A Quiet Life(65)

Laura asked for a telephone, and Alistair pointed to it at the bar. She dialled the number of Toby’s house, but the line was dead. She put out her hand to the brandy that Alistair had bought her, downed it, and then went to find the lavatory. A flagrantly exhausted face, streaks of dust on her cheeks, looked at her from the mirror. Alongside another woman Laura washed her face and hands and lipsticked her mouth. The woman beside her said something about how the noise would get you down if nothing else would, and Laura smiled the usual response.

‘They say it’s coming down hard over the East End again,’ Alistair said.

‘Any news of Belgravia?’

‘Not that I’ve heard. Another drink?’

Laura hadn’t eaten since lunchtime, but he was right, they had to keep drinking and trying not to think of what might be happening elsewhere in London. At one point the room seemed to sway, as if a high explosive had landed too near for comfort, but although the woman beside her clutched her arm, nobody left, nobody screamed. Eventually they heard, as if from far away, the all-clear.

‘I have to get back, Alistair.’

‘I’ll go with you.’

Soon after they started walking, they saw a bus coming through the lightening gloom, and Laura ran to the bus stop.

‘To Marble Arch, that will do – no need to come with me now. Thanks so much.’

‘Any time you want another drunken night …’ Alistair seemed untouched by anxiety, speaking as if they had been drinking in a city dedicated to pleasure rather than bludgeoned by war. It was the pose that many of Edward’s friends took these days, Laura knew, but no one did it with such panache as Alistair, smiling at her, overly smug, she thought, about their own courage in drinking and socialising despite the horror around them.

As the bus swung down Oxford Street, she saw the gaping holes of department stores, but that was old damage. Once she got off she started running, in stockinged feet again, longing to see the white row of houses, their ample doors, their blind windows. But when she rounded the corner she saw the worst: an ambulance at the head of the street, a fire engine, women in tin hats, dust in the air. She was running past them, forcing her way through a knot of people, calling out to ask what was gone.

There he was, walking towards her through the dust, blood running down his cheek – but it was only a cut, it was only a splinter of glass, he was unharmed. ‘Where have you been?’ It would have taken too long to explain, so Laura just shook her head and held him, revelling in the warmth of their bodies. ‘Dying to sleep,’ she said, and she went in, her feet bleeding and filthy on the once fine parquet floors. Their house only had more windows blown out, but a few doors down a house had taken a hit, and all morning, as Laura slept fitfully, she heard the sounds of digging, shovels scraping through foundations, through the London clay, into the dark.

It was weeks before a meeting came together. Finally she left a note in the dead-letter drop. A few days later a strange man stopped her on the way to the bookshop and asked her about the Quintero tobacco she wanted, and told her to come and meet him at the Lyons’ Corner House in the Strand the following day. She had never seen him before, and when she slid into the seat opposite him, he frowned at her.

‘You missed your last meeting.’

‘I couldn’t help it – where is Stefan?’

She said it before she remembered the prohibition on direct questions. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t respond.

‘I have something to deliver,’ she muttered. ‘What should I do?’

‘Small?’

‘Very small.’

‘Use the drop.’

‘Too precious. I can’t risk it. Can I pass it now?’

‘Not at this meeting, I can’t be sure you weren’t followed. Next time. Come in three days.’

Laura tried to tell him that it was urgent, but he was already getting up. She was left there, with everything unsaid and the film still in her bag, powerless to stop him.

The next time, they passed the film in the way that Stefan had taught her, placing it in the newspaper that she left between them. Laura tried to mutter an explanation. This is it, she said in broken whispers, the drawings, the night-fighting, but who knows what chaos in the east had drawn Stefan away from London, and this man seemed ill at ease, as if Laura might present some danger to him. He stayed silent for a while, and when there was nobody around them he spoke two sentences only. ‘You must go on ice for a while. There have been too many breaches of security, too many missed meetings.’

‘So long as you give that to them.’ The man showed no interest in the film, but it was now in his hands and Laura walked back through the scarred city free from it. As she waited at a traffic light at Marble Arch, she realised gas was seeping from a mains somewhere and she covered her nose and mouth against the smell.





16


As the months of bombardment went on, Laura became more and more conscious of the silences that fell between her and Edward when they were alone. She wanted, so much, to talk to him about the political situation. When would the promised conflict between capitalism and communism become clear, or would this grim struggle between fascism and imperialism, both sliding more and more deeply into darkness, go on interminably? Sometimes she tried to bring their conversations towards the political, in her desire for elucidation, but always a barrier seemed to close between them when she did so.