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 ground – 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.
‘What are you doing?’ I jerked my hand back and grabbed the sides of the ladder. Our young neighbour, Patricia, was framed by her open window.
‘I… there’s a birds’ nest.’
‘So?’
‘They were making a noise. Disturbing Hazel. Nick’s daughter.’
She looked doubtful. ‘Where is Dr Cawson?’ she asked. She had watched me and Tibbot leave the house yesterday. Someone might have told her to note down our comings and goings.
‘He’s at work.’
She crossed her arms. ‘I heard one of Churchill’s lying broadcasts coming from his daughter’s room. Through the wall. Do you let her listen to that rubbish?’