Liberation Square

by Gareth Rubin

  But then, sometimes women’s cycles do stop for no special reason. So it could simply be that mine had halted for a while and the pregnancy test that he gave me was unreliable. And when Nick had talked on the telephone about testing the medicine on a private patient, he could have meant just that: one of his private patients. Equally, his reluctance to think about having another child at that moment was quite understandable, given the awful few days he had just experienced.

  My mind swung one way and then the other.

  I gripped the fence until the wire bit into my flesh. I didn’t know where to go. I sat on the ground, feeling the wet sand and stones under me, and told myself I should return home, pack what little I owned and catch a train, stay with Sally while I tried to learn the truth of what had happened. And if it turned out that my fears were right, I could stay there, or in some town where I had never been and knew no one. There were so many rootless people these days I would simply be one more piece of driftwood.

  And yet I knew that I couldn’t leave, because no matter what had happened and what I had heard that day, I had never been as happy as I had been in the months spent with Nick. When I had gone through his desk, when I had followed ghosts in Kent and lied to NatSec, all of it was for him.

  A sharp pain stabbed in my chest. Something was surging and I doubled over as my stomach convulsed, bile falling from my mouth in short, sharp jerks. It came in waves of nausea and pain, and when there was nothing left I sat on a mound of broken bricks. I stayed there for a long time, watching the birds glide and the sun move across the sky.

  Back at our house – his house, really – I sloped upstairs and collapsed on the bed. All the way, I had been telling myself that I needed to know what had happened to me, just to have some level of certainty; and a thought had entered my head, a way of discovering the truth. It came from the look in Nick’s eyes when he had seen me at the theatre – when, just for a second, he had seemed to think Lorelei stood in front of him.

  I pulled the box of her possessions from the back of my wardrobe and delved through the books and compacts until I found her perfume bottle. I unstoppered it and let the sweet scent drift out. Then I found what I needed: the record of one of Lorelei’s plays. It would be my teacher for a task that seemed reckless to me – but then the world had shifted and I had to change with it.

  In Nick’s study I placed it on his player. My fingers itched to open the drawer where I knew those letters from Lorelei lay, but I resisted and instead lowered the needle to the disc. The speaker on the side began to play the sort of music they danced to in nightclubs between the wars.

  ‘Five pounds on red,’ Lorelei called out. ‘Yes, thank you.’ With her scent on my wrists and her voice in the room, it was as if she had never gone.

  I repeated her words out loud, listening to my own accent. It was a Kent coast sound, with shades of the London evacuee children I had taught. I felt ashamed of it.

  ‘And now, all my winnings on black.’

  ‘And now all my winnings on black.’ It was better now. Had Lorelei been brought up in a country house and then sent to Cheltenham Ladies’ College? Or had she looked into that society from the edges and moulded herself from clay? That is what an actress does, of course: she invents herself day by day and night by night. I had never fancied myself an actress but there was a seed of change in me now. For what I had in mind I would need her voice and talent for self-invention.

  ‘Well, Mr Beckeridge, you’re the last person I expected to bump into tonight. Would you care to try your luck?’

  Her voice changed for the second sentence. It was still of the English ruling class but it had added something, a coquettish undercurrent. I imagined what she would have felt carrying out what I had planned. She would have felt no fear at all, I told myself. Nothing but the thrill, like a rider galloping after the hounds.

  ‘Why not?’ answered a rough, gravelly male voice on the recording.

  ‘And what stakes are you playing for tonight?’

  ‘And what stakes are you playing for tonight?’ I held the air lower down my throat, and the accent changed. The vowels became more rounded.

  I kept listening to the recording, copying Lorelei’s words and voice, until the sound of the front door opening alerted me to Nick’s arrival home. I pulled the record from the player, locked the study door and dashed back to our bedroom. He came in just as I was pushing her box back into place in my wardrobe. ‘Oh, hello, darling,’ I said. ‘Is the surgery all back to normal?’

  ‘Awful patients complaining of imaginary illnesses,’ he replied, taking his shoes off. ‘So, yes, you could say that. I was looking forward to coming back to you.’ I wondered if that were true. I hoped, still, that it was.

  ‘Sally wrote. She’s coming to London tomorrow to go to Moorfields Eye Hospital. She has to have an operation and needs someone to see her back to Herne Bay. I said I would do it. I’ll stay at hers and come back in the morning.’ I examined a pair of shoes. I wasn’t used to lying, least of all to him.

  ‘Fine,’ he replied. ‘Don’t forget we have people for dinner on Wednesday.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Nick, I’ve got such a terrible migraine, I think I’ll stay in the guest room tonight. I’ll be restless all night and don’t want to disturb you.’

  ‘If you want.’

  ‘Yes. That’s what I want.’

  He looked at me with a furrowed brow, as if there were something wrong, but he couldn’t work out what it was. Then he dismissed the thought and took off his tie and jacket. I realized that I had been speaking in Lorelei’s voice.

  31

  The next day moved past, the clouds rolling listlessly across the sky, and I pulled my coat tighter as I stepped from a train on to the platform at a village railway station in Surrey. The electric light above barely penetrated more than a metre of the night.

  You are cordially invited to join the party at Mansford Hall, Fetcham, Surrey. Masques from eight until midnight. Tuesday, the 25th of November 1952.

  The invitation had read. And then the words scrawled wildly at the bottom:

  Nick knows you’re selling him out

  I could hardly believe I was there – that I had had the nerve to dress for it, buy the ticket, board the train. Each point had seemed like a border I was crossing. But whoever had sent Lorelei that card knew her secrets and Nick’s, so they might know the nature of Nick’s hidden work – and whether that drug really had found its way into my veins. In a strange way, that knowledge would map out the rest of my life. It’s an uncomfortable feeling to realize that such knowledge exists and someone other than you possesses it. Nick had it, of course, but he was the one person I couldn’t ask. I had considered confronting him with the question, but to what end? Denials that I wouldn’t be able to believe anyway? No matter what he said, it would bring nothing but sorrow.

  So I was looking for the sender of that note, in the hope that the secrets they knew included what had happened to me.

  I walked out of the desolate station to find two unlit lanes. I didn’t know which to take, so I picked the left-hand path and walked, nervously gripping the small evening bag I was carrying as if it were a talisman and hearing nothing but my footsteps. I could only trust that the glint of light ahead was the village, and not an isolated farm building. The light grew as I walked and gradually I began to feel the path ahead was solid and open. It became the village high street, where the glint became a glow, the glow became a light, the light became a bright window.

  Wide and low, the building before me was an inn of the oldest type: a rest-stop for travellers in need of a simple bed. The sign overhead said it was the Bell, and this was where I had telephoned to arrange a room for the night. Feeling relieved, I pushed through the heavy oak door to feel a wall of warmth wrap around me. Raucous laughter seemed to bounce off the brick walls and I struggled to see what the joke was until I caught sight, through a line of heavyset backs, of a little man attempting to drink a yard of stout as another time
d him. Most of it was ending up on his collarless shirt rather than in his stomach but that didn’t seem to put any of them off the game, least of all him.

  Behind the bar a fat publican was laughing hard. ‘Oh, Sam, Sam, you’ll drown!’ he shouted over. ‘And none of us’ll give you the kiss-a-life!’ The party cheered as Sam finished his drink. The publican steadied himself on the bar as he shook with hysterics, and then brought himself up short when he saw me. ‘Oh, beg your pardon, miss,’ he said, looking me up and down. ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘I’ll have what he’s having,’ I said. ‘But I’ll just have a glass of it.’

  The barman guffawed and handed me a smeared glass full of the treacly black liquid. ‘There you go, miss. Eightpence.’

  I took a swig of the stuff. It was thinner than I had expected, a cheap home brew. ‘I telephoned about a room. My name is Lorelei Cawson,’ I said, putting the money on the bar. Saying it to someone who could meet my eye felt unnatural, but not as unnatural as I had thought it would.

  ‘Oh, that’s you, is it?’ he said.

  ‘That’s me.’

  One of the men, with dirty black hair and strong gypsy features – a farmhand by the look of his frame – wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and ambled over to me. ‘What brings you to Fetcham?’ he asked in a low, guttural tone that suggested he didn’t speak much day by day.

  ‘I’m going somewhere.’

  ‘Going somewhere, aye? Everyone’s going somewhere.’

  ‘I expect that’s true. My name’s Lorelei.’ I held out my hand. He shook it warily.

  ‘Pete. So where’re you going?’

  ‘Just a house.’ I was beginning to enjoy the feeling of making other people hang on my words.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Mansford Hall,’ I said.

  His voice went cold. ‘Mansford.’

  I felt all attention on me. Perhaps I shouldn’t even have mentioned it – I hadn’t realized that the name alone signified something. I had thought that out in the countryside there would be less suspicion and fewer conversations that you couldn’t have, but were there CIs even here? There must have been. I could sense these men were as distrustful of me as I was of them now, and I wished I had been more secret, hadn’t let my tongue rush before my head. I tried to bluff it out. ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Mansford. The big house,’ he muttered. He turned away from me.

  ‘You know it well?’ I asked his back. He slowly shook his head. ‘Have you been there?’

  ‘Once.’

  ‘For work?’

  ‘Not my work,’ he said.

  ‘Then whose?’

  ‘My brother’s.’ The men around us looked uncomfortable and shifted on their feet but said nothing.

  ‘What does he do?’ He made no answer but rolled his shoulders backwards and stalked out the door.

  ‘Mansford,’ the publican said ruminatively behind me, as if he were turning the name over in his mind. ‘What’re you going there for?’

  ‘A party.’

  ‘A party,’ he repeated. It sounded like the answer he had expected and didn’t like.

  I walked out after Pete. I could see a body moving in the gloom a hundred metres up the lane. I said nothing but he heard me and stopped. I walked slowly and deliberately. ‘I don’t know the way,’ I told him.

  ‘You’ll find it.’

  ‘I’m not from around here.’

  ‘That road,’ he said, pointing. I could hardly make it out. He came close to me. ‘What do you want?’ I said nothing in reply. ‘People like you. Women like you.’ He pursed his lips. ‘All right, I’ll show you the way.’

  Eventually, we faced the gate of a huge square brick house – Tudor, it might have been. A clamour of voices and music was bursting out in a crash of sound, and there was something about it that reminded me of the madhouse that held Rachel. Here too there were guards on the gate and I looked at Pete. We both knew there was no point inviting him: he wouldn’t want to come in and they wouldn’t let him.

  ‘Thank you for walking with me,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Well, I know where to find you when I come back.’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Goodbye.’ As his back melted into the darkness, I called after him. ‘What’s your brother’s name?’

  ‘Greg. Gregory.’ And he disappeared.

  ‘May I ask your name, ma’am?’ said one of the gatemen.

  ‘Lorelei Cawson.’ Having been Lorelei to Pete and the other men, it felt more natural now.

  ‘May I see your identity card?’ I handed over the card, which had been in her box of possessions, thankful that it had been issued in her legal married name rather than that of the famous actress Lorelei Addington, or I would have been wholly unable to use it. In the darkness I looked enough like her photograph not to arouse suspicion. ‘Just a moment, ma’am,’ the guard said politely. He went into his hut, glanced at me and turned on an overhead electric bulb to examine the pass. I tensed as the light shone out over me and half turned so that he couldn’t see me so clearly.

  ‘So cold tonight,’ I said to the other guard.

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘I had no idea it was so far from the station.’

  ‘Most of our guests have motors.’ He said it in a way that suggested it was strange that I had come by foot.

  ‘My husband crashed ours yesterday. Silly man. He’s still up in town trying to get it fixed.’ I was about to go on with the story, but could feel it spiralling away from me and forced myself to stop, surreptitiously watching the guard in his hut examine the card. He reached up and pulled the switch to turn off his light, and for a moment he didn’t move. Then his silhouette began to shift and flow, back out the doorway of the guard post. ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ he said, handing me the document.

  ‘Thank you.’ Relieved, I took a few paces up the path before stopping to open my evening bag and take out the glittering red lace mask that had come with Lorelei’s belongings. I tied it around my eyes and forehead. The house remained a block of stone, punctuated by beams of light glaring out on to the front lawn, and by its glow I noticed that the hem of my red dress was ripped, probably from bushes I had brushed against on the path. It was a stubby, jagged tear with threads drooping from it; I knelt to pull them away.

  A black official car, with the hammer and compass on the registration plate, stopped in front of the house, and a thin man with a chicken-like neck and ridges of hair only over his ears eased himself out to stand imperiously still. On the other side, a sylph-like girl at least twenty years his junior was helped out of the vehicle. He slid a carnival mask over his face and ignored her as he strode unevenly into the house, taking a glass of fizzing wine from a waiter standing by the doorway. The girl followed.

  The heels on my shoes shifted in the gravel as I reached the double doors, around which a classical wooden portico wound. I took a glass of wine as I passed into a small entrance hall, then into a large room with a haze of smoke so thick that I couldn’t even see the ceiling.

  Although more than half the room consisted of men in their fifties with girls in their twenties – not a pleasant sight, but one that I became used to – here and there I could see other young people milling around without attachment. Most wore masks, although there were a few army officers in dress uniform who wouldn’t have dreamed of polluting their appearance that way. A couple of Soviet naval officers were drinking in the corner. The room was alive with conversation and flirtation, but these pursuits were taking a second seat to the room’s main interest: gambling at tables set up to make a casino. It was real money being staked too, piles of it in wads of paper that were being handed to butlers in exchange for chips. Croupiers who had kept in practice since before the War dealt cards and spun roulette wheels. To my left, a plump and bow-legged man was speaking sharply to a woman who had dealt him a hand he didn’t like. Behind him, his companions were doubled up in laughter.

  ‘Will yo
u be playing, ma’am?’ asked a croupier.

  ‘I’ll watch for now,’ I replied. I hadn’t seen so much money in the world.

  ‘Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen.’ Even calling people ‘ladies and gentlemen’ would have been brave outside this house. I spent a while wandering around, watching the games, attempting to discreetly engage one or two of the young women in conversation as a ploy to comprehend who exactly was here, and who might be the one I was looking for – but they were as clueless about the other guests as I was, and I suspected that they had, in fact, been hired for the evening. I received some aggressive attention from the Soviet officers, but pretended not to notice.

  As I was taking another glass of wine, someone whispered in my ear, ‘Have you come out without your purse?’ I looked around to see a man at my side wearing a white mask that covered all but his mouth, making him look a little like he had been in some sort of terrible accident.

  ‘Yes, silly of me.’

  ‘Oh, dear. Well, here.’ He reached inside his jacket, pulled out a fist of paper and dropped it on a silver tray carried by a butler, who carefully flicked through, then measured out a stack of chips that my new friend indicated were to go into my hand.

  ‘That’s very generous of you,’ I said.

  ‘Jeremy. And you are?’

  ‘Lorelei.’

  ‘Well, off you go, Lorelei. Place your bet.’

  I took some of the chips and placed them on the table. I recalled the line from the play that I had repeated over and over again to learn her voice. ‘Five pounds on red,’ I said.

  ‘Bravo,’ called my new friend. The wheel spun and the ball clattered through the numbers. A man in an evening suit and a woman in white, with a withering purple flower in her hair, were at the table. Two more men slipped in behind me to watch. ‘Now keep your nerve.’ I did my best. The ball fell into a red slot and I felt a thrill. ‘Well done.’ He patted me on the back.

  ‘And now, all my winnings on black.’