28

Twenty-seven. Twenty-seven lives have been lost this year as our countrymen have tried to escape that prison colony that calls itself a republic. Twenty-seven families marking Christmas with an empty chair at the table. Twenty-seven diaries that will never be filled. The number lies heavy in my heart.

Winston Churchill, Radio Free Europe address,
Saturday, 22 November 1952

‘Who’s that?’ I called out. There was no sound but the wind whipping down the alley like a spear. ‘I can see you.’ I raised my voice, hoping someone in the houses on either side would look out, but they remained lifeless. My searching hands found my bag and drew it to me. Clutching it, I stood up, spun on my heels and ran for safety. But as I rounded the corner I saw that the alley ended not in an open path to the next road, but in a high wooden gate topped with barbed wire.

The man hadn’t come around the corner yet, but I could hear the shuffling of his feet, a snap and a metallic sound as he kicked a can. I pressed myself into the corner. The footsteps came closer. As he stepped out of the smog I recognized the rough green tattoos on his neck even before his face.

‘What do you want?’ I asked, holding my handbag to me as if it would offer protection.

The printer put his face right up to mine before grabbing hold of the bag. I tried to keep it from him, but he was too strong and threw me off. He searched inside and pulled out the paper package that contained the negative and print.

‘Give that to me!’ I shouted, snatching for it and hoping someone would hear. He pushed me away again and held me off as he fumbled inside his pockets, drawing out a lighter with no cap. He flicked the wheel and a spark flew up but no flame. He tried again, this time shooting up a bright jet. I didn’t know what the purpose of those images had once been, but I knew they were important enough for him to tear them from me. He put the flame to the corner of the paper bag and I clutched for it again, but he dropped it into a metal tray that someone had discarded on the ground and I had to watch as the paper burned away, briefly leaving the print and the negative. I didn’t understand why he had given me the print, and then followed me to rip it away. The plastic of the negative melted and shrivelled into a black mass before the print caught too. For a second by the light of the flame I saw Lorelei’s face before it turned to ash.

He kicked the tray to shake apart the remains before picking up my handbag and pulling out my identity card. I felt too defeated to attempt to stop him. ‘ “Jane Cawson,” ’ he read from it. ‘Right. I know who you are now. So stay the fuck away from the shop. And if I was you I would forget that name you heard.’

So that was it. That was why he had given me the print – it was only when I had subsequently mentioned Crispin that he had felt danger. There was something threatening about that name, or the man who bore it.

I felt angry afterwards that I had let that happen but still had to find my way to the theatre for Noël Coward’s new play, Three Days Without Wine. Nick might know who Crispin was – one of Lorelei’s friends, possibly. I would have to be subtle about asking him, though.

I passed a squad of young male soldiers dressed up for one of the dances that the state organized with the healthier girls – as chosen by their Pioneers COs or college political officers – in the hope that they would marry and soon have children to add to the strength of the state. Sexual desire and energy were to be harnessed for the march of the Soviet ideal by breeding a little army, we understood. I received a couple of wolf-whistles from the oily-haired young men, but the walk did me good, and I felt better by the time I saw Wyndham’s Theatre’s grand Victorian façade of patchwork bricks and intricate moulding.

Nick was in the lobby, buying tickets from the window with Charles beside him – I had forgotten Charles was coming. The ticket-seller held Nick’s five-pound note up to the light and rubbed its paper between her fingers, eventually accepting it was real and not something he had knocked up in our shed. I thought it would be fun to surprise Nick with my dolled-up image so I put my coat in the cloakroom, positioned myself behind him and waited for him to turn around. But it was Charles who caught sight of me first. He seemed to halt midway through blowing a stream of smoke to the ceiling and stared. Then Nick himself turned. His eyes widened, then narrowed, and the tickets fluttered out of his grasp to the floor. I glanced about, to see what it was that had fixed his gaze, and that had made Charles stop too, but behind me there was only a fat old woman being helped to the door by an obsequious younger man. Something was very wrong.

Nick’s voice was colder and harder than I had ever heard it. ‘Why did you do that?’ he demanded.

I looked desperately around again. I had no idea what he was talking about. ‘What … what have I done?’

‘You must know.’ His jaw clamped down on the words.

I looked to Charles, hoping he would tell me what had made Nick so angry. But he simply looked back at me. ‘I don’t,’ I said.

Nick lifted his hand. ‘Are you saying this was an accident?’

‘What is?’ I was becoming frantic, checking again over my shoulder in case there was some clue.

He looked grim. ‘Your hair. You dyed your hair red. Like Lorelei’s. And you’re wearing it like she used to.’

‘It’s just the same,’ Charles said. ‘You look just like her.’

The chatter around us seemed to die away. ‘No,’ I said, dragging a curled lock out of the French twist that Stephanie had created for me. ‘But it’s not. It’s not like hers.’ I turned to look at my reflection in a glass panel on the wall. I had thought it would be coloured like Stephanie’s strawberry-blond hair. As I stared at it, I saw that it had, indeed, turned out darker. And it did look just like Lorelei’s had at the party. I hadn’t realized when I was sitting in the chair and Stephanie was teasing it into curls. ‘I didn’t know.’

‘So much like her,’ Charles said, reaching his hand up to touch it.

Nick’s anger was growing. ‘You’re telling me this was just coincidence? You had your hair cut and dyed just like my former wife’s purely by chance.’ He seized me by the arm, led me to one side and shoved open a door to what must have been a fire exit. We were in a freezing, uncarpeted stairwell. ‘What’s this about?’ he demanded. ‘What on earth are you trying to do?’

I too felt a wave of anger, at the way he was treating me. Until then I had managed to suppress my frustration that he was hiding from me what had secretly been between him and Lorelei; but with his apparent accusation it all started to come out. ‘Are you saying I can’t even cut my hair how I want without your permission?’ I replied.

‘You’re just like her.’ He was speaking to himself, not me.

‘No.’

‘Yes, you are.’

I thought back to the party. How she had looked, how she had stood and moved. And just now, when he saw me, Nick had dropped the tickets out of shock. A thought crept into my mind: what if it wasn’t shock or anger? What if, just for a moment, it had been hope?

‘Nick? Did you –’

Behind him, the door opened. A short man with side-whiskers appeared wearing an evening suit. ‘Excuse me, sir,’ he said. ‘This area is for staff only.’

‘What of it?’ replied Nick.

‘May I be of assistance?’

‘You can leave us alone.’ His tone was unmistakable. There was to be no more talk.

The man silently withdrew. Nick just glared at me and shook his head before walking away, back into the lobby. I stood, feeling the cool air flowing in from the door at the end that led to the outside world. I knew I could leave through that door, and I probably would have done, once, nursing my wounds, but something kept me there. Sticks and stones, I thought to myself. And I thought again of that day when I had found her. Of the memories hidden from me.

I followed Nick out. He was talking quietly to Charles, who watched my return through the corner of his eye. Nick caught sight of me too and seemed to relent somewhat. ‘Listen,’ he began to say to me. But he was interrupted by the bell ringing to tell us to take our seats, and we reached a joint unspoken conclusion that the best thing would be to leave things to settle, so we traipsed in without another word. For the next hour we sat watching a frothy farce about a farm girl playing a buffoonish English aristocrat and an equally dim-witted and arrogant American banker off against each other.

Before the interval, Nick’s hand crept on to mine and I shifted my weight so that my shoulder was against his. I felt him sigh. I knew he hadn’t meant to be angry. It was just surprise more than anything else. I couldn’t blame him, really, now that I knew why, and I regretted matching his anger with my own. Yes, it was annoying that he wasn’t being wholly open with me about what had been between him and her, but that was just the world we lived in nowadays.

Still, as I sat there, I couldn’t help but wonder again what had flashed through his mind when he had first seen me. Had some buried hope risen at the thought she was there in the room with him? Perhaps.

During the interval, we went to the bar to discover that the miasma of smoke it enclosed was thicker than the smog filtering in from the street. Nick forced his way forward to get served, and Charles and I waited at the back of the room. ‘Your husband is a very intelligent man,’ Charles said, as we watched Nick’s back disappear between the bodies.

‘Oh, yes,’ I replied. ‘It was what first attracted me to him.’

He tapped ash out into a glass ashtray on the table beside us. ‘I’m sure it was.’

I waited for him to say more, but he didn’t, so I tried to fill the gap. ‘How long have you worked –’

‘And now you’re wondering if you’re the right girl for him?’ I felt my face burn, and opened my mouth but couldn’t make a sound. ‘Mrs Cawson, I’m sure you are not a wicked person, I’m sure what you did this evening was an accident, but it seems to me that you and he might not be well suited,’ he added, dropping the last of a cigarette into a discarded glass, where it hissed in the liquid at the bottom. ‘Sometimes that happens.’

‘I –’

‘Where are you from?’

‘Kent. Herne Bay,’ I stammered.

‘Family?’

‘They died. TB,’ I said hoarsely.

‘I’m sorry, but we all have to live with such things. All of us. There’s a danger that when we lose a family, we try to find a new one.’

‘Charles, I’ve caused you problems, I know.’

He turned to face me. ‘You make it sound like you wasted a day of my time. I received a letter today telling me that I had to move out of my flat within two weeks. It’s being reassigned.’

How much had I set in motion? ‘Is it NatSec?’

‘I should say that’s a given, wouldn’t you?’

I had to. ‘Where will you live?’ I asked, my tongue tripping over the words.

‘They sent me the details and I went to see it – it’s a hostel, really. My own room, yes, but a shared bathroom and kitchen. All filthy. There was a man just sitting drunk in the hallway.’

I felt rotten. The knowledge that it had been a step on the path to freeing Nick didn’t help much – ruin one man’s life to save another’s? It was a hard balance. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said.

‘And because of what you have done – I don’t even want to know what it actually was – I might never get another job after this one.’ He was right, no doubt. ‘Don’t worry. I haven’t mentioned any of this to Dr Cawson. I can’t because he’s your husband and he’s not likely to take my side, is he?’

‘There are lots of flats that you …’ I trailed off, realizing that I was talking like an idiot. He didn’t want any useless advice; he just wanted me to understand my part in his harsher future. If only I could make up for what I had done to him, but I would probably only make matters worse. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said again.

‘But that doesn’t change anything, does it?’

I turned to watch the junior Party officials trying to use their position to push through the queue, and the young rakes out on the town.

Soon Nick returned with our drinks. ‘Very kind,’ Charles said, as Nick handed out the glasses.

‘I’m sure Charles has been too modest to tell you,’ Nick began, with a glint in his eye. ‘But it’s largely down to him that I’m out of choky.’

‘Is it?’ I said, rather surprised.

‘His connections. He made some calls; I’m sure that’s what got me released.’

‘I doubt it was that entirely, Dr Cawson.’

‘But it must have helped.’ Nick secretly winked at me. He didn’t believe for a moment that Charles’s attempts had helped.

‘Well, perhaps,’ Charles replied.

‘Thank you for that.’

‘Not at all. Although, Dr Cawson, I do believe now is the time for you to join the Party – this might all have been avoided with the right friends.’

Nick looked serious now. ‘Yes, you might be right. I’ve put it off for a long time. But it’s true.’

‘I’m sure it is.’

‘I’ll need a sponsor,’ Nick said. But as he said it he wasn’t looking at Charles. Something was distracting him.

‘Yes, one of your patients, I would say. Would you like me to go through the list?’ He paused. ‘Dr Cawson?’

‘Hmmm?’

Nick was looking at a young man in the corner of the room who was confined to a wheelchair, his legs ending at his knees. There were others around him, but they were standing and talking over his head, and Nick’s gaze took on that melancholy, faraway look I saw when he was back thinking about his War service. The man caught sight of Nick, and their eyes met. They seemed to understand each other. Nick raised his drink to the man and the gesture was echoed. They drank.

‘Dr Cawson? Shall I make some enquiries among your patients who have influence? Discreetly, of course.’

Nick’s attention returned to us. ‘What do you think?’ he asked me.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. I never wanted to go through what had happened to us again, but, unlike Nick or Charles, I knew just how close NatSec had been. They might even have been in our house – the young man with the pebble-like goitre on his neck who had pulled Tibbot and me from the train, perhaps. They would never let Nick join the Party unless it was as their stooge, their blackmailed and beholden puppet keeping tabs on the other members. The Party was said to be rife with those.

‘Yes. Well, go ahead, then,’ Nick said decisively.

‘I’ll make the calls in the morning.’ Charles looked satisfied.

It struck me that three days ago Nick had been in NatSec’s cells; now he was planning to join the Party. All of our memories were becoming shorter.