And there was Kit at the door, scanning the crowd, so she moved towards him. She had known he was coming tonight, but he looked a little embarrassed, mumbling something about how sorry he was that he hadn’t looked in on her recently, how glad he was to see her here this evening, and that he was planning to leave to go back to Boston at the weekend. She knew that his attempt to break into journalism had not gone well, and his graceful stance seemed to slump as he said he was not sure what he was going to do next. ‘But Joe’s coming tonight too – you know he’s doing well now. Have you seen him?’
And there Joe was as if on cue, walking into the party behind them. It seemed a little odd that neither Kit nor Joe had been in touch after the stillbirth, but there, that was the nature of such a miserable experience. Nobody wanted to mention it; nobody wanted to say the wrong thing. She wanted to show them it didn’t matter, and she put on a friendly manner as she asked Joe how he was finding Washington, and as he turned to her she felt warmed by the unforced enthusiasm of his response. ‘Living in a shoebox, working all the hours that God sends, going to parties every night to gawp at the world’s players – how could I not love it? And you?’
Laura tried to match his energetic tone, telling him that they were lucky enough to have found somewhere to live that was not a shoebox. As she told the story of how they had found their Georgetown house, she mentioned the name of the professor who owned it, and Kit laughed.
‘You’re in his house, the mad old right-wing conspiracist?’
Laura was surprised that both Kit and Joe seemed to know exactly who Professor Runcie was. Joe was talking about one of his books, which he seemed to admire, while grabbing a couple of glasses of champagne from a passing tray and putting one in Laura’s hand.
‘He sees Reds behind every bush and up every tree, nobody takes him seriously,’ Kit said.
‘A lot of what he says is pretty sensible,’ Joe demurred, but Laura could not tell whether he was genuinely disagreeing with Kit or simply arguing for the sake of conversation. He went on talking, saying that people in Washington were simply too blind to how far the Russians would go, and Kit was saying something about how it was ridiculous to exaggerate the threat, and that even Inverchapel had been happy to have a relationship with Stalin when he was ambassador in Moscow. Laura was casting about in her mind for a way to turn the conversation, but when she asked if they were likely to go to Portstone that summer as Washington was simply too miserable when it got hot, she was ignored.
‘If you want a good story about Reds,’ Kit was saying to Joe now, ‘you should go and see that friend of mine I mentioned, Carswell – not actually a friend, but I knew him at college. He used to be a communist and he says there are communists even in the State Department now, that it’s almost like a club – all nonsense, I’m sure.’
Despite another little gambit from Laura about what they thought of the party, Joe was caught by this story and was leaning towards Kit asking more about the man. But thank goodness, here was Edward walking over to them. In this crowd, he was as Laura remembered him from London parties, urbane, sure-footed, surrounded by the group, by people who thought they knew him. And here were Monica and Archie again, Monica in a puffball of a dress, Archie talking as soon as he reached them. ‘I’m going to blame you for that editorial about British diplomats,’ he was saying to Joe. ‘I saw your hand in it. “The good fellowship atmosphere of a very uppity club” indeed, “men who understand the faded diplomacy of Kipling’s age better than the aspirations of a modern government”.’
Joe came back at Archie, insisting that surely he would be the first to admit that he wasn’t on the wavelength of the American way of doing politics. And Kit was quick to back him up, quoting further from the article, as if he felt in some way responsible for Joe and how the others saw his work. Archie was about to respond, when Monica broke in.
‘For heaven’s sake, do you have to talk work here?’ It felt as if she were dragging, as couples so often do, the trail of some previous altercation into this new arena.
‘More drinks?’ Edward said in a vague voice.
‘I think they’re finishing up now,’ said Monica.
‘Tell you what,’ Joe said, following Edward’s reluctance to end the party, ‘someone at the Washington Post told me about a great little club just opened up on U Street, with a nigger band that plays the best—’
‘Or we could just go to the Shoreham – it’s kind of pretty there in the evenings.’
‘The club sounds fine,’ Laura said, and noted a rather surprised look on Monica’s face. It was not usually Laura who wanted to go on. ‘Let’s go there.’
‘I said I’d meet Suzanne later – but I can telephone from the club.’ And as they left the party, Joe was explaining to Laura that Suzanne was his new girlfriend, a fine girl he had met at the newspaper.