“Amnesties are through there in the Banner Hall,” she said.
He passed through double doors into a hall about the size of a gymnasium, with a line of desks across the top end and a lot of glory troopers milling or loafing about on benches. These fellows were in poor condition, thin with haggard faces, their uniforms ill-fitting and poorly kept. They looked like released Night and Fog, which would explain the reference to amnesties. The hall reminded Lawrence of the recruitment centre of General Wardian where his career had begun a decade ago; a blank teenager had signed on the dotted line without a clue as to the gates of hell opening before him. The system here was the same: you took a numbered ticket and waited. About half an hour passed before his number got called out and he approached a fat sergeant, who stretched an arm across his desk to take the ticket. He frowned at the cover letter and consulted a list of names. Against the name Lawrence Morton Aldingford was a red asterisk.
“Okay, you go upstairs and report to the cabinet office of the president.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“Very sure, deary.”
Fear rippled throughout Lawrence as he ascended concrete steps to the upper floor. Everyone else up here—both men and women—wore the National Party suit and trousers. A few glanced up and down at his plus fours and crottle pullover, obviously taking him for some kind of bumpkin.
“Can I help you?” one young lady asked him, without ceasing her clacking away on a typewriter.
“I’m looking for Sarah-Kelly Newman.”
“Down that corridor, second door on the right, that’s the cabinet office of the president.”
The corridor ran along the back of the building. Its windows looked down into a yard of one of the industrial complexes, a place of mud, logs and heaps of coal. He turned into the second doorway and stopped, having to squint into the low sun blazing through the windows. It was a large room divided into sections by banks of filing cabinets. Because of the filing cabinets, Lawrence had to take a few paces in before he spotted Sarah-Kelly sitting at a desk with another man, rather a fine-featured and well-groomed fellow with good shoulders. The sight of her shot a bolt of shock through him—or was it the man with her that prompted this reaction? Sarah-Kelly was thinner and her face more serious than the young woman he had known until four and a half months ago. He thought about his own middle-aged face. They had both lived hard in the months since the summer.
It seemed so banal to just amble across the office to her desk. In doing so, sweat poured out of him into his shirt. He could feel the drips under his armpits and down the arch of his back.
“Hello lead statement manager,” he said.
Both she and the well-groomed chap jumped, annoyed by the interruption of what had obviously been an intimate discussion. Despite Lawrence’s having tried to prepare himself, the encounter with this new man of hers filled him with a nauseous resignation.
“What do you want?” Well-Groomed said, frowning. He straightened up slowly, face stiff as a mask and not friendly. Lawrence had noticed this type elsewhere in the building: implacable creatures of committee rooms, their eyes as remote as their empathy.
“God, I wouldn’t have recognised you,” Sarah-Kelly said. She flew back in her chair with shock. “Is that Byron’s pullover?”
“Who is this?” Well-Groomed turned to stare at her.
“It’s Lawrence—don’t you know your own brother?”
Now Well-Groomed got to his feet, eyes flickering over Lawrence’s face and shoulders. He gazed with as much unabashed shock as Lawrence felt himself.
“I am Donald, your elder brother.”
This was a different man from the Donald of memory. Or was it that memory slowly distorts according to the derision inspired by the face in question? No—this was a different man. Long gone was that tight smirk common to the servants of power. Behind the eyes glowed anger, the jaw was set with a rigid purpose. Lawrence grasped the hand and shook it warmly, smiling. Donald was reserved, frowning as if his younger brother were a species not normally encountered on the Island of Britain.
“Pull up that seat,” Donald said finally, pointing to a nearby chair.
Lawrence did so, tucking up awkwardly against the front of Sarah-Kelly’s desk to keep the passage clear. His mood rose to a tentative optimism. This was not the reception of a man to be arrested, even if it was less than enthusiastic.
“Do ultras ever come here?” he pressed.
“No,” Donald said. “They’ve gone to ground.”
This at least was good news.
“How did you two get involved in the National Party? Especially you, brother. Some kind of social cataclysm must have inverted your life.”
“To put it mildly,” Donald said.
“It’s not possible for a thinking person to stay out of the National Party,” Sarah-Kelly said. “We’re finally wrenching the new world into existence, even if at the moment we’re only holding the baby.”
“How big is this republic of yours?”
“The frontier is the Great Ring Drain at the moment,” Sarah-Kelly said. “Once we’ve consolidated within the London basin we’ll spread north through the industrial asylums up the Grand Union Canal. They’re sending enthusiastic gestures of friendship—they hate the dozing cat of sovereign rule just as much as we do.”
“What do you have for armed forces?”
“Most of the glory garrisons from the Central Enclave swore into to our National Army.”
Lawrence was highly sceptical about the “most”—not that it made much difference.
“The glory garrisons of the Central Enclave amounted to about fifteen thousand troops if I recall my advanced cadre courses correctly,” he said. “That’s less than the garrison of just one large sovereign land, and there are seven of them around the Great Ring Drain... If you don’t mind my saying so, I don’t think you’ve
