Dominion

Chapter Forty-Four

SINCE COMING TO SEAN AND EILEEN’S house Frank had, for the first time in over a week, passed hours at a stretch without thinking of death. Sitting with the others, talking to them, he would feel a strange warmth inside, towards these people who were endangering their lives for him. He had been frightened of Sean at first but then he’d apologized for his behaviour, something Frank couldn’t remember anyone ever doing before. That afternoon, playing games in the lounge, he had actually forgotten the constant danger, relaxed a little. After dinner his drugs made him tired and he went upstairs to lie down, dozing off for a while.

A soft knock at the door woke him.

‘Yes?’

The woman, Natalia, came in. Frank smiled at her nervously.

‘How are you?’ she asked.

‘Not so bad.’

She leaned against the wall – weighing him up, Frank thought, though in a friendly way. ‘Things must have been very bad for you,’ she said quietly. ‘Ever since the accident with your brother.’ She hesitated. ‘But trying to run off like you did in that field, that was not right.’

‘I know. It put you all in danger. But I didn’t see how we could escape.’

She smiled and spread her arms. ‘But we are here. And you heard Eileen, there is a submarine waiting to collect us. We are moving closer to safety, Frank, step by step. And already you have changed.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I have watched you, this past week. When we first picked you up from the hospital your walk was slouched; you slumped over. Already it is a little less so. And your speech is more –’ she smiled – ‘direct.’

‘Is it?’ He wanted to believe her, to hope, but it was hard. He changed the subject. ‘Where are you from?’ he asked curiously.

‘I am from Slovakia. It was part of Czechoslovakia once: you remember, the country Mr Chamberlain gave to Hitler.’

‘I was always against appeasement. David and Geoff and I used to talk about it at university.’

She took out a packet of cigarettes. ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’

‘Please. Did you escape from your country?’

‘I was lucky. I met a German, a good German. I came to England with him. After he died I decided to help the Resistance.’

‘You must have met Nazis, too. We’re told they’re our friends, but I never thought so.’

‘The Germans have fallen under the spell of a madman, much of the German army, also. Though they are realists, too, they know now that they can never conquer all of Russia. I think when Hitler dies the army and the SS will fight each other.’ She smiled. ‘And then the Resistance in Europe will have a great opportunity.’

Frank said, ‘The Germans must never get hold of my secret. You do understand that.’

‘Yes.’ She nodded seriously. ‘It must be hard, carrying dangerous knowledge in your head.’

‘But you don’t know what it is, do you?’ Frank looked alarmed for a moment.

‘No.’

He hesitated, then asked, ‘Do you carry one of those poison pills David has?’

‘Yes.’

‘I told him to ask you if I could have one.’

She shook her head. ‘I’m afraid the answer is no. If the Germans come, I promise you they won’t take any of us alive.’ She looked him in the eye. He admired her clear, cool directness.

‘You must think about dying too, all of you,’ he said. ‘A sudden blackness, ceasing to exist. Or heaven, walking in a garden with Jesus.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘Or hell. The lives God gives to us, the awful things we can’t escape from. Sometimes I think that sort of God would enjoy making hell for us after we die.’

‘I think we’ll all just face the blackness.’

‘So do I, really.’

‘May I sit down?’ Natalia asked.

‘Of course.’

There were no chairs in the room so she sat on the floor opposite him, leaning back against the wall. Frank asked, ‘Why do you want to keep me alive?’

‘I’ve been told it’s what the Americans want. For us to rescue you and get you to the coast.’

‘Aren’t you curious? You and the Resistance people? About what I know?’

She smiled. ‘We’ve been told not to ask. And the Resistance is like an army, we’re soldiers, we obey orders.’

‘You kill people like soldiers as well, don’t you? The stories about bombs and assassinations, they’re true, aren’t they?’

‘I wish there were another way. But all other roads have been blocked off.’

‘Have you killed anyone yourself?’

She didn’t answer. Frank said, ‘My brother, he started all this, put us all in danger.’

She smiled sadly. ‘I had a brother, too.’

‘Did you?’

‘Yes. But he was not like yours. We were close. But he had – what they call mental problems. Difficulties in dealing with the world. When he was young he was very confident, but I think there was always fear underneath.’

‘Did he go to hospital like me?’

‘No.’

‘My brother Edgar was confident. Everything came his way. Or seemed to.’

She smiled encouragingly. And then, to his own surprise Frank found himself telling her about his childhood, his brother and his mother, Mrs Baker, and then the school. He had never talked to anyone about these things the way he talked to Natalia now. Because she listened, and believed him, and didn’t judge. At the end Frank said, ‘I’ve always been afraid, like your brother.’

‘But you had real things to be frightened of,’ Natalia said. ‘My brother was different, he didn’t have any real cause for fear. Not until the war came.’

‘What was he like?’

She smiled. ‘Peter was two years older than me. He had Tartar eyes like mine, but blond hair like our mother, who had German blood. A mixture. A beautiful mixture. A big, noisy boy, always getting into scrapes. But everyone forgave him, because he never meant harm to any living thing. And all the girls loved him.’

Frank frowned slightly. He sounded too good to be real. Natalia caught his look and smiled. ‘It’s true, everyone loved him. I worshipped him. Yet sometimes I would find him standing in a room quite still, looking so afraid. I used to ask him what the matter was and he would say, “Nothing, I was just thinking”. Our mother died just after Peter started university, while I was still at school, and that made him worse.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘She had a sudden heart attack. I remember one day after she died going into our sitting room and Peter was standing looking out of the window, his hands clasped together so tightly. He had that frightened look and there were tears in his eyes. I asked what the matter was. He said, “We’re all alone, Natalia. There’s no meaning, no safety. Something can just come out of the blue and destroy us like it did Mother and there’s nothing we can do.” He said, I remember it exactly, “We spend all our lives walking on the thinnest of thin ice, it can break at any moment and then we fall through.” I see him now, standing there, the words rushing out of him, the blue sky outside our window.’ Natalia broke off and smiled. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t mean to distress you.’

‘Thin ice. Yes. I’ve always known about that.’

‘Perhaps we all do. But we all have to go on hoping it won’t break.’ She sighed. ‘Otherwise, like Peter, or your mother, you can go looking for salvation in some mad theory, some pattern to the world that isn’t really there.’

‘What did he believe in?’

‘Communism. He joined the Party just after our mother died. So many people in Europe turned to the Fascists and Communists in those years. Peter became a Communist and he was much happier for a while. He thought he had found the key to history. The Fascists thought they had too, of course, in nationality. Peter finished university, did some painting – he was a painter like me, though a much better one. Before he joined the Party he did some remarkable work, surreal, I think it reflected the confusion in his mind. But later he designed Party posters, square-jawed workers and beautiful maidens waving scythes . . .’ She laughed. ‘Our father was a merchant, he was so angry when Peter became a Communist.’

‘I’ve never really believed in anything,’ Frank said sadly. ‘I just wanted to be left alone.’

‘You believed in science. You worked at a university.’

‘Believed in it? I was interested in it.’ He shook his head. ‘In my old life I worked. I ate. I slept. I read science-fiction magazines and books. I had a flat in Birmingham. I don’t think I’ll see it again.’

‘Peter was living in a science-fiction book called communism,’ Natalia said with sudden bitterness. ‘He thought he saw the future of humanity, its true meaning, in Russia. But then he went there. On an official tour. I had been away studying English, in London.’

‘That’s why you speak it so well.’

She lit another cigarette. ‘I remember when I came back Peter was getting ready for his visit to Moscow, he was full of it, he even said he might emigrate to Russia. But when he got there, being Peter, he wandered off on his own one afternoon, gave the tour guide the slip and went exploring Moscow. The Communists were destroying the old city then, putting up big blocks of flats, bright and white, accommodation for the workers’ future.’

‘They’re starting to build them here, too. The high-rises.’

‘There were some near where Peter was staying, they were new, they hadn’t even laid the pavements yet. Peter told me how he walked over the muddy ground, opened the door of one of the blocks and went inside. He said it was indescribable, filth everywhere, people had been going to the toilet on the floor. The flats were full of families crammed into single rooms, more than one family sometimes, just a tatty curtain to divide them and give some privacy, all swearing and fighting with each other. They screamed abuse at him when he wandered in. And somehow, seeing the inside of that block of flats, seeing how people really lived in his Communist paradise – he was never the same after that.’

Frank thought of Peter stumbling through the mud of that Moscow building site. ‘Poor man,’ he said.

‘Yes. Poor Peter. I don’t know what he expected to find there, a palace?’ Her voice was angry. ‘He got into trouble with the tour people for that. He was lucky he had a foreign passport. That was 1937, during the worst of Stalin’s Great Terror. When Peter came back to Bratislava he left the Party and spent more and more of his time indoors, alone in his room.’

‘A room, a home, it’s a place to hide, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’ She blew out a cloud of smoke, sighed. ‘Meanwhile, out in the world, things were getting worse. Next year Hitler took the Sudetenland, then in 1939 he made Slovakia an independent puppet state, and then the war broke out. Father was retired by then, but he had money and I was working as a translator so I was able to take care of Peter. I looked after him for two years. Father helped too, but he was old, he did not really understand.’

‘Peter was lucky. Having someone to look after him.’

‘I did what I could. Then in 1941, the Germans invaded Russia. The Slovak government sent soldiers to help them. My brother was conscripted, he was young and fit and they didn’t care about his mental state. He fought all the way to the Caucasus. He came back with a shattered leg. It healed, but the effects on his mind –’ she shook her head sorrowfully – ‘he was terrified people were going to come for him, terrified. Communists or Fascists or priests – I don’t know who, anybody. Father had died while he was at war. In the end he jumped out of the window.’ She gave Frank a long, hard look. ‘It was a terrible thing to do to me.’

‘He couldn’t live with his fear,’ Frank said simply.

‘The whole world has had to learn to live with fear now.’ She got up, her knees creaking. It reminded Frank that she was his age, she wasn’t young. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said quietly. ‘I did not mean to talk of all these sad things.’

‘It’s all right.’

She walked over to the window, pulled the curtain aside. The fog was as bad as ever, thick, cloying, almost liquid; there was nothing to see but darkness. ‘No sign of this ending,’ she said. Then she turned to face him, smiling. ‘Thank you.’

‘What for?’ he asked, surprised.

‘Because you understood about Peter.’

After she had gone Frank thought, was her brother really like me? He felt a little awed that she’d talked so openly to him. Then David had come to check on him. He’d tried to doze again but he was restless now, all the conversations he had had that day coming back into his head. After a while he decided to go downstairs. As he passed the door of the next room, he was surprised to hear low voices. He wondered whether they were talking about him. He stood next to the door. He heard Natalia’s voice, very quiet, ‘You need a woman as much as I need a man.’ He stepped away, suddenly filled with betrayal and loss and jealousy. Then he felt numb.

Downstairs Ben was sitting with the O’Sheas, still playing cards. He looked up. ‘A’ right? Thought you were asleep.’

‘No. No, I – I couldn’t settle—’

Ben looked at him keenly. ‘Sure you’re all right?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s a bit early for your bedtime pill. I’ll give it you in an hour, that’ll get you to sleep.’

‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ Eileen asked with a smile. ‘A bit of cake maybe?’

‘No, no thanks. Where’s Geoff?’

She nodded to the door of the front room. ‘He’s asleep in there. Why don’t you go and see how he is?’

Frank opened the door. He felt their eyes on his back. The light was on; Geoff was asleep in an armchair but he woke as Frank came in. He coughed.

‘I’m sorry,’ Frank said. ‘Did I wake you?’

‘I was only half asleep.’ Geoff sat up, coughing again, a harsh rasp. He didn’t look well, there was sweat on his brow. ‘What time is it?’

‘Nine o’clock. How are you feeling?’

‘A bit rotten.’ He looked at Frank. ‘How are you? Holding up?’

‘Yes. Yes, I suppose so. I’ve got a bit of a tickle in my throat, but it’s not getting any worse.’

‘I think I might go up to my room and lie down.’

Frank raised a hand. ‘No, I don’t think –’ he stumbled over his words – ‘not yet.’

Geoff gave him a puzzled frown. ‘Why not?’

‘I – I think David and Natalia are up there.’ Frank felt himself blush. ‘Together.’

Geoff nodded his understanding, gave a sad little smile. ‘I wondered if something was going on there. Thanks for the warning.’ He frowned. ‘But I wouldn’t have thought –’ he looked at Frank intently – ‘listen, if we get to meet up with Sarah, David’s wife, you mustn’t say anything. He and Natalia – well, these things happen when everyone’s thrown together, under such a strain—’

‘I won’t say anything. I promise.’

Geoff sat back wearily in his chair. ‘I suppose I’d better stay down here for a while then.’

‘David and Natalia,’ Frank said. ‘His wife. They shouldn’t—’

‘Who are we to say?’

Frank looked down. ‘I don’t know.’

Geoff shook his head. ‘Only fifteen years ago you and I and David were at university. It was a different world then, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes, it was.’

Geoff smiled. ‘Do you remember the day when we were all in this pub, and there was that idiot loudmouth from our college, I’ve forgotten his name now, arguing that Hitler only wanted to revive Germany’s national spirit, just wanted territories that were historically German and he was entitled to them—’

‘Carter,’ Frank said.

‘That’s right. And you said, “They’re not territories, they’re places where people live and it’s the people that matter.” I remember he just sat and stared at you. I think he was a bit surprised you’d answered him back.’

Frank said, ‘You remember that, after all this time?’

‘Oh, yes. I—’

Geoff broke off suddenly, at the sound of a tremendous crash from the front door. Frank turned, so fast he almost lost his balance, as another followed. Geoff looked at him, then threw open the door from the front room to the hall. Outside, in the hallway, Sean had come out of the lounge and stood, a gun in his hand, facing the front door. As they watched it splintered and flew open. Three men burst in from the fog, pistols drawn. Two were uniformed Auxiliary Police. One was carrying a sledgehammer and the other a pistol. The third was in plain clothes and to his horror Frank recognized Syme, the tall, thin policeman from the hospital. He had a gun too. Sean fired at the Auxiliary who had the pistol, a tremendous noise in the confined space. The policeman toppled back onto the other two, unbalancing them, blocking the doorway, blood gushing from his neck. The plain-clothes man, though, had time to fire at Sean, and the big Irishman went down with a crash, his body hitting the floor with an impact that shook the boards.

Frank stood paralysed. As the two intruders struggled with the body of their dead colleague in the doorway, Geoff grabbed his arm and pushed him towards the open doorway of the lounge. Ben stood there, also holding a gun. There must have been guns in the table drawers. Behind him Eileen stared through the door at her husband’s body, eyes wide with horror. Frank glanced at Sean’s face; the blue eyes whose gaze had scared him were still and dead now.

There was a clattering on the stairs and David and Natalia appeared, running down, David frantically buttoning up his clothes. In any other circumstances it would have looked ridiculous. Natalia, too, was holding a gun. Syme and the other Auxiliary were in the hall now and both raised their firearms but Natalia fired first, Ben following from the doorway a second after. They missed Syme but Natalia hit the other Auxiliary in the arm. He yelled and staggered. Just outside the house, they heard the sound of a police siren.

Geoff had Frank inside the lounge now. Natalia and David followed and David banged the door shut.

‘Out the back!’ Eileen pointed at Frank, her voice a loud scream. Geoff grabbed Frank’s hand and pulled him towards the kitchen. The others heaved the heavy table in front of the door to the hall, blocking it, just before the plain-clothes man threw himself against it. Other police were coming and it would not hold for long. Eileen shouted, ‘Go!’

Ben opened the back door, slowly and carefully. Outside, nothing but a bank of fog. There could have been a dozen more armed policemen out there, but there was nowhere else to go. Other policemen had arrived through the front now, and were throwing themselves against the lounge door. Frank looked back at Eileen. She smiled weakly, then reached into her dress, between her breasts. She pulled something out and put it in her mouth. Frank had a momentary glimpse of her body convulsing.

The back door was half open, Ben peering round it, gun in hand. He waved to the others to stand back. Frank braced himself for another rush of blue uniforms from the backyard. But there was nothing, just the fog. Ben took a deep breath and stepped outside, gun raised in both hands. David and Natalia followed, then Geoff hauled Frank out, too, slamming the back door shut to cut off the light. He had taken the key from the side of the door and turned it, locking it.

They were out in the yard, in the dark and fog. There was a flash of light from somewhere and a bang. Beside Frank, Geoff gave a cry and toppled over, letting go of Frank’s hand. He lay still on the ground, blood spreading across his chest. He twitched violently once and then was still. Ben and Natalia both fired blindly back into the murk, and Frank heard the sound of someone falling, cursing and swearing. There must have been only one policeman round the back. Then Ben had Frank’s hand, pulling him through the fog, across the yard. Frank cried out, ‘Geoff!’

‘He’s dead!’ Ben said. He hauled Frank across the little yard; a brick wall loomed up. There was a big metal dustbin beside it. David helped Natalia onto it. She climbed over the wall. David followed. Behind them, they heard crashes at the back door.

‘Come on!’ Ben shouted at Frank. He climbed onto the wall, then reached down, took Frank under the arms and lifted him up. Frank grasped the wall, bracing himself to feel a bullet in his back, half hoping for it, but it didn’t come. From the top of the wall Ben fired back towards the house.

‘Fucking come on!’ Ben screamed in Frank’s ear. Then Frank was hauled bodily over the wall. He fell on wet cobbles with a crash that winded him. Ben and David pulled him up and half carried him down an alley, into a street that was just a choking yellow-grey mass of fog. More shots sounded, flashes in the gloom ahead. More police had been waiting in the street. Frank collided with the wall of the alley, grazing his arm. Ben had taken a grip on Frank’s other arm but it loosened as he fired again into the street. Everyone was just firing blindly, nobody could see. Frank heard a sound from behind him; more policemen and Syme, no doubt, climbing over the O’Sheas’ wall in hot pursuit.

Frank pulled away from Ben’s grasp. He was gripped by utter panic – the gunshots, the images of Sean and Geoff falling, Eileen’s body convulsing. They couldn’t save him, they were going to be captured as he had known they would be. He turned and ran away, blindly, into the fog.