by C. J. Sansom
He learned more about the Resistance, too, an alliance of Socialists and Liberals with old-fashioned Conservatives like Jackson and Geoff, who loathed Fascist authoritarianism and who had come, sadly, to realize the Imperial mission had failed. Their numbers were growing all the time, and violence had become necessary to destabilize the police state.
Natalia was always there; listening avidly, always smoking. David didn’t know what her politics were, knew only that she was a refugee from Slovakia, a far corner of Eastern Europe of which he had barely heard. At meetings she said little, though what she said was always to the point. As time passed he began to see her look at him in the way Carol did, and Sarah once had. He didn’t respond, but something in the way she was both focused and committed, yet somehow rootless, stirred him unexpectedly.
He stubbed out his cigarette. This Sunday he had to copy some papers for the next High Commissioners’ meeting detailing possible South African military assistance to Kenya. Then he had to photograph a secret paper which he had heard of but not seen – about the Canadians supplying uranium to the United States for their nuclear weapons programme. It was known the Germans were working on nuclear weapons, too, but with little success. Apart from anything else they lacked uranium; they were mining it in the former Belgian Congo but had lost a huge consignment which the Belgians had shipped to the United States just before the colony was annexed by Germany in the peace treaty with Belgium in 1940. He also had to find anything he could on New Zealand’s threats to leave the Empire. That made him think of his father; he was happy there, kept asking David and Sarah to join him. With a sigh, David put the camera in his pocket, picked up the bulky High Commissioners’ file, and went out.
He walked along the corridor, stepping quietly. He could have photographed the High Commissioners’ file in his office, but papers were best copied in bright artificial light, and the room where the secret files were kept had an Anglepoise lamp. In the Registry, he opened the flap of the counter and walked over to Carol’s desk. There was a pile of stubs in her overflowing ashtray. He went up to the frosted-glass door, took out his duplicate key, and opened it.
The room was quite small, with a table in the centre and files on shelves. He knew his way around the filing system intimately now. The Anglepoise lamp with its powerful bulb stood on the desk.
He laid the High Commissioners’ file on the table and began taking the buff envelopes, each with a red diagonal cross, out of their places. It took an hour to find the documents he wanted, rapidly scanning them to check their relevance, then extracting them and laying each one neatly on the desk with the papers he needed from the High Commissioners’ file. He worked efficiently, calmly, very quietly, always with one ear cocked for sounds from outside. Then he switched on the Anglepoise lamp and carefully photographed the documents, one by one. When he was finished David switched off the light, replaced the camera in his jacket pocket and started returning the secret papers to the files piled on the table, stringing them quickly through the tail-tags.
He was halfway through when he heard a loud voice beyond the door speak his name. He froze, one of the secret papers still in his hand.
‘Fitzgerald’s not in his office.’ It was the deep voice of his superior, Archie Hubbold. ‘I’ve come down to the Registry, you know my office phone isn’t working. I have mentioned it.’ David realized Hubbold was talking to the porter on the Registry telephone, speaking, as he always did to non-administrative staff, as though to a half-witted child. ‘Are you sure you saw him come in?’ He heard a couple of grunts and then, ‘All right. Goodbye.’ There were a few dreadful seconds of silence before he heard, faintly, Hubbold’s footsteps padding away.
There was a chair by the desk and David sat down. He forced himself to be calm. Hubbold occasionally came in to work at weekends, and the porter must have told him David was in. He must have gone to David’s office, then come down to the Registry to telephone.
He had to get back to his room fast; finding him absent, Hubbold would probably have left a note. He would have to tell him he had been in the toilet; Hubbold was too fastidious to look for someone in there. Moving as rapidly as he could, David replaced the remaining papers in the files. He always liked to double-check everything was in order but there wasn’t time now. He re-tagged the papers from the High Commissioners’ file and then, with a deep breath, unlocked the door, stepped out, and locked it again.
Back in the office, Hubbold had indeed left a note for him. Heard you were in. Could I have a final look at the HC file please. AH. David put the file back under his arm and hurried out, walking rapidly up the stairs to Hubbold’s office on the floor above.
Archie Hubbold was a short, stocky man with thinning white hair. Thick glasses magnified his eyes, making his expression unreadable. He and David had moved to the Political Division at the same time, three years ago. It had been a sideways move for David, though he was overdue for promotion. But David knew that although he was regarded as reliable and conscientious he was thought to lack the spike of ambition. Hubbold, though, had relished his promotion to Assistant Under-Secretary. He was vain, pompous and pernickety, but sharp and watchful, too. When policy issues were discussed, like many in the Service he enjoyed paradoxes, playing one view off against another.
David knocked on Hubbold’s door. A deep voice called, ‘Enter,’ and he forced himself to smile casually as he went in.
Hubbold waved his junior to a chair. ‘So you’re working overtime as well.’
‘Yes, Mr Hubbold. Just wanted to check all was well on the agenda. I got your note. Sorry, I was in the gents.’ David patted the file under his arm. ‘You wished to see this?’
Hubbold smiled generously. ‘If you’ve been checking it over, I’m sure it’ll be all right.’ He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small silver box, tapping two little spots of brown powder onto the back of his hand. Many senior civil servants liked to cultivate some personal eccentricity, and Hubbold’s was that he took snuff, like an eighteenth-century gentleman. He sniffed quickly, then sighed with mild pleasure and looked at David. ‘You mustn’t make a habit of weekend work, Fitzgerald. What will your wife think of us, keeping your nose to the grindstone all the time?’
‘She doesn’t mind now and then.’ Hubbold had met Sarah at a couple of office social functions. He had been there with his own wife, a brash, tactless woman who had hogged the conversation, to her husband’s obvious annoyance.
‘Spending time together is de bene esse of a good marriage, you know.’ Hubbold, like so many in the Civil Service, loved peppering his conversation with Latin tags.
‘Yes, sir,’ David answered, an unintended coldness coming into his voice.
Hubbold said, in a more formal tone, ‘There’s a meeting we’ve been asked to arrange. A bit delicate. Some of the SS officials at the German embassy want to meet with appropriate staff from South Africa House, to look at whether aspects of apartheid might be useful in organizing the Russian population. I wonder if you could arrange that tomorrow. It’s just bilateral liaison, low-level at this stage. Keep it quiet, would you?’
David thought he saw a flicker of distaste cross Hubbold’s face when he mentioned the SS. But he had no idea where Hubbold stood politically, if anywhere; anybody politically suspect had been weeded out of the Civil Service years ago, along with the Jews. Civil servants had always discussed politics between themselves in a detached, superior way but these days they tended to avoid even the hint of commitment to anything at all unless speaking with friends they trusted.
‘I’ll speak to the South Africans tomorrow.’ He left, his hands shaking slightly as he walked down the corridor.
He arrived home just before six. Sarah was sitting knitting in front of the fire. He held out a large bunch of Michaelmas daisies he had bought from a stall on the way home. ‘Peace offering,’ he said. ‘For last Sunday. I was a pig.’
She got up and kissed him. ‘Thanks. Good afternoon’s tennis?’
‘Not
bad. I left my kit to be washed there.’
‘How’s Geoff?’
‘All right.’
‘You look tired.’
‘Just the exercise. What was the film like?’
‘Very good.’
‘It’s getting foggy out.’ He hesitated. ‘How was Irene?’
‘She’s all right.’ Sarah smiled. ‘We saw some Jive Boys in Piccadilly, and that got her going a bit.’
‘I can imagine.’ The two of us speak so stiffly now, he thought. On an impulse, he said, ‘Look, why don’t we re-wallpaper those stairs?’
Her body seemed to relax with relief. ‘Oh, David, I wish we could.’
He hesitated, then said, ‘Somehow I’ve felt – if we did it then we might come to forget him.’
She came across and hugged him. ‘We won’t ever forget. You know that. Never.’
‘Perhaps everything’s forgotten, in time.’
‘No. Even if one day we managed to have another baby, we’d never forget Charlie.’
David said, ‘I wish I believed in God, could believe Charlie still existed, in some afterlife.’
‘I wish that too.’
‘But there’s only this life, isn’t there?’
‘Yes,’ she said. She smiled bravely. ‘Only one. And we have to do the best we can with it.’
Chapter Five
FRANK SAT LOOKING THROUGH the window at the grounds of the mental hospital, the sodden lawn and empty flowerbeds. It had been raining since early morning, hard and steady. The drug they gave him, the Largactil, made him feel calm and sleepy most of the time. In the Admissions Block he had been on a large dose, but after he was stabilized and had moved to a main ward, they reduced the dose and in his mind now the periods of dull calmness were sometimes broken by violent flashes of memory: the school; Mrs Baker and her spirit guide; how his hand had become crippled. He suspected he was getting used to the drug, lessening its effect, but he did not want to go back on a larger dose because he needed his mind to be clear enough to keep his secret.
He had come into a little side room off the main ward that Monday morning, the quiet room as it was called, partly because the other patients frightened him, and also to get away from the overwhelming smell of cigarettes. Frank had never smoked. At school he knew he couldn’t dare join the other boys smoking behind the boiler room; tobacco had passed him by like so much else. The patients were constantly wheedling the staff for tobacco, a Woodbine or just a dog-end. The hospital ceilings were all brown with it. He sat in an armchair, which, like all the hospital furniture, was huge, old and heavy. His right hand hurt, as it often did when it rained, pain coursing through the two damaged fingers, shrunken and claw-like.
It had surprised Frank, when he arrived at the hospital three weeks before, that there were no bars on the windows. But as the police car that brought him drove through the gates he had glimpsed beyond the high wall, on the inner side, a broad ditch full of water, screened from view from the hospital by privet hedges. One of the patients on the admissions ward, a middle-aged man with lined, chalk-white features and wild hair, had told him he planned to escape, swim the ditch and climb the wall. The law said if you escaped from a loony bin and weren’t recaptured in fourteen days you were free. Frank looked at the man in a grey wool hospital suit that was even more shapeless than Frank’s own. Even if escape were possible, which he doubted, there was nowhere for him to go now. After what had happened at his flat his neighbours would alert the police as soon as they set eyes on him again. It had been like that at school, nowhere to run. The gates were always open, but he knew if ever he ran away, got off that bleak Scottish hillside and somehow managed to get home to Esher, his mother would simply bring him back. The mental hospital reminded him constantly of the horrors of school – the dormitory with its iron beds, the uniformed inmates who most of the time ignored him. And an all-male world; like all mental hospitals this one was divided into a men’s side and women’s side, the sexes kept entirely apart. From the looks he sometimes got Frank could tell the patients knew what he had done, perhaps were even afraid of him. The staff, too, reminded him of his teachers, with their sharp military manner and quick brutality if someone got difficult. Frank had tried to avoid thoughts of school for years but now he was constantly reminded; though school had been worse than here.
That afternoon Frank had an appointment with Dr Wilson, the Medical Superintendent, in his office in the Admissions Building. He didn’t want to go, he just wanted to stay in the quiet room. Sometimes other patients came in but he was alone today. He hoped he might be forgotten – patients’ appointments were forgotten now and then – but after an hour the door opened and a young man in the peaked cap and brown serge uniform of a senior attendant came in. Frank hadn’t seen him before. He was short and stocky, with a thin face and a prominent nose which at some time had been badly broken. His brown eyes were alert. He was carrying a big, rolled-up umbrella. He gave Frank a nod and a friendly smile. Frank was surprised; mostly the attendants treated the patients like recalcitrant children.
‘Frank Muncaster?’ the attendant asked in a broad Scottish accent. ‘How’re ye daen?’ Frank’s face spasmed into a wide rictus, showing all his teeth, his chimp grin. Hearing a Scottish accent could unnerve him, because it reminded him of the school. But the attendant’s accent was very different from the elongated vowels and rolling ‘R’s of middle-class Edinburgh that had prevailed at Strangmans; he spoke quickly, the words running together, a more guttural but, to Frank, less threatening accent.
The attendant’s eyes widened a little; everyone’s did when they saw that grin of Frank’s for the first time. He said, ‘I’m Ben. I’ve come to take you to Dr Wilson. They said in the day room you’d be here.’
Reluctantly Frank followed Ben out, through the day room, where several patients sat slumped in front of the television. Children’s Hour was on, a puppet in a striped uniform dancing manically on the end of its strings.
They walked along the echoing corridors to the main door, then out into the rain. Ben raised his umbrella and motioned Frank to stand under it with him. They splashed along the path between the lawns. Ben said, conversationally, ‘Expect you saw Dr Wilson on the admissions ward.’
‘Yes. I saw him last week, too. He said he wants me to have some treatment.’ Frank looked sidelong at Ben; he had said little to anyone since his admission but this attendant seemed friendly.
‘What sort of treatment?’
Frank shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’
‘He likes new treatments, Dr Wilson. I suppose some of his ideas aren’t bad – this new drug Largactil, it’s better than the old phenobarb and the paraldehyde – Jesus, how that stuff used to stink.’
‘I told him I wanted to leave, go back to work, but he said I wasn’t nearly ready. He asked if I’d like to talk about my parents; I don’t know why.’
‘Aye, he does that.’ Ben’s voice was amused, half-contemptuous.
‘I said what was the point, my father died before I was born and Mother’s dead, too, now. He looked cross with me.’
‘You were a scientist afore you came here, weren’t you?’
‘Yes.’ A touch of pride entered Frank’s voice. ‘I’m a research associate at Birmingham University. Geology department.’
‘I would have thought you could have afforded the Private Villa then. Ye get yer own room there.’
Frank shook his head sadly. ‘Apparently as I’ve been certified I’ve lost the right to control my money. And there’s no-one to be a trustee.’
Ben shook his head sympathetically. ‘The almoner should sort that out. You should ask Wilson.’
They reached the Admissions Block, a square, two-storey rectangle, redbrick like all the asylum buildings. In the doorway Ben shook out the umbrella. Frank glanced back at the enormous main building. It stood on a little hill; across the countryside, on a clear day, you could see the haze over Birmingham in the distance. From outside, the asylum, with its many-windo
wed front and neat grounds, looked like a country house; inside it was quite different, a thousand patients packed into cavernous wards with dilapidated furniture and peeling paint. Two nurses from the women’s wing, capes over their starched uniforms, came out of the block. ‘Good morning, Mr Hall,’ one said cheerfully to Ben. ‘Filthy day.’
‘Aye, it is.’
The nurses raised umbrellas and walked quickly down the drive to the locked gates. Frank watched them go. Ben touched his arm. ‘Come on, pal, wake up,’ he said gently.
‘I wish I could get out.’
‘Not after what you did, Frank,’ Ben said gravely. ‘Come on, let’s get ye inside.’
Frank’s mind shied away from the event that had led him here. But sometimes, when the effects of the Largactil were wearing off, he would think about it.
It had started with his mother’s death, a month before. She was past seventy, a little, bent, querulous old woman living alone in the house in Esher. Frank visited her a couple of times a year, out of duty. His older brother, Edgar, only saw her on his rare visits from California. When Frank went to see her, Mrs Muncaster would compare him unfavourably with his brother, as she had all her life. There Edgar was, married with children, a physicist in a great American university, while Frank had been stuck in the same boring job for ten years. She lived for Edgar’s letters, she said. Frank didn’t think his mother saw anyone apart from him these days, as her involvement with spiritualism had ended five years before when Mrs Baker, her spiritual guru, had died, and the weekly séances in the dining room had ended.