Liberation Square

by Gareth Rubin

  Sally and I were like two peas in a pod: one hundred and sixty centimetres (my mum would have said five foot three, but you get in trouble these days for imperialist measurements), fresh-faced blondes soon to turn thirty. We had bought matching jackets for the January chill and done our curly hair in the same Greta Garbo style, giggling for a week that we were coming up to find ourselves chaps. The War had robbed us of men in our early twenties, so seven years after it ended we were still trying to make up for lost time. Sally had insisted on Victory Red lipstick and I had gone along with what she wanted, even though I thought it was a bit much.

  When the train came to a halt, I opened the door and she saw Nick on the platform, waiting to climb in after our departure. So Sally – never one to hold back – shoved me right on to him, and ‘Oops-a-daisy!’ was what I heard as I fell straight into his chest. I think it was about two seconds before my cheeks turned the same colour as my lipstick.

  ‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ I said, feeling the flush spreading to my neck as I pushed myself off him.

  ‘No, she’s not,’ Sally called from behind me.

  ‘I am.’

  ‘She isn’t.’

  I wasn’t completely, if I’m being honest. He just laughed. Nick always had a nice laugh – free and easy; and a handsome, puckish face that could have been eighteen years old or forty. There were a few silver strands in his brown hair, though, giving the game away. He insisted he dyed them that way just to look distinguished.

  ‘Well, if you’re not sorry, then you should be,’ he said. ‘You’ve got lipstick all over my shirt.’

  ‘Oh, now I’m sorry again.’ I blinked down at the cream cotton and saw that it really was stained bright red. ‘I could …’ I ran short of anything I could do. ‘Buy you a new one?’

  ‘This one was two pounds.’

  ‘I can’t buy you a new one.’

  ‘She can do other things,’ shouted Sally, who remained in the doorway, leaning against the frame with her arms folded, enjoying every second.

  ‘Will you shut your trap?’ I demanded over my shoulder.

  ‘Only trying to help.’ She jumped down. ‘All right, let’s have a look at you,’ she said, examining him. I always marvelled at how forward she was – it must be nice to be like that. She should have been in an infantry regiment or something. ‘Nice and tall. Ooh, all your own teeth, I see.’

  ‘I’m a doctor. I don’t want to see a dentist if I can help it. Matter of professional pride.’

  ‘Doctor. Right, that’s it: looks like I’m up on my own for the day. I’ll see you on the six thirty train,’ she told me, striding away past the propaganda posters. ‘But if I’m not here, don’t wait for me. Oh, and her name’s Jane, doctor. She needs some medical attention. You should probably take a look at her.’

  ‘I’ve seen worse,’ he said. I slapped his shoulder and he laughed. There was a moment’s hesitation when neither of us knew what we were meant to do next. ‘Well, I don’t usually perform consultations on the platform at Waterloo Station, so I suppose we had better go somewhere else,’ he said.

  ‘Weren’t you on your way somewhere?’

  ‘It can wait,’ he said with a smile.

  Oh, that charm of his. You really could lose yourself in it.

  4

  As I sit in my study in Winfield House, an old house in Regent’s Park, I am but a few hundred yards from the iron curtain that fell across our land some six years ago. It is a wretched and ugly line. Indeed, I am but a few hundred yards from the raised guard posts where young Britons have their rifle sights fixed on their fellow citizens – men and women forced by the Marxist authorities to doubt their friends and family and to fear those whom they should most trust. Tomorrow is their national celebration. A day their self-deluding masters call Liberation Day. And yet I believe that one day the true liberation will be when they break their rusted bonds of servitude.

  Winston Churchill, Radio Free Europe address,

  Monday, 17 November 1952

  ‘Lorelei!’

  Her name echoed all around and rang off the walls. I stared at her, her mouth pulled into that silent scream, her hair wafting under the surface and her eyes as bright as coral. The flood at my feet made it seem like the floor itself was shifting. The black-and-white squares were losing their familiar shape, twisting into one another.

  And then a thought pushed into my mind. An urgent and desperate hope that forced away all the others: perhaps she was still alive.

  Perhaps I had mistaken what had happened. There might still be a pulse beating in her wrists. I thrust my hands into the water and tried desperately to lift her, but her head arched back and the sides of the copper bath were too high. As the taps continued to pour down a torrent, I pushed my arms deeper until I was half submerged. ‘Lorelei!’ I shouted again, fighting against the radio in the corner as it blared her voice, the lines from a play recorded long ago.

  Her body against mine as I wrenched her up with all my strength, I cried out her name for the last time. Then her face burst through the surface, her mouth open, as if she were gasping for air, and I stared into her eyes, waiting for them to turn to me. I stared from one to the other.

  But there was no breath, no flush of colour on her cheek. And, as I felt it against me, I knew her body was as cold as stone. In that moment, with her in my arms, I collapsed downwards, my hair trailing in the water like hers, some of the strands intertwining and drifting in the tide. At the last I held her against me, feeling my arms shake, feeling numb, before I let her slip back under. Nothing but the icy water now.

  The radio crackled as I stumbled out of the room, down the stairs and out the front door. ‘And what have you been to me, my love? What have you been to me?’

  It was, I suppose, an hour later that I stood again on that landing. The floor was still awash but the radio was broadcasting a man’s voice. ‘In readiness for tomorrow’s magnificent celebrations for Liberation Day …’ I didn’t know when the programme had changed.

  The house seemed full of men now. One asked me a question and I think I told him the answer. And Nick was there too – someone must have called him, though it hadn’t been me. I was thankful that they had: just having his familiar presence there made it feel like I was still in this world.

  ‘Did you touch her?’ It was an older man with square glasses and white hair, thin as a rake, who was speaking to me. He gently guided me away from the doorway so that I couldn’t see into the bathroom. ‘Did you touch her?’

  I turned my bewildered eyes to Nick, wishing that he – or anyone, really – could answer the questions for me. I struggled to form any words: it was as if they had been locked away from me. ‘I … I tried to pull her out,’ I mumbled.

  ‘You tried to lift her out?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. My mind was focusing, fighting through the shock of the body. ‘How did she … Did someone do that?’

  He didn’t answer me. ‘Go back to the beginning. You entered the room – what then?’

  I put my hand to my forehead. As I touched it, I felt a stab of pain. ‘I … fell. I think I hit my head. On the bath. Then I woke up on the floor.’

  He wrote it down in a notepad. ‘That’s when you saw her, tried to pull her out, couldn’t, and ran for help. Is that right?’

  My head was throbbing. I saw her image under the water. Shimmering and perfect. White all over. As I tried to remember, it hurt more. ‘Yes, that’s right,’ I said.

  ‘She was definitely dead at the time?’ I looked at him now. He had an air about him like one of the houses that had been bombed in the night Blitz, leaving a sad shell that, when the morning came, threatened to collapse in on itself.

  ‘Sergeant, as my wife told you –’ Nick interjected.

  ‘Please stay out of this, sir.’

  ‘She was dead. I know she was,’ I pleaded. I saw her again.

  ‘Mrs Cawson?’

  I realized the policeman had asked me another question but I hadn’t heard it.
Nick put his arm around my shoulders. ‘Sergeant, I’m taking my wife home,’ he said. ‘She can’t remember because she has concussion. It’s very common after an accident. You can speak to her later.’ He turned to me. ‘Just rest. You’ll be fine in a couple of days.’

  ‘I’m afraid you can’t take her, sir.’ I stared at the hammer-and-compass insignia on his cap. Even after years of seeing it, the sight still jarred.

  ‘I can and I will,’ Nick insisted, taking me by the arm.

  We started to leave and I felt an overwhelming rush of gratitude to him. It wasn’t just gratitude, though – mixed in was a sense of guilt that was spreading as I recalled more. I had gone to the house in the mad, unjust belief that Nick was there, making love to her. I looked at him, trying to tell from his face if he knew what I had done, hoping that he didn’t, but I saw only concern for me. My eyes blurred with tears and I realized that, until then, I had been too shocked to cry.

  But the policeman put an open hand in Nick’s path. He wasn’t young. He looked as if he had been in a few hard situations in his time and was prepared for another one if politeness wasn’t enough. ‘Dr Cawson, I can’t let your wife leave here until I’ve spoken to her. It’s the scene of a death. We have to know what we’re dealing with. You understand, don’t you, sir?’

  Nick looked as if he were considering knocking the officer’s hand aside and taking me home regardless. ‘Good God, she’s concussed!’ he said. ‘If you just leave her be, she’ll get better, she’ll remember more. Talk to her tomorrow.’ He rubbed his hand over his eyes. ‘And I have to leave. I have to tell my daughter.’ My God, I hadn’t even thought of Hazel, his daughter with Lorelei. Telling her would be a burden far greater than looking after me.

  ‘I understand, sir, but we’ll see what she remembers now. We won’t keep her too long.’ His manner was kind. I looked up at Nick and nodded. ‘I’ll make sure she’s all right, sir.’

  Nick seemed to relent. But there was something else in his manner, and he hesitated. ‘Officer,’ he said. He took the policeman to one side and said something very quietly.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ muttered the other man. ‘When was it?’

  ‘A few weeks ago.’

  I knew what Nick had told him. It was something that should have been just for us. The pain of that night, of what had happened at the party where Lorelei had shone so, had not gone away – would never go away – and now he was telling this policeman. It’s agonizing to have a stranger know your grief. They looked at me for what seemed a long time. ‘Come this way, please,’ the officer said to me gently.

  ‘All right,’ I said.

  He led us into the master bedroom. The walls were covered with theatre playbills and film posters but it didn’t register that they were Lorelei’s productions until I saw her name in big letters at the bottom of one of them. ‘And just what were you doing here, Mrs Cawson?’ he asked. I didn’t know what to say. The shame I felt, the stupidity – they held the words in my throat. ‘Mrs Cawson. What were you doing in Miss Addington’s house?’

  ‘Tell him,’ said Nick. ‘Whatever it is, you have done nothing wrong.’

  I gulped down air. ‘I thought …’ The humiliation set fire to my cheeks and held my tongue so that no matter how I tried I couldn’t make another sound.

  ‘Sergeant –’ began Nick.

  ‘I thought Nick was here,’ I blurted out. ‘I thought he was here. With her. With Lorelei.’

  The policeman looked at Nick with his eyebrows raised. I could see his mind working. Mapping out a chain of events. Nick’s mouth fell open a little and he clamped it shut again. I could see his forehead furrow in anger.

  ‘And why did you think that?’

  ‘I don’t know!’ I cried out. ‘I don’t know,’ I repeated to Nick. ‘I’m sorry.’

  How I wished I could somehow take back what I had done. If only we could do that in life, as children do when they play games, to save themselves.

  ‘I think you do know,’ the officer said.

  Nick looked as if he wanted to shout at me but was forcing it down. ‘It was nothing,’ I insisted.

  ‘Tell me.’ The policeman moved between me and Nick, blocking him. I lifted my hand to Nick, but he made no motion to take it.

  I turned over in my mind those little signs that had made me think Nick would be there: the perfume in his office and how it had once been in my home; Nick’s absence from the surgery that Charles wouldn’t explain. The magazine.

  But now I knew my suspicions had been wrong they seemed so transparent and weightless that a breeze would blow them away.

  ‘It was … nothing.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘There was a package at his office. Perfume. The one she wears.’ For a second, I actually looked to the officer for confirmation that that did, truly, look suspicious, just so I wouldn’t feel so idiotic and disloyal.

  ‘What?’ Nick burst out, amazement in his voice. ‘The … I bought a bottle for you. Not her brand, a different one. I thought you would like it.’

  It was awful. I was a patient in a madhouse being watched by the sane.

  The policeman tapped his pencil on his notepad. ‘Where were you today, Dr Cawson?’ he asked.

  Nick looked like he was about to explode at the implication. ‘I went to my surgery and saw my patients. At lunchtime I went for a walk and then to a house call. Comrade Taggan, Deputy Secretary at the Department of Labour. I was there for an hour and a half. After that I returned to my surgery and your station called to say what had happened. I came straight here. Feel free to check.’

  The policeman nodded. ‘Long house call. It was at his home?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Was anyone else there?’

  ‘Of course not. It was a medical consultation.’ Nick became exasperated. ‘For God’s sake, this was just an accident. They happen all the time.’

  ‘He’s not married? Housekeeper? No one else?’

  Nick’s face darkened. ‘He is married. His wife was not there. He has no housekeeper as far as I’m aware. He is a senior government official and also Secretary of his Party branch. I should think his word would be sufficient.’

  ‘Thank you.’ The officer nodded. ‘Would you please wait downstairs?’ Nick glanced at me as he passed. I saw anger in his eyes. I couldn’t tell who had inspired it but some of it was probably directed at me. I think I would have felt better if he had torn into me. ‘Do you work, Mrs Cawson?’

  ‘I’m a teacher. English.’

  ‘Which school?’

  I fluttered my hands. ‘I don’t have a job right now.’ I didn’t want to explain that for the half-year since I had married Nick I had been writing to education boards hoping for a position in one of the new schools opened by the Republic and hadn’t been offered one. But I realized that it wasn’t just my hands that were fluttering – my whole body was shaking. I stared at my limbs.

  ‘It’s the shock,’ he said. ‘It’s normal. You’ll be all right.’

  The bedroom door opened and a well-built man in his thirties with an aquiline nose and a bald head entered, looking around the room in a methodical way. He didn’t wear a uniform and the old policeman seemed annoyed at the man’s presence, smacking his notepad against his hip in irritation. The newcomer leaned against the wall and waved his hand in a manner that said we should continue. ‘When did you get married?’ the white-haired policeman asked.

  ‘May the twelfth.’

  ‘This year?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Lambeth Records Office.’

  He wrote it down. For another ten minutes we went through what I had seen and not seen, heard and not heard. There wasn’t much. I kept looking at the other man, bemused by whom he could be. He said nothing and yet somehow had an air of authority. I can’t properly explain it – it was just something about the way he held himself. ‘Was there anyone else here?’ the policeman asked. I was about to say no, but hesitated. He
noticed. ‘Think very carefully.’

  I put my hands to my temples. And, as I concentrated, I saw those flickers of memory from just before I fell. I closed my eyes.

  I had climbed the stairs; thrown open the bathroom door. And then, in the light, there was Lorelei. I saw her again now, red hair, pale skin. Her beauty unmistakable. But was she alive or dead? Ready to cry out or past caring about this world? I couldn’t be certain. After seeing her, my feet had moved over the wet tiles; and as I looked up, there had been something reflected in the gilt mirror above the bath. Something dark – a figure. I tried to make it out now but it was too obscure, too shifting.

  After that, I had fallen, cascading on to the solid metal of the bath, down into the black. And I had woken to find her drifting under the water. I ran then for the police.

  I dropped my hands and looked at the officer. ‘What is it?’ he said.

  ‘There might have been someone behind me.’

  ‘Who?’ He spoke urgently.

  ‘I don’t know. There’s a mirror there. I think I saw someone in it.’

  ‘Man or woman?’

  Desperately I tried to picture the rough form. I wanted to turn the fading edges into clean lines and the greys into colours, but I couldn’t. It remained a ragged silhouette. I shook my head. ‘I’m sorry, it’s too blurred.’

  ‘You have to try.’

  And so I tried again, seeing the shifting water reflected in the glass. Waves of light ran across its surface and I tried to focus on them, telling myself that if I remembered, it would mean an end to this terrible day and Nick and I could go home. He would loathe me for my unfounded suspicions about him, but we could get through it and pick up the pieces. Yet, no matter how hard I reached for the memory, feeling my head pulse with the effort, it stayed locked away from me as surely as if it had never formed. ‘I can’t,’ I whispered.

  ‘Try.’

  ‘I can’t, I just can’t!’ There was silence. I looked at the other man in the room. He said nothing.