Rupert Thomson - Divided Kingdom

I had been a member of the Parry household for about twelve months when a brown envelope arrived in the post. Victor took one look at the scarlet peacock stamped in the top left-hand corner and passed the letter to Marie, then he went and stood by the kitchen window. I watched Marie’s dark eyes skim the half a dozen lines of type. I was being summoned to the Ministry of Health and Social Security, she told me. She didn’t think it was anything to fret about, just a routine interview, but the air in the room had stretched tight, which told me there was probably more to it than that.

When the day came, Marie walked me down to the Ministry, an imposing edifice of glass, flint and pale stone that backed directly on to the river. It was April or May, a chill wind blowing. The Red Quarter’s flag snapped and shuddered on its pole. As we climbed the wide, shallow steps to the entrance I tilted my head back and looked up at the roof, and the rapid flight of clouds past the eaves gave me the impression that the building was falling on top of me. My hand in Marie’s, I hurried onwards, through the double-doors. The hallway in which we found ourselves had the atmosphere and dimensions of an atrium, the space filled with the whisper of voices, the slither of shoes and also with an inexplicable ghostly laughter, and all these sounds seemed to swarm and mingle in the air above us. We reported to reception and were told to take a seat. A man in a dark-grey suit appeared in front of us just moments later.

‘Thomas Parry?’

Smiling at Marie, he asked her to wait where she was. He led me through a roped-off area guarded by a man in a maroon uniform, then past a bank of lifts and on into a maze of open-plan offices. As we walked, he asked me all about myself — how old I was, where I went to school, what I was going to do in the holidays. Though there was nothing original about his line of questioning, he seemed relaxed and jovial, which put me at my ease. At last we reached a door. He knocked twice with a crooked forefinger, then drew the door open and ushered me inside. Installed behind a desk was a stout woman with pink cheeks.

‘Sit down, Thomas,’ she said.

My stomach slowly turned over. ‘Miss Groves. What are you doing here?’

She smiled. ‘I work for the Ministry.’

‘But I thought —’

‘You thought I belonged at Thorpe Hall,’ she said. ‘I was just there temporarily, the same as you. How are you settling in?’

‘Fine, thanks.’

‘And your father? How’s he?’

I watched Miss Groves across the desk. The transformation she had undergone since I last saw her reminded me of the fairy tale where the grandmother is actually a wolf. I thought about Victor with his pair of scissors and his silver shoe, and somehow I trusted him more, even though he had been trying to hide things from me. I felt that his lie was visible whereas hers was not and I decided that while it would be politic to appear to be cooperating I would say as little as possible.

‘It’s difficult,’ I said.

Miss Groves leaned forwards hungrily, as I had suspected she might. ‘Really? And why’s that?’

‘I don’t see very much of him. He’s working so hard, for the railways.’

‘The railways. That’s right. Is he enjoying it?’

‘Oh yes. Sometimes, on my way to bed, I stop outside his door. There’s always music on, some kind of singing usually, and he’ll be studying his plans.’ I looked down into my lap and wrinkled my forehead, as if I were thinking. Abruptly my forehead cleared and I looked up again. ‘Sometimes he even chuckles to himself.’

I’m not sure why I said that. It wasn’t true. But somehow I felt that Victor was under threat, and needed protecting.

Without taking her eyes off me, Miss Groves straightened in her chair. ‘And your sister Marie? What about Marie?’

‘We get on really well’.

‘No sign of melancholy?’ Miss Groves said casually.

I shook my head.

‘No hints of phlegm or choler?’

‘No.’

Her short pale fingers began to peck viciously at the keys on her computer like a flock of blind hens eating grain. From time to time she glanced up at me suspiciously, as though she expected to catch me in the middle of an indiscretion.

At last she closed the file and sat back. ‘Do you remember our final lesson together,’ she said, ‘when I read to you about the sanguine temperament?’

‘“The paragon of complections,” ’ I said. ‘ “The prince of all temperatures.” ’

‘Very good.’ Miss Groves’s eyes glowed, just as they had glowed in the ballroom at Thorpe Hall, with the chandeliers trembling above our heads and the men in armour watching us sidelong, across their cheeks. ‘And to the best of your knowledge, Thomas,’ she said, ‘is that what you see around you?’

For some reason I thought of Mr Page just then, conjuring him up so vividly that I even caught a whiff of perchloroethylene.

‘Yes, Miss Groves,’ I said. ‘That’s exactly what I see.’

I would have been roughly eleven when Victor took me on my first field trip. As we climbed into his clapped-out four-door saloon that morning I thought once again what an unconventional car it was — unconventional for the Red Quarter, that is, sanguine people having little or no attachment to decay — though, knowing Victor, he would probably have argued that the old banger was proof of his optimistic nature, since he firmly believed that it was going to last for ever. I remember asking him if he was taking me to the office. The office? he said. No, not today. He grinned at me across one shoulder. Knowing better than to press him on the subject, I settled back and watched as we reversed past a wall smothered in convolvulus, the limp white bells brushing against the side of the car. In the end, I was happy just to be going somewhere with him.

We didn’t talk much during the journey. We never had talked much. I often felt the pressure of his curiosity, though, especially since I received my first summons to the Ministry. There had been other interviews, of course — like visits to the dentist, they occurred at regular intervals and filled me with a sense of trepidation — and I had stuck to my theme, embroidering a little when I thought it appropriate — how grateful I was to have been placed with such a wonderfully sanguine family, how lucky I had been, and so on — but I had never mentioned the content of these interviews to Victor, nor had he asked. His was a silent insistence. It was as though he was trying to get me to own up to something, but without compromising himself, without committing himself in any way. At the same time there was the feeling that if nothing was said then everything must be all right and we could go on as we were.

After driving for an hour, we turned along a one-lane road that led to a modest red-brick railway station.

‘It’s derelict,’ Victor said, ‘but not for much longer, I hope.’

We stepped out of the car into hazy sunlight.

The line used to serve an area of the country that was now the Blue Quarter, Victor told me, but as a result of the Rearrangement it had been suspended and the station had become irrelevant. In his opinion, though, it could be resurrected. With a bit of imagination and some capital investment, it could be turned into a junction station for the Red Quarter’s new southwestern network.

Ignoring the danger signs with their jagged lightning bolts and hollow skulls, we struck out across the tracks, the silver of the rails concealed by rust. We climbed down into a urine-stained underpass, our feet crunching on broken glass. We stood thoughtfully on silent platforms. Weeds flowered among the sleepers. The smell of buddleia and cow parsley was everywhere. But Victor’s eyes were darting about, and I knew that his vision had come alive. He was imagining the trains that would pass through the station, some pausing, others rushing on towards the coast. He could already hear the power humming in the insulators that hung like grubby concertinas above our heads.