And then there was the pure physical distance such a move would put between her and Edward. If he was now in Russia, silenced for some reason but still alive, he was not so very far. There was always the possibility that Stefan would walk into her life again, passing her in a narrow Swiss street, handing a card to her in a crowded train. In Boston, miles and oceans would divide her from them.
But as Laura thought of this, and the possibility of Edward’s presence just across the borders, or Stefan in this very city, the silence, unbroken for two years, screamed in her ears. What had Stefan’s promise actually meant? When he had said that they would bring her over, was he just reassuring her with empty words so that she would let the precious Virgil go without her? She thought of the network of contacts that had been knitted around Edward. Thinking back, unpicking conversations, she recognised that Nick was not the only one. There must have been one other source in Washington, with a link to the cryptographers’ discoveries, and another one in London, who knew when Edward would be brought in and who would interrogate him. Laura had never been given the keys to that kingdom of secrets. She had not realised it all these years, but she had always been an appendage, locked outside the masculine relationships that they said might endanger her, but which, she also saw, could have been the route to her survival. Outside one group, she had also been outside another. She really was alone, as Edward had never been alone.
As she thought that, other fears began to crowd in. She could no longer push away the insinuations that Valance had made, that the press had been running with, that Giles had stated baldly and that Alistair had wanted to include in his book – that Edward and Nick had gone off together, not just as spies, but as lovers. And as that thought entered her mind, other pictures from the past that she had been trying to forget, that she had always refused to look at directly, were sharp, scissoring through her memory: an evening at the end of the war and Nick’s hand touching Edward’s neck, laying claim to a long intimacy with him; a dark night in Washington, and Edward blundering out of the house to go drinking with Nick; the secret that Edward had blurted out on that final night, that Nick had recruited him at Cambridge. What form had that recruitment taken? What memories had Patsfield held for him that had drawn him back when he needed to make a new life? She remembered Nick’s excitement the night that they set off, the exuberance in his face as Edward came down the stairs to him, ready to leave his pregnant wife, to set off into the darkness for their final adventure.
And now, was it as Giles imagined it? That even now he was with Nick, safe in their dream country, happy, free, making love, more content without Laura than he had been with her? Maybe he had only stayed with her all these years because she knew his secret. She had been a useful dupe, a good mask for him. Was that all she had been? Laura heard Rosa crying out upstairs and as she went to hold her and comfort her, finally bringing her down to nestle against her in Laura’s own bed, she found herself confronting the possibility that she had refused to consider ever since she had heard the car drive away that damp May evening – that Rosa might never know her father. More, that Laura had never, really, known him.
9
‘I’ll telephone the consulate,’ Laura found herself saying to her mother the day after Ellen’s departure. ‘I’ll go and talk to them about us going back to the States.’ One says things, Laura realised, without necessarily meaning them, because the moment seems to make them essential. It wasn’t possible any more for Laura to find excuses that would make Mother happy. She had to talk as if a return was on the cards. She picked up the telephone later that afternoon, with Mother listening in from the living room, and dialled the number of the consulate.
Although Laura found it hard at first to explain why she was calling, still, the first person she spoke to knew who she was; her fame had not faded. But she was passed on from secretary to secretary, and then was told that someone would call her back. Nobody did, for some days, and when she was finally telephoned, she was asked to come in for a meeting. Still, she was not nervous. Entering the building that cloudy spring morning she assumed that they would simply refuse her permission to travel to America, and she could use that as an excuse to Mother and Ellen.
So she was off-guard when she was taken into a room where Valance was sitting alone, behind a desk, his jowly face as ugly and inexpressive as when they had met two years earlier. But this time she was not lost in the hazy fog of new motherhood, and it dawned on her with an immediate jolt where she had seen that face before – in 1944, in the swaying ballroom of the Dorchester, between Blanchard and Victor. What had he been doing with them, with the Soviet spy who had gone over to the Fascists, and the arms dealer whom Edward could not countenance speaking to? The miasma of corruption that had hung around those nights was there again in the dull room of the British consulate in Geneva.