A Quiet Life(43)
As they held one another, Laura heard a blackbird singing from a nearby tree. She felt as though she had lost all her boundaries. The song ran through her, through her mouth and thighs. Edward’s hand was hooked inside the top of her stockings, pushing her thighs apart almost too roughly. She straddled as wide as she could in her narrow skirt, rocking back on her heels. She would have fallen if it hadn’t been for his other hand, around her back, pressing her chest into his. She grasped his thighs with hers, moving her body up his so that his erection was in the right place, in what she experienced just then as the entirely open, entirely wet centre of her body, even though their bodies were touching through layers of clothes. The blackbird’s call, liquid, honeyed, sprang through them before falling into the green spaces of the park. Laura felt the song running through her, she felt Edward’s closeness, she groaned, his mouth was so hard on hers that it hurt, and tears came into her eyes.
10
Even in the blackout, dawn made itself known: the birds calling the city to wakefulness, the bluish glow at the edge of the blinds. Laura was already awake, alone in her narrow bed, pictures and words from the previous day tumbling through her head. After the revelation, they had gone on walking around the muddy lake, and although their conversation had stopped and started, at times there had been a rush of surprising clarity. She had begun to understand what he must have been like eight years ago, at the time when he entered this secret life: an undergraduate at university, a young man who seemed to outsiders to be a perfect fit in a world that was moulded for him, yet who felt all the time that everything was out of kilter. ‘But I don’t have to explain that to you,’ he said to her, and this assumption of their mutual understanding startled her.
He had been an open socialist then, he said, having moved away from his youthful Christianity and into a greater understanding of how one might create a better world here on earth rather than waiting for the kingdom of heaven. One evening in a friend’s room, he mentioned his desire to go to the Soviet Union after university, and then another undergraduate had followed him out into the night at the end of the discussion and asked him to reconsider, to make a deeper and more secret commitment.
‘And so I told everyone that I had lost interest in communism. My parents were so delighted when I started to talk about the Foreign Office.’
He had told her with a kind of sad pride that nobody had ever suspected him. She considered that. She had seen enough of him with his friends to see that he was entirely accepted in his social circle – more, he seemed to take for granted a sort of deference. She thought about how he spoke, how he moved; the pauses in his conversation, the stillness of his bearing, the way he encouraged revelation from others rather than opening up himself. Now that she knew what lay beneath this aura of controlled authority, she could see how brittle his manner was. But she knew how she had seen him at first: invulnerable, bright with the armour of his social status.
At the same time that she now saw his vulnerability, she also saw his heroism. She had been convinced by Florence that there was an answer to the failures of the world around her, that there was a better future ahead. Yet despite their apparent certainty, Florence and Elsa had not shown her a straightforward path to the promised world; she had seen how their lives were overwhelmed by all those meetings and marches that seemed to achieve so little. But Edward had found a way through all of that impotent activity. Lying there, as the clock ticked on the hours she should be sleeping, it was not doubt or fear that kept Laura awake: it was happy anticipation.
She would see Edward again that evening; they had arranged to meet in a restaurant near to Shaftesbury Avenue. She would not quiz him, she thought, she would not ask any of the obvious questions, about how he got away with passing secrets and how he could bear to spend so much time with people who understood nothing about him. She would ask him nothing, she decided as she lay there, but she would show him … The memory of their kiss, and that moment when he mentioned a connection between them which meant he did not have to explain himself, flooded her with pleasure so intense that she turned over and buried her face in the pillow, smiling. She would show him that she understood.
As she got out of bed and pulled off her nightdress, walking over to her closet to find clothes for the day, she found that every action felt imbued with a sense of purpose she had never known before. As she ate toast and drank strong tea with Winifred, who was yawning after going to bed too late the night before, she felt her secret trembling inside her – not wanting to get out, no, but there like an extra dimension to a scene that would otherwise be too flat to be real. And as she opened the door to the street, the very city around her seemed changed, because out in it was somebody who might also be thinking of her.
As she had decided, she didn’t quiz him, and so that evening started off with more inconsequential conversation. He asked her about her day and she replied with unaccustomed talkativeness, telling him about a woman who had come into the shop asking for a novel whose title she could not remember, by someone whose name she could not remember, but she said that there was a very nice dog in it. ‘Can you believe,’ Laura marvelled, ‘that she thought we might know what the book was?’
He responded in kind, telling her a story about a man he worked with who had picked up the book Edward was reading, which happened to be Madame Bovary, and said, ‘Any good?’ Laura did not quite understand the humour in this story, but it did not matter, she still appreciated the spirit in which it was told. As they talked, their gazes were constantly drawn to one another, and a small smile kept coming and going on Edward’s face.