36
The bedside clock said it was after nine when I woke the next morning, Friday, in the spare bedroom. I had told Nick I was having a bout of insomnia and wouldn’t want to disturb him – in truth, I just hadn’t wanted to spend the night in the same bed as him. I wouldn’t usually sleep nearly so late either, but recent events had left me exhausted. I heard voices downstairs. ‘Who was –’ I began, as the bedroom door opened. But it wasn’t Nick, as I had expected, standing there. It was Sanderson Morton, observing me. I was too taken aback to say anything.
‘Your husband has asked me to talk to you,’ he said. He was carrying a black leather bag.
‘Has he?’ was all I could reply.
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘He thinks that you may be having a difficult time right now.’ He walked over and sat on a stool in front of the dresser. ‘You recently suffered something very distressing.’ I couldn’t think what to say. ‘He told me you suffered a miscarriage. That must have been a terrible event for you.’
‘Yes,’ I whispered, knocked for six by the invasiveness, the directness.
He looked as if he were broaching a topic he found difficult himself. ‘Mrs Cawson – this can be quite a delicate subject – you know about shell shock, don’t you?’
‘It comes from being in a very stressful situation. Essentially, your mind attunes to that level of stress. Then it can’t cope when you’re in a normal situation. You suffer panic, insomnia, general unhappiness. That sort of thing. This is something that Soviet doctors have recently discovered and passed the knowledge on to us. So, believe it or not, what you are going through now is something like shell shock.’ He opened the clasp on his bag with a click that seemed to ring off the walls.
‘What do you mean?’
He turned on a small electric lamp. ‘Lie back,’ he said. My nerves were stretched taut, but I did so and he peered in my eyes. ‘Look up,’ he said, pulling down my lower eyelid. ‘And now look down.’ He released me and timed my pulse. His fingers on my wrist were oily. I watched his face as the second hand whirred around the dial on his watch. ‘Do you think about it a lot?’
‘Yes,’ I said, truthfully.
‘I can give you something that will lift your mood, so you don’t dwell too much on it. From there, you can recover at your own pace. It’s healthier in the long run.’
‘I just want to deal with it myself.’
‘I understand. And that is to be commended. But sometimes we need help from our friends and family.’
‘Please just leave me alone.’
‘I have treated many men with shell shock. Believe me, you will recover far more quickly if you give yourself a rest from those thoughts.’ He took a phial and syringe from his bag.
‘I don’t want it,’ I said.
‘It will help you.’ He drew a line of liquid up into the glass of the syringe.
‘I don’t want it,’ I said again, pushing him away.
‘Now, Mrs Cawson –’
‘No!’ I cried.
‘Mrs Cawson!’ He grabbed my wrist from under the blanket and dragged it up, exposing my arm. ‘Do you want me to get your husband up here?’ I struggled to get out of bed, but he was a big man and used his weight against me. All I could see was Rachel, dragged away in her hospital, spitting and screaming out in raw pain.
‘Morton!’ He and I both spun around at the sound, to see Nick in the doorway. ‘What the hell are you doing? I said nothing of this.’
I wrenched my arm free. ‘I said I don’t want it!’
Morton glared at him, then at me, put a cap on the syringe and shoved it back in his bag. ‘A word,’ he muttered to Nick as he left the room.
‘Jane –’ Nick began, coming over to me and taking my hand.
‘Leave me alone,’ I said, drawing it away. He glanced at me, and then followed Morton out.
I lay there shaking. They were downstairs, arguing, but I couldn’t make out the words. Morton seemed to leave, and Nick came back up. He stood at the foot of the bed and swept his hands over his hair. ‘I don’t know why he did it like that – that was wrong of him – but he was trying to help you,’ he said, keeping his voice under control.
‘He was attacking me.’
‘It just got out of hand.’ He sat on the edge of the bed. ‘Christ. Morton and his bloody Russian ideas. I wish he had left them over there where he found them. He can’t even see how brutal they are.’
Could any of us? Stuck, now, in the middle. Nick’s American orders, Morton’s Russian ideas.
‘Will you leave me alone?’ I asked.
He nodded. ‘Yes, of course. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I have to go to work anyway.’
He left and went to his study. I could hear him opening and closing drawers, and then his steps as he went down the stairs and out into the back garden. I hauled myself to Hazel’s room, which overlooked the garden. Below me, Nick emerged from the shed hefting a rusted old brazier into the middle of the lawn. He crossed back towards the house and bent over to pick up something just out of my view before going back to the brazier and dumping what he carried into the iron cage. Small, folded pages spilled in. I guessed what they were. Pages that he had found himself unable to destroy, no matter how much he had wanted to.
After that he took a box of matches from his pocket and lighted the corner of one of the pages. The flame spread up the edge and along the other until the whole thing was a blaze of light. He threw it in and the brazier glowed, sending smoke up into the mist. As he watched them burn, I slipped downstairs to make a telephone call.
Tibbot answered. ‘Nick’s burning the letters from Lorelei,’ I told him.
‘Be careful,’ his voice crackled down the line.
‘I will be.’
I heard the handle of the back door turning. I shoved the receiver into the cradle and flew up the stairs as quietly as I could, all the while listening to Nick’s footsteps through the hallway. I heard him stop by the telephone. Had I put the receiver on the wrong way around? Had I moved it from where it was normally kept? But he opened the front door and I watched him from our bedroom window as he stepped out. He halted and I saw his head bow down. Then he turned around and looked up. For what seemed an age he just gazed at me. Then he turned back on his path and walked away.
‘What happened?’ Tibbot’s voice crackled down the line an hour later.
I tapped my fingernails on the hall mirror. ‘He came in.’
‘Right.’
‘Frank,’ I said. ‘I’m going to confront him. About Lorelei.’
‘Oh, Jane,’ he said, frustrated. ‘What do you think will come of it? He’ll tell you the truth? I spend days in rooms questioning people who have killed, raped, stolen. They don’t confess even then. He’s just going to tell you that you’re imagining things.’
‘I’m not imagining things.’
‘He’ll say you are.’
‘What else do you suggest?’ He was silent. He had to admit that he too could see no other move. ‘Frank, I can’t go on like this, wondering if he …’ I broke off, unable to continue, and leaned against the wall, with the handset by my side. ‘Can you come here by eleven thirty?’ I asked.
He relented. ‘Look, it’s not easy today,’ he said. ‘There’s some trouble: the Teddies are kicking off a bit, having a go at the coppers. Revenge for Liberation Day, that’s the word.’
‘I’ll do it all. You can just sit in Hazel’s room and listen.’
He disliked the idea, but I had known that he would. This would be the last time he would humour me, I suspected. ‘All right,’ he muttered. ‘I’ll be there as soon as I can get away.’
‘Thank you.’
He hung up and I dialled again.
‘The consulting rooms of Nicholas Cawson, Charles O’Shea speaking.’
‘Hello, Charles, it’s Jane Cawson. Can you put me through to my husband, please?’
‘I’m sorry, he’s with a patient.’
‘Charles, this is urgent,’ I said. ‘Absolutely urgent.’
‘All right,’ he replied. He lowered his voice. ‘Are you feeling all right?’
‘Yes. Thank you. Just put me through, please.’ Perhaps he would eavesdrop, but there was little that I could do about that.
The line went quiet for a minute, then there was a click as it was picked up in Nick’s room. His voice came on. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.
‘I’ve got something to tell you. Show you, really. I don’t want you to be shocked.’
‘What?’ he sounded surprised.
‘It’s about Lorelei. Her death.’
‘What are you talking about? What’s it got to do with you?’ He was trying to control a burst of anger. It just made me more resolved. ‘I had to get rid of a patient for this.’
‘It’s about her death, Nick. I know something about it.’
He paused. I could picture him struggling with all the possibilities. ‘What do you know?’
‘I’ve found something.’
‘Then spit it out.’
‘She was drugged. By the time I got there, she was already dying.’
Silence again. Longer this time. His voice was slow and measured. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’
‘She was blind when I got to her and she was dying. She hadn’t been beaten up, though, so she must have been drugged.’
‘How?’
‘The bottle of Champagne. It was on the floor beside her when she died. I think it was in there. They sent over a box of things of hers today and the bottle was in it – they checked it for fingerprints but they won’t have tested it for drugs. So it might have some traces in it.’ Then I asked a question – a lot was riding on it. ‘Do you think I should call the police and tell them?’
I waited. The line hissed and I heard him breathing. If he said yes, I would know he had had nothing to do with her death. If he said no, well …
‘Take it to the police?’ he repeated.
‘Yes.’ My nerves strained under my skin. ‘Do you think I should?’
He paused again. I heard him working it through – what it would mean, how he should answer. Outside, two people were screaming at each other. Just another of the daily disputes we seemed to have these days. Then Nick spoke. ‘No. No, I don’t think so.’
‘You don’t?’
‘No, I think it would be best to wait.’
‘All right,’ I said, my body collapsing a little. And I saw her again, under the water, her eyes as bright as coral. ‘I’ll just give it to you.’
‘Yes. That’s probably best.’
‘You will test it, won’t you?’ Even then I felt a flicker of hope that maybe I was wrong.
He hesitated. ‘I can’t do it myself, but I know a toxicologist,’ he replied slowly.
‘And there’s her hairbrush,’ I said. ‘She used it while she was in the bath. Lots of women do that because hair straightens if it’s brushed while it’s wet. There are hairs still in it – hairs soak up chemicals, don’t they?’
‘Some. I don’t know which. It’s not my field.’
‘So that’s also proof that she was drugged.’
He was being cagey now, instead of angry. ‘Yes. Perhaps.’
‘Good. Then meet me here at twelve thirty.’
‘All right. Have you told anyone else?’
‘No. I wanted to keep it between us for now.’
‘Good. Yes, that’s best. I don’t want NatSec grabbing either of us again,’ he said. No, I was sure he didn’t. ‘What first gave you the idea?’
‘It just seemed so strange that someone would break into her house, kill her and run away without taking anything.’
‘Yes, that’s true,’ he said.
And what was he thinking now? I wondered. Was he regretting the weeks that had passed? Perhaps he too was picturing her with the locks of her hair drifting out like threads in a stream. We were on each end of a line, trying to fathom what was in the mind of the other. ‘Did she have anything worth killing her for? I mean, did she have anything stored from before the War or anything like that? Jewellery?’
‘I don’t think so. But she kept so much hidden from me it was impossible ever to tell what Lorelei was doing. So it’s not out of the question.’
‘No. Well, I’ll see you here?’
‘I’ll be there.’
‘I love you,’ I said. There was a pit in my chest where those words sounded but didn’t resonate.
‘I love you too.’
I put the telephone down and went to the kitchen. I knew that I should eat something but couldn’t. I sat at the table, surrounded by all his possessions, none of them mine, and wondered if he had ever meant any of it. I had. I had meant it all. I felt ill with my thoughts now. The smog had come down heavily enough to seep into the house through cracks in the plaster; you could taste the sulphur at the back of your throat.
One of the old pre-War magazines from the bottom of my wardrobe lay on the table. I opened it at the most-thumbed page to see a review of a play Lorelei had been in. It was some light comedy in which she had fallen in love with someone unsuitable – a writer of comic songs – and she had had to convince her father to approve of their marriage. It came off in the end, of course. According to the critic, the play was mediocre but Lorelei blazed ‘like a firework’. So he was in love with her too. The review was printed below a photo of her and her co-star dancing in eveningwear.
I had to keep the nerves down – actors went through the same thing before they went on stage, I knew. Stage fright. I gazed again at Lorelei’s face, made up of tiny dots on a page that from a distance looked like her but that, when you got closer, turned into nothing. I tried to pick out a shadow of uncertainty there, a sign that one day it might all fall apart. It had – but not in a way that anyone could have predicted.
Wandering out into the back garden, I found the brazier still smouldering but containing only ashes now. A jackdaw burst from the crack in the bricks where Nick had kept the drugs, sweeping up into the smog and disappearing within seconds. And, as he passed the neighbouring house, I saw a pair of human eyes watching me. Patricia was there again.
Anger got the better of me and I rushed through our house, out the front and hammered on her door. I kept it up until she answered, looking amazed. ‘You’re going to stop watching us. Now!’ I told her furiously.
‘What?’
‘If I ever catch you watching or listening to what goes on in our house, I’ll be putting in a call to the police about how you’re always listening to Churchill and talking about buying a fake exit visa to get out. How do you feel about that?’
‘But I don’t –’
‘It doesn’t matter, does it? Want a NatSec investigation on your record? How will that go down with your Party branch?’
She looked dumbfounded. I thrust her away from her own door and pulled it hard closed before spinning around and returning to our house.
I stood in the hall, collecting myself. Perhaps that hadn’t been the cleverest thing to do, but it was done now. I went to the kitchen and drank some cold water in the hope that it might cool me, but I stayed hot. As I placed the glass back on the sideboard, I checked my watch. Before Tibbot arrived, there was another card that I had to play: to dress the scene like the play that Lorelei’s life had been. If Nick were guilty, it might wrong-foot him and lead him to reveal himself. If innocent, then, well, he would perhaps think I was mad, but at least I would know and could tell him it was the stress of the previous weeks but that it was over now. If he forgave me, we could try to rebuild our marriage. It was either that or leave.
I climbed the stairs, slowly, listening to my own breath, just as I had climbed the stairs in her house.
Our bathroom was smaller than hers. The floor was bare boards, not black-and-white tiles, and the bath was barely large enough for me, unlike Lorelei’s, which was big enough to float in. Nick had framed and hung a few small propaganda posters on the walls. One showed a line of beetles crawling along a factory floor, with a booted foot about to fall on them. LET’S CRUSH THE PARASITES, read the slogan. IF YOU KNOW SOMEONE SHIRKING WORK, LET HIS MANAGER KNOW. OUR NATION HAS ENEMIES OUTSIDE AND IN.
I pressed down the plug and turned the taps. Tepid water flowed through the steel and fell to the bottom with a thud that quickly became a storm-like gushing.
It will all be over soon, I told myself.
From our bedroom wardrobe, I took the box of her possessions. There was the bottle of Champagne, which I carried through and placed on the floor beside the bath. Then, tucked away at the bottom of the box, I found the record from which I had learned to copy her voice. I removed Nick’s player from his study, placed it in the bathroom and set the needle to it. That play, The Lucky Lady, started from the speaker once again.
‘Five pounds on red. And now all my winnings on black.’ All chance.
A knock on the front door told me that Tibbot had arrived. I hurried down to answer it.
But it wasn’t Tibbot standing there. It wasn’t Nick.