Edward nodded, as though this made absolute sense to him. ‘And you – are you a Party member? Do they know you, does the Party know you?’ His pressure on this point seemed strange. Again she remembered Florence, intent on warning her, her high, energetic voice telling her that she might always be under surveillance. So she was under surveillance, was she? This irreproachable civil servant was a government informer, spying on radical elements?
‘You tell me first,’ she said. She said the words without any particular forethought, but when he reacted so quickly, pulling back from her with such shock in his eyes, she pushed on in a way that was more intuitive than rational. ‘Tell me – go on – your secret is safe with me.’
‘My secret.’
She had not expected him to react like this, turning away from her and leaning forwards, putting his hands on his knees. She spoke again, thinking from his reaction that her guess must be right, he must be trawling for information. However terrible that truth was, she wanted to clear the air between them. ‘You can tell me—’
But she broke off from what she was about to say, as he suddenly stood up. Pulling her hand, he was dragging her down the gravel path and towards the artificial lake, down to where the trees grew thick and there were no walkers, further on, off the path. He was pulling her still, too quickly, between the trees, she was stumbling as she walked, the brambles snagging at her stockings. Then he stopped, and held her by the shoulders. ‘To tell you – my God, it would be …’ And then he did tell her.
Of course she had had no idea. How could she? Nobody could ever have guessed. It was only a misunderstanding that had made him think that she had an inkling of the way he lived. The secret was so much larger than anyone would have imagined. It was almost beyond Laura’s comprehension, even when he spelled it out. At first she was unable to judge it. She judged him, however, as he finished telling her. He looked exhausted and stood there lighting a cigarette, smoothing back the blond hair that was always falling across his forehead. As he put the cigarette to his mouth, Laura saw his lips tremble. She reached out her hand, took the cigarette away and kissed his trembling mouth.
As they held one another, Laura heard a blackbird singing from a nearby tree. She felt as though she had lost all her boundaries. The song ran through her, through her mouth and thighs. Edward’s hand was hooked inside the top of her stockings, pushing her thighs apart almost too roughly. She straddled as wide as she could in her narrow skirt, rocking back on her heels. She would have fallen if it hadn’t been for his other hand, around her back, pressing her chest into his. She grasped his thighs with hers, moving her body up his so that his erection was in the right place, in what she experienced just then as the entirely open, entirely wet centre of her body, even though their bodies were touching through layers of clothes. The blackbird’s call, liquid, honeyed, sprang through them before falling into the green spaces of the park. Laura felt the song running through her, she felt Edward’s closeness, she groaned, his mouth was so hard on hers that it hurt, and tears came into her eyes.
10
Even in the blackout, dawn made itself known: the birds calling the city to wakefulness, the bluish glow at the edge of the blinds. Laura was already awake, alone in her narrow bed, pictures and words from the previous day tumbling through her head. After the revelation, they had gone on walking around the muddy lake, and although their conversation had stopped and started, at times there had been a rush of surprising clarity. She had begun to understand what he must have been like eight years ago, at the time when he entered this secret life: an undergraduate at university, a young man who seemed to outsiders to be a perfect fit in a world that was moulded for him, yet who felt all the time that everything was out of kilter. ‘But I don’t have to explain that to you,’ he said to her, and this assumption of their mutual understanding startled her.
He had been an open socialist then, he said, having moved away from his youthful Christianity and into a greater understanding of how one might create a better world here on earth rather than waiting for the kingdom of heaven. One evening in a friend’s room, he mentioned his desire to go to the Soviet Union after university, and then another undergraduate had followed him out into the night at the end of the discussion and asked him to reconsider, to make a deeper and more secret commitment.
‘And so I told everyone that I had lost interest in communism. My parents were so delighted when I started to talk about the Foreign Office.’
He had told her with a kind of sad pride that nobody had ever suspected him. She considered that. She had seen enough of him with his friends to see that he was entirely accepted in his social circle – more, he seemed to take for granted a sort of deference. She thought about how he spoke, how he moved; the pauses in his conversation, the stillness of his bearing, the way he encouraged revelation from others rather than opening up himself. Now that she knew what lay beneath this aura of controlled authority, she could see how brittle his manner was. But she knew how she had seen him at first: invulnerable, bright with the armour of his social status.
At the same time that she now saw his vulnerability, she also saw his heroism. She had been convinced by Florence that there was an answer to the failures of the world around her, that there was a better future ahead. Yet despite their apparent certainty, Florence and Elsa had not shown her a straightforward path to the promised world; she had seen how their lives were overwhelmed by all those meetings and marches that seemed to achieve so little. But Edward had found a way through all of that impotent activity. Lying there, as the clock ticked on the hours she should be sleeping, it was not doubt or fear that kept Laura awake: it was happy anticipation.
She would see Edward again that evening; they had arranged to meet in a restaurant near to Shaftesbury Avenue. She would not quiz him, she thought, she would not ask any of the obvious questions, about how he got away with passing secrets and how he could bear to spend so much time with people who understood nothing about him. She would ask him nothing, she decided as she lay there, but she would show him … The memory of their kiss, and that moment when he mentioned a connection between them which meant he did not have to explain himself, flooded her with pleasure so intense that she turned over and buried her face in the pillow, smiling. She would show him that she understood.
As she got out of bed and pulled off her nightdress, walking over to her closet to find clothes for the day, she found that every action felt imbued with a sense of purpose she had never known before. As she ate toast and drank strong tea with Winifred, who was yawning after going to bed too late the night before, she felt her secret trembling inside her – not wanting to get out, no, but there like an extra dimension to a scene that would otherwise be too flat to be real. And as she opened the door to the street, the very city around her seemed changed, because out in it was somebody who might also be thinking of her.
As she had decided, she didn’t quiz him, and so that evening started off with more inconsequential conversation. He asked her about her day and she replied with unaccustomed talkativeness, telling him about a woman who had come into the shop asking for a novel whose title she could not remember, by someone whose name she could not remember, but she said that there was a very nice dog in it. ‘Can you believe,’ Laura marvelled, ‘that she thought we might know what the book was?’
He responded in kind, telling her a story about a man he worked with who had picked up the book Edward was reading, which happened to be Madame Bovary, and said, ‘Any good?’ Laura did not quite understand the humour in this story, but it did not matter, she still appreciated the spirit in which it was told. As they talked, their gazes were constantly drawn to one another, and a small smile kept coming and going on Edward’s face.
Because she was so determined not to question him, but to show that she fully accepted him as he was, and was satisfied with whatever he wanted to tell her, Laura only gradually came to understand how Edward’s double life was organised. Details came slowly, dropping now and
again into their conversation and always after a hesitation, as though he was eyeing a gate that looked closed and only gradually realising that it could swing open. That evening, for instance, he reminisced about his interview with the Foreign Office when he had first applied to them. ‘They asked me about my interest in communism …’
‘How did they know?’
‘I hadn’t kept it a secret at university, not at the beginning. So obviously they had to ask. I said that I had been interested, but I had come less and less to admire it. I was ready to go on, you know, if I’d been asked, but the odd thing was, I don’t think they were even listening to my answer. The chap who interviewed me, he’d been at the same college as my father, and he’d seen my father the night before the interview, in the bar at Pratt’s. So it wasn’t as though they wondered about me, it wasn’t as though … I was never outside …’
Never outside – was that what he said? Laura hadn’t quite heard the end of the sentence in the noise of the restaurant where they were sitting, and was about to ask more, when he asked her something instead, about the last time she had been to a Party meeting.
In fact, strangely enough, he seemed more interested in the details of her world than she allowed herself to be in his. He kept asking her about the Party members she had met, about the meetings, about what they had talked about, what was in the Worker that day, what people said about this or that writer or event. Laura sometimes struggled to answer, and often she felt that her anecdotes fell short of his expectations. If she tried to express to him her sense of the impotence of the British communist movement, he seemed not to understand her. She came to realise that he thought she was lucky to be openly part of that world.
One evening they talked about the change of line on the war. They were walking arm in arm back to Cissie’s flat after going to see an American film. He listened to her confusion, her account of how the Party members had tried to adjust themselves to the new line, but how uneasy it had all felt, and then he told her that it wasn’t Stalin’s job to pull the imperialists’ chestnuts out of the fire for them. ‘It won’t be long, though,’ he said. ‘Really, Britain drove the Russians into Hitler’s arms. If we’d only been able to create a united front … but when the Soviet Union has built up its strength and can confront fascism and imperialism – it won’t be long.’
‘I know,’ Laura said, warmed by hearing from him the same arguments that she had heard from Florence and realising that he would have heard them from some inner Party source.
They did not talk about world events all that much, however, even in those first few weeks. Politics might be the key in which their love song was placed, but it wasn’t the melody itself. That lay in the rhythm of their bodies. They were intensely aware of one another from moment to moment, their blood beating up at any touch – knee to knee as they sat in the cinema, or hand to arm as he steered her out of a restaurant, or during the brief luxury of an embrace as they said goodbye in a blacked-out street. Somehow those fleeting touches were enough, during those first weeks. More than enough, at least for Laura. For her they added up to an unexpected excess of happiness.
In May it was her birthday, and when Edward discovered the date he made a point of asking her to meet him at a more expensive restaurant. He had also mentioned to her, in a tone whose carelessness seemed studied, that his flatmate was away for a few days.
Laura arrived early. Sitting alone in the crowded restaurant took her back to the very first time that they had met for a meal, for that stilted lunch in Manzi’s. How changed everything was. She shook out her napkin and ordered herself a martini. She felt so connected to the noise and colour around her that the clatter of cutlery and the burble of other people’s conversations seemed to be a rhythmic accompaniment to her own thoughts. She could not think directly of the night ahead of her, but there it was, sharpening every sensation. As Edward entered the restaurant, she saw him greet two men who were sitting near the door. He had not yet seen her, so she could luxuriate in watching him walk through the restaurant, and take pleasure in seeing how women at other tables noticed him too.
It was to be a celebration, and so they ate more extravagantly than usual, although the food was nothing special: tough little lamb cutlets, creamed spinach that had been too heavily salted. At one point, as he poured her wine, she put a finger on the inside of his wrist, where his skin was silk. But it didn’t take long before she noticed that something was off, that he was distracted. He was doing an odd thing that she had never seen him do – before he spoke, and sometimes in the middle of sentences, he would move his glass or his fork half an inch to the left or right, as if lining them up. She had never before seen him betray any kind of fidgetiness. She had said something about emotions that last, and suddenly he said, ‘If only one could know when things would last.’ At first she went on speaking, and then she realised that he had given the words a strange weight, and she stopped and asked what he meant.
It took him a while to explain. The salt cellar was moved to line up with the pepper pot, and the wine glass with the water glass, at every pause. Gradually she began to understand. They had told him that the situation could not continue. She was too openly a communist, visiting Party meetings and spending time with known Party members. Even if her cousin and her aunt had never noticed what she was doing, the taint of her being associated with that world was too obviously a danger for him.
‘You mean …?’
‘They want me to stop seeing you – it’s too dangerous. An ultimatum.’
The shock of it stopped her talking or eating for a while, but then she realised he had not stopped talking. He was saying something about how he couldn’t ask her to give up her freedom. He was talking about how it would be too much to tell her that she had to live the way he lived, with everything kept dark from everyone. She tried to cut through what he was saying. ‘So it isn’t an ultimatum,’ she said. ‘I just have to break off with Florence.’
‘She’s your only friend,’ he said, shaking his head. He believed that it would cost her too much, not to see Florence again and to stop going to Party meetings. He was saying that she wouldn’t, if the situation were reversed, expect him to give up his friends. This was true, but the situation was not equivalent. At that point, as they were struggling to understand one another, the waiter stopped by their table, asking if they would like anything else. There had been Queen of Puddings on the menu, and Laura ordered it although she had no idea what it was. ‘I can’t walk into your life and destroy it,’ Edward said after the waiter left. Again, the wine glass was brought into line with the water glass. She realised she had not made herself clear, and quickly she told him that of course she would give up Florence and the visits to Party meetings.
‘But I can’t say to you, just give up everything that matters to you. You know the penalty if I’m found out. I can’t do that to you.’
Something had shifted. Although he was saying that he couldn’t say it to her, he was saying it. He had stopped playing with the cutlery. He was looking at her. The clouds cleared. He was asking her to throw in her lot with him. Nothing else mattered.
‘I don’t want anything else.’
He went on speaking about why that was impossible, but his tone said otherwise. He told her that the penalties were too harsh, the strictures too difficult, what she would be giving up was too great. ‘If you do this – it’s pretty odd, the way I have to live. Pretty lonely.’
Pretty odd. Pretty lonely. At the time, she could not see through his English understatement, and she brushed it aside. ‘We won’t be lonely. We’ll have each other.’ Just then the Queen of Puddings and the brandies were set down on the table, and so Edward’s reaction to her statement was gone in a nod to the waiter. There seemed nothing more to say for the moment. The die had been thrown. She picked up the spoon. ‘How nasty,’ she said, grimacing. ‘It tastes like soap, sweet soap.’
‘Let me order you something else.’
‘There’s no need.’ He ca
lled back the waiter and ordered her an apple pie instead, and pushed a brandy towards her. As he did so, his foot touched hers under the table. She pulled her chair closer into the table, hoping to press her knee against his, but just then the friends he had greeted on his way into the restaurant were at their table. They were going on to the Ace of Clubs for a drink, they were saying. Nick would be there, back from Washington, and Amy was in town. Edward was polite, and said they might see them later.
When they had gone, he looked back at Laura. ‘Do you want to go to the club?’
‘No.’ Her mind was running on how she must break with Florence. ‘I should tell her immediately – I’ll think of a reason. Immediately, don’t you think?’
‘I’m on ice until I either break off with you or you come in.’ He pulled his knuckles across his lips, and she realised how hard it was for him to speak clearly about his work after so many years of silence. He told her that they had told him that he might be no further good, having broken the primary and absolute rule of secrecy, and that he had had to spend time trying to convince them she might be trustworthy. ‘The first bad judgement I’ve ever made, that’s the way they see it.’
She was puzzled by the tension in his face as he said that. It was as though he feared the people he was talking about, and yet he must surely be their treasure, their darling, with his extraordinary fidelity to their cause despite the fact that it worked so entirely against his own self-interest.
After that brandy they had another. She was beginning to get used to the constant drinking, and to ending the evenings dazed with alcohol. Eventually, very late, they left the restaurant. Blackness, warm and dense, surrounded them; wrapped in its cloak they walked up the Strand, through Covent Garden and into Bloomsbury. They walked with the whole sides of their bodies touching, Edward’s arm around Laura’s waist, her blood flushing up at the touch of his body. Time seemed to slow, they spoke little, finishing each other’s sentences, as they walked through the hidden city.
A Quiet Life Page 14