‘Where do you get your energy from, Cis?’ Winifred asked, lying on the sofa.
‘Come on, we’re going out tonight, aren’t we?’
‘We are, we are – and you’re coming too, Laura.’
Laura said something about being too tired, from her place slumped in a green armchair. But Cissie and Winifred were having none of it. It was Cissie’s birthday and Winifred felt it was incumbent on all of them to go out.
‘You work fewer hours than we do,’ Cissie reminded her.
Laura knew that was true, she didn’t work nearly as hard as the other two, and she didn’t have their social lives either, which took them out night after night with colleagues and boyfriends.
‘Alistair said to meet him at the Ace of Clubs, if we were coming late – they’re all going for dinner first, but frankly he’d only stand me a meal, not all three of us, so let’s just go to the club.’ Winifred and Cissie were feverishly energetic about having as much fun as they could on their budget, which was not limited in the way that Florence would have recognised as a limit, but which was still no match for some of Alistair’s friends, as Laura understood from Winifred’s constant gossip about their clothes, their dinners, their drinking, all unrestricted by the war.
As Laura was pulling on the blue dress with the wide neck that she thought would be suitable, she remembered that awkward night when she had first met Alistair and his friends. She looked at herself in the mirror. Her hair had been shorter then, falling forwards over her ears, but now it was longer and she wore it with a side parting, it was better to brush it back from her face. She picked up her brush and assessed her face, bit by bit. Plucking stray hairs from her eyebrows, finding the darker shade of lipstick: you had to concentrate on the details even if the whole was wrong, as she suspected it still was.
The women went through the streets holding their blackout torches; there was no threat in the darkness when they were all together like this, and they linked arms and chattered. As they walked, Laura felt buoyed up by the female friendship that she hardly deserved. Although she had never felt really intimate with Winifred, she had to recognise her generosity in giving her the independence that she had craved and including her in her own brisk, busy life. In response, she decided that for one evening she would try to be the cousin that she felt Winifred wanted. So she asked with apparent interest who would be at the club, and whether Giles would be there.
‘Didn’t I tell you? They’ve moved Giles’s outfit out of London – too dangerous here, the risk of having it all blown up.’ Laura realised she was still not quite clear about what Giles actually did. Winifred was vague. ‘Aeroplanes, radios, you know. And Quentin won’t be there tonight either, now he’s joined up.’ It was hard to square that development with the fleshy man who had held court over dinner. Winifred seemed to know what she was thinking. ‘Anyone less likely to be the hero of the hour, I know, but apparently because he was in the Coldstream Guards for a year before university he can float back in now.’ Laura asked if Alistair was planning to do the same. ‘He can’t bear the idea, really – but he isn’t quite sure what to do. He’d like to be something really vital at the Ministry of Information, but he says they are just crammed with old Etonians … he’s feeling awfully left out of everything …’
This was the way Winifred and Cissie tended to talk, as though the war were a kind of social gathering in which it was important to find the right clique. Through the big door in a road south of Oxford Street, through the blackout curtains beyond – going through these layers of darkness into light made the expectation rise in Laura’s chest. But it was a rather drab nightclub, she was surprised to see, and the floor was tacky under her high-heeled shoes as she walked across it with Winifred and Cissie. It was crowded, and at first she thought it held nobody they knew, but then a waiter moved and there in the corner at a large table was the group: Alistair, Sybil and the man with the light hair whom she had not forgotten. He had already seen them and was rising to his feet in a way that made her wonder if he was leaving, but it was just his immediate politeness.
‘Do you know Laura?’ Winifred was saying to Edward as they sat down.