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.

Anthony Blunt, speech to the Communist Party of Great Britain Annual Assembly, relayed on RGB Station 1,
Friday, 28 November 1952

‘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.