Monday, April 19
Westward from Paddington, through the city’s stained, concrete outskirts and rows of drab streets, the train ran. Rose stared out. This was England: flat, denuded, gray. The high streets were all alike. Each had their grocer’s shop whose windows were stacked with fake goods to disguise the shortages: loaves made of cardboard, milk bottles filled with salt, cereal packets with nothing in them. Each had a police station where citizens must register and report to have their identities checked on a regular basis. Each had a pub, with spittle and sawdust on the floor and tankards of mild Alliance ale. Each had a post office with a back room where Alliance officers would sift and censor mail. And in every town was a church that, since Rosenberg’s Drive to Eliminate Christian Influence, rang not with hymns but the hubbub of sturdy female parishioners fundraising for the Alliance Winter Festival.
It was the kind of anonymous English morning that was blanketed by bone-gray cloud. Traffic was light; only the odd bus and tram passed in the streets beyond the track. She caught a glimpse of a road sweeper shifting dirt from one end of the curb to the next. There were no park railings anymore, just as there were no stair rods or brass plates outside doctors’ offices, because all kinds of metal were required on the mainland. Everything was monochrome. Even the sparrows seemed to have dust on their wings. The only unusual aspect was the strings of pastel bunting draped across the Victorian terraces in anticipation of the coronation.
A tattered poster of the Leader flapped on a hoarding, torn at the edges and dampened by rain. His was the face that everyone knew, hung in schools and shops, theaters, swimming pools, and community halls. It was more familiar than family and greater than God, both instantly recognizable yet strangely evanescent. If you tried to focus on it, the image slipped away, like a malign Mona Lisa, as though it could never quite be captured. In this poster, he stood against a mountain backdrop, mouth downturned, eyes averted to an idealized distant land that, while unknown, seemed unlikely to be the English territories. It was hard to guess what he was thinking.
Advertising hoardings flashed by—Rowntree’s Fruit Gums, Chesterfield Cigarettes: Man-Size Satisfaction. Once, between towns, Rose caught sight of concentric rings of barbed wire surrounding a series of high walls with watchtowers and electric searchlights fixed to them. There were all kinds of detention centers—correction centers, reeducation centers, enlightenment centers—but most people just called them camps. She shuddered, and the minister’s threat throbbed in her mind like a physical pain.
If you don’t want to end up in a camp…
What went on in a camp? She had never seen inside one, and she knew nobody who had either, though there were always stories. Of people who disappeared from the workplace or their home and never came back. Or those who did return, hollow-eyed and silent, and never talked about it. Sometimes, walking along the street or shopping, you might see a collection truck pass and glimpse terrified faces staring from the grille of a window. Yet most people turned away, as though even to look was forbidden. More often, the security forces deployed disguised vehicles, done up to look like bread or milk or grocery vans with a steel floor and a cramped cell space in the back, so as not to disturb citizens unduly.
She picked up a newspaper that had been left on the opposite seat and read through in a desultory way. With newsprint restricted, the papers had all grown leaner in the past decade, both physically and in content. Just as radio journalists were assessed for ideological bias, broadcasting transmitters guarded and monitored, and foreign stations jammed, so newspapers were obliged to run the gamut of the censors, and most editors operated by a motto of “If in doubt, cut.”
The People’s Observer, a tabloid with large, shouty font, was the sister publication to Germany’s most popular daily, the Völkischer Beobachter, and Rose knew the kind of stories she would see even before she had read them. It was news by the yard, as cardboard as the bread in the shops, as cheap and garish as gummi bear sweets, produced in reams in the Press Ministry located directly below her own office.
On the mainland, journalists would be summoned to the Propaganda Ministry in Berlin for the morning news conference and be told what to write. Any deviation merited instant punishment. The system worked so well that after the Alliance was formed, it was swiftly transferred to England. Every day, journalists from all the daily papers—the Express, the Mail, the News Chronicle, the Echo, the Manchester Guardian, the Times—would queue up to enter the conference room and be briefed by officials, or if it was important the minister himself, on what the news was, what it wasn’t, and how it should be reported.
It was like making a cake, Bridget Fanshaw said. First you took the raw materials. A man had discovered that his wife, a Leni, was carrying on with a hauptsturmführer in her office. He comes home from the factory and stabs her with a bread knife. The body of a woman is fished from the Thames, identifiable only as a Gretl by tattered remnants of brown clothing. Police are appealing for witnesses. Two Gelis have been killed in a car driven by a sturmbannführer. A new musical, A Girl in Every Port, is opening at the London Palladium.
These ingredients are sifted to remove the grit—the details of the Leni’s lover, for example, the name of the sturmbannführer driving the crashed car, any impropriety in the musical that might offend the Morality Office—then sliced, diced, and blended to the tastes of individual readers. A little more spice for readers of the Daily Mail, a dryer mix for the Times.
Today was no different. The splash concerned the country’s record munitions production. Three new factories had been opened and thousands of relocated Gretls and Friedas drafted in to staff them. The good news was illustrated by a picture of the women, turbans on their heads and their shapeless forms draped in workers’ overalls, bent over their machinery, making bullets. Rose had given up wondering what or who the bullets were for. Apart from some skirmishes in the Far East, the Alliance was not at war, but as the government repeated with wearying regularity, Defense Is the Backbone of a Strong and Stable Society. For anyone who didn’t know, the motto was regularly emblazoned on boards in the lobby of every ministerial building, even Culture.
Plenty of newsprint was given over to the coronation, including blurry shots of the royal families of Denmark and Romania arriving at Heston Aerodrome, and a feature on two of the gray geldings, Donner and Blitzen, that would pull the four-ton gold state coach.
Before the coronation, a dinner was to be held at Clarence House with celebrated socialites including the Mitford sisters, Unity and Diana, invited, not to mention Diana’s husband, Oswald Mosley, the former prime minister. The Londonderrys and assorted aristocrats would also be in attendance along with a selection of faceless members of Parliament who presided over Alliance business in the House of Commons. A set of new stamps had been issued to mark the coronation, the Leader’s disembodied profile floating gothically above the happy couple.
Rose turned the page, flicked through the horoscopes, and her eye ranged casually across the advertisements.
Come to Clacton-on-Sea, Britain’s Gold Coast! Sea and sun at all-exclusive Alliance resort. (Class III females and above.)
Celia had been to Clacton-on-Sea the previous year and was entranced. She returned telling Rose she couldn’t care less about the foreign travel ban when the English seaside offered that kind of attraction.
Felixstowe. Gateway to Glamour.
A photograph of a couple of Gelis holding on to their hats on the windswept promenade of Britain’s largest container port.
In the midst of the classifieds was the dating column, the doomed hunting ground of Magdas and Gretls who, of all castes, had the hardest job finding a man. These women brought fewer rations with them and were restricted as to where they could live and the places they could frequent. No smart restaurants or cafés for them. Their clothes were drab and their looks frequently ruined by hard physical work.
One thing they did come with, however, was a womb.
Blond female (Class IV b), energetic, considered attractive, seeks man, any age, for love and reproduction.
Beautiful, blue-eyed, healthy Class III girl, excellent cook, nursing skills, wishes to bear children for a male companion.
Respectable young woman hopes to produce a son for the Alliance.
Rose scanned the lumpen prose with a cool, professional eye. What might Jane Austen or Emily Brontë have made of these desperate advertisements? How might Becky Sharp have viewed these guileless pleas?
Alongside the classifieds, in almost mocking proximity, was a photograph of a beautiful woman, her heart-shaped face, high arched brows, and implausibly milk-white skin buffed to a dewy studio sheen. The caption said that the American film star, Sonia Delaney, was visiting London to present a documentary movie about the coronation of Wallis Windsor called American Queen. There followed a few paragraphs about Miss Delaney, some lines in which she explained why Queen Wallis had “a special place in every American heart” and a list of the actress’s most recent movies—two spy capers, a couple of thrillers, and a romantic comedy.
Rose’s attention quickened.
Not because she had any interest in Sonia Delaney or her films but because Martin had recently mentioned that the Culture Ministry was to host a reception for a delegation of American filmmakers, and the authorities were over the moon. Relations with America had been cool over the past thirteen years, despite Ambassador Kennedy’s initial enthusiasm for the Alliance, so the prospect of a posse of Hollywood power brokers, ready to discuss a slate of proposed coproductions, had prompted the Culture Ministry to roll out the red carpet. Queen Wallis was widely credited with these friendly overtures, which was, Martin said, just one more reason to love her.
Rose didn’t care why the Americans were coming. All she wanted was the chance to meet them.
American was a byword for worldly sophistication, and as most people had no chance of ever encountering one, this legendary status was never dispelled. Everything British citizens knew about America came from the movies. America was a Shangri-la, full of impossible quantities of food, home of Coca-Cola, milkshakes, and glistening cocktail bars with mirrors and black marble. Of gleaming Chevrolets and good-looking young men. Dean Martin. Eddie Fisher. Perry Como. The regime itself did not encourage this vision. America was not an ally, after all, but a neutral country, and Jews there were allowed a quite disproportionate influence on government. Yet the very adjective American had come to signal sophistication and chic in the way that once, incredibly, Parisian had been used.
As the train traveled farther, the towns fell away, and they entered the countryside proper. Spring fields stretched out in furrows, and kestrels hovered high above. A herd of russet cows lay in the shade of a tree, and a haze of young green tipped the distant woodland. Willows trailed leafy fingers into streams. Lush banks of bluebells, cow parsley, the clotted cream of hawthorn, and saucers of elder blossom fringed the train track. After the drab homogeneity of the towns, this landscape was like another England, an ancient, sleeping land that lay deep and undisturbed just below the surface.
A line ran like a ribbon of music through her head.
Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
Where did that strange incantation come from? Those enchanting, archaic words? Faintly, into her mind floated a poem about a pilgrimage. It must be something Dad had told her. Dad loved to recite poetry; he knew acres of it by heart. He had an “office”—in fact a converted garage at the side of the house—overflowing with books, papers, jam jars of pens and nibs and pencil sharpeners, all rich with the smell of pipe tobacco and a faint, lingering tinge of motor oil. He would sit there, one hand stroking his chin, occasionally leaning toward her with a spark in his eye.
“Do you see, Rosie? Do you see what the poet is doing there?”
Even when she didn’t understand the words, when they were essentially meaningless to her, their magic still reached inside her and made the air between them tremble. The poetry her father read seemed exhilarating, as though its cadences could affect your life and maybe even transmute it.
The thought of Dad brought back the encounter with Celia, and a fresh jolt of sorrow assailed her. She could imagine Geoffrey bundling his hapless old father-in-law into the back of his Jaguar, talking heartily of a day trip or some other concocted lie, as the car sped toward the faceless institution where Dad would sit in a chair, knowing no one, out of contact with everything he held dear.
What would Dad make of her mission today? She dearly wished she could ask him.
Rose hadn’t dared tell Martin about the minister’s threat.
She’d managed to see him briefly over the weekend. He rented an apartment in Dolphin Square—a handsome redbrick set of mansion blocks in Pimlico on the north bank of the Thames, largely occupied by single men rather than families, SS and ministry civil servants and their women friends. He had given Rose a key, but she had never used it and was nervous of calling on Martin unexpectedly; it breached some unspoken rule between them that said his private territory was sacrosanct, to be visited by invitation only, whereas he might call on her at any time. The minister’s request, however, had left her in a state of anxious desperation.
Martin was wearing a dark-green dressing gown, luxuriously silky and flattering against his tanned flesh, the neck revealing a glimpse of curled chest hair that was damp from the shower. A towel was draped around his shoulders, and he had a razor in one hand. He looked so attractive, Rose wondered immediately if he had a female visitor, but on his bed was only his uniform laid out: black tunic with silver buttons, white shirt, black jodhpurs, peaked black cap with silver braiding beneath the death’s head, and on the floor beneath, black leather boots polished to a mirror shine.
He glanced rapidly up and down the corridor and quickly ushered her in.
“This is a pleasant surprise, Liebling.”
“I’m sorry, Martin.”
She only realized she was trembling when he put a steadying hand on her arm.
“I wouldn’t have come, only the minister’s ordered me to visit the Widowlands outside Oxford and interview some Friedas for the Protector’s book. I’m to go on Monday. But I haven’t the first clue where to start. And I’ve no idea how to find anything out.”
“Hey. Calm down.”
“But I was thinking—”
“Trouble with you, my darling? You do too much thinking.” He tapped her forehead, mock stern. “What else did he say?”
“Nothing much.”
“Then what are you worried about?” He went over to his desk and scribbled on a piece of paper. “I have a colleague who lives in Oxford. Detective Bruno Schumacher. We were at school together. When I went off to study law, he, poor fellow, joined the police force, got divorced, then was drafted over here for his sins. If you have any problems, give Bruno a call.”
“Really?”
“Of course. Tell him I sent you. And don’t worry!” He tipped her chin toward him. “This isn’t like you, Rose. What are these Friedas going to do? Attack you with their knitting needles? They’re old women. What is there to be frightened of?”
Martin was right. What was she frightened of?
After all, she rarely had cause to see or speak to a Frieda. When the Alliance was formed, the office that regulated women on the mainland—the Frauenschaft, or Women’s Service—was rolled out in Britain. Each caste was overseen by a division of the FS that did everything from administering ration books to running Mothering classes and policing adherence to clothing and behavior rules. Once women were assigned a caste, FS officers instructed them in appropriate behavior. Those who violated any kind of ordinance faced deprivation of rations, imprisonment, downgrading of caste, and worse. Klaras who behaved inappropriately risked having their children taken into the care of the state.
Women in the Alliance faced regulations for everything—where to go, shop, eat, live. How to style their hair. Their identity cards specified the precise number of calories each category of woman would be allocated—2,613 for Gelis, 2,020 for Lenis, 2,006 for Magdas, Gretls 1,800, and Friedas, 879. All these calculations were based on guidelines drawn up on the mainland.
Yet even more plentiful were the regulations for what was forbidden, and the list for women of class VI was the longest. Friedas were forbidden to walk in public parks, to attend cinemas, theaters, hospitals, or restaurants. They could not keep pets. They were allowed no meat or eggs. They could shop only after five o’clock, when most of the produce was gone.
They could not associate with men.
For some reason, into Rose’s head came an incident shortly after the formation of the Alliance, when she had accompanied her father to the Royal Albert Hall in Kensington. It was Ransom family tradition to attend a concert at Christmas, and their father always booked the tickets well in advance, yet when they arrived at the box office that day, everything was at sixes and sevens. The venue had been co-opted as a designated collection point, someone apologized, as a posse of uniformed men strode through the foyer past the winding queue. On impulse, while her father waited, Rose slipped away along a corridor, up some steps, and parted a crimson velvet curtain to peer inside.
It was an astonishing sight.
The auditorium was filled with hundreds of Friedas in spiraling lines, waiting to be interviewed by a row of officers behind desks, each with a pile of manila folders to hand. It seemed that the women were being given the details of their relocations and instructions as to what clothes and possessions they could take. A large board had been erected with the instructions.
2 x black dresses
2 x underwear
1 x black coat
1 x pair boots
2 x towels
As she watched from behind the velvet curtain, Rose could not tear her eyes away. The Friedas’ faces were sallow moons above a basalt sea. Although none of them spoke, they milled anxiously like the crawling mass of a beehive, exuding insect energy. They seemed, in their ubiquitous black, almost inhuman. Repelled and a little scared, Rose let the curtain drop.
Now, the memory disturbed her. She rarely gave Friedas any thought. A Frieda was not allowed to address a Geli directly without permission, and there were very few occasions in which their paths would even cross. So why did she feel trepidation, almost revulsion, at the idea of entering Widowland and a sinking dread of what she might find?
With an effortful screech of brakes, the train pulled into Oxford station, and almost immediately, it was clear something was happening. The platform was crowded with excited children, girls in the sky-blue-and-white uniform of the Alliance Girls’ League and boys in the chestnut-brown shirts of the Alliance Youth, hurrying past. Others, with trays of tin badges, were stationed at each side of the exit, making it impossible for commuters to avoid a donation. It was only when Rose had produced an Alliance mark and had a tin badge thrust into her hand that she understood.
How could she have forgotten? Tomorrow was the Leader’s birthday.
April 20 was a special day across the whole of Europe, marked each year by rallies and brass bands in town squares, readings in decommissioned churches, and school plays reenacting scenes from the Leader’s life. Workers in factories and offices would sing the national hymn, and a relaxation in rations was allowed—either an extra packet of National cigarettes or a small quantity of sugar per family.
Judging by the instruments and sheet music they were carrying, these children must be practicing for the next day. As their instructors shepherded them toward the city center, the faint thump of brass instruments and drums could already be heard.
Rose allowed herself to be carried along in the stream of children, swallowed up in their bubble of excited chatter, gazing at the honey-colored buildings around her. Long ago, her father had studied here for a year, at a place called Ruskin Hall, established for working men who could never dream of the traditional university route. His reminiscences of the medieval quadrangles, the domes and spires, and the neoclassical Sheldonian Theater designed by a young Christopher Wren had percolated their childhood. In Rose’s father’s mind, Oxford was the most beautiful city in England, a lost kingdom of beauty and culture and learning for its own sake. She had not for a second expected the place to match up to Dad’s rose-tinted memories, but now she saw that he was right. Even though the sandstone was dulled with soot and the pillars and pediments were crumbling with age, there was a harmony about them and the way they seemed to fit together that enchanted her. Above the towers and pearl-gray cupolas, a filigree of leaves unfurled against a soft blue sky.
Many of the colleges had been commandeered for VIPs in anticipation of the Leader’s visit, and each ancient stone door was manned by a brace of sentries in field gray uniforms, to the obvious disdain of the traditional college porters, who could be seen, in their black coats and familiar bowler hats, moving officiously around their lodges just inside the gates.
Outside the Sheldonian Theater, a ring of square stone pillars topped by head and shoulder busts of ancient sages had stood guard for centuries. Yet now the Roman emperors and philosophers had been replaced by busts of the Leader, his deputies Hess and Himmler, Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Mueller, and a couple of other senior men. Their freshly carved faces stared balefully out from their pillars, like decapitated warriors in some ancient and bloody battle. Fleetingly, Rose wondered what her father would make of the renovation. Martin had explained that what people like her father saw as a reverence for culture was really only a small-minded attachment to the recent past by people who had no ability to innovate, but still, it was a small mercy that Dad was not here to see it.
The children were congregating, unpacking their instruments and being assembled into lines. Before long, they had begun a rendition of “Land of Alliance Glory,” a song whose music never failed to stir the blood, even if many people could not bring themselves to mouth the words. The children had no such qualms, their high, pure voices wavering into the clear April air.
Rose stood for a while among the onlookers enjoying the sight until, out of the corner of her eye, she noticed something less harmonious going on.
In the grip of three policemen, a black shape that appeared, on closer inspection, to be an old Frieda was thrashing vigorously as the men restrained her. Her mouth was a gappy void—Friedas were not entitled to false teeth—and her stringy hair was coming loose from her bun. She was shouting, her voice clear and educated, ringing out among the medieval façades.
“Take your hands off me, you louts!”
Her tone took Rose straight back to school and the figure of Miss Price, a math teacher at the Clapham School for Girls. A mini martinet, in pebble glasses and a steel-gray bun, Miss Price was known not to suffer fools gladly, and the sternest of men withered in her glare. Miss Price had been the bane of Celia’s life, but when she taught Rose, a glint of humor softened the icy rigor. It crossed Rose’s mind to wonder where Miss Price would be now. In some distant Widowland perhaps, fenced in and draped in black?
The burliest policeman was gripping the old woman pincer fashion by the back of the neck, his face rigid with anger, his jaw jutting and skin flushed with the effort of restraining his more violent urges.
“I am not Class VI subsection C or any other kind of class.”
Faces began to turn. Interest quickened, and a thrill of diversion ran through the crowd.
“I’m an individual. My name is Adeline Adams.”
Her voice, hoarse with shouting, retained the timbre of command. Presumably some Friedas had once been more used to giving orders than taking them.
“I’m a British citizen, and I demand to be treated with respect. Your behavior is despicable. I said, remove your hands.”
Only a Frieda would dare to be so subordinate. It was almost as if Friedas didn’t care what happened to them.
The policeman gave an aggressive laugh. “If that’s what you want.”
He thrust her forward onto the ground, where she fell awkwardly on her forearm, and pinioned her with a foot on her chest. Attracted by the commotion, children turned away from the singing and with tribal excitement began pointing and laughing at the woman’s predicament.
The sound of a motor closed in as a car, closely followed by a dingy van, swung around the corner and came to a halt at the curb. Instantly, the mood among the onlookers changed, and the children’s teachers attempted physically to block their view. Out of the back of the car, a man in civilian clothes emerged. The policeman removed his foot from the Frieda’s chest and straightened up. Rose strained to hear the conversation.
“What the hell’s this about?”
“Suspected guerrilla action, sir.”
“Evidence?”
“Eyewitness, sir.”
“And the reason for this?” The newcomer gestured with distaste at the woman, now sitting on the ground, cradling her arm.
“Resisting arrest, sir.”
The suited man looked around at the three police officers. “And that took three of you, did it? What was she in her previous life? A professional wrestler?”
“She’s stronger than she looks, sir,” said the policeman in injured tones, casting a vindictive glance at his elderly victim, who was now dusting down her black serge dress with meticulous care.
“Well, Sergeant Johnson, you know the form. Get her in and take the witness statement. Don’t, for Christ’s sake, make more of a spectacle of yourself than you have already.”
With a sigh, the man clambered back into his car, and the three policemen set about shoving the old woman into the back of the collection van with some extra kicks for good measure.
The morning that had seemed so pure was spoiled. It was starting to drizzle. Water was speckling the sheet music of the trumpet players, and the children were shifting restively, focused on getting out of the rain. Moisture dappled the shop windows, and the Alliance flags hung limply against their poles.
Turning away, Rose checked again the address of the hotel. She had calculated that her interviews would take a few days so had booked herself into a place that was appropriate for a person on ministry business while not grand enough to raise eyebrows. It was called the Red Lion, and judging by her map, it was only a few streets away. Hurrying off, she turned left down a slip of a cobbled passage called Magpie Lane squeezed between two colleges. It was so narrow that it set her mind wandering back to the past again—how ancient carts might have creaked through its rough medieval walls and very likely gotten stuck there. Now, the only transport in evidence was a couple of bicycles, leaned against the wall of a student lodging house.
Then, toward the end, at the point where the lane measured no more than ten feet across, a vivid scrawl of paint leaped out at her, arcing across the brickwork like a spasm of blood.
Lock up your libraries if you like but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind
The minister was right. It was everywhere.