But then, sometimes women’s cycles do stop for no special reason. So it could simply be that mine had halted for a while and the pregnancy test that he gave me was unreliable. And when Nick had talked on the telephone about testing the medicine on a private patient, he could have meant just that: one of his private patients. Equally, his reluctance to think about having another child at that moment was quite understandable, given the awful few days he had just experienced.
My mind swung one way and then the other.
I gripped the fence until the wire bit into my flesh. I didn’t know where to go. I sat on the ground, feeling the wet sand and stones under me, and told myself I should return home, pack what little I owned and catch a train, stay with Sally while I tried to learn the truth of what had happened. And if it turned out that my fears were right, I could stay there, or in some town where I had never been and knew no one. There were so many rootless people these days I would simply be one more piece of driftwood.
And yet I knew that I couldn’t leave, because no matter what had happened and what I had heard that day, I had never been as happy as I had been in the months spent with Nick. When I had gone through his desk, when I had followed ghosts in Kent and lied to NatSec, all of it was for him.
A sharp pain stabbed in my chest. Something was surging and I doubled over as my stomach convulsed, bile falling from my mouth in short, sharp jerks. It came in waves of nausea and pain, and when there was nothing left I sat on a mound of broken bricks. I stayed there for a long time, watching the birds glide and the sun move across the sky.
Back at our house – his house, really – I sloped upstairs and collapsed on the bed. All the way, I had been telling myself that I needed to know what had happened to me, just to have some level of certainty; and a thought had entered my head, a way of discovering the truth. It came from the look in Nick’s eyes when he had seen me at the theatre – when, just for a second, he had seemed to think Lorelei stood in front of him.
I pulled the box of her possessions from the back of my wardrobe and delved through the books and compacts until I found her perfume bottle. I unstoppered it and let the sweet scent drift out. Then I found what I needed: the record of one of Lorelei’s plays. It would be my teacher for a task that seemed reckless to me – but then the world had shifted and I had to change with it.
In Nick’s study I placed it on his player. My fingers itched to open the drawer where I knew those letters from Lorelei lay, but I resisted and instead lowered the needle to the disc. The speaker on the side began to play the sort of music they danced to in nightclubs between the wars.
‘Five pounds on red,’ Lorelei called out. ‘Yes, thank you.’ With her scent on my wrists and her voice in the room, it was as if she had never gone.
I repeated her words out loud, listening to my own accent. It was a Kent coast sound, with shades of the London evacuee children I had taught. I felt ashamed of it.
‘And now, all my winnings on black.’
‘And now all my winnings on black.’ It was better now. Had Lorelei been brought up in a country house and then sent to Cheltenham Ladies’ College? Or had she looked into that society from the edges and moulded herself from clay? That is what an actress does, of course: she invents herself day by day and night by night. I had never fancied myself an actress but there was a seed of change in me now. For what I had in mind I would need her voice and talent for self-invention.
‘Well, Mr Beckeridge, you’re the last person I expected to bump into tonight. Would you care to try your luck?’
Her voice changed for the second sentence. It was still of the English ruling class but it had added something, a coquettish undercurrent. I imagined what she would have felt carrying out what I had planned. She would have felt no fear at all, I told myself. Nothing but the thrill, like a rider galloping after the hounds.
‘Why not?’ answered a rough, gravelly male voice on the recording.
‘And what stakes are you playing for tonight?’
‘And what stakes are you playing for tonight?’ I held the air lower down my throat, and the accent changed. The vowels became more rounded.
I kept listening to the recording, copying Lorelei’s words and voice, until the sound of the front door opening alerted me to Nick’s arrival home. I pulled the record from the player, locked the study door and dashed back to our bedroom. He came in just as I was pushing her box back into place in my wardrobe. ‘Oh, hello, darling,’ I said. ‘Is the surgery all back to normal?’
‘Awful patients complaining of imaginary illnesses,’ he replied, taking his shoes off. ‘So, yes, you could say that. I was looking forward to coming back to you.’ I wondered if that were true. I hoped, still, that it was.
‘Sally wrote. She’s coming to London tomorrow to go to Moorfields Eye Hospital. She has to have an operation and needs someone to see her back to Herne Bay. I said I would do it. I’ll stay at hers and come back in the morning.’ I examined a pair of shoes. I wasn’t used to lying, least of all to him.
‘Fine,’ he replied. ‘Don’t forget we have people for dinner on Wednesday.’
‘Yes, of course. Nick, I’ve got such a terrible migraine, I think I’ll stay in the guest room tonight. I’ll be restless all night and don’t want to disturb you.’
‘If you want.’
‘Yes. That’s what I want.’
He looked at me with a furrowed brow, as if there were something wrong, but he couldn’t work out what it was. Then he dismissed the thought and took off his tie and jacket. I realized that I had been speaking in Lorelei’s voice.
31
The next day moved past, the clouds rolling listlessly across the sky, and I pulled my coat tighter as I stepped from a train on to the platform at a village railway station in Surrey. The electric light above barely penetrated more than a metre of the night.
You are cordially invited to join the party at Mansford Hall, Fetcham, Surrey. Masques from eight until midnight. Tuesday, the 25th of November 1952.
The invitation had read. And then the words scrawled wildly at the bottom:
Nick knows you’re selling him out
I could hardly believe I was there – that I had had the nerve to dress for it, buy the ticket, board the train. Each point had seemed like a border I was crossing. But whoever had sent Lorelei that card knew her secrets and Nick’s, so they might know the nature of Nick’s hidden work – and whether that drug really had found its way into my veins. In a strange way, that knowledge would map out the rest of my life. It’s an uncomfortable feeling to realize that such knowledge exists and someone other than you possesses it. Nick had it, of course, but he was the one person I couldn’t ask. I had considered confronting him with the question, but to what end? Denials that I wouldn’t be able to believe anyway? No matter what he said, it would bring nothing but sorrow.
So I was looking for the sender of that note, in the hope that the secrets they knew included what had happened to me.
I walked out of the desolate station to find two unlit lanes. I didn’t know which to take, so I picked the left-hand path and walked, nervously gripping the small evening bag I was carrying as if it were a talisman and hearing nothing but my footsteps. I could only trust that the glint of light ahead was the village, and not an isolated farm building. The light grew as I walked and gradually I began to feel the path ahead was solid and open. It became the village high street, where the glint became a glow, the glow became a light, the light became a bright window.