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 before 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.