by C. J. Sansom
‘The Permanent Secretary, up on the top floor. Nobody else. People sometimes come in to work on Saturday, but seldom on Sundays.’ He smiled at David. ‘I remember, sir, when I started here. Assistant Secretaries often didn’t come in till eleven. Nobody here at weekends except the Resident clerks.’ He shook his head.
‘The trials of Empire,’ David said, returning the smile. He signed the day book. Sykes reached back to the row of numbered keys on the board behind him, and handed David the one to his office, on its metal tag. David walked to the lift. It was ancient and sometimes marooned people between floors. He wondered if one day the hundred-year-old cables might break, sending everyone inside to perdition. Creaking, it rose slowly to the second floor. He pulled aside the heavy gates and got out. In front of him was the Registry, where during the week clerks endlessly checked files in and out from behind a long counter, the clacking of typewriters audible beyond the door of the typing pool. At the far end of the counter Carol’s desk stood empty, in front of a door with its smoked glass panels marked Authorized Personnel Only. David looked at it for a second, then turned and walked down the long narrow passage. It was strange how footsteps echoed in here when you were alone.
His office was half of a big Victorian room, an elegant cornice cut off by a partition. He saw, in the centre of his desk, the fat High Commissioners’ Meetings file, the draft agenda he had prepared for Hubbold pinned to the front with a note in his superior’s tiny scrawl. We spoke. Let us discuss further, on Monday.
David took off his coat, then retrieved the tiny silver camera from his pocket. It was, ironically, German, a Leica; not much bigger than a Swan Vestas matchbox, you could photograph dozens of documents just by the light of a lamp. The camera had seemed an extraordinary thing when he was first given it, like something out of a science-fiction story, but he was used to it now. He lit a cigarette to steady himself.
After that first meeting on Hampstead Heath, the next time David saw Geoff at the tennis club he had asked, ‘That man Jackson, he’s in the Civil Service, isn’t he?’
A spasm had crossed Geoff’s face, annoyance and guilt mixed together. ‘I can’t answer that, old boy; you have to realize, I can’t.’
‘Jackson knew a lot about me. Is he interested in me for some particular reason?’
‘I can’t tell you. You have to decide first whether you’re willing to support us.’
‘I do support you. You mean, am I willing to do things for you?’
‘With us. Things are hotting up, now we’re illegal.’ Geoff gave his quick sardonic smile. ‘You may have noticed.’
David had heard the radio broadcasts saying the British Resistance was a treasonous organization, the public under a duty to report its activities. He had seen the new posters, a picture of Churchill when he was a minister during the 1939–40 war, dressed in a dark suit and Homburg and holding a machine gun, the caption underneath, ‘Wanted Dead or Alive’. He moved closer to Geoff and asked quietly, ‘The news reports about illegal strikers carrying guns, about that armoured police car being blown up in Glasgow, are they true?’
‘They rigged the election,’ Geoff said heavily. ‘And they declared war on us. You know what war is.’
‘I’ve never been a pacifist like Sarah.’ David shook his head. ‘But if I worked with you I’d be putting everything on the line. My whole life. My wife’s life.’
‘Not if she didn’t know.’ There was a long silence. ‘It’s all right, David,’ Geoff said. ‘You’ve got responsibilities, I know.’
‘I hate it all,’ he said quietly.
Geoff looked at him. ‘Would you like to see Jackson again?’
David took a long, long breath. ‘Yes,’ he said finally.
It was several meetings later, towards the end of 1950, that Jackson told David he wanted him to be the Resistance spy in the Dominions Office. The two of them were in a private room in an exclusive Westminster club.
‘We need information, intelligence on what the government’s thinking and doing. Not just in home policy, but foreign and Imperial policy, too. After all, the core agreement of the 1940 Treaty was that Hitler took Europe and we kept the Empire. And developed it, too, to an extent we hadn’t bothered about before, to make up for the loss of markets in Europe.’ He smiled sadly. ‘The retreat into Empire. The old dream of the political right, Beaverbrook’s dream.’
‘But we’ve made the Empire hate us.’
‘Yes, we have, haven’t we?’ That sad smile again. Then Jackson gave David one of his long, slow looks. ‘The Resistance have people in the India Office and the Colonial Office. There have been three famines in Bengal since 1942, for example, that we’ve never been told about. We need someone who can tell us how it’s going with the Dominions. The White Empire. We know Canada and Australia and New Zealand aren’t happy with political developments here, though the South Africans don’t mind. We want to know how the big African settlement programmes are going, the plans for the new East African and Rhodesian Dominions. You could supply us with that information, papers too. You’d meet periodically with me, our man from the India Office, and our Colonial Office fellow.’
‘Geoff’s the Colonial Office man, isn’t he?’ David said. And you’re from the Foreign Office, he thought. Jackson didn’t answer.
‘I’m too junior to be allowed to take papers from the office.’
Jackson nodded his big grey head and smiled in that way he had, half confidential, half condescending. ‘There are ways.’
‘What ways?’ David asked. Looking back, he realized that was the moment when he had made the final, irrevocable commitment.
Jackson said, ‘So you’re joining us?’
David hesitated, then nodded. ‘Yes.’
Jackson smiled, a smile of real warmth. ‘Thank you,’ he said. He shook David’s hand firmly.
And so, bit by bit, David learned how the Resistance had people everywhere, in factories, offices, the countryside, organizing protests and poster campaigns, strikes and demonstrations. There were even small areas, mining villages and remote country districts, where they were in charge, where the police dared not venture except in force. Passive resistance was over; the police and army and their buildings were all legitimate targets. They had links with other Resistance groups throughout the continent. And they had spies everywhere, ‘sleepers’ working in institutions all over the country, awaiting the call.
Shortly after, when they met in the club again, Jackson said, ‘Time to introduce you to the Soho flat.’
‘Why Soho?’
‘Soho’s a good place to meet, full of all sorts.’ He smiled. ‘If we bump into someone from the Service in the streets, he’ll think we’re on the same business as he is, and he’s hardly going to talk about it, now is he?’
David visited the flat for the first time the following week, one evening after work. It felt strange, getting off the tube at Piccadilly Circus and walking into Soho. The address he had been given was in a narrow alley, a door with peeling paint beside an Italian coffee shop. Inside, two Jive Boys stood beside a jukebox, which was belting out some of the horrible new American rock ’n’ roll. The papers said the jukebox craze would kill live music, that they should be banned. David knocked. He heard footsteps descending stairs and the door opened. A dark-haired woman stood there; even in the dim light from within David saw she was attractive. She wore a shapeless smock covered in splashes of paint. She gave him a direct look from green, slightly Oriental eyes, and said, ‘Come up,’ brusquely. She had a faint accent that he couldn’t place.
He followed her up a narrow staircase, smelling of damp and old vegetables, into a studio flat, a big single room with pictures stacked against the wall and on easels, a narrow bed and tiny kitchen at one end. The pictures were oils, well done. Some were urban scenery, narrow streets and baroque churches, others snow-covered landscapes with mountains in the distance. In one, figures were lying on the snow, covered with red splashes; blood, David realized. At once he was reminded of Norway,
German planes strafing the column of British soldiers stumbling terrified through the snow.
Geoff and Jackson were sitting on either side of an electric fire. Geoff smiled awkwardly. The woman spoke first. ‘Welcome, Mr Fitzgerald. I am Natalia.’ Her smile was pleasant but somehow closed. In the light she looked a little older than he had thought, in her mid-thirties perhaps, tiny crow’s feet beside those eyes, slightly narrowed and upturned at the corners. She had long, straight brown hair and a wide mouth above a pointed chin.
‘This is where we will meet, our little Imperial group.’ Jackson looked at Natalia with a respect that surprised David. ‘Natalia is to be trusted absolutely,’ he said. ‘When I’m not here, she is in charge. We meet together, and never with anyone else, apart from our India Office man’
‘I understand.’
‘So.’ Jackson put his hands on his knees. ‘Tea, everyone? Natalia, would you mind doing the honours?’
The first thing they discussed, that night at the end of 1950, was how David could gain access to the room in which the confidential department files were kept. David could think of no way to get in there, as the only people with keys were the Registrar, Dabb, and the woman in charge of the secret files room, Miss Bennett, and both had to hand their keys in to the porter whenever they left the building.
‘We don’t need the key,’ Jackson said briskly, ‘just the number on the tag. You know there’s a number stamped on all of them, four digits, so that if a key gets lost they can match the numbering with their records at the Department of Works.’
‘All Civil Service filing cabinets, and the keys, are made by Works Department locksmiths,’ Geoff explained. ‘When the ’48 rules came in forbidding Jews from working in the Civil Service all Jewish employees had to leave. For security reasons.’
‘Yes.’ David remembered lying awake at night beside his sleeping wife as Parliament passed yet another anti-Jew law, fists clenched, eyes wide.
Jackson said, ‘One of the locksmiths was an old Jew who was kicked out then. He’s come over to us, and brought the specifications for all the keys with him. All you need is the number on the key to the secret room and he can make a copy.’ He smiled. ‘These stupid Jew laws actually help us sometimes.’
‘But how do I get it?’ David asked.
Jackson exchanged a look with Geoff. ‘Tell me about Miss Bennett.’
‘She’s one of the 1939–40 intake, when they allowed women into the administrative grades because of the war.’
Jackson nodded. ‘I often think those women who stayed after the Treaty must feel very out of place. Unmarried, of course, or they would’ve had to leave. What’s Miss Bennett like?’
David hesitated. ‘A nice woman. Bored, I think, wasted in that job.’ He thought of Carol, her desk behind the counter with the buff files with red crosses marked ‘Top Secret’, a cigarette usually burning in her ashtray.
‘Attractive?’ Jackson asked him.
David could suddenly see where this might be going, and felt something sink in his chest. ‘Not really.’ Carol was tall and thin, with large brown eyes and dark hair, a long nose and chin. She always dressed well, always with a touch of colour, a brooch or a bright scarf, in tiny defiance of the convention that women in the Service should dress conservatively. But he had never been remotely attracted to her.
‘Interests? Hobbies? Boyfriend? What sort of life does she have outside the office?’
‘I’ve only spoken to her a few times. I think she likes concerts. She’s got a nickname, like a lot of the junior staff.’ He hesitated. ‘They call her the bluestocking.’
‘So, possibly lonely.’ Jackson smiled encouragingly. ‘How about if you became friendly with her, took her out to lunch a couple of times, say. She might be flattered by the attention from a handsome educated fellow like yourself. You might be able to contrive a way of seeing the key.’
‘Are you suggesting I . . .’ He looked round the small group. Natalia was smiling at him a little sadly.
‘Seduce the girl?’ she said. ‘Ideally no. That could lead to gossip and even trouble, given you’re married.’
Jackson looked at him. ‘But you could make friends with her, lead her along a little.’
David was silent. Natalia said, ‘We all must do things we do not like now.’
And so David made friends with Carol, going towards her end of the long counter if he had papers to book out or return, taking the opportunity to chat. It had been easy. Carol wasn’t popular in the dusty, conservative atmosphere of the Registry and was pleased to have someone to talk to. He remarked casually that he had heard she had been to Oxford, like him. She told him she had read English at Somerville, that her real love was music but she had been hopeless at any instrument she tried. He learned how lonely she was, with only a couple of women friends and her elderly, difficult mother, whom she looked after.
They had told him to take his time, but it was Carol who, a month later, diffidently took the initiative. She said that sometimes she went to lunchtime concerts at local churches and wondered if he might like to come to one. He had pretended an interest in music and he could see the hesitant hope in her eyes.
And so they went to a recital. Snatching a quick lunch in a British Corner House afterwards Carol asked, ‘Doesn’t your wife like music?’
‘Sarah doesn’t like going out much just now.’ David hesitated. ‘We lost a little boy, at the start of the year. An accident in the house.’
‘Oh, no.’ She looked genuinely distressed. ‘I’m so sorry.’
David couldn’t answer; he felt suddenly choked. Tentatively, Carol put out a hand to touch David’s. He withdrew it sharply, and she reddened a little. ‘Sorry,’ he said.
‘I understand.’
‘It helps to get away from things at lunchtime, do something different.’
‘Yes. Yes, of course.’
There were more recitals, more quick lunches, after that. She told him of her problems with her mother. And sitting together at the concerts, she would try to make sure their bodies touched. He hated what he might be doing to her. But his commitment to the Resistance was hardening and so, slowly, was he. He learned, in Soho, more of the truth behind the propaganda in the press and on the BBC; the strikes and riots in Scotland and the North of England, the chaos in India, the endless savagery of the German war in Russia. He saw the increasing confidence of the Blackshirts on the streets as the Jews, marked by their yellow badges, shuffled along, eyes on the ground.
It was January before he managed to see the key. Watching her, David had seen that at work Carol kept it in her handbag, always giving it to the porter before they went out. At their last concert David had noticed she seemed a little distracted. She told him over lunch that her mother was being especially difficult, and had accused her daughter of taking money from her purse, which was absurd because it was Carol’s salary that kept them both. She feared the old lady might be going senile.
He worked out how he might do it. The following week he suggested another concert, in Smith Square. Carol agreed enthusiastically. He said he would get the tickets on his way home. On the day of the recital, bringing a file into Registry, he went over to her desk. She was splitting one of the secret files into two, carefully moving documents from one folder to another. As usual, David was careful to avoid glancing at them; she was well trained and whatever Carol felt about him she would have noticed that. ‘Looking forward to the concert?’ he asked.
He saw that sparkle in her eyes. ‘Yes. It should be good.’
‘What seats are we in?’
She gave him a puzzled smile. ‘You’ve got the tickets.’
‘No, no. I gave them to you.’
She stared at him. ‘When?’
‘Yesterday. I’m sure I did.’
She closed the files carefully, picked up her handbag and, as he had hoped, opened it on the desk. She took out her purse, then bent her head to look through the compartments. The bag lay open. David looked round quickl
y but no-one was watching them; their friendship was stale gossip now and Dabb, the Registrar, was busy checking a file. David bent over a little, enough to see into the bag. There was a powder-puff, a packet of cigarettes and the key on its metal tab. Squinting, he made out the numbers stamped onto it: 2342. He stepped away just as Carol looked up from her purse.
‘They’re jolly well not here.’ There was anxiety in her voice.
David took out his wallet, checking. With an expression of surprise, he pulled out the tickets. ‘I’m terribly sorry. They were here all along. I am sorry, Carol.’
She sighed with relief. ‘For a moment I was frightened I was going potty, with all this worry over Mother.’
Walking back to his own office David had to stop at the gents. He went into a cubicle and was violently sick. He crouched, breathing heavily; the vomiting relieved the almost unbearable tension he had felt since getting the number, but did nothing to assuage his shame.
And so he began to come in at weekends and photograph papers from the secret files. At least once a month he met in Soho with Jackson, Geoff – who was indeed the Resistance agent in the Colonial Office – and Boardman, a tall, thin man from the India Office, an old Etonian like Jackson. The quiet discussions in the squalid Soho flat went on for hours, while next door a prostitute – another Resistance supporter – plied her trade, cries and bumps occasionally audible through the wall. David learned more and more about the fragility of Fascist Europe. The Depression and the demands on her economies to feed the gigantic, endless German war effort in Russia were sucking the continental countries dry, while labour conscription to Germany was sending young men in France and Italy and Spain literally running to the hills. On the other side of the world Japan was as deadlocked in its war with China as Germany was in Russia. Its strategy towards the Chinese was the same as the Germans towards the Russians, summed up in their policy of the ‘three alls’: kill all, burn all, destroy all. Recently Jackson – who David knew now was in the Foreign Office – had told them the rumours that Germany was in political trouble were true. The reason Hitler never appeared in public was that he was seriously incapacitated by Parkinson’s disease, barely lucid enough to take decisions, hallucinating about Jews with skullcaps and sidelocks grinning at him from the corner of the room; hallucinations were sometimes a symptom of the latest and severest stage of the disease. Following Göring’s death from a stroke the year before Goebbels was his nominated successor but he had many enemies. Factions representing the army, the Nazi Party and the SS were all circling and plotting.