A Quiet Life(123)

But at all times they tried to avoid the mystery around Edward. That taint of espionage, those suspicions of homosexuality were too filthy and complicated for them to want to discuss. Laura could see how hard her mother tried to focus on the needs of the moment, rather than thinking of what might lie behind the disappearance. She knew that strategy very well; it was the one she had used for years. You must keep your gaze on the immediate scene: the plates that needed clearing, the dresses that needed ironing, the vases that needed fresh water, while the clouds above you gathered and dispersed and gathered again.

Now, they were focused on the idea that Laura must get away from Patsfield. Aunt Dee had the solution, one that she had been putting forward for some weeks already: they should go and stay with Winifred.

‘She says she knows lots of quiet towns around Geneva – you know the sort of thing, mountains, hotels – she can take time off work and settle us in. I haven’t forgotten my French, so there won’t be any problem finding our way around,’ Dee was saying.

‘It’s not a bad idea – the Alps, do you remember our first skiing lesson when we were at school there?’

‘I could hardly stay upright. What do you think, Laura, shall I tell Winifred we’ll come soon?’

Before they made any certain plans, Laura said, she would need to talk to Bill Spall. She had promised to stay in touch with the Foreign Office, after all. Mother and Aunt Dee shied away from that statement, and Laura waited until they were settled in the living room with their cups of tea before she went to the telephone. She did not really want them to overhear her conversation with Spall, but in the event it was truncated. ‘I just need to get away for a bit,’ Laura tried to explain. ‘My doctor said—’

‘I’ll call you back,’ he said. But when the telephone rang later, the voice was not his. ‘I’m calling from Mr Valance’s office,’ a woman said. ‘He’d like to come and see you this week. He’ll come to your house tomorrow.’

Valance. That was the name. Laura had had no sense, up to now, that anyone in the security services was interested in what she might or might not know. She had not been questioned. The house had not been searched. The statements made by Herbert Morrison and Anthony Eden and others in Parliament about Edward had been made without any reference to Laura Last. You are just the wife, Laura thought to herself, you are nothing to them. But Valance was the man whom Edward and Stefan had feared, and neither of them was here to advise her. As she walked the corridors that night, holding a fussy Rosa, inhaling her scent, longing for her to rest, she wondered whether now it was the beginning of the end.

As the black Austin parked in the drive outside the house the next day, Laura was rather glad to see from an upstairs window that the photographer who staked the house night and day was trying to snatch a picture of the man who got out, and that his driver was having to go out and remonstrate with him, explaining no doubt that while Edward’s family was fair game, you could not photograph members of His Majesty’s secret services. Laura was waiting for him in the living room, holding Rosa. She had tried, in a way that felt unfamiliar to her now, to dress well and to put on make-up, but the face that looked back at her from the mirror seemed changed – not just tired, but flattened, worn down by the overwhelming events of the last few months, and there were silver hairs showing along her parting.

As soon as Valance came in, Laura disliked him. He was a large man who might once have been good-looking, with a shock of strikingly white hair, but whose jowly face now looked doglike and whose belly strained at his jacket. There was something about him, indeed, that seemed familiar, but Laura was not sure what it was. She went out and gave Rosa to Mother, and returned to the room.

‘Would you like some tea?’

‘Let’s just get down to business, shall we?’ he said. He had a voice which wanted to be as certain in its vowel sounds as Toby’s or Edward’s, but there was a memory in it of a regional accent which Laura could not place. He shut the door. ‘Let’s not start with Mr Last. Let’s start with you. Tell me about your involvement with communism.’

The shock was physical, in the pumping of her heart and the dryness of her mouth. Given Spall’s obvious assumption that she was superfluous and ignorant, she had not expected this opening. But the long weeks of waiting had helped her. There was no question she had not run over in her mind at some point during these weeks, no scenario that had not already unspooled in her restless imagination as she paced the floors with Rosa.

‘Well, I never was involved. I read a little of the Worker when I first came to England – a girl I met gave me one – but I’m not really political.’

‘Who was this girl?’

Laura screwed up her mouth in what she hoped looked like willing concentration. ‘I think she was called Florence. I talked to her on the train from Southampton to London, you know, years ago.’ His face didn’t flicker. Laura had decided to admit to a couple of slight encounters with people she knew were communists, in order to make her other denials sound more convincing.

‘Did you go to meetings organised by the Communist Party?’

‘No, not at all. I once heard Florence speak. It was at a Co-operative Guild meeting, I think.’

‘Were you ever approached to become a member?’

‘I suppose Florence may have mentioned it, but I wasn’t as involved as that.’