Liberation Square Read online

  As I washed, I turned to the more practical idea that I had had last night that perhaps there was someone who could help – one of Nick’s contacts in the American CIA, if I could just find them. All I had, though, was that telephone number from her book.

  The operator put me through. I knew how long the silence lasted – four seconds – and how many clicks there were – five – before it connected. Then the metallic ringing, like an idiot playing a distant instrument. ‘Hello?’ someone said. It was the female voice I had heard the previous day.

  ‘Hello. I’m here.’ I mentally begged her not to end the call as she had before.

  ‘All right.’

  ‘I called yesterday.’

  ‘I can’t … I’m hanging up.’

  ‘No. Please. Just please.’ I clutched desperately for a way to persuade her. She was the only chance, the only number in Lorelei’s book that worked. I tried a wild lie. ‘Are you married?’

  There was a long pause. ‘Yes.’

  ‘I, I found this number in my husband’s diary. I think he’s having an affair, please, please, put my mind at rest.’

  ‘That’s nothing to do with –’

  ‘Children?’

  ‘Yes, please don’t –’ she began.

  ‘I’ve got three. I just need to know that he’s not going to abandon us. I don’t know what I would do.’ I put such tension in my voice I hoped she would break whatever rule she had been instructed to follow.

  Her voice lowered, became more intimate. ‘I don’t know about your husband. This is a government number. I’m just the receptionist.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘It’s for’ – I plucked a name from the air – ‘Comrade Williams?’

  ‘No,’ she said, puzzled. ‘Honeysette.’

  Tim Honeysette. He was Nick’s patient who had tried to introduce Nick to Ian Fellowman that night. The night when I had lost our child. Whatever this was, he was involved.

  So maybe he could help.

  ‘May’ – my voice shook – ‘may I speak to him? It’s very important.’

  ‘He won’t be in until later.’

  ‘When?’

  She paused again. ‘You said it was about your husband.’

  ‘It is. It’s urgent that I speak to him. It’s government business.’

  ‘So it’s not about your husband.’ I heard the suspicion rising.

  ‘It’s about him, but –’

  ‘What’s your name?’ she demanded.

  I hung up. I hoped she would be too worried about the consequences of having said too much to report it.

  Up in Nick’s study, I found a big red volume filled with his expansive looping hand. His handwriting was often hard to read, but with a bit of effort I managed to make out Honeysette’s address in Brixton, the commuter edge of London. Victorian clerks living there had taken trains to their jobs in the City, but it was better known now for its prison, where low-level political criminals sat out their sentences.

  I stepped out on to the landing, already planning my journey, when a sound reached my ears – Hazel was in the hall talking to someone. ‘… W-S-O-N. Yes, that’s right,’ she was saying. I quickly descended the stairs and she looked at me, startled, lowering her hand with the telephone receiver.

  ‘Who are you talking to?’ I said.

  ‘It’s …’

  I looked at her, waiting for an answer. Then I took the handset and lifted it to my ear. ‘Hello? Who is this?’

  A woman on the other end replied, ‘National Security Police.’ She sounded annoyed. ‘Who are you?’

  I slammed the telephone down. ‘What are you doing?’ I demanded.

  Hazel looked scared and retreated a step. ‘I wanted to help. I thought I could find some way to help get Dad out.’

  For a second, I was speechless, chilled by the danger of what she could have said if I hadn’t stopped her. I took her by the shoulders, trying to keep calm. ‘You can’t speak to anyone about this! Do you hear? It’s very dangerous. It will make things worse for your father.’ I paused, doing my best to soften. ‘Hazel, I know you want to get your dad out, but you have to leave it to the adults.’

  ‘You’re not doing it, though,’ she said. It wasn’t bitter, nor was it an accusation, just a simple statement with the logic of a fourteen-year-old.

  I wanted to explain but I didn’t have time. ‘Look, I know why you’re saying that. I do. But I’m doing all I can and I can’t tell you about it. Now, it would help me to help your dad if I can go out and leave you just to sit in your room and not do anything else.’

  ‘I’ll come with you.’

  ‘No, you can’t.’

  She looked frustrated. ‘All right. But will you tell me what you’re doing?’

  ‘Later. Please, please, just stay in the house and don’t speak to anyone.’

  After watching her retreat to her room, I went out on to the street, shaken by what she had almost done. I just hoped to God she wouldn’t try anything like that again.

  Honeysette’s house was a solid-looking place, a few doors down from a row of bombed-out buildings where two vagrants were huddled at the back of the rubble, wrapping themselves in sheets and attempting to get a fire going from some broken wood they had scavenged. There was a lot of grey smoke but little flame. Compared to the thrilling colourful trips I had made to this city as a child, modern London often seemed like a flickering black-and-white newsreel.

  I pressed the bell and steeled myself. It was risky, but if he refused to help Nick, or even to speak to me, I would threaten to expose him. The door opened to reveal Honeysette wearing an overcoat, about to go out. He blinked, clearly surprised to see me, and glanced nervously over my shoulder before taking me inside without a word.

  His large, warm parlour was decorated with pictures of Marx, Engels and Blunt, and with stacks of books all around. They were everywhere – old and new volumes – as was the sweet smell of cherry tobacco. I couldn’t help but think of my father, who had infused our little house with the same scent. Comrade Honeysette stood upright in the centre of the room with his arms by his sides, waiting for me to say something.

  ‘We met at –’ I began.

  ‘Yes, I remember.’

  ‘I’m here on my husband’s behalf.’

  ‘He sent you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’ He was suspicious.

  I thought it best to face him down; it was less risky than an excuse that could fall apart under scrutiny. ‘He has business to attend to. It can’t wait. And neither can I.’

  He stared at me, evidently weighing up the situation. ‘You know what this concerns?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  He paused. ‘Then tell me.’

  I kept myself in check as much as I could. There was only one thing I could think of. ‘Orders from America.’

  He pursed his lips, considering. He seemed to take in the expression on my face, the way I was standing.

  ‘All right,’ he said after a while, although he didn’t seem entirely relaxed.

  With his back to me, he went to a polished wooden box on the mantelpiece, opened it and took out a brown envelope. He placed something in it that I couldn’t see and handed it to me, hesitating just for a brief moment. I lifted the flap and looked inside. It held two five-pound notes. It was all so strange and I had no idea what I was supposed to do with them. There was little point leaving with them, though – they told me nothing. I tried to fill the pause, hoping he would say more so I could better understand the situation. ‘Do you have a message for Nick?’

  ‘No, that covers it,’ he said, indicating the envelope and apparently waiting for me to do something, tell him something, take something – leave?

  I tried to think of anything else to say or do. The wait became impossible and I began to lose control. I opened my mouth to speak but could only stutter the beginnings of words. I was utterly at a loss.

  His eyes widened as realization dawned on him. Wildly, he snatched the money
back. ‘Get out!’ he ordered me.

  I didn’t know what to do. He began to push me hard towards the door; he wasn’t a strong man but he was stronger than me.

  ‘Nick’s been arrested,’ I said urgently. He stopped dead and stared at me. Then he pushed me again, harder. ‘You have to help him.’

  ‘Just get out!’

  ‘Please help him.’ He pulled the door open and shoved me to the threshold. ‘Just put me in touch with people who can help. I’ll give NatSec your name if you don’t!’ I did my best to sound as if I would go through with it.

  He threw me out and I stumbled over the step as he slammed the door. I tried knocking although I knew he wouldn’t answer. The house might as well have been empty and boarded up. Not wanting to draw the attention of the neighbours, I walked away, but only to the end of the street, where I waited, thinking. For once the smog was a blessing, as it hid me.

  Ten minutes later, with the cold seeping through my limbs, I saw him emerge. I planned to follow him but he opened up his garage, jumped in a car and drove off, so that I saw only his rear lights glowing as they sped away.

  On the way home, I stopped to sit on a wooden bench to think. Above it, a hoarding depicted the Needle road as the tip of an actual syringe, literally sucking the blood out of the RGB.

  Schoolchildren filed past me towards a large secondary school, and I deliberated whether, if I never saw Nick again, looking after Hazel would be a role that I could take on indefinitely. That would be if they let me, of course – the state often took away the children of dissidents, raising them in communal schools to drain them of their parents’ divergent views.

  It was a daunting prospect. After all, I had no experience of actually bringing up a child, and fourteen was probably the hardest age of all to take on – she would be old enough to rebel against my edicts but not yet able to take responsibility for her own. How would I deal with that? With great difficulty, I imagined.

  The sound of the radio buzzed down from Hazel’s room when I got home around eleven o’clock. Churchill was speaking. ‘I walked through Regent’s Park this morning to breathe the fresh air of freedom. It is a simple thing to walk along the road without fear, without let or hindrance,’ he rumbled. ‘To know that the man or woman that you pass is a friend and not the bully-boy agent of a state that treats its own citizens as the enemy. And so, to my friends on the other side of that ugly scar on the face of our nation, I say only this: courage. Courage, for …’ And then the Internationale broke in with a loud and tinny whining, as our jamming stations locked on to the frequency.

  The song was quickly replaced by a voice we all recognized. Usually our stations would simply pretend Churchill didn’t exist but there was a man named Alec Mathers who had begun appearing immediately after Churchill’s broadcasts to ridicule them. Like Fellowman, he was one of a handful who had defected from their side to ours. It wasn’t satire that he broadcast – those shows poking fun at the ruling elite were long gone, leaving a hole in our cultural life – it was simply a foul sort of hatred.

  The people trying to clamber over the Wall to the DUK were selfish ingrates who had been educated, clothed, fed and inoculated by the state, and now wanted to defect so they could make dirty money with the ‘small-time Fascist gangster’ Churchill, he claimed.

  Even if there had been a nugget of truth in his words – albeit one twisted entirely out of shape by his hyperbole – it was completely buried under the bile. And I couldn’t fathom how you could hate a stranger simply for wanting to live somewhere else, even if you disagreed with their choice. I was going to tell Hazel to turn it off when a sudden hammering on our front door stopped me.

  I found Charles on our doorstep looking furious. His voice was like low thunder. ‘I had the NatSec goons crawling all over the practice this morning. They went through the patient records,’ he growled.

  ‘Oh, God,’ I said, panicked. ‘Did –’

  ‘I told you this would happen if you started poking around. Have you any idea what they could have done?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said meekly.

  He sucked on his cigarette and angrily blew the smoke out. It made my throat sting. ‘Do you want to end up in the NatSec files? Because I’m bloody well in them now. I’ve never so much as listened to that radio station and now I’m in their records as some sort of traitor.’ I understood just how serious this was for him. Because of his parents’ support for the Royal Family he had already found it hard enough to find a job. Now things could turn far worse.

  ‘What did you tell them?’

  ‘What did I tell them? Nothing. Because I don’t know anything. I have done nothing wrong. I don’t know about your husband, but, as far as I know, he has done nothing wrong either. Whatever you are doing, it is making it worse for both of us – but you knew that already, because I warned you repeatedly.’ And, amid the anger, there was more noise as the telephone rang, the bell demanding to be answered. I ignored it. ‘All I have done is try to help you. And this is how I’ve been repaid.’

  ‘I, I …’ I stammered, unable to think of something to say.

  He threw his fag on the ground, screwed it into the slabs with his foot and stepped into the hall. ‘Well, if you don’t think of me, think of her.’ He pointed over my shoulder. Hazel was standing at the top of the stairs. ‘You’re putting her at risk too.’ He was probably right but involving her raised my hackles. ‘Listen –’

  ‘No. You listen. Stop acting like a fool!’ I said, losing my temper. The sound of the telephone bell was now filling my ears.

  ‘I’m a fool?’ He glared at me. The telephone continued to ring. Without warning, he swept it from the table and it tumbled to the floor.

  ‘Mrs Cawson?’ a hoarse voice whispered from the receiver. I made to pick it up, but Charles kicked it from me.

  ‘I’m a fool?’ he repeated. ‘I have friends in the Party who can make sure your stupidity doesn’t cost your husband any more than his time. So, from now on, you wait here. You look after her. Nothing else.’

  ‘Mrs Cawson? Are you there?’ the voice pleaded.

  ‘Who is it?’ I called out.

  ‘Rachel Burton,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Rachel?’ I gasped, amazed.

  ‘Can you hear –’

  But Charles was drowning out the words. ‘So be bloody careful,’ he growled.

  I tried to push him aside, but he wouldn’t move and I caught only a few more distant words from the handset: ‘The orders are … where the bomb hit.’

  I attempted again to grab it, but Charles got there first and slammed it into its cradle. ‘It’s for your own good!’ And with that he stormed out. I reached for the receiver. There was only the dialling tone now.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Hazel was visibly upset by the scene she had witnessed. I stared at the telephone to see if it would ring again. Those words.

  ‘Nothing. Just some trouble at the surgery,’ I said distractedly, but I was thinking of those strange words of Rachel’s.

  An image formed in my mind: Rachel dragged from the room, spitting and screaming. She had cried out that she and Lorelei had fought about ‘big orders’. I didn’t want to think what she had had to promise an orderly in order to make a telephone call; she must have been desperate for me to know something. ‘The orders are … where the bomb hit,’ she had said. But her words made little sense.

  And then they did.

  22

  Rachel’s words made sense when I thought of what I had found in Lorelei’s house. I lifted my head and spoke to Hazel. ‘Can you go to your room for a bit? I’ll come up and speak to you soon.’ She reluctantly agreed, and as she returned to her bedroom I went into the back garden.

  An aeroplane – civilian – rushed overhead in the direction of the coast. Flying in the other direction, a grey-and-black jackdaw soared and dipped, then came to a sudden swooping stop on one of the broken timbers that poked from the house’s upper storey into the void a few metres above the groun
d – the remnants of what had been knocked down by a doodlebug in ’44.

  Above those exposed bones of the house was the uneven and ugly replacement back wall, thrown together in the months that had followed the peace. The lines of the bricks weren’t straight, and the weather or subsidence had combined with the poor workmanship to prise apart two jagged expanses of them at the rear of Nick’s study. He once told me that the gap led to the wall cavity, where the birds roosted at night.

  The bird I was watching hopped along the projecting timber to the wall, sat for a while without moving, as if waiting for something to happen, then fluttered through the breach. I stared up at the brickwork, wondering. In the corner of the garden there was an old Anderson shelter that served to store some of Nick’s larger junk, and inside I found a rickety and paint-splattered folding ladder. As I propped it up against the wall, the jackdaw emerged, looked down at me as if I had disturbed it and flew away.

  The ladder shifted a bit as I climbed, but I kept on up until my face was level with the broken floorboards jutting out. The wood, I saw, had been baked and lashed with rain so many times since the night of the German air raid that it resembled something from a shipwreck, and when I took it in my hand, a piece tore away. I reached up to the gap.