Red Joan (35 page)

Small what? thinks Joan. She is lying in a strange bed in a strange room and it is hard to distinguish Nick's voice above the noise. She opens her eyes but the process is laborious and her mind feels strangely detached. Where is she? What is she doing here? For a moment she doesn't remember anything at all. There are flowers by her bedside, a few sprigs of foxglove in a plastic-looking vase. She thinks they must be from Nick. Who else would have given her flowers? She remembers suddenly that he has been cross with her although she cannot think why, and for an instant she believes that perhaps she has been forgiven for whatever it is she has done, and it is a warm, woollen feeling, as if the bandage on the part of her head where she fell is not medicinal but a soft hand, stroking, anointing.

The flowers in the vase remind her of another sick bed many years ago, and with the memory comes the return of awareness, spreading slowly across her brain like congealing blood. She thinks of Leo and her heart thuds inside her.

‘Ah, hello there,' says the doctor, noticing that she is awake. He comes to her bedside and leans over. Joan's eyes flicker and she catches a glimpse of him. He is not as young as he sounds. His hair has receded halfway back along his scalp and his eyes look as if he has been awake for hours. ‘Now, Joan. Don't worry, you're going to be fine. It was a minor stroke, a transient ischemic attack to give it its proper name, but I've been treating you and you're going to be absolutely fine.'

‘A stroke?' Joan whispers. Her mind is numb.

‘Just a small one. Nothing to worry about. You may experience a few lingering symptoms but they should clear up in the next few hours.' He stands up straight, wipes his hands on his jacket and looks across at Nick. ‘Make sure she doesn't get anxious,' he says. ‘Press this button if you need me or one of the nurses. I'll be back in an hour or so to see how she's getting on.'

He leaves, slipping out between the curtains, and Nick watches him go. He turns to Joan and attempts a smile, although it is not his habitual, easy one. ‘Well,' he says eventually. ‘I thought you were a goner for a moment.'

Joan does not move. ‘I'm sorry for giving you a scare,' she whispers, and his expression momentarily softens.

‘Don't be sorry. Briony and the boys send their love. They wanted to come in but I told them visits were restricted because . . . ' He stops and makes a sweeping, uncertain gesture. ‘Well, I haven't told the boys yet.'

Joan nods. She understands. ‘Thank you for the flowers,' she whispers.

‘What flowers? Oh, those. They're not from me. They're from our friends in MI5.'

‘Oh,' she whispers. ‘I thought . . . ' Stupid of her to think he could be so easily won over. Who is she to expect such forgiveness? What right does she have to expect it?

‘They're waiting outside. Maybe they think I'm going to help you stage some sort of getaway.' He laughs at this, a sharp, too-loud laugh, but it is not unkind exactly. Hurt, perhaps.

It tears at Joan's heart to hear it. ‘I take it you haven't changed your mind then?' she asks tentatively.

‘About what?'

‘About being my lawyer.'

There is a brief silence. Nick sits down and picks up a magazine which has been left by the previous occupant of the cubicle. ‘Let's not talk about this now.' He turns a page of the magazine, tuts, turns another page, tuts again. ‘How much of this did Dad know?' he asks suddenly.

Joan closes her eyes. Her head feels fuzzy from the medication.

‘I mean, you and he were so close,' Nick goes on. ‘I often think of how you two were together, and I've even thought that Briony and I lack something in comparison.' He stops. ‘I haven't said this to her. I haven't said it to anyone. It's just that I don't remember you ever snapping at Dad as she does at me. Or him ignoring you when you said something.' He gives a half smile. ‘Apparently I do that to her.'

Joan reaches out her hand and holds Nick's arm. She is touched that this is how he remembers his childhood, although she is aware that there was another reason why she would never have snapped at his father, even if she had felt like it, which, in truth, wasn't often; how grateful she was to him; how careful she had always been to try to deserve him. ‘Australia was a long way from home,' she says eventually. ‘We were all each other had. And I didn't have a high-powered job like you do. It's much easier not to snap when you're not so busy.'

Nick shakes his head, moving his arm slightly so that Joan's hand falls away. ‘There was more to it than that. You both laughed at each other's jokes even when they weren't funny. You just seemed so . . . ' He stops. ‘So happy.'

‘Yes,' Joan whispers, thinking of her husband's hand reaching for hers from his hospital bed. Right as rain tomorrow. She feels an ache in her chest. ‘We were happy.'

There is a pause. Nick leans forward. ‘But how much did he know?'

Joan closes her eyes. She cannot speak. ‘Enough,' she whispers.

A
fter a depressing hospital breakfast of cold toast and margarine along with a bowl of watery porridge, Joan is informed that she is being discharged. Ms. Hart appears at the door when this news is delivered, and it is apparent that she has been there all night, dozing in the corridor outside Joan's room after visiting hours had ended and keeping an eye on things. The nurse has evidently not been told the nature of their relationship, and is talking to Ms. Hart as though she is Joan's daughter or some other close relative, explaining what Joan should eat, how many aspirin she should take, while all the time affirming that Joan will be absolutely fine as long as she is properly looked after.

Ms. Hart nods, her expression indicating that she is listening intently, but Joan knows that the cause for her concern is not, as the nurse believes, Joan's welfare, but the fact that the announcement in the House of Commons is scheduled for just over twenty-four hours' time and they still haven't got anything on William. Joan asks the nurse to close the door while she gets dressed, and there is a brief moment of confusion before the nurse realises that Joan wants to be alone, and that she also wants the woman who sat up outside her room all night to be taken outside too.

Once Joan is ready to go, the doctor comes in to talk to her. She observes his eyes flick down to the electronic tag on her thin ankle, visible above the slippers she was wearing when the stroke occurred, and which nobody had thought to replace so that she might be more appropriately dressed when she left the hospital. He looks away again, his curiosity unsatisfied but hidden now beneath a veneer of professional calm. He seems to have an idea of who Ms. Hart is and why she is being so attentive, but Joan can see in his expression of pity and kindliness that he does not know any of the details. He would not smile at her like that if he knew what she'd done. She wonders if he would recognise her if he saw her picture on the evening news. Possibly. Probably. She feels a throbbing pain in her stomach.

‘Rest, rest and rest,' he announces. ‘That's all I'm going to prescribe. And aspirin.'

He looks at Ms. Hart as he says this, but she is preoccupied with removing the plastic lid from a huge coffee cup without spilling any of the contents, and doesn't appear to be listening.

The doctor coughs and continues: ‘There should be no lasting symptoms, but you must come straight in again if you feel anything unusual. Anything at all.' He pauses. ‘Are you sure you feel okay?'

Joan looks at him and she knows that she is being given a chance. If she claimed to feel dizzy or light-headed now, he would believe her. She would be allowed to stay here. She could delay the press conference, maybe even delay the statement in the House of Commons, at least until after William's cremation.

But she also knows that there is no point in delaying. It will not go away now. And it is what she has always known. Badness deserves to be punished.

Her bones feel like chalk when she stands up, rubbing against each other as she walks to the door. ‘I'm fine,' she whispers. ‘I'd like to go home now.'

 

Those first few months after Leo's death pass in a blur for Joan; blank, sleepless passages of time through which she gropes her way, cycling to the laboratory every morning, forgetting her sandwiches, working so hard that she emerges from the building blinking like a new-born rabbit and then cycling home again. Getting out of bed every day feels like stepping into the North Sea on a chilly morning, but without the benefits of any bracing after-effects. She is thinner, smokes too much, drinks sherry on her own when she gets home. The invitations from the young men she used to date are no longer forthcoming. Most of them are now married or have moved away, but Joan is largely indifferent to this lack of romantic interest. She cannot be bothered to attend cinematic outings with men she cannot talk to. How could she possibly talk to anyone when there is nothing she can say? Or nothing true, at least.

There will be things she will later remember about that time. Sitting at the kitchen table and eating burnt toast. Listening to the phone ringing, ringing, and marvelling at how long some people (Sonya, her mum, Lally) will keep holding, still expecting an answer. Why don't they realise I'm not here? she thinks. And she is momentarily irritated by this until she realises that she is there. She is always there. She puts a cigarette in her mouth but she does not light it. She simply holds it. Waiting.

At the laboratory, she continues to make copies of everything but she does not give them to Sonya. She feels Max's eyes on her as she works, and he will occasionally ask her advice on something he is working on, how to phrase something or present it more clearly, but he does not pry. He simply watches.

‘Does it not hurt your neck, to type so bent over like that?' he asks one afternoon, when it is just the two of them in the room.

She sits back and rubs her neck. Has she always sat like this, or just recently? ‘I suppose it does.'

‘Maybe you should get glasses.'

She doesn't look at him. ‘They wouldn't suit me. I'd look like a hedgehog.'

There is a pause. Rain falls quietly on the window. How she wishes she could tell him everything. What would he say then?

Probably not this: ‘Then get tortoiseshell frames. Hedgehogs always wear wire-rimmed ones.'

She almost laughs.

The copies she makes are filed in a separate folder in Max's office, labelled and left neatly stacked on the shelves. It is habit, she supposes, which keeps her doing this, but she knows that is not the only reason. She does it because she is scared. She is scared they might come for her next. If Leo could be accused of treachery, so could she. So could anyone. She wants to be able to show that she intended to keep on giving the information but was just waiting until it was safe to smuggle it from the laboratory into Sonya's hands.

But when the time comes for her next appointment with Sonya, she does not turn up. Nor does she call to say that she will not be coming. The same happens the next time, and the next. She receives a couple of letters from Sonya which she merely skims and then throws away, and then a card announcing the birth of her and Jamie's baby. There is a photograph enclosed with the card. A baby girl with big round eyes and tiny dimples, named Katya after Sonya's mother. Joan burns the card. She props the photograph up on the mantelpiece and then takes it down again. She puts it in a drawer.

And then there are the stories which appear in the newspapers almost daily, describing how Russia is consolidating its grip on Eastern Europe, buckling down its buffer zone over the war-ridden states, and crushing any glimmer of democratic opposition. The show trials that Joan remembers so vividly from Russia in the 1930s are being repeated in Warsaw, Budapest, Prague, Sofia. Can it still be justified as Leo used to claim the first time it happened? She is no longer sure. Certainly the gleam of heroism attached to the Russian war effort is starting to lose its dazzle. It is becoming opaque and cloudy, and Joan finds these doubts inhibiting. Whereas before she had been comfortable in her belief that sharing these secrets, fulfilling Churchill's promise to share, was the morally decent thing to do, she can no longer hold to this with such certainty.

Quite simply, she wants out. But what is the procedure for leaving? If she tries, will they send for her, just as they sent for Leo? She does not know. She can only withdraw quietly and hope that nobody notices.

Eventually Sonya comes to visit her one Sunday morning, waiting at the front door of the mansion block until one of the other inhabitants lets her in. She leaves her perambulator at the bottom of the staircase and puffs her way up to the fourth floor with Katya in her arms, knocking triumphantly on Joan's door.

Joan is asleep when she arrives, having discovered that she sleeps more easily after dawn than before, and so she has fallen into the habit of making up for lost sleep at the weekends. On hearing the knock, she sits bolt upright. There are various people she thinks it could be, her mother, Lally, Karen, other friends she sees occasionally, but she does not think of any of these people. She cannot say exactly what it is she fears. Two men, dressed in black with low-brimmed hats. Large, physical men who could take her away, just as they took Leo. Or a policeman, short and amiable, with handcuffs clipped to his belt.

Sonya calls out to her. ‘It's me, Jo-jo. Are you in?'

Joan breathes out. She pulls on a dressing gown, runs a brush through her hair, and takes the photograph of Katya out of the drawer and props it up once more on the mantelpiece. Then she runs to the door and flings it open. ‘How lovely to see you! And hello, Katya.' She chucks the little girl's chin. ‘We meet at last!'

The little girl in Sonya's arms smiles, and Joan is astonished to see that she is no longer a baby but a small child, not quite a year old but nearly.