Rue. Regret. Two meanings. I went to Southwark Library last week to look it up. There was a battered old volume in which medical students had made notes. ‘Abortifacient effect,’ it said. But it’s hard to get the dose right. Adverse reactions: ‘Gastric pain … renal failure … vasodilation and coagulopathy … systemic failure …’ I didn’t understand it all, but I understood enough. The book also mentioned that it produces little blisters on the skin if you handle it wrongly, so that was probably the rash I saw on Charles’s hand that day at the surgery.

The book included a picture of the herb. It has pretty little yellow flowers, and I thought of Ophelia pinning it to her brother’s chest before she drowns herself. She calls it herb-of-grace then: a blessing herb. A drowning herb too, really.

I spent a long time in the library, just sitting, thinking, until it closed at five and I had to go back to the boarding house I’m in now. It’s warm and dry enough. The landlady takes all our coupons and sells some of them, I think, but I don’t blame her: I suppose she’s just trying to make ends meet like the rest of us. Everyone is trying. Frank Tibbot stopped by once to see how I was. He’s a kind man. He’s still in the police but says he has to look over his shoulder all the time.

Fellowman’s office is right beside the one Guy Burgess now occupies as Deputy First Secretary and I can’t help wondering how long it will be before they move up again, and how many of Fellowman’s whispers will end up as our laws. I asked him what they intended to do with Charles but he didn’t say. It doesn’t matter now.

Who was the father after all? Was Lorelei even pregnant? All the secrets she’s taken with her now lie as dust on the ground. And, in a way, I think it means she won out in the end.

I walked to Checkpoint Charlie from our house – what remains of it, anyway. Before leaving, I stood in the back garden and looked up at the charred brickwork. No birds live there now and at first it seemed to me that the garden was bare, but then, here and there, I noticed little slivers of paper and fabric – pinches of our everyday life that had floated out on the hot air. They had been soaked by rain and bleached by the sun; but still, under rocks and in crevices in the wall, they lingered as some sort of witness. I’m glad there’s a witness.