Liberation Square

by Gareth Rubin

  And at the end, for ten, twenty, I don’t know how many seconds, he knelt with his fingers pressed to Nick’s neck, all the while looking at me. And then he slowly sat back and lifted his hand away. ‘No!’ I shouted. My hands searched desperately over Nick’s chest, trying to find the heartbeat that would save us both.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Tibbot said quietly.

  ‘No!’

  ‘He’s gone.’

  ‘I won’t … no!’

  Without warning, Tibbot grabbed me and dragged me aside, falling against the broken bannister. I looked back to see a bundle of flames and burning fabric tumble to the floor where I had been kneeling, the fire flooding out from it as it hit the boards. The coat rack was now a mass of light and more fell, separating us from Nick. The smoke was getting thicker.

  ‘We have to get out,’ Tibbot coughed, his chest hacking.

  ‘He’s –’

  ‘He’s gone. We have to get out!’

  All I could feel was my skin burning. It could have all burned away. And, as I looked up, I saw Hazel in the doorway, standing just as she had done when a policewoman brought her to our house after her mother’s death.

  I ran to her, my arms outstretched, turning her so that she couldn’t see the broken form on the floor. She put her arms around me and I felt her tremble with tears that began to wet my own cheeks.

  All I could do was stroke her hair and pull her tighter. ‘It’s going to be all right,’ I said. ‘I’ll look after you. I’m here. I’ll look after you.’

  39

  What do we see, when we see the land ahead? We see endless possibilities. For our nation, our new way of political life presents a land ready to be filled with people and human endeavour.

  Anthony Blunt, broadcast on RGB Station 1,

  Monday, 3 August 1953

  I walked all the way to Checkpoint Charlie today. I don’t know what I was expecting to see. I stared at the gap covered by that impenetrable curtain of rope, holding Hazel’s letter tightly in my hand.

  The paper that she had written on was fine and heavy, the sort we had many years ago for correspondence but no longer use because there’s no call for delicate and mannered words now. She was starting at a new school, and she told me about her teachers and some of the girls in her class. They’re going to be studying The Great Gatsby later in the year, she said, so she’ll be putting the copy that I gave her to good use. She had enclosed a photograph of herself in her new uniform, and I looked at it again in the afternoon light. It was green with gold detailing – so much cheerier than the heavy navy blue on our side. I found that somehow comforting.

  Fellowman arranged it all, of course, in return for the name of the doctor in Los Angeles who supplied the drugs to Lorelei. I had expected at least some sort of reaction when I explained that the exit visa was for Hazel, not me, but he remained quite impassive, quite inscrutable, and I had the impression that this was the real Ian Fellowman, not the one I had seen at Mansford Hall. After all, it fits better with what he does. I should probably have guessed earlier, but, what with everyone else playing games, it’s not surprising that one passed me by.

  It was from him that I discovered Charles had listened to the telephone conversation between Nick and Adam Cutter the day before Lorelei’s death. Adam, drunk as usual, had told Nick that Lorelei claimed to be carrying his child; and he asked if it were true they had been having an affair. Nick had only cursed her and slammed the telephone down without answering. That was what Adam had considered a confession. Anyone else would have thought Lorelei’s claim to be no more substantial than her other stories but Charles took it to heart.

  Such a fool he was for her. How she could make us doubt ourselves.

  So the next morning, before he went to work, Charles brought Lorelei some Champagne to toast their emigration to Ireland. While she wasn’t looking, he dosed it with something to end her pregnancy. Common rue from a greengrocer’s, it seems. He found it detailed in one of the practice textbooks. He hadn’t wanted to kill her; the opposite, really – he just wanted the life together that she had promised him.

  Fellowman told me all this after the Secs told him. They had found Charles sitting in his flat. I imagine he just wanted someone to listen to him.

  Rue. Regret. Two meanings. I went to Southwark Library last week to look it up. There was a battered old volume in which medical students had made notes. ‘Abortifacient effect,’ it said. But it’s hard to get the dose right. Adverse reactions: ‘Gastric pain … renal failure … vasodilation and coagulopathy … systemic failure …’ I didn’t understand it all, but I understood enough. The book also mentioned that it produces little blisters on the skin if you handle it wrongly, so that was probably the rash I saw on Charles’s hand that day at the surgery.

  The book included a picture of the herb. It has pretty little yellow flowers, and I thought of Ophelia pinning it to her brother’s chest before she drowns herself. She calls it herb-of-grace then: a blessing herb. A drowning herb too, really.

  I spent a long time in the library, just sitting, thinking, until it closed at five and I had to go back to the boarding house I’m in now. It’s warm and dry enough. The landlady takes all our coupons and sells some of them, I think, but I don’t blame her: I suppose she’s just trying to make ends meet like the rest of us. Everyone is trying. Frank Tibbot stopped by once to see how I was. He’s a kind man. He’s still in the police but says he has to look over his shoulder all the time.

  Fellowman’s office is right beside the one Guy Burgess now occupies as Deputy First Secretary and I can’t help wondering how long it will be before they move up again, and how many of Fellowman’s whispers will end up as our laws. I asked him what they intended to do with Charles but he didn’t say. It doesn’t matter now.

  Who was the father after all? Was Lorelei even pregnant? All the secrets she’s taken with her now lie as dust on the ground. And, in a way, I think it means she won out in the end.

  I walked to Checkpoint Charlie from our house – what remains of it, anyway. Before leaving, I stood in the back garden and looked up at the charred brickwork. No birds live there now and at first it seemed to me that the garden was bare, but then, here and there, I noticed little slivers of paper and fabric – pinches of our everyday life that had floated out on the hot air. They had been soaked by rain and bleached by the sun; but still, under rocks and in crevices in the wall, they lingered as some sort of witness. I’m glad there’s a witness.

  So what do you think, Nick? Because now, in the end, I can admit that all of this is addressed to you. I’m speaking to you day in and day out, and I’m trying to tell you why I did what I did, because I don’t think that drug was ever in my blood, and I don’t know if you were truly guilty of anything except trying to make it through in the way that we have to now. And I miss you and I’m sorry. Just so, so sorry. It’s not all going to work out for the best.

  I watched our house burn. I would never have thought it possible that bricks and wood could take so long to burn to the ground. But there it was, for hours alight in the smog.

  Oh, Nick, you once laughed at how badly I wrote for an English teacher. And you were right: I could write a thousand pages, but it wouldn’t say anything more. It couldn’t. And it still wouldn’t be a grain of sand in comparison to what I want to say. So all I can tell you is that every minute of every hour I stare out the window and dream of going back and starting again. And that’s all there is. All of it.

  Except for Hazel. Yes, Hazel. Officially, she’s over there until the end of her education and then she has to return, but that’s hardly likely, is it? It’s part of a new era of rapprochement with the DUK. ‘Mutual acceptance of our different ways of life and an end to the destructive mistrust that has so long blighted our futures,’ Blunt said on the radio yesterday. His tone was different in that address – more open to question. We’re all reading so much into the speech, endlessly discussing it in hushed voices. Hazel even thinks it won’t be long befor
e I can visit her for a while. Perhaps. Things will need to change a great deal for that to happen. But things do change. And we have a glimmer of it now so let’s just hold on to that.

  There was a man at the Wall selling photographs of it to be used as postcards, just like the time you and I went there together. He was shuffling through the school groups and young couples to offer strings of the grainy images for a few pence. I was almost tempted to buy one when it was my turn to be approached, but in the end I said no and gave it back. He nodded politely and went off to try elsewhere. He struck lucky with a platoon of Pioneers, though, who handed him their money and took the cards to save or post home to their parents. One boasted loudly that he would be sending it to his girlfriend, until the others’ jeers made him blush and bite his tongue.

  I realized, as I waited, that it would be Hazel’s birthday soon. I tried to guess what she would receive from the family looking after her – clothes maybe, or records. I’ll send her more books, some that I loved at her age. So long as I choose them carefully, they should get through.

  Eventually my watch told me it was six o’clock, the time she had specified in her letter, and I gazed at the mesh-covered breach in the concrete, knowing that she was on the other side, looking back. She had said that she would wave even though I wouldn’t be able to see her. It was hardly further than the other side of the road but that gap seemed so far away, set behind the guard post and steel barriers chained together and bolted to the ground.

  ‘Are you all right, miss?’ It was the man trying to sell postcards.

  ‘Yes. Just thinking about someone,’ I replied.

  He looked back at the Wall. ‘Someone dear to you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He stroked his jaw. ‘I’m sure they’re thinking about you too.’

  ‘I think so.’

  The sun had sunk lower towards the horizon, and I looked to where Hazel was standing. She was waving to me, I knew, sure that I was here on the other side. After all that had happened, she trusted me to be here. I watched for a while, seeing her in my mind’s eye, waving to me in the light, as the postcard seller walked away.

  Chronology

  1939

  23 August. Germany and the Soviet Union agree the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, which keeps the Soviets out of the War.

  3 September. Britain and France declare war on Germany.

  1944

  6 June. D-Day fails; most troops are killed or captured.

  29 August. Germany executes Operation Kestrel, the invasion of Britain.

  30 August. The Royal Family escape to safety in Northern Ireland.

  16 October. Britain capitulates. Winston Churchill is persuaded to join the Royal Family, now fleeing to Canada, so that he can direct the resistance to the Nazi occupation.

  1945

  11 March. The Soviet Union sweeps through Poland and into Berlin. With twelve million men under arms, the Soviets cut through the badly overextended German forces.

  18 November. Soviet forces land in Britain, moving slowly through the country to mop up German troops and sympathizers.

  29 December. United States troops, along with the remnants of Britain’s armed forces led by Churchill, land in Liverpool and quickly occupy the north of England, Wales and Scotland.

  1946

  18 January. The Royal Family leave Canada for Scotland.

  8 June. An agreement is reached to divide the nation in two. There is a separate division of London. The Soviets declare the birth of the Republic of Great Britain, to be ruled by a committee chaired by Anthony Blunt.

  1 August. A fence is built to surround the DUK sector of London, soon to become a wall.

  Historical Notes

  For a detailed but readable history of the division of Berlin, Frederick Taylor’s The Berlin Wall takes you through the power-plays at a good pace. Or, for a description of the tragedies and absurdities of life on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, 1989: The Berlin Wall – My Part in Its Downfall, by British journalist Peter Millar, is an entertaining narrative of his time as the East Germany correspondent for the Sunday Times.

  For insights into the workings of the secret police and, in the new world, how to address the past, Stasiland by Anna Funder is an affecting work. It details not only how the Stasi murdered peaceful citizens, but also how they regulated the smaller aspects of life, down to strictly controlling licences for typewriters and children’s printing sets.

  Anthony Blunt died in disgrace in 1983. In 2009 the British Library revealed that it had had his handwritten memoirs since the year after his death, when they were deposited by a friend of Blunt. They are a fascinating document in which he claims that, while he had been recruited to spy for the Soviets for ideological reasons, in later life the reality of Soviet State Socialism had led him to reject it. He says that his treachery was the biggest mistake of his life and he had considered suicide in its aftermath.

  Like the man, his handwriting is often hard to decipher. It is made up of sharp lines up and down. The curves are crushed. The vowels – the vehicles of emotion – are suppressed. All we really see is the underlying meaning.

  When the emotion does come out, it is often bitterness at the way that he has been portrayed. The preface, written in hand in black ink, concludes: ‘It is written for my friends, who have stood by me with unbelievable affection and loyalty, and for the members of the public who are I believe more numerous than might be supposed, who want to know the truth about my life and actions, as opposed to the versions which have been served up to them by the press – I do not say “the gutter press” because that would imply that some parts of the press were not of the gutter.’

  The Archangel was a real ship. HMS Royal Sovereign, a Revenge-class battleship, was lent to the Soviet Navy to protect the Arctic transports. The Soviets renamed her the Archangelsk. After the War, she was handed back to Britain.

  Arthur Wynn was the founder of the Oxford Spy Ring – a group less prominent than their Cambridge counterparts but operational. He was recruited by Edith Tudor-Hart, who had also recruited Kim Philby. He was not exposed until the 1990s. John Cairncross was a self-confessed Soviet spy who may – or may not – have been the ‘fifth man’ in the Cambridge ring.

  Lillian Hall-Davis was a star of the silent era. She took her own life in 1933.

  The 1938 meeting between Winston Churchill and Guy Burgess at Churchill’s country home was described by Burgess in 1951, with a recording taken in which he imitates Churchill’s distinctive drawl.

  No. 60 Great Queen Street, London, is the Freemasons’ Hall, home to the United Grand Lodge of England, a very austere-looking building.

  Dr Max Jacobson – aka ‘Dr Feelgood’ – was responsible for some of the liveliest Hollywood performances from the 1940s until the 1960s. His ‘vitamin injections’ – which were largely amphetamine sulphate – kept actors and actresses working with smiles on their faces. His clients included Bogart and Bacall, Marilyn, Elvis and JFK. In 1969 one of his clients died of an overdose and his medical licence was eventually suspended.

  The London Post Office Railway operated from 1927 until 2003.

  London’s Great Smog of 5–9 December 1952 is believed to have killed more than 10,000 people, mostly through respiratory problems. At its worst, visibility could be as low as a single metre. Pea Soupers – so-called because the smog had a green-yellow tinge – had been common since the Victorian era, but this was the worst ever recorded.

  Acknowledgements

  First to Claire McGowan, Hannah Boardman and Ed Latham, who read early drafts of this book and gave some vital pointers. Also Dr Peter Mann, who advised on the medical aspects. My agent, Simon Trewin, and editors, Emad Akhtar and Joel Richardson, whose excellent ideas I have willingly passed off as my own.

  garethrubin.com

  twitter.com/garethrubin

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  MICHAEL JOSEPH

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  First published 2018

  Copyright © Gareth Rubin, 2018

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Cover design by kid-ethic

  Cover images © Mark Owen / Trevillion Images, © Shutterstock and © Allan Cash Picture Library / Alamy

  ISBN: 978-1-405-93062-8