Stephen Baxter - Weaver

Julia laughed. 'I imagine it was the same in India under the Raj. Oh, I met one interesting chap. English, I mean. Claimed to be a second cousin of the King.'

'Which king?'

'Well, as Edward and George are brothers, that's rather a silly question, isn't it? In fact this chap is another Edward, viscount something-or-other. Now he's come down from London, and he claimed that there's a theory going around up there that all this is divine retribution.'

'For what?'

She blew smoke out through pursed lips; her lipstick was a little smudged. 'For deposing Edward, of course. That bully Stanley Baldwin – even Churchill thought it was the wrong thing to do. And now England's reaping the whirlwind.'

'What a load of cobblers. This isn't the Middle Ages.'

'Well, it's a point of view. Heydrich rather took to the viscount, I think. He said he admires our aristocracy.'

'A pack of traitors, if you ask me.'

Julia sighed. She crossed to him and wrapped her arms around his waist. He could feel her breath on his neck, the shirt rustling against his back, the smooth firmness of her body only a couple of layers of cloth away from his own. 'Ah, dear George, you are always so browned off, aren't you? You despise most of the English more than you despise the Nazis, I think.'

'Mind my fritters.'

'Oh, to perdition with your beastly fritters.' She pulled at him, turning him around. Her face was close to his, her eyes and mouth wide, and her hair was a golden cloud in the dim light.

'Bloody hell,' he whispered. 'I really am batting above my average with you.'

'You say the most ridiculous things.' Her lips closed on his and her tongue flickered, alive; he tasted cigarette smoke and wine and a hint of spice, the relic of her reception with the Nazis. She grabbed his balls, her moves confident, decisive. 'And do you despise me?' she asked breathily.

'You ask me that every day.'

'You despise what I do. The people I work with. Everything I believe in.' And, it went unsaid, he despised those of her colleagues who had executed his daughter in cold blood. 'And yet here we are. Funny, isn't it?'

'There's nothing funny about this bloody war.'

'Kick me out, then.' She massaged his crotch, while her other hand pressed into the small of his back. 'Go on. Just push me away.'

'You and your bloody games. You're cracked.'

'And you say that every day too. Tell me to leave.'

He took her wrists, and gently disengaged her hands from his body. 'I'll tell you to pack it in for now. Believe it or not I'm hungrier than I'm randy, and those Spam fritters are calling.'

She laughed. She spun away, bunching up her hair behind her head with her hands. 'You do sound your age sometimes. All right, I'll leave you alone. Just make sure you wake me up when you come in from the curfew.'

21 September

They were in a muddy field, once the football pitch attached to a boys' prep school, now fenced off with barbed wire and sentry towers and guns. In the grey light the men stood in their rows like tree stumps, shabby in their battered coats and wooden clogs, with their shaven heads. The Wehrmacht guards walked before them, their rifles in their arms. This was the dawn appell.

The stalag commander walked out and stood before the men. Because this anonymous Sunday was Sea Lion Day, he announced, the first anniversary of the invasion, the prisoners would get a boost to their rations, a bit of pork sausage from their cousins in Bavaria, and the work kommandos would be allowed an additional hour off in the middle of the day. There were the usual ironic cheers from the ranks.

Willis Farjeon, standing tall in his blue RAF greatcoat, murmured, 'Good old Boche with all their memorial days. As long as we get a bit of extra kip they can make a memorial out of anything they like.'

'I bet you'd like to make a memorial out of my arse, you bum bandit,' called one of the men.

Willis turned and grinned. 'And you'd like a lick of my pork sausage, wouldn't you, pongo?'

'Bit early in the morning for that, Betty Grable,' murmured Danny Adams, the SBO, actually an NCO in this other-ranks camp, a blunt scouser of a sergeant-major.

The men calmed down and endured the rest of the appell.

Gary couldn't care less about any of it. He just stood there huddled in a greatcoat that still bore the bloodstains from the day he had been captured a year ago, after only a few hours in combat. He did look for Ben Kamen. The men of the work kommandos tended to cluster together, separate from the 'housewives', as stalag slang had it, the men who remained in the camp. Gary couldn't see Ben today.

Breakfast was a bowl of watery potato soup and a tin mug of the brownish liquid the goons called 'tea'. Then the kommandos filed to the camp gates in their work parties, past the solid buildings that had once housed a headmaster's office, and a medical room where nurses had searched little boys' heads for hair nits, and now a German trooper with a machine gun sat in a corrugated-iron shed on the roof.

At the gates they loaded themselves on their lorries. A young man called Joe Stubbs saw Gary coming and made a show of helping him up into the truck. That was the standing joke with the lads, that Gary, at twenty-six, was an old man, in fact an old Yank.

It was a few miles from the stalag to the old Roman camp at Richborough, where the monument was slowly being built. The men endured the rattling journey in silence.

At Richborough Gary and his mates stripped off their greatcoats and jackets. They got to work. Gary had to mix concrete, shovelling sand and mortar into the maw of a grinding mixer. After a year all the men had long lost their flab. Their elbows and knees were prominent, their faces gaunt.

There were perhaps a hundred men working here, prisoners or civilian labour, in parties scattered around the camp. Richborough had been converted into a construction site, with ramps laid roughly down over the Roman ditches. A steady stream of lorries turned up through the day with rubble core and marble blocks and other supplies, to be unloaded by the workers. At the heart of it all was a forest of scaffolding, from which the four great feet of the double-arch monument were already rising.

It was turning into a dismal autumn day, the sky a grey lid, and a hint of the rain to come prickling in the air. The men grumbled, but Gary didn't mind the work. The physical effort made it easier not to think. But you worked slowly; the stalag diet of spuds and swedes and the odd bit of meat didn't provide enough fuel for anything more than that. It wasn't a pleasant thought that the cold today was a foretaste of the winter to come; the last had been bad enough, and Gary had lost his fat since then.

The men worked, the guards patrolled. Mostly the guards were soldiers of the Wehrmacht. But today, maybe because of the Sea Lion anniversary, the Wehrmacht troops were supplemented by men in khaki uniforms. They had armbands bearing the swastika-on-George's-cross symbol of the Albion protectorate, and when they spoke you could hear accents from Kent and Sussex and Hampshire and even London. These were the Landwacht, a German equivalent of the Home Guard, Englishmen who had volunteered to work for the protectorate authorities. When these characters had first turned up the prisoners had gone out of their way to give them a hard time, trying to knock off their tin hats with bits of hardcore, or spiking the muddy ground with nails embedded in bits of wood. But the Landwacht blokes responded with a ferocity not matched by the Germans, and there had been one occasion when Wehrmacht troops had had to intervene to stop a beating.

After the others were already at work, Willis Farjeon came sauntering over to Gary's group, as blithe as you pleased. 'Morning, pongos,' he said brightly.