A Quiet Life(102)

There was no certainty left; the ground was slipping. She went upstairs, turned the shower full on in the bathroom, and stepped under it. When she came out of it, Edward was standing at the sink shaving, but she could not even meet his eyes in the mirror. She put on a plain skirt and blouse and went downstairs and made coffee and toast for Edward.

‘No need to wake Joe,’ she said when Edward came into the kitchen. ‘I’ll get him up in an hour or so. I don’t think they start so early at the newspaper.’ Then she put the radio on loudly, and ran the tap into the sink, and lowered her voice as she put a coffee in front of him. ‘I didn’t copy all the papers, but take them with you, don’t let them stay here another day – take them back. And don’t bring anything today – I had a word from Alex, we need to stop, wait something out, give it forty-eight hours.’

‘All right,’ Edward said. Had he caught the urgency in her voice? As he left, his step was slow.

When Joe woke, Laura was sitting in an armchair, smoking a cigarette, watching him. He sat up and shook his head. ‘I feel lousy.’

‘I’ll make you some coffee.’

‘No need – I’ll get some in a drugstore – I should get to work.’

Laura insisted, and then picked up the tray from the previous night, and the ashtrays, and opened the curtains. She came back a few minutes later with breakfast to find the room empty, and waited for him to return from the bathroom. He came in, showered but obviously unshaven, and sat down on the edge of the sofa. If only she could tune in to the key of his thoughts, if only she could read his responses. Here they were alone in her house, nothing to interrupt them and nowhere to go, but he did not allow their hands to touch as he took the coffee, and by that more than anything Laura felt that he must know. He was moving away, he was distancing himself. Was it to ready himself before he struck the blow?

He drank his coffee in silence, and then brushed an imaginary crumb from his leg.

‘Well, it was good to see you,’ Laura said. ‘Bring Suzanne next time, won’t you?’

‘Sure,’ he said, not looking at her, and getting up. He, Laura thought, had not yet learned to act, had not yet been steeled into falseness. She said goodbye as he went into the hall. He turned, and they put out their hands, their fingers touched, but his were rigid under her touch. As he left, she stood at the door and watched him go down the street.

After he had gone, she ran upstairs. She kept the Minox still in an old purse at the bottom of her closet. She took it out, wrapped in a handkerchief, and then she was back downstairs, picking up yesterday’s newspaper, putting the Minox inside its sheets, pulling the pages she had typed the previous night out of the drawer of the desk, wrapping them too in the newspaper. Her actions were quick despite the confusion in her mind, and then she put on her coat, tied the belt tightly, and went out to a public telephone box. The newspaper with its weight of guilt was thrown decisively into a trash can at the corner of the street. She would have liked to take it further, but there was no time.

She saw Alex approaching the corner of M and 31st Street before he saw her, and she was careful to scan the approaches and not to walk directly to him. She walked past him, slow and measured, and felt him follow her. They went on for a block or two before she dropped back to his shoulder so that he could hear her. Then Laura told him what had happened. She was brief, necessarily, and as she talked she created certainty out of her cloud of uncertainty. She told him that he had to protect them, that the blow could fall any moment; that Joe was on his way to the newspaper. Alex said nothing; Laura did not know whether the silence meant despair or dissent.

‘You can’t abandon us,’ she insisted, still whispering, but spitting her whisper out. ‘Hiss had the statute of limitations, it was all in the past; this is today, and he – you know how hard he’s finding it already, to keep it all together. When he’s drunk he says things – what if people start remembering that?’

‘What kind of things?’

Laura told him about how Edward had talked about the revolution to Joe, how he had openly stated his opposition to the nuclear deterrent. ‘I don’t think he always knows what he is saying, but there it is. You know – he drinks.’

‘And he is still bringing such precious stuff,’ said Alex. ‘Go on then, go home.’

How Laura would have liked to shout at him, to tell him not to dismiss her like that, but she could control her fear for a few more seconds, a few more steps – so she did, and for the next few steps, and so on, and that, as always, was how she got through the day. She imagined nothing concrete, but images came constantly into her head – an instruction would come, perhaps, to go to the airport, or to the Soviet Embassy, once the defection had been arranged, or maybe Alex could be cleverer than that and plant some information on Joe to suggest that Edward was a double agent who was only passing false documents to confuse the Soviets. Anything would do, surely, just to throw him off the scent.

That afternoon Laura had an appointment at a dressmaker that Monica had recommended. It had taken her a long time to lose the weight she had gained years ago during her pregnancy, but now she had slimmed down, and wanted an old evening dress taken in. She stood there in front of the dressmaker’s big mirror, while the waist of the dress was pulled tight to her body. ‘You’re cold,’ noted the dressmaker. ‘No, it’s warm in here,’ said Laura, trying to control the shake in her arms.