Liberation Square

by Gareth Rubin

  ‘What are you doing?’ I jerked my hand back and grabbed the sides of the ladder. Our young neighbour, Patricia, was framed by her open window.

  ‘I … there’s a birds’ nest.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘They were making a noise. Disturbing Hazel. Nick’s daughter.’

  She looked doubtful. ‘Where is Dr Cawson?’ she asked. She had watched me and Tibbot leave the house yesterday. Someone might have told her to note down our comings and goings.

  ‘He’s at work.’

  She crossed her arms. ‘I heard one of Churchill’s lying broadcasts coming from his daughter’s room. Through the wall. Do you let her listen to that rubbish?’

  ‘Oh, God, no. I’ll make sure that’s the last time.’

  ‘It was this morning. My husband said we should speak to you.’

  ‘Thank you. Yes. She’s just a girl, doesn’t know what she’s doing. I expect we were the same at her age.’

  ‘Were you?’

  ‘Oh, I was a horror. But thank you for letting me know. I’ll have a word with her.’ Go away, I wanted to shout at her. Just leave us alone.

  ‘She has read The Compass?’

  ‘Yes, she has. At school, of course,’ I said. That red paperback had never seemed so absurd to me as now.

  ‘Good.’ She paused and her face softened a little as she moved on to a new subject. ‘Will Lorelei Addington be coming again?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ I asked hoarsely.

  ‘I saw her here when she came, oh, a few weeks ago.’ Her face broke into a smile. ‘She was my heroine when I was at school. Will she be coming again?’

  I hoped Hazel wasn’t within earshot. ‘No. She won’t, I’m sorry, I have to –’

  ‘Did Dr Cawson give her the magazine?’

  ‘What magazine?’

  ‘She was in an old magazine I found, and I thought she would want it. I gave it to Dr Cawson to pass on to her. Did she get it?’

  So it was this obsessed girl who was the source of the glossy publication I had found in Nick’s surgery before Lorelei’s death, the one that had made me imagine all sorts of false things.

  ‘I’ll see to it,’ I mumbled.

  ‘That would –’

  ‘I really must get on with this.’

  A pregnant pause passed between us, but it meant that she finally got the message and left me to it. I thought about abandoning what I was doing and going back into the house, afraid of what she might know or say in one of her Party meetings, but I pressed on. Stretching as far as I could, I managed to touch the sharp corner of one of the bricks at the edge of the gap, yet couldn’t reach in any more than the sunlight could.

  Back on the ground, I folded away the ladder and returned to the house. I couldn’t access that narrow space from the outside, but it struck me that it might be possible from within the house. Passing Hazel’s room, I made sure her door was closed, and then I entered Nick’s study. I had made a mistake, I realized, when I had searched through it previously for anything that the Secs would have wanted. I hadn’t thought of Lorelei’s house. She had had a hiding place in the ceiling of Hazel’s room. Wouldn’t Nick have one too? Rachel had been trying to tell me where it was.

  The back wall of the study was hung with a couple of framed watercolours that Nick had said he valued because they were so astonishingly ugly that they demonstrated immense talent. I had laughed then. Now I lifted them away and smoothed my hand over the plastered wall. There was nothing. Neither was there anything of interest behind his writing desk or any indication of a ceiling cavity. I drew back the curtains and checked behind them – and my eye fell on something I hadn’t seen before. About half a metre up the wall, hidden behind the material, there was a large square wooden panel, with sides about forty centimetres long. I couldn’t recall seeing anything like it in any other room. I knelt down and felt around it.

  The sound of movement from Hazel’s room made me stop. The subsequent silence told me that she wasn’t coming, however, so, after first taking the precaution of locking the study door to make sure, I went back to running my fingers around the wood. There was a hair’s breadth of a gap between it and the wall but the edge was too thin to get a grip on. I looked through Nick’s desk for something I could use to prise it away. An old pen with a steel nib looked like it might work, and I stabbed it into the thin gap, but the only effect, as I tried to lever the panel away, was to bend and snap the nib. I needed something more solid.

  I hunted through drawers, tossing aside envelopes, an ashtray and a few notebooks. Then, at the back of one, I found what I needed: a brass ruler, tarnished at the edges and its numbers rubbed away, but fundamentally strong.

  I returned to the floor and shoved the ruler in hard behind the wood. It went in only a few millimetres, though, and, try as I might, that produced no leverage. I grabbed a hardback book from Nick’s shelf – a medical textbook detailing the effects of hormones – and placed it against the end of the ruler. I shoved with all my weight and felt the brass slip in further, far enough to act as a lever. The wood didn’t want to move; it was jammed in tight; but, little by little, working the metal back and forth, and then doing the same on the opposite side, I managed to draw the panel slightly towards me and into the room. Eventually, I could grip it properly and rip it away, to leave a gaping, rough hole in the plaster and a little cloud of dust seeping through the air.

  Was this it? I bent down to find a cavity wall, with two layers of bricks. The external layer was the one with the crack in it. Then there was the cavity, then the internal layer. Some of the bricks had been removed from the internal layer, giving access to the cavity from inside the house. The hole had then been covered by the wooden panel. It had been deliberate, I was certain of that.

  I looked through into the cavity; yet, just as from the garden side, it was impenetrably dark, so I pulled over a reading lamp from the desk and shone it through, hoping there would be something there. I couldn’t see much – dirty bricks, the same mist of plaster dust that I had sent floating up and the skeletal timber frame. Pressing my face right to the hole to peer around, I could smell the damp air, mixed with the odour of mould.

  And then there was sharp pain and confusion – something was screeching at me and clawing at my cheek, drawing blood. I cried out as I felt its talons across my skin and its wings beating at my face, and I fell backwards, knocking over the lamp and scrabbling away, to press my back against a bookcase. The screeching went on and on, as if it were in my head, and at the same time I could hear Hazel calling out my name and then come running and trying the handle, banging on the door. ‘It’s all right, Hazel. I’m fine. I just … dropped something. Silly of me,’ I managed to stutter.

  ‘Can I come in?’ she asked, hesitatingly.

  ‘No, I’m … It’s your father’s things. His private …’ And in the beam from the tumbled lamp, I caught sight of the glittering black eye of the bird that had scratched my cheek. I put my hand to the stinging wound. ‘Please, just go back to your room.’

  She sounded doubtful. ‘All right.’

  I stared at the bird. It was watching me through the gap in the plaster. And then it thrust its head through into the room and looked around, studying me with its head to one side, for a long while. I sat as still as I could, hoping it wouldn’t fly into the room. Then it jumped back into the darkness, out of my sight, and all I heard was its wings flapping against the bricks as it flew away into the open air.

  Recovering myself, I crawled to the hole and righted the lamp. Very carefully this time, I placed my face back to the breach. With the light I could see a bit more. There was a nest made from twigs and rubbish that sat on one of the floorboards, and beside it a pale and misshapen thing that I couldn’t quite make out. It was about the same size as the nest, but not twisted together by a bird. Something man-made. I reached through, took hold of it and brought it back into the room.

  On the floor in front of me, crumpled and empty, was a cardboard box simila
r to the one I had found in Lorelei’s hiding place. It was a little larger but otherwise the same: divided into small compartments just like the ones that had held rifle rounds during my basic training. I unfolded it and shook it out. The compartments were empty – or so I thought, until I noticed, wedged in at the bottom of one, a circular piece of thin glass with jagged edges reaching upwards. It had clearly been broken off a larger item. Stuck to it was a tiny slip of paper with a single typed word, the letters stretching right to the rough edge. I held it in my fingertips and read it out loud to myself, rolling it on my tongue to try to make sense of it: ‘Jacob’.

  For a minute I remained still, hearing nothing. And then, with a rush of blood through my mind, I understood what I had missed.

  I grabbed the stack of intimate letters from Lorelei that Nick had kept in his desk drawer. There was something in one that I needed to read again. I hunted through the lines about parties and acerbic comments about social climbers and fusty old men; declarations of love and laughing rejections of Nick’s ‘slushy’ replies; and finally I found the letter in which she mentioned the American wartime colonel who had asked her about the Reds embedding themselves in British society. I pulled it out and scanned it. The name I was looking for was there in blue ink, as dark as when she had written it.

  I looked hard at the box – I had seen others like it far more recently than during my Compulsory Basic. Maybe this letter could save Nick. If I were right, he was guilty of a crime, but it was nothing like what the Secs thought.

  23

  The League of World Nations has condemned an attempt by the so-called Democratic United Kingdom to hijack its proceedings yesterday. The truly democratic nations of the world, led by the Soviet Union, Jugoslavia and China, threw out a motion attempting to blame the Republic of Great Britain for the division of the British island. The democratic states refused to relinquish the microphone in the assembly chamber until the motion was withdrawn. They were roundly applauded by all the countries present.

  News broadcast, RGB Station 1,

  Wednesday, 19 November 1952

  I took the Tube to the Aldwych. From there, I walked to the brass-studded front door of 60 Great Queen Street, a huge, faceless old building made of white stone blocks. I must have looked out of place and deathly nervous – the people freely entering this building were rarely civilians. After being searched, I was allowed inside to find a wide and tall lobby, plain to the point of austerity, where the reception desk was behind a thick glass window – thick enough to withstand a shot from a pistol, perhaps. I touched Lorelei’s letter to Nick, held in my pocket, to confirm to myself that it was there. It was what I trusted to get me out of there safely.

  As I approached the thick glass, a young woman in uniform glanced up at me without interest before returning to the paperwork she was involved with. There were four forms, each with two carbon copies, and she seemed to be filling them all out simultaneously with the same information. Twelve copies of that report to be sent through the offices of government, some to be looked at and ignored, some to be acted upon, some to be binned, some to be filed unread. I waited. ‘Yes?’ she mouthed after a while.

  I pressed myself to the glass. ‘My husband, Nicholas Cawson, is here. You … you suspect him of a crime.’ A young man in a uniform that was too small for him was standing right behind me, making no attempt to hide the fact that he was listening.

  ‘Yes?’ the woman repeated.

  ‘May I speak to someone?’

  ‘About what?’ asked the young man.

  ‘I have some information.’

  ‘Have you?’ He sounded intrigued and a little pleased with himself. The woman, seeing someone else take the burden of dealing with me, opened a file and extracted another ream of forms that she began to fill out. ‘You’ve done the right thing coming to us.’

  It dawned on me that he thought I had come to provide information against Nick. I was about to tell him he was wrong, but it was more likely that I would have a hearing if I went along with his mistake. He took a key and let himself through a door in the wall, reappearing behind the glass partition. ‘Your name?’

  ‘Jane Cawson.’ I spelled it out.

  ‘And your husband’s?’

  ‘Nicholas Cawson.’ He glanced at the scratch on my cheek that the bird had made. I put my hand to it. He didn’t seem too interested, though, and wrote our two names on a piece of paper before going to the back of the reception desk to look through some cards. ‘Wait over there,’ he said, picking up a telephone and pointing to a line of chairs bolted to the floor.

  On the wall was a poster of a man in a narrow alleyway, a shadow obscuring his face. ‘Saboteur. Parasite. Black marketeer. You THINK he is your friend, but he is working against you. Report counter-social behaviour. No matter who it is.’ There was a telephone number and I wondered how many people had called it – some proud to do their political duty, others ashamed and hoping no one would ever know.

  I took the only available seat, next to an old man dressed in clothes that looked like they might once have been smart but were now torn and frayed. He had the air of someone who had felt his high hopes and ideals crushed out of him, and in between little sobs he opened a briefcase and pulled out what appeared to be pupils’ exercise books – distracting himself by reading over them. A teacher who had welcomed the arrival of Socialism with open arms, perhaps, only to find his syllabus restricted and his students staring at him as a relic to be eased out and forgotten.

  After a while, the loudspeaker in the corner of the ceiling began to whine, then bark. It was time for Comrade Blunt’s address. ‘… banished superstition to the silvery pages of the history books. Our children will read of religion as they read of the Black Death – a terrible scourge that they will, thankfully, never encounter …’ He didn’t mention that his deceased father had been a vicar and he had been brought up a good Christian. Of course, Stalin had studied at a seminary, hadn’t he? Perhaps it was the constant immersion in these ideas that had resulted in their violent loathing. Churchill and Blunt fighting over us with words and ideals – it never seemed to end. And the letter in my pocket set out the price that we had paid for their warfare.

  It must have been ten times over the course of the next hour that I got up to leave, before losing the courage even to walk out the door. Finally, I decided for certain that I was making a terrible mistake and picked up my bag to go. At that moment, however, a man strode into the room – bald, but quite handsome despite it, and my heart sank. Instantly I was back in that cage, the smog seeping into the dark van as we wound through traffic, the smell of his breath and sweat. I had hoped never to see Grest again, but my name must have been linked with his in the files. He stopped and looked around the lobby, then came over to me. ‘Mrs Cawson.’

  I stared at him. ‘I’m sorry, I’ve –’

  ‘Come this way,’ he said, as he led me towards two doors guarded by Secs with gun holsters.

  ‘No, I was –’

  ‘Come this way.’

  His shoes clipped on the floor as he recorded my entry at the guard post. In the corridors on the other side, everyone had the same look of grim determination, as if we were still at war and the enemy were expected to land at any moment. I had to keep up with his pace, until he stood back with formal politeness to let me enter a plain room. The door was thick enough to prevent any sound passing through it.

  I sat at the small table, trying not to think of the other featureless rooms in this building and what took place in them. Somewhere, Nick sat or lay. If he knew I was there, he might have felt some comfort or simply more fear. ‘My husband,’ I said, trying to speak with strength but finding that strength dissolving.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He’s innocent.’ Grest just snorted. I could see he was wondering what my plan was. Simple pleading? Vehement denials? Supply some rumour about Nick’s friends in return for favour? He had probably heard it all a hundred times. ‘Well, he’s not entirely innocent.
He’s committed a crime but it’s not what you think.’ Now he looked mildly interested. ‘You think he and Lorelei were working for the Americans. They weren’t. Please. Read this.’ I reached into my pocket and pulled out the letter I had taken from the stack in Nick’s writing desk. I didn’t want to think what would happen – to him, to me – if I were wrong.

  Lorelei’s letter told of the American colonel who, she suggested, was in a more underhand section of the army than the Education Corps to which he claimed allegiance. But before she wrote of him, she had described some of the other guests at the party – and one in particular:

  … the town is also 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 …

  ‘I found this hidden in the house.’ From my pocket I drew the broken piece of thin, circular glass with jagged edges that had been in the box. The typed label that stretched to the rough edge read: ‘Jacob’, the last few letters having been torn off. ‘I’m sure it’s the base of a medicine phial. I saw them all the time at the surgery.’ The card boxes with their little compartments, those that had reminded me of the cartons full of rifle rounds, had held the delicate little tubes. And Tim Honeysette had handed me ten pounds at his house, expecting something contraband but vital in return.