Widowland

by C. J. Carey

  ‘Well, I’m telling you, you’ll love it. I can take you shopping down the Champs Elysées.’

  Suddenly into Rose’s mind came a line she had recently eradicated from Jane Eyre in which Rochester promised the same thing. He would take Jane shopping for dresses of amethyst silk and pink satin.

  I told him . . . that he might as well buy me a gold gown and a silver bonnet at once: I should certainly never venture to wear his choice.

  Involuntarily, she touched her neck, where the pearl necklace Martin had given her hung like a millstone.

  ‘I don’t want to go shopping. I’m not interested in that.’

  Martin tensed.

  ‘You’ll love the art. And the architecture. There are plenty of good buildings left. You know the Leader approves of Paris for holidays. He believes it to be culturally edifying. We can be together publicly, without worrying about what people think.’

  She struggled for a response. The blood-red library walls seemed to be closing in, squeezing the breath from her lungs, and she had a desperate urge to escape. So this was why Martin had wanted to show her off to his friends tonight. The relief she had felt a few moments ago turned to mutinous despair.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking. You don’t want to be with me publicly. When you walk out with me you see people flinching at my uniform. They see nothing beyond it. It swallows you, this uniform. You have no idea how it feels to wear it.’

  ‘Do you have any idea how it feels to see it?’

  In the dim firelight, he could not read her expression, but his tone darkened.

  ‘I don’t think you appreciate the immensity of what I’m doing, Rose. Senior men simply never marry their . . .’

  ‘Their what?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘Their concubines? Their mistresses? Their Gelis?’

  ‘Call it whatever you like. Words don’t matter.’

  ‘You’re wrong, Martin. Words matter very much. You told me as much. Remember?’

  Stiffly, he stood and faced her.

  ‘So you refuse to accompany me?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Martin.’

  ‘I won’t ask you again.’

  He hesitated another moment, and receiving no answer, turned on his heel and left the room.

  Rose realized she was trembling. She had crossed some kind of rubicon. She had no idea what to do, but she guessed she might as well leave. Collecting her coat from the doorman, she walked out and paused for a moment to get her bearings.

  The evening murk was sequinned by the lights of the West End shows. All around, people were flooding out of the theatres, patting their pockets for cigarettes, thronging up St Martin’s Lane and Long Acre to Leicester Square, trying to prolong the escape from dour routine that an evening’s entertainment provided. Rose had an intense burst of longing to be among that crowd, caring for nothing but the play they had just seen and the prospect of the Coronation to come.

  What happened next was so fast that she barely registered what was going on.

  A car pulled up at the kerb beside her. Two men got out, one in front and one behind her. They wore the grey-green livery of the Alliance Security Police and their faces were as nondescript as their uniforms. Each man grasped one of her arms and they lifted her slightly, sandwiched her between them and then bent her like a doll into the back of the car. Wildly she looked around for Martin, or anyone, but the eyes of the club doorman slid discreetly away and passers-by averted their gaze, as they always did when police appeared.

  ‘What’s happening? What do you want? Where are you taking me?’

  The car jerked off with a squeal of rubber, forcing her back against the seat, and one officer leaned over from the front.

  ‘You’ll know soon enough.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The Romanesque towers and Gothic turrets of the most feared building in London, the Alliance Security Office, sliced the South Kensington skyline like a sheaf of knives. In previous times this building had been a citadel of education, behind whose spiky, idiosyncratic facade, studded with the reliefs of birds and animals, scholars and archivists probed the origin of species.

  Now the place existed to examine one species alone. Man.

  The building once known as the Natural History Museum was now familiar to every Londoner as the Honeycomb. It wasn’t named for the intricate pattern of its honey-coloured facade, nor the thousands of cells in its basement designed to contain the defunct bodies of insects and other creatures. Now that the dinosaurs, dodos and blue whales had been relocated, its cathedral-like spaces and labyrinthine corridors were dedicated to another use. ASO was the hive to which foragers of information brought their nectar: the reports, and nudges and whispered denunciations. These findings would be meticulously filed away in the system of rotating stacks devised by Heinrich Himmler himself for the Sicherheitdienst in Germania, and later installed here in a network of tunnels that coiled for miles beneath the intricate marble floor. The ASO was the living brain of the Alliance, its deep memory and dark, beating heart. It was an ever-replenished battery of information, essential for the Alliance’s continued survival.

  In a strange way, it made sense. Society was like nature, the Leader had once said. A vast inter-related organism in which every part was connected to another, watching, monitoring, informing. The perfect society must remain in a state of perpetual alertness. Humans, therefore, under Alliance rule, were only conforming to their most primal instincts.

  Once past the glass security booth, where a guard scrutinized her identity documents, Rose walked between the two officers across the vast, vaulted atrium and through a concealed panel leading to a corridor painted industrial green, where fly-flecked lamps cast an underwater light. Even at this time of night, the building was pulsing with activity. Night and day seemed to have no meaning here. Frosted-glass doors led off the corridor. The sounds of women’s voices, telephones and typewriters emanated from behind them. The atmosphere was one of dull bureaucracy. Lenis, with clipboards and pencils behind their ears, clipped along, chatting to each other. The corridor was lined with forgettable, low-grade reproductions of cityscapes: Berlin, Cologne, Paris, Vienna, Prague, and one of London that looked as though someone had spilled brown soup over it. The dust of long-extinct animals that had once been displayed here seemed to choke the air, as though the dinosaurs and whales were still present, floating in a phantom, particulate trace in the atmosphere.

  One officer peeled off and the other led the way down a flight of steps, and then another flight, moving further and further from ground level until they came to a corridor flanked on either side by steel doors. Once, Rose thought, these must have been storerooms for something beautiful – African butterflies or rare, exotic birds – but they were now a holding area for frightened living creatures like herself.

  A prisoner passed, pale-faced, sandwiched between two officers. His eyes dragged over her in desperation and an answering sweat broke out on her in a cold film of fear.

  Wordlessly, the guard pulled a key from the bunch attached by a chain to his waist, opened a door and pushed her inside. The key turned in the lock.

  The cell was ten feet by six. A wooden bench was fixed to the wall, as was a steel lavatory, and high in the side wall was a rectangle of frosted glass. Three thick bolts were slid across the other side of the steel door and in one corner the mark of a boot, like a child’s potato print, was etched in dried blood. She had no idea how long her wait would be, but she could guess what lay at the end of it.

  Rose knew about interrogation. Once, during her relationship with Laurence Prescott, he confided that he had been invited to a top-level ASO conference at a mansion north of London. The place was like a country house hotel, he said, and along with the silver trays of tea and the plush furnishings, one might have taken it for the annual get-together of an accountancy firm, were it not for the number of SS uniforms around the bar. The discussion centred around enhanced interrogation procedures, but to Laurence’s sur
prise, he himself had been summoned to discuss his journalistic interview techniques.

  They said they knew how to do the heavy stuff, but it was the subtlety they were after. How a journalist gets a person to open up despite themselves. They thought, because I interview actresses, I could tell them how to beat the truth out of some poor sod who’d resisted their knuckledusters. I’m not sure if I told them anything, but I did learn a couple of tips myself.

  What did you learn?

  They said, no prisoner needs anyone else to betray them. They will betray themselves. Just like a doctor knows that a patient’s diagnosis will announce itself, if only he listens properly.

  For once, Laurence’s natural jollity had evaporated, and she could tell how deeply his brush with ASO had shaken him.

  Thing is, Rose, in those interrogations, you can’t win. They not only want you to say black is white, they want you to explain why black is white. They’re remorseless. They have all the time in the world. They can see behind every shadow in your mind.

  She tensed as a pair of boots thudded down the corridor and panic rose like bile in her throat, constricting her chest and forcing her to take breaths in tiny gasps. But the thumps passed the door without stopping, the heavy tread receded and her heartbeat gradually slowed.

  Hugging her knees to her ribs, she tried to tamp down her emotions and think rationally. In particular, about Martin. One question worried her. When they were at the reception, and Martin had been complaining about his workload, he had said, The graffiti’s getting worse.

  The Commissioner had instructed her to keep the graffiti a secret, and Rose had obeyed him. So why did Martin assume she knew all about it?

  Slowly the night passed. Dawn announced itself in a slice of light from the frosted window that crept slowly across the stone floor. At some point the door was opened, and a shaft of cold horror pierced her, but it was only an unseen hand that pushed in a tray containing water and a single slice of bread, smeared with margarine.

  She shivered. Beneath the navy evening coat she was still wearing her sleeveless black dress, satin with a velvet bodice, flimsy shoes and Martin’s pearl necklace at her throat. She couldn’t imagine how she must look. Or how long she would be alone.

  Human beings can only tolerate so much solitary confinement, and the citizens of the Alliance were less equipped than most. Solitude was discouraged. Every moment of a citizen’s life should be spent in productive or social events. Once, during one of Celia’s inquisitions about marriage, Rose had echoed Greta Garbo’s appeal in Grand Hotel.

  I want to be alone.

  Her sister was furious.

  Don’t say things like that. You spend far too much time alone as it is. You’re not even in the Women’s Service. They notice these things.

  Now, Rose had her wish. She was truly, deeply alone. Yet even solitude was not enough. Was there any corner of her mind where she could crouch unseen?

  It wasn’t until the slice of light had passed the central point of the floor that the scuffle of boots and crank of keys told her she was finally being summoned.

  To her surprise, the interrogator was younger than her. He must have been in his early twenties, with tow hair shaven like a freshly cut lawn. Like every institution in the Alliance territory, most of the staff members were native-born and this one reminded her of her baby-faced cousin Paul, right down to the tiny wound on his neck where he had nicked himself shaving.

  Her breathing calmed. Perhaps she could take him on.

  The young man slid a piece of paper across the desk, with a pen. He looked nonchalant. Bored even.

  ‘Sign.’

  Rose had heard about this. Under the system imported from the mainland, prisoners taken into custody, without judicial proceedings, had to sign their own Schutzhaftbefehl – the order requesting imprisonment. Once she had scrawled her signature, he said, ‘Sit on your hands.’

  She knew about this too. The hands would sweat and they could remove the rough material from the chair seat, in case they ever needed scent for dogs to follow.

  Every fibre of her body was tense as she waited for the interrogation to begin.

  And waited.

  The officer tapped his fingers on the table. When she lifted her eyes to his enquiringly, he looked away. She realized she was not the only one waiting; he was waiting too.

  Then the door slammed open and another man entered.

  Ernst Kaltenbrunner’s irises were as pale as concrete and the whites resembled boiled eggs. Half his face was scarred like a collapsed candle. Albert Speer, the Leader’s architect, had described his look as ‘curiously mild’ but others detected in him a low, patient cunning, like a snake biding its time. Perhaps in emulation of the Leader, he carried a bullwhip casually dangling from one hand. He addressed her in German.

  ‘Miss Ransom, this can be difficult, or it can be easy.’

  He had a soft, slippery voice, which made her want to confide everything she knew. She felt it penetrate, reaching for the secrets that might lie buried beneath her every instinct and inhibition.

  At Kaltenbrunner’s nod the younger man rose and scurried out of the room, with every sign of relief.

  Rose focused hard on the desk in front of her, tortured with cigarette burns. Her mind was spinning with the implications. The chief of the ASO himself had arrived to interrogate her. There had to be a reason.

  He came close and touched the strand of pearls around her neck, rolling one between his fingers. She forced herself not to recoil.

  ‘You’re a friend of the Assistant Culture Commissioner, SS-Sturmbannführer Kreuz, I hear.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘What do you discuss with him?’

  ‘I report to him for my work.’

  ‘And your work is . . . ?’

  ‘I correct literary texts to align them with Alliance ideals.’

  ‘What rules do you follow in that correction?’

  It was a tricky question. While in every other area of life there were enough regulations to fill a library all of their own, the Alliance’s rules on female subordination largely existed unwritten. Unwritten rules were more powerful. They made people check themselves. Self-censorship was always more effective than any other kind. Why police people when you can scare them into policing themselves?

  ‘I often refer to the Leader’s Table Talks.’

  She had found the collection of Table Talks given by the Leader a useful reference. He was known to despise ‘intelligent’ women. A woman should never aspire to better a man in education or conversation. She should never assert her individuality.

  ‘Do you discuss politics with Herr Kreuz?’

  Martin? Could it be that their interest lay in Martin, and not her?

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Come, come. Not even harmless tittle-tattle? You never chat about the Commissioner’s new haircut, or the arrival of the Leader, or . . .’ – a soft chuckle – ‘the dismal quality of senior staff in the Culture Ministry?’

  ‘No.’

  Kaltenbrunner perched on the edge of the table and changed tack. This was like a dance, she understood. An interrogation must have a rhythm and a progress. Maybe the idea was, he would step forward, then step back, and eventually she would step into his arms.

  ‘You’ve been visiting Oxford. What were you doing there?’

  She recalled the Commissioner’s face. Tell no one. But nobody, not even the Commissioner, was above the ASO.

  ‘I was asked to visit the Widowlands there to interview some women about their lives.’

  That much was true.

  The ASO chief’s snarl deepened, as though he was personally offended.

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘The Protector is writing a book about the mythic traditions of ancient England and the connections between the German and English people. He wants a section on superstitions and he believes that old women will be the best source of knowledge for that.’

  It was so plausible. The Protector’
s enthusiasms were enough to make even Ernst Kaltenbrunner glaze over.

  ‘Why Oxford?’

  ‘It was the Commissioner’s suggestion.’

  ‘Who did you associate with there? Apart from Friedas?’

  The face of Bruno Schumacher came into her head. Then Oliver Ellis.

  ‘Nobody.’

  ‘Is that a lie?’

  He had the kind of mild voice that could make a person jump better than any scream.

  ‘Surely a man of your experience would know a lie when he hears one.’

  The slap of his bullwhip on the table stung the air.

  ‘Don’t try to play with me, Fräulein Ransom. I assure you we are much better at games than you. We have interrogated people in the London Library. A Leni there gave you unorthodox access without permission.’

  Poor girl. She would be out of a job. There would be no happy Coronation party with her friends. What horrors could Kaltenbrunner’s cold imagination fashion for her?

  ‘She tells us you showed an interest in certain volumes of degenerate historical work. A reader in the stacks where you browsed recalled seeing you.’

  The man in the tweed suit. Oscar Stephenson.

  ‘What exactly were you looking for?’

  What could she say? That she hardly knew herself? She thought fast.

  ‘I’m correcting a text of Jane Eyre to be placed in schools. Sometimes we write an addendum. I wanted to provide examples of degenerate attitudes to female education.’

  It made no sense, but nor did anything in Alliance literary policy and it seemed to satisfy Kaltenbrunner. Abruptly he rose, brushed imaginary dust from his sleeve and said, ‘Right then. You can go.’

  Could that really be all? Relief weakened Rose’s limbs. She could barely stand up.

  Kaltenbrunner walked across to the door and opened it a fraction, then paused, hand on the handle, as if a thought had just struck him.

  He closed the door again.

  ‘Just one thing. We found this in your possessions.’

  Removing an envelope from his pocket, he extracted a small, thin square of paper, rolled up to the size of a matchstick. Rose had hidden it so carefully right at the bottom of her bag between the join in the lining. But her bag had been taken from her the moment her arm was seized and they could find anything if they put their mind to it.