A Quiet Life(132)

As she thought that, other fears began to crowd in. She could no longer push away the insinuations that Valance had made, that the press had been running with, that Giles had stated baldly and that Alistair had wanted to include in his book – that Edward and Nick had gone off together, not just as spies, but as lovers. And as that thought entered her mind, other pictures from the past that she had been trying to forget, that she had always refused to look at directly, were sharp, scissoring through her memory: an evening at the end of the war and Nick’s hand touching Edward’s neck, laying claim to a long intimacy with him; a dark night in Washington, and Edward blundering out of the house to go drinking with Nick; the secret that Edward had blurted out on that final night, that Nick had recruited him at Cambridge. What form had that recruitment taken? What memories had Patsfield held for him that had drawn him back when he needed to make a new life? She remembered Nick’s excitement the night that they set off, the exuberance in his face as Edward came down the stairs to him, ready to leave his pregnant wife, to set off into the darkness for their final adventure.

And now, was it as Giles imagined it? That even now he was with Nick, safe in their dream country, happy, free, making love, more content without Laura than he had been with her? Maybe he had only stayed with her all these years because she knew his secret. She had been a useful dupe, a good mask for him. Was that all she had been? Laura heard Rosa crying out upstairs and as she went to hold her and comfort her, finally bringing her down to nestle against her in Laura’s own bed, she found herself confronting the possibility that she had refused to consider ever since she had heard the car drive away that damp May evening – that Rosa might never know her father. More, that Laura had never, really, known him.





9


‘I’ll telephone the consulate,’ Laura found herself saying to her mother the day after Ellen’s departure. ‘I’ll go and talk to them about us going back to the States.’ One says things, Laura realised, without necessarily meaning them, because the moment seems to make them essential. It wasn’t possible any more for Laura to find excuses that would make Mother happy. She had to talk as if a return was on the cards. She picked up the telephone later that afternoon, with Mother listening in from the living room, and dialled the number of the consulate.

Although Laura found it hard at first to explain why she was calling, still, the first person she spoke to knew who she was; her fame had not faded. But she was passed on from secretary to secretary, and then was told that someone would call her back. Nobody did, for some days, and when she was finally telephoned, she was asked to come in for a meeting. Still, she was not nervous. Entering the building that cloudy spring morning she assumed that they would simply refuse her permission to travel to America, and she could use that as an excuse to Mother and Ellen.

So she was off-guard when she was taken into a room where Valance was sitting alone, behind a desk, his jowly face as ugly and inexpressive as when they had met two years earlier. But this time she was not lost in the hazy fog of new motherhood, and it dawned on her with an immediate jolt where she had seen that face before – in 1944, in the swaying ballroom of the Dorchester, between Blanchard and Victor. What had he been doing with them, with the Soviet spy who had gone over to the Fascists, and the arms dealer whom Edward could not countenance speaking to? The miasma of corruption that had hung around those nights was there again in the dull room of the British consulate in Geneva.

A secretary was just bringing him coffee. ‘This might pass for coffee in London – but we can do better than this dishwater here.’

Laura sat down on the high-backed chair that she was motioned to. Outside long windows, she could hear children playing in the Parc Beaulieu.

The secretary went out, and came back in with something that she obviously thought would be more to Valance’s taste. Laura saw how nervous she was around him; saw his pleasure in bullying even this clumsy woman. When they were alone, he spoke.

‘You’ve kept your side of the bargain.’

Surely it was wrong of him to start by talking of bargains, she thought; surely that was too open a move.

‘But now you are asking about moving to America. We have evidence … you know what I’m talking about. We didn’t want to take you in when your baby was so small – but now … You seem to assume you are free, that we have lost interest.’

Laura had not prepared herself for this kind of blatant attack, this talk of evidence and arrest, and she simply spoke as she had so often: with a statement of ignorance. Edward was not a traitor; she had no idea where he was going that May evening. Valance did not react to her statement, but asked whether, if she did know, she would tell him. This time she had to do better in her acting, but her voice seemed forced even to herself as she told him that of course she would.

‘I need you to do a job for me, which will bring us both closer to the truth.’

Now she did not trust herself to speak. She kept very still, pulling her eyebrows together as though puzzled, and he began to speak about her network. He wanted more of it. He wanted more of what she knew.

‘I don’t even know what you mean,’ Laura said. Her voice came out childish, almost petulant, rather than innocent.

‘Tell me about your cousin Giles.’

The box. The key. The diagrams. Sweaty hands slipping on the camera; the anti-aircraft guns booming around her. That was not poor Giles’s fault. Laura said something about how she was sure that Giles had been such a tireless worker in air defence, and then she backtracked and said she knew nothing about what he did in the war. It was all so confusing now; what should she say?