A Quiet Life(74)

‘It’s not loaded.’

Without speaking, Laura called his bluff, lowering it a little. He tried to grab for it but she held on, pulling back from him.

‘How did you know it was there?’

‘You left the drawer open.’

He must have known she was lying. But maybe he began to compute each of the potential scenarios ahead of them, as she did. Denunciation and counter-denunciation, and possible exposure. If he began to wonder who Laura was working for, whether she was a Fascist spy come to demand more information, or whether she had come to him from the Soviets to demand he come back to them, or whether, more likely, she was from the Americans – whatever conclusion he came to, the realisation must also have followed that no knowledge was good knowledge. It was better if they remained ignorant, if they stopped here.

He sat up and rebuttoned his trousers.

‘All right, Mrs Last. Put that down. Look, I will open the door to the corridor and we will talk quietly. Let’s have a real drink rather than these filthy cocktails.’

Laura still had the pistol in her hand while he poured two glasses of cognac. She didn’t want this drink any more than she had wanted the first, but strangely she still felt a kind of social pressure to remain here in the room in a dignified way for a few minutes, trying to recapture a semblance of normal behaviour. When they were both holding their glasses, he raised his. ‘To …?’

‘To our leaders?’

‘To our leaders, Mrs Last.’ Neither of them mentioned who those leaders might be as they drank. He said nothing as she got up, smoothed down her hair and left the room.

As Laura let herself into the house that evening, she realised, as though looking down on herself from above, that her hand was shaking as she turned the key in the door. She paused by the telephone in the hall, wondering why, all of a sudden, she thought of picking it up and speaking to someone – but there was nobody. Winifred was probably working, or out drinking somewhere; she could not place a long-distance call to Ellen or Mother out of the blue, and Florence … why did Florence’s strong voice recur to her now? Florence was long gone, her marches and speeches blown back into the past.

Surely it was Edward she needed. Yes, she thought as she went upstairs, dragging her hand on the banister, if only she could come to rest in his arms. She needed his understanding of the necessity of their work, a necessity that could outrun shame and failure. He was not in the bedroom. She pulled off her now hated black dress, threw out her torn underwear, and put on a grey utility dress which was the only spring garment she had been able to get with her ration book. She went downstairs, into the living room, put on the gramophone and poured herself a drink. Why didn’t he come home?

At last, she heard Edward’s key in the door. ‘Drinking alone?’ he said in a quizzical voice as he came into the room. She poured him a drink and sat down next to him on the sofa. She was waiting for him to notice her shakiness and ask her what was wrong, but he seemed distant and distracted himself. Still, the simple fact of his presence was reassuring to her in that moment. She felt her pulse slow, as they sat for a while in silence. How clean and strong he looked. She could not imagine how to start the story of her evening, but she was about to begin, when he spoke.

‘Do you ever miss home?’ he asked.

It was an unexpected question, but at that moment she was glad to be asked something personal that did not lead her back into the shock of the evening. ‘I suppose I do,’ she said.

And it was true; something like homesickness had become stronger in her lately. She had recently had a letter from Mother that had startled her into a kind of guilt about staying away so long. Father was sick, it was clear from the letter, although what kind of illness and how serious it was had been left vague. Ellen had got married two years ago, had moved to Boston and now had a daughter. Laura could tell from her letters how for Ellen the breathlessness of being courted had already moved into the slower pace of family life.

But perhaps, if she was honest, it wasn’t her sister or her parents she missed so much as the lost rhythms of speech of her home country. Sometimes, when she talked to Americans in London, she felt a shock of what she realised was nostalgia. She was about to tell Edward this, but stopped. He would find it odd, she thought, if she talked about how American she sometimes felt. She knew what the group thought of Americans: so crass, so uncultured – and ‘so frightened all the time’, as Alistair used to say about the American officers in the Dorchester. And as new battle lines were being drawn, surely in Edward’s eyes any loyalty to her country would become more and more absurd.

Her thoughts had made her fall silent again. She tried to say something honest about how she did miss home, and her mother and sister, even though she knew how little she really got on with them. Edward listened for a while, and then got up to pour another whisky. Over the glug and gurgle of the new bottle being poured, he told her the news. They were to leave London. They were to go to Washington. In May. A shock to him as well as to her. Though obviously they had always known he would not be in London forever. Working for the Foreign Office meant a certain amount of moving around. And this was a good, an enviable posting.

‘It’s quite a promotion, actually.’

‘And I’ll see Mother, and Ellen …’ Laura’s voice sounded uncertain even to herself.

‘You were just saying how much you missed them.’