The Summer Isles

by Ian R. MacLeod

  Just by saying this, he’d probably already broken the protocols he’d agreed with Chamberlain. There was no talk of balances and coalitions. No mention of negotiations with other parties. But it didn’t matter now. Everything would soon be changed. John Arthur was in power.

  15

  NEXT MORNING, WEIGHED DOWN with the fatty ballast of a full English breakfast, I wander in the New Dorchester’s glowing amber air. Everywhere, people are smiling. The women are in wisps of crepe-de-chine. The girls are dressed up like bridesmaids. The boys come in kilts and bow ties. The men opt for tight double-breasted or looser colonial ice-cream suits.

  I trip down carpet waterfalls, drawn by signs that point towards the AIR RAID SHELTER. Down and down, dicing with the newfangled escalators, and still the New Dorchester’s smooth luxury doesn’t give out. Regrettably, the entrance to the shelter itself is closed. It looks like a cloakroom as I peer through the metal links of the sliding gate.

  Further up, although still deep underground, lies the SOLARIUM AND SWIMMING POOL. It’s damply warm here, a perpetual tropic midday closer to the earth’s core. Beads of sweat pop up on my face as I drop into one of the deckchairs that populate the tiled shore. I watch shamelessly as various bodies dive and slice beneath the rippling mock-cavern roof. I don’t know why the smell of these places is always so nostalgic, or why swimming costumes are so much more erotic than the mere nakedness of Penrhos Park…

  “Found your way down here, Mr. Brook? Thinking of trying the water?”

  Slick and wet, he squats down beside me in just his trunks. I know I should recognise him.

  “Tony Anderson. KSG,” he says, smiling at my confusion. “I came up to Oxford to deliver the PM’s letter. You look better than when I last saw you. After that illness on your holiday in Scotland. I hope you don’t mind me saying that, Mr. Brook.”

  Captain Anderson shakes the droplets from his right hand and offers it to me. His grip is moist, vast. The hairs across his chest have been sculpted into little chevrons.

  “You’re, ah, working here?”

  “You could say that.” He slicks back his hair. “On duty, I suppose you might call it…” He glances around. A young woman, equally sleek, almost equally lovely, climbs out from the pool at the far side and waves. He waves back. “I wish it was always like this…”

  “Girlfriend?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “A colleague. We, ah—well, you know…” He grins. My heart skips about in my ribcage. “There’s nothing going on there at the moment. To be honest, I wasn’t quite straight with you when I came up to Oxford with that letter.”

  “Oh?”

  “The fact is, I volunteered. You see, I always enjoyed those articles you wrote for the Daily Sketch. Well—enjoyed isn’t quite the right word. They meant a lot to me. And you must have led a fascinating life. Being at Oxford. Having met John Arthur.”

  “It’s had its moments. And I’m pleased you remember the articles…”

  “So I was wondering if I could perhaps take you out for a meal this evening? I really would welcome the opportunity to have a proper talk with you.”

  “I’m not sure I’ll have the energy. I’m supposed to be going to New Buckingham Palace this afternoon. It’s nice of you to ask but—”

  “—Of course. I understand.” Captain Anderson stands up and the water pats down from him, splashing on the tiles. The blue air shimmers. My thoughts are doing leapfrogs. You never know with these people, not even when they’re in wet swimming trunks and you can see the bulge of their cock. But what would be more suspicious: to accept a seemingly genuine offer, or turn it down for no proper reason?

  The flags and the bunting are going up as I’m chauffeur-driven across London towards New Buckingham Palace. Tomorrow is the eve of Trafalgar Day, although my itinerary is blessedly blank apart from the evening Thanksgiving Service at Westminster Abbey. Already cheery messages to our Leader have replaced the advertisements on the sides of buses for Idris Table Waters, Venos’s Cough Cure and Dr J. Collis Browns’s Chlorodyne. GREATER BRITAIN THANKS YOU. HERE’S TO THE FUTURE. Madame Tussauds, with its fine displays of British celebrities and grisly French and Irish atrocities, is granting free admission. All pretence of normality has been forgotten—as has the fiction that we can keep all of this secret from John Arthur. He must know by now.

  My long black Daimler sweeps with a stream of others around Hyde Park Corner and through the towering gates to pull up beside the steel flagpoles in front of New Buckingham Place. I wade through a dizzy sense of unreality past the guardsmen in their busbies and up the vast carpet-tongued marble steps into the jaws of the glittering doorway. I queue to be greeted in the crystal fairyland of the Great Hall amid white-plumed colonial hats and Technicolour saris. I’m giving Monday’s suit a trial-airing, and have even placed News From Nowhere in the inner pocket to give a similar weight and feel to the pistol. Nobody stops me. Nobody searches me. Once I’ve handed in my invitation card and have had a name tag attached to my lapel, no one even asks me who I am. There are one or two square-looking men who don’t seem to be guests lingering at watery intersections of tile and glass, but they keep well out of the way.

  Dresses rustle as the queue shuffles forward to meet the Royal Family. I breathe the jangling air that is mingled with the scents of floor polish, lilies, mothballs, new leather, face powder, eu de cologne. My palms start to sweat. This really is starting to feel like a dry run for the day after tomorrow. There’s the barbed sense of ordinariness, fear and monumentality that must claw at the mind of every assassin as they wait for their moment to come.

  My turn arrives to meet the Royal Family. His Highness the Duke of York stammers slightly as he greets me. I bow. Then his wife the Duchess, their two plain daughters. A moment later I’m standing before King Edward and Queen Wallis. Me! Whoever I am. I glance discreetly to both sides as I bow whilst, frail as dry leaves, their gloved fingers brush against mine. It would be easy for me to reach inside my jacket at this point. The gesture would seem innocent—part of the overall motion of bowing. Click back the hammer as I pull the pistol out. Blam. Then blam again. Two shots, minimum. Walter’s Humane Bullets thudding into the chest at close range, exploding through the basic organs, shredding blood vessels, bone, gristle. Within moments, this whole place would implode in shatters of glass and steel, it and Greater Britain would be drawn up through the skies in a hissing gale, back towards fairyland where they belong. The King clears his throat. A liveried butler touches my shoulder. The queue shuffles forward again. I float away.

  The guests wander out through pillared archways into the afternoon’s gracious warmth. There’s a stir when the silver trays of sweet Merrydown Wine emerge for the royal toast—it’s better than the stuff I tasted on Midsummer Night, but still not a patch on my college’s champagne—another when the shadow of The Queen Of Air and Darkness drifts over our heads; hired today by the BBC as a part of their live outside broadcast. The gardens as I explore them still feel a little like Green Park of old. The stepped orchards and monumental statues don’t quite fit. The roses that amazingly still bud and flower on the trellises in this bright October sunlight look too red, too raw. You can almost smell the paint, and hear the bellowing voice of the Queen of Hearts. No! No! Sentence first—verdict afterwards.

  Much of what happened after John Arthur became Prime Minister seemed so traditional that at first even the skeptics were reassured: the marches, the brass bands, the jamborees, the re-planting of public parks, the resumption of longer pub opening hours, the improvement of the roads and the railways. Economic prosperity, although it didn’t arrive immediately, already seemed to be on its way.

  The arrests certainly came. The few remaining communist and socialist MPs were immediately deprived of their seats—after the years of riots, strikes and disturbances, that only seemed like a sensible precaution. Left wing newspapers like the Manchester Guardian were the subject of firebomb attacks, and bookshops and news vendors soon took the hint that i
t was better not to stock them. The Jews and the Irish were the subject of intimidation. Homosexuals were still routinely beaten up. In fact, in many ways, little had changed. At this early stage in the dream of Greater Britain, it was often the groups John Arthur was soon to eradicate who pleaded loudest for his protection.

  At this time, Britain was still supposedly a democracy. There were debates in Parliament, and for a while even a Cabinet of sorts. But John Arthur plainly had little time for the fripperies of a discredited political system. He was too busy actually governing the country. In his first weeks in power, he passed by acclamation—the few more bothersome MPs who might have voted according to their conscience being conveniently ill or missing—a short Enabling Bill that built upon the foundation of Chamberlain’s Emergency Powers Act to the extent that he could rule by decree. Legally, nothing had changed; the courts still continued to translate the law. In a country without any written constitution, John Arthur took a cautious and legalistic route towards dictatorship.

  For a while, people still talked about a time when they might choose not to vote for John Arthur and give the Tories or even Labour another bash. But a series of convenient events arose to secure Modernist power more deeply. In India, a scandal-embroiled Gandhi was arrested and soon after supposedly committed suicide in his cell. As they had been in the previous century, concentration camps were established there, then in Southern Africa and many other colonies. In Britain, it was a time of whispers, for re-examining one’s friends and neighbours. In schools, there was generally at least one committed Modernist master who would report any colleagues he perceived to be pedalling decadent or inaccurate teaching to the EA-dominated Local Education Authorities. Anxious to keep our jobs, the rest of us readily towed the line and amended our syllabuses in accordance with the new nationally coordinated instructions; we never quite seemed to cross the line of realising that we were peddling Modernist lies.

  Despite the thrill of the fresh new vision that was gripping the country, there was an atmosphere of almost perpetual crisis. A plot to kill John Arthur by a bomb was narrowly averted, and at the trial several famous names from the political past were implicated, although Churchill himself had left for America by the time the police arrived at Chartwell to question him. The climax of it all, now commemorated in nursery-rhyme, song and pier-end tableau, took place on the night of 23 June 1933, just before an ailing King George and Queen Mary were due to head north from Old Buckingham Palace to Balmoral. A series of virtually simultaneous fire-bomb explosions crackled across the palace at ten o-clock that evening. Much older inside than out, conveniently stacked with draughty passages, plaster ceilings and ancient furniture, the vast building went up like a torch, lighting the overcast skies as far off as Kingston and Bromley with a baleful glow. In the atmosphere of permanent national crisis and suspicion, the fire and the Westminster Fire Brigade’s abysmally slow response came as less of a surprise than it should have done. It seemed only to prove that there was much that was deeply wrong with our nation, much that still needed to be done. Even the discovery of the charred bodies of King George and Queen Mary amid the glowing ruins seemed more emblematic than real; like a tragedy that took place long ago in some half-forgotten land.

  There were many arrests, many strong measures, many disappearances after the fire, but the expected trial of the guilty parties never came, although by common consent they were Irish. It was as if this event was too large to be dragged into the dull glare of a specific reality and blamed on one particular group of men. In the classrooms, in back rooms, in the barbers and the chip shops, in the official files, on the EA posters, in our mistrust of strangers and our continued need for aggressive security, the fire at Old Buckingham Palace has currency to this day. Am I the only person who is convinced that it was done with the connivance of the Empire Alliance? No, of course not. But I imagine that the EA probably did find some Irishmen who wanted to score a point against a neighbouring country which openly supported Loyalist terrorists in their own north. With a gate left open, an easy passage through customs, things would just seem to fall into their laps. So much easier to get someone else to do your dirty work for you. It’s the Modernist way.

  Edward VIII was crowned King, and toasted warmly in Westminster’s Great Hall by Mussolini, and Old Buckingham Palace in ruins remained at least as big a draw as it had been standing. Soon, sightseers began to clamber over the railings, searching for souvenir scraps of plaster as they wandered amid the blackened hallways and fallen beams. Of course, this was incredibly dangerous, but John Arthur captured the national mood when he suggested that, rather than have the old Place restored or demolished, the remains should be shored up and re-landscaped as a public park so that we could all go there. Few people had any affection for the drab acres of Green Park just across Resolution-nee-Constitution Hill, anyway. It would be the perfect site for a new palace.

  For all its aspirational spires, towers and glittering domes, New Buckingham Palace looks rather like an immense greenhouse. Within a couple of years of its construction, it was overlooked by the Victory Spire at the corner of Park Lane. With London and the shining Thames spreading below and the certainties of Modernism filling their hearts, day trippers on the viewing platform could peer down at the Palace through penny telescopes to see if they could see the King, or perhaps Queen Wallis. And they could wonder out loud why he had to marry her when she was, let’s face it, used goods, and he could have had any fancy tart in the world for the asking.

  Looking around for something more filling than smoked salmon sandwiches, light-headed as my belly growls and premonitions of pain begin to dance around me, I recognise a famous face as I make my way between the pools and fountains.

  “Personally, I can’t stand fiddling around with plates and standing up at the same time,” he says affably. “Strikes me as a foreign habit.”

  I nod. Deputy Prime Minister Arkwright looks small and ordinary in the flesh, almost exactly like his pictures, even without the pipe and the Homburg. In fact, he really hasn’t changed that much from the man I glimpsed standing with John Arthur all those years ago at the Cottage Spring. He was probably born cherubically plump, going-on-fifty.

  “Hmm. Oxford,” he says when I tell him who I am. “You know, I still wish I’d had a University education. And you know John from way back?”

  “I taught him briefly when he was a child,” I reply, conscious of the rainbowed sun gleaming through the fountain spray on Arkwright’s blood-threaded cheeks, the strange intensity of his gaze, even as he chomps a handful of cocktail sausages. William Arkwright’s the EA’s comic turn, shouldering the blame for fiascos like the Cyprus Adventure that go so badly wrong they can’t be hushed up. He’s frequently seen on the arms of busty actresses. But he’s Deputy Prime Minister and Home Secretary. He’s the second most famous face in the country, even if he trails the first by a long way. He can hardly have come this far by accident.

  “That’s interesting,” he says. “John’s always so quiet about his past. When you get to meet him, you make sure you remind him of that. I keep telling him he should stop all those dreadful books being written about him.” Another handful of sausages. Arkwright chews them, waving the greasy sticks. “Of course, no one gives a bugger about my upbringing. It’s called charisma, I suppose. Some us have to make do with hard work.”

  “Did you ever think you’d get this far?”

  Arkwright tilts his head as the water clatters over the green copper dolphins behind us. From the way he studies my lips, I realise he’s slightly deaf. “What was it Cromwell said about those who don’t know where they’re going rising the furthest?”

  “It was something like that.”

  “Well, he was right. I’m permanently lost, Mr. Brook. Permanently amazed. Although I know I don’t look it…”

  I nod. I’d never realised how oddly difficult it is to talk to someone famous, that sense of knowing them even though you don’t, and the way Arkwright’s looking at me as i
f there really is something shared between us… Then I realise what’s happening—and immediately wish I hadn’t. It’s there in his eyes. It’s in that smile of his and the way he studies me. After all these years, I’ve finally met someone else who knows the truth about John Arthur.

  We gaze at each other. I swallow a sudden mouthful of saliva.

  “What do you think of John Arthur, Mr. Brook?”

  “What?”

  “What do you think of John Arthur. I know it’s been a long time, but do you like him personally?”

  “He has my… admiration.”

  “Admiration.” He slurps his wine and savours the word, then points the rim of the glass towards my face. “I suppose that’s about as much as any of us can hope for…”

  Deputy Prime Minister William Arkwright smiles at me. Then he pretends to see someone else he recognises over my shoulder, and waddles away through the rainbowed haze.

  Still wandering half an hour later, re-fortified by tablets and what food I could find, grimly determined to make the most of these last days before dissolution or trial or public shame or private agony or whatever else awaits me, I come across Father Phelan standing alone in a long chilly room inside the Palace where the pillars are entwined with wrought-iron ivy. He catches the click of my new shoes on the tiled floor before I can head off in another direction.

  “The Professor!” he calls, waving a bottle of Johnnie Walker. “Would you care for one? A wee sip? Sorry I’m without any glasses.”

  I shake my head and stand looking at him as he sways mirrored amid glass cases containing the relics of Empire; rifles, claymores and assegai, torn and bloodstained flags that men once gave their lives for.

  “A fine fella, the King—but smaller in the flesh, don’t you think, Professor? Can’t say that I much admire his choice in women, either.”

  I nod, and make to turn away.

  “Don’t go yet, Professor! Don’t go! I’ve been meaning to ask you. Did you really know John Arthur?”