It was getting dark, and the plane trees outside threw a fretwork of shadows on the linoleum floor, but Rose didn’t switch on the overhead light. Instead she sat in her chair, staring at the radio, contemplating turning the dial.
The urge had become greater recently, batting like an insistent moth at the edge of her consciousness until it was almost irresistible. Everyone knew shortwave radio broadcasts emanating from America encouraged dissidents and ordinary citizens to resist the regime. With the right radio set, it took only the minutest twiddle of the dial to find a bright Atlantic voice engaging in a chat show or a political discussion or a historical documentary. Freedom Radio, it was called. Mostly the Alliance administration refused to recognize the station’s existence, but in the ministry corridors, where it was acknowledged, Freedom Radio was denigrated as propaganda or psychological warfare. The penalty for listening was harsh. Imprisonment at the very least.
None of this would have mattered had not Celia, a few months ago in a fit of home renovation, acquired a brand-new Bakelite Volksempfänger—the official Alliance radio with its preset stations—and offered their cast-off Roberts radio to Rose. Nobody wanted old-style English sets, least of all Geoffrey, who fancied himself a technology buff, and Rose’s own transistor was a primitive thing. The Roberts had a fresh set of batteries, which should not go to waste.
The first time she touched the dial, she sprang away from it as if scalded. The second time, she had summoned her courage late at night and turned it sufficiently to catch the whisper of a talk show, fading in and out from the fog of static. Voices rose and dipped, and once they settled enough to make anything out, she discerned that the format was not unlike that of Men of Distinction. Yet in another way, it could not have been more different. For a start, the panel appeared to be made up of both men and women, but the more astonishing aspect of it was that the females spoke entirely without deference. One woman in particular, who got annoyed by a fellow male panelist, said “I’m afraid, Professor, you don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about!”
Just like that.
Now, moving toward the set, Rose reached tentatively for the dial and stroked it toward the position she had memorized, keeping the volume as low as possible. A susurration emerged, like the faintest whisper of wind, carrying with it a trace of two voices, one male and one female, that resolved into a fuzzy dialogue.
“…the Britain problem.”
“Oh, the Britain problem! Britain can look after itself. Don’t we have enough problems on our doorstep?”
“I call that a most regressive viewpoint considering that our new president Eisenhower has specifically set his face against isolationism. Didn’t he say all free nations have to stand together? There’s no such thing as partial unity?”
So absorbed was Rose in this exchange, she almost missed a sound from the next-door flat. It might have been no more than a chair shifting or the tread of a footstep or the slight rearrangement of a timber floorboard, but as soon as she heard it, she snapped off the radio.
It was foolish to underestimate Elsa Bottomley.
Elsa Bottomley could hear a bat-squeak of conversation. She knew when Rose woke and when she went to bed and almost certainly every detail of her private life. She was wasted in the Transport Ministry. She should have been one of those women in the Alliance Secret Communications HQ, with headphones on their ears, charting every illicit conversation, every breath of dissent.
Her ear must be perpetually pressed to the wall.
Rapidly Rose swiveled the dial to the BBC, and the jocular tones of an announcer filled the room. “This one’s for Hubert Smith from his granny, Mrs. Sandra Smith. Hubert is ten tomorrow and going to his first ever meeting of the Alliance Youth. Congratulations, Hubert, and your granny has asked for a marching song to get you in the mood!” The BBC evening request show, an institution. Nothing suspicious there.
Rose got up and paced around her room. The exchange she had heard on Freedom Radio made it impossible to settle. What did the panelist mean about free nations standing together? More importantly, what exactly was the Britain problem? Did it mean that Americans knew the truth about life in the Alliance? That they saw the oppression, the surveillance, and the deprivation Britons suffered and believed them to be wrong?
The questions would not go away, resounding in her head as she supplied her own, inadequate answers. Restlessly, she made toast, then tea, tidied her clothes, took up a piece of mending, and put it down again. Eventually, to quiet her racing mind, she turned off the radio, settled herself down, and picked up Middlemarch.
Without doubt, it was Rose’s status as star of the team that meant the correcting of George Eliot’s masterpiece had fallen to her. She had only just begun the work, and already she knew she had never faced a challenge like it.
When she first picked up the nine-hundred-page volume, her heart had sunk a little, but Rose set about approaching the task in her usual meticulous fashion—perusing the entire text and, as she went, diligently marking out with a pencil her first impressions of those passages that would infringe upon the Alliance line on feminine portrayal. No female protagonist should be overly intelligent, dominant, or subversive, no woman should be rewarded for challenging a man, and no narrative should undermine in any way the Protector’s views of the natural relationship between the sexes.
To begin with, Middlemarch was straightforward. Astonishingly so. The story was set in the nineteenth century at a time in England when women could not vote and had no rights, and their status was wholly dependent on that of their husband. The nineteen-year-old heroine, Dorothea Brooke, wanted to marry a severe, elderly scholar called Edward Casaubon so as to support him in his literary endeavors. This seemed wholly commendable. The twenty-six-year age gap between the pair was scarcely unusual in Alliance terms, and Dorothea’s justification for learning Latin and Greek to assist her husband was entirely appropriate. “It would be my duty to study that I might help him the better in his great works.” Dorothea quelled her naturally passionate nature to become a model of self-sacrifice, dedicated to providing Casaubon with secretarial aid. All this was fine. Even the title of Casaubon’s great work, The Key to All Mythologies, seemed to carry a ghostly ring of the Protector’s own magnum opus, The Myth of the Twentieth Century.
And yet as Rose read on, the novel took a different turn. Somehow, George Eliot managed to show that Dorothea should aspire to learning for its own sake, for herself, and not to assist her husband. That she should live in tune with her own noble, intelligent nature, rejecting passive submission to a male intellect. That she should take responsibility for her existence on her own terms.
As with many of the novels she read now, Rose began to see her own life refracted through its pages. In Dorothea, who sought to devote her life to a cause and a passion, who yearned for a life beyond the strictures of femininity, who thrilled to the idea of opening books and hearing voices she had never expected, Rose saw herself.
The more she became engrossed in Dorothea’s story, the more her heart expanded.
She was so deeply absorbed that she no longer heard the grumble of the traffic outside or the sounds of her neighbors around her. Curled up in her armchair, under the glow of the desk lamp, she read on and on until the pencil dropped from her hand, and outside, the last vestiges of light gave way to a starless night.