The Winning Side

by Lance Parkin

  After a short walk, he emerged into a clearing. He looked around. Here, he was away from it all: out of sight of the house, the village, any sign of human beings and their wars and other troubles. It was around midday, and he was watching the sun through the trees At the bottom of the hill was a stream, one that would eventually run into the village.

  ‘Hello there.’

  Lechasseur looked up and saw the speaker. A woman. He was sure he recognised her. She was in her seventies, with waist-length grey hair.

  ‘Honoré Lechasseur,’ she told him. ‘The detective. Fancy meeting you here.’

  The penny dropped.

  ‘Amanda?’

  It was the woman from the flat, twice as old, wearing faded overalls instead of her faded silk gown.

  ‘You remember me?’ she seemed flattered.

  ‘Like it was yesterday.’

  ‘I remember you. But why haven’t you changed? Aged?’

  Lechasseur wondered if he could trust his eyes. There wasn’t a ghost image of her. What did that mean?

  ‘Why are you here?’ he asked.

  She looked around herself. ‘I was given instructions... many years ago, just after our... meeting.’

  She lifted an envelope she was carrying. ‘I have to deliver these to the house. Over there.’

  Lechasseur looked to where she was indicating. A path lead away from the clearing down the hill.

  ‘What’s in it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Lechasseur raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Honestly, I don’t know. I was given money, this envelope, and instructions to deliver it here, on this day, by a man called Radford.’

  ‘What did this Radford want in return?’

  Amanda looked pained. ‘It seemed a fair bargain at the time. A few papers in exchange for wealth and a way out.’

  ‘And the catch was...’

  ‘This is all my fault. The atomic war, the rise of the Party... this.’ She swept her arm around.

  Lechasseur didn’t have to remember that far back to recall that Amanda was prone to the theatrical gesture, and was more than a little self-centred.

  ‘I doubt it,’ he told her, in a tone that he hoped suggested that she get some sense of perspective.

  Then she told him.

  The old world ended on the twenty-first of January 1950.

  When Amanda said the world ended, she meant that. It didn’t change, it didn’t have some new thing or person to cope with, it ended. The old world, the way it worked, it all ended. Politics, economics, history, religion, culture, liberty... for a few months they had seemed like luxuries that would need to be rationed for the duration. Then they’d all withered away. Soon they’d all been forgotten. There was only the Party. There had only ever been the Party. Amanda had fled to the country, here to Yorkshire, the home of a friend. It was worst in London, you see, because there, every square inch was –

  Lechasseur asked her to start at the beginning. Amanda struggled to. It was as if she was doing that ‘tuning’ he’d had to do, as if she had to travel mentally to an alien planet, the world of 1949, and London, and silk gowns and history books about trade unions.

  She’d met Simon Brown in early July 1949 at some dinner party. He was a civil servant, but a young one. He’d returned from the War determined to rebuild the world, to see that great things came from the horror and death he’d witnessed in the Far East, the murder and destruction that had consumed virtually the whole world.

  Amanda’s husband had died during the War, left her everything, and she’d sold it all and moved to the biggest place she could afford in Bloomsbury. She’d spent much of the War reading, and knew that the country would be different when the fighting ended. If nothing else, women were used to working, and there would be fewer men around. The traditional family was a thing of the past.

  Simon was married, with a young child.

  That night at the party – Amanda paused at the word: she’d forgotten that ‘party’ had once meant something quite different – she’d told him her theories. He was ten years younger than she was, and had lapped up her every word like it was the gospel truth. He’d known nothing of the Left, of the rise of Communism, of the workers’ struggle, of the inevitability that this old order would be swept away.

  She’d led him up to a guest room and undressed. She’d told him that much Socialist thought depended on free love and the abandonment of bourgeois notions of monogamy, which was simply a method of social control. Their act was a political one, not merely a physical one. She’d neglected to mention that she’d been lonely since the death of her husband, that it felt good for a younger man to stare at her, kiss her, to paw at her, to hold her down.

  Lechasseur suggested that she didn’t need to tell him everything.

  The relationship had continued, she told him. He’d meet up at her flat. They’d talk in bed, swap history books and the occasional novel or magazine article. It had been a whole six weeks before the subject of atomic weapons had come up.

  Simon Brown had done a degree in Physics at Cambridge, and one of his jobs was to translate some technical papers into a form that his more Classically trained superiors could better understand. He’d proved adept at this, and was seeing more and more papers. There was some system in place to prevent him seeing every secret document, but the more papers he saw, the more he could piece together. Holidays and absences meant that he often saw many more papers than he strictly should have done.

  Before long, he’d become probably the only man in England who knew the exact state of the British atomic weapons programme. He’d suspected it was some sort of loyalty test, an entrapment exercise, and he’d been scrupulous in keeping the secrets. Soon, though, it’d became abundantly clear that he was giving his political masters more credit than they deserved. They didn’t understand that they were handing him an almost complete picture of the field.

  Amanda hadn’t known any of that when she’d told him the latest thinking about atomic weapons. Philosophers and thinkers had realised that it revolutionised war, turned it on its head because –

  Lechasseur stopped her. He’d had this conversation with Emily.

  Amanda had explained to Simon that she thought that the only way to prevent the atomic bomb from being the ultimate tool of imperialist oppression was if it could be made to act as a deterrent.

  Lechasseur stopped her again. That’s what had been happening, surely? The Americans had beaten the Japs by threatening to use the bomb, not by wiping them out. And now, the one thing stopping Joe Stalin from sending the Red Army into Europe was the threat that they’d be wiped out in an atomic holocaust. What had happened in Berlin since last summer... or thirty-six summers past... would have led to war in any earlier age. Instead, the city divided, there was peace. Uneasy peace, but better than war.

  A long-forgotten memory flickered across Amanda’s face. That wasn’t true deterrent. That was people being scared of America. And the United Kingdom – she said the words carefully, as if pronouncing Latin – wanted their own atom bomb for the same reason. It was an ally of the United States, but that might not always be the case. Far more likely, Simon told her, that in a situation involving purely British interests, America might not be willing to bomb our enemies. Atomic deterrent only worked if your enemy knew for certain that the bomb would drop.

  Simon knew what only a few men in the world knew: there were just a handful of atom bombs. The materials involved were so rare, there were so few entrusted with the secrets. In 1949, the Americans had a mere handful of bombs, and each bomber had a one in ten chance of reaching a city deep in the Soviet Union. They couldn’t know for certain that even one atom bomb could hit its target.

  She laughed as she remembered that their foreplay consisted of her telling him the latest political thinking. How Stalin wasn’t worried about the bomb, but the Amer
icans were thinking of pressing ahead now, while they had the advantage. It aroused them both; they liked to imagine themselves great minds, they liked to link what they were doing to the great struggle of the workers. She found that comical, now, that her reciting Marx or Engels or even just Wells at him as he cupped her and licked at her and trailed his finger over her was anything other than exactly the sort of middle-class decadence they both despised.

  Amanda had been telling him about a pamphlet she’d been reading on atomic warfare. She had said that if every country had the bomb, then no-one would ever dare start a war. No-one would mass an army on a border, or switch a whole industrial area to munitions production, or assemble a naval taskforce. War would end, but only if every country had the bomb.

  Simon had stopped cold.

  ‘I could do that,’ he had told her.

  Simon was confused at first – surely the bomb was evil? Surely it was the weapon of plutocrats and dictators? Finally, one man could wipe out a million workers, as so many robber barons and union busters and corporation chairmen had wished they could.

  Only while it remained in the hands of a few, Amanda insisted, seeing Simon in a new light, suddenly. She realised she shared a bed with the most powerful man in the world – the only human being to combine political enlightenment with the ability to enact it. It excited her, and Simon Brown forgot all about politics for a moment.

  As he took her, though, and as she screamed his name, Amanda’s mind was elsewhere.

  ‘You sold atom secrets to the Russians?’ Lechasseur said, full of contempt for this stupid old woman.

  ‘No. They had them already. They knew everything that Whitehall knew. But Stalin... none of us really thought he was perfect. You mentioned Berlin. Well, you probably remember the blockade better than I do. He was another Hitler. Exactly the sort of dictator our plan would neutralise.’

  ‘Then?’

  ‘We gave the world the bomb,’ Amanda explained. ‘The papers I sold... they were circulated widely throughout the scientific and literary communities. It spread faster than the plague, copies being copied and passed on and copied and passed on. Soon, every thinking man could build an atom bomb.’

  ‘You just said that they use rare materials. That not even America had that many.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘So, in less than a year, you’re saying there were enough bombs around to...’

  ‘No-one ever built one of our bombs.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t you see? No-one had time to. It would take months or years to build an atom bomb, even with a team of scientists and all the materials you needed.’

  ‘Then?’

  Amanda had a tear in her eye. ‘The men who had the bombs already wanted to maintain their monopoly. That’s how they’d always worked. In the West, it was the men who owned the railways, or the merchant fleets, or the oil, or the automobile factories, or the mines, or the steelworks. A tiny number of rich men, controlling the economy. In the East, it was the same. A handful of men with political and military power. Capitalist or Communist, it didn’t matter. What mattered was that power was concentrated in the hands of a few.’

  ‘But if everyone had the knowledge... you can’t just lock up everyone.’

  Amanda sighed.

  ‘That’s precisely what they did. Knowledge is power, and we’d given everyone the ultimate knowledge, the ultimate power. And before it could be used, it was taken away. The libraries burned, the universities were closed, every newspaper and publisher was taken over. They piled every book onto bonfires, and when that didn’t work, they rounded up every scientist, their families, their friends and threw them onto the fires, too. We always used to say that you couldn’t uninvent the bomb, but that’s exactly what they did. I’d opened Pandora’s box, Mr Lechasseur. What came out destroyed the world, and when all that was left in there was Hope, the Party went in, dragged her out and had her shot.’

  It was the middle of the morning, and Emily and Radford were walking through the grounds.

  Emily was becoming used to the overalls. She’d asked for something to neaten up fingernails that she’d variously bitten or caught on things. Radford had looked at her at first as though she’d demanded to bathe in asses’ milk, but had managed to procure a nail file. As she’d taken it, he’d watched her warily, as though she could turn it into a weapon. He was over a foot taller than she, and possibly weighed three times as much, all of the difference being muscle. Her potential as a threat to him was limited, at best.

  Now they walked. It was almost pleasant. The sky was clear, a rich, uniform blue. All around them, birds were bobbing in and out of the trees. Emily was warm and no longer thought she was in immediate danger. There were no televisions watching her here, no eavesdroppers.

  ‘But you must see the difference,’ she continued.

  ‘There isn’t one.’

  ‘Of course there is. History is what happened.’

  ‘It’s what someone said happened.’

  Emily rolled her eyes. They were going around in circles. ‘Technically, but –’

  ‘You have no idea what it is like to be able to have this debate,’ Radford told her. ‘To have to explain something so obvious to someone so intelligent, it’s exhilarating.’

  Emily looked over at him. Radford was grinning.

  ‘I’m not sure if I’ve just been insulted...’

  ‘Not at all. No-one thinks like you. So few people even think. Most people would have only the vaguest sense of what you mean when you say “history”. To distinguish between the events and the telling...’

  ‘This is nonsense,’ Emily countered. ‘Whatever you want to call it... whether it’s “history” or “events”. Call it “events”. Those events happened.’

  ‘Not if the Party says they didn’t.’

  ‘That’s silly. I was there. I was in 1949. I know the world hasn’t always been like this. I know that... a hundred years ago, that truck wouldn’t have existed, we used horses and carts.’

  Radford looked puzzled.

  ‘So the truck is a new invention,’ Emily explained. ‘Things are getting discovered all the time.’

  ‘People don’t know that,’ he said simply.

  ‘But that doesn’t stop it from being true.’

  Emily looked around for inspiration. Behind her was the manor house.

  ‘That house. It’s obviously old, it self-evidently wasn’t built to be your headquarters. There are stables, for a start. And these were obviously once lawns, not vegetable patches.’

  Radford conceded the point.

  ‘So it doesn’t matter if the people don’t know the word “Victorian” or know that this place must be about a hundred years old, they can see that it’s been here a long time. Just looking at it, you can see it’s been extended and altered over the years.’

  Radford was looking back. ‘You can tell all that by looking?’

  ‘Even if I couldn’t... well, if that gift you have is anything like Honoré’s, then you must have been able to see that for yourself. You must have seen its history with your own eyes. And whatever the Party tell you, you can see what they are telling you is all lies.’

  Radford winced. ‘A contradiction in terms. Look... who’s to say that events are more important or more real than history? Reality is what we say it is. You’re called Emily because we agree that’s what you’re called. A dollar is worth a dollar because we agree it. It’s midday because we say so. We’re fighting a war because we say we are. We won a great victory in Cairo. The Party has always ruled.’

  Emily smiled.

  Radford looked at her. ‘What?’

  ‘I saw you before. You were worried about a tiny scrap of newspaper. And you were right to be. Because it doesn’t take much. It only takes someone’s watch to be a little slow.’

  ‘What?�
�

  ‘Tell me the time.’

  Radford checked. ‘It’s exactly twelve hundred.’

  ‘You took my watch away. But I bet it doesn’t tell exactly the same time as yours. And if my watch tells me it’s five to midday, it’s five to midday. It doesn’t matter what time you say it is.’

  They stood there for what seemed like forever. The silence broke as bells started chiming twelve.

  ‘I guess it wasn’t exactly twelve hundred,’ Emily smiled.

  Radford was watching her the same way he’d watched her when she’d first picked up the nail file.

  She looked him in the eye, and said: ‘If the Party’s so powerful, why do they have to keep erasing the past? What scares them so much?’

  There was one universe. It had a clear blue sky, with tree branches as thick as jailhouse bars obscuring it. Amanda was there, every line and wrinkle of her face etched on with a clarity that made Lechasseur wonder if they hurt her.

  Here, there had been purges, there had been war, there had even, irony of ironies, been atomic bombardment. It worked as deterrent only in times of peace. In war, the use of the bomb became inevitable; all too easy to justify as saving time and lives.

  Lechasseur saw it all now. Thirty five years of history unfurled around Amanda, all fitting together like a pocket watch, the ticking of the clock giving way to the march of jackboots and the ratta-tat-tat of machine guns.

  Time, he saw now, was a monolith. The universe is what it is, we are where we are, what’s done is done, not even God can change the past, so it is written. It didn’t matter that he was meant to be on page 1949 but he’d skipped a chapter. It didn’t matter how he’d got here or if he got back.

  He saw it all as he and Amanda hugged each other, both of them sobbing, perhaps the last two people on Earth to remember the world that had been lost.

  London, glorious, filthy, broken London. So full of colour, so full of history. The British Museum had been razed to the ground, its curators machine-gunned in the courtyard. There had been wave after wave of purges and pogroms, broadcast live to every home in loving detail over and over until it seemed normal. Until it was normal.