Liberation Square

by Gareth Rubin

  ‘So he is. I really must speak to him. Excuse us.’ Nick walked over to the small, sweating man, who was evidently his patient with the connection to Ian Fellowman, leaving me with Charles and the apparatchik.

  ‘So you’re just married, Comrade Cawson?’ the paunchy man asked me.

  ‘In May,’ I replied.

  ‘Church wedding?’ He was trying to sound friendly, not sly.

  ‘Lambeth Records Office.’

  ‘Ah.’ My distaste for this man made my stomach turn. But then I realized it was more than that. There was a sharp pain there too. I rubbed it involuntarily. He cocked an eyebrow. ‘Are you hungry? There is so much food here, all proof of the bumper harvests we have had recently.’

  Charles volubly agreed. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘It is important to eat well. As Comrade Blunt said himself: we are the thriving muscles of the body politic. Just as the head relies on the limbs for movement, so those limbs rely on the head for …’ His voice drifted away.

  Despite my lack of interest in his second-hand thoughts, I waited for Charles to continue, but then I realized that his attention had moved elsewhere, and I followed the direction of his gaze to the doorway I had come through a minute before. There, under its lintel, stood a tall, slim woman with bright red hair twisted up in the French style. She was in a scarlet dress that flared slightly at the bottom, exposing equally red high heels. Such heels were officially scorned nowadays as a bourgeois affectation, and yet she seemed to have gone for the reddest pair she could find. Although in her late thirties or early forties, she was still striking – by far the most striking woman in the room. A waiter offered her a gilded box of long, thin cigarettes, and she took one and held it to the flame on his lighter. For a moment it seemed like everything around her face had darkened. The flame flickered down as she let a stream of smoke drift from her mouth. When it had all gone, there was a smile left on her lips like an aftertaste.

  ‘She’s … very beautiful,’ I said. It was all that I could say.

  The apparatchik nodded vigorously. ‘Oh, yes. Yes, sometimes I used to watch her films three times over.’

  I realized then who she was.

  ‘Is that Lorelei?’ I said.

  ‘You didn’t recognize her?’

  I looked at Charles. He appeared surprised. ‘No,’ I replied, self-consciously.

  It was strange that I hadn’t. Victory 1945. It was shown on a loop all day long on Liberation Day. Lorelei had stolen the film as the resistance fighter with a pistol and untold courage who, upon discovering her soldier boyfriend had been killed by the Germans, had roused her cell, and then the crowds in the streets, to throw off the Nazis and welcome our Soviet liberators. But it had been more than a film: it had been the declaration of our statehood, the way we told each other that we were a new country. Lorelei was the image of everything that we were going to be: beauty and courage personified. It had affected me just as much as the other young men and women of my generation, because after the disaster that had engulfed the entire world for a decade – the Nazis, the War – it was up to us to change it for the better.

  ‘I suppose you have never been introduced – your husband is hardly likely to do that, is he?’ said the apparatchik. He gave out a hearty little chuckle. ‘I wish I could do the honours. She did so much for our nation.’

  ‘She did,’ said Charles wistfully.

  Yes, it was strange that I hadn’t recognized her. From the film’s release in 1946 and throughout the following years, her face had rarely been absent from newspaper pages and posters, but where had she been for the past few years? I hadn’t seen her in anything.

  A man she seemed to know approached her, offering his arm, and she accepted, gliding through at a sedate pace. As she passed us, I could smell her perfume: sweet and playful, it seemed to be drifting through the whole room, and the man at my side looked from me to her, then took a sip of his Champagne.

  She stopped walking to tap on Nick’s shoulder, and he turned and broke into a smile. What was he thinking at that moment, with us both in the room? Her and me. I would have loved to have known that. So I hesitated, but, well, jealousy got the better of me and I walked over, with Charles following in my wake. ‘Hello, darling,’ Nick said, as I approached.

  Lorelei turned her head ever so slightly to look at me. One of the curls from her hair swung to brush her cheek. ‘You must be Jane,’ she said. Her voice was airy but full of confidence. Now that I was beside her, I felt weak in her presence, like the new girl at school. Up close, I could see the cat-like curves of her green eyes, and I must admit I was pleased to see the traces of crow’s feet there.

  ‘Yes. Lorelei?’ I tried to sound unconcerned by her presence.

  ‘That’s right. Hello, Charles.’

  ‘Miss Addington. It’s very nice to see you again.’

  She smiled weakly at him, before examining me and the glass of white wine that I was clutching for security. ‘Good God, if you’re married to Nick, you’ll need something stronger than that,’ she burst out, taking it from my hand and grabbing a passing waiter. ‘Brandy for the lady.’ He scuttled away to find some.

  It was not what I had been expecting, and I hoped it wasn’t some trick that she was pulling on me.

  ‘Will it be that bad?’ I asked. I didn’t know whether I needed to be guarded or to go with the joke.

  ‘Marriage to Nick? Probably. It’s hard for me to tell: I was squiffy for most of my sentence.’

  I was taken aback. She really was being friendly. Yet, somehow, I found that harder to deal with than outright hostility. Charles looked, as Nick had said he might be, star-struck. And Nick was clearly amused by his former wife. ‘I’ll have to take that as a tip,’ I said, still uncertain how I should respond.

  ‘A tip from me? Golly, I’m the last person you should take one from.’ She took the glass of brandy that had arrived with the waiter, put it in my hand and swapped her empty Champagne glass for a full one from his tray. ‘Now, see that off and we can take it from there.’ She knocked back her drink and indicated for me to do the same.

  Nick intervened. ‘Following Lorelei in anything tends to result in madness or severe injury,’ he said.

  ‘Preferably both,’ she added.

  ‘Well, let’s see where this gets me.’ I threw half of it down my throat.

  ‘Mrs Cawson,’ began Charles. ‘If you would like –’

  ‘Good girl,’ Lorelei interrupted. I felt like my throat was on fire. ‘We’ll make a flapper of you yet.’

  ‘What’s that perfume?’ I asked.

  ‘This?’ She held out her wrist. ‘Tabac Blond. By Caron. Do you like it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Based on sweet Virginia tobacco, of all things. Hard to get now. Order Nick to get you a bottle. Place in Bristol does it – he knows which one. Now, Nicholas, I want to spend some time with you tonight, but I must go over there and sweet-talk the Ruskies, since they’re our masters now. Cheerio, Jane. We’ll compare notes later. I’ve got some tips for controlling Nick. I got them from a wild-animal keeper at the zoo.’

  My throat was still raw from the brandy and I had to struggle to pronounce more than a crackle. ‘I’ll look forward to it.’ That was true. I felt intimidated by this force of nature but also drawn to her. Some people are like that, aren’t they? You just can’t help yourself around them. ‘Goodbye,’ I said, waving my empty glass.

  Nick focused his attention back on me. ‘This is Comrade Honeysette. He’s in the Ministry of Food.’

  ‘I’m very pleased to meet you,’ Honeysette said, shaking my hand. He had a quick, rattling manner of speech.

  Charles looked across the room and spoke. ‘Comrade Honeysette is a friend of Comrade Fellowman.’

  ‘Known him since Oxford. Solid man. Very committed. Came over in ’47.’ So when scores of people were being thrown into Brixton Prison for attempting to escape from our side to theirs, Ian Fellowman was one of the handful who had made the journey in the other dir
ection. I had seen and heard men like him interviewed on the radio and television, speaking about the corruption and hunger in the DUK that they were leaving behind, but I had never seen one in the flesh. I was quite intrigued. I felt another pain in my abdomen but managed not to let it show.

  At that moment, a murmur went through the room and heads turned as, in the corner, a small train of guards and assistants strode forth. In the midst was someone familiar to me from the pages of the Morning Star: Guy Burgess. He was tall, medium build, with a rectangular face, and in his wake followed a clutch of eager apparatchiks, like seagulls chasing a trawler.

  But it wasn’t him that Charles and Honeysette were watching, it was someone else: a very big man with thin ginger hair who was following at a distance of only a couple of paces, and yet seemed somehow alone. He wore a drab grey suit, and there was something strangely transparent about him as he slipped between people, as if he could disappear right in front of you. They all entered a small area divided from the rest of the room by silk ropes.

  ‘That’s Fellowman, isn’t it?’ said Nick.

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ Honeysette replied, thoughtfully. ‘Shall we go over and I’ll see if I can catch his eye?’

  ‘Yes, let’s.’

  We walked through the throng. Comrade Fellowman was whispering in Burgess’s ear as we arrived, before stepping back to instruct a couple of junior assistants. ‘Ian,’ Honeysette called over. Fellowman glanced at him. ‘May I introduce a few friends of mine. This is Comrade Nick Cawson and his wife, Jane.’ He was about to speak again, but it was just then that a man appeared on the stage, tapped the microphone twice to make sure it was on and spoke, his voice distorted by the wires and speakers.

  ‘Comrades. It is my great honour tonight to welcome some very special guests,’ he said. ‘First, our colleagues in the struggle for democratic Socialism from the Russian league of Communism International.’ Clapping resounded around the room as we all turned to a group of ten men standing near the stage. I felt a hot flush and sweat forming on my brow, my stomach clenching. ‘And also to the Secretary of State Information, Comrade Burgess.’

  Burgess raised his hand to louder clapping, which died out as the speaker returned to the microphone. I saw Charles grin widely at me. But then something different passed over his face. Something like shock. It was reflected in the faces of all the men immediately around me. They were looking down to the floor at my feet. A few paces away, Lorelei seemed to have frozen in the act of clapping, her hands resting in mid-air as she too stared at the floor below me. Nick’s eyes rose, wide, to mine. Then there was a bolt of searing pain through my whole body, and I felt the glass slip from my fingers. It shattered on wood stained with droplets of wet blood, the shards exploding across the polished surface.

  ‘Christ,’ someone said.

  11

  Nick’s study was a small, necessarily tidy room at the back of the house – it would have been larger had it not been foreshortened by the doodlebug that had blown the back off the building. Although I was doing it for Nick, searching the room for anything that could incriminate him, I still had a sense that I was somehow invading his privacy. Before I began, though, I waited to make sure Hazel was in her room and listening to the radio. The sound of voices and a laughing audience through the wall told me that she was doing as I had asked – I didn’t think for a second that she would take much of it in, but at least it would give her mind a rest from her fears and sadness.

  Boxes of files were stacked untidily around the study walls. One wall also displayed a map showing how Britain had been divided. I traced the border along the complete southern shore of the Thames, and along the eastern part – our part – of the northern shore. Those stretches were all fence. The solid concrete wall, ranging from five to eight metres high and topped with barbed wire, ran up from the river near Trafalgar Square in the middle of the city, through Piccadilly Circus, where Checkpoint Charlie had been built, then north for fifteen kilometres to Barnet, at which point it curved west down to meet the Thames again at Twickenham.

  For those in DUK London, the only way out of it was the heavily fenced-in road that the Westerns had named ‘the Needle’ because it pierced the cordon we had thrown around them. That ran from Checkpoint Bravo, on the western limit of DUK London, out through our land to Oxford, which was the beginning of the main part of the DUK. It was Nick who had explained to me that a convoy of supply lorries – and a few civilians with the right visas – passed along the Needle each day. The DUK’s London citizens actually ate better than the rest of their country because the Americans sent so much food – mutton and pork and fish – along the road just to make sure they couldn’t be starved into submission if we were to cut it off.

  That border. Even if we did need it to reduce conflict with the DUK, it was awful how it also kept us divided from ourselves and from our vital, collective history. I couldn’t help thinking that even my own mind was taking on its character by locking away the memories I needed the most: those lost moments in Lorelei’s house. I suppose on some level our thoughts will change to reflect and resemble the world around us.

  Under the map stood Nick’s writing desk – one of the lovely old roll-top ones with leather and brass all over. It looked so intriguing that I started my search there, lifting the top to find a few letters ready to post, the normal assortment of pens and notepaper; some old correspondence in the drawers; and, in the very bottom one, a clutch of letters neatly gathered in ribbon. Although the ink on the envelopes was fading, I knew the hand: it was the same as in the book that I had stashed under my shoes in our bedroom. With some trepidation, I untied the ribbon. The notepaper was scented – it must have been old because you couldn’t get that sort of paper any more.

  It’s one thing to know that your husband was once in love with another woman. It’s another to know that he kept her letters.

  28th April 1942

  Darling Boy,

  I’ve just landed in New York. Eleanor and Harry met me off what they think is called an ‘airplane’ (‘Well, it flies through the air, don’t it?’) and drove me straight to their little place on Long Island. I say ‘little place’ but they have clearly dug up Canada to build their garage and drained most of the North Atlantic to fill their swimming pool. I therefore made sure to chuckle loudly at all the inconsistencies in architectural style and smile in a condescending manner at their attempt to re-create Versailles in a town where they think Versailles is a type of fish. I think they got the message. Well, if you can’t insult two of your closest friends, who can you insult? Although it’s now after midnight and I’m almost as tired as their wallpaper, I’m lying on my four-poster bed and dreaming of the best ways to insult their children. Will write again when they have asked me to leave.

  Kiss Hazel for me.

  L

  20th August 1942

  Darling Boy,

  Hollywood is a God-awful place. Yes, yes, all the sunshine is nice, and they seem to have pink gins coming out of their ears, but the town is full of the worst sort of harpies ready to fall backwards with their legs in the air if it means an audition. Half of them have a permanent grin like a hyena. It’s stuck on with lipstick and regular injections from a doctor, Max Jacobson, who everyone here calls Dr Feelgood. I have no idea what’s in those shots, but I have to say that after I gave one a go I was dancing from Friday night until lunchtime on Tuesday. He was telling me how he could get hold of the latest medical drugs in big quantities when a Yank officer marched over, announced that his name was Colonel Hank Dee, that he was a huge admirer of mine and that he would be honoured to take me out for a drive. I politely told the good doctor I would talk to him later about his offer and allowed Col. Dee to escort me away. You would have been endearingly jealous, as you always are, but don’t worry – the dear Colonel is sixty if he’s a day (not that that stops them over here!).

  He says he’s in the Education Corps and he has all those lovely manners of the old-fashioned Southern g
entleman – but behind Col. Dee’s eyes there’s a light that’s burning just a little bit too bright for the classroom, if you know what I mean. So when we were in his car, taking a nice evening drive through the hills, we chatted about Britain right now and is it true that half the House of Commons and a smattering of the idiot sons of the Lords are red to the bone? They absolutely loathe Stalin over here. As well as being a commie, they think he’s a coward for staying out of the War. Not surprising, really. And my new friend IS terribly sweet, with all that ‘Why ma’am, ah’m jus’ a simple country boy from South Carolina’ flim-flam. Do you think I should see him again?

  And don’t worry, Darling Boy, I’ve only got eyes for you. Well, when I’m in London anyway. Right now there’s a charming little cornball from somewhere called ‘Iowa’ with muscles like a Studebaker car who keeps following me around. Maybe tonight will be Chuck’s lucky night!

  Kiss Hazel for me.

  L

  I checked the date on Lorelei’s letters. They had been written when Hazel was about four. The marriage had lasted another seven years, give or take.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  I spun around to see Hazel standing behind me. I stared at the page in my hand. ‘It’s nothing,’ I said quickly. It was like being caught stealing – and I was stealing something: a part of Nick’s past. My first instinct was to hide the letter, but it was too late for that. Hazel came closer and looked down at it.

  ‘That’s my mum,’ she said.

  ‘It’s an old letter to your father.’

  She took it out of my hand and read it. ‘She was in Hollywood for a bit,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sure she missed you.’ I realized that I was speaking as if I knew her. Strange to be so famous, a household name to millions, and yet so unknown. I wondered if Nick had really known her, or if she had always played a part with him too.

  ‘Did you meet her?’ Hazel asked.