There are many types of loss. Loss of a child. Loss of one’s dignity. And loss of what you used to be. We used to be generous. We used to look out for those who lived beside us.
26
Nick went out with Hazel the next morning to spend the day with her, to talk about her mum and give her a chance to grieve properly. She hadn’t even had that yet. ‘I almost wish she had a bit more of her mother in her,’ he had said to me. ‘Frost inside. Instead, she’s like you. A warm Victoria sponge.’
‘Do I take that as a compliment?’
‘Probably best to.’ I tried to look stern but found myself unable to do so.
Just before ten o’clock, as I was sweeping the hallway, I answered a knock at the door to find a young policeman in uniform. There was a cardboard box at his feet. ‘Is’ – he checked a slip of paper in his hand – ‘Dr Cawson here?’ he asked.
‘No, he’s out. I’m Mrs Cawson.’
‘Are you? Well, I’m handing something over. Some items, taken from… Mrs Cawson, you say?’
‘Yes.’
‘Second wife?’
I became instantly self-conscious. ‘Yes.’
‘Right. I see. These were taken from the house of… another Mrs Cawson.’ He looked at me with… with what? Pity? Disdain? I couldn’t tell. He must have thought that I was the next one on some conveyer belt of wives. Or maybe he was Catholic, a relic from the old era, and disapproved of remarriage at all. It was hard to tell. ‘It’s the stuff we took away for fingerprints ’n’ that. Couldn’t find any.’
‘I’ll see that he gets them.’
The possessions had mostly been taken from her bedroom and bathroom. I supposed it was anything that might have been touched by whoever had been there. Her identity card was on top and underneath it a few items of clothing, a glittering red lace mask of the type ladies once wore at society balls, tied on with ribbon of the same shade, a red gown made of silk – the one she had worn on the poster for The Lucky Lady, I thought – a pair of ashtrays, a long-player recording of one of Lorelei’s plays in a paper sleeve, an ivory-inlaid cigarette lighter and a bottle of her perfume. A few cheap romance novels made my eyebrows lift – she led such a glamorous life, there was surely little reason to live another one vicariously through the pages of a shilling-book.
Flicking through, I found that they were not all classic romances either – a couple were American ‘pulp’ that mined the seamier side of life in the United States. The cover of one showed two girls with long hair tussling on the floor of a women’s prison, their skirts riding up to expose their thighs. Another was set in the Roman Empire, although The Lusts of Rome looked little like the history books I had read at school. Tucked in the corner was a stack of letters, with all the envelopes torn open. I couldn’t help but pull out their contents. A few bills; some fan mail forwarded by her acting agent; and a thick card with a gilded edge. It was an invitation, the rippled-edge, copperplate-script type that had once been for elegant weddings before they were denounced as bourgeois frippery.
You are cordially invited to join the party at Mansford Hall, Fetcham, Surrey. Masques from eight until midnight. Tuesday, the 25th of November 1952.
That was four days away. Those, and a telephone number at the bottom, were all the printed words, but there was more – a strange postscript scrawled at the bottom in near-illegible handwriting, as if the writer were in the grip of pain:
Nick knows you’re selling him out
Nick. Seeing his name there felt like a blow. The card had arrived in an envelope postmarked the day before Lorelei’s death, so whatever was between them hadn’t completely ended until her death after all. ‘Selling him out’? What did that mean? I searched through the rest of the box, pulling out lipsticks, silk scarves and pill-boxes; yet nothing else made mention of this gathering. Without thinking, I picked up the telephone. Nick’s surgery was on our exchange so I dialled straight through.
‘The consulting rooms of Nicholas Cawson, Charles O’Shea speaking.’
‘Hello, Charles, it’s Jane Cawson.’
‘Mrs Cawson,’ he said.
‘Is…’ But what would I say to Nick? Would I demand to know about the note and what it referred to? It was something to do with their black-market business.
The line hissed.
No, I should wait and calmly work out what to do. And one thing was certain: she was dead now, so it was truly over.
‘Mrs Cawson?’
‘Yes.’
‘Your husband isn’t here.’
‘No?’
‘No, he is out with his daughter.’
‘Oh, yes, yes, of course. I’ll speak to him later. Goodbye.’
I hung up and looked at the invitation again. There was something about it that was magnetic too. I had never been invited to one of these events; they existed for me only in the pages of Jane Austen or Baroness Orczy.
I opened the box again to find a few more unremarkable letters, and one envelope different from the rest. There was neither a stamp nor an address on it, only a single name: ‘Crispin’. It held something solid and I ripped it open to find a slim paperback book: a copy of Sheridan’s bawdy School for Scandal. Just her sort of thing, I imagined.
I opened the book. Tucked inside was a slip of thin paper with a smudged stamp that read: ‘Citylight Prints, 2a Hannson Street, London W1’. It was dated five months earlier. There was also one of those ‘this belongs to’ gummed labels on the inside of the cover, sporting her spiderish handwriting, and when I traced over her name with my fingertips I noticed something: ridges under the label that told me there was something concealed underneath. I couldn’t help being intrigued.
I tried to scratch back the label with my nails, but it was stuck on too firmly and tearing it away could have damaged whatever lay below. A sharp knife was also unable to lift it safely, so I had to resort to the kettle to dampen and melt the glue. The label slowly curled up, lifted by the blade, to reveal an item around which the glue had been carefully laid down so as not to stick it to the page.
It was a little square negative from a camera film. I gently brushed dust from it with my sleeve, put it to the light and squinted. The head and shoulders of a figure emerged – ‘Crispin’, I presumed. I could just about see that he had a slim face, glasses, neat mid-length hair parted on one side, but beyond that it was impossible to make out anything else. It was strange that Lorelei would have a negative of this man’s image. It certainly didn’t seem to fit with anything that I knew of their scheme.
The woman had so many secrets. Every time I thought I had discovered her, there was another layer below.
I took the box to our room, lifted out the backless red silk dress and held it in front of myself, looking at it in the full-length mirror. The silk was a type that wrinkled and crinkled to give it texture, not the smooth style that had been the norm before the War, and was the same deep red as her hair.
That afternoon, I passed Leicester Square’s bronze statue of Kim Philby. His figure, poring over the lists of suspected Fascist sympathizers that he had personally handed to Beria, was dull in the lacklustre morning light. The pub opposite was named the Archangel and, as I walked under its sign showing the battleship floating on a serene Thames, I noticed a tin hoarding nearby covered with posters. One was an old bill for Victory 1945, but it was only half the poster, ripped off in the middle. Although the head and shoulders of Lorelei’s on-screen boyfriend were still wrestling with a Gestapo officer, she was gone from it, no longer inciting a crowd to stand up to the Nazi occupiers. It seemed that when she had been dropped from the pages of the Morning Star four years ago, she had also been torn from the walls. Nick had once told me that the reason we had to hand in our newspapers at the end of the month was not only to reuse the paper; it was also to ensure that the only records of the past were in Somerset House. Can you rewrite history? Well, it seemed that we were trying.