‘I hear your trip to Iowa went very well,’ Monica said to the ambassador, simply the expected words at the expected moment, as he paused near to her.
‘It wasn’t too bad,’ Inverchapel conceded, and then launched into a would-be amusing anecdote which, Laura thought, must have been trotted out a dozen times already that evening. ‘The slight difficulty was that I had asked to stay in a farm for three days, and I’d brought as a gift a quart of Scotch and a quart of Schnapps – I thought the father looked a little tight-lipped. It was only later I discovered they were all strict teetotals.’ Inverchapel acknowledged their smiles, and walked on to more interesting conversations.
And there was Kit at the door, scanning the crowd, so she moved towards him. She had known he was coming tonight, but he looked a little embarrassed, mumbling something about how sorry he was that he hadn’t looked in on her recently, how glad he was to see her here this evening, and that he was planning to leave to go back to Boston at the weekend. She knew that his attempt to break into journalism had not gone well, and his graceful stance seemed to slump as he said he was not sure what he was going to do next. ‘But Joe’s coming tonight too – you know he’s doing well now. Have you seen him?’
And there Joe was as if on cue, walking into the party behind them. It seemed a little odd that neither Kit nor Joe had been in touch after the stillbirth, but there, that was the nature of such a miserable experience. Nobody wanted to mention it; nobody wanted to say the wrong thing. She wanted to show them it didn’t matter, and she put on a friendly manner as she asked Joe how he was finding Washington, and as he turned to her she felt warmed by the unforced enthusiasm of his response. ‘Living in a shoebox, working all the hours that God sends, going to parties every night to gawp at the world’s players – how could I not love it? And you?’
Laura tried to match his energetic tone, telling him that they were lucky enough to have found somewhere to live that was not a shoebox. As she told the story of how they had found their Georgetown house, she mentioned the name of the professor who owned it, and Kit laughed.
‘You’re in his house, the mad old right-wing conspiracist?’
Laura was surprised that both Kit and Joe seemed to know exactly who Professor Runcie was. Joe was talking about one of his books, which he seemed to admire, while grabbing a couple of glasses of champagne from a passing tray and putting one in Laura’s hand.
‘He sees Reds behind every bush and up every tree, nobody takes him seriously,’ Kit said.
‘A lot of what he says is pretty sensible,’ Joe demurred, but Laura could not tell whether he was genuinely disagreeing with Kit or simply arguing for the sake of conversation. He went on talking, saying that people in Washington were simply too blind to how far the Russians would go, and Kit was saying something about how it was ridiculous to exaggerate the threat, and that even Inverchapel had been happy to have a relationship with Stalin when he was ambassador in Moscow. Laura was casting about in her mind for a way to turn the conversation, but when she asked if they were likely to go to Portstone that summer as Washington was simply too miserable when it got hot, she was ignored.
‘If you want a good story about Reds,’ Kit was saying to Joe now, ‘you should go and see that friend of mine I mentioned, Carswell – not actually a friend, but I knew him at college. He used to be a communist and he says there are communists even in the State Department now, that it’s almost like a club – all nonsense, I’m sure.’
Despite another little gambit from Laura about what they thought of the party, Joe was caught by this story and was leaning towards Kit asking more about the man. But thank goodness, here was Edward walking over to them. In this crowd, he was as Laura remembered him from London parties, urbane, sure-footed, surrounded by the group, by people who thought they knew him. And here were Monica and Archie again, Monica in a puffball of a dress, Archie talking as soon as he reached them. ‘I’m going to blame you for that editorial about British diplomats,’ he was saying to Joe. ‘I saw your hand in it. “The good fellowship atmosphere of a very uppity club” indeed, “men who understand the faded diplomacy of Kipling’s age better than the aspirations of a modern government”.’
Joe came back at Archie, insisting that surely he would be the first to admit that he wasn’t on the wavelength of the American way of doing politics. And Kit was quick to back him up, quoting further from the article, as if he felt in some way responsible for Joe and how the others saw his work. Archie was about to respond, when Monica broke in.
‘For heaven’s sake, do you have to talk work here?’ It felt as if she were dragging, as couples so often do, the trail of some previous altercation into this new arena.
‘More drinks?’ Edward said in a vague voice.
‘I think they’re finishing up now,’ said Monica.
‘Tell you what,’ Joe said, following Edward’s reluctance to end the party, ‘someone at the Washington Post told me about a great little club just opened up on U Street, with a nigger band that plays the best—’
‘Or we could just go to the Shoreham – it’s kind of pretty there in the evenings.’
‘The club sounds fine,’ Laura said, and noted a rather surprised look on Monica’s face. It was not usually Laura who wanted to go on. ‘Let’s go there.’
‘I said I’d meet Suzanne later – but I can telephone from the club.’ And as they left the party, Joe was explaining to Laura that Suzanne was his new girlfriend, a fine girl he had met at the newspaper.
The air in the evening streets was already filled with the warmth of the summer ahead which intensified as they walked into the dark, crowded club. Here Laura thought they would be conspicuous, all so formally dressed from the previous party, but nobody seemed to be looking at them as they found a small table at the side of the room. The nigger band, as Joe had put it, played in a way she had never heard before, but she liked it; it seemed to mute rather than exacerbate the jagged edges of her thoughts.
Soon Joe’s girlfriend Suzanne arrived, and Laura was immediately impressed; she was still in her work clothes, but whereas some girls would have been self-conscious in that blue skirt and cropped jacket next to the other women in the club in their bright evening wear, she seemed to be bestowing the pleasure of her company on others rather than asking for their approval. In other words, Laura thought, watching her, she was a lot richer than Joe and carried her class with a kind of thoughtless confidence. Joe naturally danced with Suzanne, and Monica was swept off by some stranger, so while Edward and Kit seemed happy simply to sit and drink, Laura got up to dance with Archie. At first he tried to talk to her as they danced, but it was irritating when he put his face close to her ear and his voice buzzed, and she was glad when he gave up and was content to turn and turn to the jittery music, and it was well into the small hours when they finally found taxis to go home.
As they went up the stairs into their house, Laura thought Edward was so drunk that he was oblivious to anything, but then he spoke as they were getting into bed. ‘Poor Kit,’ he said. Why on earth, Laura wondered, did he pity Kit? ‘He’s obviously in love with Joe, isn’t he – and Joe not a bit interested in men. Poor Kit.’
Laura turned with interest to Edward, asking more; he never gossiped about people and this interpretation of Kit’s behaviour fascinated her. But Edward was already falling asleep. Laura lay awake for a while, wondering why she had not seen it herself; she remembered how she had been surprised, too, when Winifred had told her long ago about Giles’s love interests. Kit had seemed languid and disconnected from others when she first met him, but she had noticed a kind of anxiety when he was with Joe, an eagerness to ensure that Joe was happy. Was that love? Surely love was the great blooming of joy she had known with Edward … Why had her thoughts run like that, back into the past, to the kiss on Hampstead Heath? He was here, now, and they had come through so much. Soon the clouds would lift again. She turned in bed, pressing her breasts against Edward’s back and fitting her legs behind his
as he slept, trying to find a point of restfulness against him.
That evening of drinking and chatter and dancing was not the only evening like it that month – or even that week. This seemed to be Laura’s path now, and as the time passed she realised that there was no point trying to step off it – her world was to be the world of the other embassy wives. So during the days she shopped and lunched and helped Monica with her charity; and she and Edward went out evening after evening, avoiding the quietness of the little house with its empty bedroom on the top floor. She started French lessons, as Edward thought his next posting might be in Paris, and surprised herself with her progress; she had so little else to do. Sometimes she went to visit Ellen and Tom in Boston, but Edward rarely went with her, and now and again she had lunch with Joe near to his newspaper. The world of the newspaper and the world of the embassy touched in enough places to mean that they soon had stories and gossip to share.
But it was something else that drew them to one another. It was perhaps that sense of being out of place in the worlds where they had found themselves; to Joe, Laura could recount some story about Inverchapel’s poor attempts at humour or he could tell her about a society hostess who had tried to get him into bed, and they could sit there in a little restaurant with a shabby front and good spaghetti, knowing that they would never really be part of the circles that seemed to embrace them.
One day Laura got out her old Leica camera and took it with her on a walk through Rock Creek Park. She started to photograph trees and their yearning reflections in the water, but she realised that bored her, and a few weeks later she asked Monica if she could photograph her children. Then something began to happen. Barbara and Harriet were intrigued by her and she by them; they were seven and five years old and she was fascinated by their physical confidence – they were always cartwheeling or skipping down the long corridor of the apartment or through the communal gardens. She tried to capture that freedom of movement, so different from the constraints on adult women. Most of the photographs were no good, but she was proud of one where the girls were doing handstands against a wall of the apartment. She didn’t show it to anyone, as they looked odd with their upside-down faces and strained arms, but she could not forget it. On a whim, she registered for a course on photography that was being held at the local library, and learned how to develop her pictures herself.
As she settled into these limited grooves of activity, she forgot all about the reactivation protocol, so that she was confused at first when, months and months later, somebody rang to ask about her sister and called himself Alex.
She had not returned to the Botanical Gardens since that rainy day of the first abortive meeting. Bright and busy now, it was a poor place for secrecy, she thought. She walked around for a while without being approached, and began to think that this was just a test to make sure that she was still in contact, rather than a real meeting. So she stopped holding herself in readiness, and sat down on a bench which was splashed with sunlight and with blossom that had blown from a nearby tree, and opened her magazine. These new clothes, with their boned bodices and stiff skirts – she liked their look of control, and she was already imagining herself in a dress with a particularly exaggerated line when the same short man as before came and sat next to her and shook out his newspaper before addressing her. ‘We need you to come in again.’
Laura said nothing, turning the pages of her magazine, hearing the words resonate in her mind. The man went on talking. That was all right, there was nobody near them to overhear.
‘He keeps saying he can’t leave documents with us to be microfilmed, that it is not safe to have them out for more than a few hours. And – we are worried. This town is small. There is nowhere to hide. He is not looking out – he is … is he drunk very often?’
Laura remained silent for a moment, considering. The cherry tree was all in blossom across the lawn, thick and pink now, but the flowers would be brown in a few days. ‘Yes, he is drunk most nights.’
‘He is missing meetings, he is unreliable.’
How alcohol and grief can transform a man.
‘Mrs Rostov says she sees you at the hairdresser. She’s the wife of another resident.’
Laura was surprised. She went to the same hairdresser regularly; she liked the way he made her hair look thicker and glossier, even when it had thinned after her pregnancy. A couple of times that striking Russian woman had nodded at her there, but Laura had not known who she was.
‘If he brings you the documents, you can retype them in your house, and then take them to the hairdresser. We will bring you a bag like the one Mrs Rostov carries, and then you can swap very easily. You can go there every Tuesday at eleven.’
‘I used to photograph them in London.’
‘You can do this work?’
‘Yes, but you’ll need to supply the film for the camera. It’s a particular type – for a Minox Riga, manufactured 1938.’
‘You don’t know how hard it is in this town now – I can’t meet you all the time to pass things. We will get it if we can and Mrs Rostov will put it in the bag, but otherwise go ahead with copying them – can you?’
‘There’s a typewriter in our house.’ There was, an old Smith Corona, left by the professor on the desk in the small study next to the living room.
‘Contact me only in a true emergency.’
They fell silent for a while, as some people walked too close, but she did not leave, just turned the pages of her Vogue without reading them. When it was possible to talk again, he fed her a new emergency contact procedure. She was to telephone only from a public telephone box, a number which was written on the newspaper he was leaving on the bench, and which she was to destroy once she had learned the number, and he would find her at or near to the junction of M and 31st Street an hour later. Laura memorised the instructions expressionlessly, and soon he got up. She could tell he did not trust her. But she knew better than to try to reassure him.
That evening Edward came in late, as ever, and without saying much ate the lamb casserole which Kathy had made. He took some documents out of his briefcase as he finished the meal. Laura reached out for them, and he held onto them. ‘I wish it didn’t have to be like this,’ he said. ‘Involving you. It’s so … I wanted it all to be …’
Laura shook her head. This was no time for nostalgia. That was what they were getting wrong, looking back instead of forward. She would find a way to stop that now. She took the documents and went over to the typewriter. She had tried it that afternoon. The ribbon was fine, and the action was satisfying, banging hard with every stroke; you could not be half-hearted about typing on such a heavy machine. As she rattled through the first page, Edward stood up and took another book from the shelves. Laura felt her back stiffen as she typed. She wished that she could clean this house of the brooding, alien presence that lay in the professor’s books. But she said nothing.
She typed, letter by letter. You can type without understanding what you are typing, and this was particularly hard to follow, being the details of some alien chemical processes. ‘Repeated distillation by sublimation and rapid condensation of vapors,’ she typed, ‘inversely proportional to the partial vapor pressure sustained by a molecule without condensation.’ She noted, but did not type out the headings of each page, the stamps saying Atomic Energy Commission, security level – top. Instead, she went on page by page typing the descriptions and then the long equations. After she pulled each page from the typewriter she had to check it through. It took a long while, and all the time there was no need to speak, just to be busy. When she had finished, late in the evening, she opened the top drawer of the professor’s desk, which locked with an old key, and put the copies in there, and handed the originals back to Edward.
‘I’ll go up to bed.’
He looked up from the book he was reading with eyes that seemed bloodshot. ‘I forgot: Nick – you remember Nick – is coming to stay next week, to see some American friends. He’s pretty miserable in Londo
n at the moment. I think he might be hoping for a transfer out here. I told him to come to dinner on Monday, would that be all right?’
Yes, Laura did remember Nick, although the memory came with no fondness. He had hardly ever even acknowledged her existence. But here was another plan, another thing to do, and she agreed with some energy, suggesting other guests – would Nick enjoy meeting Joe? They owed Archie and Monica so many invitations too; they were always being invited to their big apartment near the river. But as Laura ran through other possibilities, Edward was standing up, putting on his coat. ‘Where are you going?’
‘I have to get these papers back on the right desk before tomorrow. Don’t wait up.’
‘At this time?’
‘Don’t worry, I’ve got keys.’
His steps went quickly and quietly down the hall. Laura stood there for a second and then went downstairs to get a cookbook. She would make this dinner for Nick a fine evening. Ellen had given her a book of recipes for entertaining that she had never used, but now she was going to make something welcoming. She got into bed with the cookbook and read through pages of recipes that seemed much too complicated for her and Kathy to put together. By the time Edward came back she was half asleep, and he was gone early in the morning, but he reappeared on Saturday evening with more papers for her to type, and again on Sunday. She wondered what kind of excuses he was giving for haunting the office all weekend, but that was not her concern.
A Quiet Life Page 29