A Quiet Life(75)

Laura was not sure what to say to that, and asked more about the job. Edward told her that it was Halifax’s doing. Laura knew that the elderly man who was forever tainted by his attempts to prevent war was now in Washington, dispatched there to try to charm the Americans. And he had called on Edward to be by his side. She felt Edward’s uncertainty. As they went on speaking, he tried to frame his hesitation as the thought of leaving London at this time, at the end of the long war. She told him it was a good time to leave, and they brushed over, with silent understanding, the real meaning of the new job. There, he would be perfectly placed for all the secrets Stefan could ever want; as the trusted subaltern of the British ambassador, he would go like an arrow into the heart of the new empire – targeted, precise. But they did not talk about that.

‘My father would have been pleased,’ Edward said at one point. ‘He talked about Washington when I first went into the Foreign Office.’ He spoke, Laura thought, as if he were fulfilling his father’s dreams rather than blowing them to dust. But Laura too, in the moment, talked about it as if it were a straightforward promotion and suggested opening one of the old bottles of champagne that were being stored for the end of the war.

As he went to get it, Laura felt that now was not the time to tell him about her evening. Here was enough strangeness. When he came back with the champagne and gave her a glass, he put out his hand and stroked back her hair with that familiar gentle gesture. ‘Yes, we’ll get away,’ he said. For a moment she believed he knew, and understood, why she wanted to leave London, why they needed to reach a new world. And so she chose to let the horror of the evening recede, and drank her champagne while they talked about planning for the journey.

A few weeks before they left for America, Sybil returned to her house. Laura worked with Ann to try to make it look its best, but it was so dilapidated now, scuffed and scarred, paint peeling, half the windows boarded up and the doors no longer fitting properly into their jambs. The mice on the top floors scurried and scratched all night, and there was a suspicious smell to the hot water in the faucets, Laura had noticed, as though something had fallen into the tank and died. As Sybil came up the stairs to the front door, both Laura and Ann stood in the hall, and Laura felt almost as though she too were a kind of maid or caretaker, a failed one.

Sybil walked slowly with her up to the first floor, running her hand over the dented banisters. ‘It’s good to be back,’ was all she said at last, and then asked Ann to bring tea to the drawing room, as if it were a pre-war spring Sunday in Belgravia. Laura and Sybil sat together on the one sofa in the room. At first conversation was difficult, and then Laura said how very sorry she had been to hear about Quentin. As soon as the words left her mouth, she was unsure that she had said the right thing, but Sybil turned to her.

‘Nobody talks about him. Father never talks about him. Toby never talks about him. It was such an awful waste, you know, they were all retreating …’ She got up, as though it hurt her to keep still. ‘He was the only person I could ever talk to.’

Laura was surprised. She had only observed a rather cold, almost needling relationship between Sybil and her brother in the couple of times she had seen them together. She wondered if Sybil was not guilty of putting on the rose-tinted glasses of the bereaved, but she did not judge her for that. And then she wondered what it meant for Sybil’s marriage, if she could not talk to Toby. She simply said, however, how sorry she was.

‘At first I just couldn’t face seeing anyone,’ Sybil said. ‘It was a relief, burying myself in the countryside and helping with the evacuees. But I have to face reality now. Toby says there will be a general election quite soon, and he wants me around.’ People were coming back to London now that the end was in sight, she said, adding that it was such a pity that Laura and Edward would be leaving soon. Laura could not quite tell, in the formality of her tone, whether she was really sorry or not. Surely she would be glad to have her house back to herself, and indeed, over the days before their departure, Sybil seemed to be trying to do what she could to remind herself of its former splendour. She brought some of the rugs out of storage and had them laid through the big drawing room, but against their glossy warmth the dirty walls looked more depressing than ever, Laura thought.

And a couple of weeks after she returned to London, Sybil asked some of their friends round for drinks. It was still not the time to bring people together, Laura felt; the city was too chaotic, the mood too uncertain, with war not yet over, even if the endgame had begun. But there seemed to be a kind of imperative, for Sybil, in pretending that they could recapture the social ease of the past, and Laura tried to match her alacrity, sitting with her and Toby and Edward in the living room, a glass of Scotch and soda in her hand, as though she was looking forward to the evening.

Laura had met Stefan, she assumed for the last time, that afternoon. He had told her to meet him in a cinema – a new and unexpected instruction. It had been full and she had had difficulty finding him in the fourth row as instructed. Under the cover of the blaring newsreel he had told her the passwords that other contacts might use in America, and thanked her for trying with Blanchard, although even in the dark she felt his disappointment that the bug had not been fitted. Then his attention had turned back to the screen. She had never mentioned to Stefan what had happened to her that evening because of his failure to detain Blanchard; her mind was closing over the experience, burying it deep. And as the newsreel rolled in front of them that afternoon, she was reminded how trivial her own little actions would always be. There above them, in irrefutable black and white, the horrors of fascism, so much greater than anything she could ever had imagined, were being uncovered at last. A cold silence fell through the cinema as they watched the walking corpses. The heroism of the Soviet Army could now never be forgotten. Perhaps this was why Stefan had asked her to meet him here, so that together they could be swept back into certainty.