A Quiet Life(68)
Eventually she went to bed alone, feeling rather weak and maudlin in the aftermath of the illness. Winifred had lent her a novel about a teacher in an English private school, but its humour was that of the group, and although she could now pick up some of the tones of irony, most of it baffled her. Though the sirens sounded in the night, she stayed in her own bed, a heavy inertia pinning her down, and lay there for a long time even once light pulsed through the edges of the blackout blinds, the covers pushed off because the air was already so close. At last she got up, splashed her face with cold water, and went down to breakfast feeling light-headed. Toby was there, head bent, munching through toast and margarine. ‘News,’ he said thickly, gesturing to the radio.
Laura caught the tail end of the bulletin: ‘Hitler now has new fields of slaughter, pillage and destruction.’ That gravelly voice had become familiar to everyone, but it seemed just for a second to be speaking directly to her. ‘I see the Russian soldiers standing on the threshold of their native land, the ten thousand villages of Russia where there are still primordial human joys, where maidens laugh and children play. We shall give whatever help we can to Russia and to the Russian people.’
‘There we are,’ said Toby, ‘not alone any more.’
Laura was nodding at a meaning he could not guess beyond his words, as she asked Ann if there was any more toast and coffee. They sat talking idly, and not long afterwards they heard the front door bang and Edward came down the basement stairs. The expression on his face was one Laura had not seen for so long. Without thinking of the others, she stood up and went into his arms, and he held her for a moment, smiling. ‘I am sorry,’ he said, ‘so much going on, I couldn’t get back last night. It’s a lovely day. Shall we walk up to the park?’
Laura went upstairs and put on a dress that she had not taken out of the wardrobe yet that summer. Sleeveless and low-necked, it seemed almost too bare for the city. There were no deckchairs free, so they sat on the dusty grass under a sycamore tree. At one point Edward picked a daisy and tucked it into her hair. It fell out and down the front of her dress and, without thinking of the people around them, he bent and kissed the hollow where it had fallen. They lunched at the cafeteria by the Albert Memorial and the sparrows came to their hands to be fed. It seemed easy to talk now – about everything, about politics, yes, if they had wanted to, now that the world had fallen into place, now that good and evil were ranged on opposite sides of the great conflict, but also about why the leaves of chestnut trees looked glossy and the leaves of plane trees looked dull, or whether they should go to hear this pianist that Alistair had been raving about last week. At one point Laura misheard Chopin as shopping, and Edward laughed so much that his coffee went up his nose, and when they watched some park warden sweeping the gravel path he quoted some nonsense rhyme about how many maids it would take to get a beach clean, and she made him repeat it until she’d learned it too. They felt drunk with their sense of relief.
17
One grey Thursday Laura saw the Red Flag fluttering over Selfridges; the only splash of colour she had seen for a long while in that grimy, shattered city. Later in the day, with hindsight, it seemed like a precursor of the telephone message that Ann shouted up to her. ‘It’s for you, Mrs Laura,’ she called up the stairs, and when Laura came down Ann handed her the receiver. ‘Someone called John Adams, he says your sister gave him your number.’
It had been months – no, years – since Laura had heard from any contact, and it was as hard as ever to slot herself back into that frame of mind. She had not missed her role in that secret work. The world around her had fallen into place more coherently since the chaos of the first years of the war. Now that Londoners spoke of Russians as the bravest of all, she felt more in step with the dogged hope that was the only acceptable attitude in the city. Tired and shabby, as all Londoners were after years of war, she went on day by day shopping for rationed food and doing shifts in that half-empty bookshop, but just putting one foot in front of another felt like enough of a journey. Perhaps she should have felt proud to be called back to the bigger struggle, but going into the dim café in Balham and seeing Stefan’s familiar ugly face at a back table, she was as nervous as ever. Once she had sat down at the next table, where he could hear her speak, she hoped for some words of reassurance or explanation. But there were only two muttered passwords, and then silence.
He seemed to have aged much more than a couple of years, she thought, looking sideways at him. His hair had turned greyer and he had put on weight; when he put out his hand to his cup of coffee she thought she saw it shake. She had brought The Times newspaper with her, although she had nothing to give him that day, and she saw he had one too. She assumed it held fresh film for the Minox, and she put her hand on it in a would-be casual manner as she got up, and put it into her bag as she left the café. She had been there half an hour at most.
Rattling back on the Underground, she decided to get out at Trafalgar Square and walk along Piccadilly to see if she could find a shop Winifred had mentioned that had been selling new nylon stockings. As she came out into the pale light, she heard voices raised in a song that she recognised. It was a communist rally; red flags and the plangent tones of the ‘Internationale’. A couple of passers-by had stopped beside her to watch and she heard something about the bravery of the Red Army and how they could teach other armies a thing or two. Everyone loved Uncle Joe now.