Liberation Square

by Gareth Rubin

  ‘But the smog has come down.’ He shrugged, a very slight movement. ‘Well, it’s not too bad today,’ I said, trying to fill the silence.

  ‘I can give Dr Cawson a message.’

  ‘It’s nothing.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  I felt more stupid now. ‘I have a migraine.’

  ‘I see.’ I wondered if he knew what had happened, how things had changed between Nick and me.

  ‘When did he leave?’ I asked.

  ‘About an hour ago.’

  ‘An hour ago?’

  ‘As I said.’ He sounded as irritable as ever.

  ‘Yes, of course. Sorry.’ It just seemed a bit odd. Nick’s Mondays were usually his busiest time – people would store up their problems all weekend and demand to see their GP first thing. Nick’s patients – many of them Party officials – brooked no refusal and he would normally just snatch a sandwich at his desk for lunch in order to meet all their expectations. And yet he had gone out for a walk at noon. ‘The schedule is usually packed, isn’t it?’ I asked.

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Do you know when he’ll be back?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Well, I’ll wait for him.’

  ‘As you wish.’

  I sat in one of the plush seats that Nick had rescued from the lines of bombed-out houses – there was something luxurious about sinking into an armchair that had come from a townhouse once lived in by Lord Such-and-Such – and watched Charles glancing at me out of the corner of his eye as he returned to his work, obviously annoyed by my presence. Lorries shuddered noisily along the road as I waited, and somewhere below us two people seemed to be having a blazing row about the cost of office stationery.

  After a while the second post arrived, fluttering through the letterbox, but that was all the excitement to be had and I wished Nick would come back. The time ticked slowly and interminably by, marked by a carriage clock in the corner of the room.

  Eventually, I grew tired of watching Charles use two fingers to laboriously type up letters, and I could see that the door to Nick’s office was unlocked and ajar. So, ignoring Charles’s protestations, I wandered in. The desk was chaotically strewn with the usual mess of pens, a stethoscope, wooden tongue-depressors in a short vase, drug phials spilling out of cartons, a pharmacology textbook and buff folders of medical notes. And there was something else: torn yellow paper in which a small package had been wrapped. Curious, I took it in my hand.

  The paper was embossed with the name of a Bristol shop that had once sold perfume to society ladies and now sold it to the wives of Party men. As I lifted it and held it in the air, a scent drifted up, the remnant of what had been bound in the paper. Its sweet, sultry notes were familiar, but I couldn’t place it. It was a strange thing to find. ‘Charles?’ I called out.

  ‘Yes, Mrs Cawson,’ he replied, in the same tone as before.

  ‘Why has …’ But then I stopped. I remembered where I had smelled it before. And my eyes gently closed in utter pain.

  I had breathed it twice, that perfume. Once at a party and once, terribly, in my own home. I slowly placed the paper back on the desk and began looking among the items on the desktop, searching through the jumble of instruments and papers for something that would speak of her. The scent was based on rich Virginia tobacco, she had said.

  I shoved the instruments and pens aside and rifled through the letters and papers, checking for anything with her name. The package could only have contained a gift for her, I was certain. I searched through it all, turning it all over.

  But no, there was nothing else. No note, no letter. And I took a step back, smoothing my palms down my skirt, berating myself. Such a fool I had been, and so wrong. I had been jumping to conclusions, nothing more. I stared out the window and the broken Houses of Parliament filled my view. Would I have acted like this a month ago? Before that party when she had shone like the sun? The party that surely led to a death that still has me twisted in a pain that won’t let go? No, no, I was sure that I wouldn’t have. A gunboat on patrol passed slowly along the Thames, its searchlight eerie in the smog, and I watched it disappear from sight.

  So I pulled myself together, took another deep breath and turned to leave. I would wait calmly for Nick to return and never breathe a word of this to him. That would be for the best.

  But then, just as my fingers touched the brass handle, I caught sight of a side table by the door. It had a short pile of brown folders stacked haphazardly on its polished surface; and there was something strange slipped into the middle of the pile. It looked like the edge of a large photograph, seemingly out of place among the medical notes, as if it had been deliberately hidden. I went over and lifted the upper folders and, as I did so, I found that it wasn’t a photograph I was holding, it was the cover of a magazine – an old society glossy full of pictures of actors and young debutantes in furs outside nightclubs – the type of frivolous publication that had entirely disappeared under the new, classless regime. Its title, On the Town, was blazed across the top in red lettering.

  Tensely, I opened it, feeling the smooth paper on my palms, and flicked through a few pages of scattered black-and-white images and unattributed gossip before I noticed that the corner of one page towards the centre of the publication was dog-eared – as if Nick had opened it time after time. My fingers turned quickly to that spread of paper. The pages fell away. And there she was.

  In a flashlit scene before one of her film premieres, the faces and smiles around her seemed to drift into the background, their owners blurred and lifeless. It was as if they had stepped back into a whirlwind. And, in the centre of it all, she stood gazing into the camera. Yes, you could see in her eyes that the whole world could go to hell and she would still be there in that light. That blaze of light. I understood why Nick had been unable to leave her in his past.

  My hands trembling, I put the magazine back as I had found it and fought to control myself before casually returning to the outer room, where Charles was writing something.

  ‘When is Nick’s next appointment?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t discuss patients’ details,’ Charles replied, without looking up.

  I paused. ‘I just want to know when he’ll be back.’ He put his pen down but eyed me coolly and didn’t reply. I spoke as calmly as I could. ‘Is he with someone?’

  He took one of those foul Soviet cigarettes from a packet and put a match to it, sending a stream of smoke to the ceiling. ‘Dr Cawson has gone for a walk.’

  It felt as if the smog were seeping into the room. I went to the window and looked out. With my back to Charles, I gripped the sill and closed my eyes. The words left my mouth but felt distant even as I spoke them. They could have been someone else’s. ‘Is he with Lorelei?’

  In the corner of the room, the clock ticked and the sound of rumbling traffic came and went again. There was a long silence before Charles spoke. ‘He has gone for a walk.’

  I felt myself collapse inwardly. ‘Would you tell me if he were with her? No, don’t answer that,’ I laughed bitterly. ‘I already know.’

  ‘Will there be anything else, Mrs Cawson?’ he said, with an unmistakable undertone of anger.

  ‘I … Just …’ I couldn’t stay there another second with the seed of humiliation growing in me.

  Standing on the kerb, I knew that what I was doing was a mistake, that nothing good would come of it, but I couldn’t help myself. I put out my hand and a car stopped. It looked like one of the black vehicles that Party officials used and I wondered if the driver were really a Party chauffeur making a little cash on the side. I gave him the address in our sector on the north-eastern side of the river, close to the Tower of London – an address that had been Nick’s too until their divorce. He still received mail there occasionally. The driver mumbled a price, let out the grinding clutch and we moved into dirty traffic ringing with the sound of tram bells and car horns.

  We rattled along the road before turning a
t speed into a one-way street populated with new blocks of flats, and I fell forward as the driver stamped sharply on the brake pedal. A line of vehicles was crawling one by one through a police stop point. My driver swore and turned tightly, accelerating away to take another route through narrow backstreets. The police watched but didn’t stop us, probably because we were in a Party car. A stroke of luck. Well, perhaps.

  We drove through ruts and past the many trenches where the road was being dug up because the Soviet system of communalized heating was being installed: it would pump hot water from a central station to all the homes in the new tower blocks. It was happening alongside a big overhaul of the telephone network too. First, our lovely old exchange names had been replaced with drab numeric codes: no longer could we ask the operator to connect us with ‘Whitehall 5532’; we had to ask for ‘Exchange 944, Number 5532’. And then residential numbers had changed in readiness for a mass expansion that would see us all connected with one another for the common good.

  As we charged past wrecked houses, my mind tumbled with thoughts. One moment I was sure Nick was with her; the next I told myself that Charles was right: he had simply gone for a walk and nothing more.

  Still, my fingers were white with tension when we eventually pulled up outside a row of Edwardian townhouses, and I handed the driver a pound note emblazoned with Marx’s grey image. Out in the smog again, I hesitated before pushing the porcelain doorbell button on a house with its plaster cracking away like an old mausoleum. If I pressed it, would she open the door and confusedly ask me why I was on her doorstep? Would she know full well and laugh at me? There was no way of telling. I had to push it home.

  A dull ring sounded somewhere inside. I waited.

  Nothing. Behind me, a platoon of Young Pioneers marched past. ‘When you salute Comrade First Secretary Blunt, just remember what you all owe him,’ their CO called out. ‘The peace that you live in.’

  I tried the bell again. Still nothing.

  But then, if Nick were there, they wouldn’t answer, of course. They would be in her room. He would be slipping off her dress.

  I looked up and down the street, past the marching Pioneers. And I thought: most of these high houses had rear entrances through which they had once admitted tradesmen: butchers with boxes of fresh meat and soot-crusted chimney sweeps. There would be one for her house.

  At the end of the road I discovered an alleyway giving access to the back gardens and counted along until I located the right gate. The wood had long since rotted – little need for the rear entrance now that we were all entitled to use the front – so it was easy to force it open. It led into a wildly overgrown garden, full of weeds and creeping creatures hiding among the stalks. It probably hadn’t been touched since Nick had lived here too.

  Quelling my fears, I waded in, kicking through wide leaves and pulling myself free from thorny bushes. The back door was unlocked, I found, and I opened it on stiff hinges to reveal an old-fashioned kitchen with a dusty floor. I wondered if she ever ate here or if it was always at restaurants and public events, surrounded by fat Party apparatchiks having their photographs taken with the celebrated actress: Lorelei, the beautiful face that our young Socialist state had once presented to the world.

  It would have been a cosy, welcoming room with a family cooking in it, I thought, yet it was quite wasted and barren like this. I passed through and into the hallway, but stopped with a jolt. There was life somewhere. From upstairs, light dance music was echoing in the chill air.

  And then she laughed. It was an unbridled, whooping laugh that flew through the house, wrapping itself around me. Just as quickly, it died away to leave only those playful notes from unseen instruments.

  I hesitated, afraid now of what I was doing and what I might learn. I stared back towards the kitchen and the door that would take me away from there; but I couldn’t leave – really, I had to know. And so, in the cold air, I forced myself to put my foot on the bottom stair.

  As I began to climb the steps, a new sound came: someone else speaking. A man.

  I stopped, my hand gripping the bannister so tightly it hurt, straining to hear, to make out his voice. But it was muffled by the music, and I couldn’t hear properly, no matter how hard I tried. I told myself that it might not be him; I could be mistaken. The voice might belong to a total stranger. I began to climb again.

  My feet took me upwards step by step. And, without really knowing it, sensing rather than hearing it, I became aware of another sound, a thudding like wood hitting wood every five seconds. I couldn’t understand what it could be.

  ‘Champagne!’ Her voice burst from the music. ‘Oh, yes, let’s drink up, because what else is there to do?’ I pictured her filling their glasses to the brim and a little more hope seeped away.

  Now as I rose, the boards creaking under my weight, I saw a strange spread of water on the carpet slipping down like fingers, touching a new stair and another, and another. They were talking more quietly, their voices masked by the music, but I caught the occasional word or phrase from Lorelei. ‘Rome’. ‘Absolute madness’. ‘It was so very dull, but the …’

  The carpet was soaking now; each footstep into it sent a little flurry of dampness down to the next stair. And finally I reached the top of the staircase, where a cold draught seemed to swirl around. In front of me was a bedroom door, open just enough to let a blade of light escape; as I watched, it began to move back slowly, pulled by an unseen hand. Wind rushed through. Without warning, it flew away from me, crashing against the wall. The air caught in my chest as I waited for an accusation against me and my unwanted presence. A humiliating dismissal. A sneer.

  But all I saw was an empty room. No one stood in the doorway to push me out or to smirk at Nick’s betrayal. The room held only furniture covered in dust sheets – a box room of abandoned things; and it was the wind through an open window that was sucking the door open and closed in that five-second rhythm. Through the gaping window I could see one of the new tower blocks topped by the hammer and compass, ready to house families harried out of their tumbledown slum homes. The door slammed shut again, leaving me staring at the blank wood.

  Behind me, I heard Lorelei’s laughter once more. Gentler than before, but with an undertone that suggested something more … more what? Selfish? Lascivious? It was coming from the door opposite and water was spilling out under the door – it must have been the bathroom – to form a stream right down the stairs. ‘More Champagne,’ she cried. ‘Come on, see it off!’

  The man laughed and I groped again for the thought that it might not be Nick. The flood ran around my feet, and it seemed that if I stood there long enough I would be worn down by it, like a statue in a river. But I took a deep breath, and decided: to hell with them both.

  I grabbed the handle, wrenched it down and threw open the door. For a moment I was blinded by a lamp shining straight into my eyes.

  And in my mind, I have only flickers of what comes next: her face in the light; my feet moving swiftly across glittering, shifting water on black-and-white floor tiles; a figure in a mirror.

  Then a mist falls. A darkness, like the smog outside. It sweeps in from the edge of my vision, taking over, fading the lines between everything that I can remember, turning it all black, so that around me there is nothing.

  I don’t know how long I was there before there was a pain that pulsed on the side of my head – a pain that told me I was waking up. Before I had memories again.

  I let that pain pull me out of the darkness, and gradually my eyes opened. Little by little my vision focused to show me the smooth squares of the black-and-white floor. For a second, I had no idea where I was. I only felt my cheek against a floor that was awash with freezing water, and when I raised my head it throbbed. Then I glimpsed the door on the other side of the room and I knew where I was. As my mind cleared, I could just about remember coming in, something happening, and then hitting the floor, with my head feeling like it had split in two.

  Now I ached a
ll over, wincing as I prised my shoulders from the floor. A gilt full-length mirror on the wall filled my vision, reflecting nothing but the flowing water. And I heard Lorelei’s voice again.

  ‘Just for tonight, sweetheart,’ it whispered to me, soft and close. ‘That’s all.’

  For a moment, all I could see were the mirror and the tide through the room, spilling from the edge of the copper bath, until I twisted to take in an empty bottle of Russian Champagne lying on the tiles. And high above it, unmoving, like an alabaster statue, Lorelei’s delicately manicured hand hung, with beads of moisture running slowly along her slim pale wrist. The droplets glistened as I dragged myself upright. I watched them slip down towards her curving shoulder, gathering others, down and down, until finally they melted into the surface of the water, where a dapple of sunlight through a window hit her skin, shining it bright silver. Under the rippling surface, the light fell on little white teeth, a narrow waist and long, pale, graceful limbs made for dancing, or to be seen draped over grass in the heat of summer. And then it touched green eyes open wide, ruby hair swimming like threads in the sea and a mouth frozen open as if it were silently crying out.

  Under water, the dead look like the living. They have smiles on their lips, soft skin, hands that seem to reach out for you with feeling. And yet you know that you are looking at a hollow shell.

  From the corner of the room her laughter shrieked out again, drawing my gaze to the radio set, its dial glowing orange. Then there was her voice. ‘I’ll dream of you tonight, darling, if you’ll dream of me. If you’ll only dream of me.’

  I didn’t know which of her plays it was. One from before the War, probably.

  3

  ‘Oops-a-daisy!’

  No, Nick’s first words to me weren’t what most people would think of as romantic. But then he had caught me falling out of a train carriage on platform four at Waterloo when I was up for the day from Herne Bay with my best friend, Sally. And, anyway, I think it is quite romantic that we met entirely by chance.