‘We met,’ he said briefly, but under cover of the chatter that accompanied their first order – champagne? Cocktails? Has everyone eaten? – he leant forwards, turning to her so that nobody else could hear his words, and said, ‘The struggle on two fronts.’
Laura nodded, her consciousness of her mistake that evening rising through her, so that she said nothing and was glad when the martini was placed in front of her. It was Alistair who spoke to her next, asking her if she was terribly busy, as everyone was these days. When she described her little job in the bookstore, he tried to make it sound refreshing that she was not doing war work. How vital for the evening that he and Winifred and Cissie were people who generously spilled conversation constantly into the air, because otherwise the rather forbidding figures of Edward and Sybil would, Laura thought, have made the table impossibly reserved.
Now Alistair had moved on to a story about how he had joined his local Air Raid Precautions wardens, just to have something to do. ‘Now the whole country is turning into an OTC camp – and you know I always was hopeless in OTC – I felt I absolutely had to … but the most exciting thing to happen so far was a false alarm when some poor old chap went to bed sozzled and set off a fire in his own bed with a cigarette … the flames leapt up just as a motor car backfired on Charing Cross Road, we thought we had a bomb at last … well, the relief when we realised …’
In return, Laura tried to overcome her awkwardness and present him with an amusing anecdote, but she had just started telling him about the night she thought she was talking to Winifred in the blackout when in fact she was talking to a complete stranger, when Edward took her by surprise by leaning over again. ‘Dance?’ he said. There were only a few couples on the floor, and it seemed strange of him to ask her, at odds with what she had seen of his character so far. When they started dancing, she was not prepared for the physical resonance of his touch, which left her unable to speak and even took away, briefly, any real awareness of the room around her.
Eventually he broke their silence. ‘Things have changed so much since the spring,’ he said.
She did not pause before replying. ‘Everything seemed much clearer then.’
That was all she said, but the words seemed to satisfy him. They went on dancing for a while in silence, and then Laura began to find the silence was making her selfconscious; she should speak again. She made some vague enquiry about his work, and he gave her to understand there was not much he could say about it. Unlike Alistair, he had no easy conversation to offer her, and they soon fell back into silence. But when he dropped her hand at the end of the dance she felt it like a loss.
She felt Sybil’s glance at her as they sat down, and without thinking she put her hand up to her hair, feeling how it had begun to frizz out of its careful wave in the damp atmosphere of the club. Sybil looked as impressive as she’d remembered her, her pale hair standing back from that aquiline face. Her dress was not fashionable, was not something that Laura would ever have picked out in a shop, but its silvery jacquard pattern and high neck gave her an almost queenly look. As Edward sat down, Sybil claimed him as her own, asking him for a cigarette, but Winifred was bolder.
‘Do give us a dance, Edward. Alistair says he hurt his foot last week tumbling down some steps in the blackout, though I’m sure it was drink rather than darkness that was his undoing, but anyway now he can’t stumble round the dance floor …’
Edward was all graciousness, and Cissie was deep in conversation now with Alistair about a mutual acquaintance of theirs who was in the same regiment as Quentin. Yet Laura felt unexpectedly loosed and confident, sprung into the dark air after dancing with Edward, and she turned to Sybil without thinking and asked her – it was the dullest opening in the world – if she had always lived in London.