Then came the march past, the thousands of soldiers, many old now, marching proudly along in lines as the band played popular tunes from the Great War, each contingent laying a wreath. As always
David and his family looked out for Sarah’s father, but they didn’t see him. The steps of the Cenotaph were still splotched with red, Rommel’s swastika prominent among the
wreaths. David wondered who the demonstrators had been. One of the independent pacifist groups perhaps; the Resistance would have shot Rommel, would have shot a lot of the Nazis stationed in
Britain, but for the fear of reprisals. Poor devils, whoever they were; they would be getting a beating in a Special Branch Interrogation Centre now, or perhaps even in the basement of Senate
House, the German embassy. As it had been an attack on Rommel, the British police might have handed the demonstrators over. He felt powerless. He hadn’t even contradicted Steve. But he had to
keep his cover intact, never step out of line, try to play the model civil servant. All the more because of Sarah’s family’s past. David felt a stab of unreasonable irritation against
his wife.
His eyes were drawn back to the veterans. An old man of about sixty, his face stern and defiant, was marching past, his chest thrust out proudly. On one side of his coat was pinned a row of
medals but on the other was sewn a large, bright yellow Star of David. Jews knew to stay out of the limelight now, not to attract attention, but the old man had defied common sense to go on the
march wearing a prominent star, although he could have got away with the little Star of David lapel badge all Jews had to wear now, very British and discreet.
Someone in the crowd shouted out ‘Kike!’ The old man did not flinch but David did, anger coursing through him. He knew that under the law he too should have worn a yellow badge, and
should not be working in government service, an employment forbidden to Jews. But David’s father, twelve thousand miles away, was the only other person who knew his mother had been that rare
thing, an Irish Jew. And half a Jew was a Jew in Britain now; the penalty for concealing your identity was indefinite detention. In the 1941 census, when people were asked for the first time to
state their religion, he had declared himself a Catholic. He had done the same thing whenever renewing his identity card, and the same again in the 1951 census, which this time also asked about
Jewish parents or grandparents. But however often David pushed it all to the back of his mind, sometimes, in the night, he woke up terrified.
The rest of the ceremony went ahead without interruption, and afterwards they met up with Jim, Sarah’s father, and went back to David and Sarah’s mock-Tudor semi in
Kenton, where Sarah would cook dinner for them all. Jim had known nothing about the paint-throwing until his family told him, though he had noticed the red stain on the Cenotaph steps. He said
almost nothing about it on the journey back, and neither did Sarah or David, though Irene and especially Steve were full of outraged indignation. When they got back to the house Steve suggested
they watch the news, see what it said about the attack.
David switched on the television, rearranging the chairs to face it. He didn’t like the way that in most houses now the furniture was arranged around the set; over the last decade,
ownership of what some still called the idiot-box had spread to half the population; having a television was a mark of the sharp dividing line between rich and poor. It was coming to take over
national life. It wasn’t quite time for the news; a children’s serial was on, a dramatization of some Bulldog Drummond adventure story, featuring Imperial heroes and treacherous
natives. Sarah brought them tea and David passed round the cigarette-box. He glanced at Jim. Despite his conversion to pacifism after the Great War, his father-in-law always took part in the
Remembrance Day parade; however much he loathed war, he honoured his old comrades. David wondered what he thought of the paint-throwing, but Jim’s prosthetic mask was turned towards him. It
was a good prosthesis, close-fitting and flesh-coloured; there were even artificial eyelashes on the flat painted eye. Sarah confessed once that when she was small the crude mask he wore then, made
from a thin sheet of metal, had frightened her and when he sat her in his lap on one occasion she’d burst into tears and Irene had to take her away. Her mother had called her a nasty, selfish
girl but Irene, four years older, had held her and said, ‘You mustn’t mind it. It’s not Daddy’s fault.’
The news came on. They watched the young Queen paying her respects, and listened to Dimbleby’s sonorous, respectful reporting. But the BBC did not show the incident with Rommel; they
simply passed from the Dominion representatives’ wreath-laying to Ambassador Kennedy’s. There was a flicker on the screen that you wouldn’t notice unless you were looking for it,
and no break in the commentary – the BBC technicians must have done a re-recording later.
‘Nothing,’ Irene said.
‘They must have decided not to report it.’ Sarah had come in from the kitchen to watch, flushed from cooking.
‘Makes you wonder what else they don’t report,’ Jim said quietly.
Steve turned to him. He was wearing one of his glaringly bright sweaters, his plump stomach straining it unattractively. ‘They don’t want people to be upset,’ he said.
‘Seeing something like that happen on Remembrance Day.’
‘People should know, though,’ Irene said fiercely. ‘They should see what these despicable terrorists do. In front of the Queen, too, poor girl! No wonder she’s so seldom
seen in public. It’s a disgrace!’
David spoke up then, before he could stop himself. ‘It’s what happens when people aren’t allowed to protest against their masters.’
Steve turned on him. He was still angry, looking for a scrap. ‘You mean the Germans, I suppose.’
David shrugged non-committally, though he would have liked to knock every tooth out of Steve’s head. His brother-in-law continued. ‘The Germans are our partners, and jolly lucky for
us they are, too.’
‘Lucky for those who make money trading with them,’ David snapped.
‘What the devil’s that supposed to mean? Is that a dig at my business in the Anglo-German Fellowship?’
David glowered at him. ‘If the cap fits.’
‘You’d rather have the Resistance people in charge, I suppose? Churchill – if the old warmonger’s even still alive – and the bunch of Communists he’s got
himself in with. Murdering soldiers, blowing people up – like that little girl who stepped on one of their mines in Yorkshire last week.’ He was beginning to get red in the face.
‘Please,’ Sarah said sharply. ‘Don’t start an argument.’ She exchanged a look with Irene.
‘All right.’ Steve backed down. ‘I don’t want to spoil the day any more than those swine have spoiled it already. So much for civil servants being impartial,’ he
added sarcastically.
‘What was that, Steve?’ David asked sharply.
‘Nothing.’ Steve raised his hands, palms up. ‘Pax.’
‘Rommel,’ Jim said, sadly. ‘He was a soldier in the Great War, like me. If only Remembrance Day could be less military. Then people mightn’t feel the need to protest.
There’s rumours Hitler’s very ill,’ he added. ‘He never broadcasts these days. And with the Democrats back in America, maybe changes will come.’ He smiled at his wife.
‘I always said they would, if we waited long enough.’
‘I’m sure they’d have told us if Herr Hitler was ill,’ Steve said dismissively. David glanced at Sarah, but said nothing.
Afterwards, when the rest of the family had driven off in Steve’s new Morris Minor, David and Sarah argued. ‘Why must you get into fights with him, in front of
everyone?’ Sarah asked. She looked exhausted; she had been waiting on the family all afternoon, her hair was limp now, her voice ragged. ‘In front of Daddy, today of all days.’
She hesitated, then continued bitterly, ‘You were the one who told me to stay out of politics years ago, said it was safer to keep quiet.’
‘I know. I’m sorry. But Steve can’t keep his damn trap shut. Today it was just – too much.’
‘How do you think these rows make Irene and me feel?’
‘You don’t like him any more than I do.’
‘We have to put up with him. For the family.’
‘Yes, and go visit him, look at that picture on the mantelpiece of him and his business pals with Speer, see his Mosley books and
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
on the
bookshelf,’ David said heavily. ‘I don’t know why he doesn’t join the Blackshirts and have done with it. But then he’d have to exercise, lose some of that
fat.’
Unexpectedly, Sarah shouted. ‘Haven’t we been through enough? Haven’t we?’ She stormed out of the lounge; David heard her go into the kitchen, and the door banged shut.
He got up and began gathering the dirty plates and cutlery onto the trolley. He wheeled it into the little hall. As he passed the staircase he could not help looking up, to the torn wallpaper at
the top and bottom of the stairs, where the little gates had stood. He and Sarah had talked, since Charlie died, about getting new wallpaper. But like so much else, they had never got round to it.
He would go to her in a minute, apologize, try to close the evergrowing gap a little. Though he knew it could not really be closed, not with the secrets he had to keep.
I
T HAD BEGUN TWO YEARS BEFORE
, with the results of the 1950 election, a few months after Charlie’s death. Since the Hungarian banking crash of
1948, caused by the drain on Europe’s economies from the endless German war in Russia, the economic and political news had been getting steadily worse. There were strikes and demonstrations
in northern England and Scotland, India was in a seemingly permanent fervour of revolt, increasing numbers of arrests were being made under the never-repealed security legislation of 1939. People
who had quietly assented to the 1940 Peace Treaty were starting to become angry, saying it was time Britain stood up to Germany a bit more and that after ten years it was time for a change of
government, time to give Churchill and Attlee’s United Democrat Party a chance. Despite the diet of pro-government propaganda from newspapers and the BBC, Beaverbrook was unpopular and there
were rumours that the UDP might make big gains.
When the results were declared, though, the party had lost most of their hundred seats in Parliament, overtaken by British Union, Mosley’s Fascist party, which rose from thirty seats to a
hundred and four, and joined Beaverbrook’s coalition of Treaty Conservative and Labour. Churchill had, finally, led his followers out of the Commons after a speech denouncing a ‘rigged
election to return a gangster Parliament’. So people whispered round the Whitehall corridors, although the newspapers and television reported that they had stormed out in a fit of pique.
Shortly after, the United Democrats had been accused of fomenting political strikes and declared illegal. They went underground and a new name, ‘Resistance’ after the French movement,
began to appear on walls.
The new government swiftly moved even closer to Germany. German Jewish refugees had been returned under the Berlin Treaty in 1940 but despite growing anti-Semitism, restrictions on British Jews
had been limited. Now the government claimed the Jews were implacable enemies of Britain’s great ally, and elements of the German Nuremberg laws were to be brought in. David would wake
sweating in the night at the thought of what might happen if his secret were found out. Everyone knew that Germany had been lobbying for years to have Britain’s Jews, the last free Jews in
Europe along with the remaining French ones, deported to the East. Perhaps now it would happen. David knew it was more important than ever to tell nobody, especially not Sarah, about his
mother.
In the months that followed, though, David had begun to speak out, to Sarah and trusted friends, about other things: the continuing recession, the growing recruitment of ‘Biff-boys’
from Mosley’s Fascists as Special Branch Auxiliary Police to deal with unrest and strikes, the promise by Churchill to set Britain ablaze with ‘sabotage and resistance’. Churchill
and his people were denied radio or television time, of course, but there was talk of clandestine gramophone records circulated secretly, where he spoke of never surrendering, of the ‘dark
tyranny that had descended over Europe’. Something had snapped inside David after the election; perhaps even before, when Charlie died.
He had talked most of all to his oldest friend, Geoff Drax. Geoff had been with him at Oxford, and joined the Colonial Service at the same time as David joined the Dominions Office. Geoff had
served in East Africa for six years, returning to work as a London desk officer in 1948. He had spoken even then of his shock at seeing at first hand how Britain had turned into a drab, conformist
German satellite state.
The years in Africa had changed Geoff. Under the thatch of fair hair his thin, bony face had new lines, and his mouth was pursed and unhappy. He had always had a sardonic sense of humour but now
he was bitter, firing out caustic remarks, accompanied by a little barking laugh. He had spoken of an unhappy love affair in Kenya with a married woman. He had told David he hadn’t managed to
get over it, and envied his friend’s settled life with Sarah and Charlie. He didn’t like his desk work in the big new Colonial Office building at Church House, and when they met for
lunch David thought how Geoff always looked uncomfortable in his black coat and pinstripe trousers, as though he should still be in baggy shorts and a pith helmet.
Geoff lived in Pinner, near David’s Kenton home, and they would often meet for a swim and tennis on Saturday mornings. Afterwards they would sit in a corner of the tennis club bar, talking
politics – quietly, for few in the club would have sympathized.
One Saturday in the summer of 1950, Geoff had been telling David about events in Kenya. ‘A hundred and fifty thousand settlers they’ve got there now,’ he said with quiet
intensity. ‘It’s bloody chaos. Unemployed families from Durham and Sheffield brought over with promises of free farms and unlimited native labour. They give them a three-month course in
farming, then hand them a thousand acres of bush. They wouldn’t have a clue if it weren’t for the blacks. But it’s the blacks’ land. There’s real trouble starting
among the Kikuyu. Blood’s going to get spilt. Some of these builders of this proposed new East African Dominion are going to wish they’d never left home.’ He gave one of his angry
barks of laughter.