A Quiet Life(57)

Her gin and tonic was still sitting there on the coffee table. She drank it and found herself pulling at her own fingers, twisting them. That, she realised, is what they mean by wringing your hands. Had she assumed he’d been a virgin too? No, of course not, not if she had stopped to think, but she had not stopped to think, and how long had the slip been there, and how many, and when, and … Laura had been living in the present for months. It had seemed to be a comfortable place, but suddenly the past and the future had opened up on either side of her and she realised that the present was a narrow spit of land, and she felt dizzy.

She thought of leaving. She reached for her purse and stood up, but as she went towards the door, it opened and there he was. For all these weeks, it had been such a revelation to her that this man’s attention was on her; she had experienced it as a complete loss of boundaries. Now, as he came in, she felt their separation again, and a distance that she had not felt since their first kiss seemed to arise between them. He moved towards her, but she moved back, into the living room. They exchanged some stilted sentences; she didn’t know how to bring up what she had seen, but then as he poured himself a drink and sat down on the sofa, pulling at his tie to loosen it, she was overcome with desire and sorrow. She put her head in her hands.

He did not ask her what the matter was. ‘Cheer up,’ he said and turned her face to his. She let him kiss her for a few seconds, the desire rising up in her as ever, and then she suddenly jerked away from him.

‘I was talking to some chaps at the office last week,’ he said, ‘and it would be possible to get you home on a convoy now that things are getting so hot.’ He thought she was scared by the start of the air war. He thought she was missing home. Or did he just want her to move on?

‘Do you want me to go?’

‘Do I want you to go?’ He almost laughed, and told her it was the last thing he wanted.

‘Is it? Is it really?’ She could not dissemble any more, and so she told him what she had seen. It would have been hard for her if he had been dismissive, but he immediately seemed to recognise her anguish and to want to reassure her. He spoke quickly and confidently; it had been some time ago, before the first evening she had come here, yes, definitely – and who had it been? Well, hadn’t she known? He thought she had known. Ada.

With a rush, Laura’s world was rearranged. She remembered Ada’s hostility that day in the back of the cigar shop as she had questioned her.

‘Do you still see her?’

They never talked about meetings that they had with Ada or Stefan; the need for secrecy was being drilled into Laura week by week. ‘Everything you don’t know makes you safer,’ Stefan would tell her over and over again in his flat East European accent. ‘Everything you know is a danger to yourself and those you care about.’ The direct question was a challenge to that new habit of secrecy, and Edward paused.

‘No,’ he said finally. ‘I don’t. It’s someone else now. I don’t know what’s happened to her.’

He seemed lost in thought for a moment, and then when Laura picked up his drink and drained it, he spoke again, telling her that there was no need for her to be jealous. ‘She meant a lot to me at one time. I suppose, like Florence for you. All the questions I had, she seemed to have the answers. I think I relied on her. When she was photographing …’

Laura’s fingers slipped on the glass. So Ada had been the one who had photographed his papers before Laura showed up, and then Ada had been moved on – or maybe she had asked to be moved – and Stefan had had to find some other solution. There were so many questions Laura wanted to ask – about how long they had been together, and why on earth the slip was here when she knew that it would threaten all the protocols of his secret world for Edward to have brought Ada to his own flat.

But as knowledge flashed through her, she saw how Edward was looking out over her shoulder towards a past she could not share. A rift had opened between them. It was a rift that she wanted to close, and it seemed that Edward felt the same. They reached for one another gently at first, and then as the passion took over they made love with a curious, almost angry abandon, Laura’s nails scoring down his back as he pushed inside her.

Maybe Laura’s uncertainty would have stayed with her, but later that evening when they were lying naked in bed, Edward said something she did not expect. He was smoking, the window was open, and the noises of London were magnified to Laura in the aftermath of love-making; she could hear the rush of buses down Gower Street, a swing band on the radio from a room below, a rattling clang as someone pulled down the shutter on a shop. They should get married, Edward said. He thought they should get married soon. If he wanted to bring her back into the present, she was ready to be there with him. She luxuriated in the moment. Above the sounds of the streets she could hear the soft screaming of the swifts as they chased each other in the still-peaceful London skies. She ran a finger down the line of Edward’s throat, where the sandpapery shaved neck gave way to the silk of his collarbone. Yes, she said, breathing in the scent of his skin and relishing the fact that doubt had disappeared.





15


Laura stood on the steps of the registry office, her husband beside her.

‘Stop!’ Winifred said. They stopped and Laura smiled into the sun. Across the road a woman pushing a pram looked at her with a weary face. A few scraps of confetti were thrown.