The next day, in the consulting room, the doctor measured and listened. His hands were cold on her skin. Turning away from her, looking at papers on his desk as she pulled down her dress, Dr Turner said that they would go ahead with the Caesarean as planned, a week on Thursday. Laura felt dismissed; she had liked that momentary sensation of being looked after. Outside the consulting room the world returned, too sharp, too loud, as she walked down the steps into Harley Street.
She drove the short distance through London to Sybil’s house. When Bill Spall had asked her to meet him the following day she had immediately suggested that they could go to Chester Square. Would Toby and Sybil not be a kind of protection for her? They both sat with her as Spall talked, and often interrupted him in their confident tones. Spall asked Laura to describe what had happened on Friday evening, and Laura told it the way she knew she would be telling it from now on: Nick, an old friend, nothing to that, the two of them coming back for a drink after work, then back to town in Nick’s car for dinner – and why not, it was Edward’s birthday; she could not do much in her condition. Yes, Edward often went to the club after work with his friends; yes, he was rather unreliable; certainly, if he had wanted to stay up in town for the weekend it was unusual of him not to telephone her, but she had assumed nothing was wrong. She had been rather tired out recently, it was nice for her to be able to rest. She had only really begun to worry on Sunday, and then …
It was Toby who tried to turn the interview around. Irritable and impatient, he began to question Spall, wanting to know exactly what the Foreign Office was doing to find Edward and Nick. So Spall told them that Nick’s car had been traced to St Malo, and two men answering the description of Edward and Nick had been seen on the ferry that connected with the train to Paris. There, he said, the trail had gone cold – but the French police were involved now. The French police, Toby said with a groan, as if they were talking about comedy characters. Paris! Sybil said, folding her lips together and straightening her back. Laura could see the judgement forming in her expression. Had Edward gone off on an unforgivable alcoholic binge with a well-known pervert and drunk? Was he right now sleeping it off in some French gutter? If Edward had not been one of them, her own brother-in-law, the verdict might have escaped her lips. As it was, there was enough bad feeling in the room to bring the conversation to a halt quite quickly.
After Spall had gone, Laura found herself longing to go too. She had to stay for a while, though, to allow Toby and Sybil to circle around what had happened and try to situate it in everyday life. Toby remembered how he had once gone with a friend to a house party in Cumberland, and Sybil had mistaken the date, and hadn’t known where he was all Saturday. ‘It came out all right in the end,’ he said, and Laura felt a deep coldness within her as she thought that, for the very first time in their lives, something was not going to come out all right. She had to escape their expectation that she would stay with them, now that the house in Patsfield was empty. ‘My mother is arriving tomorrow, you know,’ she had to say more than once. ‘I’d rather be there, really – in case Edward telephones, or comes back tonight.’
‘Surely he’ll guess where you are,’ Sybil said, but her insistence on this point seemed to be tempered, Laura thought, by her own growing anger with what she thought Edward had done, and after tea Laura was able to escape.
During that night, as she moved in and out of sleep, dogged by heartburn and cramp in her legs, unable to find a comfortable way to lie, Laura found the conversation with Spall playing again and again in her head. Stefan had said that the man who broke Fuchs was to break Edward this week. He had mentioned his name; it wasn’t Spall, but Valiant, something like that. Stefan had been quite sure that the code-breaking in Washington had pointed straight to the truth, and yet Spall seemed so unsure about what he was handling – it was almost as if he had no evidence at all. Perhaps he had not been given all the material. Perhaps he was bluffing to catch Laura out. Or perhaps he knew the truth, but saw Laura as irrelevant to it and believed there had been no need to tell her or ask her anything. She saw herself as she had been that afternoon, sitting on the sofa in Sybil’s room with her hands clasped over her huge belly: the epitome of femininity, alien, outside whatever masculine narrative, whether of espionage or alcoholism, the Foreign Office was constructing from Edward’s disappearance. A pregnant woman is even more invisible than other women, Laura thought as she fell asleep, or rather, only her pregnancy is visible.