Dominion (2 page)

‘People wanting to get a first look at the Queen, I imagine.’

‘I hope we manage to find Steve and Irene all right,’ Betty said, worrying again.

‘I told them to meet us by the ticket booths at Victoria,’ Sarah told her. ‘They’ll be there, dear, don’t worry.’

David looked out of the window. He was not looking forward to spending the afternoon with his wife’s sister and her husband. Irene was good-natured enough, although she was full of silly
ideas and never stopped talking, but David loathed Steve, with his mixture of oily charm and arrogance, his Blackshirt politics. David would have to try to keep his lip buttoned as usual.

The train ground to a jolting halt, just before the mouth of a tunnel. There was a hiss somewhere as brakes engaged. ‘Not today,’ someone said. ‘These delays are getting worse.
It’s a disgrace.’ Outside, David saw, the track looked down on rows of back-to-back houses of soot-stained London brick. Grey smoke rose from chimneys, washing was hanging out to dry in
the backyards. The streets were empty. A grocer’s window just below them had a prominent sign in the window,
Food Stamps Taken Here.
There was a sudden jolt and the train moved into
the tunnel, only to judder to a halt again a few moments later. David saw his own face reflected back from the dark window, his head framed by his bulky dark coat with its wide lapels. A bowler hat
hid his short black hair, a few unruly curls just visible. His unlined, regular features made him look younger than thirty-five; deceptively unmarked. He suddenly recalled a childhood memory, his
mother’s constant refrain to women visitors, ‘Isn’t he a good-looking boy, couldn’t you just eat him?’ Delivered in her sharp Dublin brogue, it had made him squirm
with embarrassment. Another memory came unbidden, of when he was seventeen and had won the inter-schools Diving Cup. He remembered standing on the high board, a sea of faces far below, the board
trembling slightly beneath his feet. Two steps forward and then the dive, down into the great expanse of still water, the moment of fear and then the exhilaration of striking out into silence.

Steve and Irene were waiting at Victoria. Irene, Sarah’s older sister, was also tall and blonde but with a little dimpled chin like her mother’s. Her black coat had
a thick brown fur collar. Steve was good-looking in a raffish way, with a thin black moustache that made him look like a poor man’s Errol Flynn. He wore a black fedora on his thickly
brilliantined head – David could smell the chemical tang as he shook his brother-in-law’s hand.

‘How’s the Civil Service, old man?’ Steve asked.

‘Surviving.’ David smiled.

‘Still keeping watch over the Empire?’

‘Something like that. How are the boys?’

‘Grand. Getting bigger and noisier every week. We might bring them next year, they’re getting old enough.’ David saw a shadow pass across Sarah’s face and knew she was
remembering their own dead son.

‘We ought to hurry, get the tube to Westminster,’ Irene said. ‘Look at all these people.’

They joined the throng heading for the escalator. As the crowd pressed together their pace slowed to a silent shuffle, reminding David for a moment of his time as a soldier, shuffling with the
rest of the weary troops onto the ships evacuating British forces from Norway, back in 1940.

They turned into Whitehall. David’s office was just behind the Cenotaph; men walking past would still remove their hats as they passed it, respectfully and
unselfconsciously, though fewer and fewer with each passing year – thirty-four now since the Great War ended. The sky was grey-white, the air cold. People’s breath steamed before them
as they jostled – quietly and politely – for places behind the low metal barriers opposite the tall white rectangle of the Cenotaph, a line of policemen in heavy coats in front. Some
were ordinary constables in their helmets, but many were Special Branch Auxiliaries in their flat peaked caps and slimmer blue uniforms. When they were first created in the 1940s, to deal with
growing civil unrest, David’s father had said the Auxiliaries reminded him of the Black and Tans, the violent trench veterans recruited by Lloyd George to augment the police during the Irish
Independence War. All were armed.

The ceremony had changed in the last few years; serving personnel no longer stood on parade around the Cenotaph, blocking the public view, and wooden boards had been laid on
blocks behind the barriers to give people a better vantage point. It was part of what Prime Minister Beaverbrook called ‘demystifying the thing’.

The family managed to get a good place opposite Downing Street and the big Victorian building which housed the Dominions Office where David worked. Beyond the barriers, forming three sides of a
hollow square around the Cenotaph, the military and religious leaders had already taken their places. The soldiers were in full dress uniform, Archbishop Headlam, head of the section of the
Anglican Church that had not split away in opposition to his compromises with the regime, in gorgeous green-and-gold vestments. Beside them stood the politicians and ambassadors, each holding a
wreath. David looked them over; there was Prime Minister Beaverbrook with his wizened little monkey face, the wide fleshy mouth downturned in an expression of sorrow. For forty years, since he
first came to England from Canada with business scandals hanging over him, Beaverbrook had combined building a newspaper empire with manoeuvring in politics, pushing his causes of free enterprise,
the Empire, and appeasement on the public and politicians. He was trusted by few, elected by none, and after the death of his immediate predecessor, Lloyd George, in 1945, the coalition had made
him Prime Minister.

Lord Halifax, the Prime Minister who had surrendered after France fell, stood beside Beaverbrook, overtopping him by a foot. Halifax was bald now, his cadaverous face an ashen shadow beneath his
hat, deep-set eyes staring over the crowd with a curious blankness. Beside him stood Beaverbrook’s coalition colleagues: Home Secretary Oswald Mosley, tall and ramrod-straight, India
Secretary Enoch Powell, only forty but seeming far older, black-moustached and darkly saturnine, Viscount Swinton, the Dominions Office Secretary and David’s own minister, tall and
aristocratic, Foreign Secretary Rab Butler with his pouched froggy face, and the Coalition Labour leader Ben Greene, one of the few Labour figures who had admired the Nazis in the 1930s. When
Labour split in 1940 Herbert Morrison had led the Pro-Treaty minority that went into coalition with Halifax; he was one of those politicians for whom ambition was all-consuming. But he had resigned
in 1943; the degree of British support for Germany had become too much for him, as it had for some other politicians such as the Conservative Sam Hoare; all had retreated into private life with
peerages.

Also standing in their dark coats were representatives of the Dominions; David recognized some of the High Commissioners from work, like the thickset, frowning Vorster of South Africa. Then
behind them came ambassadors representing the other nations who had fought in the Great War: Germany’s Rommel, Mussolini’s son-in-law Ciano, the ambassadors of France and Japan, Joe
Kennedy from America. Russia, though, had no representative; Britain, as Germany’s ally, was still formally at war with the Soviet Union though she had no troops to spare for that giant
meat-grinder, the German–Soviet war, which had gone on, over a 1,200-mile front, for eleven years now.

A little way off a group of men stood round an outside-broadcast camera, an enormous squat thing trailing thick wires,
BBC
emblazoned on the side. Beside it the heavy form of Richard
Dimbleby could be seen speaking into a microphone, though he was too far off for David to hear anything.

Sarah shivered, rubbing her gloved hands together. ‘Golly, it’s cold. Poor Dad will feel it standing around waiting for the march past to start.’ She looked at the Cenotaph,
the bare white memorial. ‘God, it’s all so sad.’

‘At least we know we’ll never go to war with Germany again,’ Irene said.

‘Look, there she is.’ Betty spoke in tones of hushed reverence.

The Queen had come out of the Home Office. Accompanied by the Queen Mother and her grandmother, old Queen Mary, equerries carrying their wreaths, she took her place in front of the Archbishop.
Her pretty young face was ill suited to her black clothes. This was one of her few public appearances since her father’s death early in the year. David thought she looked tired and afraid.
Her expression reminded him of the late King’s in 1940, when George VI rode down Whitehall in an open carriage beside Adolf Hitler, on the Führer’s state visit after the Berlin
Peace Treaty. David, still convalescing from frostbite caught in Norway, had watched the ceremony on the new television his father had bought, one of the first in the street, when the BBC resumed
broadcasting. Hitler had looked in seventh heaven, beaming, flushed and rosy-cheeked, his dream of an alliance with the Aryan British at last fulfilled. He smiled and waved at the silent crowd, but
the King had sat expressionless, only raising a hand occasionally, his body angled away from Hitler’s. Afterwards David’s father had said ‘enough’, that was it, he was off
to live with his brother in New Zealand, and David would come too if he knew what was good for him, never mind his Civil Service job. Thank God, he added feelingly, David’s mother
hadn’t lived to see this.

Sarah was looking at the Queen. ‘Poor woman,’ she said.

David glanced over. He said very quietly, ‘She shouldn’t have let them make her their puppet.’

‘What alternative did she have?’

David didn’t answer.

People in the crowd glanced at their watches, then they all fell silent, removing hats and caps as, across Westminster, Big Ben boomed out eleven times. Then, shockingly loud in the still air,
came the sound of a big gun firing, marking the moment the guns had stopped in 1918. Everyone bowed their heads for the two minutes’ silence, remembering the terrible costs of Britain’s
victory in the Great War, or perhaps, like David, those of her defeat in 1940. Two minutes later the field-gun on Horse Guards Parade fired again, ending the silence. A bugler sounded the notes of
the last post, indescribably haunting and sad. The crowd listened, bareheaded in the winter cold, the only sound an occasional stifled cough. Every time he attended the ceremony David wondered that
nobody in the crowd ever burst out crying, or, remembering the recent past, fell shrieking to the ground.

The last note died away. Then, to the sound of the ‘Funeral March’ played by the band of the Brigade of Guards, the young Queen bore a wreath of poppies that looked too big for her
to carry, laid it down on the Cenotaph, and stood with bowed head. She walked slowly back to her place and the Queen Mother followed. ‘So young to be a widow,’ Sarah said.

‘Yes.’ David had noticed a faint smoky tang in the air and, looking up Whitehall for a moment, saw a slight haze. There would be fog tonight.

The rest of the Royal Family laid their wreaths, followed by the military leaders, the Prime Minister and politicians, and representatives of the Empire governments. The base of the stark,
simple monument was now carpeted in the dark green wreaths with their red poppies. Then Germany’s ambassador, Erwin Rommel, one of the victors of the 1940 campaign in France, stepped forward,
trim and military, Iron Cross pinned to his breast, his handsome face stern and sad. The wreath he bore was enormous, larger even than the Queen’s. In the centre, on a white background, was a
swastika. He laid the wreath and stood, head bowed, for a long moment before turning away. Behind him Joseph Kennedy, the veteran American ambassador, waited. It was his turn next.

Then, from behind David, came a sudden shouting. ‘End Nazi control! Democracy now! Up the Resistance!’ Something sailed over the heads of the crowd and crashed at Rommel’s
feet. Sarah gasped. Irene and some of the other women in the crowd screamed. The steps of the Cenotaph and the bottom of Rommel’s coat were instantly streaked with red and for a moment David
thought it was blood, that someone had thrown a bomb, but then he saw a paint-pot rattle down the steps onto the pavement. Rommel did not flinch, just stood where he was. Ambassador Kennedy,
though, had jumped back in panic. Policemen were reaching for truncheons and pistols. A group of soldiers, rifles at the ready, stepped forward. David saw the Royal Family being hurried away.

‘Nazis out!’ someone called from the crowd. ‘We want Churchill!’ Policemen were vaulting the barriers now. A couple of men in the crowd had also produced guns and looked
fiercely around: Special Branch undercover men. David pulled Sarah to him. The crowd parted to let the police through, and he glimpsed a struggle off to his right. He saw a baton raised, heard
someone call out, ‘Get the bastards!’ encouragingly to the police.

Sarah said, ‘Oh God, what are they doing?’

‘I don’t know.’ Irene was holding Betty, the old woman weeping, while Steve was staring at the melee with a face like thunder. The whole crowd was talking now, a susurrating
murmur from which the occasional shout could be heard. ‘Bloody Communists, beat their heads in!’ ‘They’re right, get the Germans out!’

A British general, a thin man with a sunburned face and grey moustache, climbed the steps of the Cenotaph, carrying a megaphone, picking his way through the wreaths, and called for order from
the crowd.

‘Did they get them?’ Sarah asked David. ‘I couldn’t see.’

‘Yes. I think there were just a few.’

‘It’s bloody treason!’ Steve said. ‘I hope they hang the buggers!’

The ceremony continued with the rest of the wreath-laying and then a short service led by Archbishop Headlam. He spoke a prayer, the microphone giving his voice an odd, tinny
echo.

‘O Lord, look down on us as we remember the brave men who have died fighting for Britain. We remember the legions who fell between 1914 and 1918, that great and tragic conflict which
still marks us all, here and across all Europe. Lord, remember the pain of those gathered here today who have lost loved ones. Comfort them, comfort them.’