Wide and low, the building before me was an inn of the oldest type: a rest-stop for travellers in need of a simple bed. The sign overhead said it was the Bell, and this was where I had telephoned to arrange a room for the night. Feeling relieved, I pushed through the heavy oak door to feel a wall of warmth wrap around me. Raucous laughter seemed to bounce off the brick walls and I struggled to see what the joke was until I caught sight, through a line of heavyset backs, of a little man attempting to drink a yard of stout as another timed him. Most of it was ending up on his collarless shirt rather than in his stomach but that didn’t seem to put any of them off the game, least of all him.
Behind the bar a fat publican was laughing hard. ‘Oh, Sam, Sam, you’ll drown!’ he shouted over. ‘And none of us’ll give you the kiss-a-life!’ The party cheered as Sam finished his drink. The publican steadied himself on the bar as he shook with hysterics, and then brought himself up short when he saw me. ‘Oh, beg your pardon, miss,’ he said, looking me up and down. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘I’ll have what he’s having,’ I said. ‘But I’ll just have a glass of it.’
The barman guffawed and handed me a smeared glass full of the treacly black liquid. ‘There you go, miss. Eightpence.’
I took a swig of the stuff. It was thinner than I had expected, a cheap home brew. ‘I telephoned about a room. My name is Lorelei Cawson,’ I said, putting the money on the bar. Saying it to someone who could meet my eye felt unnatural, but not as unnatural as I had thought it would.
‘Oh, that’s you, is it?’ he said.
‘That’s me.’
One of the men, with dirty black hair and strong gypsy features – a farmhand by the look of his frame – wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and ambled over to me. ‘What brings you to Fetcham?’ he asked in a low, guttural tone that suggested he didn’t speak much day by day.
‘I’m going somewhere.’
‘Going somewhere, aye? Everyone’s going somewhere.’
‘I expect that’s true. My name’s Lorelei.’ I held out my hand. He shook it warily.
‘Pete. So where’re you going?’
‘Just a house.’ I was beginning to enjoy the feeling of making other people hang on my words.
‘Which one?’
‘Mansford Hall,’ I said.
His voice went cold. ‘Mansford.’
I felt all attention on me. Perhaps I shouldn’t even have mentioned it – I hadn’t realized that the name alone signified something. I had thought that out in the countryside there would be less suspicion and fewer conversations that you couldn’t have, but were there CIs even here? There must have been. I could sense these men were as distrustful of me as I was of them now, and I wished I had been more secret, hadn’t let my tongue rush before my head. I tried to bluff it out. ‘That’s right.’
‘Mansford. The big house,’ he muttered. He turned away from me.
‘You know it well?’ I asked his back. He slowly shook his head. ‘Have you been there?’
‘Once.’
‘For work?’
‘Not my work,’ he said.
‘Then whose?’
‘My brother’s.’ The men around us looked uncomfortable and shifted on their feet but said nothing.
‘What does he do?’ He made no answer but rolled his shoulders backwards and stalked out the door.
‘Mansford,’ the publican said ruminatively behind me, as if he were turning the name over in his mind. ‘What’re you going there for?’
‘A party.’
‘A party,’ he repeated. It sounded like the answer he had expected and didn’t like.
I walked out after Pete. I could see a body moving in the gloom a hundred metres up the lane. I said nothing but he heard me and stopped. I walked slowly and deliberately. ‘I don’t know the way,’ I told him.
‘You’ll find it.’
‘I’m not from around here.’
‘That road,’ he said, pointing. I could hardly make it out. He came close to me. ‘What do you want?’ I said nothing in reply. ‘People like you. Women like you.’ He pursed his lips. ‘All right, I’ll show you the way.’
Eventually, we faced the gate of a huge square brick house – Tudor, it might have been. A clamour of voices and music was bursting out in a crash of sound, and there was something about it that reminded me of the madhouse that held Rachel. Here too there were guards on the gate and I looked at Pete. We both knew there was no point inviting him: he wouldn’t want to come in and they wouldn’t let him.
‘Thank you for walking with me,’ I said.
‘Yeah.’
‘Well, I know where to find you when I come back.’
‘Aye.’
‘Goodbye.’ As his back melted into the darkness, I called after him. ‘What’s your brother’s name?’
‘Greg. Gregory.’ And he disappeared.
‘May I ask your name, ma’am?’ said one of the gatemen.
‘Lorelei Cawson.’ Having been Lorelei to Pete and the other men, it felt more natural now.
‘May I see your identity card?’ I handed over the card, which had been in her box of possessions, thankful that it had been issued in her legal married name rather than that of the famous actress Lorelei Addington, or I would have been wholly unable to use it. In the darkness I looked enough like her photograph not to arouse suspicion. ‘Just a moment, ma’am,’ the guard said politely. He went into his hut, glanced at me and turned on an overhead electric bulb to examine the pass. I tensed as the light shone out over me and half turned so that he couldn’t see me so clearly.
‘So cold tonight,’ I said to the other guard.
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘I had no idea it was so far from the station.’
‘Most of our guests have motors.’ He said it in a way that suggested it was strange that I had come by foot.
‘My husband crashed ours yesterday. Silly man. He’s still up in town trying to get it fixed.’ I was about to go on with the story, but could feel it spiralling away from me and forced myself to stop, surreptitiously watching the guard in his hut examine the card. He reached up and pulled the switch to turn off his light, and for a moment he didn’t move. Then his silhouette began to shift and flow, back out the doorway of the guard post. ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ he said, handing me the document.
‘Thank you.’ Relieved, I took a few paces up the path before stopping to open my evening bag and take out the glittering red lace mask that had come with Lorelei’s belongings. I tied it around my eyes and forehead. The house remained a block of stone, punctuated by beams of light glaring out on to the front lawn, and by its glow I noticed that the hem of my red dress was ripped, probably from bushes I had brushed against on the path. It was a stubby, jagged tear with threads drooping from it; I knelt to pull them away.
A black official car, with the hammer and compass on the registration plate, stopped in front of the house, and a thin man with a chicken-like neck and ridges of hair only over his ears eased himself out to stand imperiously still. On the other side, a sylph-like girl at least twenty years his junior was helped out of the vehicle. He slid a carnival mask over his face and ignored her as he strode unevenly into the house, taking a glass of fizzing wine from a waiter standing by the doorway. The girl followed.
The heels on my shoes shifted in the gravel as I reached the double doors, around which a classical wooden portico wound. I took a glass of wine as I passed into a small entrance hall, then into a large room with a haze of smoke so thick that I couldn’t even see the ceiling.
Although more than half the room consisted of men in their fifties with girls in their twenties – not a pleasant sight, but one that I became used to – here and there I could see other young people milling around without attachment. Most wore masks, although there were a few army officers in dress uniform who wouldn’t have dreamed of polluting their appearance that way. A couple of Soviet naval officers were drinking in the corner. The room was alive with conversation and flirtation, but these pursuits were taking a second seat to the room’s main interest: gambling at tables set up to make a casino. It was real money being staked too, piles of it in wads of paper that were being handed to butlers in exchange for chips. Croupiers who had kept in practice since before the War dealt cards and spun roulette wheels. To my left, a plump and bow-legged man was speaking sharply to a woman who had dealt him a hand he didn’t like. Behind him, his companions were doubled up in laughter.