2

In my very soul I believe that there is nothing on this earth as wonderful as the land we have inherited from our forefathers. Tomorrow we will mark seven years since the shining Archangel sailed up the Thames to liberate us from Fascism. In those seven short years we have sown the seeds of peace to realize the promise of our ancestors. Capitalism, you see, sees greed and mutual mistrust as the most desirable of human attributes. Communism answers that claim with a belief in the fundamental goodness of humanity. And we have believed it for a very long time – for what was the cry of the French Revolutionaries? Liberté. Egalité. Fraternité. Now I won’t paint a rosy picture of the future. At times it will be difficult. But some day we will be truly free, and that means living in equality and brotherhood.

Anthony Blunt, interviewed on RGB
Station 1, Monday, 17 November 1952

A few weeks later, I walked the same route north to Oxford Street, part of a mass of people trudging slowly with scarves or cotton masks tied over their mouths to keep out the heavy November smog. The few cars on the road sprayed one by one through the gutter, so that regular waves of oily water swept on to the pavement, leaving pools clouded with dirt. It had been less than a month since that day, but so much had changed.

I stopped to look down Regent Street. With their faces covered, the swaddled bodies seemed like a strange crowd of moving shop mannequins, reeling about on the pavement in patterns only they understood. Someone’s shoulder knocked into mine and a man in a raincoat seemed to mumble an apology through his scarf, but before I could say anything he had melted into the throng, disappearing among countless others shambling in every direction. I took a moment to wipe the grime from my face before I set off again.

Along the way, I peered into the shop windows. Some were well stocked with winter clothes that could keep the cold out and the warm in. My shoes would do for another year, but I needed a new pair of leather boots and I hoped Nick could find me some. One of his patients could get hold of good clothes – the yellow woollen overcoat he had somehow come up with was the best I had ever had. Even before the War, I could barely have afforded it and there was certainly nothing in the shops now that came close. I thought about asking if he could buy another one and keeping it in a box until needed – you never knew when you would see anything like that. Nick said the man had connections with the factory, that’s how he had first go at what they turned out.

Looking in one misted window, I found myself staring into a baby-goods store. Its sole display was a wooden cot, painted bright pink for a girl and my eyes traced the delicate flowers etched up its sides. But then the migraine that I had felt brewing all morning seemed to worsen and I knew that I needed to sit down and let it pass. I thought of the little café around the corner where the coffee was ersatz but the staff were friendly and didn’t bother you if you ordered something small from time to time. The owner was a plump and matronly woman who seemed to treat customers like members of her family who had dropped by for a chat, and she served little scones for five new pence, which was good value. ‘All I can charge, love,’ she had told me, although I didn’t think that was true. They were edible too, unlike what was offered by some of the places around there. Or Nick’s surgery wasn’t far – I could go there instead and sit in one of the soft armchairs and he would tell me a silly joke he had heard that day, busying himself while I let the pain subside.

‘Are you just going to stand there?’

I looked around to see a cheaply dressed woman my own age staring at me. ‘Sorry,’ I said, my cheeks flushing red as I stepped aside to let her enter the shop. ‘Miles away.’

‘Hard enough as it is,’ she muttered. ‘Probably nothing in there anyhow.’

‘Oh, I’m sure there will be.’

She looked at me as if I were an idiot. ‘And you would know all about it, would you?’

‘I mean –’

‘Don’t matter what you mean, do it?’

She pushed past me into the store and I blushed again, embarrassed, before hurriedly edging into the flow of muffled people descending the steps into Oxford Circus Tube Station.

The concourse wasn’t too bad, but when I got to the Oxaloo Line platform I found it so packed that I thought I would never get on the train, and the closeness of the coughing bodies and lack of air made my head worse. As the carriages came to a halt, we all shoved in, staring straight ahead, not speaking to each other, and I only just managed to get on. While we shuffled around, my eyes fell on a poster above the seats, warning of the threat of infiltration, showing tunnels burrowing from the DUK land – everything north of a line stretching from Bristol to Norfolk, plus the north-western quarter of London – into our Republic of Great Britain, covering southern England and the rest of the capital. Constant vigilance was needed, it said. Then a man pushed in front of me, blocking my view of the poster.

The train started up and rattled away from the now-deserted platform. They say that during the Blitz, the men and women who used the Underground as a shelter at night would just take themselves off to quiet corners without even knowing each other’s names. No doubt, thinking you might get blown apart as soon as you set foot above ground makes you realize that there are some things you don’t want to go to your grave never having tried. And I think it was seen as patriotic too if it were some young man being sent to the front who might never come back – to give him something to smile about when he was on the ship going over.

Not many did come back, of course, and I knew some of those who didn’t: boys I had grown up with and would never see again except in my mind’s eye. I had held those sickness-inducing photographs of the D-Day beaches, though – countless bodies with their heads or limbs missing. Tens of thousands of corpses floating in the water. The Germans had taken a lot of images to celebrate how victorious they had been over us. Then, after the Red Army had, in their turn, defeated the Germans, we had been shown those images to learn how lucky we had been that the Soviets had come to our aid. Either way, the photographs had left me feeling ill for a very long time.

After forcing my way out at Waterloo, I passed the broken remains of Westminster Bridge that invited you to step off the bricks and into the river. That’s if you could somehow scale the electrified wire and stay hidden from the guard towers and their searchlights, of course. Everyone had heard of someone who had managed it, but the stories were always second-hand, and there was a line of simple white crosses on the other side for those who had slipped silently into the black water at night and tried without success.

As I walked, the paving stones echoed to the sound of Comrade Blunt’s daily radio address leaking from a government building. He was speaking of the new day ahead of us: a day of peace and plenty. My footsteps rang in unison with his words as I passed the gloomy block, followed by sparsely stocked grocery shops, a pub or two, and little tobacconists.

And then, finally, Nick’s surgery shifted into view, at the top of one of the old Georgian blocks on the south side of the Thames, opposite the Houses of Parliament.

From his consulting room, you could see Big Ben – or what was left of it. The glass had been smashed out of the four clock faces, leaving ugly dark holes like blinded eyes. Apparently the Luftwaffe had shot them to pieces as they scented victory over us and there was no more RAF to stop them – it must have been nothing but sport to them then. Below the tower, most of the Palace of Westminster still stood, but the far end had been turned to rubble in the final battle and no one had rebuilt it. And, in front of it all, the American ‘protection troops’ stood along the river with their rifles pointing at us. It was that sight, more than any other, I think, that seemed to sum up for me what extremities our nation had been forced into.

‘Good afternoon, Mrs Cawson,’ Mr Paine, the ageing porter, greeted me from his chair just inside the building entrance.

‘Good afternoon.’

‘Smog’s heavy today.’

‘Yes, it is,’ I said, doing my best to be friendly despite the thudding pain in my head. He touched his cap in salute and I smiled at his lovely old-fashioned manners. I hoped some things from the past would stay with us.

‘Would you like a cup of tea to warm the bones?’ He reached into a leather bag and took out a flask. ‘My sister sends me honey from her own bees. It’s nicer than the daily teaspoon of sugar. Better for you too.’

‘Yes it is,’ I said happily. ‘That would be very nice.’ I loved the taste of honey and you didn’t see it all that often.

‘Good.’ He pulled another chair over and poured warm nut-brown tea into a cup. The tip of his tongue pushed between his lips as he concentrated, spooning bright yellow mounds from a jar to the cup and stirring five times in each direction. He took such pains with it.

‘Thank you. And you must call me Jane.’ I tasted the brew. He was right, the rich honey made it taste far better than the few grains of sugar we were allotted each day.

‘And I’m Albert.’ He blew on his own cup. ‘My grand-daughter’s called Jane as it happens.’ He put his hand inside his jacket and drew out a wallet of photographs. There was one of a little girl playing the violin. She had the same tongue-between-the-lips expression of concentration.

‘She looks very good at that.’

‘She is. She’s going to one of the special music schools soon.’

‘Oh, I’m sure she’ll love it there. I’m a teacher and someone I used to work with is at one of those schools now. She says they’re wonderful – the children really flourish. I rather wish I were that age again so I could keep up my clarinet practice; I was never conscientious enough.’

He chuckled. ‘Children. They never change.’

‘No they don’t. No. But music is such a gift. Maybe one day I’ll be able to hear your granddaughter perform.’

‘I hope so. You and your husband can be her first audience.’

‘Yes we could.’

‘Then one day when you have a child I can come to his recital.’

I drank a little more as we looked through a few more photographs and talked about his four grandchildren. He was so proud of them all. ‘Now, thank you so much for the tea,’ I said after a while. ‘I have to go up to the surgery.’

‘It was nice speaking to you. Mind how you go.’

‘You too.’ I waved as I began to climb the stairs.

A welcome surge of warmth drifted over me as I reached the top of the stairs and entered the surgery. Charles, Nick’s secretary, was staring out the window.

‘Mrs Cawson. I’m sorry, but Dr Cawson isn’t here,’ he said, moving to his well-ordered reception desk. It had a little wooden block with his name, CHARLES O’SHEA, on it, that he had pestered Nick for. Charles was always neatly turned out, his fine hair flipped artfully over on the left side, but his figure was squat and somehow shapeless.

‘Oh.’ It hadn’t crossed my mind that Nick wouldn’t be there to sit me down and help me stave off the pain.

‘You should probably call first next time.’

‘Yes, you’re right.’ I looked at him keenly. I always felt self-conscious in front of Charles. ‘Where has he gone?’

‘He went out for a walk,’ he said, comparing two sheets of paper on his desk. He appeared to have some sort of unpleasant rash on his left hand and when he caught me looking at it he put it in his pocket.

‘But the smog has come down.’ He shrugged, a very slight movement. ‘Well, it’s not too bad today,’ I said, trying to fill the silence.

‘I can give Dr Cawson a message.’

‘It’s nothing.’

‘Nothing?’

I felt more stupid now. ‘I have a migraine.’

‘I see.’ I wondered if he knew what had happened, how things had changed between Nick and me.

‘When did he leave?’ I asked.

‘About an hour ago.’

‘An hour ago?’

‘As I said.’ He sounded as irritable as ever.

‘Yes, of course. Sorry.’ It just seemed a bit odd. Nick’s Mondays were usually his busiest time – people would store up their problems all weekend and demand to see their GP first thing. Nick’s patients – many of them Party officials – brooked no refusal and he would normally just snatch a sandwich at his desk for lunch in order to meet all their expectations. And yet he had gone out for a walk at noon. ‘The schedule is usually packed, isn’t it?’ I asked.

‘Sometimes.’

‘Do you know when he’ll be back?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Well, I’ll wait for him.’

‘As you wish.’

I sat in one of the plush seats that Nick had rescued from the lines of bombed-out houses – there was something luxurious about sinking into an armchair that had come from a townhouse once lived in by Lord Such-and-Such – and watched Charles glancing at me out of the corner of his eye as he returned to his work, obviously annoyed by my presence. Lorries shuddered noisily along the road as I waited, and somewhere below us two people seemed to be having a blazing row about the cost of office stationery.

After a while the second post arrived, fluttering through the letterbox, but that was all the excitement to be had and I wished Nick would come back. The time ticked slowly and interminably by, marked by a carriage clock in the corner of the room.

Eventually, I grew tired of watching Charles use two fingers to laboriously type up letters, and I could see that the door to Nick’s office was unlocked and ajar. So, ignoring Charles’s protestations, I wandered in. The desk was chaotically strewn with the usual mess of pens, a stethoscope, wooden tongue-depressors in a short vase, drug phials spilling out of cartons, a pharmacology textbook and buff folders of medical notes. And there was something else: torn yellow paper in which a small package had been wrapped. Curious, I took it in my hand.

The paper was embossed with the name of a Bristol shop that had once sold perfume to society ladies and now sold it to the wives of Party men. As I lifted it and held it in the air, a scent drifted up, the remnant of what had been bound in the paper. Its sweet, sultry notes were familiar, but I couldn’t place it. It was a strange thing to find. ‘Charles?’ I called out.

‘Yes, Mrs Cawson,’ he replied, in the same tone as before.

‘Why has …’ But then I stopped. I remembered where I had smelled it before. And my eyes gently closed in utter pain.

I had breathed it twice, that perfume. Once at a party and once, terribly, in my own home. I slowly placed the paper back on the desk and began looking among the items on the desktop, searching through the jumble of instruments and papers for something that would speak of her. The scent was based on rich Virginia tobacco, she had said.

I shoved the instruments and pens aside and rifled through the letters and papers, checking for anything with her name. The package could only have contained a gift for her, I was certain. I searched through it all, turning it all over.

But no, there was nothing else. No note, no letter. And I took a step back, smoothing my palms down my skirt, berating myself. Such a fool I had been, and so wrong. I had been jumping to conclusions, nothing more. I stared out the window and the broken Houses of Parliament filled my view. Would I have acted like this a month ago? Before that party when she had shone like the sun? The party that surely led to a death that still has me twisted in a pain that won’t let go? No, no, I was sure that I wouldn’t have. A gunboat on patrol passed slowly along the Thames, its searchlight eerie in the smog, and I watched it disappear from sight.

So I pulled myself together, took another deep breath and turned to leave. I would wait calmly for Nick to return and never breathe a word of this to him. That would be for the best.

But then, just as my fingers touched the brass handle, I caught sight of a side table by the door. It had a short pile of brown folders stacked haphazardly on its polished surface; and there was something strange slipped into the middle of the pile. It looked like the edge of a large photograph, seemingly out of place among the medical notes, as if it had been deliberately hidden. I went over and lifted the upper folders and, as I did so, I found that it wasn’t a photograph I was holding, it was the cover of a magazine – an old society glossy full of pictures of actors and young debutantes in furs outside nightclubs – the type of frivolous publication that had entirely disappeared under the new, classless regime. Its title, On the Town, was blazed across the top in red lettering.

Tensely, I opened it, feeling the smooth paper on my palms, and flicked through a few pages of scattered black-and-white images and unattributed gossip before I noticed that the corner of one page towards the centre of the publication was dog-eared – as if Nick had opened it time after time. My fingers turned quickly to that spread of paper. The pages fell away. And there she was.

In a flashlit scene before one of her film premieres, the faces and smiles around her seemed to drift into the background, their owners blurred and lifeless. It was as if they had stepped back into a whirlwind. And, in the centre of it all, she stood gazing into the camera. Yes, you could see in her eyes that the whole world could go to hell and she would still be there in that light. That blaze of light. I understood why Nick had been unable to leave her in his past.

My hands trembling, I put the magazine back as I had found it and fought to control myself before casually returning to the outer room, where Charles was writing something.

‘When is Nick’s next appointment?’ I asked.

‘I’m afraid I can’t discuss patients’ details,’ Charles replied, without looking up.

I paused. ‘I just want to know when he’ll be back.’ He put his pen down but eyed me coolly and didn’t reply. I spoke as calmly as I could. ‘Is he with someone?’

He took one of those foul Soviet cigarettes from a packet and put a match to it, sending a stream of smoke to the ceiling. ‘Dr Cawson has gone for a walk.’

It felt as if the smog were seeping into the room. I went to the window and looked out. With my back to Charles, I gripped the sill and closed my eyes. The words left my mouth but felt distant even as I spoke them. They could have been someone else’s. ‘Is he with Lorelei?’

In the corner of the room, the clock ticked and the sound of rumbling traffic came and went again. There was a long silence before Charles spoke. ‘He has gone for a walk.’

I felt myself collapse inwardly. ‘Would you tell me if he were with her? No, don’t answer that,’ I laughed bitterly. ‘I already know.’

‘Will there be anything else, Mrs Cawson?’ he said, with an unmistakable undertone of anger.

‘I … Just …’ I couldn’t stay there another second with the seed of humiliation growing in me.

Standing on the kerb, I knew that what I was doing was a mistake, that nothing good would come of it, but I couldn’t help myself. I put out my hand and a car stopped. It looked like one of the black vehicles that Party officials used and I wondered if the driver were really a Party chauffeur making a little cash on the side. I gave him the address in our sector on the north-eastern side of the river, close to the Tower of London – an address that had been Nick’s too until their divorce. He still received mail there occasionally. The driver mumbled a price, let out the grinding clutch and we moved into dirty traffic ringing with the sound of tram bells and car horns.

We rattled along the road before turning at speed into a one-way street populated with new blocks of flats, and I fell forward as the driver stamped sharply on the brake pedal. A line of vehicles was crawling one by one through a police stop point. My driver swore and turned tightly, accelerating away to take another route through narrow backstreets. The police watched but didn’t stop us, probably because we were in a Party car. A stroke of luck. Well, perhaps.

We drove through ruts and past the many trenches where the road was being dug up because the Soviet system of communalized heating was being installed: it would pump hot water from a central station to all the homes in the new tower blocks. It was happening alongside a big overhaul of the telephone network too. First, our lovely old exchange names had been replaced with drab numeric codes: no longer could we ask the operator to connect us with ‘Whitehall 5532’; we had to ask for ‘Exchange 944, Number 5532’. And then residential numbers had changed in readiness for a mass expansion that would see us all connected with one another for the common good.

As we charged past wrecked houses, my mind tumbled with thoughts. One moment I was sure Nick was with her; the next I told myself that Charles was right: he had simply gone for a walk and nothing more.

Still, my fingers were white with tension when we eventually pulled up outside a row of Edwardian townhouses, and I handed the driver a pound note emblazoned with Marx’s grey image. Out in the smog again, I hesitated before pushing the porcelain doorbell button on a house with its plaster cracking away like an old mausoleum. If I pressed it, would she open the door and confusedly ask me why I was on her doorstep? Would she know full well and laugh at me? There was no way of telling. I had to push it home.

A dull ring sounded somewhere inside. I waited.

Nothing. Behind me, a platoon of Young Pioneers marched past. ‘When you salute Comrade First Secretary Blunt, just remember what you all owe him,’ their CO called out. ‘The peace that you live in.’

I tried the bell again. Still nothing.

But then, if Nick were there, they wouldn’t answer, of course. They would be in her room. He would be slipping off her dress.

I looked up and down the street, past the marching Pioneers. And I thought: most of these high houses had rear entrances through which they had once admitted tradesmen: butchers with boxes of fresh meat and soot-crusted chimney sweeps. There would be one for her house.

At the end of the road I discovered an alleyway giving access to the back gardens and counted along until I located the right gate. The wood had long since rotted – little need for the rear entrance now that we were all entitled to use the front – so it was easy to force it open. It led into a wildly overgrown garden, full of weeds and creeping creatures hiding among the stalks. It probably hadn’t been touched since Nick had lived here too.

Quelling my fears, I waded in, kicking through wide leaves and pulling myself free from thorny bushes. The back door was unlocked, I found, and I opened it on stiff hinges to reveal an old-fashioned kitchen with a dusty floor. I wondered if she ever ate here or if it was always at restaurants and public events, surrounded by fat Party apparatchiks having their photographs taken with the celebrated actress: Lorelei, the beautiful face that our young Socialist state had once presented to the world.

It would have been a cosy, welcoming room with a family cooking in it, I thought, yet it was quite wasted and barren like this. I passed through and into the hallway, but stopped with a jolt. There was life somewhere. From upstairs, light dance music was echoing in the chill air.

And then she laughed. It was an unbridled, whooping laugh that flew through the house, wrapping itself around me. Just as quickly, it died away to leave only those playful notes from unseen instruments.

I hesitated, afraid now of what I was doing and what I might learn. I stared back towards the kitchen and the door that would take me away from there; but I couldn’t leave – really, I had to know. And so, in the cold air, I forced myself to put my foot on the bottom stair.

As I began to climb the steps, a new sound came: someone else speaking. A man.

I stopped, my hand gripping the bannister so tightly it hurt, straining to hear, to make out his voice. But it was muffled by the music, and I couldn’t hear properly, no matter how hard I tried. I told myself that it might not be him; I could be mistaken. The voice might belong to a total stranger. I began to climb again.

My feet took me upwards step by step. And, without really knowing it, sensing rather than hearing it, I became aware of another sound, a thudding like wood hitting wood every five seconds. I couldn’t understand what it could be.

‘Champagne!’ Her voice burst from the music. ‘Oh, yes, let’s drink up, because what else is there to do?’ I pictured her filling their glasses to the brim and a little more hope seeped away.

Now as I rose, the boards creaking under my weight, I saw a strange spread of water on the carpet slipping down like fingers, touching a new stair and another, and another. They were talking more quietly, their voices masked by the music, but I caught the occasional word or phrase from Lorelei. ‘Rome’. ‘Absolute madness’. ‘It was so very dull, but the …’

The carpet was soaking now; each footstep into it sent a little flurry of dampness down to the next stair. And finally I reached the top of the staircase, where a cold draught seemed to swirl around. In front of me was a bedroom door, open just enough to let a blade of light escape; as I watched, it began to move back slowly, pulled by an unseen hand. Wind rushed through. Without warning, it flew away from me, crashing against the wall. The air caught in my chest as I waited for an accusation against me and my unwanted presence. A humiliating dismissal. A sneer.

But all I saw was an empty room. No one stood in the doorway to push me out or to smirk at Nick’s betrayal. The room held only furniture covered in dust sheets – a box room of abandoned things; and it was the wind through an open window that was sucking the door open and closed in that five-second rhythm. Through the gaping window I could see one of the new tower blocks topped by the hammer and compass, ready to house families harried out of their tumbledown slum homes. The door slammed shut again, leaving me staring at the blank wood.

Behind me, I heard Lorelei’s laughter once more. Gentler than before, but with an undertone that suggested something more … more what? Selfish? Lascivious? It was coming from the door opposite and water was spilling out under the door – it must have been the bathroom – to form a stream right down the stairs. ‘More Champagne,’ she cried. ‘Come on, see it off!’

The man laughed and I groped again for the thought that it might not be Nick. The flood ran around my feet, and it seemed that if I stood there long enough I would be worn down by it, like a statue in a river. But I took a deep breath, and decided: to hell with them both.

I grabbed the handle, wrenched it down and threw open the door. For a moment I was blinded by a lamp shining straight into my eyes.

And in my mind, I have only flickers of what comes next: her face in the light; my feet moving swiftly across glittering, shifting water on black-and-white floor tiles; a figure in a mirror.

Then a mist falls. A darkness, like the smog outside. It sweeps in from the edge of my vision, taking over, fading the lines between everything that I can remember, turning it all black, so that around me there is nothing.

I don’t know how long I was there before there was a pain that pulsed on the side of my head – a pain that told me I was waking up. Before I had memories again.

I let that pain pull me out of the darkness, and gradually my eyes opened. Little by little my vision focused to show me the smooth squares of the black-and-white floor. For a second, I had no idea where I was. I only felt my cheek against a floor that was awash with freezing water, and when I raised my head it throbbed. Then I glimpsed the door on the other side of the room and I knew where I was. As my mind cleared, I could just about remember coming in, something happening, and then hitting the floor, with my head feeling like it had split in two.

Now I ached all over, wincing as I prised my shoulders from the floor. A gilt full-length mirror on the wall filled my vision, reflecting nothing but the flowing water. And I heard Lorelei’s voice again.

‘Just for tonight, sweetheart,’ it whispered to me, soft and close. ‘That’s all.’

For a moment, all I could see were the mirror and the tide through the room, spilling from the edge of the copper bath, until I twisted to take in an empty bottle of Russian Champagne lying on the tiles. And high above it, unmoving, like an alabaster statue, Lorelei’s delicately manicured hand hung, with beads of moisture running slowly along her slim pale wrist. The droplets glistened as I dragged myself upright. I watched them slip down towards her curving shoulder, gathering others, down and down, until finally they melted into the surface of the water, where a dapple of sunlight through a window hit her skin, shining it bright silver. Under the rippling surface, the light fell on little white teeth, a narrow waist and long, pale, graceful limbs made for dancing, or to be seen draped over grass in the heat of summer. And then it touched green eyes open wide, ruby hair swimming like threads in the sea and a mouth frozen open as if it were silently crying out.

Under water, the dead look like the living. They have smiles on their lips, soft skin, hands that seem to reach out for you with feeling. And yet you know that you are looking at a hollow shell.

From the corner of the room her laughter shrieked out again, drawing my gaze to the radio set, its dial glowing orange. Then there was her voice. ‘I’ll dream of you tonight, darling, if you’ll dream of me. If you’ll only dream of me.’

I didn’t know which of her plays it was. One from before the War, probably.