A Quiet Life(52)
It was cold, heavier than it looked, and the report was louder than she expected. After she had fired it, she stood with her hands by her side. If she had ever disappointed him, this was the time. Over and over again she tried to hit the target, but failed every time. With each failure the awkwardness grew, and she realised it looked as if she were being deliberately clumsy. Finally he took the pistol away from her and put it back in his pocket. He lit a cigarette and offered her one. They stood there, smoking, listening to the alarm calls of the birds throughout the wood. ‘I hope you never have to shoot your way out of trouble,’ he said.
Was she wrong, or was there a note of humour in his voice? She looked at him. Up to now she had been nervous and formal with him, but she tried a small smile. ‘Stefan,’ she said, ‘I’m never going to be a heroine.’ She meant a heroine in the kind of film where girls aim pistols and make quick getaways.
He gave her a little bow. ‘To the Soviet Union, all who risk their lives for revolution are heroes.’ It was a rhetorical answer, and yet it seemed to put them both at ease. They were both nothing, he seemed to imply, and yet they were both everything, in a bigger picture. They walked back to the car more companionably. ‘I have to drop you at the St Pancras station,’ Stefan said. He often spoke like that – I have to, you must, it is necessary that – without any explanation.
‘Don’t let me forget the film,’ Laura said, taking it out of her bag as the car started up.
‘You have some more? They say your photographs are good, very clear. Make sure you don’t cut off the left margin, sometimes you angle a bit to the right.’
Laura considered that. She had not expected this praise, but she had already found, almost to her own surprise, that she liked using the little camera; of all the jobs and instructions she had been given, it was the only one that made sense to her. After Stefan had dropped her off at St Pancras, she walked down to Tottenham Court Road to a camera shop she had seen. She had decided she wanted to buy a proper camera, for herself. The tiny Minox was fine for the work she had to do, but it was no good for ordinary photography, and she fancied that it would be useful cover for her – if anyone found the Minox on her – if she could present herself as a real amateur photographer. She spent some time talking to the man in the shop. He was patronising towards her, but she didn’t mind, and in the end she spent a lot more than she could really afford on a Leica. He told her it was a beautiful machine, and she could believe it, as she put it back in its glossy leather case and handed over the money for it.
After that, as the dusk began to fall, she walked over to Edward’s apartment. His flatmate had recently moved out, and Edward had made no move to find someone else to share with. He was already there when she arrived, and passed her a packet of papers. As he fixed drinks for them, she pulled down the blackout blinds, moved the 100-watt lamp she had bought previously into position, and started to photograph them, one by one – sometimes taking more than one picture of a document if she wasn’t sure that she was getting everything in, and being careful to leave more of a margin on the left.
As soon as she had finished and started to put the papers back in the packet, she felt Edward’s hands around her waist. With a sense of luxuriant surrender, she turned to him.
Afterwards, as she was washing and dressing, he was standing there going through his post. ‘Look, a postcard from Giles.’ He was smiling. ‘Says they’ve moved his outfit – he can’t say where, but he says it’s not far from my childhood home. Tell you what, I’m owed a few days off, we should go down to Sutton, and I’ll get him to come down too. I think Toby and Sybil will be there as well, as the House will be on recess. But there’s masses of room.’ It felt like a reward he was offering her, an escape from the drudgery and secrecy of London.
13
This time they left London together for Worcestershire, settling down in the train carriage beside one another, Laura holding a copy of Vogue and Edward a book of French poetry. At one moment he leant over her to pull up the window. She felt so flooded by the scent of his skin that it was all she could do not to press her lips to his throat above his shirt collar, but the presence of two elderly women in the carriage prevented that. Once they were in the back seat of the Daimler, they succumbed to a brief, open-mouthed kiss, but Laura quickly pulled away, conscious of Mrs Last’s servant in front, the back of his head in a grey cap and his gloved hands on the wheel.
The house had still not been requisitioned in any way by the military, and as the car pulled to a stop in front of it, Laura saw it with a shock of recognition, as if its restrained beauty had entered deeply into her after that one previous visit. It seemed only enhanced by the growing wildness of the garden, the ivy breaking over its walls, the gravel blurred with blown leaves. Edward’s mother was not waiting for them in the drawing room, but Sybil, who had already been up there for a few days, was there. She had obviously been playing Patience, and shuffled the cards together when they walked in, yawning.
‘Your mother is busy with her war work,’ she said to Edward. She told them that she had hardly seen Mrs Last the last few days as she had taken some kind of job with the evacuees and was out of the house a lot. ‘And Toby is busy with his writing …’ There was something almost dismissive in the way Sybil talked about the work of others. ‘I asked for a cold luncheon – do you mind?’