A Quiet Life(71)
When she telephoned Alistair, he seemed puzzled by her desire to go back to the Dorchester. She understood why; it had been an uneasy evening at best. Laura looked at herself in the hall mirror as she talked to him, and saw herself raising her eyebrows and laughing as she told him how lovely it was going out dancing when everything else was so grim. ‘My treat, this time,’ she said, and wondered how foolish she sounded.
Each time she and Alistair went back to the Dorchester over the next few weeks, she had to put on that persona; she had to become that woman who was a bit of a butterfly and couldn’t see when others weren’t quite in the mood to join her. Every time it became a greater strain. She knew that really she was too dull for Nina and her friends; she had to learn to drink much more than she was comfortable with, and stay out until the small hours, laughing at their jokes.
‘I hate it, Stefan, and I’m not learning anything about anyone. They just flirt and drink. It’s horrible.’
Stefan nodded. Now that this had been going on for a couple of months, he too had realised that Laura was learning nothing except the way that Blanchard liked to get drunk with his girlfriend on his nights off. But if Laura expected to be released, she was disappointed by his next words.
‘If you can get into his room alone just once, I want you to put a bug into it. Then we can hear him. Then we will know. He must be making contact with the other side somehow. We need to know what he is telling them.’
Laura did not even know what he meant by a bug.
‘A listening device – like a radio receiver.’ Stefan’s voice was impatient. It was too cold for them to meet outside, and they were in that little café again. Laura suspected that the owner was a Party member and that was why Stefan felt at home there, but she had felt safer in the old days when they used to meet in open spaces. Their conversations were always so rushed here, and she felt that she had not even really heard what Stefan was saying before she had agreed.
The next day they met in a prearranged spot in Tooting, and he drove them south out of London in his little grey car. They pulled into a lay-by and he showed her the device that she was to fix in Blanchard’s room. The instructions he gave her were detailed, and she nodded as he talked, but back in her bedroom that evening, alone, she got the bug out of its box and looked at it disconsolately. It was bigger than she had expected, a long antenna connected to a silver-plated can in which, Stefan had told her, were the wires and plates that would act as a microphone when radio waves were transmitted to it, which another agent could do from a different hotel room once this bug was fixed in Blanchard’s room. He had talked to her about the best way she could fix it: it need only be temporary, so she could put it in the furnishings of the room, on the underside of the desk or the back of a bedside table, for instance. There was no need to drill a hole into the skirting board, he said, as though that was reassuring. He had given her a little tube of glue, a tiny tin of epoxy resin and some small tools, but Laura felt incompetent as she looked at the kit, and could not imagine how she could carry out her task without discovery.
That evening, getting ready to go out with Alistair, she decided to leave it behind; she packed it into an old hatbox at the top of her wardrobe. While she was making up her face, Edward came in unexpectedly early, and she asked if he felt like coming out with her and Alistair, but he shook his head, saying the Dorchester wasn’t really his thing.
‘I know,’ was all she said. She assumed he knew why it was that she was going there; not in detail, of course – they both knew not to discuss their work – but he must know that she would not be going if she did not have some kind of mission there. He paused behind her, looking at her in the mirror. For a moment she was about to tell him what lay ahead of her and how she felt sick with apprehension at the task Stefan had given her. ‘Do you ever—’ she started, about to ask him whether he ever found that Stefan gave him things to do that he balked at, but the words were slow in her mouth and at almost the same time he was telling her not to stay out too late.
‘I know it’s fun,’ he was saying, ‘but they are such an odd crowd there.’ She thought she heard in his voice an anxiety about her, about what she had to do, and she stood up and put her arms around him.
‘Bother,’ she said, ‘I’ve put lipstick on your collar.’
‘It’s going into the laundry anyway,’ he said, disengaging himself and picking up a book that was lying by their bed.
By now Nina and Blanchard seemed to have accepted that Alistair and Laura would come over to their table at some point during the evening. Alistair had done most of the work of making them accept their company; he was happy to dance and flirt with Nina, while Laura still felt she faced an uphill struggle to get Blanchard to notice her. But Nina seemed languid that evening, and almost as taciturn as Ingrid, and Alistair went wandering off to the other side of the room to gossip with a journalist he knew. Nina had said the previous week that she would soon be going to visit Sybil in Derbyshire, Laura remembered, but when Laura asked her about the visit, Nina looked vague.
Blanchard, too, seemed distracted, and Laura thought suddenly, as she was drinking her second cocktail, that she was going to give up after that evening and give Stefan back that bug. What was the point of trying to make headway with Nina or Blanchard, or to pretend that she was this girl who wanted to get drunk and dance with people who didn’t even like her much? Just then she noticed that Nina was looking at her with an oddly glassy stare, and she asked if she was all right. Nina nodded, but Laura saw how her gaze wavered even when her head stilled. Nina got up, saying she was going to powder her nose, and Laura got up too. Blanchard asked why girls always went to pee together, and Victor laughed and made some smutty innuendo. As they walked through the room, Laura felt Nina’s hand suddenly on her elbow, a tight pressure. ‘Feeling a bit tired,’ was all Nina said when Laura turned to look at her. They went into the ladies’ powder room; it was large, with little peach-coloured armchairs and a maid whose job it was to lay out the linen towels by the peach basins. It smelt of shit and tuberose perfume. Laura, feeling nauseous, sat down by a basin as Nina went into one of the lavatories. The door was locked. There was silence. Laura was pleating the silk of her dress in her fingers. The silence lengthened. Another woman, middle-aged and respectable in green crepe, came, urinated and left.