The clock by my bed ticked. Lorelei laughed again, a reckless whooping cry that rose and faded, seeping into the hard bricks and plaster of the house. I felt that somehow it would stay locked in them, in the fabric of our house. Charles’s eyes were a dark, searing red as they looked to me, then down to his hands. He wiped them with his sleeve, leaving little dark patches on the material, and his mouth twisted into a silent sob. Then his arm went back over his face to shut out the world. I recognized that pain, the very sadness of love.
‘Were you going to go to Ireland?’ I asked. He nodded, his skin glistening below his sleeve. Charles, who, Nick had said, wanted a wife and children more than anything. I guessed what she had told him. ‘Did she say the baby was yours?’
He nodded again, a shallow little double dip of his head, gaze downcast, which spoke of a man whose life had slipped from his grasp a long time ago. ‘But it wasn’t.’ It was little more than a whisper.
So that was how it had turned. Her death wasn’t the result of ambition or money. Like so many others in our shattered land, she had just wanted out. But they had put a wall up around us, to protect our new state, and he had been her only way through it. So subtle, she had been.
‘It wasn’t,’ he said, tears rolling down his cheeks.
I had to know. ‘What did you do?’ He didn’t reply. ‘Charles? What did you do to her?’
And then he spoke. ‘I… tried to get it out of her.’
My eyes closed and I felt sick. Those final minutes she had lived through in immeasurable pain. I couldn’t help but picture them.
There had been something in her Champagne, yes. Charles had put it there to take away a child he thought was another man’s.
He lowered his arm and looked at me. Wet streaks on his skin reflected the light. ‘Please,’ he said, reaching out a hand. ‘Please.’ His hands were open, the palms up, begging for understanding.
I had to get away from him, to dispel the image of the pain that had racked her. I knocked his hands away and grasped the mantelpiece, pulling myself to my feet, but my limbs were hardly working and I twisted my ankle. And then I was on my front with his knee on my spine, pinning me to the floor. ‘No!’ he said. ‘Stop!’ And a grey mist came down, as if my mind wanted to blot out what was happening. I struggled but his weight was too much for me. Pressing me down.
I tried to think of something to tell him, to convince him to let me go. ‘I’ll help you,’ I said desperately. ‘It was an accident, wasn’t it?’ And he paused, listening. ‘Did she drink too much of it?’
He stayed there, unmoving. I waited, hearing his lungs wheeze, until his voice wheedled like a child’s. ‘I didn’t want that,’ he said. ‘I didn’t.’
‘I know! I’ll tell them that.’ If he would just accept it could be true. ‘Charles, I’m on your side.’ A hesitation, and then he pulled up, just a little.
‘Will you?’
‘I’ll tell them what you told me. Just an accident.’ And, with another tiny move, almost imperceptible, his weight shifted away from the knee on my back.
I could feel the situation changing, moving my way, safety in sight. ‘I can go–’
But, as I said it, something broke in: a sudden insistent sound from downstairs. The brass knocker on the front door was clacking, ringing through the hollow dark hallway.
‘Hello?’ a man’s loud voice called from outside. I had no idea who it was – the postman with a package or a neighbour calling around. I just prayed it was something they wouldn’t let go.
I began to form a word, a cry to beg for help, but, as I lifted my chest to draw in breath, Charles seemed to harden his thoughts and crushed his weight back down on to me, so that I could hardly suck in enough air to breathe. I could only croak out a cry for help so weak that it wouldn’t have been heard outside the room.
The door knocker clacked again. The man was still there. I struggled, trying to turn on to my side, but Charles pulled my head back hard by my hair.
‘Let me go,’ I gasped. ‘Let me go.’
The letterbox creaked open. ‘Is anybody at home?’ Looking in, whoever it was would see only an empty hallway. The letterbox closed again with a dull flapping sound, and we waited, listening, but there was only silence. We stayed there for a long time, long enough for the caller to leave and be swallowed up by the smog. I felt the hope that I had built slipping out of me.
Charles pushed himself away. I no longer had the breath and blood to get up and run. He sat on the bed, shaking still with his own shock and nerves. ‘Sit there,’ he said, pointing to the dresser.
I dragged myself to the dresser in the room I had shared with Nick, the room where we had first made love after our wedding, looking at my cosmetics, at the compact and the rouge. Lorelei’s voice came through the wall, speaking over a soaring violin. Charles sat staring at the floor. He couldn’t let me go. I knew it. He knew it. If he did, he would get the rope. He was as trapped as I was.
And, even as we sat there, both of us unable to leave that room, each looking for a way out that couldn’t possibly exist, I couldn’t help but think the same thought that I had had on the balcony with Ian Fellowman: that this was the squalid natural ending to those dreams he and Anthony Blunt and Kim Philby and Guy Burgess and Arthur Wynn and John Cairncross had woven for us. This was where they ended: in ordinary people desperate to run away, but too fearful of the consequences that waited outside like bare-toothed dogs. All the words these men had poured into our ears and down our throats night and day – all they really amounted to when the light hit them was this havoc. This utter wreckage.
Something fell away in me then, leaving a numbness of feeling. It was like half my being had gone, leaving only my body. I didn’t care any more. Not for any of it. There was nothing left to care. ‘Charles,’ I said quietly. ‘I’m going. Please don’t stop me. Just let me go.’
I pushed myself up and attempted to walk calmly across the room. And, as I took a pace, then another, reaching the centre of the room, I honestly thought he was going to let me leave.
But halfway across his eyes flicked open and I knew then, looking into them, that if he touched me I wouldn’t see the day through. And, although my mind and body were numb, there is within us a sense of self-preservation stronger than almost anything else in the world that we can know. And so, once more, I ran.
Ignoring the pain in my ankle, knowing that he was a pace or two behind me, without an idea of where to go, I threw myself out of the room. I wouldn’t get to the hallway before he caught me, so by instinct I made for the bathroom, the only room with a door that could be locked.
My feet skidded on its floor, awash with water, just as Lorelei’s had been that day. I tried to slam the door, but he was barging in and the force knocked me back against the bath. And then he grabbed hold of me and my face hit the cold surface of the overflowing water and it felt like glass.
Somewhere, Lorelei was singing. She was offering someone Champagne to the sound of light music. Music to dance to.
I struggled for a time, twisting this way and that, catching glimpses of the air above, but the sounds of the world outside became muted, slow and heavy. I couldn’t understand them any more, I was falling asleep and they seemed to be coming from a place where I had never been and didn’t belong. The strands of my hair drifted out like threads. The water was pulling me deeper, tangling my limbs and cooling my thoughts, until my mind was all washed through and strange. Images flickered past – people I had known, emotions; the poster on the wall above us, its political words picked out in red type. But they were all somehow indistinct and without weight or time. I felt nothing for them as they slipped away.