NEXT MORNING, WEIGHED DOWN with the fatty ballast of a full English breakfast, I wander in the New Dorchester’s glowing amber air. Everywhere, people are smiling. The women are in wisps of crepe-de-chine. The girls are dressed up like bridesmaids. The boys come in kilts and bow ties. The men opt for tight double-breasted or looser colonial ice-cream suits.
I trip down carpet waterfalls, drawn by signs that point towards the AIR RAID SHELTER. Down and down, dicing with the newfangled escalators, and still the New Dorchester’s smooth luxury doesn’t give out. Regrettably, the entrance to the shelter itself is closed. It looks like a cloakroom as I peer through the metal links of the sliding gate.
Further up, although still deep underground, lies the SOLARIUM AND SWIMMING POOL. It’s damply warm here, a perpetual tropic midday closer to the earth’s core. Beads of sweat pop up on my face as I drop into one of the deckchairs that populate the tiled shore. I watch shamelessly as various bodies dive and slice beneath the rippling mock-cavern roof. I don’t know why the smell of these places is always so nostalgic, or why swimming costumes are so much more erotic than the mere nakedness of Penrhos Park…
“Found your way down here, Mr. Brook? Thinking of trying the water?”
Slick and wet, he squats down beside me in just his trunks. I know I should recognise him.
“Tony Anderson. KSG,” he says, smiling at my confusion. “I came up to Oxford to deliver the PM’s letter. You look better than when I last saw you. After that illness on your holiday in Scotland. I hope you don’t mind me saying that, Mr. Brook.”
Captain Anderson shakes the droplets from his right hand and offers it to me. His grip is moist, vast. The hairs across his chest have been sculpted into little chevrons.
“You’re, ah, working here?”
“You could say that.” He slicks back his hair. “On duty, I suppose you might call it…” He glances around. A young woman, equally sleek, almost equally lovely, climbs out from the pool at the far side and waves. He waves back. “I wish it was always like this…”
“Girlfriend?” I ask.
He shrugs. “A colleague. We, ah—well, you know…” He grins. My heart skips about in my ribcage. “There’s nothing going on there at the moment. To be honest, I wasn’t quite straight with you when I came up to Oxford with that letter.”
“Oh?”
“The fact is, I volunteered. You see, I always enjoyed those articles you wrote for the Daily Sketch. Well—enjoyed isn’t quite the right word. They meant a lot to me. And you must have led a fascinating life. Being at Oxford. Having met John Arthur.”
“It’s had its moments. And I’m pleased you remember the articles…”
“So I was wondering if I could perhaps take you out for a meal this evening? I really would welcome the opportunity to have a proper talk with you.”
“I’m not sure I’ll have the energy. I’m supposed to be going to New Buckingham Palace this afternoon. It’s nice of you to ask but—”
“—Of course. I understand.” Captain Anderson stands up and the water pats down from him, splashing on the tiles. The blue air shimmers. My thoughts are doing leapfrogs. You never know with these people, not even when they’re in wet swimming trunks and you can see the bulge of their cock. But what would be more suspicious: to accept a seemingly genuine offer, or turn it down for no proper reason?
The flags and the bunting are going up as I’m chauffeur-driven across London towards New Buckingham Palace. Tomorrow is the eve of Trafalgar Day, although my itinerary is blessedly blank apart from the evening Thanksgiving Service at Westminster Abbey. Already cheery messages to our Leader have replaced the advertisements on the sides of buses for Idris Table Waters, Venos’s Cough Cure and Dr J. Collis Browns’s Chlorodyne. GREATER BRITAIN THANKS YOU. HERE’S TO THE FUTURE. Madame Tussauds, with its fine displays of British celebrities and grisly French and Irish atrocities, is granting free admission. All pretence of normality has been forgotten—as has the fiction that we can keep all of this secret from John Arthur. He must know by now.
My long black Daimler sweeps with a stream of others around Hyde Park Corner and through the towering gates to pull up beside the steel flagpoles in front of New Buckingham Place. I wade through a dizzy sense of unreality past the guardsmen in their busbies and up the vast carpet-tongued marble steps into the jaws of the glittering doorway. I queue to be greeted in the crystal fairyland of the Great Hall amid white-plumed colonial hats and Technicolour saris. I’m giving Monday’s suit a trial-airing, and have even placed News From Nowhere in the inner pocket to give a similar weight and feel to the pistol. Nobody stops me. Nobody searches me. Once I’ve handed in my invitation card and have had a name tag attached to my lapel, no one even asks me who I am. There are one or two square-looking men who don’t seem to be guests lingering at watery intersections of tile and glass, but they keep well out of the way.
Dresses rustle as the queue shuffles forward to meet the Royal Family. I breathe the jangling air that is mingled with the scents of floor polish, lilies, mothballs, new leather, face powder, eu de cologne. My palms start to sweat. This really is starting to feel like a dry run for the day after tomorrow. There’s the barbed sense of ordinariness, fear and monumentality that must claw at the mind of every assassin as they wait for their moment to come.
My turn arrives to meet the Royal Family. His Highness the Duke of York stammers slightly as he greets me. I bow. Then his wife the Duchess, their two plain daughters. A moment later I’m standing before King Edward and Queen Wallis. Me! Whoever I am. I glance discreetly to both sides as I bow whilst, frail as dry leaves, their gloved fingers brush against mine. It would be easy for me to reach inside my jacket at this point. The gesture would seem innocent—part of the overall motion of bowing. Click back the hammer as I pull the pistol out. Blam. Then blam again. Two shots, minimum. Walter’s Humane Bullets thudding into the chest at close range, exploding through the basic organs, shredding blood vessels, bone, gristle. Within moments, this whole place would implode in shatters of glass and steel, it and Greater Britain would be drawn up through the skies in a hissing gale, back towards fairyland where they belong. The King clears his throat. A liveried butler touches my shoulder. The queue shuffles forward again. I float away.
The guests wander out through pillared archways into the afternoon’s gracious warmth. There’s a stir when the silver trays of sweet Merrydown Wine emerge for the royal toast—it’s better than the stuff I tasted on Midsummer Night, but still not a patch on my college’s champagne—another when the shadow of The Queen Of Air and Darkness drifts over our heads; hired today by the BBC as a part of their live outside broadcast. The gardens as I explore them still feel a little like Green Park of old. The stepped orchards and monumental statues don’t quite fit. The roses that amazingly still bud and flower on the trellises in this bright October sunlight look too red, too raw. You can almost smell the paint, and hear the bellowing voice of the Queen of Hearts. No! No! Sentence first—verdict afterwards.
Much of what happened after John Arthur became Prime Minister seemed so traditional that at first even the skeptics were reassured: the marches, the brass bands, the jamborees, the re-planting of public parks, the resumption of longer pub opening hours, the improvement of the roads and the railways. Economic prosperity, although it didn’t arrive immediately, already seemed to be on its way.
The arrests certainly came. The few remaining communist and socialist MPs were immediately deprived of their seats—after the years of riots, strikes and disturbances, that only seemed like a sensible precaution. Left wing newspapers like the Manchester Guardian were the subject of firebomb attacks, and bookshops and news vendors soon took the hint that it was better not to stock them. The Jews and the Irish were the subject of intimidation. Homosexuals were still routinely beaten up. In fact, in many ways, little had changed. At this early stage in the dream of Greater Britain, it was often the groups John Arthur was soon to eradicate who pleaded loudest for his protection.
At this time, Britain was still supposedly a democracy. There were debates in Parliament, and for a while even a Cabinet of sorts. But John Arthur plainly had little time for the fripperies of a discredited political system. He was too busy actually governing the country. In his first weeks in power, he passed by acclamation—the few more bothersome MPs who might have voted according to their conscience being conveniently ill or missing—a short Enabling Bill that built upon the foundation of Chamberlain’s Emergency Powers Act to the extent that he could rule by decree. Legally, nothing had changed; the courts still continued to translate the law. In a country without any written constitution, John Arthur took a cautious and legalistic route towards dictatorship.
For a while, people still talked about a time when they might choose not to vote for John Arthur and give the Tories or even Labour another bash. But a series of convenient events arose to secure Modernist power more deeply. In India, a scandal-embroiled Gandhi was arrested and soon after supposedly committed suicide in his cell. As they had been in the previous century, concentration camps were established there, then in Southern Africa and many other colonies. In Britain, it was a time of whispers, for re-examining one’s friends and neighbours. In schools, there was generally at least one committed Modernist master who would report any colleagues he perceived to be pedalling decadent or inaccurate teaching to the EA-dominated Local Education Authorities. Anxious to keep our jobs, the rest of us readily towed the line and amended our syllabuses in accordance with the new nationally coordinated instructions; we never quite seemed to cross the line of realising that we were peddling Modernist lies.
Despite the thrill of the fresh new vision that was gripping the country, there was an atmosphere of almost perpetual crisis. A plot to kill John Arthur by a bomb was narrowly averted, and at the trial several famous names from the political past were implicated, although Churchill himself had left for America by the time the police arrived at Chartwell to question him. The climax of it all, now commemorated in nursery-rhyme, song and pier-end tableau, took place on the night of 23 June 1933, just before an ailing King George and Queen Mary were due to head north from Old Buckingham Palace to Balmoral. A series of virtually simultaneous fire-bomb explosions crackled across the palace at ten o-clock that evening. Much older inside than out, conveniently stacked with draughty passages, plaster ceilings and ancient furniture, the vast building went up like a torch, lighting the overcast skies as far off as Kingston and Bromley with a baleful glow. In the atmosphere of permanent national crisis and suspicion, the fire and the Westminster Fire Brigade’s abysmally slow response came as less of a surprise than it should have done. It seemed only to prove that there was much that was deeply wrong with our nation, much that still needed to be done. Even the discovery of the charred bodies of King George and Queen Mary amid the glowing ruins seemed more emblematic than real; like a tragedy that took place long ago in some half-forgotten land.
There were many arrests, many strong measures, many disappearances after the fire, but the expected trial of the guilty parties never came, although by common consent they were Irish. It was as if this event was too large to be dragged into the dull glare of a specific reality and blamed on one particular group of men. In the classrooms, in back rooms, in the barbers and the chip shops, in the official files, on the EA posters, in our mistrust of strangers and our continued need for aggressive security, the fire at Old Buckingham Palace has currency to this day. Am I the only person who is convinced that it was done with the connivance of the Empire Alliance? No, of course not. But I imagine that the EA probably did find some Irishmen who wanted to score a point against a neighbouring country which openly supported Loyalist terrorists in their own north. With a gate left open, an easy passage through customs, things would just seem to fall into their laps. So much easier to get someone else to do your dirty work for you. It’s the Modernist way.
Edward VIII was crowned King, and toasted warmly in Westminster’s Great Hall by Mussolini, and Old Buckingham Palace in ruins remained at least as big a draw as it had been standing. Soon, sightseers began to clamber over the railings, searching for souvenir scraps of plaster as they wandered amid the blackened hallways and fallen beams. Of course, this was incredibly dangerous, but John Arthur captured the national mood when he suggested that, rather than have the old Place restored or demolished, the remains should be shored up and re-landscaped as a public park so that we could all go there. Few people had any affection for the drab acres of Green Park just across Resolution-nee-Constitution Hill, anyway. It would be the perfect site for a new palace.
For all its aspirational spires, towers and glittering domes, New Buckingham Palace looks rather like an immense greenhouse. Within a couple of years of its construction, it was overlooked by the Victory Spire at the corner of Park Lane. With London and the shining Thames spreading below and the certainties of Modernism filling their hearts, day trippers on the viewing platform could peer down at the Palace through penny telescopes to see if they could see the King, or perhaps Queen Wallis. And they could wonder out loud why he had to marry her when she was, let’s face it, used goods, and he could have had any fancy tart in the world for the asking.
Looking around for something more filling than smoked salmon sandwiches, light-headed as my belly growls and premonitions of pain begin to dance around me, I recognise a famous face as I make my way between the pools and fountains.
“Personally, I can’t stand fiddling around with plates and standing up at the same time,” he says affably. “Strikes me as a foreign habit.”
I nod. Deputy Prime Minister Arkwright looks small and ordinary in the flesh, almost exactly like his pictures, even without the pipe and the Homburg. In fact, he really hasn’t changed that much from the man I glimpsed standing with John Arthur all those years ago at the Cottage Spring. He was probably born cherubically plump, going-on-fifty.
“Hmm. Oxford,” he says when I tell him who I am. “You know, I still wish I’d had a University education. And you know John from way back?”
“I taught him briefly when he was a child,” I reply, conscious of the rainbowed sun gleaming through the fountain spray on Arkwright’s blood-threaded cheeks, the strange intensity of his gaze, even as he chomps a handful of cocktail sausages. William Arkwright’s the EA’s comic turn, shouldering the blame for fiascos like the Cyprus Adventure that go so badly wrong they can’t be hushed up. He’s frequently seen on the arms of busty actresses. But he’s Deputy Prime Minister and Home Secretary. He’s the second most famous face in the country, even if he trails the first by a long way. He can hardly have come this far by accident.
“That’s interesting,” he says. “John’s always so quiet about his past. When you get to meet him, you make sure you remind him of that. I keep telling him he should stop all those dreadful books being written about him.” Another handful of sausages. Arkwright chews them, waving the greasy sticks. “Of course, no one gives a bugger about my upbringing. It’s called charisma, I suppose. Some us have to make do with hard work.”
“Did you ever think you’d get this far?”
Arkwright tilts his head as the water clatters over the green copper dolphins behind us. From the way he studies my lips, I realise he’s slightly deaf. “What was it Cromwell said about those who don’t know where they’re going rising the furthest?”
“It was something like that.”
“Well, he was right. I’m permanently lost, Mr. Brook. Permanently amazed. Although I know I don’t look it…”
I nod. I’d never realised how oddly difficult it is to talk to someone famous, that sense of knowing them even though you don’t, and the way Arkwright’s looking at me as if there really is something shared between us… Then I realise what’s happening—and immediately wish I hadn’t. It’s there in his eyes. It’s in that smile of his and the way he studies me. After all these years, I’ve finally met someone else who knows the truth about John Arthur.
We gaze at each other. I swallow a sudden mouthful of saliva.
“What do you think of John Arthur, Mr. Brook?”
“What?”
“What do you think of John Arthur. I know it’s been a long time, but do you like him personally?”
“He has my… admiration.”
“Admiration.” He slurps his wine and savours the word, then points the rim of the glass towards my face. “I suppose that’s about as much as any of us can hope for…”
Deputy Prime Minister William Arkwright smiles at me. Then he pretends to see someone else he recognises over my shoulder, and waddles away through the rainbowed haze.
Still wandering half an hour later, re-fortified by tablets and what food I could find, grimly determined to make the most of these last days before dissolution or trial or public shame or private agony or whatever else awaits me, I come across Father Phelan standing alone in a long chilly room inside the Palace where the pillars are entwined with wrought-iron ivy. He catches the click of my new shoes on the tiled floor before I can head off in another direction.
“The Professor!” he calls, waving a bottle of Johnnie Walker. “Would you care for one? A wee sip? Sorry I’m without any glasses.”
I shake my head and stand looking at him as he sways mirrored amid glass cases containing the relics of Empire; rifles, claymores and assegai, torn and bloodstained flags that men once gave their lives for.
“A fine fella, the King—but smaller in the flesh, don’t you think, Professor? Can’t say that I much admire his choice in women, either.”
I nod, and make to turn away.
“Don’t go yet, Professor! Don’t go! I’ve been meaning to ask you. Did you really know John Arthur?”
“It was a long time ago.”
“But without the crap? The lies?”
“The facts have got twisted about since, but yes, I did once know him.”
“Thing is…” Father Phelan’s eyes roll back in his head and his chin glistens as he glugs down another inch of whisky. “Thing is, I never knew the bugger at all. Will you fucking credit that?”
“Does that really matter? Everyone seems to think you did…”
“What do they know? It’s right I was working in the East End about 1920, helping lads with the boxing. Terrible times, but a sweet church, a busy little congregation. Worked there for a few years before I got moved on after I had a bit of a bash up with the Bishop. Over this basically…” He waves the bottle, then plonks it down on the long low case he’s standing beside, hands making rainbows smears across the glass. Inside, there’s an antique cannon dredged up from the Marie Rose. “Then John Arthur takes over from that bastard Churchill, and it seems he spent some time boxing in the East End. You know how it is—you tell stories on Friday evening you can’t even remember on Saturday. You think, what the fuck? That sounds good enough to be true. Who cares? Almost came to believe it myself, I did. Got my name and my face in the local paper…”
I nod. Faintly distorted, echoing along the crystal corridors, comes the thump of martial music.
“But it gets a bit scary. I’m expecting, you know, some kind of visit. When it comes, it’s this fella from the KSG says he wants a quiet chat. Of course, I’m shitting myself, but I come out straight and tell him it’s all a load of crap, I never even saw John Arthur let alone taught him boxing. But this fella is all understanding like. Says that it really doesn’t matter. And then he starts to tell me about the times when I used to help them poor lads in the East End. About me touching those sweet lads like I’m Jesus some kind of pervert…
“But the fella tells me all soft and kind like he’s only just letting me know. Not that he believes it. Not that he gives a flying fuck either way. The deal is that I just have to keep spinning the same crap about having helped John Arthur at my boxing club. Basically do what I’m doing now…” He attempts to make an ironic bow. His hand slips on the glass case. He staggers. “Right here in front of the bloody King of fucking England.”
“That doesn’t seem so very harsh,” I say. “Not when you think what’s happened to some of your people, Father. Assuming you are Irish, a Roman Catholic.”
“Doesn’t, does it?” he mutters, ignoring my jibe. “But how about you, Professor? Where does that leave you with that fucking look in your eyes and your nice wee tablets, tottering on your silly stick? You bloody well actually knew him.”
“Perhaps,” I say, “the truth had to slip though somewhere. Perhaps even John Arthur understands that.”
“But where! Where! You tell me the truth, Professor…!”
I walk along the corridor through splinters of flashing light, away from the clamour of Father Phelan’s voice.
Captain Anderson stands waiting for me that evening in the New Dorchester’s foyer. He’s still in his uniform, and he smiles when he sees me emerging from the crowds, and shakes my hand again, his belts creaking slightly, smelling of starch and Brylcreem. Specks of weariness float before my eyes. Already, I’m wishing I hadn’t agreed to come.
“It’s good to see you, Mr. Brook.”
“Just call me Geoffrey.”
“I had the car brought around to the front…”
It’s hard to tell as we stand outside the New Dorchester’s colonnades that there’s anything special about the neat black Ladybird that awaits us on the circled drive. Just the odd lettering of the numberplates and the absence of a tax disc.
“It’s just a pool car,” he says as he holds open the passenger door. “Being in the KSG, I don’t get the chance to own many things…”
“You make it sound like a religious order.”
Captain Anderson chuckles. The Ladybird’s interior smells of wood and leather. My seat, as I run my hands across it, is soft as a spaniel’s ears.
“Do you have any idea where you’d like to go?” he asks, pumping up the choke, jingling the keys.
“I thought I’d leave that up to you.”
He isn’t wearing a gun. Not obviously, anyway. “To be honest, I did take the precaution of booking somewhere. It’s a bit out, but we should be against the traffic…”
We drive across the Thames, through Westminster and Chelsea and then out beyond Hammersmith and along the Great West Road past the bright new factories where Smiths make their crisps, and Macleans their toothpaste. The Hudson Car, complete with dummy passengers, floats floodlit a full hundred feet up. But beyond there, beyond the glare of the sodium street lights, the factories give way to building sites, and the buildings sites give way to ruined warehouses, strips of wasteground. Greater Britain is like a film set. Push hard enough, I keep telling myself, and it will collapse entirely.
Captain Anderson turns north at a roundabout beside a new neon-and-concrete Underground station. Soon, we are amid the suburbs. Here, much like the streets where my acquaintance lived in Oxford, although teeming in a far greater multitude, are the bay windows, the neat gardens, the half-jokily named pubs, the new rows of shops. Captain Anderson lights a Capstan and winds down his window. I lean out of my own before I start to cough, breathing in gardenfuls of air.
We arrive at a place called the New Galleon. It crouches on concrete beams at the edge of a reservoir as if preparing to stride across the black waters that the recent rains have provided. I’m surprised at the expanse of new metal in the car park. Bentleys and Rovers. The kind of Jags and Bristols, glinting blood-red or blue in this water-scented darkness, that are owned privately but take so much money, so much influence and simple position to get hold of that they might as well be official.
Inside, up the curved concrete ramp, it’s all horse brasses, Constable prints—or possibly originals—flock wallpaper, Mantovani strings. Although he tells me he’s never been here before, Captain Anderson seems at ease, peeling off the paper coaster from the base of his double whisky as we sit on tartan chairs around a low copper table and study the copper-plate menu. There’s a sense that everyone knows everybody else here. Wealth and success in Modernist Britain have become a kind of club.
“Quite the popular place to be,” he observes as a dinner-jacketed waiter leads us to our reservation beside a wide plate glass window overlooking the reservoir and the flowing lights of the arterial road beyond. He nods discreetly. “I think that’s Tommy Lawton over there. That man we passed on the way in—he’s Charles Hill the Radio Doctor.”
I have no idea who Captain Anderson means, but I follow his gaze in the window’s reflection. He is far from being the only member of the KSG here either, although as a captain he’s the most junior.
“I don’t know if I’m supposed to say this, ah, Tony, but I’d like the meal to be my treat. I can easily afford the bill.”
“Don’t worry. I have a standing imprest. No one will query it.”
He clicks his fingers and orders another whisky, then lights a fresh cigarette from his last. After this long day and my experiences of mixing too many tablets with too much alcohol, I settle for iced water, which smells, as I raise it to my lips, like that swimming pool from which Tony Anderson emerged. I study him now, still hardly able to take in how ordinary these KSG people are when you get close to them. He’s still young enough to have a small whitehead showing at the corner of his mouth.
“Did you really enjoy my articles?” I ask as we wait for the food.
In reply, he gives me a passable run-through of the subjects I covered in those Saturday pages. He’s obviously been well-briefed, but it’s like listening to a student regurgitating his studies for an oral exam in the certain knowledge that it’ll all be forgotten a day later. I notice that his second or possibly third whisky’s already down to the ice.
The food, when it finally comes, is a disappointment. I’d imagined that the plain names and descriptions on the New Galleon’s menu were a double-bluff; surely boiled potatoes, beef and swede really couldn’t mean just that? But it does. Tony’s meal is a steaming heap of mashed potato, a sprinkling of parsley over cod from which he has to carefully extract the bones. So this is what the fabulously rich and famous eat at dinner. Of course, John Arthur likes only plain food himself. Francis, I remember, was exactly the same.
We plod through the pudding.
“I’m sorry,” Tony Anderson sighs, standing his spoon up in the custard. “This place was recommended to me. I nearly went instead for this Italian place down in Bayswater.” He smiles. His face has relaxed somewhat with the whisky. “It’s all garlic, those big pepper grinders, candle smoke on the ceiling…”
“Perhaps some other time.”
“Yes…” He gazes at me. Those blue eyes. I can warm to him more easily now that he’s given up the pretence of being interested in Figures Of History.
“Still, Tony, I’ve enjoyed our meal.”
“There’s no hurry to go back to the New Dorchester, though, is there?” He sounds almost hopeful. “We could drive into central London first. Take a stroll. See the sights. This of all nights, there must be plenty going on…”
He signs for the bill after downing his last whisky, and I follow him back outside, collecting my coat, my stick, chewing on a little mint that looks and tastes like one of my fat tablets. The little man who sweeps in past us through the swing doors is clearly Lupino Lane, and the car park is fuller than ever. A seagull is mewing. The London air whispers and rustles around us, pulling me this and that way with fingers of weariness, hope, expectancy.
“Why did you join the Knights of Saint George?” I ask Tony as he starts the Ladybird up and backs it out from beside a Bentley Convertible.
“I just wanted something better for the future,” he says.
“Isn’t that what everyone says?”
“I know…” He pulls a face as we wait at the junction on the main road. “…It’s a cliché.” The traffic lights shine red, orange, then green. He pulls off. These simple commands—from machines, even—which everyone now obeys.
“Does that mean it’s true?” I ask.
Slipping into the traffic’s flow, talking more easily now that we’re no longer face to face and half his mind is on the driving, Tony Anderson tells me how he was brought up in the Wirral just over the Mersey from Liverpool, the same kind of nothing-place where most of us start our lives. His father had been a shopkeeper—hardware; one of those emporiums filled with tin baths, stick-on soles, replacement broom handles, lino, shoe polish, patent floor cleaners and just about everything else imaginable.
Tony Anderson, who’s twenty-five now, was born at a hard time, something that’s so easy to forget about his generation when you see them now, so at ease in the world they have created. His first memories are about the end of the War: defeat, depression, unemployment, hyper-inflation, limbless ex-soldiers sleeping and dying on the streets. Tony and his father, mother and two elder sisters lived above the shop in three small rooms. They should have been alright, providing basic domestic supplies to the large urban population of Birkenhead. But the business just went down and down. The customers couldn’t pay. The supplier’s prices went haywire. They ended up accepting credit just to create the impression that they were busy, but at the end of the day there was no way out. No food. No money.
Tony’s father was beaten up on the orders of the moneylenders he’d gone to in an effort to keep going. The moneylenders were Jewish; it wasn’t unusual for minor financiers to be Jewish in those days. His father tried turning to other trades; offering cheap groceries which he went down to collect from the market ten miles away by handcart. That didn’t work either.
“The shop’s still there,” Tony says, pulling past a slow-moving Colman’s Mustard van as we bowl along the Fulham Road. “Or at least the building is. It’s a barbers now, although you can still see our name on the gable bricks if you look carefully. My father was a good businessman, not afraid to do new things and stock new products, to change with the times. He did his best, his absolute best. By everything that was right and fair, he should have succeeded. But you’re a historian, Mr. Brook—you probably understand this better than me. There are some things you can’t fight against. They just steam-roller over you no matter what you do about it. It’s just—what?—the force of history?”
“That’s as good a name for it as any.”
“My father struggled on for a while. He went up to look for work in Bolton. Then Sheffield. He was much too old to be a labourer by then, but that was what mostly he did, and sent us what money he’d saved. Then we just stopped getting the letters. My mother had to go down to collect his belongings. She would never talk about it—I still don’t know quite how my father died…”
“So you joined the EA?”
“I just wanted to belong to something that made sense. I was sixteen when John Arthur came into power, and by then we were all living in a single room. One of the first things John Arthur did was introduce new scholarships and City Colleges—did you know that? And he made the benefits system work for the people who really needed it. He gave me and millions of others a chance. I found I could go back to school. And I found that I was good at learning. Good at sports. Good at dealing with people. It was as if it had been a secret that people had kept from me until then. So I was happy to become a party member. I felt I owed it to John Arthur personally. He virtually saved my life.”
“To get into the KSG, though… There must have been a lot of competition?”
“Of course,” Tony grins, still proud of the memory of all that he’s achieved.
Leicester Square is brighter than daylight as we crawl around it with the rest of the traffic. Long gone are the days of my own furtive wanderings here; a quick exchange of looks and words, then back to a room around Russell Square, the smell of the stairs, tramlines flashing like lightening beyond the curtainless windows, the sag of the bed and the trickle of soapy water as we size each other up and privately regret our decision.
It would be hard to find a place to park this Ladybird in central London tonight if Tony wasn’t able to ignore the signs. We step out into the crowds and are carried with them towards the fairground that’s been set up in Regents Park. There’s the sickly smell of candy floss and soaring, sparkling lights. Sleepy, excited children, their sticky faces shining with sugar and grease, nag their parents for a last ride on one or another of the vast machines of fear and joy, then scream as the wheels rise and turn and clanging trains swoop down from the sky. The older lads nudge each other excitedly at the sight of Tony Anderson in his KSG uniform. When they grow up, they all want to be him. Tony finds a drinks tent and has the barman—who notices his uniform easily and comes over straight away, despite the press of the crowds—refill the steel whisky flask he produces. I shake my head when he offers it to me, and watch as he slugs it back.
He seems absorbed in his own life and his own history as he walks beside me, his arm brushing my own; but I still find it hard to squeeze the real person into this uniform, the fact of what he is. Further out beyond the stalls and the tents and the rides lies an open space and a vast bonfire, throwing sparks into a grey-glowing sky. I buy us both hot potatoes from a crooked-chimneyed oven. After the New Galleon’s dire food, they taste like hot new bread, salt and honey. Tony and I stand at the long ropes and watch the bonfire’s spiralling antics as butter melts down our chins.
Two Spitfires swoop out of the night, low over the bonfire, agitating the sparks, trailing ribbons of smoke whilst lads stripped to the gleaming waist climb over each other to make trembling pyramids, marshalled by absurd middle-aged men in khaki shorts and broad-brimmed hats. Just as I’m wondering what else goes on in the ridged canvas tents that have been set up behind the zoo, I sense that I’m being stared at from across the ring. It’s Christlow, his face slippery with firelight as he marshals the next shining cluster of Modernist youth preparing for some gymnastic feat or other. His eyes flick away from mine when I attempt to smile at him. He looks around as if in panic, then stumbles back into the trembling heat.
“Perhaps we should go,” I say to Tony, and we push into quieter areas of the fair just as the London Police Alsatian Display Team begins to leap through flaming hoops. Everything seems tired now. Lads are yelling fuck-this and fuck-that at each other. Couples lie coiled like heaps of rope in the shadows between the tents. The toilet tents have turned nasty. Back at the Ladybird, the streets are almost quiet.
The New Dorchester seems worn out, too. Voices are low, and all but one of the bars have closed. The night staff are out with mops and vacuum cleaners in some of the communal spaces, doing their night duties. Tony Anderson stands close beside me as we wait for the lift.
“Don’t mind if I come up, do you?” he says to the burnished steel door as it slides open. He presses the right button for my floor. The cables draw us up the dark shaft. I can smell the whisky coming off his flesh.
I unlock the door of my room for him. We step inside. The main lights, too hard, too bright, flicker on. Everything here is immaculate, unchanged. Saint George is still at prayer in his forest of fragmented glass. The sheets of my huge bed are drum-taut. I sleepwalk over to the tall ash-and-ebony cabinet and pour out two drinks from the first bottle that comes to hand. I watch as Tony takes his and swallows, and then force myself to knock back my own. His face is paler now, dotted with silvery beads of perspiration.
“You don’t need to do this, you know.”
“That’s okay.” He smiles and licks his lips. “Perhaps I could borrow your bathroom…”
I shrug and wander away from him, propping myself half-up on the vast bed as he puts down his drink, loosens his collar, steps out of his shoes. I reach to the line of buttons and make the lights grow dimmer. Saint George fades, the forest darkens. His face is a picture of piety, a younger version of John Arthur’s; or Francis Eveleigh when he wasn’t John Arthur and the world still seemed full of love and life and hope and honour. That night on the train to Scotland. Clatter tee tee. Telegraph lines rising, falling. The scent of the smoke and the feel of far away. The incredible pressure of flesh against flesh. He took everything then, did Francis—my money, my dreams, my love—and he’s been giving it all back to me ever since.
Out of habit, Tony closes the bathroom door as he finishes stripping for his shower. Then he holds it open again on the pretence of asking me about the towels, and leaves it that way as he turns and steps out of his underpants, giving me a glimpse of his parted bum, the droop of his balls, the entire way that he is made. Realising that I still have my drink in my hand, I take a swig of it, feeling it burn in my throat—a little touch of blessed reality.
Tony turns on the shower and steps in. I watch him broken and multiplied in reflection of the many bathroom mirrors as he soaps himself. The water clatters, dribbling from the points of his elbows, the tip of his cock. He has a wide, strong back, has Tony. He’s more beautiful than any man I’ve ever had—including, yes, even including Francis. Yet I’m somehow reminded instead of those sour stairways after a pickup in Leicester Square; those cheap, uncurtained back rooms, and the sense of regret that came even before the beginning. By the time Tony comes out again, wrapped modestly enough in a New Dorchester towelling robe, I feel tired. Washed up. Washed out. Dead or dying.
“I don’t want you in that way, Tony. I almost wish I did. But…”
“That’s okay.” He rubs a towel across his sticking-up hair, trying hard not to look relieved. He has his blood group tattooed across his upper arm; the small blue circle stretches and contracts as he moves.
“Can they really give you orders to do this?” I ask.
“It isn’t like that.”
“What is it like then?”
He flops down beside me on the bed, smelling of soap, wet hair, clean flesh, new laundry. “It’s just a suggestion that’s made…”
“Why you?”
“I didn’t tell you how I made the money that helped keep my mother and sisters after Dad died, did I? It was easy enough. I took the ferry across to the docks at Liverpool. If nothing else, I always knew I was good looking—a pretty boy. I never thought I was doing it for any other reason but that. But then I had a fling with a Major a couple of years ago when I was in Rhodesia. We were bored, lonely… We were found out, of course.”
“That woman at the pool you waved to…?”
“I can hope, I suppose.”
He lies back on the bed, his broad arms crooked up, his hands clasped beneath his neck. Bits of him are sticking out; young tender flesh—but it no longer matters. I lie beside him, just relishing the sense of simple human closeness for what, if things go according to plan, will probably be the last time in my life. Together, we stare up at the ceiling.
Tony nudges me later from a doze. He’s dressed again, and clearly has been sitting watching me from the side of the bed whilst I mutter and drool until—what? Three-forty, for God’s sake. Saint George is still at prayer in his darkened forest. The Bells’ bottle is half empty.
“You’d better get undressed and in between the sheets,” he tells me. “I was told to be gone before the morning.”
“Before…?”
He shrugs. Smiles. I’m so glad we didn’t spoil this night by fucking each other. “There’s going to be an air raid alert first thing.”
“For real?”
“Of course not.” His hand touches my arm. “It’s just another part of the show.”
I sit up, dragging the shot-silk coverlet with me in spears of static and pain. “That explains why there’s only Westminster Abbey down on the itinerary…” I mutter as I look around for my tablets and shake them out and gulp them down.
“Could be.”
“You must have seen some action, Tony.”
His face is a picture for a moment. He thinks we’re back to sex again. “Yes. I was in Rhodesia. One of the first.”
“What was that like?”
“It was hardly a proper war. We just walked in through Bechuanaland. Half the country wanted us there—whites especially. Arrested a few League of Nations soldiers and put them back on the boat to Belgium…”
“But that’s not what you’re for, though, is it? You’re the KSG. A political force…”
Tony’s gaze trails away from mine across the carpet. The rumour was that ten to fifteen thousand people vanished in the first weeks of British re-occupation of Rhodesia. They were gathered up in trucks by local “Modernist sympathisers”, guided and supported by the KSG. They were taken to camps to be tortured, questioned, killed, whilst refugees poured along the roads and old enmities were settled. Blam blam as history grinds on and flies gather over the corpses. The pattern, by now, is familiar enough.
“It’s not worth it, is it, Tony?”
“What?”
“What you’re doing. Get out of the KSG while you can, give your life a chance.”
He stands up, finally almost drunk as he places his tumbler down on the polished bedside table a little too carefully. He crosses the room to pick up his jacket. “It’s too late for that,” he says, smiling lopsidedly as he brushes at some imaginary fluff from the lapels and pulls it on. Buttons jingle as he tugs at the sleeves, pulls the pockets straight and smoothes and buckles the belts. He combs his hair, stoops to lace his shoes, re-checks his already perfect parting in the mirror.
Once again as he leaves my room, even now half-marching, dark angel of death and delusion, young male beauty personified, Captain Tony Anderson of the KSG scares me.
I was summoned to the Headmaster’s office at the Friary School mid-way through the 2B’s morning natural history lesson. This was in 1932 and the Daily Sketch and I had, after six relatively glorious years, finally parted company. My moment of fame had been and gone, I was 52, already the second oldest master at the school, and I’d began thinking about retirement, of selling my mother’s house and moving to some quiet cottage with a view of the sea that I might just be able to afford if I lived frugally. On that particular day, I was covering for Green, and had just about run through my sum total of knowledge about the life cycle of the cabbage white. Ink pellets were flying. Desk lids were banging. Even now that John Arthur had succeeded in stabilising the economy and staff weren’t being fired quite so regularly, a summons to the Head was usually a bad sign. Today, though, I was almost grateful.
Still, all the usual suspicions went through my mind as I waited outside the oak door for the minute that it always seemed to take Harks to realise someone had knocked on it. Poor results, perhaps, in the new Basic Grade exams? Or my sucking off that foundry worker outside the Bull at Shenstone last Saturday evening?
“Come in!” Harks shouted, seemingly quicker than usual.
Inside, it was a shock to find that he was actually out of his desk, standing as if to greet me. It was a running joke in the senior staff room that Harks didn’t have a lower portion to his body.
“Ah, Brook!” Since my Daily Sketch years, Harks had decided that my employment records were at fault, and addressed me in all written correspondence—which was his usual way of dealing with people—as Brook without the e. I doubt if he even knew what my first name was. I certainly didn’t know his. “Take a pew, take a pew. Mrs. Cringle will be in with some tea in a moment. She’s promised to see if she can rustle up some biscuits…”
I slumped down, totally confused.
“I’ve received a letter this morning,” Harks began, rubbing the cream vellum between his fingers as if he still didn’t quite believe it. “From the Vice Chancellor at Oxford. It seems that they’re seeking to widen their, ah, remit. Trying to get in some fresh educational blood. Your name, Brook, has been mentioned…”
A cool day, the year’s first frost covering the allotments. The sky a pale English blue. The bells, the bicycles. That odd little man Christlow who called himself a scout but was in fact the personal servant to a few of us dons. Worn stone steps. Faded luxury. Casement windows. The college principal Cumbernald taking me for lunch at the White Horse jammed between Blackwells and Trinity as if he really had every reason to welcome me, fraud that I clearly was. An applewood fire was burning in the snug’s grate, I remember, and Cumbernald told me that he was newish to the college himself, and that we’d make a fine team together as we ate sharp ham-and-cheddar rolls and a few of the other dons wafted in from dim smoky corners to give me their own Varsity tips. I confided to Cumbernald about the book I’d always planned to write, and he nodded gravely. By the time we’d opted—yes, why not?—for a third pint of Pedigree, I didn’t feel like an impostor. I felt as if I was gliding at last into the warm currents of a stream along which my life had always been destined to carry me.
I remember that the news vendors were selling a Special Extra Early edition of the Oxford Evening News as we walked back along High and Cumbernald regaled me with a few of his own supply of Oxford stories. He bought a copy and we stood and read it together. Other people were doing the same, nearly blocking the street. It had just been announced that a British Expeditionary Force had landed at Dronacarney north of Dublin, and that a task-force fleet led by HMS Hood had already accepted the surrender of Belfast, barring a little fighting around the Falls Road, without needing to do more than turn her guns upon that loyal City. I think Cumbernald actually whooped and punched the air. That was most people’s reaction. It was a fine day to be British.
More fine days were to follow. There was easy victory in Ireland. The commemorative Victory Tower went up and up in London, and word was that the contract had been let even before the troops set out, such was the confidence that now pervaded Greater Britain. I, meanwhile, shivered pleasurably at Christmas to the soaring music of the choir at Kings. And I worked hard. For these new and nervous students who entered my rooms clutching essays and reading lists I became what I had always been, which was a teacher. I did my best and, amazingly, my best was often enough. There were gatherings, panelled rooms, mulled wine in winter, mint teas and Japanese wallpapers in the spring, cool soft air off the river on long walks alone. Our forces aided Franco’s victory over the communists in Spain, and we resigned from the League of Nations. The Cyprus Adventure came and went. Britain re-took Rhodesia. I bought myself an expensive new gramophone.
The rest of the world found it easier to treat John Arthur as a kind of Fascist straight-man to the comical Mussolini. France, Germany and the Lowlands were too busy forming themselves into a Free Trade Community whilst the USA under Roosevelt, when it wasn’t worrying about the threat in the Far East from a resurgent Japan, remained doggedly isolationist. In the Middle East, Britain’s canny re-alignment of Egypt’s King Farouk in the Modernist mould, and his recent conquest of Palestine with the help of British military advisors, were seen as no more than the par for the course in that troubled region. After all, Britain was behaving no more aggressively than she had throughout most of modern history. Even now that the whole of Kent has been turned into a military camp as a precaution against some imagined Franco-German threat, the world still remains determined to think the best of us.
Meanwhile, and despite all the puzzlements and disappointments, I grew to love Oxford almost as much in reality as much as the dream. Eights Week. The Encænia Procession. Midnight chimes. The rainy climate. The bulldogs in their bowler hats checking college gardens for inebriate sleepers. The Roofs And Towers Climbing Society.
History went on. The Jews were re-located. Gypsies and tramps were forcibly housed. Homosexuals were invited to come forward for treatment. Of course, I was a panicked for a while by that—but by then I had my acquaintance, our discreet messages on the cubicle wall at the Gents beside Christ Church Meadow, our casual buggerings when he’d do it to me first and then afterwards I’d sometimes do it to him—my soft and easy life. I had my desk, my work, my bed. I had my books, the tea rooms, the gables, the cupolas, the stares of the Magdalene deer, the chestnuts in flower, music from the windows of buildings turned ghostly in the sunlight, young voices in the crystalline dusk and the scent of ancient earth from the quads.
I was dazed. I was dazzled. Without even trying, I had learned how to forget.