A Quiet Life(54)

When the evening finally broke up, she felt tiredness washing over her as she opened the door to the guest bedroom, but she stayed awake, anticipation skidding through her body, until she heard Edward opening the door and all the desire that had been building since the warm train journey, since the golden hours by the river, since the long dinner, could finally find its release.

The next day, the others went down to the tennis court, and Laura, who had never learned to play, sat and watched them, an abandoned magazine beside her. Giles and Toby went on talking between strokes, sometimes arguing about politics, which they seemed to see solely in terms of clashes of ego, and sometimes discussing their friends in that way that was becoming familiar to Laura, in which harsh judgements were masked by humour. At one moment Giles asked Edward if Quentin was still as wrapped up with Nina as ever.

‘Yes – it is rather a bore.’

‘She is rather a bore, you mean.’

‘I suppose she thinks with those looks she can behave rather badly.’

Laura remembered the first time she had seen Nina, coming into Sybil’s party with Amy. She started to speak about that moment, thinking she would tell the story of how she had only been invited to Sybil’s party as a replacement for Nina and how small that had made her feel. But as soon as she started to talk, she realised that she didn’t have the confidence to go on and expose her own vulnerability to Giles and Sybil. So she turned the story around quickly, stuttering a bit as she did so, and simply said how gorgeous Nina and Amy had looked, and how she remembered seeing Amy disembarking from the Normandie a few months earlier, surrounded by photographers. ‘I suppose Amy is quite – well known?’

‘That kind of fame …’ Sybil’s tone showed what she thought of it. ‘Lately, she’s been lucky – I mean, one can’t call it luck, it’s the war – but the papers haven’t been free to take her on. Not so much interest in gossip now. And Anderson, her new husband – he’d be absolute bait to them in peacetime, but now of course he’s joined up so there isn’t much they can say.’

Sybil returned to the subject of Amy that afternoon, when the five of them – Mrs Last being absent again – were eating tea at a table set out on the terrace. She was talking about how Amy had gone up to Scotland as her new husband was in a training camp in the Highlands and wondering how on earth she was coping there. Giles agreed with her that it was absurd to think of Amy in Edinburgh.

‘The scattering – I hate it,’ Sybil said. ‘You in Malvern, Quentin God knows where now. It’s so lucky that Toby and Edward have to stay in London.’

‘Yes, we must keep the clan together as long as we can,’ Toby said rather lugubriously, drinking his tea.

Laura spread cream and jam on her scones as she listened to them. She wanted to believe that she was happy, here in the sunlight with Edward and the people he was closest to. But she was finding Sybil and Toby and Giles more rather than less forbidding as she got to know them. They had been a group for so long, so homogenous and so inward-looking, that every sentence they spoke was loaded with assumptions that they had never thought to question. How could Edward bear to live within this tight circle every day? Laura wondered, looking at them as they talked and ate and nodded and judged.

Giles had just started saying that one of the dour Scottish men he was working with had got into a terrible argument with their boss about his refusal to do any work at all on a Sunday. ‘Old Penrose’s riposte was that he should see work against the invasion as a kind of prayer. I could see that wasn’t going to cut the mustard in convincing the deluded chap. It’s funny how there is never any point arguing about really heartfelt beliefs, is there – you can’t be rational, and if you try to beat them at their own game, like Penrose did, you just end up sounding mad yourself.’

In response, Toby began to tease Edward again about his adolescent devotion to Christianity. Giles broke in with interest, and for the first time that weekend the conversation drifted onto ideas. Giles was remembering how Edward had been a passionate Christian when they had first met at school. ‘There is a Christ – not the Christ that we’re served up in school services or this war, that one has to love, that’s what you used to say.’

‘Not the Christ of the church, no,’ Edward said, putting down his teacup.

‘How can there be a Christ not of the church?’ Toby said, his voice quickening with irritation.

‘You were always trying to get me to read Tolstoy on that,’ Giles continued, talking to Edward. ‘He’s dead set against what the church made out of Christ’s actual teaching, isn’t he? Thinks it’s a joke that it’s used to justify the state and that the church colludes in that.’

‘And why are we listening to a Russian nihilist’s view of our religion?’ Toby said in that tense voice again.

‘For goodness’ sake,’ said Giles to Toby, ‘you don’t have to sound quite such an MP.’

Toby clearly wanted to shut down the conversation, but now Edward and Giles were talking further about Tolstoy and whether he would have stuck to his views if he were alive now.

‘What, if he’d seen the storming of the Winter Palace? Or Dunkirk? You think he would have seen how pure force is sometimes the only answer?’

‘Unless you want to sleepwalk towards the wreckage of our civilisation.’