by Gareth Rubin
The Soviets learned from their mistake too. Instead of just closing the tunnels, they filled complete sections with rubble from the buildings that the Germans had destroyed during the relentless five-day bombardment that began their invasion. Most of those broken bricks had come from the East End – ‘a hotbed of Jews and Trades Unionists’, Mosley had informed the Nazi high command in advance. Well, those people had had their revenge in time, and Mosley’s body soon lay broken on the street, next to that of his vile wife.
Coming from Kent, I had never really known the devastation that London had suffered until one night when Nick and I had climbed up on to the roof of a theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue, home to all the grandest playhouses. He had pressed a coin into the hand of an usherette during the interval of a musical, and she had surreptitiously pulled aside the chain that closed off the topmost flight of stairs.
‘You see how some of these theatres have the roof missing?’ Nick had asked me as the cool night air drifted about us.
‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘The Blitz?’
‘Not quite. This street’s where the Home Guard made their last stand against the Nazis.’ He shook his head. ‘Old men up here with rifles and paraffin bombs against Panzers. Well, until the Luftwaffe blasted it all to bits. Poor blokes.’ I tried to take it in, but it wasn’t so easy. The official line that we were fed by the new state was that Churchill, in an act of supreme cowardice, had immediately signed the order of capitulation and saved his own skin by running off to Northern Ireland with the Royal Family. Others argued – discreetly – that he had been right to leave because someone needed to be in charge to direct the resistance, which was true. Well, you took your pick of viewpoints.
A night fighter on patrol passed overhead. Nick went right to the edge and peered down. ‘Have you taken out life insurance?’ I asked casually.
‘Sorry, old girl, not a penny. So there’s really no point doing it.’
‘Pity.’
We looked to the other side of the Wall. Cars buzzed about with bright headlamps; there were omnibuses full of people; and bustling shops, despite the late hour. Sometimes, if you were close to the Wall and the wind was right, you could hear music coming over – that very fast, jumpy American jazz with guitars and singers that they played occasionally on Radio Free Europe. Young people – the Teddy Boys especially – would head to the basement milk bars of Soho to try to guess how the dances went, re-creating the steps while they drummed on the tables with cutlery and fists. I had pictured Nick and myself over there dancing to the hot tempo music before laughing out into the street as the sun came up.
The train wheels crunched over tracks as Tibbot and I trundled back to London now. I looked out the window at houses passing in the night.
‘He’s lost,’ Tibbot said. And he waited for it to sink in. ‘I’m sorry, really, but if you keep on, it will only bring this down on you too. If they thought you knew anything about it, you would already be in one of their cells.’ He was right. By delving into Nick’s secret, I had made myself a target. And I had made Tibbot one too.
It was all so hard to take in. I understood that the state had its enemies – it never tired of telling us that – but I just hadn’t seen Nick as one of them. I hadn’t known him.
Whatever he had been doing for the Americans, though, I guessed he had stopped by the time we married. But then Lorelei had died and her death had somehow brought her and Nick’s activities to NatSec’s attention. Whether her death was itself connected to their work, or was the product of something else entirely, didn’t really matter – NatSec had learned about them.
‘What do you think the “big orders” were?’ I said.
‘What?’
‘Rachel said that’s what they had fought about. She and Lorelei.’ It was something so big they had come to blows. Yet, whatever it was, it didn’t appear to have happened yet.
‘I suppose it was all put on hold when she was taken in.’
‘I expect so.’ Perhaps that had been the final cause of Lorelei’s death: someone had wanted to stop the plan or to take it over … or anything, really. All those possibilities of which we had no idea.
We pulled into a station and waited. The lights flicked off and back on. A door slammed. From further down the corridor, we heard a man’s voice. ‘Your identity cards!’ It echoed through the train. Tibbot and I looked at each other, worried, and I pictured Larren on the telephone to whoever had transferred Rachel’s car to him in return for keeping her quiet in his asylum.
‘Two of them,’ Tibbot said, putting his head outside the compartment. ‘One’s on the platform.’
I knew that I should have stayed put and calmly handed over my card, crossed my fingers and bluffed it out. I knew that. But panic took hold of me.
I jumped up, slid back the door and bolted into the corridor, away from the voice. Tibbot ran after me and grabbed me by the arm just as I was about to enter the furthest compartment. ‘Calm down!’ he ordered me. ‘Breathe.’ He checked over his shoulder. Luckily the man on the platform had his back to us and the other wasn’t in sight.
‘Identity card,’ we heard again from one of the compartments.
‘I’m sorry, I have it here somewhere.’ It was a young man’s voice, a local accent.
‘What do we do if they recognize us?’ I asked furtively.
‘Come in and sit down.’ He pulled me into the next compartment. An old woman in a shawl was sitting alone. Trembling, she held her card out to us.
‘It’s all right, that’s not us,’ said Tibbot.
‘What do they want?’ she asked in a feeble voice.
‘Hard to say,’ Tibbot replied.
I shot him a glance. I wanted to tell the woman it was us they were coming for, that she was safe, even if we were not.
She started talking nervously. ‘Yes. A boy from my village, you see … I do my best, but you never know if the rules have changed and if someone is going to say something.’ She took a handkerchief and dabbed her brow. She waved Tibbot away when he tried to put his hand on her arm. I heard the man’s voice again, muffled by the door between us, but closer. ‘And what then? What then?’
The door opened, but it was a girl, aged about eighteen, with her hair in the short style the Party encouraged. She sat down and no one said anything else. We just waited. The waiting went on for five, then ten minutes. Another door slammed and ours opened.
‘Identity cards.’ He was aged about forty – a little older than they usually were. NatSec preferred young men and women because they were more eager to shape the new world. It was the Secs’ belief that made them so frightening. I don’t think I could ever have believed anything as strongly as they did.
I saw Tibbot look past the Sec, to the train door leading on to the platform. He was sizing the man up, then glancing at me. I could tell he was coming to the conclusion that it wasn’t worth any rough stuff – he could probably handle himself, but not with me to look after too. The old woman and the girl who had sat down offered up their cards. They were taken, held up to the light, bent back and forth to test them and handed back without comment. Tibbot drew out his warrant card.
‘All right?’ he asked as he showed it. The Sec tried to take it from his grip. ‘No need for anything, is there?’
‘There is if I say there is.’ His expression was challenging. He took the card from Tibbot and looked at it, then at him. ‘This way,’ he muttered. ‘And you too.’ I looked to Tibbot; he nodded. We did as we were told.
Stepping down on to a sullen-looking platform, we found it empty apart from the other Sec, a younger man, my age and athletic-looking. ‘Now come on, mate,’ Tibbot chuckled. ‘What’s this all about, eh?’ A solitary light shone over a station sign that had been so broken and weather-beaten it was illegible. I guessed that we must have been close to Blackheath, the Closed Village where the Politburo lived with their NatSec minders.
‘In there,’ the senior man replied, pointing to the waiting room. The doorway was em
pty, with rusted hinges sticking uselessly out of the brickwork. Behind us, the train began to move off, the wheels whining as they strained to spin, and we watched the blank face of the old woman in the carriage disappear. ‘I said in there.’
‘All right, come on, a bit of professional comradeship,’ Tibbot said, still trying to be pally.
‘You’re not my comrade.’ Inside it was dark, with the smell of vagrants and what they had used it for. I started as I felt the younger man’s hand on my back. ‘Sit down.’
‘I can stand,’ I said.
‘Sit down.’
‘Just do it,’ Tibbot muttered.
‘Where have you been today?’
‘Kent,’ Tibbot replied, leaving behind the attempt at a friendly tone.
‘Sergeant, you want to fuck about, you’ll regret it.’ I knew as well as Tibbot that he was probably right.
Tibbot lowered himself on to a backless bench in the middle of the room. He made the Sec wait before he answered. ‘I was investigating a crime.’
‘What crime?’
‘Car theft,’ Tibbot told him.
‘Car theft.’
‘That’s right.’
The Sec pointed to me, then to another bench in the corner, behind Tibbot. His younger colleague took me by the arm and led me over. The older one resumed his questions. ‘And just who reported this theft?’
‘Sorry, that’s between me and them.’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘Police business. Not yours.’
‘Like I said, Sergeant, you fuck me about, you regret it.’
The younger Sec sat beside me. He had a small, pebble-like goitre bulging from the left side of his neck. He leaned in close to me. ‘Your house,’ he said quietly. ‘Must be nice living somewhere big like that.’ I stared dead ahead.
‘Listen,’ Tibbot said to the other man. ‘You’re pushing it and we both know that. Now, I know what you and your mates get up to in the basement of your HQ, but, unless you’ve brought a couple of rubber truncheons with you tonight, I’m going to cross my arms and sit here nice and polite while you piss off.’ The Sec glanced at me. ‘And you had better drop that idea and all, son.’
‘Are you fucking threatening me?’
‘Sounds like it, don’t it?’
‘You’re a long way from home, Sergeant,’ the older Sec told Tibbot, thrusting his face so close they almost touched.
‘So are you,’ Tibbot replied darkly. I was worried how this would end.
‘You want to try, old man?’
‘Been through as much as you.’
‘You haven’t a fucking clue.’ I saw the saliva fly from his mouth.
Tibbot sat back, appraising him. ‘What regiment?’ he asked.
‘One-four-two Commando.’
‘Chindits?’ The Sec nodded. Tibbot paused. ‘And look at you now. Wingate wouldn’t spit on a cunt like you.’
The Sec made eye contact with his colleague, who leaped up, grabbed the collar of Tibbot’s jacket and pulled it down as far as his elbows, trapping his arms. The older man kicked Tibbot in the chest, toppling him backwards. He fell against my legs – if he hadn’t, he would have cracked his head on the concrete floor. I bent down to help but the younger man dragged me back and I sat up again, my legs shaking.
‘Fucking stay down!’ the older man shouted at Tibbot.
Someone appeared at the door: a couple of kids aged thirteen or fourteen apparently attracted by the noise. They stopped at what they saw. ‘Piss off,’ the older Sec barked at them. They took his order and hurried away.
Tibbot was pushing himself on to his side.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked, afraid to help him up.
‘Yeah.’ But he wasn’t breathing well and I hoped he was only winded.
The senior Sec took a notebook from his hip pocket, turned his back on us and marched over to a bashed-about call box in the corner of the room. He flipped through his book until he found what he was looking for, called a number and mumbled into the telephone. Tibbot pulled his jacket off and threw it angrily to the side. We all waited, freezing in the dank room as the Sec made his call.
A train, an express hooting its speed, came through in the opposite direction to ours. Distant road traffic provided a distorted chaos of noise. We waited, still. After a minute, the older man came back. ‘The car is not stolen. There hasn’t been any crime. It doesn’t concern you any more, so you can go back to nicking pickpockets or whatever you normally do. Your inspector has been informed. I doubt he’s over the moon.’ Another train was pulling in on its way to London. ‘You’re getting on that one.’
‘Are we?’ Tibbot spat. I could hear the ice in his words.
‘Yes. You are.’
Tibbot raised his head. He waited a moment before speaking. ‘I’ve been in this game longer than you have, son,’ he said. ‘You learn some things.’ He stood up stiffly, plucked his dirt-streaked jacket from the ground and walked towards the train.
As the train pulled into Blackfriars, I was reminded of the moment I had met Nick on the platform at Waterloo Station. Even after what had happened, the memory could still make me smile. But I had to come to terms with the fact that he wasn’t coming back to me – what Rachel had said left little room for doubt – and if I ever saw him alive again it would be in a military court, where I would be giving evidence against him. I wouldn’t have any choice about that. I would look at him across the room and it would split my heart, but if they ordered me to declare that I had witnessed him passing messages to American spies or that he had tried to recruit me to the cause, I would. He wouldn’t blame me; he would understand.
‘Well, thank you,’ I told Tibbot as we stood on the platform. I knew that the moment he turned his back, the tears would flood out and I wanted to be alone with that grief.
‘I didn’t help much in the end.’
‘No, but, well, I would have been much worse on my own.’
‘What will you do now?’
‘I’ll have a talk with Hazel about her father. I think I need to prepare her for the idea that he may not be coming home … soon.’ I didn’t want to be the one to tell her, but I didn’t want anyone else to do it either. ‘What about you?’
‘I’ll go home, take a bath, make myself something to eat, fall asleep next to the radio, get up in the morning, go back to work.’ He smeared his hand across his face.
‘I first met Nick in a railway station,’ I said. ‘Oh, he could be charming.’
‘That’s probably why he was able to get away with it. For a while.’
‘Probably.’ The cold was beginning to get to me. ‘Well, thank you. I suppose it’s goodbye.’
‘I hope it goes all right with Hazel.’
‘Thanks.’
He slipped away towards the entrance to the Underground, into the sea of people hurrying in all directions and none. No one took any notice of this ageing man with an air of sadness about him.
‘Hazel,’ I said, knocking on her door, ‘would you like to come down and have supper?’ She opened the door. I could see she had been crying again. ‘May I come in?’
We sat together on the bed. ‘What about Dad?’ she asked.
‘Your dad’s still where he was.’
‘What did he do?’
I hesitated. ‘Your dad is a good, brave man who always tried to help other people. If anyone says anything else, don’t listen to them. He’s a doctor. He helps other people, even when it costs him.’
‘Are they going to let him go?’
‘It might take longer than we thought.’
‘Why?’
‘I think you should eat something. Will you do that for me?’
‘All right,’ she said unhappily.
I took her down to the kitchen. There was much of her mother in her, and yet there was a shyer grace in her movements – Lorelei seemed to attract attention even when she was standing still. I made an omelette with a little cheese, although I could hardly swallow mine. Then I
saw her to bed and we talked for a while about Nick and what might happen now. I left her to let the thoughts sink in. Tomorrow we would talk more.
Sitting on my own bed, I couldn’t stop thinking about how I had lost my own parents. I had been older than Hazel and had had time to come to terms with it – but even then it had been hard enough.
And I made a decision. I resolved to find a way to prevent that happening to her.
But what on earth could I do now? My mind went back to Nick’s contacts. What if the Americans could help get him out? Some sort of deal. They did those from time to time: a man sent each way across the border, overseen by someone from the League of World Nations. But I could hardly walk into the American Embassy and ask. There had to be another way.
The more I tried to work it out, however, the more I realized how exhausted I was; and, in the end, I fell asleep without even undressing.
21
Sources within the RGB say the constant jostling for influence among the senior members of the Communist Party is crippling the country. Economic output is grinding to a halt, as internal bickering means state industries are run by bureaucrats with no experience of managing them. The result has been those companies teetering on the verge of collapse. As winter bites, shortages of food and fuel are already being felt. Scenes of great hardship are now expected in what was once the most fertile part of our island.
News broadcast, Radio Free Europe,
Wednesday, 19 November 1952
I woke just after eight o’clock the next morning, stiff in my clothes. I stretched and rubbed my limbs, but it did little good.
Nick had said that the concussion would take a couple of days to ease, and I lay there trying to recall more of that day when I had found Lorelei. I closed my eyes and pictured her there in the damp room as the light played on her skin. Her hands seemed to lift up to me and I looked deep into her glittering, searching eyes. But all that came back to me was a sense that there had been words on her lips: a cry of warning or distress. And what the words had been, I couldn’t tell. I went to the bathroom and examined my face in the mirror above the sink. I asked myself how fanciful it was, that sense that I had that the division of our nation had in some way seeped into my own body, to divide me from my memories? Or was I just a silly woman wanting to blame her own failings on a political situation that had absolutely nothing to do with them? Well, maybe. But what did Socialism mean if not a connection between the individual and the state, one reflecting the other? At least on some level, even the most basic animal level of all, the injury I had sustained, the one that had beaten my memory from my mind, had been a result of the changes in how we lived – of the suspicions that we were forced to foster. The doubts about my own husband that had drawn me to Lorelei’s house that day. On that level, it was no absurdity. It was a hard, physical fact.