It was not what I had been expecting, and I hoped it wasn’t some trick that she was pulling on me.
‘Will it be that bad?’ I asked. I didn’t know whether I needed to be guarded or to go with the joke.
‘Marriage to Nick? Probably. It’s hard for me to telclass="underline" I was squiffy for most of my sentence.’
I was taken aback. She really was being friendly. Yet, somehow, I found that harder to deal with than outright hostility. Charles looked, as Nick had said he might be, star-struck. And Nick was clearly amused by his former wife. ‘I’ll have to take that as a tip,’ I said, still uncertain how I should respond.
‘A tip from me? Golly, I’m the last person you should take one from.’ She took the glass of brandy that had arrived with the waiter, put it in my hand and swapped her empty Champagne glass for a full one from his tray. ‘Now, see that off and we can take it from there.’ She knocked back her drink and indicated for me to do the same.
Nick intervened. ‘Following Lorelei in anything tends to result in madness or severe injury,’ he said.
‘Preferably both,’ she added.
‘Well, let’s see where this gets me.’ I threw half of it down my throat.
‘Mrs Cawson,’ began Charles. ‘If you would like–’
‘Good girl,’ Lorelei interrupted. I felt like my throat was on fire. ‘We’ll make a flapper of you yet.’
‘What’s that perfume?’ I asked.
‘This?’ She held out her wrist. ‘Tabac Blond. By Caron. Do you like it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Based on sweet Virginia tobacco, of all things. Hard to get now. Order Nick to get you a bottle. Place in Bristol does it – he knows which one. Now, Nicholas, I want to spend some time with you tonight, but I must go over there and sweet-talk the Ruskies, since they’re our masters now. Cheerio, Jane. We’ll compare notes later. I’ve got some tips for controlling Nick. I got them from a wild-animal keeper at the zoo.’
My throat was still raw from the brandy and I had to struggle to pronounce more than a crackle. ‘I’ll look forward to it.’ That was true. I felt intimidated by this force of nature but also drawn to her. Some people are like that, aren’t they? You just can’t help yourself around them. ‘Goodbye,’ I said, waving my empty glass.
Nick focused his attention back on me. ‘This is Comrade Honeysette. He’s in the Ministry of Food.’
‘I’m very pleased to meet you,’ Honeysette said, shaking my hand. He had a quick, rattling manner of speech.
Charles looked across the room and spoke. ‘Comrade Honeysette is a friend of Comrade Fellowman.’
‘Known him since Oxford. Solid man. Very committed. Came over in ’47.’ So when scores of people were being thrown into Brixton Prison for attempting to escape from our side to theirs, Ian Fellowman was one of the handful who had made the journey in the other direction. I had seen and heard men like him interviewed on the radio and television, speaking about the corruption and hunger in the DUK that they were leaving behind, but I had never seen one in the flesh. I was quite intrigued. I felt another pain in my abdomen but managed not to let it show.
At that moment, a murmur went through the room and heads turned as, in the corner, a small train of guards and assistants strode forth. In the midst was someone familiar to me from the pages of the Morning Star: Guy Burgess. He was tall, medium build, with a rectangular face, and in his wake followed a clutch of eager apparatchiks, like seagulls chasing a trawler.
But it wasn’t him that Charles and Honeysette were watching, it was someone else: a very big man with thin ginger hair who was following at a distance of only a couple of paces, and yet seemed somehow alone. He wore a drab grey suit, and there was something strangely transparent about him as he slipped between people, as if he could disappear right in front of you. They all entered a small area divided from the rest of the room by silk ropes.
‘That’s Fellowman, isn’t it?’ said Nick.
‘Yes, that’s right,’ Honeysette replied, thoughtfully. ‘Shall we go over and I’ll see if I can catch his eye?’
‘Yes, let’s.’
We walked through the throng. Comrade Fellowman was whispering in Burgess’s ear as we arrived, before stepping back to instruct a couple of junior assistants. ‘Ian,’ Honeysette called over. Fellowman glanced at him. ‘May I introduce a few friends of mine. This is Comrade Nick Cawson and his wife, Jane.’ He was about to speak again, but it was just then that a man appeared on the stage, tapped the microphone twice to make sure it was on and spoke, his voice distorted by the wires and speakers.
‘Comrades. It is my great honour tonight to welcome some very special guests,’ he said. ‘First, our colleagues in the struggle for democratic Socialism from the Russian league of Communism International.’ Clapping resounded around the room as we all turned to a group of ten men standing near the stage. I felt a hot flush and sweat forming on my brow, my stomach clenching. ‘And also to the Secretary of State Information, Comrade Burgess.’
Burgess raised his hand to louder clapping, which died out as the speaker returned to the microphone. I saw Charles grin widely at me. But then something different passed over his face. Something like shock. It was reflected in the faces of all the men immediately around me. They were looking down to the floor at my feet. A few paces away, Lorelei seemed to have frozen in the act of clapping, her hands resting in mid-air as she too stared at the floor below me. Nick’s eyes rose, wide, to mine. Then there was a bolt of searing pain through my whole body, and I felt the glass slip from my fingers. It shattered on wood stained with droplets of wet blood, the shards exploding across the polished surface.
‘Christ,’ someone said.
11
Nick’s study was a small, necessarily tidy room at the back of the house – it would have been larger had it not been foreshortened by the doodlebug that had blown the back off the building. Although I was doing it for Nick, searching the room for anything that could incriminate him, I still had a sense that I was somehow invading his privacy. Before I began, though, I waited to make sure Hazel was in her room and listening to the radio. The sound of voices and a laughing audience through the wall told me that she was doing as I had asked – I didn’t think for a second that she would take much of it in, but at least it would give her mind a rest from her fears and sadness.
Boxes of files were stacked untidily around the study walls. One wall also displayed a map showing how Britain had been divided. I traced the border along the complete southern shore of the Thames, and along the eastern part – our part – of the northern shore. Those stretches were all fence. The solid concrete wall, ranging from five to eight metres high and topped with barbed wire, ran up from the river near Trafalgar Square in the middle of the city, through Piccadilly Circus, where Checkpoint Charlie had been built, then north for fifteen kilometres to Barnet, at which point it curved west down to meet the Thames again at Twickenham.
For those in DUK London, the only way out of it was the heavily fenced-in road that the Westerns had named ‘the Needle’ because it pierced the cordon we had thrown around them. That ran from Checkpoint Bravo, on the western limit of DUK London, out through our land to Oxford, which was the beginning of the main part of the DUK. It was Nick who had explained to me that a convoy of supply lorries – and a few civilians with the right visas – passed along the Needle each day. The DUK’s London citizens actually ate better than the rest of their country because the Americans sent so much food – mutton and pork and fish – along the road just to make sure they couldn’t be starved into submission if we were to cut it off.
That border. Even if we did need it to reduce conflict with the DUK, it was awful how it also kept us divided from ourselves and from our vital, collective history. I couldn’t help thinking that even my own mind was taking on its character by locking away the memories I needed the most: those lost moments in Lorelei’s house. I suppose on some level our thoughts will change to reflect and resemble the world around us.