A Quiet Life(92)

That evening of drinking and chatter and dancing was not the only evening like it that month – or even that week. This seemed to be Laura’s path now, and as the time passed she realised that there was no point trying to step off it – her world was to be the world of the other embassy wives. So during the days she shopped and lunched and helped Monica with her charity; and she and Edward went out evening after evening, avoiding the quietness of the little house with its empty bedroom on the top floor. She started French lessons, as Edward thought his next posting might be in Paris, and surprised herself with her progress; she had so little else to do. Sometimes she went to visit Ellen and Tom in Boston, but Edward rarely went with her, and now and again she had lunch with Joe near to his newspaper. The world of the newspaper and the world of the embassy touched in enough places to mean that they soon had stories and gossip to share.

But it was something else that drew them to one another. It was perhaps that sense of being out of place in the worlds where they had found themselves; to Joe, Laura could recount some story about Inverchapel’s poor attempts at humour or he could tell her about a society hostess who had tried to get him into bed, and they could sit there in a little restaurant with a shabby front and good spaghetti, knowing that they would never really be part of the circles that seemed to embrace them.

One day Laura got out her old Leica camera and took it with her on a walk through Rock Creek Park. She started to photograph trees and their yearning reflections in the water, but she realised that bored her, and a few weeks later she asked Monica if she could photograph her children. Then something began to happen. Barbara and Harriet were intrigued by her and she by them; they were seven and five years old and she was fascinated by their physical confidence – they were always cartwheeling or skipping down the long corridor of the apartment or through the communal gardens. She tried to capture that freedom of movement, so different from the constraints on adult women. Most of the photographs were no good, but she was proud of one where the girls were doing handstands against a wall of the apartment. She didn’t show it to anyone, as they looked odd with their upside-down faces and strained arms, but she could not forget it. On a whim, she registered for a course on photography that was being held at the local library, and learned how to develop her pictures herself.

As she settled into these limited grooves of activity, she forgot all about the reactivation protocol, so that she was confused at first when, months and months later, somebody rang to ask about her sister and called himself Alex.

She had not returned to the Botanical Gardens since that rainy day of the first abortive meeting. Bright and busy now, it was a poor place for secrecy, she thought. She walked around for a while without being approached, and began to think that this was just a test to make sure that she was still in contact, rather than a real meeting. So she stopped holding herself in readiness, and sat down on a bench which was splashed with sunlight and with blossom that had blown from a nearby tree, and opened her magazine. These new clothes, with their boned bodices and stiff skirts – she liked their look of control, and she was already imagining herself in a dress with a particularly exaggerated line when the same short man as before came and sat next to her and shook out his newspaper before addressing her. ‘We need you to come in again.’

Laura said nothing, turning the pages of her magazine, hearing the words resonate in her mind. The man went on talking. That was all right, there was nobody near them to overhear.

‘He keeps saying he can’t leave documents with us to be microfilmed, that it is not safe to have them out for more than a few hours. And – we are worried. This town is small. There is nowhere to hide. He is not looking out – he is … is he drunk very often?’

Laura remained silent for a moment, considering. The cherry tree was all in blossom across the lawn, thick and pink now, but the flowers would be brown in a few days. ‘Yes, he is drunk most nights.’

‘He is missing meetings, he is unreliable.’

How alcohol and grief can transform a man.

‘Mrs Rostov says she sees you at the hairdresser. She’s the wife of another resident.’

Laura was surprised. She went to the same hairdresser regularly; she liked the way he made her hair look thicker and glossier, even when it had thinned after her pregnancy. A couple of times that striking Russian woman had nodded at her there, but Laura had not known who she was.

‘If he brings you the documents, you can retype them in your house, and then take them to the hairdresser. We will bring you a bag like the one Mrs Rostov carries, and then you can swap very easily. You can go there every Tuesday at eleven.’

‘I used to photograph them in London.’

‘You can do this work?’

‘Yes, but you’ll need to supply the film for the camera. It’s a particular type – for a Minox Riga, manufactured 1938.’

‘You don’t know how hard it is in this town now – I can’t meet you all the time to pass things. We will get it if we can and Mrs Rostov will put it in the bag, but otherwise go ahead with copying them – can you?’

‘There’s a typewriter in our house.’ There was, an old Smith Corona, left by the professor on the desk in the small study next to the living room.

‘Contact me only in a true emergency.’

They fell silent for a while, as some people walked too close, but she did not leave, just turned the pages of her Vogue without reading them. When it was possible to talk again, he fed her a new emergency contact procedure. She was to telephone only from a public telephone box, a number which was written on the newspaper he was leaving on the bench, and which she was to destroy once she had learned the number, and he would find her at or near to the junction of M and 31st Street an hour later. Laura memorised the instructions expressionlessly, and soon he got up. She could tell he did not trust her. But she knew better than to try to reassure him.