A Quiet Life(129)

‘For me, he was a kind of hero,’ Giles said, kicking at the snow as he walked. Kick, kick, kick, leaving dirty marks on the white sidewalks. ‘When I think of him now … I remember him leaning on the bridge at Trinity, quoting some bloody Horace. I thought he had everything – brains, so charming too – I never really thought I was good enough for him. He was the only man who made me feel like that. He invited me to his house in the holidays. I remember him reading Edward Thomas to me. He thought there was so much in it, the poetry of everyday life, but I couldn’t see it.’ That brought Edward suddenly very near, and Laura tuned out of Giles’s train of thought for a while, but when she tuned back in he was still on the same theme. ‘He told me about Tolstoy, about the need to get away from possessions. I thought, how extraordinary he was, right at the centre of that class, you know, but with this social conscience – and sensitive: he knew all the names of the wild flowers when we went walking. He made me feel at home there, at Sutton – the other boys like him at Cambridge made me feel a bit – you know, I was a scientist, I wasn’t rich.’ Laura remembered Giles in the garden at Sutton, and realised how she had misread him, seeing his pleasure at being there as confidence, when in fact it was just eagerness to belong. ‘I was jealous of you, because he married you. I thought, you’ll never understand him as I do. But of course neither of us understood him at all – nobody did; except, I suppose, we must assume Nick did.’

Perhaps fresh snow was about to fall, the sky was greying and there was a wind coming up. ‘Let’s go and get a hot drink,’ Laura said. They were passing a café, and they went in and ordered hot chocolate and brandies. In the glass-fronted counters were gleaming confections of pastry, cream and bilberries, and Laura ordered a couple of cakes that were left untouched between them. Nothing could stop Giles talking as he was swept down such a river of reminiscence.

‘He was a pacifist at heart; he hated the whole war machine. The last conversation we had, he was talking about Korea. He could see the evil on both sides. How could he have ever put his trust in Stalin? He must have been so utterly duped.’

Laura said nothing except that she didn’t know. As the drinks arrived, she realised that she wished that she could ask Giles more about his assessment of Edward’s politics. When the world was embarking on the showdown between fascism and communism, she wanted to ask, where did you want to be? But she remembered Edward reading Tchernavin on the Soviet prison camps, and being unable to speak about what he read. When you saw the pictures from Hiroshima, she wanted to ask Giles, did you believe American power should have no counterweight at all? But she remembered Edward expressing his fears to Joe about the Soviet atomic tests. She could not begin that conversation with Giles about the rights and wrongs of the great political standoff of their age, because, even now, a year on, every step of the way, her mask must never slip. She had to be an empty-headed wife who knew nothing about politics. And even if she had been able to start that conversation, would she have done so? For so long, after those first conversations in 1940, she and Edward had avoided talking directly about what it was they were working for, and now when she looked back she felt unmoored by the uncertainty she felt about what he had really been thinking, all that time. She just said, ‘But Giles, he was never a traitor.’

‘Do you think it was just a mistake, then – that Nick was going and Nick dragged him along, that Edward didn’t know what he was getting into until it was too late?’

‘I just don’t know,’ Laura said, her voice a rush of cold on the heat that had been building from Giles’s words. She stirred her hot chocolate, which was gritty at the bottom. ‘Nothing about it makes sense to me. Have you talked to the security people?’

‘You mean MI5? God, I tried to talk to them at the beginning. I told them I knew him – come and talk to me – but they weren’t interested. Some junior chap popped over one day, but hardly listened to me. Alistair tried to talk to them for his book – his vicious book – but they wouldn’t spill any beans. Nothing said, nothing done, if you ask me.’

‘Is his book really so nasty?’

‘I brought you an advance copy – Winifred told me to. It’s in my room, back at the hotel.’ Giles lapsed into silence, brooding and looking into his glass. He was unshaven and rather crumpled, but not, Laura thought, unattractive; he had the kind of energy that clever, emotionally thwarted people often have, as though some passion was only being held in check by an intellectual effort. Laura wished that she could have spoken, could have talked about the things they were both struggling to understand, and brought down the barriers between them. But she could not. So as they went on talking, she kept on parrying, going sideways, and at the end, as they walked to the hotel, through the snow that had begun to fall around them, she sensed anger brewing in him. He might not have realised it, but he was furiously disappointed that his confidences had not been received with the interest he thought they deserved.

So, as he went on talking, it was not so much about how important a figure Edward had been in his life, but how significant he had been in Edward’s. ‘Of course, I know that he was lonely. I wish I could have spent more time with him – but being posted to Malvern, and then working in Bristol, made it difficult. I wish I could have been with him more; maybe I could have persuaded him out of whatever it was that made him put his trust in Nick.’ Laura still said nothing except that there was no point in regrets. When he handed her Alistair’s book at the door of his room, she felt that he did so with pleasurable expectation, as if he knew and approved of the pain it would cause her.