‘For me, he was a kind of hero,’ Giles said, kicking at the snow as he walked. Kick, kick, kick, leaving dirty marks on the white sidewalks. ‘When I think of him now … I remember him leaning on the bridge at Trinity, quoting some bloody Horace. I thought he had everything – brains, so charming too – I never really thought I was good enough for him. He was the only man who made me feel like that. He invited me to his house in the holidays. I remember him reading Edward Thomas to me. He thought there was so much in it, the poetry of everyday life, but I couldn’t see it.’ That brought Edward suddenly very near, and Laura tuned out of Giles’s train of thought for a while, but when she tuned back in he was still on the same theme. ‘He told me about Tolstoy, about the need to get away from possessions. I thought, how extraordinary he was, right at the centre of that class, you know, but with this social conscience – and sensitive: he knew all the names of the wild flowers when we went walking. He made me feel at home there, at Sutton – the other boys like him at Cambridge made me feel a bit – you know, I was a scientist, I wasn’t rich.’ Laura remembered Giles in the garden at Sutton, and realised how she had misread him, seeing his pleasure at being there as confidence, when in fact it was just eagerness to belong. ‘I was jealous of you, because he married you. I thought, you’ll never understand him as I do. But of course neither of us understood him at all – nobody did; except, I suppose, we must assume Nick did.’
Perhaps fresh snow was about to fall, the sky was greying and there was a wind coming up. ‘Let’s go and get a hot drink,’ Laura said. They were passing a café, and they went in and ordered hot chocolate and brandies. In the glass-fronted counters were gleaming confections of pastry, cream and bilberries, and Laura ordered a couple of cakes that were left untouched between them. Nothing could stop Giles talking as he was swept down such a river of reminiscence.
‘He was a pacifist at heart; he hated the whole war machine. The last conversation we had, he was talking about Korea. He could see the evil on both sides. How could he have ever put his trust in Stalin? He must have been so utterly duped.’
Laura said nothing except that she didn’t know. As the drinks arrived, she realised that she wished that she could ask Giles more about his assessment of Edward’s politics. When the world was embarking on the showdown between fascism and communism, she wanted to ask, where did you want to be? But she remembered Edward reading Tchernavin on the Soviet prison camps, and being unable to speak about what he read. When you saw the pictures from Hiroshima, she wanted to ask Giles, did you believe American power should have no counterweight at all? But she remembered Edward expressing his fears to Joe about the Soviet atomic tests. She could not begin that conversation with Giles about the rights and wrongs of the great political standoff of their age, because, even now, a year on, every step of the way, her mask must never slip. She had to be an empty-headed wife who knew nothing about politics. And even if she had been able to start that conversation, would she have done so? For so long, after those first conversations in 1940, she and Edward had avoided talking directly about what it was they were working for, and now when she looked back she felt unmoored by the uncertainty she felt about what he had really been thinking, all that time. She just said, ‘But Giles, he was never a traitor.’
‘Do you think it was just a mistake, then – that Nick was going and Nick dragged him along, that Edward didn’t know what he was getting into until it was too late?’
‘I just don’t know,’ Laura said, her voice a rush of cold on the heat that had been building from Giles’s words. She stirred her hot chocolate, which was gritty at the bottom. ‘Nothing about it makes sense to me. Have you talked to the security people?’
‘You mean MI5? God, I tried to talk to them at the beginning. I told them I knew him – come and talk to me – but they weren’t interested. Some junior chap popped over one day, but hardly listened to me. Alistair tried to talk to them for his book – his vicious book – but they wouldn’t spill any beans. Nothing said, nothing done, if you ask me.’
‘Is his book really so nasty?’
‘I brought you an advance copy – Winifred told me to. It’s in my room, back at the hotel.’ Giles lapsed into silence, brooding and looking into his glass. He was unshaven and rather crumpled, but not, Laura thought, unattractive; he had the kind of energy that clever, emotionally thwarted people often have, as though some passion was only being held in check by an intellectual effort. Laura wished that she could have spoken, could have talked about the things they were both struggling to understand, and brought down the barriers between them. But she could not. So as they went on talking, she kept on parrying, going sideways, and at the end, as they walked to the hotel, through the snow that had begun to fall around them, she sensed anger brewing in him. He might not have realised it, but he was furiously disappointed that his confidences had not been received with the interest he thought they deserved.
So, as he went on talking, it was not so much about how important a figure Edward had been in his life, but how significant he had been in Edward’s. ‘Of course, I know that he was lonely. I wish I could have spent more time with him – but being posted to Malvern, and then working in Bristol, made it difficult. I wish I could have been with him more; maybe I could have persuaded him out of whatever it was that made him put his trust in Nick.’ Laura still said nothing except that there was no point in regrets. When he handed her Alistair’s book at the door of his room, she felt that he did so with pleasurable expectation, as if he knew and approved of the pain it would cause her.
After dinner, once Mother and Rosa were asleep in their rooms, Laura began Alistair’s book and went on reading it all night. While reading she remembered how Winifred had told her seven years ago that Alistair was not quite able to see another’s full humanity, and the force of this observation struck her as she saw Edward become, in his hands, a mere caricature of a traitor. But it was not an unlifelike portrait. With Alistair’s description of Edward on his return from America, Laura was plunged back into that dinner at the Savoy when they had all tried so hard to play their roles: ‘His appearance on that evening was unexpected. He had lost his serenity, his hands would tremble, his eyes were hooded and he looked as if he had spent the night sitting up in a train … Though he remained as detached and amiable as ever, I felt it was clear that he was in a very bad way. From time to time, even in mid-conversation, a kind of shutter would fall as if he had returned to some inner and incommunicable anxiety.’
But there were other, less expected cruelties in the way that he wrote about her. ‘It is clear that Laura Last is as confused as all her friends about the circumstances of his disappearance. Any latent political beliefs he had were obviously not confided in a wife whose inability to interest herself in any aspect of politics is at times painfully obvious. She is a woman dedicated to dancing and flirtation, and her eagerness for admiration could often be an embarrassment for Last, who would detach himself from her social life.’ And Laura was forced down the hidden lanes of memory again, those nights when she had insisted that Alistair took her dancing at the Dorchester, when he had been the witness to her naïve attempts to flirt with Blanchard. Shame coursed through her, as it had done all those years ago.
The next morning Laura waited until Winifred and Peter and Mother had gone off skiing again and Aurore had taken Rosa into the hotel crèche, before turning to Giles over the breakfast table and restarting the conversation. ‘He is cruel.’
‘And the editors got him to take out Edward’s relationship with Nick …’
‘Whatever do you mean?’ Laura’s temper sparked at last; how could it be that even Giles, who claimed such knowledge of Edward, would believe such a thing?
‘We don’t have to beat around the bush any more, do we? They went off together, didn’t they – how much more obvious did they have to make it? Alistair told me that you’d known and you’d turned a blind eye, for years.’
‘That’s nonsense.’
�
��I’m sorry if I offended you,’ he said, in a stiff, satisfied voice that showed he was not sorry at all. ‘Alistair said you knew. I loved him at Cambridge. Well, I fancied him, but it was Nick he cared for. We can see that now.’
There was no more for them to say. Social niceties were at an end. ‘I must go and get ready for skiing – it’s absurd to come all this way and not even bother to go on the slopes.’ She stood up, throwing down her napkin, and went out of the restaurant. She did not go out to the mountains, however; she could not face the great whiteness of the outdoors. She went into the crèche to find Rosa and to roll coloured balls with her, while her mind travelled back over the years.
The interest aroused by the book’s publication was intense. Laura could gauge it by the increased numbers of telephone calls she got from journalists, and when it was published in America there was another surge. Mother had tried to push Laura to go to America that summer, and every week, it seemed, she received letters from Ellen, telling her she should think of coming home. But she was very aware of Valance’s warning that she could not travel too far, and once or twice Ellen enclosed cuttings about Edward from American newspapers with her letters and Laura quailed at the anger they revealed. She wrote impersonal little notes back to Ellen, suggesting that she should come to Geneva herself.
It was not until the following spring that Ellen finally took up the invitation, without Tom and her son, but with her daughter Janet, who was now ten. As Laura saw them walking towards her, she felt she was looking at the future of motherhood – the child who grows apart from you and looks with bored eyes as you fuss with suitcases and passports. Of course one knows that it will happen, Laura thought, but it was the first time she had felt the future with that kind of physical shock: what it would be like for her and Rosa when they were no longer locked into the double step of infancy.
Although it was their mother who had been asking Ellen to come over, the first evening the chatter was mainly between the two sisters. Laura put on the bright persona that she had honed for visitors, telling them what a lovely city Geneva was, how she was so happy to be in this part of it – the shops! The restaurants! The cosmopolitan crowd! And they could go for drives along the lake, and up in the mountains. But after a day or so her mood corroded. She felt, as she always had – but worse now than ever – Ellen’s critical gaze on her life. And she could not warm to Janet, who seemed to have inherited Ellen’s negative view of the world; Laura found herself irritated by the ten-year-old’s passive attitude, her lack of enthusiasm for the holiday. Gradually the apartment, crowded with the two sisters, their mother and two little girls, began to feel impossibly claustrophobic.
The night before her second birthday, Rosa was unable to settle; it seemed that she was sickening for something, though she had no rash or fever. Whatever the reason, the broken night made the morning feel too bright and noisy, with Ellen and Mother making plans for the day and Janet trying to play with Rosa, but only succeeding in upsetting her. They went out for the day, in the little train up into the hills, with Rosa in a stroller, and at the lunch in a hilltop café Laura felt that she should drink only one glass of wine. But as soon as they returned to the apartment, she poured gin into a glass of orange juice while the others were setting the table. They had invited Winifred to come around for a birthday tea after work, and Laura could see that Ellen and Winifred took to one another immediately. That made her feel resentful rather than pleased; she realised it was childish of her, but she saw them as belonging to such different parts of her life, and she did not want Winifred to value Ellen – dull Ellen – with her terrible American sandals and her bright red nail polish. But here they were, talking in a down-to-earth way about where Ellen should go shopping the next day and about Winifred’s work. Laura cut the over-iced chocolate cake and stepped back onto a balloon whose explosive burst caused Rosa to collapse into tears.
Immediately Mother and Ellen began trying to calm her down, but Laura could see that their well-meaning distractions were only upsetting her more, so she pulled her out of her high chair and took her out onto the balcony, alone. Rosa strained away from her, her bottom lip trembling, and as Laura tried to distract her she could hear the women talking in the room, thinking she was out of earshot.
‘Why won’t she come back to America?’
‘False hopes,’ said Winifred.
‘I thought there was a problem with her passport?’
‘I thought it was hoping that Edward might turn up in Europe.’
‘She’s got to move on.’
After a while Rosa relaxed and let Laura tickle her into hiccupping giggles. Laura went back into the room, feeling a pool of silence spread around her as she did so, and put the child into her high chair. She had planned to take a photograph of Rosa for her birthday; these were the only photographs she took nowadays – studies of her daughter. But when she took the camera out, she found that nothing was going well: the light was too dim and Rosa began to complain again.
After Janet and Rosa were finally in bed, the four women sat in the living room, eating more birthday cake. At least Winifred’s presence gave Laura an excuse to open a bottle of wine. It was not long before Ellen moved into the open. Clearly, she had been emboldened by the agreement of Winifred and Mother that it was time for Laura to move on.
‘I’ve found out, Laura, that if you come back to the States you could get a divorce from Edward quite easily – don’t, don’t, please listen,’ Ellen said, irritated that as soon as she started talking, Laura stood up.
‘I am listening,’ Laura said, although she had such a headache that it was hard to concentrate on her words. ‘I’m just getting another drink.’
‘It doesn’t mean that you couldn’t be with him again if he comes back, but at least it will regularise your position. It’s impossible like this. If you come to Boston, I could help with Rosa, and she’d have her cousins to grow up with.’
Laura tried to sound reasonable. ‘It’s kind of you, but I can’t decide just like that. The Foreign Office agreed to Geneva, but it took some persuading. They would never let me go to the States. And I can’t bear the thought – you can’t imagine what the press was like in England. They’d all be out again in full force in America. He was secretary of the Combined Policy Committee, you know. It meant he knew everything about the bomb. I’d never hear the end of it there.’
‘Nonsense, Laura. I’m not saying it wouldn’t be bad for a bit – but you faced it down in England—’
‘I didn’t. I ran away. It was impossible.’
‘It was impossible,’ their mother agreed.
‘Mother,’ cried Ellen. ‘I thought you were on my side!’
‘I am,’ their mother said. ‘But, Ellen, you’ve no idea. We couldn’t leave the house.’
‘That was two years ago, it’s not a new story any more. Come on, Laura, you can’t stay here forever. It’s not fair on Mother, or Rosa.’
‘Who says it’s going to be forever?’
In the face of Laura’s continued faith in her absent husband, Ellen and Mother fell silent. Winifred spoke next.
‘They do have a point, darling. Maybe you should look for a job? It’s not good just brooding all the time.’
Again, Laura tried to sound reasonable, and talked to Winifred about what might be possible during the time that Rosa could spend with Aurore, and given Laura’s minimal experience. The women were glad that Laura seemed open, at least, to letting them discuss her impossible, rudderless life, and so they went on talking in circles for a while longer, and then Laura said she had to go to bed.
Once in her room, she lay fully dressed on her bed, looking up at the ceiling, which was painted a pale, shiny grey. There were cobwebs in the corners, she noticed, and on the ceiling light. She should get a broom and knock them down. She should tell the cleaning lady tomorrow. Her headache was growing at the back of her eyes. She felt isolated by the way that Mother and Ellen and Winifred had attacked her, all wanting to change her
life. She could see herself through their eyes: drinking too much, a nervous and irritable mother, wandering through life with a vain, stupid hope, not thinking about how her choices affected those around her, selfishly making her mother stay with her when she wanted to be back in America.
If only she could just give in, go to Boston, let Rosa grow up with her cousins. A normal, suburban life; wasn’t that what she wanted, really? Maybe it was all she had ever wanted, maybe her other dreams had been only adolescent illusions. But as soon as she thought of it, she knew how distant that was from her now. She had seen something of the temper of the times in Washington; she could not return to the fire that had destroyed Hiss. The silences of the British secret services chilled her, but their cold inertia gave her a way of surviving.
And then there was the pure physical distance such a move would put between her and Edward. If he was now in Russia, silenced for some reason but still alive, he was not so very far. There was always the possibility that Stefan would walk into her life again, passing her in a narrow Swiss street, handing a card to her in a crowded train. In Boston, miles and oceans would divide her from them.
But as Laura thought of this, and the possibility of Edward’s presence just across the borders, or Stefan in this very city, the silence, unbroken for two years, screamed in her ears. What had Stefan’s promise actually meant? When he had said that they would bring her over, was he just reassuring her with empty words so that she would let the precious Virgil go without her? She thought of the network of contacts that had been knitted around Edward. Thinking back, unpicking conversations, she recognised that Nick was not the only one. There must have been one other source in Washington, with a link to the cryptographers’ discoveries, and another one in London, who knew when Edward would be brought in and who would interrogate him. Laura had never been given the keys to that kingdom of secrets. She had not realised it all these years, but she had always been an appendage, locked outside the masculine relationships that they said might endanger her, but which, she also saw, could have been the route to her survival. Outside one group, she had also been outside another. She really was alone, as Edward had never been alone.
A Quiet Life Page 41