His eyes bore into mine as he considered. ‘Because I don’t like having weak links in the chain.’
I could see his reasoning. Weak links can break; they can even get caught and talk to the police.
But there was more to it, I guessed. I glanced back at the room we had left. Yes. This way he could help out his friends in the Party’s upper echelons, those with whom he had just been playing cards, perhaps. A favour granted, a favour returned.
‘I can give you the contact,’ I said, trying to control my nerves. ‘What do I get in return?’
‘What do you want?’
‘What were you giving Lorelei?’
He cocked his head to one side in a look of curiosity. ‘I don’t see that it matters.’ I waited. ‘Well, it’s nothing now. She wanted a marriage exit visa.’
A marriage exit visa. So Lorelei was engaged to a foreigner, someone who could take her to a new life outside the RGB. She wasn’t just selling out Nick; she was also leaving the country.
‘Who was she marrying?’
‘I have no idea and no interest,’ he replied. ‘All that she told me was that she wanted the visa. I said I could arrange it in return for an introduction to her supplier in America.’ He looked down towards the dark lake in the grounds. There was silence as we both lost ourselves in our private thoughts. ‘No, no one listened to Churchill,’ he said after a while. ‘Instead we had the War and all that followed. Men chewed up by bullets and machines. Those camps. And people still ask us why we need Socialism. We need it to prevent men turning once more into savages. I don’t want to see that again.’ He threw the glowing cigarette butt into the night. ‘Call our friend Adam when you’re able to see this through.’ He pushed back into the room.
I stared out. There were others like him in every street in every city now, squabbling over the scraps of a nation that could barely muster eighteen million people. Lorelei’s death wasn’t the result of jealousy or anger. Not really. It was the result of small men scrabbling over tiny possessions. Such a grubby little country we had become. Socialism meant a minister and the wife of a GP haggling over the price of a box of medicines.
33
So he’s been at it again, has he? That drunken buffoon. Did Churchill mention that it’s the American arms companies lining his pockets? Who do you think pays for that huge mansion with so many servants licking his boots? Oh, my friends, I can’t tell you how much freer we are in the Republic of Great Britain. So the next time the fat old fool comes on to make fun of you, turn it off.
It was the sight of my dress on the bare bedroom floor and a shard of morning light through the window that told me where I was. Downstairs in the pub, a girl was sweeping up. I paid her for the room, brushed some of the mud off my shoes and opened the door. Somewhere across the fields and streams stood Mansford Hall. I couldn’t see it, but I knew it was there.
The railway station was bright in the morning sun, washed clean by the night’s rain. Its telephone box shone spick and span. I dropped a penny into the slot.
‘Mansford.’
‘May I speak to Mr Cutter?’
‘Whom may I say is calling?’
‘A guest from last night.’
‘Please wait, ma’am.’
There it was, that relic of the old way of things: ma’am. The woman’s voice on the other end of the telephone was old too. I wondered if she had even served Churchill when he had visited.
‘Hello.’ The sound was cheerful. Adam might have been half-cut last night but he was fresh today.
‘Hello, Adam.’
‘And who might that be?’ he called down the crackling and echoing line.
‘It’s Jane Cawson.’
A pause. ‘Hello,’ he repeated suspiciously.
‘You do remember last night?’
‘I do.’
‘Good. Did Nick know that Lorelei was getting married?’
‘What?’ he blurted out.
His surprise was too sharp and quick to be feigned. ‘She was getting a marriage exit visa.’
‘But she…’ He broke off.
‘But what?’ Silence. ‘What were you going to say?’
‘Just…’ He broke off again, as if the words were restricted.
‘Just what?’ He was beginning to annoy me, acting like a child caught in a lie. I hardened my voice. ‘Shall I show Comrade Fellowman the note you sent Lorelei about him? I don’t think he’ll like that you’ve been talking about him behind his back.’
‘Please.’
‘What do you think he’ll do? Make your house his?’ I changed my tone to sound more sympathetic. ‘Adam, Lorelei’s dead; there’s no need to keep her secrets now.’
There was hissing on the line. I waited. Then he spoke three words in that quiet vocal parody of the old carefree upper class. They beat in my head one by one.
‘She was pregnant.’
It was a shock, and a rush of thoughts crowded my mind at the news, but I tried not to let it tell in my voice. ‘So it was this foreign man’s.’
‘No,’ he said. He sounded reluctant to speak. ‘It wasn’t. It was… It was someone else’s.’
The air felt thick. It seemed to weigh on me like in the hot moments before a storm, and I could feel something coming: a terrible knowledge. Words left my lips and I knew what they were, but I could hear them only from a distance. ‘Who was–’
He didn’t wait for the final sounds. ‘Nick’s. I think it was Nick’s.’
A fit of anger bucked through me. ‘No!’ I shouted. I just didn’t want it to be true. ‘It wasn’t!’ He made no reply. There was just the crackling on the line. My head was ready to crack in two. ‘Are you… Were they having an affair?’
‘If you want to call it that.’
‘But how do you know?’ I demanded.
A pause, and he replied quite simply. ‘She told me.’
‘So? She could be lying! She was always lying.’
‘I don’t think she was about them having an affair.’
‘Why?’
And then the final answer. ‘I called him. He didn’t even deny it.’ And that was it. I sank down.
What did I feel then? What was it that racked my body in that little call box for so long that Adam asked if I was still there? It wasn’t fury, or a sense of betrayal, that made me sob and then retch. It was loss, I think. Anger and hurt were there too, but it was the loss that left me unable to see anything but a blur in front of me, and the flesh of my wrist going white as I twisted the telephone cord around it in coil after coil.
When I had overheard Nick on the telephone to an unknown hollow and metallic voice, he had said that the drug, norethisterone, would have prevented Lorelei ending up ‘like she did’. I had presumed that referred to how she had died. But now I knew: he had meant it would have stopped her conceiving. I had no idea really if he had been using me to test that vile drug, but, somehow, even if he had, it was nothing next to this.
I breathed slowly and laboriously, like a hospital patient with infected lungs. ‘Did Nick know she was pregnant?’
‘I told him.’
There was a terrible pulsing in my head. It took me a while to speak again, as I tried to take in what he said and what it all meant – everything that had gone before, and everything that was still to come. ‘What was between them?’ I asked, keeping my voice as even as I could.
Adam sighed. ‘Oh, who knows? They always seemed to want each other more when they hated one another.’
‘What do you mean?’ I needed to know if Nick’s desire for Lorelei had crowded out any real feelings for me.
He sucked in a deep breath. ‘Well, I remember a dinner party at the house.’ He paused. ‘Are you sure you want to hear this?’