Liberation Square

by Gareth Rubin

  ‘Yes,’ I said, hardly able to speak. ‘Thank you.’ I began to leave but, as I was crossing the threshold, I turned to speak to him. ‘By the way, do you know anyone called “Crispin”?’

  ‘ “Crispin”?’ He paused. ‘Don’t think so.’

  ‘All right. Thank you.’

  Outside, the woman opposite was in front of her shop again, still smoking. She was even more striking-looking than the previous day, with immaculate make-up, a silver cameo choker on her neck and a large glittering mother-of-pearl comb in her hair. And, even though she was wearing a simple sort of white dress, there was something about the way she wore it. ‘You’re very glamorous,’ I said, before I could stop myself.

  She hooted with laughter. ‘Nice of you to say that, love.’ She reached out and took my hair in her fist, rubbing it between her fingers. ‘You know, you could be a pin-up if you just paid a bit more attention to your make-up and did something with this. A wave. Bit of a tint. I’ll do it for less than a quid.’

  I looked behind her and realized that her shop was a hairdresser’s. ‘Like yours?’

  ‘If you like.’ Nick and I were going to the theatre that evening, and I thought it would be jolly to have my hair done for it. I was about to step in when something caught my eye: a line of men marching past the end of the street, clad in overalls. It was a work party of Germans on their way to dig up the road. Their guards were armed with guns and batons, and we watched them pass, some looking dejected, some angry and swearing in German. There were rumours that the Department of Labour was considering taking our own reported Parasites and putting them into these work details so they would learn the happiness of labour – I hoped that was just talk, though. ‘Don’t feel sorry for them. Not one bit,’ said my new friend, watching them coldly. ‘Me brother was at D-Day. He saw them shooting his mates on the ground after they had surrendered.’

  People were often reticent about D-Day. Some claimed that it was Blunt himself who had supplied Stalin with our plans, and the Soviets had passed them on to Hitler so that our offensive would fail. The Red Army, they said, had stayed out of the War precisely so that we and Germany would knock each other to pieces, and they could then sweep through Europe when we were both so weak that we could hardly stand. Blunt didn’t come across as that underhand, but how could you really tell?

  The work party began to dig up some of the ruts in the road and shovel the dirt on to wheelbarrows. ‘Your brother came back all right, then?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah. He was a POW in Holland. Got home eventually.’ It had taken six months for many of the POWs to make it back under their own steam, the Soviets not being too keen on the return of even the ragged remnants of our army. We had never been told what became of those who had surrendered to the Japs in Burma and Ceylon. She led me inside. ‘Anyway, it’s all over now, isn’t it? So let’s get you settled in. For a night out, is it?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m going to a show with my husband.’

  ‘Lovely.’

  I sat for an hour as she tinted and teased my hair into the same French twist that she wore. After that, she spent another five minutes redoing my rouge. ‘Don’t worry, no extra charge,’ she said. ‘Oh, and me name’s Stephanie. Next time you come, ask for me.’

  ‘All right.’

  She continued to fuss over me. ‘So what was it you wanted over there, anyway?’ She tipped her head towards the print shop opposite.

  ‘I found their details in an old address book of mine. I couldn’t remember why I went there.’

  She looked at me out of the corner of her eye. ‘I see.’ She clearly didn’t believe me. But she just as clearly had a grudge against her neighbour. ‘I could tell you some stories about that place.’

  ‘Could you?’

  ‘Oh, I could. They print all sorts there, they say. Dirty postcards; snide papers; magazines they say are French, though the girls in them are about as French as I am, and I’m from sodding Whitechapel, if you’ll pardon the expression. Should wash me mouth out with soap ’n’ water. Call me a gossip if you must but just telling what I’ve heard. Can’t shoot me for that.’ She stood back and flexed her back. ‘Now it’s seventy-five new pence, or have you got something to swap?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Nothing? What’s your job?’

  ‘I’m a schoolteacher.’

  ‘Oh. Pity,’ she said sympathetically as she went back to my make-up. ‘Seventy-five new pence, then.’

  I handed over the coins and left, bidding her goodbye. The few cars on the road crawled through the smog at the same pace as the pedestrians, with their headlights shining to make them look like giant insects. A motorcycle, one that seemed to have been salvaged from the War, drove through the wet gutter, spraying dirty water over my legs. I absent-mindedly stopped to brush it off my stockings and noticed footsteps some way behind me.

  I turned through a narrow alleyway that I thought must cut to the next road, though it bent a little in the middle so you couldn’t see through to the end. The steps behind me turned down it too, echoing off the high walls of the buildings that hemmed us in. There were rumours that on days likes these thieves would walk beside their victims to slash through the side of handbags, grab their purses and then just walk off in the mist. We only had rumours, though, because the government hushed up news of most crimes.

  I walked a little faster, but I tripped and my feet slithered when I came to a pile of rubbish and broken bricks that spanned the path. As I picked my way over them, the steps behind mine slowed. I glanced back. I could only make out a shambling figure close to the wall. Hurrying now, I squeezed past a dumped bedframe lying on its side, only to stumble on something that spun out from under my foot, making me drop my bag in the gloom. I wanted to leave it and bolt away, but it held my purse, so I had to nervously scrabble about for it. The figure stopped. I heard his silence.

  28

  Twenty-seven. Twenty-seven lives have been lost this year as our countrymen have tried to escape that prison colony that calls itself a republic. Twenty-seven families marking Christmas with an empty chair at the table. Twenty-seven diaries that will never be filled. The number lies heavy in my heart.

  Winston Churchill, Radio Free Europe address,

  Saturday, 22 November 1952

  ‘Who’s that?’ I called out. There was no sound but the wind whipping down the alley like a spear. ‘I can see you.’ I raised my voice, hoping someone in the houses on either side would look out, but they remained lifeless. My searching hands found my bag and drew it to me. Clutching it, I stood up, spun on my heels and ran for safety. But as I rounded the corner I saw that the alley ended not in an open path to the next road, but in a high wooden gate topped with barbed wire.

  The man hadn’t come around the corner yet, but I could hear the shuffling of his feet, a snap and a metallic sound as he kicked a can. I pressed myself into the corner. The footsteps came closer. As he stepped out of the smog I recognized the rough green tattoos on his neck even before his face.

  ‘What do you want?’ I asked, holding my handbag to me as if it would offer protection.

  The printer put his face right up to mine before grabbing hold of the bag. I tried to keep it from him, but he was too strong and threw me off. He searched inside and pulled out the paper package that contained the negative and print.

  ‘Give that to me!’ I shouted, snatching for it and hoping someone would hear. He pushed me away again and held me off as he fumbled inside his pockets, drawing out a lighter with no cap. He flicked the wheel and a spark flew up but no flame. He tried again, this time shooting up a bright jet. I didn’t know what the purpose of those images had once been, but I knew they were important enough for him to tear them from me. He put the flame to the corner of the paper bag and I clutched for it again, but he dropped it into a metal tray that someone had discarded on the ground and I had to watch as the paper burned away, briefly leaving the print and the negative. I didn’t understand why he had given me the prin
t, and then followed me to rip it away. The plastic of the negative melted and shrivelled into a black mass before the print caught too. For a second by the light of the flame I saw Lorelei’s face before it turned to ash.

  He kicked the tray to shake apart the remains before picking up my handbag and pulling out my identity card. I felt too defeated to attempt to stop him. ‘ “Jane Cawson,” ’ he read from it. ‘Right. I know who you are now. So stay the fuck away from the shop. And if I was you I would forget that name you heard.’

  So that was it. That was why he had given me the print – it was only when I had subsequently mentioned Crispin that he had felt danger. There was something threatening about that name, or the man who bore it.

  I felt angry afterwards that I had let that happen but still had to find my way to the theatre for Noël Coward’s new play, Three Days Without Wine. Nick might know who Crispin was – one of Lorelei’s friends, possibly. I would have to be subtle about asking him, though.

  I passed a squad of young male soldiers dressed up for one of the dances that the state organized with the healthier girls – as chosen by their Pioneers COs or college political officers – in the hope that they would marry and soon have children to add to the strength of the state. Sexual desire and energy were to be harnessed for the march of the Soviet ideal by breeding a little army, we understood. I received a couple of wolf-whistles from the oily-haired young men, but the walk did me good, and I felt better by the time I saw Wyndham’s Theatre’s grand Victorian façade of patchwork bricks and intricate moulding.

  Nick was in the lobby, buying tickets from the window with Charles beside him – I had forgotten Charles was coming. The ticket-seller held Nick’s five-pound note up to the light and rubbed its paper between her fingers, eventually accepting it was real and not something he had knocked up in our shed. I thought it would be fun to surprise Nick with my dolled-up image so I put my coat in the cloakroom, positioned myself behind him and waited for him to turn around. But it was Charles who caught sight of me first. He seemed to halt midway through blowing a stream of smoke to the ceiling and stared. Then Nick himself turned. His eyes widened, then narrowed, and the tickets fluttered out of his grasp to the floor. I glanced about, to see what it was that had fixed his gaze, and that had made Charles stop too, but behind me there was only a fat old woman being helped to the door by an obsequious younger man. Something was very wrong.

  Nick’s voice was colder and harder than I had ever heard it. ‘Why did you do that?’ he demanded.

  I looked desperately around again. I had no idea what he was talking about. ‘What … what have I done?’

  ‘You must know.’ His jaw clamped down on the words.

  I looked to Charles, hoping he would tell me what had made Nick so angry. But he simply looked back at me. ‘I don’t,’ I said.

  Nick lifted his hand. ‘Are you saying this was an accident?’

  ‘What is?’ I was becoming frantic, checking again over my shoulder in case there was some clue.

  He looked grim. ‘Your hair. You dyed your hair red. Like Lorelei’s. And you’re wearing it like she used to.’

  ‘It’s just the same,’ Charles said. ‘You look just like her.’

  The chatter around us seemed to die away. ‘No,’ I said, dragging a curled lock out of the French twist that Stephanie had created for me. ‘But it’s not. It’s not like hers.’ I turned to look at my reflection in a glass panel on the wall. I had thought it would be coloured like Stephanie’s strawberry-blond hair. As I stared at it, I saw that it had, indeed, turned out darker. And it did look just like Lorelei’s had at the party. I hadn’t realized when I was sitting in the chair and Stephanie was teasing it into curls. ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘So much like her,’ Charles said, reaching his hand up to touch it.

  Nick’s anger was growing. ‘You’re telling me this was just coincidence? You had your hair cut and dyed just like my former wife’s purely by chance.’ He seized me by the arm, led me to one side and shoved open a door to what must have been a fire exit. We were in a freezing, uncarpeted stairwell. ‘What’s this about?’ he demanded. ‘What on earth are you trying to do?’

  I too felt a wave of anger, at the way he was treating me. Until then I had managed to suppress my frustration that he was hiding from me what had secretly been between him and Lorelei; but with his apparent accusation it all started to come out. ‘Are you saying I can’t even cut my hair how I want without your permission?’ I replied.

  ‘You’re just like her.’ He was speaking to himself, not me.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes, you are.’

  I thought back to the party. How she had looked, how she had stood and moved. And just now, when he saw me, Nick had dropped the tickets out of shock. A thought crept into my mind: what if it wasn’t shock or anger? What if, just for a moment, it had been hope?

  ‘Nick? Did you –’

  Behind him, the door opened. A short man with side-whiskers appeared wearing an evening suit. ‘Excuse me, sir,’ he said. ‘This area is for staff only.’

  ‘What of it?’ replied Nick.

  ‘May I be of assistance?’

  ‘You can leave us alone.’ His tone was unmistakable. There was to be no more talk.

  The man silently withdrew. Nick just glared at me and shook his head before walking away, back into the lobby. I stood, feeling the cool air flowing in from the door at the end that led to the outside world. I knew I could leave through that door, and I probably would have done, once, nursing my wounds, but something kept me there. Sticks and stones, I thought to myself. And I thought again of that day when I had found her. Of the memories hidden from me.

  I followed Nick out. He was talking quietly to Charles, who watched my return through the corner of his eye. Nick caught sight of me too and seemed to relent somewhat. ‘Listen,’ he began to say to me. But he was interrupted by the bell ringing to tell us to take our seats, and we reached a joint unspoken conclusion that the best thing would be to leave things to settle, so we traipsed in without another word. For the next hour we sat watching a frothy farce about a farm girl playing a buffoonish English aristocrat and an equally dim-witted and arrogant American banker off against each other.

  Before the interval, Nick’s hand crept on to mine and I shifted my weight so that my shoulder was against his. I felt him sigh. I knew he hadn’t meant to be angry. It was just surprise more than anything else. I couldn’t blame him, really, now that I knew why, and I regretted matching his anger with my own. Yes, it was annoying that he wasn’t being wholly open with me about what had been between him and her, but that was just the world we lived in nowadays.

  Still, as I sat there, I couldn’t help but wonder again what had flashed through his mind when he had first seen me. Had some buried hope risen at the thought she was there in the room with him? Perhaps.

  During the interval, we went to the bar to discover that the miasma of smoke it enclosed was thicker than the smog filtering in from the street. Nick forced his way forward to get served, and Charles and I waited at the back of the room. ‘Your husband is a very intelligent man,’ Charles said, as we watched Nick’s back disappear between the bodies.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I replied. ‘It was what first attracted me to him.’

  He tapped ash out into a glass ashtray on the table beside us. ‘I’m sure it was.’

  I waited for him to say more, but he didn’t, so I tried to fill the gap. ‘How long have you worked –’

  ‘And now you’re wondering if you’re the right girl for him?’ I felt my face burn, and opened my mouth but couldn’t make a sound. ‘Mrs Cawson, I’m sure you are not a wicked person, I’m sure what you did this evening was an accident, but it seems to me that you and he might not be well suited,’ he added, dropping the last of a cigarette into a discarded glass, where it hissed in the liquid at the bottom. ‘Sometimes that happens.’

  ‘I –’

  ‘Where are you from?’

&n
bsp; ‘Kent. Herne Bay,’ I stammered.

  ‘Family?’

  ‘They died. TB,’ I said hoarsely.

  ‘I’m sorry, but we all have to live with such things. All of us. There’s a danger that when we lose a family, we try to find a new one.’

  ‘Charles, I’ve caused you problems, I know.’

  He turned to face me. ‘You make it sound like you wasted a day of my time. I received a letter today telling me that I had to move out of my flat within two weeks. It’s being reassigned.’

  How much had I set in motion? ‘Is it NatSec?’

  ‘I should say that’s a given, wouldn’t you?’

  I had to. ‘Where will you live?’ I asked, my tongue tripping over the words.

  ‘They sent me the details and I went to see it – it’s a hostel, really. My own room, yes, but a shared bathroom and kitchen. All filthy. There was a man just sitting drunk in the hallway.’

  I felt rotten. The knowledge that it had been a step on the path to freeing Nick didn’t help much – ruin one man’s life to save another’s? It was a hard balance. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said.

  ‘And because of what you have done – I don’t even want to know what it actually was – I might never get another job after this one.’ He was right, no doubt. ‘Don’t worry. I haven’t mentioned any of this to Dr Cawson. I can’t because he’s your husband and he’s not likely to take my side, is he?’

  ‘There are lots of flats that you …’ I trailed off, realizing that I was talking like an idiot. He didn’t want any useless advice; he just wanted me to understand my part in his harsher future. If only I could make up for what I had done to him, but I would probably only make matters worse. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said again.

  ‘But that doesn’t change anything, does it?’

  I turned to watch the junior Party officials trying to use their position to push through the queue, and the young rakes out on the town.