A Quiet Life(45)
‘You mean …?’
‘They want me to stop seeing you – it’s too dangerous. An ultimatum.’
The shock of it stopped her talking or eating for a while, but then she realised he had not stopped talking. He was saying something about how he couldn’t ask her to give up her freedom. He was talking about how it would be too much to tell her that she had to live the way he lived, with everything kept dark from everyone. She tried to cut through what he was saying. ‘So it isn’t an ultimatum,’ she said. ‘I just have to break off with Florence.’
‘She’s your only friend,’ he said, shaking his head. He believed that it would cost her too much, not to see Florence again and to stop going to Party meetings. He was saying that she wouldn’t, if the situation were reversed, expect him to give up his friends. This was true, but the situation was not equivalent. At that point, as they were struggling to understand one another, the waiter stopped by their table, asking if they would like anything else. There had been Queen of Puddings on the menu, and Laura ordered it although she had no idea what it was. ‘I can’t walk into your life and destroy it,’ Edward said after the waiter left. Again, the wine glass was brought into line with the water glass. She realised she had not made herself clear, and quickly she told him that of course she would give up Florence and the visits to Party meetings.
‘But I can’t say to you, just give up everything that matters to you. You know the penalty if I’m found out. I can’t do that to you.’
Something had shifted. Although he was saying that he couldn’t say it to her, he was saying it. He had stopped playing with the cutlery. He was looking at her. The clouds cleared. He was asking her to throw in her lot with him. Nothing else mattered.
‘I don’t want anything else.’
He went on speaking about why that was impossible, but his tone said otherwise. He told her that the penalties were too harsh, the strictures too difficult, what she would be giving up was too great. ‘If you do this – it’s pretty odd, the way I have to live. Pretty lonely.’
Pretty odd. Pretty lonely. At the time, she could not see through his English understatement, and she brushed it aside. ‘We won’t be lonely. We’ll have each other.’ Just then the Queen of Puddings and the brandies were set down on the table, and so Edward’s reaction to her statement was gone in a nod to the waiter. There seemed nothing more to say for the moment. The die had been thrown. She picked up the spoon. ‘How nasty,’ she said, grimacing. ‘It tastes like soap, sweet soap.’
‘Let me order you something else.’
‘There’s no need.’ He called back the waiter and ordered her an apple pie instead, and pushed a brandy towards her. As he did so, his foot touched hers under the table. She pulled her chair closer into the table, hoping to press her knee against his, but just then the friends he had greeted on his way into the restaurant were at their table. They were going on to the Ace of Clubs for a drink, they were saying. Nick would be there, back from Washington, and Amy was in town. Edward was polite, and said they might see them later.
When they had gone, he looked back at Laura. ‘Do you want to go to the club?’
‘No.’ Her mind was running on how she must break with Florence. ‘I should tell her immediately – I’ll think of a reason. Immediately, don’t you think?’
‘I’m on ice until I either break off with you or you come in.’ He pulled his knuckles across his lips, and she realised how hard it was for him to speak clearly about his work after so many years of silence. He told her that they had told him that he might be no further good, having broken the primary and absolute rule of secrecy, and that he had had to spend time trying to convince them she might be trustworthy. ‘The first bad judgement I’ve ever made, that’s the way they see it.’
She was puzzled by the tension in his face as he said that. It was as though he feared the people he was talking about, and yet he must surely be their treasure, their darling, with his extraordinary fidelity to their cause despite the fact that it worked so entirely against his own self-interest.
After that brandy they had another. She was beginning to get used to the constant drinking, and to ending the evenings dazed with alcohol. Eventually, very late, they left the restaurant. Blackness, warm and dense, surrounded them; wrapped in its cloak they walked up the Strand, through Covent Garden and into Bloomsbury. They walked with the whole sides of their bodies touching, Edward’s arm around Laura’s waist, her blood flushing up at the touch of his body. Time seemed to slow, they spoke little, finishing each other’s sentences, as they walked through the hidden city.
When they entered his flat, they did not turn on any lights, they did not speak to one another. But they reached out for one another with a silent confidence. That night, she began to learn the softness and hardness of his body, and she felt those qualities mirrored what she was learning of the harshness and vulnerability of his character. She felt as though she touched his spirit as well as his body, as though his spirit was made flesh. At one point she pushed him away, holding him by his shoulders. ‘It’s too risky,’ was all she said, and he said, ‘I’ll make it safe,’ getting up and looking in a drawer. She disliked the interruption of the rhythm of their embraces, but his response to her fear was completely reassuring to her.