Dominion

Geoff asked, ‘Are your paintings of your home town?’

‘Mostly of Bratislava, the Slovak capital, where I lived before I came here.’

‘And the battle scenes?’ David asked.

‘Slovakia sent soldiers into Russia with the Germans when Hitler invaded. We were the only Slav country to join the invasion. Only a token force.’ She hesitated, then added, ‘My brother was with them on the Caucasus front. He was badly wounded. Later he died.’

‘I’m sorry,’ David said.

‘It was ironic, because in the thirties he was a Communist. He went to Russia for a while, full of hope, but came back disillusioned. Russia was the graveyard of his hopes and then it took his life, too.’

‘And then you came to England?’

‘A few years later, yes. And here I am,’ she added, a note of finality in her voice.

Beside the motorway they passed one of the agricultural settlements for the unemployed. The government’s propaganda preached that the countryside represented the British soul, that the people needed to be brought back in touch with it. David saw shabby prefabricated huts set in mud, plots all around marked off with chicken wire and sagging little fences, like a city allotment on a larger scale.

‘Recreating our glorious medieval past,’ Geoff said with angry sarcasm.

People were working there, bent double, planting spindly trees. A tired-looking woman in coat and headscarf carried a muddy toddler between the shacks.

‘It is the same all over Europe,’ Natalia said. ‘Countryside worship. The heart of the nationalist dream. Look at it.’

Geoff suggested they put the radio on, and for a little while they listened to Two-Way Family Favourites, records requested by soldiers’ families for their loved ones serving in India and Aden, Malaya and Africa. After a request from a mother for her boy in Kenya, Geoff asked Natalia to turn it off, the programme was depressing him.

The place where they stopped for lunch was an old coaching-house, but the interior had been modernized, all black-painted oak beams and whitewashed walls gleaming with horse-brasses, a shield and crossed swords nailed above the fireplace. There was a television set at one end of the bar, showing a display of morris dancing. During the week it would have been full of travelling salesmen but today there were only a few elderly people at the tables, a couple of retired military types propping up the bar. David went to get drinks and order lunch.

‘The problem with the British working man,’ one of the old men at the bar was saying, ‘is that frankly he just doesn’t like work, he’s too bloody lazy.’ He jabbed a finger at his friend. ‘The answer’s to put them under military discipline, give the slackers a damn good flogging in front of the others. And shoot some more of these demonstrating trade unionists, like they did in Bradford in the summer.’

‘I don’t know if they’ll go in for public floggings, Ralph. Beaverbrook’s still a bit soft for that.’

‘Mosley’s calling the shots now. He’ll get the shirkers working properly, then our industry can maybe match the Germans and the bloody Yanks.’ He laughed. ‘Same again?’

As he walked back to the table David remembered that talk of shooting trade unionists had once been a joke among some of his father’s lawyer friends; but now it was actually being done and people like those old barflies were happy about it. They had taken a table by the window with a view out over brown frosty fields. Geoff had lit his pipe. He said with a self-deprecating bark of laughter, ‘I’ve been talking about life out in Kenya again. Boring poor Natalia.’

She smiled at Geoff; David felt an odd pang of jealousy. ‘It is not boring,’ she said. ‘It sounds like another world, Africa. Like the Garden of Eden.’

‘It’s hot and full of disease.’

‘The White Man’s grave.’

‘That’s West Africa. But it’s hard work. Out where I was in the tribal areas there were just a few of us running an area half the size of Wales. Well, the chiefs ran it really, but they had to defer to us. We pushed a road through while I was there. I thought it was a good thing, would help them develop some commerce, but it was just used to ferry black labour to the white settler areas.’ His mouth set hard.

Natalia said, ‘It must have been very lonely if you were the only white man.’

‘Yes, their way of life’s so different. They don’t really trust us. Can’t blame them, I suppose, we just arrived and took things over.’ He gave his bitter laugh. ‘Sometimes among them I felt like a man stumbling about in the dark with a dim lantern.’

David said, ‘We used to have black visitors at the Dominions Office sometimes. I remember not long after I started, I had to meet a South African student who was stranded here without any money, and didn’t want to go home. I thought I had liberal ideas about race but when he came in all I could do was sit and stare at him because he looked so different. He must’ve thought I was mad. Spoke to me in perfect Oxford English.’ He shook his head. ‘Of course, Africans and Indians aren’t allowed to come to England to study any more.’

Geoff pulled at his pipe. ‘If I was honest I was always happy to see other white officers, veterinarians and forestry people. And I’d go down to Nairobi often.’ A shadow crossed his face and he fell silent. David thought, he still hasn’t got over that woman he knew out there, though it was years ago. It was a strange sort of fidelity, admirable but somehow frightening. He wondered if Natalia knew Geoff’s story. She probably did, she probably knew everything about them.

She met his eye briefly, then glanced out of the window. ‘Winter has come early this year. It reminds me of my country.’ She smiled sadly, in her self-contained way.

The men at the bar were becoming drunk and loud-voiced. ‘During the Great War, if a man wouldn’t go over the top and fight you gave him a quick court-martial, then took him out and shot him. I’ve seen it done. Why should it be any different with people who won’t bloody work?’ David remembered something Sarah had said once, that the Great War had made mass slaughter ordinary, that was why Stalin and Hitler could commit murder on a scale inconceivable before 1914. It was why these old men could talk like Soviet Commissars or SS men.

The barman had turned the television up. Everyone looked round. The background of a turning globe, the BBC initials underneath, was showing; they heard the announcer say, ‘. . . special broadcast from the Minister for India, the Right Honourable Enoch Powell MP.’ Powell’s ascetic face with the black moustache and fierce, passionate eyes appeared. Everyone was looking. He began to speak, in his ringing voice with its Birmingham accent; unsmiling – Powell never smiled. ‘I wish to broadcast to you today about our most important Imperial possession, India. You will all be aware of the seditious rebellion and terrorism there. It has even infected native regiments within the Indian army. But I want to tell you today that we shall not, will never, give in. We know that the majority of the Indian people support us; the ordinary people to whom we have brought railways and irrigation and a measure of prosperity, the rulers of the princely states, our loyal allies. The Muslim League, who fear Hindu domination. For two hundred years we have governed India, firmly and fairly. Ruling it is our destiny.’

He leaned forward, those blazing eyes on the screen seeming to fix on each of them individually. ‘That is why, with the agreement of our German allies, we are recruiting a hundred thousand soldiers to strengthen our presence there. Firm and quiet rule will soon descend on India once more. We shall not withdraw, or compromise, ever. A nation that showed such weakness would be heaping up its own funeral pyre. So be reassured, British rule and British authority in India will be established ever more firmly.’

The old men at the bar cheered and clapped.

‘We knew something like that was coming,’ Geoff muttered.

Natalia said, ‘India. Churchill was determined to hold on to it too, wasn’t he, before the war?’

‘He knows he’s lost that one,’ Geoff said.

A waitress came with shepherd’s pie, stodgy but filling. Afterwards Natalia said she would like to stretch her legs, just for ten minutes, as there was still a long way to go. Geoff said it was too cold for him and he would wait in the car. There was nowhere to walk except round the edge of the almost-empty car park behind the roadhouse so David and Natalia began to circle it, going slowly, smoking. She kept one hand in her pocket. David thought, perhaps her gun is in there. Jackson had called her a crack shot. Who had she shot? he wondered. Across the fields he saw a village. Like others they had passed recently it was built of red brick; they were well into the Midlands now.

Natalia said to him, ‘Soon you will see your friend Frank. He sounds like a man with many difficulties.’ Her expression was sympathetic.