Laura could not tell her that her mother had never mentioned the war.
‘No wonder they married where they could – sorry, I’m sure your father is … it’s just Mother is such a snob, she thinks your mother only fell in with him because there wasn’t anyone left in England.’ Winifred turned to Laura, but she was unsmiling. ‘And this time – you know what they’re saying. Aerial bombs, all of that – but what are we supposed to do? We can’t stop the world.’
Just then Mrs Venn came into the garden, saying Giles was on the telephone for Winifred. ‘God, if he’s cancelling this evening, I tell you …’ and she stalked off.
But he was telephoning to ask if Laura could come with Winifred. Apparently the girlfriend of one of his friends was unwell, and so there was a gap for another woman at the dinner, and at the dance afterwards as well. Winifred accepted without even consulting her, and immediately she came off the telephone she called to Laura to come upstairs and look over what she would wear.
‘I suppose it is a bit of a winter dress, but it’s the right one,’ Winifred said eventually, after Laura had put on each of her two evening dresses and she had vetoed the grey one. ‘You don’t want to look like Jane Eyre,’ she said, and although Laura wasn’t sure of the reference, she could see that the dress she had thought of as silvery and subtle was in fact drab and drained her face of colour. Nobody could say that the red velvet dress was dull. Laura had bought it in Boston and had never worn it, but had been aware of it hanging up in the closet here in London, a brilliant rebuke to the dullness of most of her days. She wasn’t sure that she wanted to wear it. Looking at herself in the mirror, she could only see the dress, not herself, but Winifred was so certain that she gave it to Mrs Venn to be pressed.
After lunch Aunt Dee suggested that the girls should rest in their rooms before the evening’s outing. Winifred scorned the idea, and stayed reading in the living room, but Laura was thankful to be able to go upstairs. Lying on the big, high bed, she started re-reading old letters from her mother and Ellen. ‘I think you should book a passage for April,’ her mother had written. And now April was here. Laura laid the letters aside and wondered whether she was foolish to want to stay in London. It was true that nobody could ignore the sandbags on the streets and the trenches dug into the parks, not to mention the constant talk about what aerial warfare would be like and the Armageddon that would ensue. But despite the fatalistic talk, despite the physical reality of the city’s preparations, there was nothing concrete for Laura in the thought of war.
She looked into a drawer of the little desk where she had put the most recent pamphlet she had borrowed from Florence, Will It Be War?, which she had already started, but not finished. Its grand rhetoric, ‘Never, never will we bow the knee to fascism’, seemed too distant from her. Again she cast her mind back to the boat, and the moment when Florence painted for her a picture of what family and work might be like without false authority. That made sense to her; she felt it again, a taste of freedom, a world made in line with human desire. But the story of how they were all to fight as never before seemed dark to her, a summoning of something too large for her to comprehend. She found herself muttering some phrases from the pamphlet under her breath, as if she would commit them to memory to hold her to the right path.
Just then the handle of her door turned and Winifred came in, but to Laura’s relief she did not seem to notice her confusion as she shoved the pamphlet under her pillow. She had just come to suggest that Laura might want to start getting ready for the evening and that the bathroom was free. Shortly afterwards, lying in the warm water and looking down at her body, her skin greenish in the water that was reflecting the tiles around the bath, Laura felt a huge reluctance weighing her down. The little she had heard about Giles’s friends had not endeared her to the idea of meeting them.