Declare

Party.
    At one of the Oxford Branch Party meetings, over tea and cucumber sandwiches, he had heard an earnest, white-flannel-clad undergraduate observe that it was a melancholy necessity that all the old English universities be razed when the Proletariat Dictatorship was achieved; and this morning Andrew Hale shivered with a big emotion that could only be grasped—right now, inadequately—as a fierce determination to stop any more English buildings from being knocked down.
    “Makes you feel like Macaulay’s New Zealander,” came a plummy voice from behind him in the open air, “doesn’t it?”
    Hale sighed and turned around.
    The hair was more gray than black now, but Hale recognized the man who had escorted his mother and him into the office of the one-legged colonel twelve years earlier. He must have been fifty years old now. The man was hatless, but his black dinner jacket and white shirt indicated that he too had been out all night.
    “A tourist in the future,” Hale said, in spite of everything not wanting to seem to have missed the reference, “visiting the ruins of London.” He looked past the figure that must have been James Theodora, and he was only vaguely depressed to see three men in coveralls—no, four—standing well back on the far side of the police hut, clearly watching. “I—did write to you,” Hale said unsteadily, “about joining the Communist Party. Whatever this is about a missing Air Ministry document—”
    “Impromptu is what it is,” said Theodora, shaking his head. “Let’s walk.” He started away eastward against the morning breeze in a long-legged stride, his black coat-tails flapping up below the hands clasped at the small of his back. Hale shrugged, though only the surveillance men could have seen the gesture, and hurried to catch up.
    “The old ARCOS raid was the only example they could think of,” Theodora said. He squinted sideways at Hale. “Right? ARCOS? ‘All Russia Co-Operative Society,’ in Moorgate? Huh! Some Communist you are. Well, that’s what it was, Special Branch went in hoping to find evidence and found only a lot of burned papers; this was fifteen years ago. Excuse enough to break off diplomatic relations with Moscow, at least. So when we needed a story last night, they just re-enacted the ARCOS raid, but on the King Street headquarters this time. Still, it did get you a police record, didn’t it?—verifiable detention, for proper espionage, right in front of the Communist headquarters! You’re at liberty right now, but nevertheless formally in the custody of Scotland Yard while you ‘assist in the inquiry.’ You’ll be sent down from Magdalen, of course.” He snickered. “Scandal, disgrace.”
    Hale was dizzy, and when he looked at his formally dressed companion in this field of wildflowers he actually thought of the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. “Not killed,” he said.
    “Good heavens no, my dear! We’d have had to order you to join the Party, if you hadn’t done it on your own. No, you’re doing splendidly. We’ll even reinstate you at Magdalen one day, if you like—there were some irregularities about your detention last night. The service taketh away, and sometimes giveth back. What else would you like? An Order of the British Empire is entirely feasible. You’re too young for a CBE. Tell me about your dreams.”
    “My dreams?” Hale had to keep remembering his mother’s words: … they’re the King’s men; they deserve our obedience , because on this surreal morning he could easily have persuaded himself that Theodora was insane; for that matter, he wasn’t necessarily confident about his own sanity either. What would happen here if he were to demand a knighthood? Would he be told it was his?—would he believe it was? “I suppose I’d like to be an Oxford don one day—”
    “No, my boy, dreams , visions you see when you’re asleep.”
    “Oh.” Coming right after thoughts about insanity, this topic was an uncomfortable one; perhaps the older man could be deflected to some other. “Well, I didn’t have any dreams last night, certainly,” he said with a forced laugh, “being chained in a chair. Did you know they chained—”
    “Not in September , of course not,” snapped Theodora, abruptly impatient. “You’re nineteen now—has puberty occluded you? Even so, you must remember, nineteen winters, you must know what I’m talking about. What dreams have you had at the shift of the year, say on