Wandering out into the back garden, I found the brazier still smouldering but containing only ashes now. A jackdaw burst from the crack in the bricks where Nick had kept the drugs, sweeping up into the smog and disappearing within seconds. And, as he passed the neighbouring house, I saw a pair of human eyes watching me. Patricia was there again.
Anger got the better of me and I rushed through our house, out the front and hammered on her door. I kept it up until she answered, looking amazed. ‘You’re going to stop watching us. Now!’ I told her furiously.
‘What?’
‘If I ever catch you watching or listening to what goes on in our house, I’ll be putting in a call to the police about how you’re always listening to Churchill and talking about buying a fake exit visa to get out. How do you feel about that?’
‘But I don’t–’
‘It doesn’t matter, does it? Want a NatSec investigation on your record? How will that go down with your Party branch?’
She looked dumbfounded. I thrust her away from her own door and pulled it hard closed before spinning around and returning to our house.
I stood in the hall, collecting myself. Perhaps that hadn’t been the cleverest thing to do, but it was done now. I went to the kitchen and drank some cold water in the hope that it might cool me, but I stayed hot. As I placed the glass back on the sideboard, I checked my watch. Before Tibbot arrived, there was another card that I had to play: to dress the scene like the play that Lorelei’s life had been. If Nick were guilty, it might wrong-foot him and lead him to reveal himself. If innocent, then, well, he would perhaps think I was mad, but at least I would know and could tell him it was the stress of the previous weeks but that it was over now. If he forgave me, we could try to rebuild our marriage. It was either that or leave.
I climbed the stairs, slowly, listening to my own breath, just as I had climbed the stairs in her house.
Our bathroom was smaller than hers. The floor was bare boards, not black-and-white tiles, and the bath was barely large enough for me, unlike Lorelei’s, which was big enough to float in. Nick had framed and hung a few small propaganda posters on the walls. One showed a line of beetles crawling along a factory floor, with a booted foot about to fall on them. LET’S CRUSH THE PARASITES, read the slogan. IF YOU KNOW SOMEONE SHIRKING WORK, LET HIS MANAGER KNOW. OUR NATION HAS ENEMIES OUTSIDE AND IN.
I pressed down the plug and turned the taps. Tepid water flowed through the steel and fell to the bottom with a thud that quickly became a storm-like gushing.
It will all be over soon, I told myself.
From our bedroom wardrobe, I took the box of her possessions. There was the bottle of Champagne, which I carried through and placed on the floor beside the bath. Then, tucked away at the bottom of the box, I found the record from which I had learned to copy her voice. I removed Nick’s player from his study, placed it in the bathroom and set the needle to it. That play, The Lucky Lady, started from the speaker once again.
‘Five pounds on red. And now all my winnings on black.’ All chance.
A knock on the front door told me that Tibbot had arrived. I hurried down to answer it.
But it wasn’t Tibbot standing there. It wasn’t Nick.
37
Our new land was born in the ashes of war. From the depths of human depravity, we have risen and said: ‘No more!’ No more will we take from one another all that we can take. No more will we cower before maddened generals. No more will we live in fear of another’s force. Henceforth we live and build and work together.
‘Charles?’ I said, confused.
‘Dr Cawson sent me to collect a bottle. He said you would give it to me.’
‘Did he?’ I was lost for words – I just hadn’t imagined this move on Nick’s part. I hesitated, leaving Charles on the doorstep, as I tried to understand. A cab, the one he must have come in, drove away.
‘May I come in?’ he asked.
‘Yes, all right,’ I said, unable to think what else to do.
He stepped over the threshold. ‘A bottle and a hairbrush,’ he said. ‘Dr Cawson was most insistent.’ Still I was bewildered. ‘Mrs Cawson? Where are they?’
Automatically, I told him the truth. ‘Upstairs.’
‘Can you get them, please?’
‘All right,’ I mumbled. And I noticed something strange. Charles was sweating – great drops were oozing from his hairline and beads were running down his neck. It was a cold day and he was sweating hard.
‘Mrs Cawson?’
Too confused to refuse, I took a couple of steps up. Then I looked back. And I saw him frozen, his face turned to the stairs, his eyes closed as if he were asleep. But he wasn’t asleep: he was listening, transfixed.
Soft and sweet it was drifting down from the record player in Nick’s study. Lorelei’s voice. ‘And what stakes are you playing for tonight?’
Nick would never have sent him for the bottle, of course.
And that’s how I realized: Charles O’Shea.
Every time he had answered the telephone, I had heard it. I had joked to myself about making his coffees Irish to match his name. Nick had even told me his father was from Dublin, and yet I hadn’t thought of it when I had asked him if Lorelei had a foreign boyfriend, the one she was going to marry and leave with once she got her marriage exit visa. All you needed was one Irish parent to claim a passport.
His eyes opened again and he seemed to wake from her voice.
‘Oh, Charles,’ I whispered. ‘What did you do?’
His eyes met mine and he started to tremble. ‘Go up,’ he said, pointing. ‘Go up.’ And I felt no fear of him, only pity, because, as I stood on the stairs, in that moment when everything dissolved and reformed, I could see how it had happened. How, like me, he had been mistaken about those he loved.
But still, as he took a step towards me, I stepped back. Under my feet I felt water. The bath was overflowing and the damp was stretching down the stairs just as it had at Lorelei’s house.
He climbed another step and I took one back. Then my limbs were working without thought and I was running to our bedroom. He came after me. And all the way my mind was turning between two poles: how I had misjudged Nick; how I had misunderstood Charles.
I dashed to our bedroom. And before I knew it he was there too, searching the dresser, hunting through my cosmetics, throwing everything on to the floor.
‘Where’s her hairbrush?’ he demanded. ‘Where?’
‘I haven’t got it!’ I cried.
‘What?’ He stared at me.
‘I… I was making it up.’
He stopped stock still, his mouth opening but unable to find the words. In a moment he too understood. ‘You thought Cawson did it.’
‘Yes!’
His body seemed to collapse into itself, the air escaping as he sat heavily on the bed and put his hands to his temples. The springs groaned, a harsh metallic sound like a cry of pain. I didn’t know what to do, to think. My breath ran fast and shallow. I thought of trying to get out, but I would have had to push past him and could only stare. For a long time he was silent, rubbing his palms on his forehead as if trying to rub away a stain. ‘I just wanted…’ he said, more to himself than to me. ‘I…’
‘I know,’ I said, blinking in the misty light through the curtains. ‘I can see now. I know.’ And I could see now, see all the links in the chain that had brought us here. They were awful and corrupt and selfish.