‘Will you get a chance to meet him again?’
‘Who knows? To be honest, I don’t know how well my patient really knows Fellowman. That’s why this looked like the best chance – a social gathering.’
‘Where you can charm him,’ I said, mustering as much of a smile as I could. ‘How long would you need?’
He paused. ‘If I could have just five minutes… God, it’s awful, isn’t it? The lengths we have to go to. But look–’
‘No. Of course you must meet him.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes, you might not get another chance.’
He took my hands in his. ‘All right. If you’re sure.’ I wasn’t. I felt dreadful, but I knew it was important to him and I didn’t want him to go home and miss his opportunity, so I resolved just to keep a lid on the nausea. I did my best not to let on how I felt as we crossed the lobby to the ballroom, had our identity cards checked against an approved list, and stepped inside.
There were no shortages where Comrades Burgess and Fellowman ate, that was clear. There were waitresses in black skirts and perfect stockings handing around trays of genuine French Champagne; plates of canapés stacked on tables; food I had never seen even in the pages of an old Vogue I had found in a pile on the floor of our wardrobe. All around it was as if the previous decades had never taken place, and we were still in the roaring twenties. The era of The Great Gatsby and all that excess. I couldn’t help but feel a shade of anger at the hypocrisy.
Burgess and Fellowman weren’t in the room – they had probably been escorted through to a more private place – and Charles was nearby, talking to a tiny man who kept wiping sweat from his head with a handkerchief. Nick was known here too, I found. Within seconds he had been grabbed by a fat Party apparatchik, accompanied by an unhappy-looking young woman, who wanted to know if Nick was treating any of the Politburo and if he had heard anything about the health of Comrade First Secretary Blunt. The tiresome man allowed his jacket to fall open so that we could see a copy of Blunt’s ruby-coloured treatise on our future, The Compass, tucked into an inside pocket. I sighed within myself. Men like this were the most irksome manifestation of the new regime, trying to ingratiate themselves here and intimidate others there.
It was Charles who intervened. ‘Dr Cawson,’ he said, attempting to suppress his excitement as he came towards us. ‘Comrade Honeysette is over there.’
‘So he is. I really must speak to him. Excuse us.’ Nick walked over to the small, sweating man, who was evidently his patient with the connection to Ian Fellowman, leaving me with Charles and the apparatchik.
‘So you’re just married, Comrade Cawson?’ the paunchy man asked me.
‘In May,’ I replied.
‘Church wedding?’ He was trying to sound friendly, not sly.
‘Lambeth Records Office.’
‘Ah.’ My distaste for this man made my stomach turn. But then I realized it was more than that. There was a sharp pain there too. I rubbed it involuntarily. He cocked an eyebrow. ‘Are you hungry? There is so much food here, all proof of the bumper harvests we have had recently.’
Charles volubly agreed. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘It is important to eat well. As Comrade Blunt said himself: we are the thriving muscles of the body politic. Just as the head relies on the limbs for movement, so those limbs rely on the head for…’ His voice drifted away.
Despite my lack of interest in his second-hand thoughts, I waited for Charles to continue, but then I realized that his attention had moved elsewhere, and I followed the direction of his gaze to the doorway I had come through a minute before. There, under its lintel, stood a tall, slim woman with bright red hair twisted up in the French style. She was in a scarlet dress that flared slightly at the bottom, exposing equally red high heels. Such heels were officially scorned nowadays as a bourgeois affectation, and yet she seemed to have gone for the reddest pair she could find. Although in her late thirties or early forties, she was still striking – by far the most striking woman in the room. A waiter offered her a gilded box of long, thin cigarettes, and she took one and held it to the flame on his lighter. For a moment it seemed like everything around her face had darkened. The flame flickered down as she let a stream of smoke drift from her mouth. When it had all gone, there was a smile left on her lips like an aftertaste.
‘She’s… very beautiful,’ I said. It was all that I could say.
The apparatchik nodded vigorously. ‘Oh, yes. Yes, sometimes I used to watch her films three times over.’
I realized then who she was.
‘Is that Lorelei?’ I said.
‘You didn’t recognize her?’
I looked at Charles. He appeared surprised. ‘No,’ I replied, self-consciously.
It was strange that I hadn’t. Victory 1945. It was shown on a loop all day long on Liberation Day. Lorelei had stolen the film as the resistance fighter with a pistol and untold courage who, upon discovering her soldier boyfriend had been killed by the Germans, had roused her cell, and then the crowds in the streets, to throw off the Nazis and welcome our Soviet liberators. But it had been more than a film: it had been the declaration of our statehood, the way we told each other that we were a new country. Lorelei was the image of everything that we were going to be: beauty and courage personified. It had affected me just as much as the other young men and women of my generation, because after the disaster that had engulfed the entire world for a decade – the Nazis, the War – it was up to us to change it for the better.
‘I suppose you have never been introduced – your husband is hardly likely to do that, is he?’ said the apparatchik. He gave out a hearty little chuckle. ‘I wish I could do the honours. She did so much for our nation.’
‘She did,’ said Charles wistfully.
Yes, it was strange that I hadn’t recognized her. From the film’s release in 1946 and throughout the following years, her face had rarely been absent from newspaper pages and posters, but where had she been for the past few years? I hadn’t seen her in anything.
A man she seemed to know approached her, offering his arm, and she accepted, gliding through at a sedate pace. As she passed us, I could smell her perfume: sweet and playful, it seemed to be drifting through the whole room, and the man at my side looked from me to her, then took a sip of his Champagne.
She stopped walking to tap on Nick’s shoulder, and he turned and broke into a smile. What was he thinking at that moment, with us both in the room? Her and me. I would have loved to have known that. So I hesitated, but, well, jealousy got the better of me and I walked over, with Charles following in my wake. ‘Hello, darling,’ Nick said, as I approached.
Lorelei turned her head ever so slightly to look at me. One of the curls from her hair swung to brush her cheek. ‘You must be Jane,’ she said. Her voice was airy but full of confidence. Now that I was beside her, I felt weak in her presence, like the new girl at school. Up close, I could see the cat-like curves of her green eyes, and I must admit I was pleased to see the traces of crow’s feet there.
‘Yes. Lorelei?’ I tried to sound unconcerned by her presence.
‘That’s right. Hello, Charles.’
‘Miss Addington. It’s very nice to see you again.’
She smiled weakly at him, before examining me and the glass of white wine that I was clutching for security. ‘Good God, if you’re married to Nick, you’ll need something stronger than that,’ she burst out, taking it from my hand and grabbing a passing waiter. ‘Brandy for the lady.’ He scuttled away to find some.