Behind me, I heard Lorelei’s laughter once more. Gentler than before, but with an undertone that suggested something more… more what? Selfish? Lascivious? It was coming from the door opposite and water was spilling out under the door – it must have been the bathroom – to form a stream right down the stairs. ‘More Champagne,’ she cried. ‘Come on, see it off!’
The man laughed and I groped again for the thought that it might not be Nick. The flood ran around my feet, and it seemed that if I stood there long enough I would be worn down by it, like a statue in a river. But I took a deep breath, and decided: to hell with them both.
I grabbed the handle, wrenched it down and threw open the door. For a moment I was blinded by a lamp shining straight into my eyes.
And in my mind, I have only flickers of what comes next: her face in the light; my feet moving swiftly across glittering, shifting water on black-and-white floor tiles; a figure in a mirror.
Then a mist falls. A darkness, like the smog outside. It sweeps in from the edge of my vision, taking over, fading the lines between everything that I can remember, turning it all black, so that around me there is nothing.
I don’t know how long I was there before there was a pain that pulsed on the side of my head – a pain that told me I was waking up. Before I had memories again.
I let that pain pull me out of the darkness, and gradually my eyes opened. Little by little my vision focused to show me the smooth squares of the black-and-white floor. For a second, I had no idea where I was. I only felt my cheek against a floor that was awash with freezing water, and when I raised my head it throbbed. Then I glimpsed the door on the other side of the room and I knew where I was. As my mind cleared, I could just about remember coming in, something happening, and then hitting the floor, with my head feeling like it had split in two.
Now I ached all over, wincing as I prised my shoulders from the floor. A gilt full-length mirror on the wall filled my vision, reflecting nothing but the flowing water. And I heard Lorelei’s voice again.
‘Just for tonight, sweetheart,’ it whispered to me, soft and close. ‘That’s all.’
For a moment, all I could see were the mirror and the tide through the room, spilling from the edge of the copper bath, until I twisted to take in an empty bottle of Russian Champagne lying on the tiles. And high above it, unmoving, like an alabaster statue, Lorelei’s delicately manicured hand hung, with beads of moisture running slowly along her slim pale wrist. The droplets glistened as I dragged myself upright. I watched them slip down towards her curving shoulder, gathering others, down and down, until finally they melted into the surface of the water, where a dapple of sunlight through a window hit her skin, shining it bright silver. Under the rippling surface, the light fell on little white teeth, a narrow waist and long, pale, graceful limbs made for dancing, or to be seen draped over grass in the heat of summer. And then it touched green eyes open wide, ruby hair swimming like threads in the sea and a mouth frozen open as if it were silently crying out.
Under water, the dead look like the living. They have smiles on their lips, soft skin, hands that seem to reach out for you with feeling. And yet you know that you are looking at a hollow shell.
From the corner of the room her laughter shrieked out again, drawing my gaze to the radio set, its dial glowing orange. Then there was her voice. ‘I’ll dream of you tonight, darling, if you’ll dream of me. If you’ll only dream of me.’
I didn’t know which of her plays it was. One from before the War, probably.
3
‘Oops-a-daisy!’
No, Nick’s first words to me weren’t what most people would think of as romantic. But then he had caught me falling out of a train carriage on platform four at Waterloo when I was up for the day from Herne Bay with my best friend, Sally. And, anyway, I think it is quite romantic that we met entirely by chance.
Sally and I were like two peas in a pod: one hundred and sixty centimetres (my mum would have said five foot three, but you get in trouble these days for imperialist measurements), fresh-faced blondes soon to turn thirty. We had bought matching jackets for the January chill and done our curly hair in the same Greta Garbo style, giggling for a week that we were coming up to find ourselves chaps. The War had robbed us of men in our early twenties, so seven years after it ended we were still trying to make up for lost time. Sally had insisted on Victory Red lipstick and I had gone along with what she wanted, even though I thought it was a bit much.
When the train came to a halt, I opened the door and she saw Nick on the platform, waiting to climb in after our departure. So Sally – never one to hold back – shoved me right on to him, and ‘Oops-a-daisy!’ was what I heard as I fell straight into his chest. I think it was about two seconds before my cheeks turned the same colour as my lipstick.
‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ I said, feeling the flush spreading to my neck as I pushed myself off him.
‘No, she’s not,’ Sally called from behind me.
‘I am.’
‘She isn’t.’
I wasn’t completely, if I’m being honest. He just laughed. Nick always had a nice laugh – free and easy; and a handsome, puckish face that could have been eighteen years old or forty. There were a few silver strands in his brown hair, though, giving the game away. He insisted he dyed them that way just to look distinguished.
‘Well, if you’re not sorry, then you should be,’ he said. ‘You’ve got lipstick all over my shirt.’
‘Oh, now I’m sorry again.’ I blinked down at the cream cotton and saw that it really was stained bright red. ‘I could…’ I ran short of anything I could do. ‘Buy you a new one?’
‘This one was two pounds.’
‘I can’t buy you a new one.’
‘She can do other things,’ shouted Sally, who remained in the doorway, leaning against the frame with her arms folded, enjoying every second.
‘Will you shut your trap?’ I demanded over my shoulder.
‘Only trying to help.’ She jumped down. ‘All right, let’s have a look at you,’ she said, examining him. I always marvelled at how forward she was – it must be nice to be like that. She should have been in an infantry regiment or something. ‘Nice and tall. Ooh, all your own teeth, I see.’
‘I’m a doctor. I don’t want to see a dentist if I can help it. Matter of professional pride.’
‘Doctor. Right, that’s it: looks like I’m up on my own for the day. I’ll see you on the six thirty train,’ she told me, striding away past the propaganda posters. ‘But if I’m not here, don’t wait for me. Oh, and her name’s Jane, doctor. She needs some medical attention. You should probably take a look at her.’
‘I’ve seen worse,’ he said. I slapped his shoulder and he laughed. There was a moment’s hesitation when neither of us knew what we were meant to do next. ‘Well, I don’t usually perform consultations on the platform at Waterloo Station, so I suppose we had better go somewhere else,’ he said.
‘Weren’t you on your way somewhere?’
‘It can wait,’ he said with a smile.
Oh, that charm of his. You really could lose yourself in it.
4
As I sit in my study in Winfield House, an old house in Regent’s Park, I am but a few hundred yards from the iron curtain that fell across our land some six years ago. It is a wretched and ugly line. Indeed, I am but a few hundred yards from the raised guard posts where young Britons have their rifle sights fixed on their fellow citizens – men and women forced by the Marxist authorities to doubt their friends and family and to fear those whom they should most trust. Tomorrow is their national celebration. A day their self-deluding masters call Liberation Day. And yet I believe that one day the true liberation will be when they break their rusted bonds of servitude.