A Dream of Wessex

  Mander and Cro lingered by the stall for a few moments, and although the young woman serving noticed their approach she gave no sign of recognition. Mander, who had often remarked to himself on her pretty face and attractive figure, was hoping she might look his way again so that he could give her a secret reassuring smile, but she seemed determined to ignore them.

  At last they walked on, and went up the steps to the patio of Sekker’s Bar.

  As they sat down at a vacant table, a distant explosion sounded across the bay, echoing from Purbeck Island in the south. This was the cannon mounted above Blandford Passage, which was fired twice a day to warn shipping and swimmers of the flood tide. At this hour of the day few people would be swimming, and apart from the fishing boats outside the harbour there were only one or two private yachts in sight. As usual, many people moved to the sea wall at the sound of the cannon, for a first sight of the tidal bore, but it would not be visible for several more minutes.

  Cro said: ‘How much do you know about the new man?’

  ‘Harkman? As much as you.’

  ‘I thought he’d been appointed to your department.’

  Mander shook his head, but vaguely; an evasion, not a denial. ‘He’s working on some kind of research.’

  ‘Is he English?’

  ‘No, British. His mother defected from Scotland.’ Mander looked across the Boulevard, and out to sea. ‘I gather he’s visited the States.’

  Cro nodded as if he knew this already, but said: ‘West or East?’

  ‘Both, so far as I know. Look, I think that must be Nadja Morovin.’

  A man and a young woman were strolling past Sekker’s, arm in arm. The woman whom Mander had indicated, wore a wide-brimmed hat low over her face, but her sleeves were rolled up and her skirt was short, provocatively revealing the pallor of her plump limbs. The glamorous couple were affecting not to notice the fact that she was instantly recognizable, and as they walked slowly through the crowd they seemed not to realize that the people approaching them were stepping unobtrusively to one side. Behind them, people stared openly, and a short way away a young man - apparently a tourist from the States - was taking one photograph after another, using a powerful telephoto lens.

  A few moments later, Mander and Cro lost sight of them as they went into the tide-skimmer shop.

  ‘Isn’t that the hydrofoil?’ Mander said.

  Cro looked out to sea again, then stood up for a better view, even though the patio at Sekker’s gave one of the best panoramas in town. Several hundred people were now standing by the sea wall, waiting to see the tidal bore as it burst through Blandford Passage. From this distance, more than thirty kilometres, only the white crest of the wave could be seen with the naked eye, but recent tides had been high and the telescope renters along the front had been illegally increasing their prices.

  Mander was pointing to the south of the Passage. From that direction, skimming along past Lawrence Island, came the hydrofoil. On the deepening blue of the presently calm waters of the bay it was the only sign of movement.

  ‘The tide will be through any minute now,’ Cro said. ‘Do you suppose the pilot realizes?’

  ‘He’ll know,’ Mander said.

  A few seconds later, the people who had hired telescopes bent to their instruments, and the tidal wave appeared. Several of the tourists pointed seawards, pointing excitedly, and children were held aloft on the shoulders of their parents.

  The waiter arrived to take their order, and Cro sat down.

  ‘Is this ... Mr Harkman on the hydrofoil?’ he said, when two beers had been brought.

  ‘I can’t think why else it should be late,’ Mander said, watching the other man for his reaction.

  ‘I heard he wasn’t rated above Regional Adviser. Would the boat be held for you or me?’

  ‘It would depend on the circumstances.’

  Well pleased with Cro’s reaction, Mander sipped his beer. Earlier in the day he had heard that the low-water berth at Poundbury was going to be busy all day, obliging the hydrofoil to wait for the tide. He assumed Cro hadn’t heard this, but decided against mentioning it because he liked Cro to have a few mysteries.

  Cro took a mouthful of beer. He wiped his lips with his handkerchief, then stood up again.

  Out in the bay the hydrofoil had slowed down, so that its hull had entered the water again. The boat had turned to face the flooding tide, and as Cro stepped down from Sekker’s patio and crossed the Boulevard to the sea wall the first turbulence reached it. The boat yawed and pitched dramatically, but as soon as the first large waves were past it turned again towards Dorchester, and accelerated through the choppy water in the wake of the bore.

  Still seated at the table, Mander looked at Cro with irritation. The arrival of any high-level appointee brought inevitable conflicts within the office, as the hierarchy unwillingly accommodated the newcomer, but Harkman’s appointment to Dorchester threatened the recent smooth state of office politics as surely as the twice-daily tides disrupted the calm waters of the bay.

  It was the vagueness of Harkman’s position at the Regional Commission that was the main problem. Mander had been told that Harkman was to be given access to whatever files or records he requested, and that Commissioner Borovitin’s authorization would be channelled through his own office. As Mander’s area of responsibility was Administration, this made sense, but he was still unsure of the nature of Harkman’s intended research. Cro was displaying an unnatural amount of interest in the new man, so Mander suspected that he knew more than he was letting on. His questioning of Mander was probably less for his own information than to try to discover how much Mander knew.

  Cro, a master at office manoeuvring, would be delighted to have someone working in his own department who had relative freedom of movement, as he would be certain to find some way of benefiting from it.

  ‘Do you want another beer?’ Mander said, when the other man returned to the table.

  Cro looked at his wristwatch. ‘I think we’ve time. The boat won’t be in for another ten minutes.’

  Mander took this as an acceptance, and summoned the waiter.

  In the bay, the flooding tidal wave from the north spread in a flattening semi-circle, the first turbulence subsiding. The rising tide still poured through Blandford Passage, and would continue to do so for another hour, but the initial violence of its arrival was past. In Dorchester Harbour the water-level, which all afternoon had risen only a metre or two, now came up quickly. The grounded pleasure-yachts lifted steadily, their hulls colliding gently with the supporting pontoons, and outside the harbour the waiting fishing boats started their engines and circled round, entering port one by one. By the time the last had tied up beside the fish-sheds the hydrofoil had arrived, and was nosing slowly towards its own berth. In the tourist part of the harbour not much had changed, except that those who idled on the decks were now in full view of those who strolled around the harbour; the commercial side of the port, by contrast, was bustling and noisy. Several of the boats had started to unload their cargoes of fish, and the tradesmen’s carts and drays had moved forward to pick up the supplies brought from the mainland by the hydrofoil.

  The horse-drawn Post Office van clattered through the crowds in Marine Boulevard, and turned down the ramp towards the hydrofoil berth.

  Then Cro played a high card; perhaps it was a trump.

  ‘I hear the man’s an historian,’ he said. ‘Would that be so?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  Cro’s most recent bureaucratic acquisition was supervision of the Commission’s archives; it had been his triumph of the year before. If Harkman was an historian, he would certainly be working with Cro as a consequence.

  As Mander finished his beer and stood up, he could already imagine the petty power-struggles of the weeks ahead.

  He and Cro walked slowly across the Boulevard, and went towards the commercial side of the port.

  By the time the first two passengers - an elderly couple from the Stat
es - had stepped ashore from the hydrofoil, Mander and Cro were waiting beside the fish-sheds, with a clear view of the landing stage.

  More tourists stepped down from the boat, helped ashore by the cabin stewards. Mander looked at each of them as they appeared, wondering what Harkman would look like. He was impressed in spite of himself, and irritated because of himself, by Cro’s political advantage.

  A figure dressed in a plain brown garment walked slowly past the two Commission men; it was the girl who had been serving at the craft stall, the girl from Maiden Castle. She stood a short distance in front of Cro and Mander, facing towards the hydrofoil.

  Mander was distracted by her presence, as he always was when he happened to see her at the stall. From where he was waiting he could see her face in quarter-profile, and he could understand simultaneously why people like Cro thought of her and her community as a vague threat to the ordered existence of Soviet Wessex, and also why Cro and the others were wrong. At first glance the young woman seemed degenerate and wanton, giving off an aura of anarchy and irresponsibility: she had long, tousled hair, her dress was loose and immodest, and her legs and feet, clad in thin rope sandals, were dusty. But she also stood with poise and a certain elegance, her features were regular, and her eyes held a deep intelligence. In the same way, the other people from the Castle, who were occasionally seen about the town, behaved with a dignity and unobtrusiveness inconsistent with their primitive appearance, and the goods they sold were well made and distinctive.

  Cro suddenly pointed towards someone who had just stepped down from the boat: ‘That’s our man. That’s Harkman.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Mander said, narrowing his eyes, but he knew Cro was right. The man was quite unlike anyone else on the quay. All the other passengers on the hydrofoil were obviously tourists or tradesmen; the former looked around uncertainly, seeking transport into town or help with their baggage, the latter immediately blended with the bustle around them.

  Harkman, though, stood at the edge of the quay and looked appraisingly across, the harbour towards the town. He seemed genuinely interested in what he saw, shading his eyes with his hand. Then he turned, looking away from the harbour towards the south, where Maiden Castle stood on its promontory overlooking the bay. To Mander he appeared to be about forty years old, dark-haired and lean; his bearing was relaxed and athletic, not at all that of the bookish historian Mander had imagined from what little he had heard about the man. Unlike the tourists, Harkman was unencumbered with luggage, but had with him just a small bag which was slung casually across his shoulders.

  ‘He’s not as young as I thought,’ Cro said, eventually. ‘The photo on file must be an old one.’

  ‘Which photo?’ Mander said, but Cro made no answer.

  The girl from Maiden Castle was watching Harkman too. She was standing quite close to him, making no effort to disguise her interest. When he turned to walk along the quay towards the town he passed her and they glanced at each other momentarily.

  She moved away to where the dock labourers were unloading crates of beer from the hold of the ship, and sat down on a stone bollard, staring out into the bay.

  As Harkman passed the two Commission men he seemed to recognize them as colleagues, for he nodded to them briefly, but made no move to introduce himself.

  Cro and Mander waited on the quay for a few minutes, by which time Harkman had vanished into the crowd in Marine Boulevard. On the minaret of the mosque that had been built for the visitors, the muezzin was calling the devout to prayer.

  four

  David Harkman breakfasted alone in the refectory of the Commission hostel. He assumed that the other people he saw were also employees of the Commission, but he made no attempt to introduce himself, and instead suffered their curious stares with an indifference affected out of self-defence. Friends in London had warned him of the protocol of the Regional Commissions, and that there would be a well-established order of precedence by which he would be introduced to his new colleagues. He had no intention of upsetting the balance of territorial claims within the office; his years at the Bureau of English Culture had made him wise in the ways of civil servants.

  He cut short his uneasiness, and the curiosity of the others, by finishing his breakfast quickly, and with noncommittal nods to all in sight he left the hostel building and went for an exploratory stroll around the town.

  It was a relief to be in Dorchester at last, after two years of waiting for the appointment to come through. Sometimes he had thought that Wessex Island was a part of the world as unreachable from London as the Presidential Palace in Riyadh. It wasn’t that his security-rating was less than impeccable; he had, after all, been given the temporary posting to Baltimore in the Western Emirate States, and had advised the Cultural Attache in Rome for one very unexpected week a few years ago. Much more likely was the inevitable grinding slowness of the Party administrative machine.

  Not that Wessex was a place to which Party employees were freely transferred. With its mosques and casinos, and the thousands of idle-rich tourists from all over the States, Wessex Island was an area of some ideological embarrassment to the Party theorists.

  Dorchester itself was the focus of this embarrassment for not only was it the nearest large town to the English mainland, but it was also the place to which most of the tourists came.

  Only the fact that Wessex was physically distinct from the mainland made it acceptable to the Party; so long as travel was restricted in England, and permits to visit the international tourist zones of the island were granted only to foreign nationals and selected Party workers, the local inhabitants couldn’t very well proclaim the evils of capitalism to the English populace at large. Or so the Party sophistry went; Harkman, like most people with a gram of intelligence or information, realized that the flood of Emirate dollars was a major contribution to the Westminster budget.

  It was actually a concern for, and an interest in, the local population that had ostensibly brought Harkman to Wessex.

  Ever since the catastrophic earthquakes and land subsidence of the previous century, what had formerly been south-west England had been separated from the mainland by the narrow but deep channel that was known as Blandford Passage. Wessex-men had been left to fend for themselves for many decades, until the Westminster government had realized the potential of the island as a tourist resort, since when it had been administered and developed and taxed in the same way as the other regions of England.

  Harkman’s interest, as a social historian, was in what had happened in Wessex during the years of isolation. There were still people alive on the island who remembered those days, and there were records scattered about - mainly in Dorchester, Plymouth and Truro - relating to conditions at the time, and Harkman intended to compile an exhaustive and definitive documentary account. It would probably take him many years, and he was prepared to treat it as his life’s work. This was his ostensible reason for the move to Dorchester, and it was the one which had obtained him his permission. But in his heart he knew that it was not the sole motive.

  There was Wessex itself. From the day that he had conceived of the project, Harkman had felt that there was some indefinable insufficiency in his life. It wasn’t just that his work at the Bureau of English Culture was unsatisfying - although in many respects it was - nor that he felt a sense of inadequacy about his life in London; more directly, it was an instinctive knowledge that Wessex was a spiritual and emotional home.

  It had started with something he’d read about the community at Maiden Castle; it had interested him, and in trying to discover more about it he had sensed a growing involvement with the-Castle and the island on which it stood. He simply hadn’t understood it, and the need to understand had compelled him with more force than anything the intellectual challenge of his social research could muster.

  So as he had arrived in Dorchester the previous evening, he had not only seen that day as the first on which his life’s work began, but also as the last on which he had awak
ened with the feeling of separation from a place that had dominated his thoughts and actions for two years.

  Then too, almost incidentally, there was the fact of the tidal bore through Blandford Passage.

  Many years before, as a young man, he had had the chance to sample the terrors and excitements of wave-riding. He had had only three weeks in which to learn the elemental violence of the tidal wave, but it was a violence which, once experienced, always enthralled one.

  Wave-riding was undeniably a young man’s sport - and one for the rich - but over the years Harkman had kept himself in physical trim, and he’d been saving his wages all his life. He had the opportunity, the money and the will to ride the Blandford wave again, and he was determined that he wouldn’t waste them.

  It was a fine, bright morning in Dorchester, and Harkman relished the lightness and cleanness of the air, the decadence of the architecture, the narrowness of the streets. It was a town with a sunny hangover; the night-clubs and bars of Dorchester catered to the tastes of the visitors late into the night, and the shutters and louvred doors of the villas and apartment-blocks were closed against the freshness of the morning. Even so, there were many holidaymakers already about, strolling through the streets to do a little concessionary shopping before departing to one of the beaches outside town.

  Impossible to believe that London was less than two hundred kilometres away!

  When he reached the street where the Commission building was situated, Harkman made an instant decision and walked on past. He had an appointment to see Commissioner Borovitin, but there were still a few minutes in hand. He remembered having seen a skimmer-shop by the harbour when he landed the previous evening, and thought he would visit it.

  He walked out of the narrow sidestreets into the bright sunlight of the Boulevard, and went down to the harbour. Here many yachts were moving in and out, for the tide was falling and in an hour or two it would be unnavigable. Harkman walked past the cafes and stalls on the Boulevard to the skimmer-shop, where, in a brightly coloured display, the various pieces of equipment needed for the sport were laid out.