A Dream of Wessex (5 page)

There were some assistants standing around in the shop - three young men with fashionably pale skin, and dressed in sweatshirts and loose, baggy shorts - but none of them seemed anxious for his custom, being involved in a conversation on the other side of the store. Harkman went outside again, and looked once more at the skimmers on sale.

The ideal craft had a combination of strength, balance and speed; the lower planes should be polished, the upper should be rough-grained enough for the rider’s feet to gain a firm grip even when the skimmer was waterlogged. The engine-housing had to be flat and streamlined, the tanks distributed so that as the fuel was used up the balance of the craft was not disturbed. The whole craft, fully fuelled and with the engine installed, should be light enough for a strong man to carry, yet heavy enough to provide stability when the same man was standing on it in rough water. There was no perfect or standard tide-skimmer; the rider’s demands of the best craft were as personal as the choice of a spouse.

Harkman sampled several more skimmers, taking them from the stack and balancing them as best he could in his hands. He looked in through the shop doorway, but the assistants continued to show no interest in him. He wished he could take one or two selected craft out on the water, to see how they handled.

He glanced at his wristwatch, and saw that he ought to return to the Commission. He took down one more tide-skimmer and held it in both hands above his head, but now each one felt like the one before it.

‘Do you want to buy a skimmer?’

Harkman turned, thinking that one of the assistants had at last come forward, but the speaker was a young woman, standing in the shadow of the awning.

‘I’ve been watching you,’ she said. ‘You don’t look like the usual sort of buyer. Our skimmers are much cheaper.’

Harkman went across to her, and recognized her as the attractive but rather dishevelled girl he’d seen on the quay the evening before.

‘You sell skimmers too?’ he said.

‘We make them. They’re hand-made, and can be finished exactly as you want them.’

‘The problem is I don’t really know what I want. It’s been a long time since I did any wave-riding.’

‘Then try a few. We’ve got a lot of samples.’

‘Are they here?’

At that moment, two of the assistants came through the doorway of the shop and walked quickly across to them.

‘You!’ shouted one of them, jabbing the girl roughly on her shoulder. ‘Get the hell out of here! We’ve told you before.’

She stepped back into the sunlight, and Harkman turned to face the man.

‘We were just talk ...’

‘We know what she wants. Can we help you, sir?’

Harkman said: ‘No.’

He turned his back on the two men, and followed the girl. She was smiling.

‘Did they hurt you?’ he said.

‘I’m used to it. What about our skimmers? Are you interested?’

‘I’d like to see some, but I’m late for an appointment. Will you be here tomorrow?’

‘I could be. That’s our stall there.’ She pointed to the craft- stall, overlooking the harbour. ‘But we don’t sell skimmers in the town, because we’re not licensed for them. Why don’t you come up to the Castle? You could see everything we have there.’

‘You mean Maiden Castle?’ Harkman said, and looked at once across the bay towards the green mound on the promontory.

‘Yes.’ She was a pretty girl, about twenty-seven years old, Harkman supposed. He looked at her plain, unflattering smock, her tangled hair, her grimy legs and feet.

‘I’ll go to the Castle tomorrow,’ he said. ‘How will I find you?’

‘Ask any of the others. I’m Julia.’

‘Do you want my name?’

‘I’ll remember you,’ she said, staring, down at the boats in the harbour.

‘I’m David Harkman,’ he said, but she seemed not to be listening. She walked away from him, not looking back, and Harkman felt she had lost interest.

Then she said: ‘I’ll wait until you arrive,’ but still she did not look back at him.

A large yacht had just berthed in the harbour, and a crowd was gathering by her stall.

The Commissioner in Dorchester was a man named Peter Borovidn. Russian name but English blood, back through three generations. Before leaving London, Harkman had found out what he could about the man, but it wasn’t much. His reading of what he had learned was that Borovitin had risen in the Regional Service more on the strength of his family name than for any individual qualities within the Party. It suited the Soviet to administer the regions with native-born Englishmen, but Harkman had heard that at least a half of the Commissioners presently in service were Slav either in name or ancestry.

By repute, Borovitin was a good Commissioner, administering the Dorchester area of Wessex fairly and competently, if unimaginatively.

The interview in Borovitin’s office - a sunny but bare room on the top floor of the Commission building, with a huge photograph of the Supreme President glaring down from the wall - was a brief one. Either Borovitin disliked Harkman, or he was not interested in him, but he seemed anxious to be finished.

After he had read Harkman’s letter of introduction from the head of the Bureau, Borovitin stared heavily at him for at least a minute.

At last he said: ‘What kind of research are you intending to do, Mr Harkman?’

‘At first I want to do a lot of reading. Newspapers, local-government files, and so on. This will give me an insight into the way the island is run. Later I want to talk to local people. It will involve a certain amount of travelling.’ Borovitin was still staring at him, so Harkman added: ‘Is there likely to be any restriction on my movements, sir?’

‘Not if you get my authorization first. Where are you going?’ Harkman knew if his project was to be done at all realistically, he would eventually have to visit every part of Wessex, but he also knew that unless he kept his early expectations modest he would find his movements strictly watched or controlled by the regime.

‘I shall be staying in Dorchester for a few months at least,’ he said. ‘Perhaps next year I will need to visit Plymouth.’

Borovitin nodded, and Harkman felt that his approach had been correct. But then Borovitin said: ‘I don’t know what you expect to find in Dorchester.’

‘There are-Commission archives, sir. Those will be a major source for my work. And I’d like to visit Maiden Castle.’

‘Why?’

The response came so quickly that Harkman was taken off-guard.

He said: ‘Is there any reason why I should not, sir?’

‘No.’ Borovitin was glancing over the introductory letter again, as if the first time he read it he had missed something of relevance. ‘I don’t see why you need to go there.’

‘It’s historically of importance and interest.’ Borovitin was staring at him again; suspicion or disinterest? Harkman went on: ‘With the greatest respect, sir, I dare say that you have not worked in sociology. In the ancient past, Maiden Castle was a more important place than Dorchester. I believe that during the years Wessex was isolated from the rest of England Maiden Castle would have reverted to a role of great strategic and sociological importance.’

‘You don’t need my authorization to go there,’ Borovitin said flatly.

This time Harkman stared back, aware that the Commissioner was not as disconcerted as he was by long silences. The reason he had offered for wanting to go to the Castle had been impromptu, but he felt he had produced an authentic-sounding reply. The fact was that he had to visit the Castle to fulfil some deeper, unspecified need, and he had no explanation for that.

And there was another reason now: to see the girl, to buy a tide-skimmer.

‘About the archives, sir,’ he said in the end, no longer ill at ease under the Commissioner’s bland scrutiny, but anxious to bring the interview to an end. ‘Could I have your authority to inspect the Commission records?’

‘You’ll have to file a formal application. See Mander.’

‘But I understood that the archives were under the jurisdiction of a Mr Cro. It was he who wrote to confirm my appointment.’

‘All administrative functions are channelled through Mr Mander.’

A few minutes later, Harkman found the office that had been allocated to him for his use. Although it was quite large, and the previous occupant had cleared it out thoroughly, Harkman disliked the room immediately. It had only one window, and although it could be opened it was set high in the wall and only by standing on a chair could he see out. The effect of it was, as Harkman reflected as he tried it for the first time, that he could sit all day under the sterile glare of fluorescent strip- lights, and smell the fragrance of flowers, hear the buzzing of insects, and listen to the sounds of the holidaymakers walking in the narrow sunlit street outside.

Donald Mander came to see him, and Harkman’s first impressions of the man were favourable. He was a florid-faced middle-aged man, with just a few wisps of hair feathering his pink, shiny head. He laughed a lot - although Harkman guessed it was intended to put him at his ease - and had what appeared to be a noncommittal and cynical way of describing the office routines and personnel.

‘Commissioner Borovitin tells me I must file an application for use of the archives through you.’

‘That’s right, yes.’

‘Then could you take it that I have applied? I’d like to start as soon as possible.’

‘You’ll need a form, Harkman. I’ll look one out for you, and send it down.’

Mander had brought a chair with him from the next office, and the swivel-joint was creaking as he changed his position.

‘Couldn’t I just have a note typed out?’ Harkman said.

‘It has to be on the proper form,’ Mander said, and laughed. Harkman thought that anyone who found that idea funny must have been working too long in one place.

He said: ‘I gather Mr Cro is in charge of the archives.’

‘I’ll introduce you to him later. Yes, the archives are his responsibility.’

From the mosque across the street, the muezzin called over the rooftops. The eerie, rising voice reminded Harkman of his short visit to the embassy in the Western States. It was the Muslim culture in North America that he had found the strangest of all strange things he had noticed in the trip. Five times daily the nation prostrated itself and prayed towards the east. It was as if the once independent America had to pay daily homage to a greater power than Allah, the power of oil-dollars, the power that had eventually absorbed a culture. This mosque in Dorchester, like the others in the main tourist centres of Wessex, was only a gesture to that power, but a reminder to the English, to the Wessexmen, of the alternatives to socialism.

‘Perhaps I could meet Mr Cro?’ Harkman said, wishing there was an alternative to this.

Mander swivelled in his chair again. ‘Of course. And I’ll show you round the building at the same time.’

The day passed slowly, and at the end of it Harkman was tired and irritable. The only positive thing he had to show for his day’s efforts was that Cro had lent him a part of the index to the archives. As it was barely more than a list of numbers, it wasn’t much better than nothing.

After leaving the Commission in the evening, and having declined an invitation to drinks with Mander and some of his colleagues, Harkman went for a long, solitary stroll around the town.

It was curious that the relaxed mood of the resort did not penetrate to the Commission offices. It was like one of the smaller administrative government offices in London that he had sometimes come up against; one was constantly reminded of form and manner and priorities, as if the Supreme President of the Soviet was expected at any moment.

Only in the front office, where there were public counters, was there any hint that Dorchester was the most fashionable resort in the country; here the large windows looked out across a tree-filled square, where there were two cafes and where several painters were at work. In the mornings the sun shone in, and all day there would be queues in the two carefully separated areas. In one, English nationals - Party employees, local residents and immigrant workers - came in and out to collect items of mail, to register for State employment funds, to buy licences for trade, and to submit to various other demands on their time and attention; at the other desk, States tourists could apply for visas to visit the English mainland, and their colourful clothes and relaxed manner made a noticeable contrast.

Harkman stood behind the counters for several minutes to watch this ordinary business of the Commission, but instead he had been distracted by the pervasive mood of leisure beyond the plate glass windows.

He walked out of the centre of the town and went towards Poundbury Camp to the north, and stood for a long time watching the little yachts from Charminster across the inlet. Charminster, unlike its larger and more cosmopolitan neighbour, catered with its State-controlled hotels and villas for English families, who travelled to Wessex by a route that took them to the north coast of the island and passed nowhere near Dorchester.

Glancing back towards Dorchester, Harkman thought of the pictures he had seen of the town that had once stood on the same site. All the buildings of Old Dorchester had gone, and all their ancient associations with them. Those that had not been shaken down in the earthquakes had been flooded in the subsidence. The new Dorchester was a successful compromise between strength and amenity, between function and aesthetic. Although no tremors had been felt in the region for more than forty years the law required every building to be capable of withstanding an earth shock of 6 on the Richter Scale; equally, every new building had to blend with the planners’ conception of a holiday centre. Accordingly, the reinforced steel and concrete shells of the buildings were faced with plaster and stucco and whitewash; the balconies and terraces overlooking the sea were integral parts of the tensioned skeletons, and yet were decorated with wrought-iron filigrees, and pinewood panels, and trailing abundant greenery; the windows were laminated, the roofs were prefabricated in one piece to appear as if tiled, and the streets, although charmingly narrow and cobbled, were straight enough and wide enough to allow emergency service vehicles access to any part of the town.