After they had eaten, they lit cigarettes and looked out over the almost too picturesque scene, and Laura was wondering whether she should start to talk about Lvov when Edward spoke. ‘I know you want to move out of Sybil’s.’ She had raised this already with him, since the retreat back to being guests in that house made her feel as though she was trying to relive something long gone, but she was unprepared when he said that he was thinking that they should move right out of the city, into a village like this. As soon as he said it, she could see why he suggested it. As far as she knew, their handlers had not been in touch. Perhaps they would not be in touch. Perhaps the precious Virgil and Pigeon were both too tainted now. Perhaps this could be the chance for a new start. A quiet life.
She did not know what to say. She stalled, asking if he was serious. ‘We don’t have to decide now,’ he said, getting up, and then suggested that they should go for a walk. They went to the bar to pay, and then Edward took her through the village, onto a footpath he seemed to remember on the other side of the green, which soon ran uphill into a wood. Bluebells lay in electric puddles among the trees, and cow parsley brushed their legs. The richness of the flowers and the birdsong, rising up from all sides, took Laura backwards, to those days she remembered when she had felt drunk with the lavishness of spring, when Edward’s body had gathered up the sunshine and brought it into hers. Now, emerging from the wood and seeing the grassy slopes glistening as if they had been washed, it was like looking at everything through the wrong end of binoculars. She could appreciate it. She could say, what a lovely spring day. She could say, how warm it is in the sunshine. But she knew they were not celebrants with the song of the thrushes. She knew they were just onlookers at the spring glory.
They sat for a while on Edward’s coat, on the side of the path. London was a distant smudge to the north, and in front of them the downs rolled airily. ‘Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill,’ Edward quoted.
‘You know so much poetry.’ Laura realised that her tone sounded dismissive, and she looked at him, trying to smile. So he had thoughts for the future, a future that still included her. She did not even know herself whether that was what she wanted, but if he was serious he must know that he would also have to start the therapy that the Foreign Office had insisted upon. She started to tell him about Lvov, about how Giles had gone to him, how he was discreet, a friend of Winifred’s … Edward seemed nonplussed at the thought of her going to talk to a therapist for him, but then he changed and there was something like gratitude in his tone. Talking directly about the situation was like plunging their hands into something dirty, and they withdrew as quickly as they could. But not before Edward had said, in a stilted voice, how sorry he was, he was determined to stop drinking.
‘I know what you’ve had to put up with,’ he said. Laura was not sure that he did know. But now she wanted to change the conversation, so she smiled at him, saying that he didn’t have to give up alcohol and move to the country and go into therapy all at once. That sounded a little overwhelming, she said in a light voice. He matched her lighter tone, but still insisted that it was time for a new start.
‘As long as we can still have a martini before supper,’ Laura said, smiling.
‘A few glasses of wine during …’
‘And a whisky after.’
‘No, seriously, Laura. I do mean it.’
‘But how would we manage living here if they give you back a job?’
‘It’s easy enough from Whitehall. You get the train from Victoria to Oxted. Doesn’t take long at all. You’ll be able to go up and down to town whenever you like.’
Laura could not bear to throw his tentative plan back in his face, so she lifted her hand and rested it on his arm, turning him towards her, and kissed him. During the kiss she felt the movement of his mouth, and the taste of the meat from lunch still on his lips. She drew back, and pulled at a windflower on the grass beside her, crushing it between her fingers. He stood up, and they started to walk back down the hill; the sun was already beginning to feel less warm.
3
That first evening when they were alone in the new house Laura found her uncertainty dissipated in the rush of organising the move. All day she had been busy supervising deliveries, making up beds, shaking out cushions. The house’s demeanour was coy; it sat back from the road to the village down its own little unmade drive, a dark approach lined with rhododendrons and laurels. But upstairs you could see the airy hills where they had walked on their first visit, while the living room and the kitchen next to it had big French windows that led into a walled garden. As the day wore on, she was going in and out of those rooms with the doors open, so that the scent of the garden blew into the house.