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.
Chapter Two
IT 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.