A Quiet Life(44)
Because she was so determined not to question him, but to show that she fully accepted him as he was, and was satisfied with whatever he wanted to tell her, Laura only gradually came to understand how Edward’s double life was organised. Details came slowly, dropping now and again into their conversation and always after a hesitation, as though he was eyeing a gate that looked closed and only gradually realising that it could swing open. That evening, for instance, he reminisced about his interview with the Foreign Office when he had first applied to them. ‘They asked me about my interest in communism …’
‘How did they know?’
‘I hadn’t kept it a secret at university, not at the beginning. So obviously they had to ask. I said that I had been interested, but I had come less and less to admire it. I was ready to go on, you know, if I’d been asked, but the odd thing was, I don’t think they were even listening to my answer. The chap who interviewed me, he’d been at the same college as my father, and he’d seen my father the night before the interview, in the bar at Pratt’s. So it wasn’t as though they wondered about me, it wasn’t as though … I was never outside …’
Never outside – was that what he said? Laura hadn’t quite heard the end of the sentence in the noise of the restaurant where they were sitting, and was about to ask more, when he asked her something instead, about the last time she had been to a Party meeting.
In fact, strangely enough, he seemed more interested in the details of her world than she allowed herself to be in his. He kept asking her about the Party members she had met, about the meetings, about what they had talked about, what was in the Worker that day, what people said about this or that writer or event. Laura sometimes struggled to answer, and often she felt that her anecdotes fell short of his expectations. If she tried to express to him her sense of the impotence of the British communist movement, he seemed not to understand her. She came to realise that he thought she was lucky to be openly part of that world.
One evening they talked about the change of line on the war. They were walking arm in arm back to Cissie’s flat after going to see an American film. He listened to her confusion, her account of how the Party members had tried to adjust themselves to the new line, but how uneasy it had all felt, and then he told her that it wasn’t Stalin’s job to pull the imperialists’ chestnuts out of the fire for them. ‘It won’t be long, though,’ he said. ‘Really, Britain drove the Russians into Hitler’s arms. If we’d only been able to create a united front … but when the Soviet Union has built up its strength and can confront fascism and imperialism – it won’t be long.’
‘I know,’ Laura said, warmed by hearing from him the same arguments that she had heard from Florence and realising that he would have heard them from some inner Party source.
They did not talk about world events all that much, however, even in those first few weeks. Politics might be the key in which their love song was placed, but it wasn’t the melody itself. That lay in the rhythm of their bodies. They were intensely aware of one another from moment to moment, their blood beating up at any touch – knee to knee as they sat in the cinema, or hand to arm as he steered her out of a restaurant, or during the brief luxury of an embrace as they said goodbye in a blacked-out street. Somehow those fleeting touches were enough, during those first weeks. More than enough, at least for Laura. For her they added up to an unexpected excess of happiness.
In May it was her birthday, and when Edward discovered the date he made a point of asking her to meet him at a more expensive restaurant. He had also mentioned to her, in a tone whose carelessness seemed studied, that his flatmate was away for a few days.
Laura arrived early. Sitting alone in the crowded restaurant took her back to the very first time that they had met for a meal, for that stilted lunch in Manzi’s. How changed everything was. She shook out her napkin and ordered herself a martini. She felt so connected to the noise and colour around her that the clatter of cutlery and the burble of other people’s conversations seemed to be a rhythmic accompaniment to her own thoughts. She could not think directly of the night ahead of her, but there it was, sharpening every sensation. As Edward entered the restaurant, she saw him greet two men who were sitting near the door. He had not yet seen her, so she could luxuriate in watching him walk through the restaurant, and take pleasure in seeing how women at other tables noticed him too.
It was to be a celebration, and so they ate more extravagantly than usual, although the food was nothing special: tough little lamb cutlets, creamed spinach that had been too heavily salted. At one point, as he poured her wine, she put a finger on the inside of his wrist, where his skin was silk. But it didn’t take long before she noticed that something was off, that he was distracted. He was doing an odd thing that she had never seen him do – before he spoke, and sometimes in the middle of sentences, he would move his glass or his fork half an inch to the left or right, as if lining them up. She had never before seen him betray any kind of fidgetiness. She had said something about emotions that last, and suddenly he said, ‘If only one could know when things would last.’ At first she went on speaking, and then she realised that he had given the words a strange weight, and she stopped and asked what he meant.
It took him a while to explain. The salt cellar was moved to line up with the pepper pot, and the wine glass with the water glass, at every pause. Gradually she began to understand. They had told him that the situation could not continue. She was too openly a communist, visiting Party meetings and spending time with known Party members. Even if her cousin and her aunt had never noticed what she was doing, the taint of her being associated with that world was too obviously a danger for him.