If You Believe The Soldiers

by Alexander Cordell

Genres: Historical Fiction; Alternative History sci-fi; Dystopian

Synopsis

Britain in the mid-1980s is a country in the grip of a brutal fascist regime. There is rioting in the streets, cold-blood massacres by extremist political groups, attempted coups by liberating forces based on the continent. Mak Seaton is a senior civil servant whose strengths and weaknesses are bound up in the view that his duty is to the ruling faction. But when Seaton uncovers evidence of corruption at the highest levels of power, even his wealth and position cannot protect him from the Triumvirate.

Release date: August 7, 2014

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 224

Sample

I first met Hallie at Hatherley; even the names were gently coincidental. Ironically, it was Moira, my wife, who invited her to come there to meet me. In retrospect, I would rather have met her anywhere but at Hatherley, which I loved; it was an invasion of its sanctity.

Here, in the house of my parents and three generations before them, were the long summers of my childhood; fishing with my father on sultry summer afternoons, tennis, swimming, and mad chases over the Big Field after butterfly specimens—the straw-boatered adolescent on half-term from Eton.

Ancient, seemingly indestructible, Hatherley had survived the blood-bath of the First World War, when it lost many of its sons, and had defied the indiscriminate bombing of the Second. Its huge poplars still waved down the Woking lanes; its woods, guarded by the Mole River, were hazed with blue now that spring had come again. Here, it was claimed, was always heard the first cuckoo in the area of Woking; here the kingfishers flashed their colours down the little brook that sang to the mill. Hatherley, for me, was classically perfect—a house unchanged until the coming of Moira: perhaps it was a tribute to her strength of character that only she could have changed it.

The house with its eight acres was born in the manner of the period; my father increased the family fortune by big legal cases abroad. He read to me religious tracts every Sunday evening, shot grouse in Scotland, and possessed a mistress in London called Fifi. His Jewish conservatism contrasted with my mother’s liberal maternalism, which extended to the housemaids. With one of these, Dolly Barber, I was in love at the age of fourteen; she was two years older, and ought to have known better, according to my mother. She had black hair and wet, red lips, I recall, and dandruff on her shoulders. And I got her in the wood shed with the light out, and Cook stood on a brick and peeped through the window, and later reported us. Dolly was discharged and sent to her mother with a letter, while I sat in sweating terror, listening to my father’s footsteps mounting the stairs to my bedroom. But it was worth it. Next to Sharps’ Creamy Toffee, Dolly Barber was the sweetest thing that had then happened to me.

Originally, the Goldstein fortune (my father had changed our name to Seaton by deed poll) had been battered out of the Gold Coast, where finger-amputation was the standard punishment for leaving one’s place of work without permission, but Hatherley had managed to absorb such unpleasantries and none of this affected the liberalism I had learned from my mother. The house, for me, was an oasis of peace and love (including that of Dolly Barber) until the advent of Moira twenty years later and, more recently, the arrival of Hallie.

Marriage to Moira, the daughter of a Connemara gipsy landowner, had brought the sherry parties. With my mother dead and my father practising in Stuttgart, the place was invaded most weekends by blue-jowled men of tweed who barked over whisky about hunting and the Market, while their shagged-out, nasal wives planned the working-class vote through meals-on-wheels and a now politically conscious W.I. All this, plus fanatical bridge, was Moira’s world, and she swept through it with the gusto of the horsed beggar, receiving the approbation of the Woking executive set, the Master of the local hunt, and the tributes of one lover after another.

It was a far cry from the white breast of little Dolly Barber, who was my first real descent into the moral abyss, before I met Hallie.

Following Moira’s invitation, Hallie had come to Hatherley with Anthony Hargreaves, now head of Brander’s Moral Guidance Council—scarcely a diplomatic choice, I considered. She had been given a double bedroom with him by a mischievous Moira, and accepted it without protest. And, when I came in from London after a hard day at the Ministry, she was sitting at the lounge window where my mother used to sit, staring over the Big Field beyond the drive. I saw her the moment I stopped the car, and did not bother to garage it. For she was like a ghost of the past sitting there in her long, white dress, unmoving. The party was already going with a swing, I remember, with Marsella, Moira’s hunting friend, the centre of attraction; there were some beautiful women in the room, but only Hallie attracted me. I paused before her, holding my briefcase against my stomach, now an indiscretion.

“Good evening,” I said.

If she replied, I did not hear her.

It was her eyes. They drifted over me in slow assessment, seeming to dance with an inner merriment. There was a reason for this, of course, and I should have been aware of it. She was beautiful, but scarcely pretty. White lace at her throat enhanced the dark sheen of her flawless skin. Her hands and feet were tiny; she was a woman in miniature. Then Hargreaves, coming up, cried, “Ah, here you are, Mark …!” and was instantly pushed aside by Marsella, who cried, gin in hand:

“Oh, no you don’t, Tony, this is mine.” And she swung to the guests, shouting in her raucous voice, “Mark, this is Hallie Fitzgeralt, the five-foot model of the Courval Salon, where we now buy our clothes. Hallie, my pet, this is Mark Seaton, the new Director of Contracts in his Ministry and the master of beautiful Hatherley,” and she added, “Look out, Moira, she’s got him!”

She had.

Making love to Hallie Fitzgeralt, I discovered later, was like swimming in a jar of warm honey. But there was more to it than the intensity of my physical relief; she was like a balm—freedom from my immense and awful loneliness.

And if Moira, in the coming weeks, knew of our affair she made no visible sign. She could have had me back with the touch of her hand, but doubtless, with more lovers than she could at present conveniently handle, she was glad to be free of me.

For my part I never really loved Hallie. After the nightmares and the savage, sweating dreams that reached out from my youth, she was a woman in which to hide in the absence of my wife.

Later, with the guests gone, Moira said, “She’s a pretty wee thing that Hallie, ye know. She’s a Jewess, says Marsella—d’ you realise that?”

I paused at the lounge door on my way to bed. She was lying on a settee with her shoes off and a large gin, moving with accentuated indolence.

“No,” I answered. “I did not know.”

She said at nothing, “You could do worse than a return to the tribe of Israel, you know—God knows why you ever married out of it.”

“Good night,” I said.

It was forgivable—she was a little drunk, of course.

A group of lounging blackshirt guards were outside the Ministry of Building when I came out of it some weeks later. It was just over a month since Brander’s military coup, I remember, during which time my friendship with Hallie had flourished, much to the disgust of Anthony Hargreaves, who plainly considered her his property. Certainly, it was surprising that Hallie seemed to prefer me to him, for he was twenty years my junior, extremely good looking, and his position as head of Moral Guidance was a glamorous comparison, in prospects, to my desultory position as Director of Contracts.

Brander’s blackshirts stood unmoving before me—the usual attempt at silent intimidation, and I stood on the steps of the Ministry with my hands in my pockets until Security Jones, our hall porter, came down and cleared them. One said:

“What about his pass, then?”

“He’s the Director of Contracts,” replied Security Jones, bulging with open hostility. “Make way if you know what’s good for you.”

I doubted the wisdom of it. Later, at the first opportunity, they would doubtless see to the pair of us. With my briefcase under my arm I walked down to the Cenotaph: there Sam, my taxi, was waiting.

“Bond Street, please,” I said.

“The Courval Salon on Thursdays,” said Sam, and drove away. Knowledge of my movements over the past ten years was one of Sam’s indulgences; he had been quick to appreciate my change of venue on Thursdays over the past month, though as far as Moira knew, I was still sleeping at the Reform Club.

“Same time tomorrow morning, Mr. Seaton?” he asked now.

“Unless I telephone the kiosk earlier, and it’s not what you think.”

“Of course not,” said Sam.

A few minor fires were still burning in the city. Although the coup was supposed to be over and Brander’s victory complete, there were still occurring spasmodic attacks upon his authority. The Admiralty, for instance, was still smouldering from the Unionist assault the night before last, although they had been repelled with terrifying losses by Brander’s storm troopers. And the wind was acrid with smoke as I opened the taxi door outside the Courval Salon. An old Centurion tank clanked past me towards Piccadilly where a workers’ demonstration was due to be held that night, and there were a lot of blackshirts on the streets, always a sign of impending Trade Union sabotage. I stared about me at the growing dusk as I rang the bell of the salon.

“Ah, Mark—I’m glad you could come,” cried Hallie.

“Scarcely, a comparison with the eminent Hargreaves?”

“Do we have to talk about him?”

Dressed in a white gown she looked charming; white enhanced her figure—tiny, yet beautifully proportioned; her dark hair was lying loosely on her shoulders.

I saw her against an avenue of naked plastic models who displayed their limbs in caricatures of death; witless victims of a shattering bomb, their hands protecting their faces as if in horror. And Hallie led the way through these puppets. Tomorrow, she informed me, they would have new clothes on, for things were becoming more normal after the Brander coup—even the Paris fashions were starting to come in. Moira, I reflected dully, would be delighted; she spent a lot of my money at Courval’s—mainly on items modelled by Hallie, perhaps a minor act of revenge: yet, even if she knew of our affair, I thought, she was scarcely in a position to mention it.

A monstrous and ornate grandfather clock was guarding the doors to the flat upstairs, and it was ticking like a time-bomb. Sweat sprang to my face and I closed my eyes.

“I’m sorry,” said Hallie, pausing to stop its pendulum. “I really should have remembered. Are … are you all right?” She touched my arm.

“Perfectly.”

“Poor Mark.” On tiptoe, she kissed my face.

To have apologised yet again for this weakness would have soiled the solemnity of Monsieur Courval’s personal morgue, which had to be entered to get to Hallie.

In the serenity of the flat above I held her, smiling within my induced oblivion. Thoughtfully, she took off her watch and laid it on the dressing-table, yet its faint ticking held me with rooted force.

“Mark, Mark!” she said.

But I only really heard the ticking of the watch.

Unaccountably, in the midst of this love-making I kept remembering the face of Moira: some sweetness seemed to be reaching out its arms to me from the early days of our marriage: even in Hallie’s sighs I heard the sounds of Moira, lying in the bed with Hallie’s hand in mine, I wondered if Moira would be at Hatherley this coming weekend, and if she might receive a gesture of love with patience: if a new refinement and mutual respect might even now be built between us. Then I remembered Henry Shearer and decided that this weekend she would probably be away somewhere with him. Vaguely I wondered how Kate, Shearer’s wife, managed to put up with this blatant infidelity: one of the most beautiful women in London, she had so far managed to ignore the growing scandals that pestered me in the office. And Su-len? Su-len, I decided, would be as passively Oriental as ever; sitting at the window where Hallie had sat, awaiting the sound of my car at the end of the drive. She never asked where I had been when away at night: for an adopted fifteen-year-old she was surprisingly diplomatic about my nightly disappearances, and the Chinese are a notably curious race. As if detecting an infidelity, Hallie asked, “What are you thinking?”

I did not answer immediately, for I had begun to think about Bishop Forsward whom Colonel Brander’s Triumvirate had recently arrested for criticism of his regime. Amazingly, as if reading my thoughts, Hallie said suddenly, “If they shoot that bishop there’s going to be trouble, you know.”

“Forsward, the South African?”

“The only churchman with the guts to speak out.”

I grunted. “If they do shoot him he won’t be the last—go to sleep, forget it all.”

She sat up, resting on an elbow beside me. Her face, in that blue light was that of an albino; white, aesthetic, with puddles of darkness for eyes. Her voice was disdainful. “Forget it? Is that all we can do? Brander’s thugs have been arresting and killing for weeks. What are they doing about it in the ministries?”

“There is nothing anybody can do, and you know it.”

“You’ve only got to go into the street and the blackshirts whistle—you try being a woman these days. One day I’ll spit in their faces.”

“I’d confine that to the bedroom, if I were you.”

“All last night they were out after the Union Apprentices—just boys. They were shooting them half the night—and you Londoners go to bed and sleep.”

“It won’t last—you don’t know Londoners.”

I was a little surprised at her. Until now I had considered her as a surprisingly intelligent model: it was a sort of pathological madness for anyone to criticise Brander. There was more to Hallie than superficially appeared, but I was wishing her to the devil; I desperately needed sleep. Warming to her subject, she said “What about the children, Mark? Do you want your Su-len to grow up under Brander’s Fascism? Joe’s an adult, but what about young Su-len?”

“What about her?” Exhaustion was claiming me. I was. drooping, and she was wide awake. Ironically I reflected on the disparity between our ages—the old fool in the young bed; vaguely I wondered what Moira was doing.

Hallie replied, “Yes, what about her? Can you really insist that she drops her nationality and becomes British in the Brander state?” I scarcely heard her; I was listening to distant guns.

“I am not insisting that she becomes British. On the contrary, I encourage her in everything Chinese—she attends the Woking School of Afro-Asian Studies—I even talk to her in Cantonese.”

“What does she look like?”

I groaned. “Oh, Hallie, at this time of night?”

She pulled me over to face her. “Haven’t I the right? You say you’re in love with me, but I know practically nothing about you. You let me find out about your son Joe, and you’ve only once mentioned Su-len—what’s she like?”

“She has black hair and slanted eyes.”

“So have most Chinese.”

“God Almighty!” I sat up, fumbling for a cigarette.

The moon was sitting in the window, I remember, and in that light I saw her face. By some trick of the moonlight it was strangely darker, and her hair, in shadow, was as black as Su-len’s. Indeed, she was at once incredibly like Su-len; then the moon faded, and the vision vanished.

“How long have you had her, Mark?”

“Su? About twelve years—she was three when we adopted her.”

“In England?”

“No—Malaya. I was on a tour of the East for the Ministry, lecturing on computerised bills of quantities … look, do we have to? It’s getting very late …”

“Tell me.” She was intent, unmoving.

I said, “Well, I was called to Kuala Lumpur to arbitrate on a contractual dispute near Kajang—nothing at all to do with the Ministry. There was a big muck-shifting contract—airfield clearance—I found her wandering around the site.”

“And you picked her up and brought her home?”

“Not immediately. In one of the hutment clearings a blade-grader unearthed an old Japanese bomb, and the contractor called me over. To my astonishment, it was ticking.”

She opened wide eyes at me. I continued: “This was my work after the war, remember? And I recognised its type immediately. It was far too big to blow in situ—there were hundreds of native huts around, I decided to disarm it.”

She nodded, unspeaking.

“Well, I sent down to First Aid for a stethoscope and got out the jeep’s tools. Somebody found me a ratchet-chain and I took the top off the thing. There was nothing complicated about it—a simple clock mechanism, or I wouldn’t have attempted it.”

“And Su-len?”

“I remembered her probably because she was the youngest child there—after I’d got the clock out the villagers wandered back—you know how kids stand and stare. I spoke to her in Tamil, but she didn’t understand, and the head man told me she was Chinese, and had only been in the village a week. Somebody passing through must have dumped her on the road near by. He said he thought she was Tangar, from the Pearl River delta—aboriginal extraction, she was nearly as dark as a Negress …”

“But why did you take her away from there?”

I said, “After I’d disarmed the bomb I called a tractor driver in and told him to hitch it up, drag it off the site and bury it somewhere. Then I went back to the jeep, got in it and drove away. I hadn’t got a quarter of a mile before there was an explosion—the bloody thing had gone up with everybody standing round it.”

“Oh, God.”

“It was the simplest booby-trap in the world, and I fell for it—a dud clockwork bomb linked by chain to a live one ten yards away; when the dud was moved the real one went up. It decimated the village; forty people were killed and nearly a hundred wounded—the tractor was blown to pieces, its shrapnel hit the surrounding compounds. The only child survivor was Su-len. Because I’d made a fuss of her she had followed my jeep down the road.”

“And this saved her.”

I nodded. “But she was badly shocked.” The ticking began in my head again. I added, “I killed them as surely as if I’d shot them up—sodding around with a Jap alarm clock and forgetting to isolate a first-stage booby. It was unforgivable.”

“And Su-len’s part of the guilt complex?” Hallie stared at me.

“I suppose so. I telephoned Moira from Singapore and she agreed to the adoption—it wasn’t easy, you know; children are precious in the East.”

“So Moira brought her up?”

“No, I did. After the initial excitement of the adoption, Moira grew less and less interested in her. But she was Chinese, and entitled to her heritage. I had been educated in China and had never quite lost my links, so I taught her the language—Cantonese, since she obviously came from the south. Embarrassingly, since Moira’s set are anti-social, as Su-len got older her skin grew darker—proof indeed that she was Tangar.”

“So she became Mark’s personal property!”

“I wouldn’t put it like that.”

“Based on a pygmalion theme?”

I replied, “That could be thought unkind.”

“It was meant to be. I’m already tired of this particular specimen.” The gunfire, I recall, was becoming louder.

“Hallie, don’t be ridiculous!”

She stretched beside me with artless grace, her hands in my hair. “Ridiculous, perhaps, but keep her safe at Hatherley while you make love to me, for I don’t intend to share.”

Tur. . .