*
Sunday began as the night had been—alone. Donald had no idea where his wife Her Decency Lavinia was, although he was prepared to bet that Tom Krossington’s elder brother Marcus-John would be in her proximity. He only heard of her whereabouts after the fact via gossip. His daughters Marcia and Cynthia were similarly absent. They might be at Laxbury House, the town residence of Lavinia’s clan, or at Wilson House. They might be at a school friend’s house party. It was pointless to get angry about his family situation as there was nothing he could do about it. To seek divorce would be suicidal. All the sovereign clans would shun him as an impudent commoner: no clients = Nameless Gone.
He was not one normally given to brooding. On this morning, though, there was such a range of worries and indignations festering away. Tanya had so far failed to respond to his message. There was the bill unpaid by the Krossingtons. His wife had abandoned him. His life was just plain lousy. And running under it all was what he had seen since being shot down. The conditions on the Lands of Dasti-Jones and the public drains were simply deplorable. Suppose all the sovereign lands were the same? And what other atrocities went on behind the veil of sovereign glamour? How could he continue to serve a clientele that any decent person could only regard as criminally immoral?
In the Public Era, there had been outrageously intrusive busybodies called journalists who made a living snuffling out the secrets of the powerful. Donald had been taught they were one of the major causes of the collapse of the Public Era. Those in power had been so afraid of journalists that they dared not take the hard decisions required to save their society. In effect, the Public Era had watched itself being devoured by its own stupidity.
What would a journalist transported forward from the Public Era make of decent society? What would they snuffle out? Donald had seen but a glimpse behind the veil. It was not just the sovereigns who used slave labour, the ultramarines also did. What really went on in the Night and Fog?
He stared at the breakfast table for a long time, thinking.
*
That afternoon, he spent a couple of hours at his sports club, hoping to encounter Tanya. He had met her at the club about nine months previously. They shared the same condition of being trapped in a failed marriage, in her case to a colourless technocratic type. Alas, she did not appear, so he ended the afternoon with a boring walk in Hyde Park, during which he had to endure a certain amount of polite chatter with various solicitors, and fellow barristers from his inn of court. He also noticed around Hyde Park several plywood boxes filled with leaflets. The leaflets were being taken by passers-by, glanced at, screwed up and dropped in the next bin (which was overflowing with balls of paper). He discovered by taking one that the leaflets were issued by the National Party. Without reading it he scrunched it up and disposed of it too, doubtless for the same reason everyone else did—high-flown radical pie-in-the-sky was irrelevant to his life and its problems. Another oddity of the walk was Naclaski action by artillery on the forts around the Grande Enceinte. The guns thundered every ten or fifteen minutes, sometimes to the north, other times to the west. He could see no aircraft in the sky. He supposed there must be some kind of exercise and did his best to ignore the interruptions.
As his limousine halted outside the front gate of his house afterwards, a young blonde woman appeared out of nowhere. She must have been hiding in the lane. To his irritation, she rapped her knuckles on the glass a few inches from his nose.
“Are you Donald Aldingford? I need to speak to your father. Don’t turn me away! I’ve got important news about Lawrence.”
“Shall I get rid of her?” Okeke the chauffeur asked.
“Just a minute.”
Donald was still bemused by the brazenness of her approach. He unhitched the window belt and let the pane drop open. His first impressions were of a hefty working girl, possibly attractive in a hard-faced sort of way, very white complexioned, lacking makeup, scented by lemons and cinnamon. She wore a metal badge on the lapel of her waistcoat, an orange circle set in a dark green background, which he recognised as the motif of the National Party. Her blonde hair hung loose to her shoulders like a factory tart and… Yes, she really did wear trousers, or plus fours to be exact, quite tight-fitting. Her feet were shod with brown working man’s boots of excellent quality. Compared to the neat boots that Lavinia wore, they seemed like crates.
“Well! Quite the lady about town…”
“Are you Donald Aldingford or not?”
Her accent was obviously of an asylum, nasal with glottal stops, although it had been moderated by service as household staff.
Okeke got out of the driver’s cab and glared down at her. He was a big man, taller than Donald, with broad shoulders and frizzy black hair that made his large, dark head look even more formidable. She just lifted her chin and stood her ground. Perhaps it was that gesture of defiance that touched Donald’s sympathies? Her face was formed of fine, strong lines, the jaw set with determination. Perhaps that was the real reason he gave her a moment.
“Tell me your name,” he said.
“I’m Sarah-Kelly Newman.”
“How did you obtain clearance to enter this district?”
“I’m a student at Bloomsbury College.”
“What do you study?”
“Economics.”
Donald assumed she meant a household management course of the kind pursued by someone wishing to be a butler. He mentally shrugged. It was a dull Sunday afternoon. Why not hear what she had to say? She was not bad looking, he had to admit.
“I’ll want details
