Dominion

Chapter Six

THE FOLLOWING THURSDAY David left for work at eight as usual, walking up the street to Kenton Station in his bowler, black jacket and pinstripe trousers. Opposite the house was a little park, no more than a small lawned area with flowerbeds; at the far end there still stood one of the square concrete shelters that had been built in 1939 in anticipation of the air raids that never came, squat and ugly and abandoned now. Children went in there to smoke sometimes; there had been a petition to the Council. He nodded to neighbours, other men dressed in similar uniform, also heading for the station. The weather was bright and clear, cold for mid-November. His breath formed a cloud in front of him, like the exhaust of an old Austin Seven sputtering by.

The tube was crowded, the air thick with cigarette smoke. Hanging on to the strap he read The Times. There was a bold headline: ‘Beaverbrook and Butler fly to Berlin today for economic talks’. That was sudden – there had been nothing on the news last night. ‘Optimism on new German trade links’, the article continued. He wondered what the Germans would want in return.

Victoria Station was heaving, thousands of commuters walking through the great vestibule, steam and smoke from the trains belching up to the high ceiling. A group of grey-uniformed German soldiers stood by a platform gate, probably on their way to the base on the Isle of Wight. They were very young, laughing and joking. They had probably been on leave in London. Those with an Isle of Wight posting were the lucky ones; the endless mincing machine of the Russian front had been killing boys like these for eleven years, would probably take these ones too in the end. David felt an unexpected stab of pity for them.

He walked down Victoria Street to Parliament Square, then up Whitehall to the Dominions Office. Sykes was on duty again behind the desk. ‘Morning, Mr Fitzgerald. Another cold day, sir.’

The lift was full, clanking painfully as it rose. David stood next to Daniel Brightman from the Economic Department, who had joined the service at the same time. Like David he was a grammar-school boy, but over the years Brightman had adopted an upper-class drawl. ‘Another day in the salt mines,’ he said.

‘Yes. Keeping busy?’

‘Meeting with the Aussies on wheat tariffs today.’ He sighed. ‘I expect they’ll be shouting as usual. The trials of Empire.’

David got out on the second floor and passed the Registry. The clerks were all in. From behind the counter Carol, at her desk, gave him a quick smile and a wave. He smiled back, guiltily remembering what he had done on Sunday.

Old Dabb, checking a card index at the counter, looked up. ‘Mr Fitzgerald,’ he said. ‘A brief word, if I may.’

‘Of course.’ David noticed dandruff on the old man’s collar.

‘I was concerned, sir,’ the Registrar said in his slow sad voice, ‘to observe you left the High Commissioners’ meeting file on the counter last night, without getting a clerk to sign it back in.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘A moment of time now can spare much confusion later.’

‘I’m sorry, Dabb, we’ve been so busy. It won’t happen again.’

It was a quiet morning; David telephoned South Africa House and discussed who might attend the meeting the SS officials were asking for. He had spoken several times that week with an eager young Afrikaner, stressing the need for secrecy. ‘Teach the Russians who’s boss, hey?’ the South African had chuckled. ‘The Germans aren’t settling the Congo, are they, got enough on their hands trying to settle Russia.’

No, David thought, they’re just looting the Congo, like the Belgians did. David hated these apartheid people and their friendship with the Nazis, but he was formally, coolly polite as he discussed which SS officials would go – out of uniform, of course – to South Africa House. Then he studied a report on the forthcoming Birmingham Empire Week, who would be manning stalls from the various High Commissions, the important businesses taking part, like Unilever and Lonrho. He thought he might go for a swim at lunchtime, to the pool at a club he belonged to nearby. He still loved diving down into the empty, peaceful silence.

Late in the morning there was a brusque knock on the door and Hubbold came in, frowning.

‘Word’s come down from the Permanent Secretary. We’ve to stall on the Coronation arrangements at the High Commissioners’ meeting.’

‘The Times said they might tie it in with Hitler’s twentieth anniversary celebrations.’

Hubbold laughed softly. ‘Ah, The Times. Forever planting the right seeds in our minds. Anyway, instructions from on high are for everyone to stonewall. It’s a nuisance, you know how potty the High Commissioners are over royalty. They’ll want to know if it’ll be the spring or summer, whether Hartnell will design the dress. Pity we’ll have to say nothing’s decided, leaves more time for awkward subjects under Any Other Business. I’ve had word the Canadians may bring up the Jew laws again.’

‘Has that come from Canada House, sir?’ David asked, antennae alert.

‘Not officially,’ Hubbold smiled. ‘Arcana imperii, you know. Secrets of authority.’ He liked it to be known he had his own sources; it was another mark of seniority for him. Some of David’s colleagues were on first-name terms with their superiors, but Hubbold had never even suggested David drop the ‘sir’. Hubbold continued, ‘The minister does get rather embarrassed when that one comes up. Anyway, useful for you to know what the nuances will be.’

Shortly after eleven one of the interdepartmental messengers knocked at David’s door. He gave him a letter inside a Colonial Office envelope: Can you meet for lunch at the club at 1.15 not 1.30? Geoff.

When the messenger had gone David sat frowning. The words were a code that meant there was something they needed to talk about; they would meet at the Oxford and Cambridge Club at one fifteen. They never spoke on the telephone if possible, as there were rumours Civil Service phones were routinely tapped by Special Branch now. David lit a cigarette and stared anxiously through the window at Whitehall. This had only happened once before, when Jackson had advance notice of a raid on the Soho brothels, and called off a regular meeting at the flat. But at least it wasn’t an emergency, there was a separate code for that.

David left the Office at one and walked up to Trafalgar Square. A huge poster had been placed on the plinth of Nelson’s Column. We Need Exports. We Work or Want. A Challenge to British Grit. David wondered what the trade talks with Germany would bring; Volkswagens to replace the Hillmans and Morrises chugging round Trafalgar Square?

He turned into Pall Mall. Two Auxiliary policemen in their blue uniforms and caps walked slowly along, guns at their waists, watching the passers-by. Two more patrolled in parallel on the other side of the road. Something was up. He thought, Sarah’s coming into town today for one of her meetings. On Sunday, after the talk about Charlie, they had made love, an increasingly rare occurrence. He had felt detached, the brief moment of warmth quickly gone.

David entered the club. A hum of conversation came from the dining room but he went directly to the library. Few people ever came in at lunchtime and only Geoff was there now, in an armchair with a view of the door. David sat opposite him.

‘Got your message,’ he said quietly.

‘Thanks for coming.’ Geoff leaned forward. ‘Message from Jackson. He wants a scratch meeting tomorrow.’

‘Do we know why?’

‘No. I only heard just before I contacted you. Just that we’ve got to be there. Seven o’clock.’

‘Sarah’s expecting me home. I can’t say we’ve fixed up a special tennis match, not at this notice.’ David thought, my wife has become someone to lie to. He sighed. ‘I’ll think of something.’

‘I’m sorry. I know it’s hard. Easier for me, living alone.’

David looked at his friend. He seemed tired, more nervy than usual. ‘How are your parents?’ he asked.

‘Oh, rolling along in their groove.’ Geoff, like David, was an only child, his father a retired businessman. His parents lived a peaceful life in Hertfordshire, revolved around bowls matches, roses and golf. ‘Keep asking whether I’ve met any nice girls,’ Geoff added. ‘I’m tempted to say, the only ones I know these days aren’t very nice.’ He gave his jerky laugh, then changed the subject. ‘How’s your dad?’

‘Fine. Had a letter last week. It’s spring in Auckland, he went with his brother’s family to look at Rotorua last week. It wasn’t raining for once.’

‘Still hasn’t met a nice Kiwi widow?’

‘He’ll never marry again. He was too devoted to Mum.’

A shadow crossed Geoff’s face; David guessed he was thinking of the woman in Kenya. He changed the subject. ‘Heard about Beaver-brook flying out to Berlin?’

‘Yes. According to the club tickertape, Hitler isn’t going to be able to meet him.’

‘Maybe it’s true Hitler’s dead, he hasn’t been seen in public for what – two years?’

Geoff shook his head firmly. ‘He’s not dead. The Nazi leaders would be fighting for his crown; they fought like rats over Göring’s economic empire when he died.’

‘I wish Hitler were dead.’

‘Amen to that,’ Geoff replied with feeling.

When he was growing up in Barnet David did not think much about being Irish. He knew bad things had happened in Ireland and that his parents had brought him to England when he was very small. His father’s parents still lived in Dublin and visited them occasionally when David was young; they died within six months of each other when he was ten. His mother never spoke of her family; over the years David gathered there had been some sort of quarrel.

There was always a burden of expectation from his mother. His father was a solid, unruffled, easy-going man, but Rachel Fitzgerald was small and thin and excitable, always busy, always chatting in her loud sing-song voice to her husband or David, the daily woman or her female friends from the Conservative Club. When not talking she was usually listening to the radio, humming along to the tunes and sometimes playing them, surprisingly well, on the piano in the dining room. She was forever telling David to work hard at school; with all the unemployment in the country since the War it was important to get qualifications. She spoke anxiously, as though their safe, secure life might suddenly be snatched away.

David was quiet and self-contained like his father. He looked like him, too, although his hair was curly like his mother’s, but black not red. ‘You and your da,’ his mother would say, ‘you’re alike as two peas in a pod. You’ll break all the girls’ hearts when you grow up.’ David would redden and frown. He loved his mother but sometimes she drove him crazy.

David went to a private day-school, then got a grammar-school place when he was eleven, passing the entrance exam easily. When they got the results his father said he was a clever lad, regarding him with pink-faced satisfaction across the dining table, but his mother looked at him fiercely. ‘This is your chance in life, Davy boy,’ she said. ‘They’ll expect you to work hard, so make sure you do now. Make your mammy proud.’

‘Please call me David, Mum, not Davy.’

‘You’re turning into a right formal English boy.’ She leaned across and ruffled his hair. ‘Wee curly top. Oh, that’s a scowl to give your ma.’

David did well at grammar school. He was taken aback at first by the severe formality of the masters in their black gowns, the obedience and quiet they demanded, and the amount of homework, but he soon adjusted. He made friends easily though he was never a leader, always held himself a little apart. In his first term the class bully started calling him Paddy and bog-trotter. David ignored him for a while, not wanting to make trouble, but one day the boy said his mother was an Irish peasant, and out of the blue David flew at him, knocking him down. A master saw the fight and both boys got the cane, but the bully left David alone after that.

He was near the top of the class. He was good at sport, too, in the junior rugby team though he didn’t much like the game. David was a very good swimmer and loved diving – climbing the ladder to the top board and jumping off, breaking the still surface of the water and going down and down into that silent world of pastel blue. Later he entered inter-school competitions. There would be a little crowd watching and cheering, but the best thing was still hitting the water, then that fall into silence.

He won cups, which his mother insisted go on the mantelpiece. Once or twice David came home from school when his mother had her friends round for tea, and she would call him into the dining room, saying, ‘Here’s my Davy that won all these cups. See what a handsome boy he’s getting. Oh, there, Davy, don’t look at me like that. See, he’s blushing.’ The ladies would smile indulgently and David would escape to his room. He hated the attention. He wanted to be just another boy, to be ordinary.

When he was eighteen he took his entrance exam for Oxford. He had extra tuition for it, and for the first time in his life he felt tired, not sure he could succeed in the task ahead. His mother didn’t help, pressing him about the exam, telling him he shouldn’t go out in the evening, give all his time to his studies. She had started to look strained and ill lately. The news in the papers sometimes upset her; it was 1935, the Nazis were in power in Germany and Italy had invaded Abyssinia. Unlike some of her Conservative Club friends Mrs Fitzgerald thought Hitler and Mussolini were monsters who would bring the world to ruin and never tired of saying so. But it was more than that, she was starting to lose weight and her endless supply of talk had dried up, like a tap turned off. David found he missed it. He wondered if it was because of worry over his exam and felt angry and helpless and guilty. He was doing his best as he always had. Why was it never enough? He became curt and rude with her.

One evening at dinner she started complaining about David wasting his time on swimming practice. He lost his temper, called her a shrieking colleen. Rachel burst into tears and went up to her bedroom, slamming the door. David’s father, who hardly ever got angry, shouted at him to show his mother proper respect and threatened to give him the back of his hand if he spoke to her like that again, though David was as big as him now.

The day the news came that David had got into Oxford, his father said quietly that there was something he must tell him. He took him into the dining room. They sat down and his father looked at him in a way he never had before, serious and sad. ‘Your mother’s very ill,’ he said softly. ‘I’m afraid she’s got the cancer.’ There was a tremble in his voice. ‘She didn’t want to tell you till after your exam, she didn’t want to worry you. But now – well, she’s feeling very poorly and she’s going to have to have a nurse in. She should have done before, really.’

David sat quite still for a moment. He said, his voice cracking, ‘I’ve been terrible to her.’

‘You weren’t to know, son.’ His father looked at him seriously. ‘But now you’ve got to be good to her. She won’t be with us long.’

David did something he hadn’t done since he was a small child; he put his head in his hands and burst into loud, sobbing tears. His body shook and trembled. His father came across and put a hand awkwardly on his shoulder. ‘There, son,’ he said. ‘I know.’

David spent the summer doing all he could for his mother. He helped the daily and the nurse, busied himself with jobs around the house and taking his mother’s meals up. He was consumed with guilt, all the more because her fierce, possessive love had faded to an exhausted dependent helplessness. He sometimes helped her in and out of bed; she was skin and bone now. She would smile bravely and touch his cheek with a shaking finger and say breathlessly that he was a good boy, she had always known that.

He was with her when she died, his father on the other side of the bed. It was a warm Saturday in September; he would be going up to Oxford in a few weeks. Rachel drifted in and out of consciousness, listlessly watching the sun drift across the sky. Then suddenly she looked straight at David. She spoke to him, in a voice full of sadness, some words he couldn’t understand. It was little more than a whisper. ‘Ich hob dich lieb.’

David turned to his father. He leaned forward and squeezed his wife’s hand. ‘We didn’t understand you, darling,’ he said.

She frowned and tried to concentrate, but then her head fell back and the life went out of her.

Afterwards his father told him the truth. ‘Your mother’s family were Jewish. They came from somewhere in Russia. In the Tsar’s time, during the pogroms, a lot left for America. Your mother’s parents – your grandparents – left Russia with your mother and her three sisters. She was eight.’

David shook his head, trying to make sense of it. ‘But how did she come to be Irish?’

‘There were a lot of crooked people involved in the emigrations. Your mother’s poor parents didn’t speak a word of English. A boat brought them to Dublin and they thought they were going to meet a boat for America but they were just left there, stuck in Ireland. Your grandfather was a cabinetmaker, very good at it, and through some other Jews he managed to set up a shop. He ran a successful business. The children grew up speaking English. They were encouraged to, so as not to be thought too different. But I suppose deep down they never forgot their first language.’

‘Was Mum speaking Russian?’

‘No. The Jews in Eastern Europe have their own language, Yiddish. It’s like German, but different. Feldman, that was the family name.’ He smiled uneasily. ‘Pretty Jewish-sounding, eh?’ He was silent a long time. ‘Years later your mother became a music teacher. This was just before I met her. The Easter Rising was coming and things were getting rough. Mr Feldman decided to sell the shop and go to America. They had relatives there. Better late than never, eh?’ He smiled again, sadly. ‘He insisted the whole family go. Your mother didn’t want to, though, she wanted to stay in Ireland. There were other problems, too; the family was very religious but she thought it was all hokum, just as I do. So there was a quarrel, her parents and sisters sailed off, and she never saw any of them again. They never wrote, her father ruled the roost and he cut her off. I think Mr Feldman was a bit of an old brute, actually. I don’t know where her sisters are now. I can’t even let them know she’s dead,’ he added bleakly.

‘Why did you never tell me?’

‘Ah, son, we thought it better if everyone just assumed your mother was Irish. She wanted you to get on so much, and she knew that here –’ his eyes narrowed – ‘oh, it’s not like Russia was, or Germany is now, but there’s prejudice. There always has been. Unofficial quotas for Jews. Even the grammar school has a quota, you know.’ He looked at David seriously. ‘Your mother wanted her background forgotten, for your sake. Her immigration records were destroyed during the Troubles, I found that out. Our marriage certificate gives our nationalities as British – Ireland was British then, of course.’ He burst out in sudden anger, ‘People dividing each other up according to nationality and religion, it’s the worst thing, it causes nothing but misery and bloodshed. Look at Germany.’

David sat, thinking. There were a couple of Jewish boys at school who went out of assembly during morning prayers. Sometimes in the playground they got things called after them, Sheeny or Jewboy. He felt sorry for them. There was enough prejudice against the Irish; he knew it was worse for Jews.

He said, ‘So I’m a Jew.’

‘According to their rules you are, since your mother was. But as far as we were concerned you weren’t Jewish and you weren’t Christian either. You’re not circumcised and you’re not confirmed and –’ his father reached forward and took his hand – ‘you’re just your ma’s Davy, and you can be anything you want to be.’

‘I don’t feel Jewish,’ David said quietly. ‘But what is feeling Jewish?’ He frowned. ‘But, if Mum didn’t want me to know, why – why did she talk to me in Yiddish? What did she say, Dad?’

His father shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, son, I don’t know. She never spoke it with me. I thought she’d forgotten it all. Perhaps at the end her poor mind was just going back.’

David was crying, a steady flow of tears. He and his father sat in silence in the quiet lounge. When David’s crying lessened his father leaned forward, clutching his arm. ‘No need ever to tell anyone else, David. There’s no point, it’ll only hold you back, and you’d be going against your mother’s wishes. It can just be our secret.’

David looked up at him and nodded. ‘I understand,’ he said heavily. ‘I understand. You’re right. And I’ll do it for her. I owe her, I owe her.’

‘It’ll be better for you, too.’

And it had been. In the years after the Berlin Treaty his silence had saved his job, his career. But always a part of him felt he didn’t deserve what he had; he felt guilt and fear, but also a strange sense of kinship when he passed those wearing the yellow badge in the street, looking shabbier and more forlorn every year.