‘Yes, of course, can’t keep Toby waiting. I wouldn’t mind a bath.’
‘You go first, I’ll wait.’ We can at least be polite, Laura was always reminding herself.
The room they were in was rather shabby, as if put together from a go-round of other rooms – a too-big bedstead, a too-small wardrobe, curtains that did not quite meet in the middle of the window. But the ground floor of Sybil’s house had recovered its comfortable face, and was carpeted and well lit. The living room was now a surprisingly acid green rather than the previous turquoise, so that the old oil paintings looked out of place on the walls. As the evening dragged on, Laura realised that Sybil and Toby were reconstructing a life precisely modelled on their own parents’ and grandparents’ lives. The children had already been put to bed by their nanny, their dinner was four courses and served in the dining room where the portrait of Sybil’s mother had been restored to its pre-war place, and Sybil took Laura into the living room for a ‘little chat’ before the men joined them.
The chat, Laura was glad to discover, was not going to be about their husbands. The change in Edward and their ignominious return from Washington would not be discussed, and neither would Toby’s evident loss of direction now that he had lost his parliamentary seat. Laura could tell his heart was not in his new life as he crumbled a bread roll, talking of the biography he was working on, how the London Library was so helpful. So the two women sitting in the acid-green living room did not talk about the men as they tried to feel their way into some kind of ease. They talked about Mrs Last, and how unwell she had been ever since she had given up Sutton Court, and about Winifred, and how she had still not married, and Laura asked Sybil for all the details of her children and asked if she could photograph them one day. ‘It’s my little hobby,’ she said in a dismissive tone. ‘One has to have something,’ Sybil said, bracingly.
When they drove over to the Savoy for dinner the following evening, the city fell dimly on either side of them. Even in this, London’s richest neighbourhood, so many holes still gaped, so many fa?ades were still filthy, paving stones still uneven. But then the lobby of the hotel opened before them, polished and coloured, as though private wealth could overcome public squalor with a single confident gesture.
The four of them were earlier than the others, but there were the first martinis to be drunk in a bar where waiters fluttered and a pianist played an unfamiliar song. Here, in public, Sybil retreated into that formal manner that Laura remembered from the past. Now she read it differently, as self-consciousness rather than as a judgement on her, on Laura, but that didn’t make it easier to break through. Winifred’s arrival brought a new tension with it; Laura knew how curious she always was, and began at once to forestall her, asking her questions as they went through to the restaurant. She knew that Winifred had moved on from the Ministry of Food, but was unsure what she was doing now; her letters had become sporadic recently. That was because she had been so busy, Winifred apologised, and now she was moving on again. ‘It’s annoying that I’ll be off so soon after you’re back …’ Yes, out of London – out of England, in fact; off to Geneva and the United Nations outfit.
Laura was impressed. Not only by the understated confidence with which Winifred talked about one job and another, but by her whole presence. No longer did she seem to be trying to fit herself into a template of her mother’s idea of femininity, bursting out of it uncontrollably from time to time. Now she had taken possession of her own personality. Her hair was cut quite short, in a style Laura would never have recommended to anyone, but which made her head and shoulders look so energetic next to Laura and Sybil with their stiffly waved hair. And her dress – sleeveless, almost straight, unlike the other women’s wide skirts – gave her a different, more dynamic profile: her arms were strong against its plain lines.