minefield, but never more so than in 1953. It was not only the Time of Resistance that remained under a veil. Citizens were instructed not to talk, and preferably not even to think, about what was popularly called the Time Before – the decades preceding the coming of the Alliance. Dwelling on the recent past, so the official line ran, could trigger all the paralyzing toxins that infected a decaying society – nostalgia, false consciousness, sentimentality. Old people with failing memories were given too much credit, in place of younger people with dreams and ambitions. The Protector railed against Jewish psychologists who advocated ‘talking therapy’. I prefer the famous British stiff upper lip, he (or his speechwriter) said.

  Rose was familiar with all this. She had once been trapped at a canteen table by Oliver Ellis, who had given her a lengthy disquisition on the Protector’s theory for as long as it took him to consume a plateful of macaroni cheese and a dish of stewed prunes. Old-style history was outlawed, he explained, to be replaced by History with a capital H. Thinking about distant history was healthy. It helped Alliance citizens better understand their roots and connect with their ancient bloodlines.

  None of this changed Rose’s immediate dilemma. She could discuss ancestral beliefs, and she had no doubt that the Friedas would talk to her – to disobey a Government Ministry official was unthinkable – but how on earth would she discover any hint of insurrection? She certainly couldn’t ask the old women directly. Short of seeing a pot of paint in the corner, there seemed no chance at all that she could discover if these Friedas had had a hand in daubing subversive graffiti on public buildings.

  And if she didn’t find something, God only knew what would follow.

  Restlessly she put her notebook down and massaged her neck. It was too early for bed. Perhaps a walk would relax her.

  Oxford’s streets were almost deserted. Compared to the bustle of London, they might have been in another age. Dusk had consigned Oxford to mediaeval times. A group of dons, shrouded in flapping, academic gowns like the habits of ancient monks, vanished through the door of Trinity College. The narrow, gabled houses, the quadrangles and cloisters were plunged in silence. Soft light glowed from upper casement windows, and through gates set into ancient walls, manicured gardens could be glimpsed: herbaceous beds filled with cobalt-blue iris, lush violet wisteria, orange tulips and blush-pink musk roses, their colours flaring like jewels in the fading light.

  Unthinkingly, Rose found herself heading for Magpie Lane, the place she had seen the graffiti that morning. The alley was drowned in darkness, yet by the light of an iron lantern affixed to the side of a building she could see that every trace of the words had already disappeared. Only an unnaturally clean patch where the wall had been meticulously scrubbed provided a ghostly echo of what had been scrawled there before.

  Nothing else remained.

  Except on the ground hard up against the wall, half hidden by a stump of cobble, was a splash of colour. A few stems of primroses, loosely bunched with string. So frail, they might almost have been dropped by accident, as if anyone dropped flowers by accident now. Because in the Alliance, flowers were always meaningful. Like Victorians, the English had rediscovered their language. From the drooping chrysanthemum tied to the railings where an insurgent had been apprehended, to the wilting rose on the bridge from where a suicide had plunged or the freesias left on the doorstep of a family who had disappeared, flowers were powerful. They spoke. And their message was always the same.

  As was the colour. Always yellow. Their blaze displayed the defiance that no one dared express.

  Even as she bent to look at the primroses, Rose realized how foolhardy she had been to return. There was every chance that the place would still be under police surveillance and simply being here was enough to bring suspicion on herself. Casting the most casual look behind, she scanned the end of the alley and caught the muzzy silhouette of a man in a trench coat passing at the top of the lane. He might equally be a citizen or an employee of the university, but whoever he was, something told her it would be better if he did not see her.

  Hastening on, she turned a corner blindly and, attracted by the peal of bells sounding the half hour, slipped through an arch, across a quad and into the sanctuary of a chapel.

  It was a long time since she had entered a church. Nobody used churches much anymore, except for community gatherings, Mother Service classes or Classification examinations for women. Yet the flickering candlelight and hushed gloom were instantly familiar. The colours of the stained-glass windows fell on the floor in patterns of sapphire, emerald and ruby. Her father had once told her that the symbolism of stained glass was to make the invisible manifest, in the same way God had made himself manifest in flesh, but stained glass was like art, too, he said, in the way it transmuted the world, how it framed and coloured what would otherwise go unseen.

  Rose could tell that this chapel was especially ancient. Stone plaques set in the wall commemorated bishops and deans who had died in the Middle Ages. Faces of forgotten saints peered from their niches, and the floor was covered by memorials inscribed in tarnished brass to other, unremembered dead. The chill prickled her skin, and she couldn’t help but think of the mouldering corpses, decaying in their tombs and sepulchres all around her. Yet the place was comforting too. The sweet, dank, musty smell was evocative of early childhood, of hymns and Christmas, of prayers and a mythical God who loved All Things Bright and Beautiful. They still sung that hymn in community centres, though the words had been changed.

  The Magda in her kitchen,

  The Gretl at the grate,

  The Leader made them lowly

  And ordered their estate

  The church was cool and dark, laced with shadows of furled stone. As sh
e advanced up the aisle towards the altar, her footsteps sounded unnaturally loud on the worn slabs. The air was thick with incense. She approached a lectern in the shape of a golden eagle with outstretched wings, where for centuries the Holy Bible would have been displayed, and now the Protector’s book lay, open at a random passage of mystic rambling.

  Today, a new faith is awakening – the Myth of the Blood, the belief that the divine being of mankind generally is to be defended with the blood. The faith embodied by the fullest realization, that the Nordic blood constitutes that mystery which has supplanted and overwhelmed the old sacraments.

  In front of the lectern was a row of candles. Finding one that was yet to be burned, she held the cool wax in her hand for a second, before touching its wick to another and setting it aflame. Kneeling at the altar rail, she shut her eyes.

  ‘Be safe till I come, Dad. Wait for me.’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Tuesday, 20th April

  Rose had logged her request with the district Gauleiter and had been told that four Friedas would be located and assembled for interview at the address provided. All Widowlands were encircled with fences, designed to enforce the curfew regulations that applied to Friedas, but these barriers were mostly ill-maintained and had fallen into disrepair, as though any money spent on widows was a waste. When Rose arrived at the guard post she saw plentiful gaps in the concrete and barbed wire.

  A thin, official face squinted at her, and waved her through the gate.

  The tightly packed rows of run-down cottages were situated on the far outskirts of the city, set between train lines and the marshy flats of a canal. The narrow terraced houses, two up and two down, had been built originally for boatyard workers and employees of the nearby ironworks foundry. Some were sunk into themselves, roofs half collapsed, propped up by their nearest neighbours. Being close to the canal had made them prone to flooding, and poor drainage led to disease. Even before the Alliance, the area had been notorious for poverty and overcrowding.

  Picking her way through the cratered streets, Rose looked nervously around her. A woman passed, draped in regulation black, carrying a bucket towards a water pump erected on the street corner. A face appeared at a window, then vanished swiftly behind a tattered curtain. A mangy cat skittered over a wall. Car tyres and mattresses mouldered in yards. Where doors had been left ajar, she peered inside to catch glimpses of cracked tiles, ramshackle furniture and candles. Many of the windows had had their glass replaced with cardboard, and in places walls had been shored up with timber, tacked haphazardly across gaping holes in the brick. An advertising hoarding for Van Heusen depicting a woman kneeling before a man in his new shirt – Show her it’s a man’s world! – had been repurposed for the side of a henhouse.

  With a jolt of pain, Rose stumbled on a pothole and wished she had worn her older, sturdier pair of lace-ups instead of the polished Mary Janes. She felt as if she had entered a foreign land, or rather, a land that was slowly and steadily being reclaimed from the grasp of man. On each side of the road, and in cracks in the tarmac, weeds and wildflowers shot up unchecked, insects buzzing and dipping around them. Gutters were silted and overgrown. It had rained in the night, and the scent of herbs – nettles, dock, mint and wild thyme – rose from the damp ground. A hawthorn in full bloom had scattered its blossom like blown snow across her path and its musty odour evoked a sudden evanescent transport of memory – of walking with Celia down the street towards their childhood home. It was over as swiftly as it had begun.

  The streets were sunk in a deep quiet, almost oppressive in its intensity. At this time of day, the Friedas must be mostly at work with only the oldest and most frail left at home. As if to confirm this, through the window of a house she glimpsed an elderly woman sitting beside a spinning wheel, operating the treadle with one foot while twisting the skein of wool expertly in her hand. Rose had heard about this. Spinning was a personal enthusiasm of the Protector, who believed it made work for idle hands and provided a link to a purer past. He had reinstated the manufacture of spinning wheels and had them distributed to the lower orders.

  She pressed on. Somewhere, a cock crowed. Dogs scavenged in a rubbish heap. In a yard a tethered cow lifted its huge gentle head to observe her steadily as she passed.

  If the Protector cherished a simpler, more primitive time, then this was its perfect expression. In Widowland, time had slipped as swiftly as a stone sinking to the bottom of a well.

  She had been told to look out for a square brick church tower, and soon it reared up ahead like an Italian campanile, its green copper roof towering over the squat, terraced rows. Beyond it, towards the canal, a flock of rooks drifted like flakes of soot onto a cluster of elm trees.

  The house itself was on the corner of two streets, its frontage laced with ivy and its windows cracked. Around the door frame a vigorous climber tangled, and from the chimney stack, a thin plume of woodsmoke braided itself into the misty air.

  Rose approached the door and knocked.

  The widows were used to being interrogated. That was immediately obvious. They sat tightly upright on their frayed and battered armchairs, hands folded in their laps, wary and composed. The oldest, Kate Wilson, seemed the self-appointed leader. With her sharp grey eyes and shock of white hair above the shabby black clothes, she might have been a bird of prey, wings folded, hawkish and attentive to Rose’s every move. Her skin was old paper, lined around the mouth and crinkled at the eyes, and her glasses were held together with tape – Friedas weren’t eligible for new spectacles. The woman beside her, Sylvia Hancock, was neat and self-contained, with hair brushed into an earmuff braid around her head in one of the fashions prescribed for Friedas. She wore an unreadable expression that might just have been sardonic. Vanessa Cavendish was a slender woman in her late fifties with a porcelain complexion and dark hair liberally threaded with grey. Mild and shy, she had been married to a vicar. The fourth, Sarah Walsh, must have been a raving beauty once, and she was still eye-catching, with high cheekbones, a straight nose and full lips. The watchful expression in her deep-set eyes made her somehow ageless – as much a wary teenager as a sceptical widow.

  ‘Do all four of you live in this house?’

  ‘Five,’ said Kate, tersely. ‘Another woman lives here too, but she’s away right now.’

  Rose rubbed the ankle she had twisted on a pothole.

  ‘I hadn’t realized it would be so . . .’

  ‘Run-down?’ queried Sylvia. ‘We do try to see the benefits, Fräulein Ransom. It’s true the Government spends very little on Class Six residential areas, but that does mean we’re spared the luxuries of more elite places.’

  ‘Luxuries?’

  ‘No loudspeakers, no agents hovering under street lights or in shop doors. We don’t have any street lights or shops for them to linger in.’

  Rose was offered the best seat, a deep wing armchair covered with a torn William Morris Liberty print that had evidently been salvaged from a tip. The walls were plastered with prints that looked as though they had been cut out of old books set in cracked frames, and the terracotta floor was covered with a threadbare Persian rug. The mismatched furniture included a coffee table made from an old orange crate and a worn sofa, upholstered in emerald silk, while a pair of china shepherdesses chivvied sheep on the mantelpiece. The creeper-clad casement windows admitted only a greenish, ethereal light and the air was saturated with the odour of damp timber. To combat the lack of heating all the women wore several layers of clothes, whereas Rose had come dressed in only a thin coat that she pulled more closely around her.

  Despite the cold, however, the cottage had a distinct feminine cosiness. In the corners of the room hung bunches of dried lavender tied with string, and against a wall stood a tin bath with a copper jug to one side.

  ‘Will you have a cup of tea?’ asked Vanessa, in a cut-glass accent, like the vicar’s widow she was. ‘It’s mint tea, actually. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried it, but it’s awfully good. We grow it
ourselves. And we have honey, too.’

  She gestured outside to the backyard, where a narrow brick path fringed with fruit bushes – redcurrants and gooseberries interspersed with raspberry canes – led to a beehive at the end.

  ‘Herbs are the salvation of a limited diet,’ she continued brightly, producing a teapot and a mismatched set of willow-pattern cups. ‘We have no meat, but we do have thyme, sage and rosemary. We have apple trees. We grow nettles and sorrel, nuts and mushrooms, but the bees are our pride and joy.’

  As the fragrance of mint rose up around them, fresh and revitalizing, Rose explained her mission.

  ‘I’m here to ask about history.’

  ‘I understood that was verboten,’ said Kate. It was hard to discern whether there was a sliver of contempt at the edge of her remark, or if it was merely caution. They were so careful, these women, as though weighing out their words with their own tin teaspoons.

  ‘Not recent history, of course. Not the Events, or the Time Before,’ said Rose, quickly. ‘I’m talking about real history. The Protector wants to explore the roots of the Anglo-Saxon Alliance. He’s interested in folklore. Traditional family beliefs that have come down through the generations.’

  She launched into the questions she had noted down. Basic information about the women’s lives and their childhoods, as well as the superstitions and folk beliefs of their parents.

  Were your parents religious?

  What superstitions do you recall from your youth?

  Which fairy tales did you know as a child?

  As they talked, Rose transcribed their comments in her book, squinting in the dim light. Observing her difficulty, Sarah rose to light an oil lamp and its guttering flame threw a lacy shadow onto the ceiling.

  ‘We used to have electricity, but when it failed, nobody was going to mend it.’