And with the press camped by her door Laura could not imagine how Stefan was ever going to reach her. How would she receive any message that was more informative than Edward’s anodyne telegram? There could be no straightforward escape for her now, no flight over the borders under cover of night. No wonder she looked strung out, but of course she could say nothing of that to Dr Turner. She smiled and said yes, she would try to rest more, she would think about where they could go for a holiday.
On the way back to Patsfield, Rosa whining on her grandmother’s lap as Laura drove, Mother picked up the subject. ‘He’s right,’ she said. ‘Never being able to have a normal day – not able to go for a walk or go shopping or anything – you can’t go on like this. He said your nerves are all to pieces, that you’re not recovering properly from the birth.’ Out of the window Laura saw that reporter with the longish hair, whose face she might have found quite attractive had he not posed such a threat to her, walking down the village high street, talking to the woman who had been keen on amateur dramatics. Laura realised that she never stopped watching out in this way now, she was never unaware of being watched, of watching the watchers. Her mother was right, it could not go on.
When they got into the house, it was nearly lunchtime. Rosa began to get restless, and while Mother and Aunt Dee ate, Laura was pacing the floor, trying to calm her. ‘Let Helen take her for a while,’ her mother said, but Laura believed that Helen would unsettle her, and it was easier to hold her herself, carrying her through the maze of her tiredness until she reached sleep and Laura could go upstairs and put her into her cot. Then she went down and ate some cold, tasteless chicken pie while Mother and Aunt Dee talked.
She had noticed how the relationship between Mother and Aunt Dee had grown over the last few months here. They liked to drift back into the past, and Laura could catch echoes of the young girls of the Edwardian age they had once been, the dreams and ideas that had fuelled their youth. But then Laura would hear them talk about the excruciating present, and they were unable to sidestep the dead ends of their lives: the unfulfilling marriages and bereavements, the children lost to a strange confusion of modernity and abandonment. Giles and Winifred and herself all became rolled up into the same narrative of anxiety, while only Ellen, with her apparently perfect family life, was outside their complicated tales of worry and woe.
But at all times they tried to avoid the mystery around Edward. That taint of espionage, those suspicions of homosexuality were too filthy and complicated for them to want to discuss. Laura could see how hard her mother tried to focus on the needs of the moment, rather than thinking of what might lie behind the disappearance. She knew that strategy very well; it was the one she had used for years. You must keep your gaze on the immediate scene: the plates that needed clearing, the dresses that needed ironing, the vases that needed fresh water, while the clouds above you gathered and dispersed and gathered again.
Now, they were focused on the idea that Laura must get away from Patsfield. Aunt Dee had the solution, one that she had been putting forward for some weeks already: they should go and stay with Winifred.
‘She says she knows lots of quiet towns around Geneva – you know the sort of thing, mountains, hotels – she can take time off work and settle us in. I haven’t forgotten my French, so there won’t be any problem finding our way around,’ Dee was saying.
‘It’s not a bad idea – the Alps, do you remember our first skiing lesson when we were at school there?’
‘I could hardly stay upright. What do you think, Laura, shall I tell Winifred we’ll come soon?’
Before they made any certain plans, Laura said, she would need to talk to Bill Spall. She had promised to stay in touch with the Foreign Office, after all. Mother and Aunt Dee shied away from that statement, and Laura waited until they were settled in the living room with their cups of tea before she went to the telephone. She did not really want them to overhear her conversation with Spall, but in the event it was truncated. ‘I just need to get away for a bit,’ Laura tried to explain. ‘My doctor said—’
‘I’ll call you back,’ he said. But when the telephone rang later, the voice was not his. ‘I’m calling from Mr Valance’s office,’ a woman said. ‘He’d like to come and see you this week. He’ll come to your house tomorrow.’
Valance. That was the name. Laura had had no sense, up to now, that anyone in the security services was interested in what she might or might not know. She had not been questioned. The house had not been searched. The statements made by Herbert Morrison and Anthony Eden and others in Parliament about Edward had been made without any reference to Laura Last. You are just the wife, Laura thought to herself, you are nothing to them. But Valance was the man whom Edward and Stefan had feared, and neither of them was here to advise her. As she walked the corridors that night, holding a fussy Rosa, inhaling her scent, longing for her to rest, she wondered whether now it was the beginning of the end.
As the black Austin parked in the drive outside the house the next day, Laura was rather glad to see from an upstairs window that the photographer who staked the house night and day was trying to snatch a picture of the man who got out, and that his driver was having to go out and remonstrate with him, explaining no doubt that while Edward’s family was fair game, you could not photograph members of His Majesty’s secret services. Laura was waiting for him in the living room, holding Rosa. She had tried, in a way that felt unfamiliar to her now, to dress well and to put on make-up, but the face that looked back at her from the mirror seemed changed – not just tired, but flattened, worn down by the overwhelming events of the last few months, and there were silver hairs showing along her parting.
As soon as Valance came in, Laura disliked him. He was a large man who might once have been good-looking, with a shock of strikingly white hair, but whose jowly face now looked doglike and whose belly strained at his jacket. There was something about him, indeed, that seemed familiar, but Laura was not sure what it was. She went out and gave Rosa to Mother, and returned to the room.
‘Would you like some tea?’
‘Let’s just get down to business, shall we?’ he said. He had a voice which wanted to be as certain in its vowel sounds as Toby’s or Edward’s, but there was a memory in it of a regional accent which Laura could not place. He shut the door. ‘Let’s not start with Mr Last. Let’s start with you. Tell me about your involvement with communism.’
The shock was physical, in the pumping of her heart and the dryness of her mouth. Given Spall’s obvious assumption that she was superfluous and ignorant, she had not expected this opening. But the long weeks of waiting had helped her. There was no question she had not run over in her mind at some point during these weeks, no scenario that had not already unspooled in her restless imagination as she paced the floors with Rosa.
‘Well, I never was involved. I read a little of the Worker when I first came to England – a girl I met gave me one – but I’m not really political.’
‘Who was this girl?’
Laura screwed up her mouth in what she hoped looked like willing concentration. ‘I think she was called Florence. I talked to her on the train from Southampton to London, you know, years ago.’ His face didn’t flicker. Laura had decided to admit to a couple of slight encounters with people she knew were communists, in order to make her other denials sound more convincing.
‘Did you go to meetings organised by the Communist Party?’
‘No, not at all. I once heard Florence speak. It was at a Co-operative Guild meeting, I think.’
‘Were you ever approached to become a member?’
‘I suppose Florence may have mentioned it, but I wasn’t as involved as that.’
‘Did you know that Edward was a member of the Communist Party?’
‘You know, that’s impossible. He is absolutely loyal. He loves his country. No, that’s impossible.’
It was not anger, but something like boredom, as if she had simply said what he had expected, that she
saw on Valance’s face. If Stefan had been right about the evidence that had fallen into the hands of the Foreign Office, Valance must either know that Laura was lying, or think that Edward had kept her totally in the dark. Was he going to bring her in now, was the game over?
But Laura knew she had one thing on her side. Over these quiet weeks she had realised that there was no appetite on the part of the British government, unlike in the States, for any open accusations, any courtroom arguments or public statements, any airing of evidence and counter-evidence. Whenever she thought about why that was, she put it down to embarrassment – the embarrassment of admitting that they had kept a traitor in the American embassy all those years, sending him to those sensitive meetings, allowing him to hear every word of the nuclear policy, every nuance of the negotiations for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and feed it all drip by drip, day by day, year by year to Stalin. But now, confronted by Valance and the regional accent that he was so eager to cover up, Laura recognised that it was also all about class, the intense fidelity to all that Edward’s family represented, everything that Laura had come to know as the group, whose every characteristic – the accents, the humour, the education, the clothes, the pastimes – compelled deference from everyone else, even from this man who was not quite part of it and yet wanted to be part of it. Even if he had the evidence, did he have the will to drive it home and destroy her?
So as Laura heard and responded to Valance’s questions, in a dance of half-revelation and retreats into secrecy, it was as though she was making him a silent promise – if they wanted to build some kind of wall around what they would see as this cesspit of treachery, she would help them build it. If they wanted to keep Edward’s secret close to their chests, she would do nothing that would mean they had to show their cards. Over and over again, as he questioned and she responded, she thought that he saw through her, but nothing was explicit and nothing became dangerous, until the end.
‘Tell me about why Mr Last chose that day to go away.’
‘I have no idea. I’ve told you, I don’t know why he went or where.’
‘We need to know how he knew things had become dangerous for him. Unless you give me the information, you – and your family – will not be left alone. Your daughter is young. We would not want to separate you so early.’
The air in the room seemed thick and lacking in oxygen. Laura was silent.
‘And tell me about Mr Last’s relationship with Nicholas Fergus.’
‘He rarely saw him. I think I met him once or twice, that’s all – only at parties.’
‘When Last was seeing a psychiatrist …’
‘A psychoanalyst.’
‘He reported that …’ and Valance made a great show of referring to his notes. Had Lvov given anything away? Would he be the weak link? ‘Ah, yes, that Last was suffering from homosexual tendencies.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Were you aware that your husband’s connection to Fergus was of that kind?’
‘That is a vile insinuation.’ But strangely, Laura found that it was no easier to speak the truth than it was to lie, and her voice sounded too reedy to be persuasive.
‘We have it here from this psychiatrist that Last was seeing on his return from Washington. Of course, Mr Fergus was notorious in that regard, it was why he was sent home from Washington. And we understand that Mr Fergus had often boasted about his … relationship with Mr Last. One colleague of Mr Last’s has told us that he saw them in a … compromising situation, on that Thursday at their club.’ He was looking straight into Laura’s face. It doesn’t take much to make a new mother break, but just at that moment Laura heard Rosa cry out in the next room and she stood up, saying she would be back in a moment.
When she returned, she was more composed, freshly powdered and lipsticked, and Valance moved on to the question of her travels. He told her that they had the powers to prevent her travelling, but that they would prefer not to do so, so long as she stayed near. Geneva was acceptable. But there was one condition. She was not to speak to the press under any circumstances at all. ‘It could seriously disrupt our investigations if you did.’
Laura understood, and she was quick to agree. She told him that he could rely on her silence at all times. At all times.
‘And will you let us know if your husband or anyone acting for him tries to contact you?’
‘That goes without saying.’ The interview was at an end. It was a relief, but as Valance left, how weak Laura felt. Mother came into the room some time later to find her sitting on the sofa, her head in her hands.
‘Can we go away?’
‘We can,’ she said, standing up and taking Rosa from her. Her weight was both reassuring and exhausting. ‘We can go.’ This place that once felt almost like home had become unbearable. It was time to leave.
7
Nothing could prepare one for the breadth and depth of the Alpine panorama, its cleanliness, its washed, bright lines. Edward would have quoted poetry, Laura thought, but Winifred was more down to earth. ‘Rather cheering, isn’t it, the mountain air – and hopefully the reporters will leave you alone here. Giles told me they’ve been ferocious in England. There was debate in Parliament about your treatment, wasn’t there?’
There had been. In the end, the long-haired reporter had got tired of waiting and had published a lengthy, entirely fictitious interview with Laura in a Sunday newspaper, detailing her anguish and her belief that her husband would soon be in touch with her. When she had seen it, Laura had felt sickened not just by its content, but by the fact that she had to grovel to Valance, explaining over and over again that she had not been culpable. For once Toby had stepped in to help, and a letter of complaint was published in The Times by a friend of his, imitating his own pompous voice. ‘The repeated invasion of the privacy of the family,’ it had said, ‘an invasion amounting at times to persecution, is surely indefensible.’ Toby had also been behind questions in Parliament about the press. He had sent Laura a copy of the entry in Hansard, in which some politician she had never met had talked about the ‘public misgiving’ that the fictitious interview had caused, and how this showed the need for a Press Council. All Laura knew was that none of this kerfuffle had prompted the newspaper or the reporter to apologise or admit wrongdoing. She found the complaints as tiring, in some ways, as the original publication, but she could not explain that to Winifred.
They were eating heavy Alpine food on the terrace of a restaurant in the picturesque little town and, seeing the great valley falling away below them and spiralling up into the cloudless evening sky, Laura felt as though she were coming out into the open after weeks locked in a dark room. It was only the next morning, however, as they were breakfasting in the hotel, that she realised how elusive her freedom still was.
An English family was having a good look at them from another table, and passing a newspaper from hand to hand. Before Mother and Winifred could notice what they were doing, Laura quickly asked a waiter for a newspaper herself. There it was on the second page: a picture of her holding Rosa on the tarmac of Geneva airport and a story about how the bungling secret services had let her leave England, and how speculation was rife about whether she was likely to make contact with her traitor husband while out of reach of their surveillance.
Laura found herself looking at the photograph of herself as if she were looking at a picture of a stranger. She had not noticed the photographer in the crowd at the airport, and all she remembered from the moment of disembarkation was the weight of Rosa in her arms, how difficult it was to go down the aeroplane stairs with a baby and how the heels of her shoes kept sticking in the corrugations of the steps. But in the photograph she looked as though she was deliberately posing, her head high and her expression knowing. The picture did not show Mother; Laura seemed to be alone, striding into the future with her daughter. If she had seen such a photograph of a stranger, Laura would have said that the woman in the picture was relishing her notoriety.
She did not show the photograph to the others, but went on turning the pages as if she was interested in international news. A few pages further in was a picture of Amy Sandall, in Monte Carlo for the weekend, walking on the esplanade and wearing a rather outré get-up which bared her midriff. Although she was with her husband, you would not have noticed him in the picture, and there was something similar about this and the photograph of Laura. Looking at it, Laura remembered the first time that she had seen Amy tackled by the photographers on the platform of the boat train at Southampton. Laura had thought then that Amy relished her fame, that she felt energised by it as she forged forward. Or did she?
As they crossed the lobby back to their rooms, Laura could see through the big doors that there were photographers waiting outside the hotel, and when they went out to drive over to Megève for lunch, they were followed all the way by two reporters, one on a motorcycle and one in a car. Discouraged, Laura and the others soon returned to the hotel, where they spent the afternoon in the hotel grounds. Mother and Aunt Dee went early to bed, and Winifred and Laura sat on the restaurant balcony, drinking cognac and smoking.
‘I can see it’s absolutely impossible for you,’ said Winifred. ‘But they will get bored soon, don’t you think?’
Laura said she was sure they would, and then she said she hoped they would. It had already been so long.
‘It’s absurd that they think they are going to land some scoop, following you about. What do they think will happen, that some Soviet agent is going to jump out of the bushes and carry you off to Moscow?’ Laura smiled at the very absurdity of the notion. ‘I suppose you’ll just have to sit this out.’
A Quiet Life Page 39