A Quiet Life(119)

During that night, as she moved in and out of sleep, dogged by heartburn and cramp in her legs, unable to find a comfortable way to lie, Laura found the conversation with Spall playing again and again in her head. Stefan had said that the man who broke Fuchs was to break Edward this week. He had mentioned his name; it wasn’t Spall, but Valiant, something like that. Stefan had been quite sure that the code-breaking in Washington had pointed straight to the truth, and yet Spall seemed so unsure about what he was handling – it was almost as if he had no evidence at all. Perhaps he had not been given all the material. Perhaps he was bluffing to catch Laura out. Or perhaps he knew the truth, but saw Laura as irrelevant to it and believed there had been no need to tell her or ask her anything. She saw herself as she had been that afternoon, sitting on the sofa in Sybil’s room with her hands clasped over her huge belly: the epitome of femininity, alien, outside whatever masculine narrative, whether of espionage or alcoholism, the Foreign Office was constructing from Edward’s disappearance. A pregnant woman is even more invisible than other women, Laura thought as she fell asleep, or rather, only her pregnancy is visible.

She felt that truth even more forcefully when Mother stepped into the house the next day. Mother was with Aunt Dee, who had met her at the airport and driven them both down to Patsfield. As soon as the two sisters looked at her, Laura was aware that this was the one thing that united the three women: the life inside her, the experience of motherhood. They stood in the hall as Laura explained the extraordinary news of Edward’s disappearance, but as if that was immaterial they began to ask her how she was feeling, and made her go and sit down in the living room while Dee helped Polly to unpack.

It was a relief to hear them going upstairs; to have voices in the house again. Laura had asked Helen to prepare a cold lunch, and how good it was that the sisters’ reminiscences and anecdotes rather than Laura’s strange situation dominated conversation over that lunch. Laura had never seen her mother and aunt together before, and despite her own self-involvement, she was intrigued. She saw how they were trying to orient themselves against one another. Mother, she saw, might have stood once in the same relationship to Dee that she had to Ellen, as the plaintive younger sister; but now they were older, both widowed, both long past their shared childhoods, they were looking at one another with new eyes. And the fact that Mother already had two grandchildren, and was now expecting a third, undeniably gave her a kind of seniority. They talked about pregnancy, about birth, about the pleasures of young children, as they ate ham and salad and asked Laura about the house. This ignorant calm could not last long, Laura knew.

It lasted only until the following morning, when the doorbell rang, peal after peal, over breakfast. ‘I’ll get it,’ called Helen, opening the door, and then Laura heard voices raised in anger. The door slammed, and Helen came back in confusion, saying that someone had asked for Mrs Last, but when she had asked him to wait, he had put his foot in the door, and it was only his fault if he had got hurt as she shut it. As Laura moved to the door, the telephone began to ring, and when she picked it up she heard a stranger asking for Mrs Last. She said Mrs Last was not available, and heard the stranger on the other end saying the name of a newspaper, promising money for her side of the story. The person outside the front door was rapping hard, with his knuckles, and calling out the name of another newspaper. Laura put the chain on the door and locked it, aware as she did so how thin it was, how her body and the man’s body on the doorstep were divided only by a few inches.

People agreed later that the leak came from France, from a French policeman who told a reporter that he was looking for two missing British diplomats and understood that they had gone east. Laura never knew if that was true, but she knew that the story of a drunken jaunt to Paris had been broken with shocking suddenness. Going back into the kitchen to make coffee, she saw before Mother did a figure appear over the wall, jumping down into the laurels, a young man with longish hair and an eager expression. She pulled the blinds over the French windows and checked that they too were locked. When she got Spall on the telephone he was unhelpful, clearly bothered himself by what was happening.

‘Just refer any reporters to the Foreign Office,’ he said. ‘We’ll prepare an official statement shortly. Have you heard anything else?’

Laura insisted that she needed protection now in Patsfield, somebody to keep the reporters away, and when he said he wasn’t sure if he could do that, she put the telephone down and called Toby instead. Now, surely, his intimate knowledge of the corridors of power would be helpful. But his tone, as he promised to see what he could do, was uncertain and full of pauses, as though he was listening to something else other than her words.

All day the doorbell went on pealing. At lunchtime Aunt Dee came in a taxi and had to push through the knot of reporters, who all started to offer her money for her story, assuming she was Edward’s mother. The plan had been for the three of them to go out for lunch, but obviously that was no longer possible; instead, they were penned into the house, which was warm in the May sunshine. They opened the windows upstairs, but kept the curtains drawn and the doors locked downstairs, and sat in the living room, Laura dozing on the sofa, listening to Mother and Aunt Dee talking.

Laura had taken the telephone off the hook during the day, but when she replaced it in the evening it began to ring again: Monica, who must have heard the story from Archie; Giles, who must have heard from Toby; Winifred, who must have heard from Giles. ‘Are you all right?’ they were all asking. ‘You’re not alone, are you?’ All Laura could hear in their voices was the taint of curiosity, and she told each of them she couldn’t talk, she had to keep the line free.