‘It’s over,’ he muttered as flame met cigarette. ‘He must go tonight. They’re planning to interrogate him on Monday. Valance, the man who broke Fuchs, will do it.’
Laura drew on the cigarette, and then as other passengers got on she went to look for a seat, holding back her thoughts. None of the compartments was empty. They could not talk any more. Soon, outside the window, the suburban muddle of London began. Buddleia and cow parsley along the railway tracks. A magpie flying too close to the window. She got up and back into the corridor. Stefan was still standing there, smoking, and she went up to him. She had to risk it. Under the rattle of the train he spoke to her.
‘They broke an old telegram that pointed to him. One of our men heard about it in Washington; he broke out two days ago, arrived here last night.’
‘How can he get away, if they know?’
‘They aren’t setting a tail in Patsfield. They don’t know he knows, they don’t want to alert him, they are only watching him in town. He can go tonight, from the house, by car.’
Laura flicked ash out of the window, and asked what she should do.
‘Make him go tonight. Hang on until Monday before you tell anyone. We won’t be able to talk to you for a long time after he goes, probably, but we’ll hold on for you. Give him something – give him something for a signal that another agent can show to you. I might have to go over with him.’ The train was pulling into a station, and Laura went back into a compartment. Being seen here, talking to a stranger, it was too dangerous.
At Victoria, they walked in opposite directions. For her cover, Laura made her way to a little shop she knew in Jermyn Street and bought Edward’s favourite shaving cream and a new badger shaving brush. She thought of lunching in Fortnum’s, but she had no appetite; London was a great roar of indifferent noise and too many people, any one of whom might be dangerous to her. She was glad to get back, but when she got out of the taxi at Patsfield and put the key back into the door, she felt her hips aching. She was exhausted. Helen had finished cleaning, and the house smelt of the baked cakes and jasmine; Laura had put a few sprigs of the flowers into a small blue vase on the hall table. As she walked past the telephone, it rang again; she let it ring three times, but thankfully it went on ringing, and she picked it up.
‘Darling – just to let you know, Nick’s in town. I’m going to bring him up to dinner tonight.’
‘Tonight! Edward, you can’t. And – Nick …’
The line went dead. Laura longed to ring him back to explain, but she couldn’t think how to speak on the telephone without alerting possible listeners. Above all, it was essential that nobody realised that he knew anything at all. She would have to delay telling him what was going on until after Nick left. But what would those few hours mean for the plan?
Helen had left the cakes on a cooling rack in the kitchen. Once Laura had turned them onto plates, she saw how uneven they were, and when she put them together with cream and jam, the sloping tops meant that the whole thing listed to one side, and the cream, which she had not whipped stiffly enough, began to spill out of the middle. It was surprising how annoying it was, this failure. You can’t do anything right, Laura thought, and again she noticed how her pelvis was aching. A warm bath might relax her.
Lying there in the cooling water, she saw the shape of her belly change as the baby shifted and pushed, as if it too were unable to settle. She hauled herself out and wrapped herself in a towel, and out of the window she saw a car sitting on the road outside the house. Just sitting there. It had to be one of Stefan’s men, keeping an eye on the house. It must be.
Once she had dressed she took the bowl of peas that she was to shell for supper out into the garden. Sitting on the terrace, she podded them, trying to make her mind slow down with the repetitive movements. That was where she was when the light began to fade, and Edward came home. He walked onto the terrace in his dark suit, his homburg in one hand, pulling off his tie. Sir Edward Last in the making, or the NKVD’s precious Virgil, she thought as he came. In the fading light he was still the tall young man she had met at Sybil’s party, the man who had listened to her. He knelt down beside her and took her hands and put his face to her belly. ‘Be good to your mother,’ his muffled voice said.
‘I saw Stefan today,’ Laura said, pulling away from him.
‘I know what you’re going to say. There’s someone out in the road, in a car.’
‘Stefan said there would be somebody, keeping an eye out.’
Edward stood up. He seemed to be considering. ‘Do you want me to go?’
The evening around them was alive with the soft alertness of squirrels rustling in the bushes and a blackbird flickering in and out of the trees. The scream of the doorbell broke the peace.
‘God, is that Nick?’ Laura said. ‘How are we going to get rid of him?’
‘He’s coming out with me – not all the way – but to make it look like a jaunt to start with.’
‘Nick? Nick is—?’
‘He’s one of us.’
Shock flooded through Laura. ‘Why did you never tell me before?’
‘He got me into the whole thing.’
Laura could not take in this new information, and as Edward went to answer the door, she went into the kitchen and put the bowl of peas and the bag of empty pods down on the table, next to the absurd cake which had now slid completely over to one side. Nick came in and Laura saw in an instant how the exodus was exciting to him, how he was buoyant with nerves and expectation.
‘I can’t believe this is where you’ve made your nest,’ he was saying with sarcastic relish. ‘A return to my childhood neighbourhood – how sweet.’ So he was the university friend with whom Edward must have walked in the woods, many years ago.
‘You should eat before you go,’ Laura said, going to get out bread, ham and a half-open bottle of wine, ignoring the celebratory champagne in the icebox. Nick immediately helped himself, but Edward went out and upstairs, and Laura followed him. When they reached the bedroom, he put his arms around her; it was impossible for her to know whether there was true communion in that kiss – it was so laden with fear and memory, it hardly existed as a present moment. Edward turned and packed a few things into a small case. He put the radio on, as loudly as he could, and she picked up a small framed photograph that sat on the bedside table. It was a picture of the house that she had taken last summer, when the roses were out on the walls. She opened the back of the frame to take it out, tore it in half and handed one half to him. ‘Give that to Stefan or whoever it is when you know you’re through, to get in touch with me.’ He took it, but he hardly seemed to register it.
‘Stefan suggested it,’ Laura said.
He put it in his pocket. ‘Try not to be alone,’ he said.
‘Mother’s coming next week anyway, remember, to help with the birth.’ At the word ‘birth’, they were unable to bear the conversation and they went downstairs, to find Nick standing in the hall.
‘Look at you and your stiff upper lips,’ he said. In front of him, Laura found it necessary not to cry. They were looking for coats, they were going to the lavatory, they were downing a last half-glass of wine. She went with them to the doorstep, heard Nick swear as he tripped over a stone, and saw the lights of the car disappear down the road, into the damp night.
5
Even now, Laura could not allow herself to feel alone. She had to act precisely in character, in every way, for as long as possible. She had put up with Edward’s absences often enough. Indeed, she knew that the fact that she had always put up with them with such apparent insouciance would be an important building block in the story that she would now create, a story that might be the key to their survival.
Although she still felt the physical exhaustion that had troubled her since the morning, she was too restless to lie down. Instead, she sat on the sofa for a while, listening to the radio and sipping automatically at a small glass of whisky. Then she began to go through Edward’s large walnut des
k which they had put in a back bedroom. She did so with a methodical bitterness, knowing that if there was anything there that was incriminating in any way, it was essential that she found it before MI5 did. And so she went through every paper, every notebook, and then through every garment in the wardrobe and every coat hanging in the hall, checking pockets, feeling linings. She found letters from Giles and Alistair, which they had sent to him in Washington, and through them she read for the first time the sad story of Giles’s downfall. She found a card from Nick, wishing him luck on his work at the American Department – ‘though I feel the charms of the Newfoundland have palled on you in more ways than one!’ – and she took the card and burned it in the grate, pounding the ashes with the poker until they were a tiny heap of nothing. She found lines of poetry that Edward had scribbled in the back of a notebook over the last few months, featuring trains and gardens, hills and birdsong, and heard his voice in them. At dawn she ate a piece of the pathetic birthday cake, and fell asleep on the sofa, only waking at about noon.
It would have been quite in character for her to have telephoned Sybil or Winifred during the day, but she held herself away from the telephone, in case they asked about Edward, in case someone had heard that Nick had disappeared – in case the chase began. It was raining, a dreary drizzle, but she made herself walk down to the village and pick up some provisions she did not need in the local store. She stood in the shop for a while, talking to the tall untidy woman she knew a little, who said she was thinking of setting up an amateur dramatic society in Patsfield. Would Laura be interested? After the baby, obviously. Laura was not interested, but she was glad to talk, to hear about the plans, to walk slowly by the woman’s side back down the high street. Letting herself into the house, its silence oppressed her. She could not bear to make herself a meal, but stood by the kitchen table, eating handfuls of raw peas, and then two more slices of the cake, the crumbs falling onto her belly. Even though she knew it was a dangerous thing to do, she couldn’t help herself, she needed to speak to someone, and she went to telephone her mother.
‘No, nothing is wrong yet, but I wondered – you know, I just have a feeling that it’s going to happen soon. I know we planned for you to come next week, when the Caesarean is booked, but how would you feel—?’
‘I’ll see if I can change the flight,’ Mother said. Her immediate response threw Laura back in her mind to that time four years ago when her mother had risen to the crisis after the stillbirth. As she replaced the telephone receiver, she found herself kneeling on the floor in the hall, gripping her own wrists painfully in an effort to keep hold of her calm.
The next morning, she went to church. She had been in once or twice before, for Easter and carol services. She liked the whitewashed simplicity of its interior, the airy setting up on the hill. But the regular congregants were standoffish with her, since neither she nor Edward were regulars. There was no presence there for her in the coloured glass and the scent of lilac, but it was good to be with other people and she stayed this time for the coffee and cookies, seeing again the woman who had talked to her about the amateur theatrics. When she got back to the house, she went straight to the darkroom. She had found some old negatives among Edward’s papers, old photographs from school. As she printed the pictures, she saw his young face looking up at her, unshadowed.
It was another sleepless night, characterised by fear and heartburn. But finally she could act: at nine in the morning she telephoned the Foreign Office and asked for Edward, and when she was told he was not there, she asked if she could speak to Archie Platt. Her mouth seemed dry as she said that she had not seen Edward since Friday evening and had thought he must have stayed the weekend in town. ‘I hope he’s not ill or …’
‘God, what a time for him to behave like this,’ Archie said. ‘I’ll pass the word along and we’ll have him ring as soon as he gets in.’
The prints in the darkroom were dry. She brought one to the house and propped it on the mantelpiece. She did not think Edward had taken a photograph of her with him. But maybe that was a sign that he didn’t think they would be long parted. She threw the stale cake in the bin before Helen came and changed her dress which, she suddenly realised, catching sight of herself in the hall mirror, she had worn all weekend; it had a stain on the front. She must look normal; she must look as though she had slept, as though she was the usual Laura.
It was after lunch when Archie finally rang back, a new tension in his usually lazy voice. ‘Look, everyone’s a bit concerned that he hasn’t turned up here either. Could I put Spall on the telephone? He’s one of our chaps – looks after this kind of thing.’ The receiver was slippery in Laura’s hand as she waited for Bill Spall to come on the telephone and introduce himself. He asked her when she had last seen Edward and where he had said he was going.
The next day, in the consulting room, the doctor measured and listened. His hands were cold on her skin. Turning away from her, looking at papers on his desk as she pulled down her dress, Dr Turner said that they would go ahead with the Caesarean as planned, a week on Thursday. Laura felt dismissed; she had liked that momentary sensation of being looked after. Outside the consulting room the world returned, too sharp, too loud, as she walked down the steps into Harley Street.
She drove the short distance through London to Sybil’s house. When Bill Spall had asked her to meet him the following day she had immediately suggested that they could go to Chester Square. Would Toby and Sybil not be a kind of protection for her? They both sat with her as Spall talked, and often interrupted him in their confident tones. Spall asked Laura to describe what had happened on Friday evening, and Laura told it the way she knew she would be telling it from now on: Nick, an old friend, nothing to that, the two of them coming back for a drink after work, then back to town in Nick’s car for dinner – and why not, it was Edward’s birthday; she could not do much in her condition. Yes, Edward often went to the club after work with his friends; yes, he was rather unreliable; certainly, if he had wanted to stay up in town for the weekend it was unusual of him not to telephone her, but she had assumed nothing was wrong. She had been rather tired out recently, it was nice for her to be able to rest. She had only really begun to worry on Sunday, and then …
It was Toby who tried to turn the interview around. Irritable and impatient, he began to question Spall, wanting to know exactly what the Foreign Office was doing to find Edward and Nick. So Spall told them that Nick’s car had been traced to St Malo, and two men answering the description of Edward and Nick had been seen on the ferry that connected with the train to Paris. There, he said, the trail had gone cold – but the French police were involved now. The French police, Toby said with a groan, as if they were talking about comedy characters. Paris! Sybil said, folding her lips together and straightening her back. Laura could see the judgement forming in her expression. Had Edward gone off on an unforgivable alcoholic binge with a well-known pervert and drunk? Was he right now sleeping it off in some French gutter? If Edward had not been one of them, her own brother-in-law, the verdict might have escaped her lips. As it was, there was enough bad feeling in the room to bring the conversation to a halt quite quickly.
After Spall had gone, Laura found herself longing to go too. She had to stay for a while, though, to allow Toby and Sybil to circle around what had happened and try to situate it in everyday life. Toby remembered how he had once gone with a friend to a house party in Cumberland, and Sybil had mistaken the date, and hadn’t known where he was all Saturday. ‘It came out all right in the end,’ he said, and Laura felt a deep coldness within her as she thought that, for the very first time in their lives, something was not going to come out all right. She had to escape their expectation that she would stay with them, now that the house in Patsfield was empty. ‘My mother is arriving tomorrow, you know,’ she had to say more than once. ‘I’d rather be there, really – in case Edward telephones, or comes back tonight.’
‘Surely he’ll guess where you are,’ Sybil said,
but her insistence on this point seemed to be tempered, Laura thought, by her own growing anger with what she thought Edward had done, and after tea Laura was able to escape.
During that night, as she moved in and out of sleep, dogged by heartburn and cramp in her legs, unable to find a comfortable way to lie, Laura found the conversation with Spall playing again and again in her head. Stefan had said that the man who broke Fuchs was to break Edward this week. He had mentioned his name; it wasn’t Spall, but Valiant, something like that. Stefan had been quite sure that the code-breaking in Washington had pointed straight to the truth, and yet Spall seemed so unsure about what he was handling – it was almost as if he had no evidence at all. Perhaps he had not been given all the material. Perhaps he was bluffing to catch Laura out. Or perhaps he knew the truth, but saw Laura as irrelevant to it and believed there had been no need to tell her or ask her anything. She saw herself as she had been that afternoon, sitting on the sofa in Sybil’s room with her hands clasped over her huge belly: the epitome of femininity, alien, outside whatever masculine narrative, whether of espionage or alcoholism, the Foreign Office was constructing from Edward’s disappearance. A pregnant woman is even more invisible than other women, Laura thought as she fell asleep, or rather, only her pregnancy is visible.
She felt that truth even more forcefully when Mother stepped into the house the next day. Mother was with Aunt Dee, who had met her at the airport and driven them both down to Patsfield. As soon as the two sisters looked at her, Laura was aware that this was the one thing that united the three women: the life inside her, the experience of motherhood. They stood in the hall as Laura explained the extraordinary news of Edward’s disappearance, but as if that was immaterial they began to ask her how she was feeling, and made her go and sit down in the living room while Dee helped Polly to unpack.
It was a relief to hear them going upstairs; to have voices in the house again. Laura had asked Helen to prepare a cold lunch, and how good it was that the sisters’ reminiscences and anecdotes rather than Laura’s strange situation dominated conversation over that lunch. Laura had never seen her mother and aunt together before, and despite her own self-involvement, she was intrigued. She saw how they were trying to orient themselves against one another. Mother, she saw, might have stood once in the same relationship to Dee that she had to Ellen, as the plaintive younger sister; but now they were older, both widowed, both long past their shared childhoods, they were looking at one another with new eyes. And the fact that Mother already had two grandchildren, and was now expecting a third, undeniably gave her a kind of seniority. They talked about pregnancy, about birth, about the pleasures of young children, as they ate ham and salad and asked Laura about the house. This ignorant calm could not last long, Laura knew.
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