Laura said she was sure they would, and then she said she hoped they would. It had already been so long.
‘It’s absurd that they think they are going to land some scoop, following you about. What do they think will happen, that some Soviet agent is going to jump out of the bushes and carry you off to Moscow?’ Laura smiled at the very absurdity of the notion. ‘I suppose you’ll just have to sit this out.’
‘I don’t know how much longer I can, though.’
‘You’ve coped up to now.’ The two women sat in silence for a while, and then Winifred asked what she must surely have been dying to say for some time. ‘Don’t you have any idea what has happened to Edward?’
But it was easy now for Laura to respond. She had answered so often, the words came without hesitation. ‘None at all. I know that he isn’t a traitor, though, whatever they say.’ And then she spoke about what was also pressingly on her mind. ‘The problem is, I don’t know how to go on practically. I don’t have a cent, you know – I’m living off Mother.’
‘Doesn’t the Foreign Office look after you?’
Laura had to explain that the very week after Edward drove off into the night, the Foreign Office suspended him. No pay, nothing. They had not responded to any questions from Laura about what she was meant to do. The mortgage payments for the house in Patsfield, doctor’s bills, Helen’s pay, diapers, food, taxis … ‘I don’t know what Rosa and I will do if—’
‘But surely Toby and Sybil – and Mrs Last—?’
Laura had to confess that she had become unwelcome there, and Winifred shifted in her chair as though the thought made her uncomfortable. ‘God, they would prefer to be living in the last century, wouldn’t they?’
‘You remember telling me I should think of getting a job?’ Laura said.
‘Not the ideal circumstances now in which to look.’
Winifred’s directness was refreshing. But it was true; as the wife of the missing diplomat, and with a small child, how would she work? And if she couldn’t, who would support her? She would have to sit down with Mother and Aunt Dee, she realised, and talk them through the situation and find out exactly what Toby would contribute. It would take a lot of direct, aggressive honesty about money. The thought was exhausting. Instead she asked Winifred about her work, and about Peter, who had got her this job and whom Laura still had not met.
‘You’ll be surprised when you meet him, everyone is. He’s much too young for me, is the truth. People keep saying, he’s not what we expected, he isn’t your usual type, but what they mean is, how did anyone as old and cynical as you snare someone so young and fresh? Not that I have snared him. In fact – he’s been talking about marriage, but I’m not so sure.’
Laura asked why. At first Winifred was vague, and then she talked more about her work, about how she enjoyed the sense of building something for the future at the United Nations. ‘I’m someone there – not someone powerful, but someone … reliable. I’m not quite sure – I know it’s an odd thing to say – that I want to stop that. If I married Peter, you know, he could be posted somewhere else tomorrow.’
Up until just recently Laura would have found Winifred’s view strange, but now she saw how she had built a life that rose directly from her own personality. At work, with Peter, with her family – people took her for what she was. Laura wondered what that would feel like. She could only hold herself together by a great effort of will; she was always aware of the mask she had to wear, but there was Winifred unafraid of the judgement of others. Admiration stirred in her.