‘They say it’s coming down hard over the East End again,’ Alistair said.
‘Any news of Belgravia?’
‘Not that I’ve heard. Another drink?’
Laura hadn’t eaten since lunchtime, but he was right, they had to keep drinking and trying not to think of what might be happening elsewhere in London. At one point the room seemed to sway, as if a high explosive had landed too near for comfort, but although the woman beside her clutched her arm, nobody left, nobody screamed. Eventually they heard, as if from far away, the all-clear.
‘I have to get back, Alistair.’
‘I’ll go with you.’
Soon after they started walking, they saw a bus coming through the lightening gloom, and Laura ran to the bus stop.
‘To Marble Arch, that will do – no need to come with me now. Thanks so much.’
‘Any time you want another drunken night …’ Alistair seemed untouched by anxiety, speaking as if they had been drinking in a city dedicated to pleasure rather than bludgeoned by war. It was the pose that many of Edward’s friends took these days, Laura knew, but no one did it with such panache as Alistair, smiling at her, overly smug, she thought, about their own courage in drinking and socialising despite the horror around them.
As the bus swung down Oxford Street, she saw the gaping holes of department stores, but that was old damage. Once she got off she started running, in stockinged feet again, longing to see the white row of houses, their ample doors, their blind windows. But when she rounded the corner she saw the worst: an ambulance at the head of the street, a fire engine, women in tin hats, dust in the air. She was running past them, forcing her way through a knot of people, calling out to ask what was gone.
There he was, walking towards her through the dust, blood running down his cheek – but it was only a cut, it was only a splinter of glass, he was unharmed. ‘Where have you been?’ It would have taken too long to explain, so Laura just shook her head and held him, revelling in the warmth of their bodies. ‘Dying to sleep,’ she said, and she went in, her feet bleeding and filthy on the once fine parquet floors. Their house only had more windows blown out, but a few doors down a house had taken a hit, and all morning, as Laura slept fitfully, she heard the sounds of digging, shovels scraping through foundations, through the London clay, into the dark.
It was weeks before a meeting came together. Finally she left a note in the dead-letter drop. A few days later a strange man stopped her on the way to the bookshop and asked her about the Quintero tobacco she wanted, and told her to come and meet him at the Lyons’ Corner House in the Strand the following day. She had never seen him before, and when she slid into the seat opposite him, he frowned at her.
‘You missed your last meeting.’
‘I couldn’t help it – where is Stefan?’
She said it before she remembered the prohibition on direct questions. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t respond.
‘I have something to deliver,’ she muttered. ‘What should I do?’
‘Small?’
‘Very small.’
‘Use the drop.’
‘Too precious. I can’t risk it. Can I pass it now?’
‘Not at this meeting, I can’t be sure you weren’t followed. Next time. Come in three days.’
Laura tried to tell him that it was urgent, but he was already getting up. She was left there, with everything unsaid and the film still in her bag, powerless to stop him.
The next time, they passed the film in the way that Stefan had taught her, placing it in the newspaper that she left between them. Laura tried to mutter an explanation. This is it, she said in broken whispers, the drawings, the night-fighting, but who knows what chaos in the east had drawn Stefan away from London, and this man seemed ill at ease, as if Laura might present some danger to him. He stayed silent for a while, and when there was nobody around them he spoke two sentences only. ‘You must go on ice for a while. There have been too many breaches of security, too many missed meetings.’
‘So long as you give that to them.’ The man showed no interest in the film, but it was now in his hands and Laura walked back through the scarred city free from it. As she waited at a traffic light at Marble Arch, she realised gas was seeping from a mains somewhere and she covered her nose and mouth against the smell.
16
As the months of bombardment went on, Laura became more and more conscious of the silences that fell between her and Edward when they were alone. She wanted, so much, to talk to him about the political situation. When would the promised conflict between capitalism and communism become clear, or would this grim struggle between fascism and imperialism, both sliding more and more deeply into darkness, go on interminably? Sometimes she tried to bring their conversations towards the political, in her desire for elucidation, but always a barrier seemed to close between them when she did so.
Still, there was no physical barrier between them, and Laura found Edward’s constant desire for her as sweet as ever. One night he came into the bedroom as she was getting undressed and wordlessly pushed her onto the bed, face-down, so that she could not even see him. She felt her desire rise to meet his, as always, but something in her stood outside them, and she saw how oddly aggressive their coupling must seem. Afterwards, in the melting sensation that followed, they lay holding one another. ‘It’s as Lawrence had it,’ he said, ‘two single equal stars, in balance.’
Laura was silent for a while, thinking of what he had just said. ‘Stars?’
‘This balance – it goes beyond love.’
She asked him why it had to go beyond love, and felt his unease begin, as he struggled away from her a little, reaching for his cigarettes. As so often, she recognised how much he disliked questions, and told herself that she must stop pressing him. Hadn’t she promised herself from the start that she could show him that she could understand him without interrogating him? If he believed that they were two equal stars, that was surely wonderful enough for her. She turned the conversation.
‘Will you take me out again?’ she asked him. ‘It’s my birthday next week – can we go out for dinner?’
Laura knew that despite the bombs, behind closed doors the clubs and grand hotels of London went on with their chattering, swaying life. She stood irresolutely in front of her closet on that Friday evening, and in the end took out the cherry-red dress she had been wearing two years ago on the night they first met. The zip moved more easily than she remembered; perhaps rationing meant that she had slimmed down a little. First she pulled her hair back, but she felt that looked much too severe, so she curled it and rolled it in front in a way that she had seen in a fashion magazine that Winifred had left behind the last time she had come over. They walked to the Dorchester in the darkening city. ‘Do you like this dress?’ she said in a flirtatious tone, and in a vague voice he asked if it was new and said how pretty it was. When she reminded him it was what she had been wearing when they first met, he stopped and looked at her, and smiled, and said that of course he would never forget, he had just been distracted by something that had happened that day at work. But when she asked what it was, he said it was a long story and fell silent.
The ballroom was crowded, but it did not take long for Laura to notice, across the room, two women picked out by the way that the gazes of others turned to them – Amy and Nina. Both of them were in black. Nina was wearing heavy amethyst earrings and a silver scarf around her shoulders, but Amy seemed to have no accessories, and her white-blonde hair was brushed back severely. Immediately Laura was conscious of her too-bright dress with its pre-war style and the absurd way she had dressed her hair, and she was not eager to go and say hello to them. When Edward saw them, however, he rose without hesitating and steered her across to their table. She was not surprised that they hardly acknowledged her. Presumably the man next to Amy was the husband that Sybil had once spoken about, the one that the newspapers would have mocked if he had not acquitted himself in some distinguished way in a theatre of war.
He hardly looked the part, while Nina’s partner was an overweight man who had not even bothered to wear evening clothes.
‘This is Michel Blanchard,’ Nina said, and the man merely nodded at them before saying something to her in an undertone. They did not ask Laura and Edward to sit with them, and Laura was relieved when they went back to their own table. She tried not to let their chilly manner bother her; neither of them had a partner to match her husband, she thought as they sat down. And in the noise and energy of the room it did not matter if there was still a pool of silence around her and Edward as they drank and danced. It was well into the small hours when they paid their extortionate bill and went into the lobby, where Edward stopped short.
‘Good evening,’ he said, as an elderly man with a hollow-cheeked face stopped in front of them and greeted him in a polite way, asking what brought him there. ‘Celebrating my wife’s birthday – Laura, have you met Lord Halifax?’
The protest that she had once seen at his door danced through Laura’s mind as she took Halifax’s hand. She remembered what they had called him in the Party: the old appeaser, the old snake; she had expected someone with an air of devilish certainty. But he seemed to hold his power in the distracted, accidental way of all the men in Edward’s class, there in his evening clothes in the lobby of the hotel, shaking her hand in a distant manner and muttering that the pleasure was all his. As they walked on, she noticed that Edward was tense with irritation, and she asked him what the matter was.
‘Of all the people to meet …’
‘But he lives here, doesn’t he? Hard to avoid him.’
It seemed strange, stepping out of the hotel and into the city’s blind blackness, to think that he lived in that gilded interior, but she remembered hearing that from Toby or Winifred.
‘I see enough of him at work – you’d think we could go for a drink without bumping into him. No doubt he’ll have something to say about me dancing all night if I don’t go in at dawn tomorrow.’
At first Laura was surprised that he felt so rebuked by being seen by his boss. But as they walked on and he put his arm around her, she realised that his reaction wasn’t rational, that there was something about always being surrounded by his work that was eating into him. So as they walked she tried to steer the conversation elsewhere, and for a few moments it worked; they talked about after the war and how they might one day have a small house where they could be together – in the hills, Laura said, or by the sea; or in the forest, Edward said. They left open which country their idyll might be in – maybe the hills of Worcestershire or Massachusetts came into their minds, or some unidentified snowy valleys or birch woods in a country they had not yet seen. But they would be free there of the bitter secrecy which made Edward so miserable, Laura thought as they opened the door in Chester Square. The evening had been quiet so far, but as soon as they began walking upstairs the sirens sounded.
Downstairs, under the table, Laura and Edward both found sleep eluding them as the morning came near and the guns began to rattle. Ann got up and made tea, and they all sat, sleepless, drinking it. For some reason they began to talk about how they didn’t really know anyone who had died in the raids: some distant acquaintances, yes, the wife of one of Edward’s colleagues at work, who had been unluckily caught in a public shelter that had taken a direct hit, and a whole family in the East End whom Ann knew a little – but no close friends or family. But as they went on with the conversation, both Ann and Laura suddenly felt superstitious, and they stopped. It might be tempting fate, Ann said, to sit down under the bombardment and say that they didn’t know the dead, and Laura agreed with her.
Nobody could have remembered that conversation except Laura on the evening in early June when she and Ann were sitting in the kitchen, drinking tea after supper, and Toby came in late and tired from the House. ‘Edward in?’ he said, pausing at the door. When Laura told him that she didn’t expect him to be home until later, Toby asked if she could tell him the news, as he couldn’t get him on the telephone and he had Home Guard duty to go to. ‘Don’t want it to wait until the morning.’
For some reason Laura thought first of Mrs Last and Sybil, though it was ridiculous given that they were safe in the countryside. The actual news made much more sense. Quentin was dead, not missing in action or taken prisoner, but dead of bullet wounds in Crete on a beach, seen by his men. Sounded quite horrific, Toby said – no need to tell anyone that, though. He had heard it from one of Quentin’s fellow officers, so the news would only be getting to his father today. Toby was gabbling rather, and Laura felt she should make him sit down and give him a drink, but he was already making his way upstairs to change into his Home Guard uniform, his feet stamping as if he were pressing down on whatever he was feeling.
When he had gone out, Laura and Ann sat in silence for a while. Then Ann tried to tell Laura she was sorry, but Laura told her there was no need for condolences, that she had hardly known Quentin. It was a shock, of course it was, to think of all that confident, unquestioning energy gone, but the shock had little resonance for her. How easy it would be to romanticise the part he had played in taking her to Edward, but he had always been dismissive of her and she had hardly seen him as an individual. To her, he had just been part of the group. The worst thing was that Toby had given her the job of telling Edward, and as she waited there with Ann she thought that she must have a drink first, and she went to the cupboard to where the whisky was kept. She offered some to Ann without thinking, and Ann accepted with a look of surprise.
‘You must have seen him in the house often,’ she said to Ann, and Ann agreed. ‘Before the war I was usually in the kitchen, but still I saw him. It’s very sad for Mrs Last,’ she said. Laura knew she meant Sybil. ‘And for their father, he’ll be so cut up, his only son. They’ve got a beautiful house up in Derbyshire, was going to be his.’ Laura thought about this, and asked Ann why Sybil hadn’t gone there on the outbreak of the war rather than to Toby and Edward’s mother. Ann started to tell her that Sybil had never got on very well with her own father, and then they stopped, knowing that it wasn’t the done thing for the two of them to gossip about Sybil as though Laura was a maid too, or as though Ann was a friend of Laura’s. Laura felt the weight of embarrassment at the same time that Ann did, and the possibility of Toby’s disapproval if he were there. How ridiculous, she told herself, you know you don’t believe in these barriers. Still, the self-consciousness persisted, and Laura said she would go upstairs until Edward got in; as she went up the hall stairs she heard his key in the door.
Did he take it badly? He hardly seemed to react at all. Laura said they should have a drink and they went into the living room. He seemed almost confused, sitting there with his hands in his lap, then saying he would read a bit before going to bed, and standing in front of the bookshelves with an indecisive air. After sitting with him for a while, Laura realised her eyes were closing, and she said she would go up. She said again how sorry she was, how awful it was, but he was not looking at her, he seemed deep inside his book.
She went to bed in their own room, as the skies were unexpectedly quiet. When Edward came finally to join her, near to morning, she woke and rolled over to hold him. She wanted to wake up properly and talk to him, but he soon started to descend into sleep, snoring loudly in a way he had never done before. His breath did not hold that hint of apple which was one of his most striking physical characteristics. It was sour with the smell of whisky. He must have been sitting there drinking for hours. A good wife would have been sitting with him, she thought, but she knew that whatever it was that he and Quentin had shared, whatever memories of first steps into university or London life, this was not something that Edward had ever told her about. This grief was not something she could share.
The next day, after checking with Edward that she was doing the right thing, Laura wrote a formal letter of condolence to Sybil, and soon received a brief acknowledgement in return. She had gone to her father’s house, she said, and for a long t
ime after that Laura heard nothing from her. Edward and Toby never mentioned Quentin again, and after a while Laura came to believe that in fact he had not meant so much to them, as they had forgotten him so quickly.
As the weeks of war continued and rationing began to bite, Laura spent more and more of her days in queues. Since that house with four people living in it created much more work than Ann could manage on her own, if Laura had not helped with the shopping they would not have had enough food in the house. One Friday in July, having missed the meat queue in their usual butcher’s after getting there just an hour or so late, Laura bought sausage rolls in a shop she had never frequented before, and they had all come down with the runs. Edward got up, grey-faced, on Saturday and went to work as usual. He didn’t come back that evening; it was no longer unusual for him to work such long hours, but Laura had to resist the temptation to telephone him at work and ask how he was feeling.
Eventually she went to bed alone, feeling rather weak and maudlin in the aftermath of the illness. Winifred had lent her a novel about a teacher in an English private school, but its humour was that of the group, and although she could now pick up some of the tones of irony, most of it baffled her. Though the sirens sounded in the night, she stayed in her own bed, a heavy inertia pinning her down, and lay there for a long time even once light pulsed through the edges of the blackout blinds, the covers pushed off because the air was already so close. At last she got up, splashed her face with cold water, and went down to breakfast feeling light-headed. Toby was there, head bent, munching through toast and margarine. ‘News,’ he said thickly, gesturing to the radio.
Laura caught the tail end of the bulletin: ‘Hitler now has new fields of slaughter, pillage and destruction.’ That gravelly voice had become familiar to everyone, but it seemed just for a second to be speaking directly to her. ‘I see the Russian soldiers standing on the threshold of their native land, the ten thousand villages of Russia where there are still primordial human joys, where maidens laugh and children play. We shall give whatever help we can to Russia and to the Russian people.’
A Quiet Life Page 21