‘I’m afraid I can’t discuss patients’ details,’ Charles replied, without looking up.
I paused. ‘I just want to know when he’ll be back.’ He put his pen down but eyed me coolly and didn’t reply. I spoke as calmly as I could. ‘Is he with someone?’
He took one of those foul Soviet cigarettes from a packet and put a match to it, sending a stream of smoke to the ceiling. ‘Dr Cawson has gone for a walk.’
It felt as if the smog were seeping into the room. I went to the window and looked out. With my back to Charles, I gripped the sill and closed my eyes. The words left my mouth but felt distant even as I spoke them. They could have been someone else’s. ‘Is he with Lorelei?’
In the corner of the room, the clock ticked and the sound of rumbling traffic came and went again. There was a long silence before Charles spoke. ‘He has gone for a walk.’
I felt myself collapse inwardly. ‘Would you tell me if he were with her? No, don’t answer that,’ I laughed bitterly. ‘I already know.’
‘Will there be anything else, Mrs Cawson?’ he said, with an unmistakable undertone of anger.
‘I… Just…’ I couldn’t stay there another second with the seed of humiliation growing in me.
Standing on the kerb, I knew that what I was doing was a mistake, that nothing good would come of it, but I couldn’t help myself. I put out my hand and a car stopped. It looked like one of the black vehicles that Party officials used and I wondered if the driver were really a Party chauffeur making a little cash on the side. I gave him the address in our sector on the north-eastern side of the river, close to the Tower of London – an address that had been Nick’s too until their divorce. He still received mail there occasionally. The driver mumbled a price, let out the grinding clutch and we moved into dirty traffic ringing with the sound of tram bells and car horns.
We rattled along the road before turning at speed into a one-way street populated with new blocks of flats, and I fell forward as the driver stamped sharply on the brake pedal. A line of vehicles was crawling one by one through a police stop point. My driver swore and turned tightly, accelerating away to take another route through narrow backstreets. The police watched but didn’t stop us, probably because we were in a Party car. A stroke of luck. Well, perhaps.
We drove through ruts and past the many trenches where the road was being dug up because the Soviet system of communalized heating was being installed: it would pump hot water from a central station to all the homes in the new tower blocks. It was happening alongside a big overhaul of the telephone network too. First, our lovely old exchange names had been replaced with drab numeric codes: no longer could we ask the operator to connect us with ‘Whitehall 5532’; we had to ask for ‘Exchange 944, Number 5532’. And then residential numbers had changed in readiness for a mass expansion that would see us all connected with one another for the common good.
As we charged past wrecked houses, my mind tumbled with thoughts. One moment I was sure Nick was with her; the next I told myself that Charles was right: he had simply gone for a walk and nothing more.
Still, my fingers were white with tension when we eventually pulled up outside a row of Edwardian townhouses, and I handed the driver a pound note emblazoned with Marx’s grey image. Out in the smog again, I hesitated before pushing the porcelain doorbell button on a house with its plaster cracking away like an old mausoleum. If I pressed it, would she open the door and confusedly ask me why I was on her doorstep? Would she know full well and laugh at me? There was no way of telling. I had to push it home.
A dull ring sounded somewhere inside. I waited.
Nothing. Behind me, a platoon of Young Pioneers marched past. ‘When you salute Comrade First Secretary Blunt, just remember what you all owe him,’ their CO called out. ‘The peace that you live in.’
I tried the bell again. Still nothing.
But then, if Nick were there, they wouldn’t answer, of course. They would be in her room. He would be slipping off her dress.
I looked up and down the street, past the marching Pioneers. And I thought: most of these high houses had rear entrances through which they had once admitted tradesmen: butchers with boxes of fresh meat and soot-crusted chimney sweeps. There would be one for her house.
At the end of the road I discovered an alleyway giving access to the back gardens and counted along until I located the right gate. The wood had long since rotted – little need for the rear entrance now that we were all entitled to use the front – so it was easy to force it open. It led into a wildly overgrown garden, full of weeds and creeping creatures hiding among the stalks. It probably hadn’t been touched since Nick had lived here too.
Quelling my fears, I waded in, kicking through wide leaves and pulling myself free from thorny bushes. The back door was unlocked, I found, and I opened it on stiff hinges to reveal an old-fashioned kitchen with a dusty floor. I wondered if she ever ate here or if it was always at restaurants and public events, surrounded by fat Party apparatchiks having their photographs taken with the celebrated actress: Lorelei, the beautiful face that our young Socialist state had once presented to the world.
It would have been a cosy, welcoming room with a family cooking in it, I thought, yet it was quite wasted and barren like this. I passed through and into the hallway, but stopped with a jolt. There was life somewhere. From upstairs, light dance music was echoing in the chill air.
And then she laughed. It was an unbridled, whooping laugh that flew through the house, wrapping itself around me. Just as quickly, it died away to leave only those playful notes from unseen instruments.
I hesitated, afraid now of what I was doing and what I might learn. I stared back towards the kitchen and the door that would take me away from there; but I couldn’t leave – really, I had to know. And so, in the cold air, I forced myself to put my foot on the bottom stair.
As I began to climb the steps, a new sound came: someone else speaking. A man.
I stopped, my hand gripping the bannister so tightly it hurt, straining to hear, to make out his voice. But it was muffled by the music, and I couldn’t hear properly, no matter how hard I tried. I told myself that it might not be him; I could be mistaken. The voice might belong to a total stranger. I began to climb again.
My feet took me upwards step by step. And, without really knowing it, sensing rather than hearing it, I became aware of another sound, a thudding like wood hitting wood every five seconds. I couldn’t understand what it could be.
‘Champagne!’ Her voice burst from the music. ‘Oh, yes, let’s drink up, because what else is there to do?’ I pictured her filling their glasses to the brim and a little more hope seeped away.
Now as I rose, the boards creaking under my weight, I saw a strange spread of water on the carpet slipping down like fingers, touching a new stair and another, and another. They were talking more quietly, their voices masked by the music, but I caught the occasional word or phrase from Lorelei. ‘Rome’. ‘Absolute madness’. ‘It was so very dull, but the…’
The carpet was soaking now; each footstep into it sent a little flurry of dampness down to the next stair. And finally I reached the top of the staircase, where a cold draught seemed to swirl around. In front of me was a bedroom door, open just enough to let a blade of light escape; as I watched, it began to move back slowly, pulled by an unseen hand. Wind rushed through. Without warning, it flew away from me, crashing against the wall. The air caught in my chest as I waited for an accusation against me and my unwanted presence. A humiliating dismissal. A sneer.
But all I saw was an empty room. No one stood in the doorway to push me out or to smirk at Nick’s betrayal. The room held only furniture covered in dust sheets – a box room of abandoned things; and it was the wind through an open window that was sucking the door open and closed in that five-second rhythm. Through the gaping window I could see one of the new tower blocks topped by the hammer and compass, ready to house families harried out of their tumbledown slum homes. The door slammed shut again, leaving me staring at the blank wood.