‘Is his book really so nasty?’
‘I brought you an advance copy – Winifred told me to. It’s in my room, back at the hotel.’ Giles lapsed into silence, brooding and looking into his glass. He was unshaven and rather crumpled, but not, Laura thought, unattractive; he had the kind of energy that clever, emotionally thwarted people often have, as though some passion was only being held in check by an intellectual effort. Laura wished that she could have spoken, could have talked about the things they were both struggling to understand, and brought down the barriers between them. But she could not. So as they went on talking, she kept on parrying, going sideways, and at the end, as they walked to the hotel, through the snow that had begun to fall around them, she sensed anger brewing in him. He might not have realised it, but he was furiously disappointed that his confidences had not been received with the interest he thought they deserved.
So, as he went on talking, it was not so much about how important a figure Edward had been in his life, but how significant he had been in Edward’s. ‘Of course, I know that he was lonely. I wish I could have spent more time with him – but being posted to Malvern, and then working in Bristol, made it difficult. I wish I could have been with him more; maybe I could have persuaded him out of whatever it was that made him put his trust in Nick.’ Laura still said nothing except that there was no point in regrets. When he handed her Alistair’s book at the door of his room, she felt that he did so with pleasurable expectation, as if he knew and approved of the pain it would cause her.
After dinner, once Mother and Rosa were asleep in their rooms, Laura began Alistair’s book and went on reading it all night. While reading she remembered how Winifred had told her seven years ago that Alistair was not quite able to see another’s full humanity, and the force of this observation struck her as she saw Edward become, in his hands, a mere caricature of a traitor. But it was not an unlifelike portrait. With Alistair’s description of Edward on his return from America, Laura was plunged back into that dinner at the Savoy when they had all tried so hard to play their roles: ‘His appearance on that evening was unexpected. He had lost his serenity, his hands would tremble, his eyes were hooded and he looked as if he had spent the night sitting up in a train … Though he remained as detached and amiable as ever, I felt it was clear that he was in a very bad way. From time to time, even in mid-conversation, a kind of shutter would fall as if he had returned to some inner and incommunicable anxiety.’
But there were other, less expected cruelties in the way that he wrote about her. ‘It is clear that Laura Last is as confused as all her friends about the circumstances of his disappearance. Any latent political beliefs he had were obviously not confided in a wife whose inability to interest herself in any aspect of politics is at times painfully obvious. She is a woman dedicated to dancing and flirtation, and her eagerness for admiration could often be an embarrassment for Last, who would detach himself from her social life.’ And Laura was forced down the hidden lanes of memory again, those nights when she had insisted that Alistair took her dancing at the Dorchester, when he had been the witness to her na?ve attempts to flirt with Blanchard. Shame coursed through her, as it had done all those years ago.
The next morning Laura waited until Winifred and Peter and Mother had gone off skiing again and Aurore had taken Rosa into the hotel crèche, before turning to Giles over the breakfast table and restarting the conversation. ‘He is cruel.’
‘And the editors got him to take out Edward’s relationship with Nick …’
‘Whatever do you mean?’ Laura’s temper sparked at last; how could it be that even Giles, who claimed such knowledge of Edward, would believe such a thing?
‘We don’t have to beat around the bush any more, do we? They went off together, didn’t they – how much more obvious did they have to make it? Alistair told me that you’d known and you’d turned a blind eye, for years.’
‘That’s nonsense.’
‘I’m sorry if I offended you,’ he said, in a stiff, satisfied voice that showed he was not sorry at all. ‘Alistair said you knew. I loved him at Cambridge. Well, I fancied him, but it was Nick he cared for. We can see that now.’