The Peacock Cloak

about!” he exclaimed. “They already have a country. It’s called Saxony. The clue is in the name. Why don’t they go back to where they came from?”
    “These people talk as if the last seventeen centuries were nothing !” Thomas said wonderingly, after translating this for Richard. “I couldn’t even say exactly where Saxony is.”
    “Self-centred bastards,” Richard growled, “they nurture grievances from two thousand years ago, but expect us to forget ours when they’ve still in living memory.”
    “They don’t really see us as people, that’s the difficulty,” Thomas said. “Their history and faith has made their destiny seem so self-evidently important to them that anyone who gets in their way is simply a problem .”
    “Why must you always try and understand them?” Richard grumbled. “Why should we care about their motives?”
    “Hello Tom!”
    It was Richard’s wife Liz, a lively, pretty, woman with bright, restless, merry eyes, who Thomas had secretly loved since he was fifteen. As ever a knife blade twisted in his heart. Oh God how different she was from his own wife Jenny, across the road there, pale and colourless and flat, at the bottom of her grey sea of misery.
    “Coffee anyone?” Liz asked, quickly averting her eyes from Thomas’.
    “For Christ’s sake, Liz,” Richard growled, “never mind coffee. Come and watch this. Your own country being sold.”
    “Oh Richard leave it!” she said. “It’s not good for you, all this anger. You know the news now. We all know it. You can’t do anything about it. Turn off the TV and talk about something else.”
    But their son Harry, who’d been sitting quietly in a corner, backed his father up.
    “You should be more angry, Mum, not Dad less. Where’s your pride? Think what we could have been if it wasn’t for the invaders!”
    Since Richard had lost his job in Cambridge, things had been very hard for the Ducketts financially. He had once briefly tried to make money by doing factory work in the State of Logres itself (first in Llundain, then eighty miles away in the city of Rhydychen, which the English had once called “Oxford”). But then came the first violent English uprising against Logrian rule, and all work permits for English people had been cancelled. Richard now had to eke out a living locally as a general purpose handyman. It wasn’t easy when no one had money to spare.
    “I’m not saying we shouldn’t be angry,” Liz said. “I just think being angry shouldn’t become the only thing we are.”
    Which is what Thomas thought too.
    But he knew he ought to go.
    “Look,” he said, “I’m sorry but I really must be getting home. Jenny will be worrying about the news as well. And wondering if I’m okay.”

    As he crossed the road back to his house a BCL jeep was going by. He didn’t pay it any attention at first but it stopped right beside him. Thomas tensed, as any English person would have done, anticipating mockery, or humiliating demand , or even possibly even a beating.
    But the voice that called out to him was entirely friendly.
    “Good news, Mr Turner, don’t you agree? Peace! Peace in prospect at last!”
    “Colonel Rhys.”
    Thomas reluctantly acknowledged the Logrian, conscious of the inquisition that would face him if any member of Richard’s family were to see him talking in an amiable way to a BCL officer. But actually the two men met quite regularly at work, Thomas having a community liaison role at school and Colonel Rhys being the BCL civil liaison officer for the East Cambridgeshire military district.
    “I’ve always thought if it had been down to people like you and I, we would have reached a solution long ago,” said Colonel Rhys in his bad, French-accented English.
    A stocky, balding man with prominent eyebrows and a quick but slightly mocking smile, the colonel had grown up in Paris. In civilian life he was an academic chemist and, as a strictly secular Brython, he had always made a point of differentiating himself from the religious Brythons and their talk of the holy destiny of the Brythonic Celts. Thomas actually rather liked him.
    “Maybe,” he said with an awkward laugh.
    Colonel Rhys reached out from his jeep to shake Richard’s hand.
    “Maybe one of these days you and I will be able to sit in a pub with a pint of English beer and laugh about all this nonsense. We Brythons and you English have so much in common really don’t we? We are all Northern Europeans after