Laura looked into the icebox, where there was nothing but some sliced cheese and a half-drunk bottle of gin, and ate and drank some of both. The air in the apartment was thick and even when she opened the windows she felt as though she could hardly breathe. It was one of those heavy days she had already come to know in Washington, when the heat beat back off the pavements all day and into the night. Away to the south, dark clouds hung in the sky and the light seemed brassy, but even when the storm broke she knew that the pressure would hardly lift. The tastes of the gin and the cheese went badly together, and she felt nauseous, sitting on the sofa and listening to the radio with a magazine on her lap when Edward’s key turned in the door late that evening. He bent to hold her, but she was unmoving in his embrace, feeling the sweat spring between their arms where they touched. ‘I am so sorry I didn’t get to the funeral,’ he said.
Laura told him it didn’t matter, and asked him for news of London. She would much rather hear about their friends there than talk about her childhood home. Edward started telling some story about how hard Toby was finding life without his parliamentary seat, but Laura was slow to respond. ‘Your mother, how is she taking it?’ Edward asked.
‘No different from what one might expect. Have you eaten?’
‘I’ve been eating round the corner. Let’s go.’
They had gone to this restaurant on their first night in Washington, but now the steaks seemed quite a normal size rather than some absurd mistake, larger than a week’s ration. At least here the air conditioning blew hard and cooled the sweat on their cheeks. Because it was so noisy it did not matter that Laura found it hard to talk, and Edward had other stories of their friends in London, as well as plans for the next few weeks. ‘I’ve got an invitation for you to the embassy luncheon this Saturday,’ he remembered at one point. ‘I was going to reply for you and say no, but then I thought maybe you’d like to have something to do – I mean, something different, new people to meet. Remind me to give the note to you.’
As they walked back, the thunder sounded and rain began to steam on the sidewalks. Neither of them had brought an umbrella, and when Laura caught sight of them in the lobby mirror as they went into the apartment block she was struck by how bedraggled they looked, her damp hair sticking to her face and her mascara smudged. Before they went to bed, Edward gave the note to her, a few impersonal lines from Lady Halifax. Laura looked at it and wondered if it would be a formal affair, but Edward said not, and that he would go over there early as Halifax liked a game of doubles before lunch. Laura turned that over in her mind: that pale, thin man playing tennis with his subalterns in the embassy garden. Strangely, she dreamt about it that night, but in her dreams Edward and the other men were playing with snowballs – ‘Don’t worry, your lordship!’ he was saying as they melted in the sun. ‘Your point, I think!’ She walked onto the court in the dream, and a snowball landed on her arm, but as it melted it left a red stain.
The next morning as Edward was about to go out of the door, he suddenly stopped. ‘Do you have the reply for Lady Halifax?’
‘I thought you’d tell them I’d be coming—’
‘If she writes, you have to write.’
He waited while Laura found a piece of paper to scrawl her acceptance on; the ink smudged, but she folded it anyway and pushed it into an envelope.
That Saturday, after Edward had left for his game of tennis, Laura found herself going through her closet without relish. The couple of summer dresses she had bought to take to Ellen’s house in Portstone seemed out of the question – they were too obviously vacation clothes – but her entire wartime wardrobe was also impossible with its shabby, skimpy lines. So she took out the only possible things she had: the clothes she had bought in Stairbridge for the funeral, a pleated black silk skirt and tight black jacket with elbow-length sleeves.
She walked the short distance over to Massachusetts Avenue, past well-kept houses with liriope and pansies blossoming by their front steps, smoking a cigarette, barely noticing the river flashing among the richly coloured trees. In the aftermath of the storm the weather had cooled a little, but in the embassy garden the air was unstirring around the English women on the garden terrace, all of them dressed in similar printed dresses, whether they were in their twenties or their sixties.
‘Mr Last is just finishing a game with my husband. He’s rather pleased that they have players for doubles now,’ Lady Halifax told Laura when they were introduced, folding her mouth down at the end of each sentence.
‘Yes, Edward likes it too – it was always hard in London to find a chance to play.’
‘Hard on the chaps if there isn’t an opportunity.’
‘It was hard in London,’ agreed another woman. ‘Very nice here, Lady Halifax, to have the space, you know.’
‘The garden is really the thing.’
‘It is, isn’t it? The garden really is something.’
‘Awfully special,’ another woman agreed, and so they went on, with Laura echoing alongside them.
When the men came up onto the terrace, however, the chorus faltered for a while.
‘Ah, so this is Mrs Last,’ said Lord Halifax, with that accidental charm that his wife failed to show. ‘And you are a born American – how nice for you to be able to come home.’
‘I grew up near Boston, not here,’ said Laura.