Liberation Square

5

Our house was in a street of semi-detached properties built for the Edwardian middle classes, close to the southern end of Blackfriars Bridge. When I first saw it, I was taken by its simple, solid lines. It wasn’t grand but it had four bedrooms – twice as many as the little house where I had grown up – so it seemed huge to me. I wondered how Nick could afford such a place on a GP’s salary but his dark eyes had twinkled when I asked and he led me around the back to show why it was so cheap: the rear wall had been shorn away by a doodlebug in ’44, leaving a pile of rubble and a scar in the ground. A hastily erected wall in the middle of what had once been a rear parlour was the new back to the house, and a split in the bricks halfway up gave a pair of jackdaws access to the wall cavity, wherein they had built a nest.

If there hadn’t been a shortage of labour due to all the new flats being put up, Nick said, he could possibly have had the back of the house repaired properly, but as things stood we would just have to lump it. It didn’t seem such a hardship, in fact, I was excited about changes like the government’s push for housebuilding.

There were people who grumbled about the new way of things, but I couldn’t understand them, really – it would be wonderful, as far as I was concerned, to see an end to people living in slums and tenements. That would be the first great achievement of our new system and it did seem that the future could only be brighter. I had even been allowed to attend a couple of Party meetings in Herne Bay – although I had been quietly shown the door when I unwittingly broke the rules by mentioning the wrong thing.

Before the outbreak of the War, the Soviet Union had signed a peace agreement with Germany and had stuck to it, watching while the Nazi soldiers marched into Warsaw, Brussels, Paris and, finally, in 1944, London. That was when the Royal Family had fled to safety in Northern Ireland, then exile in Canada a month later, for it seemed all was lost. Six months after that the Red Army’s twelve million fresh troops had overrun the over-stretched German lines to claim all that territory for themselves; and the Soviets’ ensuing advance up through Britain had been halted only when the Americans had arrived in the North. The Royal Family had followed and taken up residence in Holyrood, their Edinburgh home. But, in the drizzle outside the Herne Bay Party meeting, it was explained to me that, while the glorious arrival of the Red Army was to be frequently celebrated, no reference was ever to be made to the Soviet Union’s prior agreement with the Nazis. It was no longer history. Well, I had my misgivings, but I tacitly agreed. After all, the past was less important than the future.

As I drew close to our house now, I saw someone on our doorstep: Charles. I felt such a rush of relief. We were hardly friends but here was someone who knew Nick, who would sympathize and help. Maybe he even knew something about why they had taken Nick, or what could have happened to Lorelei, and could lead me through the confusion.

‘Mrs Cawson. I have been calling for an hour. Is Dr Cawson here?’ he asked as soon as I was within earshot.

‘Oh, God, he’s been arrested,’ I said.

He stopped, confused. ‘The police?’

‘NatSec.’

Confusion turned to amazement. ‘They took him to Great Queen Street?’

‘Yes. They –’

‘No.’ He looked around to see if anyone had overheard. ‘Tell me inside.’

I was gabbling, I knew, as we hurried to the parlour. Charles had a limping gait, the result, Nick had once told me, of taking a round to his hip on D-Day, and I was rushing ahead of him. ‘Lorelei. She’s …’ The shock came back to me as we reached the room. ‘I found her dead.’ His mouth fell open. ‘In her home.’

‘Her home?’ He could only repeat what I had said, as if it couldn’t be true.

‘The bathroom. She drowned.’

‘Why?’ he asked after swallowing hard. ‘What –’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know. They’ve taken Nick. Why do you think they did that?’

He stared at me. ‘I have no idea. Was he there?’

‘No,’ I said, fighting back tears.

‘What happened to her?’

‘They’re trying to find out. Can you think of anything about her, why it could have happened?’

He shook his head, scratching that rash on his hand until it became an angry crimson. ‘What did they tell you?’

Charles rubbed his forehead. Mine still ached from where I had hit it on the bath, although the pain was lessening. ‘It’s hard to say. I have some friends in the Party. I’ll contact them and ask them to find out the situation.’

‘Can they get him out?’ It was a glimmer of hope.

‘I believe they can try.’

‘Well, please call them. Please. Do anything you can think of. Anything.’ That guilt, I knew, would tear me to pieces if things turned worse.

‘Yes, yes, I will. Straight away. Can you think of any friends of your husband’s who might be able to exert some influence?’

I sat mentally running through all of Nick’s friends and colleagues who might be of use. But my mind just wasn’t working properly. And, besides that, I didn’t really know many or what they could achieve. Charles put forward a few names but I was only vaguely aware of them. He knew them and their potential far better than I did, so I just agreed to whatever he suggested. I ran out of words. I had never known anyone taken away by NatSec.

We were interrupted by a knock on the front door and my heart leaped at the thought that it might be news of Nick’s release. When I dashed to answer it, I found a woman in police uniform on the doorstep and I felt sure this must be it, she had come to tell me Nick was coming home – but then I saw, behind her, a tall, thin fourteen-year-old girl, her orange hair falling across her face from under a school cap, and I realized that the officer’s visit was for a different reason. ‘Oh, Hazel,’ I said, going to the girl with my arms outstretched.

‘Are you her stepmother?’ asked the policewoman.

‘Yes.’

Nick’s daughter had been at one of the state’s dreary boarding schools until the beginning of the new academic year, when she had come back to live with her mother and go to a normal school. I had only met her a handful of times and now she was here. Nick’s parents were dead and Lorelei’s mother was old and frail, I knew, so there was no immediate place of safety and familiarity to take her in. I tried to put my arms around her shoulders in the hope that I could bring her some comfort, but she pulled back and hugged her bag to her torso. My arms hung in mid-air before I let them drop.

‘She was at a friend’s. Got home and found us there, packing up,’ the officer explained quietly, as if the girl wouldn’t hear her. Why do people think children can’t see what’s right in front of them?

‘Come in,’ I said. The girl shuffled into the hall. She looked like all the blood had been drained from her.

‘Will she be staying with you?’

‘Oh, yes. Of course.’ Hazel looked at her feet and seemed to shrink further into herself. ‘She’ll be all right here.’ The officer nodded, glanced at the girl and left, joining a male colleague stamping his feet to keep warm in the five o’clock twilight.

Charles had appeared behind me. ‘Are you really going to look after …’ he began, with a sceptical look on his face.

‘Yes.’

‘As you wish.’ He returned to the parlour.

‘Hazel.’ I lifted her satchel from her hands, placed it on the floor and wrapped my arms around her. She was shaking. ‘You’ll be staying with us now. You’ll be all right.’

She tried to speak but could hardly form the words. She was in shock too, I could see; the grief hadn’t yet hit her. ‘Where’s Dad?’ she managed to stutter.

I didn’t know what to say. I had presumed the policewoman had informed her about Nick, but the girl had been told only that her mother had died.

‘He’s not here right now,’ I said.

‘Where is he?’ There was need in her voice, but in her eyes there was something else. A flash of what? Resentment? She wanted her father and instead here I was swanning around in his home.

It was best she knew, I thought, or she would become more frantic the longer it was delayed. ‘The National Security people are talking to him.’

‘He’s in Great Queen Street?’ she gasped. I had hoped she wouldn’t know much about 60 Great Queen Street. A forlorn hope.

‘Yes, but he’ll be fine,’ I said quickly. ‘He’s done nothing wrong; they just think he can help them work out what happened.’ She dropped on to the stairs and buried her face in her arms. I could do nothing but stroke her back. She flinched from my touch. ‘He’ll be with us soon.’ Her mouth opened as if she were trying to form words, but closed again as tears began to course down her cheeks. ‘I have to …’ she sobbed, trying to speak. ‘My mum. I …’ But she couldn’t go on and I gave her a few minutes just to cry.

‘You’ll be all right,’ I said again, at a loss for anything else to say, anything with depth to it. I wanted to talk more to Charles, to see if there were anything we could do for Nick, but right now this girl needed me.

‘No,’ she whispered.

‘You will.’

She gazed up at me and her expression changed, as if she were making her mind up about something. ‘I have to go back to my house,’ she said, her mouth still twisted by sadness.

‘What?’ I couldn’t understand. Did she want to say goodbye to her mother? ‘Why?’

‘I just have to go there. I need to get something.’

‘What is it?’

She froze. I turned to see Charles with his arms folded. Hazel looked at her feet. ‘What are you talking about?’ he said. ‘Perhaps I can help.’

‘Thank you, but no,’ I said forcefully.

‘As you wish.’ He walked back to his chair and I closed the door behind him – this looked to be something that Hazel wanted to keep private.

‘Hazel, you can’t,’ I whispered. ‘It’s … you just can’t. The police won’t let you.’

‘I’m going!’ she said defiantly.

What could I say? ‘Oh, Hazel, I can’t think what you’re going through, but I have to make sure you’re all right. Do you want your clothes? I’ll lend you some.’ She looked at me, then suddenly broke away and ran out the door. She was in such a state of distress that I was worried what she would do. ‘Hazel!’ I shouted, as I grabbed my purse and keys from the table and chased after her along the smog-filled road. I caught up with her after twenty paces and pulled her, struggling, to the side of the pavement. ‘You can’t go there. It’s not safe!’ I insisted. I was becoming almost as wild as her. I held her tightly and she tried to fight me off. ‘Hazel, that’s enough. It’s not safe for you or for your dad.’ She kept tugging away from me, but with less fervour.

‘I need to get something,’ she said to the ground.

‘What? Tell me.’

She wiped her face. She was trying to remain defiant but it wasn’t really in her. ‘Something of Mum’s.’

She stopped again. Charles was walking towards us. ‘I’m going to see what I can find out,’ he said.

‘All right,’ I said, exasperated by his interruption.

‘You should go inside. Both of you. Wait until I come back. Don’t do anything else.’

‘Charles, he’s my husband.’

‘I’m as concerned as you are. But we have to understand that the state takes precautions when it feels a citizen may be endangering society.’ He had changed his tune.

A fury hit me. ‘Is that what you think he’s done?’ I demanded. ‘Put the state in danger?’ It seemed so absurd. He seemed absurd. I saw the curtains of the house beside ours twitch.

‘It doesn’t matter what I think. It is what the state thinks that matters. And that is precisely what I’m going to find out.’ He stalked away without another word. I had no time to argue with him too.

Hazel had composed herself. ‘Please, can I go?’ she said.

‘No.’ But there was clearly something she was keeping to herself, and I softened. ‘Hazel, whatever it is, you can tell me. I only want what’s best for you and your dad.’ She hesitated, unable to decide whether to tell me. But the girl was fourteen and her need to trust someone was winning. ‘Hazel?’

‘I think …’ she stammered. She lowered her voice and I had to lean in to hear her properly. ‘I think Mum was hiding something. In my room.’

I glanced around. ‘What do you mean?’ But already my mind was racing on. It made some sense out of a situation that seemed inexplicable: the Secs wouldn’t normally attend a domestic death; their work was political – subversives, plots against the state. So what had Lorelei got herself into? ‘Is that why NatSec was at your house?’ I asked, with some trepidation. She nodded, and I began to understand why the girl was so desperate. I gripped her hand in mine and stared straight ahead as my mind worked double speed. ‘Hazel, what was she hiding?’

She was about to answer but halted at the sight of a young couple walking past, wearing worker’s caps with Spartacist badges on them. They were probably off to a meeting in advance of Liberation Day. Hazel waited until they had gone before she spoke. ‘I’m not sure.’ She put her hands to her cheeks. ‘She did it even before Mum and Dad split up. They didn’t know I knew about it.’

‘Where is it?’

She hesitated. ‘In the ceiling. You can take the light fitting out and there’s a sort of hole you can put things in. Mum put them there when she thought I was asleep.’

It wasn’t unusual for people to have hiding places – for fake food coupons, foreign currency or pro-American samizdat leaflets surreptitiously circulated among the most trusted friends. But somehow this sounded different.

‘What was she hiding?’ I made her look at me. ‘It’s important.’

She glanced nervously at the backs of the Spartacist couple as they disappeared into the smog. ‘I’m not sure. It was boxes, white boxes made out of card. This big.’ She held her palms about thirty centimetres apart.

Card boxes that size, well, that could be anything. ‘Do you know what was in them?’

‘I never looked. I thought Mum might catch me.’

‘I’ll get them,’ I said.

I had no idea if Lorelei’s house had been searched. If it had been, the police or the Secs might have found whatever it was she had been storing. They might have thought Nick was involved and that was why they had taken him. On the other hand, if the house hadn’t yet been searched, I felt that I had to get there before it was, or that evidence could be held against Nick and he might never be released. Perhaps if I hadn’t felt so guilty for suspecting him earlier, and desperately needed to make penance for it, I wouldn’t have had the courage. It just wasn’t the sort of reckless thing I would do.

‘Will you?’

I pulled together as much resolve as I could find in myself. ‘Yes.’

We talk of love as such a powerful driver of what we say and do, but sometimes guilt is just as strong.

It took me half an hour to walk back to Lorelei’s house over Blackfriars Bridge, past the bombed-out shops and even an old Victorian doss house where the destitute once slept in coffin-like boxes for a few pence per night.

I had lived through the hunger of the Depression and the sheer brutality of the War, and I would never shake those memories; yet from that massed rubble we would create something to be proud of. I was certain of that. Ending the slum poverty was the first step, and all those new tower blocks were proof of our intention. No, our new nation wasn’t spotless – people talked quietly of NatSec’s visits during the night; and it felt low after five hundred years of parliaments to have a government choose itself – but the free hospitals and schools we were promised had to count for something. Soon there would be no more private healthcare; it would all be provided by the state, with the same for everyone; and education for the sons of bricklayers would be as good as for the sons of dukes. Sometimes to get out of the wood you have to pass through the brambles. That’s what I told myself any time I began to doubt.

There was a police notice on the front of Lorelei’s house, warning people not to enter, but no one was around to enforce it. Once again, I stole in through the back gate. In the dusk the garden seemed different – thicker and danker as I trod through finger-like tugging weeds and over mounds of earth to the kitchen door.

I didn’t dare turn on the lights when I got in, so the house stayed hidden from me, until, slowly, my eyes adjusted to the weak glow from the streetlights outside. I slipped silently through the hall and up the damp stairs, and I couldn’t help but open the door to the bathroom, to see stagnant pools of water on the floor. Even though I knew Lorelei’s body was long gone, my stomach twisted when I gazed at the copper bath, before my eyes rose to the gilt mirror on the opposite wall. And then, as my heart began to beat faster, I tried to picture someone in the dark glass, to bring the memories back. Something began to form.

A sound made me stop: creaking from somewhere in the house. I froze, nervously trying to hear; all I could make out, though, was the wind outside and a draught through the cracks. After a while, not moving a muscle, I decided that it had only been the house settling, but I knew I shouldn’t spend any longer here than was necessary, so I hurried out to find Hazel’s bedroom in order to collect what I had come for.

One of three on the upper floor, Hazel’s bedroom was pleasant and airy despite the gloom. She liked books, I could see from her shelves. They were filled with a mixture of classics – Dickens, the Brontës, Louisa May Alcott – and the sort of girlish romances that I used to read at her age. If I had been there any other time, seeing this would have made me smile – to know that, when it came down to it, each generation was just like the last. But the circumstances hardly allowed for sentimentality.

There was a desk and a chair that she had covered in a velvet throw. I pulled the chair underneath the wide brass light fitting and stood on it to reach. Just as Hazel had told me, the fitting unscrewed. It came away quite easily, hanging from the cable, to leave a roughly cut hole in the ceiling. I stretched up so that I could see into the cavity above it and gingerly, worried about what I might find, slipped my hand inside. I felt about until I touched something smooth, something that moved as I probed it. Reaching further, I managed to twist it out.

A white box made of card lay in my hands, looking quite plain, quite unremarkable, yet I couldn’t help but hope that this was the key to how and why Lorelei had died. The key to getting Nick released.

It was about the size of a dinner plate, ten centimetres tall, without a single mark on it to denote its contents. I lifted the lid. It tipped up to reveal that the box was divided into a dozen identical little segments – but, crushingly, whatever had once been in those compartments was now gone. The thing was empty and meaningless.

I was about to cast it aside in anger when something struck me, though: a sense that there was something familiar about the box, something that I recognized. I was sure that I had seen one like it before. And yet I couldn’t think where.

It had been years ago, I was sure of that – when I was younger, although not a child – but when? Where? I racked my brains trying to remember more.

It was the clamour of a police-car bell outside that made me stop. Nervous, I eased back the curtain and looked out the window. The car came close to the house, charging through the ruts and black water, but continued straight past without slowing. It wasn’t coming here – but, my God, what they could do to us just with the sound of a bell.

I returned to the box, weighing it in my hand and trying to picture another like it. I paced thoughtfully around Hazel’s room, surrounded by her books; the pictures on her wall; the soft pink ballet shoes tied to the back of her door; her navy school skirt and blouse slung over the back of a chair. I could have kicked myself for not being able to remember. The dank house, it was as if it were taunting me. Then I halted and looked back at the chair.

That uniform. I stared at it. And suddenly I was back in another time, a time when I had worn a muddy-brown uniform, my feet damp even through thick leather boots as thin rain drizzled down. Yet a thrill of excitement was running through me as I looked along the barrel of a bolt-action rifle. I and twenty other girls were all lined up for our Compulsory Basic at a run-down former naval base in Kent and I reached into a carton just like this one to lift out a round, before slotting it into the breach and squeezing the trigger. Then came the explosion and a kick into the muscle of my shoulder. Followed by the dark, distant hole appearing in the target.

I held up the box, my mind churning, the speckled light making the white box a dull grey. Is that what it had held? Those little metal spears? And, if so, what the hell was Lorelei hiding them for? I couldn’t for a single second picture the beautiful actress who wore furs firing a weapon. The idea seemed wholly impossible.

Of course, they could have been for someone else – but then, in a sense, it didn’t matter: whatever her purpose in storing them, it was placing us all in danger. Another creak from the house startled me and made me catch my breath.

I put the box on the bed and stepped back on to the chair. Once more I reached into the void and patted my hand around to see if there was anything else up there. I felt nothing and was about to jump down when my fingers touched the corner of something hard. Stretching up, with my feet unsteady on the chair, I just managed to pull it out.

It was a thin hardback book with plain leather covering, like a ledger I thought, and about the dimensions of a school exercise book. Curious, I opened it to find blocks of writing, but before I could examine them, I heard a violent metallic ringing from outside that told me the police car was coming back. I crept to the window with my heart in my mouth. The car was drawing closer, from the end of the street, then to within fifty metres, finally stopping abruptly on the other side of the road, a few houses up. I waited to see, trying to think if I could run – but where to? For a few moments nothing happened, then three plain-clothes officers jumped out and charged up to the nearest house, where they began hammering on a red door until it opened and they all rushed in. I felt relief. They hadn’t come for me, but I knew that I should leave.

After replacing the light fitting, with my hands trembling a little, I went into Lorelei’s bedroom in search of a bag to hide what I had found. At the back of a wardrobe I found one with a stiff flat base inside. I tore away some of the thread and managed to slip the book between the base and the outer fabric. The box that I had taken was designed to fold flat, so that went in too. I dropped in my purse, handkerchief, and a silk scarf I found on the floor of the wardrobe to cover it all, put the bag over my shoulder and went out the back of the house, checking around carefully before hurrying away in the dark.

As soon as it felt safe, I stopped walking. On the other side of the road a little corner café was still open and advertising fresh mutton in the stew, rather than the spam and corned beef that still made up the meat staple of our diet. It seemed a good place to sit for a while to examine what I had taken.

I sat at a cracked table to order a tea, carefully lifted out the book and opened it to discover the pages were fine old paper, thick and creamy, thinly lined. I didn’t recognize the handwriting that appeared – it could have been Lorelei’s and I knew it wasn’t Nick’s, unless he had gone to some pains to disguise it. It was compact yet spiderishly untidy, and it made me wonder about the person who had made those little marks and dashes on the page – can you really tell someone’s personality from their handwriting? It seems a silly idea, and yet, as I traced the careless lines and reckless curls, they seemed to conjure the woman I presumed was their author. I pictured her rapidly scratching a pen across the surface of each page, with the doors locked and bolted to prevent anyone catching her. The writing filled page after page, but it was all in a strange form, nothing like what I had expected.