As she thought that, other fears began to crowd in. She could no longer push away the insinuations that Valance had made, that the press had been running with, that Giles had stated baldly and that Alistair had wanted to include in his book – that Edward and Nick had gone off together, not just as spies, but as lovers. And as that thought entered her mind, other pictures from the past that she had been trying to forget, that she had always refused to look at directly, were sharp, scissoring through her memory: an evening at the end of the war and Nick’s hand touching Edward’s neck, laying claim to a long intimacy with him; a dark night in Washington, and Edward blundering out of the house to go drinking with Nick; the secret that Edward had blurted out on that final night, that Nick had recruited him at Cambridge. What form had that recruitment taken? What memories had Patsfield held for him that had drawn him back when he needed to make a new life? She remembered Nick’s excitement the night that they set off, the exuberance in his face as Edward came down the stairs to him, ready to leave his pregnant wife, to set off into the darkness for their final adventure.
And now, was it as Giles imagined it? That even now he was with Nick, safe in their dream country, happy, free, making love, more content without Laura than he had been with her? Maybe he had only stayed with her all these years because she knew his secret. She had been a useful dupe, a good mask for him. Was that all she had been? Laura heard Rosa crying out upstairs and as she went to hold her and comfort her, finally bringing her down to nestle against her in Laura’s own bed, she found herself confronting the possibility that she had refused to consider ever since she had heard the car drive away that damp May evening – that Rosa might never know her father. More, that Laura had never, really, known him.
9
‘I’ll telephone the consulate,’ Laura found herself saying to her mother the day after Ellen’s departure. ‘I’ll go and talk to them about us going back to the States.’ One says things, Laura realised, without necessarily meaning them, because the moment seems to make them essential. It wasn’t possible any more for Laura to find excuses that would make Mother happy. She had to talk as if a return was on the cards. She picked up the telephone later that afternoon, with Mother listening in from the living room, and dialled the number of the consulate.
Although Laura found it hard at first to explain why she was calling, still, the first person she spoke to knew who she was; her fame had not faded. But she was passed on from secretary to secretary, and then was told that someone would call her back. Nobody did, for some days, and when she was finally telephoned, she was asked to come in for a meeting. Still, she was not nervous. Entering the building that cloudy spring morning she assumed that they would simply refuse her permission to travel to America, and she could use that as an excuse to Mother and Ellen.
So she was off-guard when she was taken into a room where Valance was sitting alone, behind a desk, his jowly face as ugly and inexpressive as when they had met two years earlier. But this time she was not lost in the hazy fog of new motherhood, and it dawned on her with an immediate jolt where she had seen that face before – in 1944, in the swaying ballroom of the Dorchester, between Blanchard and Victor. What had he been doing with them, with the Soviet spy who had gone over to the Fascists, and the arms dealer whom Edward could not countenance speaking to? The miasma of corruption that had hung around those nights was there again in the dull room of the British consulate in Geneva.
A secretary was just bringing him coffee. ‘This might pass for coffee in London – but we can do better than this dishwater here.’
Laura sat down on the high-backed chair that she was motioned to. Outside long windows, she could hear children playing in the Parc Beaulieu.
The secretary went out, and came back in with something that she obviously thought would be more to Valance’s taste. Laura saw how nervous she was around him; saw his pleasure in bullying even this clumsy woman. When they were alone, he spoke.
‘You’ve kept your side of the bargain.’
Surely it was wrong of him to start by talking of bargains, she thought; surely that was too open a move.
‘But now you are asking about moving to America. We have evidence … you know what I’m talking about. We didn’t want to take you in when your baby was so small – but now … You seem to assume you are free, that we have lost interest.’
Laura had not prepared herself for this kind of blatant attack, this talk of evidence and arrest, and she simply spoke as she had so often: with a statement of ignorance. Edward was not a traitor; she had no idea where he was going that May evening. Valance did not react to her statement, but asked whether, if she did know, she would tell him. This time she had to do better in her acting, but her voice seemed forced even to herself as she told him that of course she would.
‘I need you to do a job for me, which will bring us both closer to the truth.’
Now she did not trust herself to speak. She kept very still, pulling her eyebrows together as though puzzled, and he began to speak about her network. He wanted more of it. He wanted more of what she knew.
‘I don’t even know what you mean,’ Laura said. Her voice came out childish, almost petulant, rather than innocent.
‘Tell me about your cousin Giles.’
The box. The key. The diagrams. Sweaty hands slipping on the camera; the anti-aircraft guns booming around her. That was not poor Giles’s fault. Laura said something about how she was sure that Giles had been such a tireless worker in air defence, and then she backtracked and said she knew nothing about what he did in the war. It was all so confusing now; what should she say?
‘All that depravity,’ Valance was saying, ‘but maybe you don’t mind that sort of thing. Your husband’s friend Alistair says you were free to go your own way; you knew Mr Blanchard in the war, didn’t you?’
Now Laura felt as though her body, with its banging heart and short breaths, was not under control. She was no good in a crisis. How could she ever have done the work she did when she was like this; it was pointless, impossible, she might as well give up now and tell them everything. Valance was getting up and for a moment she thought that he was going to touch her, to force her; when he stood up, she realised how tall he was, and she was weak with panic. But he was getting a file from another desk. ‘Whatever you knew yourself, you will have to help us find something now. What about Peter Gillett? Was he the one who discovered your husband had to leave?’
What was this? Peter? That was nonsense. ‘He was in Geneva then,’ Laura said. ‘I met him here for the first time last year.’
‘I’m getting tired of all these lies. He would drink with Mr Last at the Reform whenever he was in London. You must have met him on occasion. You know his political sympathies.’
‘Peter? But he – he’s my cousin’s boyfriend …’ This was wrong. Peter had never even talked about Edward. He had never mentioned politics. His job with the Permanent Representative to the United Nations was dull, bureaucratic. What would he be doing there if Valance was right?
Valance was still talking, saying that Laura knew well enough what he was talking about – ‘his father, Cuba, all that’ – and then asking about the messages he used to run. ‘We know he was involved, but we just need a little thing to clinch it and bring him in. He’s not much in himself. Why don’t you find out who else he was working with? That will be enough to keep you safe for now. One name. Who tipped off the network about Mr Last’s impending interrogation. Just the name.’
Laura looked out of the window, past Valance’s face. She made a gesture of submission and denial, a big breath and a sigh, and told him that she had no idea how he could say such things about Peter, he was such a nice man, she hadn’t even met him until she came to Geneva.
‘Do you want us to put real pressure on you? I’ve said we don’t want a trial, especially while your daughter is so young.’ He then said something about the Rosenbergs, who were clinging on, still on death row, but Laura had found some breath at last,
and was speaking over him, speaking for all the world as though she was on trial, saying clearly that most of what he had just said to her was a mystery to her, that neither she nor her husband had ever done anything wrong, but that she did understand he wanted her to talk to Peter Gillett. She would do that, and would tell him what he said, although she didn’t think she would find out anything useful because she thought they were all barking up the wrong tree. And one day, when her husband was found, everything would be clear.
‘Failure isn’t really your best option,’ he said. It seemed that the interview was at an end.
The weather was so changeable in Geneva; clouds were coming over and Laura was shivering in the wind as she walked down the streets where the cars were too loud, the people stepped too close to her. She went into a café on the corner, almost empty but for a couple of middle-aged men reading newspapers, but she ordered coffee rather than brandy. The story that Valance had just peddled seemed full of holes. She could not believe Peter had been any kind of messenger in the drama. He was too much out of the loop, here in Geneva: how would he have heard what the cryptographers in Washington were doing or who had been given the task of breaking Edward that week in May? Valance was sending her up a cul de sac by talking about him, but she was aware that even if it was all nonsense, and even if Valance knew it was all nonsense, the demand for some information in return for her safety might indeed be real. The request to go to America had not even been considered; she was expected to stay here and help MI5 – that was clear. Maybe her failure on this first task was a given, so that she would feel she had to do better the next time.
And who would blame her for giving in? Just as Laura had done anything once upon a time to save herself and Edward, so now she would undoubtedly do anything to save herself and Rosa. She could hardly bear to recall the horror of the end of their time in Washington. You knew nothing, she reminded herself. You planned nothing. You only asked for safety. They did everything. But there is irreducible guilt that never goes away, however much one goes on weaving the excuses that enable one to carry on and take the next step and the next through a banal life, one foot in front of the other, slow, unremarkable, through the streets of London or Washington or Geneva. The weight of fear settled on Laura again as she walked: she was just a tiny thing, a fly in a web whose corners she could not see.
As she came into the apartment, Rosa came and clung to her legs. Above her burble Laura heard the telephone ringing, and she picked it up as Aurore came to distract Rosa. Archie’s voice came on the line; it was the first time he had telephoned. Yes, Yugoslavia was so interesting … yes, winter in Morocco … but back here now it was spring … and what was Laura planning to do in the summer …?
‘Well, we aren’t quite sure yet.’ Laura tried to make her voice light; it was not so bad, she wanted to convey, quite fun, living the drifting life that she did now. ‘Mother might go over to Boston. But I’m not sure that I want to go there …’ She was not ready to tell Archie that she was not yet allowed to go so far.
‘I’m taking a house in Italy for the summer,’ Archie said on the crackly line. ‘Cyril’s house, as he’s going off to India on some mad expedition. Why not join me? Down on the Adriatic Coast.’
‘I do come with others, you know …’
‘There’s masses of room – that’s the thing, really: too much room. I’ll see if Winifred and Peter can come too, for some of the time. Do come, with your daughter as well.’
The invitation could hardly have come at a better time, Laura thought. When she told her mother that evening that the consulate would not give immediate permission to travel to America, she was able to move on to the invitation to Pesaro and tell her that she thought she could probably get them to agree to that.
‘I’ll go to Boston for the summer, then, and see Ellen,’ Mother said, clearly relieved. ‘Tell me more about this Archie.’
In front of her, and for Aurore and Rosa, Laura had to be confident about this arrangement for the summer. Valance sent the message through a secretary. A trip to Pesaro was acceptable; a month away from Geneva was no problem if it was just to Italy. They would meet again later in the summer. So, with a manner of airy confidence, Laura made plans, bought new swimming costumes for herself and Rosa, and told Mother that it wouldn’t be long before the consulate saw sense and gave permission for her to travel to America.
But only once she’d got onto the train in the summer did she realise how uncertain she was about this trip. Aurore did not look as if she had dressed for a holiday, in a grey skirt and blouse, and there was always that tension between mother and nanny when they were alone with Rosa: which one of them would respond when Rosa cried, who was really responsible for the mistake of putting orange juice in her bottle, which was upended on her new white dress?
That sense of uncertainty deepened on their arrival at the house. It was a tall villa overlooking the ocean, bleached out in the bright afternoon light. But when one stepped out of the taxi and into the hall, the house seemed different from what one anticipated from the exterior, rather dark and faded, as though the sunlight had not permeated its huge rooms with their painted ceilings and their stone vases in tall alcoves. In the living room Laura noticed the rings that glasses had left on the coffee tables and the unemptied ashtrays. Archie was obviously casual about this borrowed house; he was talking about the friends that had been staying up until the previous day, how he was keeping the house full all summer. Rosa was whining, bored and hot from the journey, and Laura felt apologetic. Archie was no doubt expecting her to be the smiling, sociable woman he had known in Washington, and here she was, a distracted mother in a crumpled cotton skirt.
She tried to cover her uncertainty with enthusiasm. ‘What a lovely house,’ she said in a bright voice. A garden opened out from the living room, laid out in a geometric pattern, with box hedges lining beds of lemon trees and herbs and geraniums.
‘Gah-den,’ Rosa shouted, stomping along the paths. Laura scooped her up and showed her the lemons on the trees, and pulled a sprig of rosemary, crushing it in her fingers for her to sniff.
‘You are lucky to have this,’ Laura said, but Archie sounded bored as he agreed. Laura had not even planted a window box in Geneva, and breathing in the scented air she was overwhelmed by a memory of the mulchy odour that used to linger under the laurels in Surrey. The wet earth of that garden in Patsfield, with its straggling scillas and damp leaves, came into her mind like a vision of a glass of water to someone desperate with thirst.
‘Do you miss England?’ she asked Archie, in a casual way.
‘Not at all – the rain, you mean? The cold? The food?’
‘Well, and the countryside – the—’
Rosa had a new habit, when she thought Laura was talking too much, of putting her little hand hard across her mother’s mouth to stop her speaking. Laura tried to pull it off, but the child began to whine again and Laura stepped quickly towards the house, looking for Aurore.
Laura felt that the price of her holiday was to be amusing, so once she had given Rosa to Aurore and made sure that the nanny knew where everything was and was happy with the arrangements for her room and her supper, she touched up her make-up and ran down to talk to Archie before their dinner.
As she sat down and her cotton skirt flew up a little, she noticed his gaze falling on her legs. She brushed it down over her knees and felt self-conscious. For some reason she had not thought up to now that his invitation might include a sexual expectation; now, as he poured her a gin and tonic, she felt that had been naïve. So she kept a quick artificial conversation going, asking him for details of all his travels, telling him dull stories about Winifred and other acquaintances. But the conversation did not seem to become easier between them. They were sitting on the terrace, eating figs and goats’ cheese as the sky darkened, and Laura was thinking that she might soon escape upstairs, pleading tiredness, as Archie talked about the plans for the following weeks. Winifred would come in a couple of days
, with Peter, and then he was also expecting Amy to stay for a while, and there were some very amusing neighbours the other side of Pesaro. ‘You know Amy, don’t you?’ he said.
‘I don’t; Edward knows her. I saw her now and again – I didn’t know you knew her?’ Laura said. Why did her voice sound nervous? Amy Sandall, divorced again, she knew that, was still someone whose face Laura saw in magazines. She had no idea that Archie would know her, and it seemed an incongruous friendship. Archie was not nearly grand enough, surely, for that charismatic woman. He seemed to realise what Laura was thinking, and told her that they had only really met in Monte Carlo the previous summer, when Archie had just come into his inheritance and run away from London. ‘Her crowd is a bit too full of themselves really; I don’t know why I asked her. But I bumped into her last month in Bordighera and asked her to come down for a while, and she telegraphed yesterday to say she would.’
When Winifred and Peter arrived a couple of days later, Laura did not find the holiday any easier. She had not seen Peter since that conversation with Valance; he had been on a trip to Sweden in May, Winifred had told her, and then to London for a while. And although she had been so sure that Valance had been talking nonsense when he said that Peter had been part of the network, as soon as she saw him, sitting on the terrace after he arrived, sunglasses blocking out his gaze, a rustle of fear began. He was asking about the swimming at the beach; he was talking about taking a speedboat out one day; he was accepting a glass of limoncello before lunch – it was all so civilised. Archie hardly knew him, had only met him a couple of times before, but of course they were easy with one another, they had the urbane understanding of the group, a shared sense of humour, shared acquaintances. Laura felt the ripple of unease deepen. How easy it would be for him, as it had been for Nick, for Edward, to hide a secret for years: nobody ever suspected men like them.
A Quiet Life Page 42