‘What exactly does Nick know?’
‘Hmmm?’ He seemed to be slipping into unconsciousness.
‘What does he know?’ I repeated it more strongly.
He looked confused. His brow furrowed and his arm lifted up towards me. His fingers closed on my mask and began to pull it; I snatched them away, holding it in place. He sighed and seemed to drift away again. Then, without warning, he sprang at me, ripping away my mask. I grabbed for it, but it was too late. He fell back, agog. ‘Who are you?’ he drawled.
I thought perhaps I could shock him into sobriety. ‘Jane Cawson. Nick’s second wife.’
‘Where’s Lorelei?’ he asked.
‘She died. It was an accident.’
‘Died?’ He reached for a glass full of dark liquid – brandy, I guessed – which he poured into his mouth. ‘My God, I didn’t know.’
‘She drowned in the bath. I’m here in her place,’ I said. ‘You can talk to me just like you talk to her.’ He drained his glass and I put my hand on his shoulder. ‘I need to know how Lorelei was selling Nick out.’
He waved towards the house. ‘Ask him, not me. Card room.’ I shook him again.
‘Adam?’
‘Please leave me.’ He was so drunk that he couldn’t even open his eyes and he folded into himself. A couple sat down on the chaise-longue next to him, laughing between themselves. I thought it best to go.
I walked over to Jeremy, whose mouth was a pit of fruit seeds and mush. ‘Look after Adam,’ I said.
‘Utterly sloshed again? Yes, he does that,’ he replied, lifting a peach from a tray and biting into it. ‘Why don’t you stay here for a while? I’m a little bit bored with the company, to tell you the truth. There’s only so much time you can spend watching idiots lose a month’s salary on the roulette wheel. I just come for the food nowadays.’ I couldn’t help but think how many coupons I would need just for what he had eaten in the last few minutes.
‘Who’s in the card room?’ I asked.
‘The card room? No idea. Take a look. It’s upstairs.’
I put my mask on to walk back. The house was built on a slope that ran down to a dark lake. Beside the water a group of four or five young men had formed a circle around a waitress they had somehow enticed out there, and they were offering her money. She was trying to leave but they wouldn’t let her. One grabbed her and she yelled, shoving her way out of the ring as they burst into laughter, continuing to call to her until she was out of sight. ‘Three quid!’ yelled one. ‘More than it’s worth.’
The card room was at the end of a short oak-panelled corridor on the upper floor. Two plain-clothes men stood in front of it, and, as I approached, one said to me, ‘I’m sorry, this is a private room. Would you please return to the party?’ I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to abandon the course I was on, but there was no way they would let me through. I was about to go back to the stairs when the door opened and a podgy man with thinning brown hair emerged, his stomach spilling out of his belt. Behind him, I caught a glimpse of a room filled with blue cigar smoke. In its centre was a circular card table with six or seven people around it. The dim overhead light was dropping shadows from their faces on to the green baize, making it hard to see their features. But the dealer, clad in a drab grey suit, was directly opposite me, and, as he lifted his face a little to push the cards to his friends, I recognized him in an instant.
32
The door closed again. I knew it had been him, though. ‘Please let me in,’ I begged one of the guards. The fat man pushed past me. As he did so, his palms seemed to stroke across my waist.
‘It’s guests only,’ one of the guards replied.
I couldn’t think what to do. I turned and walked away. Then I started to hurry to where the podgy man was about to reach the top of the stairs. I stumbled against him.
‘Sorry,’ I giggled.
‘Had a bit too much?’ he said, a wide grin spreading across his face.
‘Yes, a few too many glasses. It’s all so nice, though.’ I sighed and let my head droop on to his shoulder.
‘Well, we could find somewhere for you to lie down.’
‘Could you?’
‘Oh, I’m sure I could. The bedrooms are through here.’ He gently tugged me by the arm towards one of the closed doors.
‘Oh, not yet,’ I yawned. ‘What’s through there?’ I pointed back to the card room.
‘Nothing very interesting. Boring men playing cards.’
I stroked his chest drunkenly. ‘Well, that’s exciting. A real-life card game. Is it poker?’
‘Three-card brag.’ He glanced back at the guards. They were ignoring us. ‘I think you need to lie down. You’ll feel better.’
‘I’ve never seen a real-life poker game. Could you show me?’
‘I think–’
‘After that, I’ll have a lie-down. I’m so tired.’ I yawned.
‘Well–’
‘Please?’ I gazed up at him.
‘All right. Normally I wouldn’t but, well, just this once. I’m Piers, by the way.’
‘I’m Catherine.’
‘Nice to meet you.’ His hand was clammy as it held mine. ‘But when we’re in there, we’ll have to sit in the background. And we must be very quiet.’
‘Like little mice.’
‘Just like little mice.’ Cautiously, he led me back to the card room. The guards opened it without reaction and we were inside. All the players at the table had the silver hammer-and-compass lapel badges worn by those who had been Party members when the Soviets arrived and a few glanced up, but paid us little attention. There were leather chairs at the side occupied by more young women, and Piers led me past them to a studded sofa. As I passed the table, I counted seven players and surreptitiously looked again at the dealer.
In his dull grey suit, vague in that cigar smoke, Comrade Assistant Secretary Ian Fellowman looked like nothing so much as a third-tier Party apparatchik. I hadn’t seen him since the terrible night of the Comintern party at the hotel, when Nick had been so desperate to be introduced to him. The stark sight of him now brought back a sudden feeling of drowning in freezing water and I had to lean on Piers to stop myself from falling. Piers smirked, presuming the drink was doing its part.
Could Fellowman really be the one who had made a deal with Lorelei for contraband medicine? He had come over from the West in ’47, an idealist among idealists. She would probably have known him, though, because of his control of our national broadcasting and her affair with Cairncross. And she had also warned Nick to stay away from him, saying that Fellowman was ‘toxic’ – which could have been her way of keeping Nick in the dark about her arrangement with him.
In the background, a record player was whining out an old speech of Blunt’s. ‘…there is art too in the simple message of the Manifesto. This soaring first line…’
‘I think we’ve heard enough from Anthony for a while,’ Fellowman said, with a wry smile to the others. It was the first time I had heard him speak, and it was almost a surprise to know that he could. His voice was very deep, befitting his size, and he had an upper-class Scottish accent. They all chuckled, and a man I couldn’t see in the darkness at the side of the room lifted the needle from the disc. ‘Dealer has a flush,’ Fellowman said.
Piers put me at the end of the sofa so I couldn’t move away, and sat up against me, with his hand on my knee. We were in semi-darkness, the heavily shaded overhead light not reaching to the edges of the room. I resolved to watch from a distance for now and try to work out what to do. Although I was in the gloom, and Fellowman had seen me for only a few seconds the previous time we had met, I was thankful for my mask.
‘These are some of the most important men in the country,’ the fat man whispered in my ear. ‘Senior Party men. That’s Alan Turner. He’s in charge of the railways now. And Ian Fellowman, he tells us all what to think.’ He guffawed to himself. He believed that I would be impressed by these men. No doubt he was, despite his studied nonchalance around them. In the old days, people would drop the names of the local gentry, and those names would carry weight and inspire awe entirely because of tradition. Now it was commitment to the cause and the sheer power that these men had over the rest of us that impressed: the power to modernize, the power to destroy and rebuild. But the man by my side didn’t know what I knew: the grubby depths to which at least one of them had sunk.