A Quiet Life(106)

Laura nodded, as another gulp of her martini hit her throat.

‘Giles went to him. You see, the reason why Giles doesn’t work for the government any more is that they got nervous about his – well, his chequered love life. Oh, let’s not pretend. They didn’t like him f*cking all the boys. There was a young man who was determined to make trouble. We only managed to stop a prosecution by the skin of our teeth. Lvov got him out of a tight corner – told his bosses at the Air Ministry he was tackling his perversions. I don’t know if he was or he wasn’t, but Lvov backed him up. He had to leave in the end, but at least nothing went public.’

Laura realised, with a slow dawning, that Winifred thought that Edward had overstepped the mark in the way that Giles had. Did Winifred think – did she really think, that Edward also …? Laura’s mind closed down on this absurd suggestion and she did as she had always done when she felt she had lost control of the situation, she mimicked Winifred’s own thoughts and voice, saying in a high tone, ‘It’s important that Edward gets back to work. It’s important that nothing – nothing that would bother the Foreign Office …’

And Winifred, apparently sure that they were both talking about the same thing, agreed. ‘Exactly. It’s pretty awful the way that these boys have to toe the line not just at work, but even, you know, in their private life. Lvov understands that, he won’t say anything that will put Edward in bad odour with Whitehall.’

‘It’s worth thinking about.’

‘I’ll give you his number. You could go and talk to him first, if you think that would be best. Now drink up, tell me how you have been doing.’

After their drinks they went back to the others, and Sybil looked reproving; they had been absent for too long. But the men had not noticed; there were quite enough anecdotes about old acquaintances to sustain them without the women’s conversation. Although to Laura the energy of the evening seemed already to have dispersed, Giles was talking about where they would go after dinner. Apparently the Ace had closed down ages ago, but he knew somewhere just like it, he told them.

‘I have to go back,’ said Sybil, frowning at Toby so that he motioned for the bill.

‘Let’s go on,’ said Edward, pushing away his glass. Laura picked up her purse. She knew she had to go with him, though she didn’t know if she could bear to listen to many more of Alistair’s descriptions of a hilarious prank a writer friend of his had played on some pompous critic, or Giles’s complaints about how some chap at the Maudsley had got all his ideas on delta waves from Giles’s own paper on the subject. But there was no stepping off for her now, so she got up with apparent alacrity and accepted her coat from the waiter, and went along at Edward’s elbow to one basement club and then another, and even after Winifred had gone home and the clubs were empty apart from a handful of sodden men, she stayed with him and Alistair and Giles, and at the end of the evening she got him into a taxi, and she and the driver dragged him out of it and up Sybil’s steps.





2


Lvov’s room, book-lined and carpeted, was screened from the noise and bustle of Marylebone High Street. For an instant, walking in, Laura felt a familiarity with it, but she could not place why. Perhaps it bore a resemblance to Toby’s study in Chester Square. Lvov himself was unchanged, and had a reassuring air of finding everything completely unsurprising. It was as though he had expected her one day to walk into his consulting room and tell him about her husband’s crack-up. So she talked just a little more frankly than she had with Winifred, although still all the things that could not be said were loud in her head, so loud that sometimes she lost the thread of what she was saying.

‘It was after this friend of yours died that he broke down?’

As Lvov asked her a few questions about Edward’s relationship with Joe, she realised that, just like Winifred, he was assuming that sexual secrets were driving Edward’s horrors. She wished she could confront that assumption, pull it out and destroy it, but she knew that to do so she would need another narrative to override it, and that narrative had to remain dark. She continued to talk about how important it was that Edward became fit enough to work and that he tackled his drinking. As she spoke, she realised how she must appear: an American girl who put all her faith in clean living and hard work. She stumbled, and tried to make it sound as though the obsession with work came from Edward. ‘The Foreign Office is his life. But … he needs to be reassured … that he doesn’t have to do everything perfectly. He overworks terribly, you know, he feels every failure – of diplomacy – on his shoulders.’

‘And I have to report back on him to the Foreign Office, do I?’

‘Well, yes, that’s what I understand. But the thing is … if anything damaging … tell me, Mr Lvov – about confidentiality.’

‘I can report to the Foreign Office if necessary about his suitability to work … not about other issues. My job is not to investigate crimes.’ And then he went on talking about what he could do, how he could explore the motivation for addiction, for unhappiness, but Laura was not really listening. She was wondering whether he could understand a crime that was not an overload of private longing. Would he find it inexplicable, or merely uninteresting, that a man might be driven by a political rather than a sexual dream?