‘Only trying to help.’ She jumped down. ‘All right, let’s have a look at you,’ she said, examining him. I always marvelled at how forward she was – it must be nice to be like that. She should have been in an infantry regiment or something. ‘Nice and tall. Ooh, all your own teeth, I see.’

‘I’m a doctor. I don’t want to see a dentist if I can help it. Matter of professional pride.’

‘Doctor. Right, that’s it: looks like I’m up on my own for the day. I’ll see you on the six thirty train,’ she told me, striding away past the propaganda posters. ‘But if I’m not here, don’t wait for me. Oh, and her name’s Jane, doctor. She needs some medical attention. You should probably take a look at her.’

‘I’ve seen worse,’ he said. I slapped his shoulder and he laughed. There was a moment’s hesitation when neither of us knew what we were meant to do next. ‘Well, I don’t usually perform consultations on the platform at Waterloo Station, so I suppose we had better go somewhere else,’ he said.

‘Weren’t you on your way somewhere?’

‘It can wait,’ he said with a smile.

Oh, that charm of his. You really could lose yourself in it.

4

As I sit in my study in Winfield House, an old house in Regent’s Park, I am but a few hundred yards from the iron curtain that fell across our land some six years ago. It is a wretched and ugly line. Indeed, I am but a few hundred yards from the raised guard posts where young Britons have their rifle sights fixed on their fellow citizens – men and women forced by the Marxist authorities to doubt their friends and family and to fear those whom they should most trust. Tomorrow is their national celebration. A day their self-deluding masters call Liberation Day. And yet I believe that one day the true liberation will be when they break their rusted bonds of servitude.

Winston Churchill, Radio Free Europe address,
Monday, 17 November 1952

‘Lorelei!’

Her name echoed all around and rang off the walls. I stared at her, her mouth pulled into that silent scream, her hair wafting under the surface and her eyes as bright as coral. The flood at my feet made it seem like the floor itself was shifting. The black-and-white squares were losing their familiar shape, twisting into one another.

And then a thought pushed into my mind. An urgent and desperate hope that forced away all the others: perhaps she was still alive.