The air in the evening streets was already filled with the warmth of the summer ahead which intensified as they walked into the dark, crowded club. Here Laura thought they would be conspicuous, all so formally dressed from the previous party, but nobody seemed to be looking at them as they found a small table at the side of the room. The nigger band, as Joe had put it, played in a way she had never heard before, but she liked it; it seemed to mute rather than exacerbate the jagged edges of her thoughts.
Soon Joe’s girlfriend Suzanne arrived, and Laura was immediately impressed; she was still in her work clothes, but whereas some girls would have been self-conscious in that blue skirt and cropped jacket next to the other women in the club in their bright evening wear, she seemed to be bestowing the pleasure of her company on others rather than asking for their approval. In other words, Laura thought, watching her, she was a lot richer than Joe and carried her class with a kind of thoughtless confidence. Joe naturally danced with Suzanne, and Monica was swept off by some stranger, so while Edward and Kit seemed happy simply to sit and drink, Laura got up to dance with Archie. At first he tried to talk to her as they danced, but it was irritating when he put his face close to her ear and his voice buzzed, and she was glad when he gave up and was content to turn and turn to the jittery music, and it was well into the small hours when they finally found taxis to go home.
As they went up the stairs into their house, Laura thought Edward was so drunk that he was oblivious to anything, but then he spoke as they were getting into bed. ‘Poor Kit,’ he said. Why on earth, Laura wondered, did he pity Kit? ‘He’s obviously in love with Joe, isn’t he – and Joe not a bit interested in men. Poor Kit.’
Laura turned with interest to Edward, asking more; he never gossiped about people and this interpretation of Kit’s behaviour fascinated her. But Edward was already falling asleep. Laura lay awake for a while, wondering why she had not seen it herself; she remembered how she had been surprised, too, when Winifred had told her long ago about Giles’s love interests. Kit had seemed languid and disconnected from others when she first met him, but she had noticed a kind of anxiety when he was with Joe, an eagerness to ensure that Joe was happy. Was that love? Surely love was the great blooming of joy she had known with Edward … Why had her thoughts run like that, back into the past, to the kiss on Hampstead Heath? He was here, now, and they had come through so much. Soon the clouds would lift again. She turned in bed, pressing her breasts against Edward’s back and fitting her legs behind his as he slept, trying to find a point of restfulness against him.
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.