A Quiet Life(22)

The woman next to her spoke to her as they stood up. ‘You’re a Red, too, are you?’ she said, and Laura nodded diffidently. ‘So you’re all for war, then? It’s an easy line. But you don’t know. If you’d lived through the last one you’d know. We all said, never again.’

Laura was conscious of her own poor understanding as she began to repeat phrases from Florence’s speech.

‘That’s what they said the last time,’ the woman said before she had finished. ‘A war to end wars. A war for a better world. They came home to higher unemployment, lower pay …’

‘But that was an imperialist war – it was fought to defend the Empire …’ Florence had come over to them. ‘This will be a war against imperialism and fascism; it’s quite different.’

The woman said something about how she sounded like the Conservatives, all this eager talk of war. Laura felt shamed by the criticism, but Florence hardly paused.

‘If Churchill and Eden and Duff Cooper can see that Chamberlain is on the wrong path,’ she said, and Laura wondered at her ease with these British personalities, ‘that’s welcome, whatever their motives. Of course that doesn’t mean that they are right on anything else. In the long run we’ll resist them just as we are resisting Adolf Hitler.’

Laura warmed to her certainty; how wonderful it must be to have such sure knowledge of what was happening and what was about to happen. But she felt, to her embarrassment, the other woman’s gaze fall on Laura’s fur coat and polished nails as she stretched out her hand for a cup. The conversation faltered, and the two young women stood in silence with their tea until it was time to go.

Outside, the air seemed to have cleared a little, and there was a frosty chill. When Laura asked Florence to show her the way back to the Underground station, Florence said she was going the same way. It was just along here, she said, that she lived with Elsa. A short silence fell, and then Florence asked if Laura wanted a quick cup of hot chocolate before going home.

So this was where Florence was living her independent life! The free life that Laura should be living if only she didn’t have her family holding her back. As Laura followed Florence up the stairs, she felt a thick excitement rising in her. To be sure, the apartment seemed unprepossessing; there was a gap in one sash window that someone had tried to fill by stuffing it with newspaper, and stacks of dusty books and papers on the floor. But still, surely it was full of the hope of freedom.

It was only two rooms, Florence explained – so Florence slept in the living room, which was also Elsa’s study, as Elsa’s bedroom was so small. It was indeed very small, and when Florence opened the door to ask Elsa if she wanted anything, Laura could see Elsa in a bed which seemed to fill the room from side to side, with a large paisley eiderdown tucked over it. ‘I think the fever’s gone down,’ Elsa croaked, and then asked Florence about the meeting. Laura heard Florence telling her that it had all gone well, that the speech had been delivered as Elsa would have done it, and that she was sure some of the women would come to the pageant. Laura sat on the edge of the hard blue couch as they talked, and then, when Florence came out to make some cocoa on the gas ring, she stood up and said she had only just realised what the time was, and that actually she should go. She asked if she could borrow a pamphlet which she had found on the floor, and Florence said she could, but hardly looked at her.

‘We’re out of sugar,’ Florence called to Elsa.

‘Open the condensed milk instead,’ she heard Elsa order her from the bedroom, ‘and help me up, for goodness’ sake.’





4


‘I get the feeling your boyfriend is not treating you well,’ Winifred said to Laura the next day as the two girls walked up to Highgate High Street to do some errands. ‘And I must say – my last dinner with Colin was dull as ditchwater. The wages of sin are boredom, don’t you think?’

‘Well,’ said Laura, ‘it’s true – it’s not …’ But she tailed off.

What could she say? After the last meeting with Florence, she had gone once or twice to other gatherings of the Party in King’s Cross or Holborn. They had been full of speeches that constantly returned to abstraction, that never delved into the experiences that had brought her and, she assumed, others into the room. Even when she had sat with the other comrades over tea in the basement office, the conversations had been so far from the exquisite insights of Florence’s discussions on the Normandie that she had almost cried with frustration. Instead, they had been mainly about procedure, with a great deal of discussion about who was on the right lines, and who was being bourgeois or deviationist or showing ‘Trotskyist tendencies’ in their approach. In all of this Laura sat in unbroken silence, and Florence herself said little, while Elsa was almost the only woman who raised her voice at all.

And the more she saw of Elsa, the less Laura could warm to her. There was the obvious scorn she showed towards those who did not come up to scratch, her grey serge dresses that smelled of sweat, the glasses she kept twitching up her nose. Laura knew she was wrong to judge Elsa in what Florence would tell her was a petty, individualist way, but she could not help herself, as she sat watching Elsa, and watched Florence watching Elsa, and saw Florence take on – without, Laura thought, knowing that she was doing so – some of the little mannerisms and turns of phrase that characterised Elsa’s speech.