England, England

by Julian Barnes

  Martha had reduced the Governor’s support staff, cut his transport to a single landau, and relocated him to more appropriate quarters. Paul had protested that some of her actions – like insisting that Sir Jack’s new PA be male – were merely vindictive. There had been rows. Sir Jack’s pouts had been Victorish, his sulks theatrical, his phone bill Wagnerian. Martha had declined to authorize it. Equally she had refused him permission to give interviews, not even to the newspapers he still owned. He was allowed his uniform, his title, and certain ritual appearances. That was enough in her view.

  The wrangling over Sir Jack’s rights and privileges – or sequestrations and humiliations, as he preferred – had helped obscure the fact that Martha’s appointment as CEO actually changed very little. It had been a necessary act of self-defence to replace an egomaniacal autocracy with a relatively accountable oligarchy; yet the Project itself had scarcely been affected. The financial structures had been the work of an expert wearing HM Treasury braces; while any adjustments to Concept Development and Visitor Targeting were minimal. Stolid Jeff and twinkling Mark had remained in position. The main difference between the previous and current CEOs was that Sir Jack Pitman vociferously believed in his product whereas Martha Cochrane privately did not.

  ‘Still, if a venal Pope could run the Vatican …’ She had just said it, like that, at the end of a tiring day. Paul had looked at her with hot eyes. He disapproved of any flippancy about the Island.

  ‘I think that’s a stupid comparison. And anyway, I shouldn’t think the Vatican did run better with a corrupt Pope. On the contrary.’

  Martha had given an inward sigh. ‘I expect you’re right.’ Once they had made common cause against Sir Jack, which should have cemented their partnership. It seemed to have had the opposite effect. Did Paul genuinely believe in England, England? Or was his loyalty a sign of residual guilt?

  ‘I mean, we could call in your underemployed chum Dr Max and ask his views on whether large political and religious organisations are best run by idealists or cynics or down-to-earth practical people. I’m sure he’d have some long-winded opinions.’

  ‘Forget it. You’re right. We’re not running the Catholic Church here.’

  ‘That’s perfectly evident.’

  She couldn’t bear his tone, which seemed pedantic and self-righteous. ‘Look, Paul, this has turned into an argument already, and I don’t know why. I usually don’t nowadays. But if we’re discussing cynicism, ask yourself how far Sir Jack would have got without a hefty streak of it.’

  ‘That’s cynical too.’

  ‘Then I give up.’

  Now, in her office, she thought: Paul’s right in one sense. I regard the Island as no more than a plausible and well-planned means of making money. Yet I probably run it as well as Pitman would have done. Is this what offends Paul?

  She crossed to her window and looked out at the Premier view which had once been Sir Jack’s. Below her, in a cobbled street overhung by half-timbering, Visitors turned away from deferential hawkers and pedlars to watch a shepherd drive his flock to market. In the mid-distance, sun glinted on the solar panels of a double-decker bus parked by the Stacpoole Marital Memorial Pool; on the village green behind, a cricket match was in progress, with someone running up to bowl. Above, in the only part of her view not owned by Pitco, an Islandair jet banked to give half its payload a farewell glimpse of Tennyson Down.

  Martha turned away with a frown and a tightness in her jaw. Why was everything back to front? She could make the Project work, even though she didn’t believe in it; then, at the end of the day, she returned home with Paul to something she believed in, or wanted and tried to believe in, yet didn’t seem able to make work at all. She was there, alone, without defences, without distancing, irony, cynicism, she was there, alone, in simple contact, yearning, anxious, seeking happiness as best she could. Why did it not come?

  MARTHA HAD BEEN INTENDING to sack Dr Max for months. Not for any observable breach of contract: indeed, the Project Historian’s punctuality and positive attitudes would have impressed any corporate assessor. Moreover, Martha was fond of him, and had long ago seen through his prickliness and irony. She thought of him now as someone afraid of simplicity, and that fear touched her.

  His flouncing departure over the Hood repositioning had fortunately proved a mere huff, an act of rebellion which had, if anything, reinforced his loyalty to the Project. But that very loyalty had now become a problem. Dr Max had been engaged to help Develop the Concept; but once the Concept had been Developed and Pitman House transferred to the Island, he had simply come with it. In a shadow move, Country Mouse had transferred his column to The Times of London (published from Ryde). No-one seemed to notice or object; not even Jeff. So the Historian currently sat in an office two floors below Martha, with full research capacity at his buffed and occasionally lacquered fingertips. Anyone, Pitmanite or Visitor, could call his office for guidance on any historical matter. His presence and purpose were advertised in every hotel-room briefing pack. A bored client on the cheapest weekend break could confront Dr Max and argue Saxon strategy at the Battle of Hastings for as long as he liked, entirely free of charge.

  The trouble was, nobody ever did. The Island had achieved its own dynamic; the interchange between Visitors and Experiences needed fine-tuning on a pragmatic rather than theoretical basis; and so the role of the Project Historian had simply become … historical. This, at any rate, was what Martha, as CEO, was preparing to tell Dr Max when she summoned him to her office. He entered it, as he always did, with one eye cocked for the size of the studio audience. Just Miss Cochrane? Well, then, a high-level těte-à-těte. Dr Max’s demeanour was sleek and blithe; it seemed bad manners to remind him that his existence was precarious and marginal.

  ‘Dr Max,’ Martha began, ‘are you happy with us?’

  The Project Historian chuckled, settled himself professorially, brushed a probably non-existent crumb from a hounds-tooth lapel, stuck his thumbs in his thunder-grey suede waistcoat, and crossed his legs in a manner proposing a far longer occupancy of his chair than Martha had intended. Then he did what few other Pitco employees, from the briefest Backdrop yokel to Deputy Governor Sir Percy Nutting himself, would have done: he took the question at face value.

  ‘H–appiness, Miss Cochrane, is very interesting from an h–istorical point of view. In my three decades as one of the most I dare not say pre-eminent but certainly visible sculptors and moulders of young minds, I have become familiar with a large variety of intellectual misconceptions, of brushwood which has to be burnt off before the soil of the mind can be tilled, of piffle and garbage, frankly. Categories of error are as multi-hued as Joseph’s coat, but the greatest and grossest of these tend to lodge under the following naïveté: that the past is really just the present in fancy dress. Strip away those bustles and crinolines, doublet and hose, those rather haute couture togas, and what do you discover? People remarkably like us, whose sweet essential hearts beat just like Mama’s. Peer inside their slightly under-illuminated brains and you discover a range of half-formed notions, which, when fully formed, become the underpinnings of our proud modern democratic states. Examine their vision of the future, imagine their hopes and their fears, their little dreamings about how life will be many centuries after their deaths, and you will see a dimly perceived version of our own delightful lives. To put it crudely, they want to be us. All piffle and garbage, of course. Am I going too fast for you?’

  ‘With you so far, Dr Max.’

  ‘Good. Now it has been my pl–easure – if a rather brutal pl–easure at times, but let’s not be over-moralistic about condemning it – to take my trusty little sickle and hack away at some of this brushwood of the developing mind. And in the pastureland of egregious error none is more tenacious, more unkillable – one thinks of ground elder, no, better, of the omnivorous kudzu vine – than the assumption that the swoony little heart which pitapats within the modern body has always been there. That sentimentally we ar
e immutable. That courtly love was merely a crude forerunner of snogging in the bus-shelter, if that is what the young still get up to, don’t ask me.

  ‘Well, let us examine those M–iddle Ages which needless to say did not view themselves as m–iddle. Let us, for the sake of precision, take France between the tenth and thirteenth centuries. A fine and forgotten civilization which built the great cathedrals, established the chivalric ideals, tamed the vicious human beast for a while, produced the chansons de geste – not everyone’s idea of a good night out, but still – and, in short, laid down a faith, a political system, manners, taste. And all to what end, I ask my little dwellers in brushwood. To what end did they trade, marry, build, and create? Because they wanted to be happy? They would have laughed at the pettiness of such ambition. They sought salvation, not happiness. Indeed, they would have viewed our modern idea of happiness as something approaching sin, and certainly an obstacle to salvation. Whereas …’

  ‘Dr Max –’

  ‘Whereas, if we were to fast-forward …’

  ‘Dr Max.’ Martha felt she needed a buzzer – no, a klaxon, an ambulance siren. ‘Dr Max, we shall have to fast-forward completely, I’m afraid. And without wishing to sound like one of your students, I must ask you to address my question.’

  Dr Max took his thumbs out of his waistcoat, brushed both lapels for phantom bacteria, and looked at Martha with that studio petulance – apparently good-humoured but implying severe lèse-majesté – which he had perfected in his struggle with hustling TV anchors. ‘Which, if I may make so b–old, was?’

  ‘I just wanted to know, Dr Max, if you were happy with us.’

  ‘Precisely wh–ere I was h–eading. If circuitously, to your mind. To simplify what is an essentially complicated position, though I realize, Miss Cochrane, that you are no brushwood brain, I would answer thus. I am not “happy” in the bus-shelter-snogging sense. I am not happy as the modern world chooses to define happiness. Indeed, I would say that I am happy because I deride that modern conception. I am happy, to use that unavoidable term, precisely because I do not seek happiness.’

  Martha was silent. How strange that she could be made to feel gravity and simplicity by such effervescence and delighted paradox. With only a touch of mockery, she asked, ‘So do you seek salvation, Dr Max?’

  ‘Good God, no. I’m far too much of a pagan for that, Miss Cochrane. I seek … pleasure. So much more reliable than happiness. So much better defined, and yet, so much more complicated. Its discontents so beautifully etched. You could call me, if you wished, a pragmatic pagan.’

  ‘Thank you, Dr Max,’ said Martha, rising. He evidently hadn’t understood the meaning of her question; nevertheless, his answer had been one she unknowingly needed.

  ‘I trust you enjoyed out little ch–at,’ said Dr Max, as if he had been the host. One of his most reliable pleasures was talking about himself, and he also believed that pleasures should be shared.

  Martha smiled at the closing door. She envied Dr Max his blitheness. Anyone else would have guessed why she had called him in. The Official Historian might disdain salvation in its higher sense, but he had just unwittingly obtained a lesser, temporal version of it.

  ‘SOMETHING RATHER UNUSUAL, I’m afraid.’ Ted Wag-staff was standing in front of Martha Cochrane’s desk. That morning, she was wearing an olive suit with a white collar-less shirt held at the neck with a gold stud; her earrings were a museum copy of Bactrian gold, her tights from Fogal of Switzerland, her shoes from Ferragamo. All bought at the Tower of London Harrods. Ted Wagstaff was wearing a green sou’wester, oilskins, and waders with the tops rolled down: an outfit baggy enough to conceal any amount of electronic equipment. His complexion was poised between the bucolic and the alcoholic, though whether this came from the outdoor life, from self-indulgence, or from Props she was unable to tell.

  Martha smiled. ‘See where a good education gets you.’

  ‘Beg pardon, Ma’am?’ He looked genuinely puzzled.

  ‘Sorry, Ted. Just dreaming.’ Martha was cross with herself. Just because she remembered his CV. She should have learnt by now that if Ted Wagstaff, Deputy Head (Operations) of Security and Client Feedback Coordinator, arrived looking and speaking like a coastguard, then that was how she should address him. The professional disguise would wear off after a few minutes; she should just be patient.

  This separation – or adhesion – of personality was something the Project had failed to anticipate. Most of its manifestations were harmless; indeed, could be taken to indicate gratifying corporate zeal. For instance, within a few months of Independence, certain members of Backdrop could no longer be addressed as Pitco employees, only as the characters they were paid to inhabit. Their case was initially misdiagnosed. They were thought to be showing signs of discontent, whereas the opposite was the case: they were showing signs of content. They were happy to be who they had become, and didn’t wish to be other.

  Groups of threshers and shepherds – and even some lobstermen – became increasingly reluctant to use company accommodation. They said they preferred to sleep in their tumbledown cottages, despite the absence of modern facilities available at the converted prisons. Some were even asking to be paid in Island currency, having apparently grown attached to the heavy copper coins they played with all day. The situation was being monitored and might throw up a longterm angle for Pitco, such as reduced housing costs; but it also could develop into mere sentimental indiscipline.

  Now it seemed to be spreading beyond Backdrop. Ted Wagstaff was a harmless case, ‘Johnnie’ Johnson and his Battle of Britain squadron more problematic. They claimed that since the Tannoy might honk at any moment and the cry of ‘Scramble!’ go up, it made sense for them to bunk down in Nissen huts beside the runway. Indeed, it would be cowardly and unpatriotic not to. So they would fire up their paraffin stoves, play a final hand of cards, and snuggle down in their fleecy flying jackets, even though part of them must have known Jerry couldn’t possibly mount a surprise attack until Visitors had finished their Great English Breakfasts. Should Martha call an emergency executive about this? Or should they merely congratulate themselves on added authenticity?

  Martha was aware that Ted was watching her patiently.

  ‘Something unusual?’

  ‘Yes, Ma’am.’

  ‘Something that … you’re going to … tell me about?’

  ‘Yes, Ma’am.’

  Another pause.

  ‘Now, perhaps, Ted?’

  The security man shook off his oilskin covering. ‘Well, to put it bluntly, there seems to be a slight problem with the smugglers.’

  ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘They’re smuggling.’

  Martha suppressed, with great difficulty, the carefree, innocent, pure, true laugh that lay within her, something as incorporeal as the breeze, a freak moment of nature, a freshness long forgotten; something so untainted as to induce hysteria.

  Instead, she gravely asked for details. There were three smugglers’ villages on the Island, and reports had been coming in of activities at Lower Thatcham incompatible with Project principles. Visitors to Lower, Upper, and Greater Thatcham were able to observe at close hand aspects of the Island’s traditional trade: the false-bottomed barrels, coins sewn into garment hems, lumps of tobacco disguised as Jersey potatoes. Everything, it seemed, could be disguised as something else: liquor and baccy, silk and grain. As a demonstration of this truth, a piratical fellow would take his cutlass and ease apart the halves of a walnut shell, then draw from the smoothed interior a lady’s glove of eighteenth-century design. Afterwards, at the Trading Centre, Visitors could buy just such a nut – or better still, a pair – whose contents were laser-encoded on its shell. Weeks later, and several thousand miles away, the nutcrackers would be brought out, and amid expressions of wonder the glove would fit the hand that had bought it.

  Recently, it seemed, the Trading Centre at Lower Thatcham had been diversifying. The evidence had been circumstantial at f
irst: the improbable appearance of gold jewellery on a number of the villagers (which at first aroused little suspicion as it was assumed to be inauthentic); a pornographic video left in one of the hotel machines; a quarter-full, unlabelled bottle whose contents were certainly alcoholic and probably toxic. Infiltration and surveillance had revealed the following: the clipping of Island coin and the minting of counterfeit; the secret distillation of a colourless, high-proof spirit from local apples; the pirating of Island guidebooks and forging of official Island souvenirs; the importation of pornography in various forms; and the renting-out of village girls.

  Adam Smith had approved of smuggling, Martha remembered. No doubt he thought it a justifiable extension of the free market, one which merely exploited anomalous differentials of tax and duty. Perhaps he also applauded it as an example of the entrepreneurial spirit. Well, she wouldn’t bother to discuss matters of principle with Ted, who stood there expecting reaction, praise, and orders, like any other employee.

  ‘So what do you think we should do, Ted?’

  ‘Do? Do? Hanging’s too good for them.’ Ted Wagstaff wanted the malefactors whipped, put on the next boat to Dieppe, and dropped off the stern for their eyes to be pecked out by seagulls. He also – his zeal for retribution confusing his grasp of freehold ownership – wanted the cottages of Lower Thatcham torched.

  Justice on the Island was executive rather than juridical, which made it swifter and more flexible. Even so, it had to be the right justice. Not ‘right’ in the old-fashioned sense, but right for the future of the Project. Ted Wagstaff was over-enthusiastic but not a fool: there had to be an element of deterrence in whatever sentence Martha chose.

  ‘Very well,’ she said.

  ‘So we chuck them on the first boat? We torch the village?’

  ‘No, Ted. We give them temporary employment.’

  ‘What? If I may make so bold, Miss Cochrane, that’s pussyfooting. These are serious criminals we’re dealing with.’