The next day they met in a prearranged spot in Tooting, and he drove them south out of London in his little grey car. They pulled into a lay-by and he showed her the device that she was to fix in Blanchard’s room. The instructions he gave her were detailed, and she nodded as he talked, but back in her bedroom that evening, alone, she got the bug out of its box and looked at it disconsolately. It was bigger than she had expected, a long antenna connected to a silver-plated can in which, Stefan had told her, were the wires and plates that would act as a microphone when radio waves were transmitted to it, which another agent could do from a different hotel room once this bug was fixed in Blanchard’s room. He had talked to her about the best way she could fix it: it need only be temporary, so she could put it in the furnishings of the room, on the underside of the desk or the back of a bedside table, for instance. There was no need to drill a hole into the skirting board, he said, as though that was reassuring. He had given her a little tube of glue, a tiny tin of epoxy resin and some small tools, but Laura felt incompetent as she looked at the kit, and could not imagine how she could carry out her task without discovery.
That evening, getting ready to go out with Alistair, she decided to leave it behind; she packed it into an old hatbox at the top of her wardrobe. While she was making up her face, Edward came in unexpectedly early, and she asked if he felt like coming out with her and Alistair, but he shook his head, saying the Dorchester wasn’t really his thing.
‘I know,’ was all she said. She assumed he knew why it was that she was going there; not in detail, of course – they both knew not to discuss their work – but he must know that she would not be going if she did not have some kind of mission there. He paused behind her, looking at her in the mirror. For a moment she was about to tell him what lay ahead of her and how she felt sick with apprehension at the task Stefan had given her. ‘Do you ever—’ she started, about to ask him whether he ever found that Stefan gave him things to do that he balked at, but the words were slow in her mouth and at almost the same time he was telling her not to stay out too late.
‘I know it’s fun,’ he was saying, ‘but they are such an odd crowd there.’ She thought she heard in his voice an anxiety about her, about what she had to do, and she stood up and put her arms around him.
‘Bother,’ she said, ‘I’ve put lipstick on your collar.’
‘It’s going into the laundry anyway,’ he said, disengaging himself and picking up a book that was lying by their bed.
By now Nina and Blanchard seemed to have accepted that Alistair and Laura would come over to their table at some point during the evening. Alistair had done most of the work of making them accept their company; he was happy to dance and flirt with Nina, while Laura still felt she faced an uphill struggle to get Blanchard to notice her. But Nina seemed languid that evening, and almost as taciturn as Ingrid, and Alistair went wandering off to the other side of the room to gossip with a journalist he knew. Nina had said the previous week that she would soon be going to visit Sybil in Derbyshire, Laura remembered, but when Laura asked her about the visit, Nina looked vague.
Blanchard, too, seemed distracted, and Laura thought suddenly, as she was drinking her second cocktail, that she was going to give up after that evening and give Stefan back that bug. What was the point of trying to make headway with Nina or Blanchard, or to pretend that she was this girl who wanted to get drunk and dance with people who didn’t even like her much? Just then she noticed that Nina was looking at her with an oddly glassy stare, and she asked if she was all right. Nina nodded, but Laura saw how her gaze wavered even when her head stilled. Nina got up, saying she was going to powder her nose, and Laura got up too. Blanchard asked why girls always went to pee together, and Victor laughed and made some smutty innuendo. As they walked through the room, Laura felt Nina’s hand suddenly on her elbow, a tight pressure. ‘Feeling a bit tired,’ was all Nina said when Laura turned to look at her. They went into the ladies’ powder room; it was large, with little peach-coloured armchairs and a maid whose job it was to lay out the linen towels by the peach basins. It smelt of shit and tuberose perfume. Laura, feeling nauseous, sat down by a basin as Nina went into one of the lavatories. The door was locked. There was silence. Laura was pleating the silk of her dress in her fingers. The silence lengthened. Another woman, middle-aged and respectable in green crepe, came, urinated and left.
‘Nina, my sweet,’ Laura called out, ‘are you all right?’ There was no answer, so she knocked at the lavatory door. Again, no answer. Laura turned around and saw the maid still folding linen towels. ‘My friend is in there – I’m not sure she is all right.’ Why did she have to spell it out? Surely it was obvious that something was wrong. The maid tried the door and knocked too, and then shook her head and left the room. Laura was still knocking and calling when she came back with a key that opened the door from their side. The maid had not said a word. Laura pushed open the door, but something was keeping it closed, and the something was Nina’s foot. Nina had slipped off the lavatory and was on the floor, unconscious. There was vomit on her grey velvet dress. Her underpants were around her calves, her dress rucked up. The maid was pulling up Nina’s underpants and straightening her dress, and Laura was wetting a handkerchief and putting it to Nina’s face, calling her name. ‘I’ll get the doctor,’ said the maid. Nina opened her eyes and gazed at Laura with the same glassy stare as before.
‘Not their doctor,’ she said clearly, ‘my doctor.’
‘I’ll get you to a room,’ Laura said. ‘Blanchard’s room?’
‘Yes, let’s go to Chéri’s room, and he can call my doctor. Ugh,’ and Nina shuddered, turned and vomited again into the lavatory. Laura asked her if she could stand, and then supported her into the corridor and to the elevator, where Nina leant heavily against Laura, so that Laura could smell her tainted breath. She felt repulsed by her. Nina had a key to Blanchard’s room in her purse, but her hands were so shaky that Laura had to open the door and then usher her in. Clearly, the room had been used just before Nina and Blanchard had come down to the ballroom – it was a mess. The bedding was a swirl of linen, there was discarded underwear on the floor, and a bottle of brandy and other things – pill bottles, medicine bottles – on the table by the bed. Nina picked up one of the bottles and shook it, but it was empty. She fell clumsily onto the bed and Laura attempted to straighten it around her.
‘Are you going to throw up again?’ Laura asked, when Nina sat up restlessly.
‘I need Chéri – I need my doctor.’
Laura told Nina to lie down and put the wet handkerchief in her hand so that she could wipe her face. Nina asked her to unzip her dress, and Laura did so. She was not wearing any undergarments except the blue silk underpants, and Laura saw bruises on her skin: a yellowing one on her breast, a fresh purple one on her thigh. Laura straightened up and left the room, telling Nina she was going to get Blanchard.
Walking through the ballroom was like moving across a stage, through the colour and chatter of the crowd, with lines that seemed laid down for her. When she reached Blanchard, she bent down and whispered in his ear that Nina was ill and that she wanted her own doctor. Blanchard got up and Laura went with him, back up to Room 248. He seemed to take in Nina’s condition at a glance, and went to the telephone to call someone. As he did so, Laura went to Nina and wiped her forehead again with the handkerchief, asking, with exaggerated concern, whether she was feeling any better.
‘I’ll go now,’ she said to Nina, with honey in her voice. ‘You ring me if you need me. I’ll leave my number here,’ and she scribbled her telephone number on the pad next to the telephone, noting Blanchard watching her.
He followed her out into the corridor, then asked her exactly what she expected him to ask her, which was to say nothing to anyone.
‘What would I say?’ Laura said with false matter-of-factness, as though every day she saw a drugged girlfriend collapse in the ladies’ room of the Dorchester and left her in the care of her violent bo
yfriend. There was a total lack of surprise or concern in her voice; she was acting, in fact, as she thought Nina herself would act in a similar situation. Blanchard looked at her assessingly, and Laura looked back at him. ‘Maybe Nina needs a rest,’ she said in her blank voice. ‘She was talking about going to visit our friend Sybil in the countryside. It might be a good idea.’ Blanchard nodded. ‘I mean,’ Laura said, ‘I’ll miss her, obviously.’ And then she did something that was so out of character for her it made her feel momentarily dazed, as though she had lost her own sense of reality. As she said ‘I’ll miss her’, she stepped right up to Blanchard, so close her breasts almost touched his chest, and looked directly into his eyes. Then she withdrew and turned and walked down the corridor. She wasn’t quite sure what she had done, but somehow she knew she had made him an offer as directly as it was possible to make one, and had told him that Nina was too much trouble for him.
At the next meeting with Stefan, Laura said little about how things were going, only that she was trying her best. But less than a week later the telephone rang one Wednesday afternoon and Blanchard was speaking to her. ‘Little Nina is gone to the countryside,’ he told her, ‘and I wondered if you would like to have dinner with me?’ Laura agreed to meet him at the Dorchester at eight. As soon as he put down the telephone, Laura put on her coat, calling to Ann that she had to go out to buy some more cigarettes. She went out of the house to a telephone box, where she rang the cigar shop and left a coded message for Stefan. It was beginning to snow, and she felt foolish as well as freezing as she stood in the phone box in her old muskrat coat.
After ten minutes of tense waiting, Stefan called back and Laura told him briefly that she might be able to do it if he could detain Blanchard somewhere at eight.
Her voice was confident as she spoke to him, but as she came back into the house she wished she could pretend to be sick and go to bed and forget about the whole thing. She felt like trash, so she was careful to dress in a way that made her look as sleek as possible. She had bought a fox wrap second-hand a few weeks ago, and she wore it over a plain black dress that Cissie had given her, and a pair of perfect nylons Ellen had sent her. She had to carry a large bag in order to fit in the bugging device, rather than the little purse the outfit demanded. She put tissue paper around it and an American cake of soap in its box on the top. Then, if anyone looked inside, she hoped it might just look as though she had been shopping that day. When she got to the hotel, she leaned over the desk. ‘Mr Blanchard asked me to go up to his room.’
‘He is not there.’
‘He wanted me to wait for him there – Room 248.’
The man knew Laura, of course, how could he not? In the weeks she had been chasing Blanchard, she had been careful to smile at all the staff she met and to tip them lavishly with Stefan’s money. He passed Laura the key as if it was nothing, and she went to the elevator. At Room 248 she knocked first, in case Stefan had not been able to get to Blanchard, and then put the key in the door.
She remembered the disorder of the room when she had accompanied Nina, and in an odd way she was expecting it still to be in the same state, but of course that was all gone: it was hotel clean. There was a large desk under the window, with an onyx lamp on it and a green leather blotting pad. At first she thought of fixing the bug under that, but the telephone was next to the bed, and surely it would be more useful for Stefan to be able to hear Blanchard’s telephone conversations. She sat on the bed, putting her hand behind it, but it was too close to the wall for her to consider gluing the bug behind the headboard. The bedside table was flush against the wall too, so she opened the top drawer to see if there was space to fix it inside somehow. Lying there in the drawer was a pistol, among papers and coins. Laura closed the drawer and stood up. With the sight of the gun, her feeling of suspended animation had shifted. It had only ever been false courage driving her on, she realised; a sense of unreality. But this was real. Fear overwhelmed her.
Just as she put her hand on the door handle to leave, it was rattled from the other side. Blanchard was there, standing bulkily in the door, although it was only quarter past eight.
‘Why are you here?’ he said without preamble.
‘You told me to meet you here.’
‘I didn’t tell you to sneak into my room.’
Laura tried to look innocent and stupid, as she muttered that she was sorry, that she had misunderstood.
‘You should be sorry. Give me my room key.’ He came into the room and shut the door with a slam, before gripping Laura’s wrist with his hand and taking the key out of her fingers. The fear was hot now, filling her stomach.
‘Shall we go down for dinner, then?’ she said, with an awkward attempt at insouciance.
‘A drink first,’ he said. Somehow she had to change the temper of the evening and withdraw the invitation she had made when she had offered her body to him silently a couple of weeks ago. But here she was, in his room, and here he was. Her thoughts dashed and dashed, but she saw no way out.
He was mixing martinis of a kind, pouring cheap gin into glasses and splashing vermouth on top. Laura sat down on the sofa and he gave her a drink, at the same time putting a hand on her knee, pushing her legs open. Instinctively she moved away, stifling a desire to slap him.
‘I’m so sorry, it’s so embarrassing, I’m not feeling very well. I ate oysters at lunchtime – I’m not sure … may I use the …’
‘It’s over there.’
In the bathroom, Laura washed her hands in cold water, wishing she did not have to come out again. She would have to pretend she had been taken ill, she thought. She came out to find him waiting for her by the bed.
‘I’m so sorry, I’m really not well. It’s such a pity; I had been looking forward so much—’
It was as though he had not heard her. He grasped her arm with his hand, bending his face down to hers. Automatically Laura pushed at his chest to get away.
‘I think I’m really unwell.’
‘I think you are playing a game. And girls who play games with me get punished.’
With no more warning, Blanchard threw her face first onto the bed. She felt his hand force her legs apart, ripping the silk of her underwear, and then his fingers were thrusting inside her. Laura screamed, but his other hand was on her mouth, pulling her head back so hard that she could hardly breathe. His fingers were pushing into her so roughly, as though they wanted to rip her softness apart. She found herself limp under him, unable suddenly to resist.
‘You like it like this,’ he grunted. It was terror that prevented her from moving. He moved his hands away from her genitals to undo his flies, positioning himself just above her. Laura moved very slowly under him, turning over and putting her hands up to stroke his shoulders, as if she had succumbed entirely to him, allowing a little moan as if of pleasure to escape her. Somehow, she did not know how, agency had come back to her. She was able to dissemble, she was able to act as if she desired him. He allowed her to move under him, he put his mouth to her breasts and she felt him biting her right nipple through her dress. Then, just as he finished unfastening his trousers, she suddenly flung herself sideways and grasped open the drawer in the bedside table. Before he realised what she was doing, she had the pistol in her hand, pointing it at him. He started back, his exposed penis slowly becoming flaccid.
‘It’s not loaded.’
Without speaking, Laura called his bluff, lowering it a little. He tried to grab for it but she held on, pulling back from him.
‘How did you know it was there?’
‘You left the drawer open.’
He must have known she was lying. But maybe he began to compute each of the potential scenarios ahead of them, as she did. Denunciation and counter-denunciation, and possible exposure. If he began to wonder who Laura was working for, whether she was a Fascist spy come to demand more information, or whether she had come to him from the Soviets to demand he come back to them, or whether, more likely, she was from the Americans �
�� whatever conclusion he came to, the realisation must also have followed that no knowledge was good knowledge. It was better if they remained ignorant, if they stopped here.
He sat up and rebuttoned his trousers.
‘All right, Mrs Last. Put that down. Look, I will open the door to the corridor and we will talk quietly. Let’s have a real drink rather than these filthy cocktails.’
Laura still had the pistol in her hand while he poured two glasses of cognac. She didn’t want this drink any more than she had wanted the first, but strangely she still felt a kind of social pressure to remain here in the room in a dignified way for a few minutes, trying to recapture a semblance of normal behaviour. When they were both holding their glasses, he raised his. ‘To …?’
‘To our leaders?’
‘To our leaders, Mrs Last.’ Neither of them mentioned who those leaders might be as they drank. He said nothing as she got up, smoothed down her hair and left the room.
As Laura let herself into the house that evening, she realised, as though looking down on herself from above, that her hand was shaking as she turned the key in the door. She paused by the telephone in the hall, wondering why, all of a sudden, she thought of picking it up and speaking to someone – but there was nobody. Winifred was probably working, or out drinking somewhere; she could not place a long-distance call to Ellen or Mother out of the blue, and Florence … why did Florence’s strong voice recur to her now? Florence was long gone, her marches and speeches blown back into the past.
Surely it was Edward she needed. Yes, she thought as she went upstairs, dragging her hand on the banister, if only she could come to rest in his arms. She needed his understanding of the necessity of their work, a necessity that could outrun shame and failure. He was not in the bedroom. She pulled off her now hated black dress, threw out her torn underwear, and put on a grey utility dress which was the only spring garment she had been able to get with her ration book. She went downstairs, into the living room, put on the gramophone and poured herself a drink. Why didn’t he come home?
A Quiet Life Page 23