by Gareth Rubin
He blew more smoke and tapped out his ash. ‘Yes, Guy was wrong,’ he said under his breath. Then he looked me squarely in the eye. ‘Now, Mrs Cawson, will you tell me why you are here?’
I shook with the blow. My mind raced to know if he had recognized me when my mask had been pulled off, or if he had known from the moment I bought a ticket to Fetcham, his people keeping track of me all the way. I uncovered my face. ‘Lorelei had a deal with you.’
‘What are you talking about?’
What did that mean? Had I misunderstood everything?
And yet he knew me, had taken an interest in me. So surely there was truth in it somewhere. I suppressed my panic and bluffed a confidence. ‘Was it for the drugs?’
He stared at me as if I were mad. ‘I fear …’
I stumbled on. One last push. ‘What she was getting for you. From America – I can get them.’
‘Mrs Cawson …’ A bemused smile broke on his face.
‘I can get them.’
I just stood waiting, hoping I had hit home. There was silence. And then he spoke.
‘Why isn’t your husband here? Why send you?’ My heart was pounding so hard I felt it in my brow and my fingers. ‘Ah. He doesn’t know you’re here, does he? So you’re keeping this from him.’ His mouth twitched. ‘Maybe it’s because you think he’s keeping something from you.’ I was right. ‘Well, now, Mrs Cawson. You say you can get me the items the previous Mrs Cawson was supplying. I don’t need any more for now. What she was offering – it was something more than just the items themselves.’
So I had been right after all. He must have dealt only with Lorelei, and that was why Nick had been so desperate to be introduced to him when relations between her and Nick soured.
‘What was it? I can get it too.’
‘You think so?’
‘I’m certain of it.’
He drew in a mouthful of smoke and let it drift from his mouth. ‘Well, I suppose we’ll see if your self-confidence is misplaced. I was tired of going through middlemen. I wanted to buy straight from the source.’
‘Why?’
His eyes bore into mine as he considered. ‘Because I don’t like having weak links in the chain.’
I could see his reasoning. Weak links can break; they can even get caught and talk to the police.
But there was more to it, I guessed. I glanced back at the room we had left. Yes. This way he could help out his friends in the Party’s upper echelons, those with whom he had just been playing cards, perhaps. A favour granted, a favour returned.
‘I can give you the contact,’ I said, trying to control my nerves. ‘What do I get in return?’
‘What do you want?’
‘What were you giving Lorelei?’
He cocked his head to one side in a look of curiosity. ‘I don’t see that it matters.’ I waited. ‘Well, it’s nothing now. She wanted a marriage exit visa.’
A marriage exit visa. So Lorelei was engaged to a foreigner, someone who could take her to a new life outside the RGB. She wasn’t just selling out Nick; she was also leaving the country.
‘Who was she marrying?’
‘I have no idea and no interest,’ he replied. ‘All that she told me was that she wanted the visa. I said I could arrange it in return for an introduction to her supplier in America.’ He looked down towards the dark lake in the grounds. There was silence as we both lost ourselves in our private thoughts. ‘No, no one listened to Churchill,’ he said after a while. ‘Instead we had the War and all that followed. Men chewed up by bullets and machines. Those camps. And people still ask us why we need Socialism. We need it to prevent men turning once more into savages. I don’t want to see that again.’ He threw the glowing cigarette butt into the night. ‘Call our friend Adam when you’re able to see this through.’ He pushed back into the room.
I stared out. There were others like him in every street in every city now, squabbling over the scraps of a nation that could barely muster eighteen million people. Lorelei’s death wasn’t the result of jealousy or anger. Not really. It was the result of small men scrabbling over tiny possessions. Such a grubby little country we had become. Socialism meant a minister and the wife of a GP haggling over the price of a box of medicines.
33
So he’s been at it again, has he? That drunken buffoon. Did Churchill mention that it’s the American arms companies lining his pockets? Who do you think pays for that huge mansion with so many servants licking his boots? Oh, my friends, I can’t tell you how much freer we are in the Republic of Great Britain. So the next time the fat old fool comes on to make fun of you, turn it off.
Alec Mathers, broadcast on RGB Station 1,
Wednesday, 26 November 1952
It was the sight of my dress on the bare bedroom floor and a shard of morning light through the window that told me where I was. Downstairs in the pub, a girl was sweeping up. I paid her for the room, brushed some of the mud off my shoes and opened the door. Somewhere across the fields and streams stood Mansford Hall. I couldn’t see it, but I knew it was there.
The railway station was bright in the morning sun, washed clean by the night’s rain. Its telephone box shone spick and span. I dropped a penny into the slot.
‘Mansford.’
‘May I speak to Mr Cutter?’
‘Whom may I say is calling?’
‘A guest from last night.’
‘Please wait, ma’am.’
There it was, that relic of the old way of things: ma’am. The woman’s voice on the other end of the telephone was old too. I wondered if she had even served Churchill when he had visited.
‘Hello.’ The sound was cheerful. Adam might have been half-cut last night but he was fresh today.
‘Hello, Adam.’
‘And who might that be?’ he called down the crackling and echoing line.
‘It’s Jane Cawson.’
A pause. ‘Hello,’ he repeated suspiciously.
‘You do remember last night?’
‘I do.’
‘Good. Did Nick know that Lorelei was getting married?’
‘What?’ he blurted out.
His surprise was too sharp and quick to be feigned. ‘She was getting a marriage exit visa.’
‘But she …’ He broke off.
‘But what?’ Silence. ‘What were you going to say?’
‘Just …’ He broke off again, as if the words were restricted.
‘Just what?’ He was beginning to annoy me, acting like a child caught in a lie. I hardened my voice. ‘Shall I show Comrade Fellowman the note you sent Lorelei about him? I don’t think he’ll like that you’ve been talking about him behind his back.’
‘Please.’
‘What do you think he’ll do? Make your house his?’ I changed my tone to sound more sympathetic. ‘Adam, Lorelei’s dead; there’s no need to keep her secrets now.’
There was hissing on the line. I waited. Then he spoke three words in that quiet vocal parody of the old carefree upper class. They beat in my head one by one.
‘She was pregnant.’
It was a shock, and a rush of thoughts crowded my mind at the news, but I tried not to let it tell in my voice. ‘So it was this foreign man’s.’
‘No,’ he said. He sounded reluctant to speak. ‘It wasn’t. It was … It was someone else’s.’
The air felt thick. It seemed to weigh on me like in the hot moments before a storm, and I could feel something coming: a terrible knowledge. Words left my lips and I knew what they were, but I could hear them only from a distance. ‘Who was –’
He didn’t wait for the final sounds. ‘Nick’s. I think it was Nick’s.’
A fit of anger bucked through me. ‘No!’ I shouted. I just didn’t want it to be true. ‘It wasn’t!’ He made no reply. There was just the crackling on the line. My head was ready to crack in two. ‘Are you … Were they having an affair?’
‘If you want to call it that.’
‘But how do you know?’ I
demanded.
A pause, and he replied quite simply. ‘She told me.’
‘So? She could be lying! She was always lying.’
‘I don’t think she was about them having an affair.’
‘Why?’
And then the final answer. ‘I called him. He didn’t even deny it.’ And that was it. I sank down.
What did I feel then? What was it that racked my body in that little call box for so long that Adam asked if I was still there? It wasn’t fury, or a sense of betrayal, that made me sob and then retch. It was loss, I think. Anger and hurt were there too, but it was the loss that left me unable to see anything but a blur in front of me, and the flesh of my wrist going white as I twisted the telephone cord around it in coil after coil.
When I had overheard Nick on the telephone to an unknown hollow and metallic voice, he had said that the drug, norethisterone, would have prevented Lorelei ending up ‘like she did’. I had presumed that referred to how she had died. But now I knew: he had meant it would have stopped her conceiving. I had no idea really if he had been using me to test that vile drug, but, somehow, even if he had, it was nothing next to this.
I breathed slowly and laboriously, like a hospital patient with infected lungs. ‘Did Nick know she was pregnant?’
‘I told him.’
There was a terrible pulsing in my head. It took me a while to speak again, as I tried to take in what he said and what it all meant – everything that had gone before, and everything that was still to come. ‘What was between them?’ I asked, keeping my voice as even as I could.
Adam sighed. ‘Oh, who knows? They always seemed to want each other more when they hated one another.’
‘What do you mean?’ I needed to know if Nick’s desire for Lorelei had crowded out any real feelings for me.
He sucked in a deep breath. ‘Well, I remember a dinner party at the house.’ He paused. ‘Are you sure you want to hear this?’
‘Yes,’ I said firmly.
‘Your choice. I remember dinner at their house – Lorelei’s house now – all through the meal they were needling each other. “Nick thinks he’s very amusing; it’s lucky somebody does.” “Lorelei looks like she needs to be taught a lesson – better make it a simple one.” In the end, she threw her wine at him and he jumped up, ran around the table and slapped her. After that we didn’t see them for an hour, only heard them upstairs making the furniture bounce on the floorboards.’ His voice drifted. ‘You look so much like her, you know.’
So Lorelei was engaged to a foreigner, or to someone in the DUK who could get her out if she were granted a marriage exit visa. She had therefore made a deal with Fellowman: she would put him in contact with the American doctor who supplied the medicines in return for that visa. But Nick found out about their deal. And then Adam told him Lorelei was pregnant with his child.
‘She met Ian Fellowman at your parties, didn’t she?’ I asked.
‘Yes. But I –’
‘What medicine was she supplying him with?’ I wanted to know everything now.
Another pause. ‘Well, you didn’t hear it from me, but I was told Comrade Burgess picked up a dose of the clap – that’s why he wasn’t around on Liberation Day. Some nice little soldier, they say.’ There had certainly been rumours about Guy Burgess for a long time. ‘The Americans have these wonderful new antibiotics that clear it right up, so Ian was getting some for him. Besides, Guy could hardly go to one of the state doctors, could he? The Secs would be looking through his files before he had even left the room. No, the Party doesn’t like nancies very much. All that sex without making babies. It interferes with your duty to the state. Very bad for morale.’
On the way home, the train passed a hoarding and I recognized the full-page advert of Britain cut in half, with ten occupied babies’ cribs on the DUK side, nine on ours, and an empty cot bearing the words YOUR CHILD. STRENGTH IN NUMBERS!
Strength in numbers. In the new era, the state would take the place of the family, or, at least, that was what many had suggested. The regime itself was tight-lipped on the subject, probably because Blunt felt that we weren’t yet ready to ditch our parents, our siblings and our children. It didn’t affect me now. I had no family to speak of.
When I reached home, I dropped my mud-spattered evening dress on the bedroom floor, hid my winnings from the roulette table, bathed, washed my hair and put on more sensible clothes to go out into the afternoon.
‘Hello, Charles,’ I said, as I entered the surgery.
‘Mrs Cawson.’ He tore a sheet of paper from his typewriter. ‘Damn thing keeps chewing up the pages.’
‘You need a new one.’
‘The licence is taking months to be approved.’
‘That must be frustrating. Oh, by the way, I bumped into a friend of mine in the Ministry of Building yesterday. She said that they often send out notices of reassignment for homes but don’t follow through on them. So you might find you’re staying in your flat after all.’ I had resolved that I would ask Fellowman to arrange for Charles to stay where he was, as part of my price for the information he wanted.
He looked cautiously hopeful. ‘Did she? Well, that would be wonderful news.’
At that moment, Nick wandered out of his consulting room and looked up from a set of patient notes. ‘Hello, darling. What are you doing here?’ he said.
‘I just wanted to see my husband. It feels like so long since I saw you.’
‘You’re very sweet.’
The telephone on Charles’s desk rang and he answered it. ‘The consulting rooms of Nicholas Cawson, Charles O’Shea speaking. Yes, please wait.’ He put his hand over the mouthpiece. ‘The ministry.’
‘I see. Better put it through, and by the way,’ he said to Charles, ‘a few people are coming to ours for dinner tonight. Why don’t you join us?’ He looked to me. ‘That’s all right, isn’t it, darling?’
‘Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘Seven o’clock.’
‘Thank you,’ said Charles.
‘Oh,’ Nick said to me, sighing. ‘I was accosted by Patricia next door this morning, asking about Lorelei again. She said she heard Hazel playing a record of one of Lorelei’s plays or something. I couldn’t make out what she was on about.’
‘It was probably the radio.’
‘Probably. Patricia can be very tiresome. Well, let’s hope she leaves us alone from now on.’ He returned to his room and closed the door. I could hear him speaking on the line.
On the spur of the moment, I took Charles by the arm and led him towards the corridor. He was so bemused he banged his hip on the corner of the desk. ‘Damn it!’ he spat, screwing up his face and thumping the wood to distract from the pain.
‘Oh, God, your wound,’ I said.
‘It’s all right,’ he muttered.
We moved out to the stairwell. ‘Charles, what was Lorelei like? As a person.’
He pursed his lips. ‘I don’t know what to say about her, really.’
‘Was she stepping out with anyone?’
He looked at his feet, embarrassed. ‘I don’t know. She wouldn’t tell me things like that.’
‘Maybe there was someone special? A boyfriend? Anyone foreign? Or in the DUK?’
‘Foreign?’ He had a blank look.
‘Charles, I want to say something.’
‘Yes?’
‘You and I have had our differences in the past.’
‘One or two but –’
‘You’ve been very good to Nick, using what influence you have in the Party to help him. So I want to thank you for that. Thank you.’
‘It was my pleasure, Mrs Cawson.’
‘I’m glad. Charles.’ I put my hand on his arm and left it there. ‘Would you do something for me?’
‘If I can.’
‘Nick has been through so much recently. And now he’s applying to join the Party. I worry that he’s overdoing it.’
‘Overdoing it? I wouldn’t think so.’
‘I expect you’
re right. You probably know him better than I do. But he has had a lot to deal with, hasn’t he?’
‘Well, yes, no doubt.’
‘Today, for instance. He must have had lots of calls.’
‘A normal number.’
‘Do you recall them all?’
He looked proud. ‘Yes,’ he said.
‘All work, I expect.’ He furrowed his brow. ‘Or some weren’t?’
He hesitated and looked back to his desk. ‘I should probably get back to work.’
‘Yes, of course. But if you do find he’s overworking himself, let me know and I’ll do something about it.’
‘Well, all right, yes.’
‘Thank you.’
Sitting on my bed that afternoon, I supposed no one would ever know whether it was Nick who was the father of Lorelei’s child or whether it was the other man, the one who was going to marry her and take her out of the country. She might not have known herself, of course.
When NatSec had suggested Nick was involved in Lorelei’s death, I had thought the idea ludicrous. But, after what I had learned about norethisterone and what Adam had told me about Lorelei’s plan to betray Nick, the thought had wormed its way into my mind. I had precious few facts, though, only suspicions and vague ideas.
There was still one thread I could follow, however. What Ian Fellowman had told me had also enabled me to work out the role of someone else: Crispin, the man who was to secretly receive Lorelei’s disguised negative.
‘Crispin could get me papers if I needed them, couldn’t he?’ I said to the man in the seedy Soho print store while the presses rumbled in the background.
‘Get the fuck out of my shop,’ he replied in a low growl.
I checked the street. Stephanie the hairdresser was watching, ready in case something happened. The first time I had come here she had told me that producing ‘snide papers’ was one of the shady side lines the print shop operated; and, five months earlier, Lorelei had supplied Crispin with a photograph – the sort of drab, head-and-shoulders picture that you used for passports or visas – hidden in a book. When Fellowman revealed that Lorelei had later asked him for a marriage exit visa – presumably after Crispin had failed to come up with the goods – it was clear what she had wanted here.