As if to underline her point, a woman in a rather bedraggled boa had just joined the small band and was singing in a voice that seemed flat on the high notes and sharp on the low ones. But under the music Laura was content to sit in silence, drinking the glass of champagne that was now in front of her, recognising that these people were no longer complete strangers to her.
Later in the evening Toby did arrive, and Laura looked at him, trying to pinpoint the similarity to Edward. Although he was fair, it was a sandy, freckly fairness, and rather than Edward’s stillness there was something fidgety about him – he was constantly turning from one person to another, patting his face or straightening his tie, moving his glass or his napkin. But the group felt a little more balanced after he arrived, since he was happy enough to dance once or twice with Cissie and to bring Alistair new gossip from Parliament to refresh the conversation. It was late into the night when Sybil asked the waiter if taxis could be found. They were a long time coming, so all of them, except Edward, squashed into one – he would walk, he said, he liked walking in the blackout. The darkness was shockingly deep on that moonless night and he was quickly swallowed up into it.
7
‘Go on, read it out – what does she say?’
Christmas Eve had drawn the two girls back to the quiet of Highgate. How strange, Laura thought, as she stepped into the brown hall that afternoon, it feels now like a return to a familiar place. She was in the living room with Winifred, reading through two letters from Mother that Aunt Dee had not yet forwarded.
‘They must be pretty bad,’ Winifred said, ‘you haven’t stopped sighing since you started reading.’ Laura realised that was true. ‘You can’t blame her,’ said Winifred. ‘You could easily go back in January if you were sensible.’
‘Ellen’s got a new boyfriend,’ Laura said.
‘Change the subject, I don’t mind. Tell me more.’
So Laura started to read out bits of Ellen’s part of the letter about a boy she had met at the Bellinghams’ dance. The Bellinghams! Before they had come into money the Bellinghams would have been unlikely to ask the Leveretts to anything at all. Ellen must have turned the change of fortune to real advantage if she was able to go to that big house by the river for a birthday celebration. And the boy was a cousin of theirs, from Boston. More to the point, Laura noted Ellen’s rare humour coming out in what she said about him, and she wondered how much things had shifted for her sister over the last year.
That afternoon they walked through a freezing fog up to the church that dominated the village. Laura liked the smell of the church, a sourness from the old oak mixed with the sweet scent of mahonia flowers in the heaps of evergreen, but the cold was dense, unbroken by the small gas heaters at the sides, and she huddled into her fur coat, her voice following those around her in the carols she did not know. She thought about what Winifred had said, about whether she should go back home. Certainly it was hard now for her to pretend to herself that it was Florence who kept her here. Since the Soviet–German pact Laura had hardly been to the meetings in King’s Cross or Holborn. Even though Florence and Elsa had been so keen to explain the new line to her, she found it opaque. The Party was clearly in disarray, and after her work at the bookshop was finished, she preferred to go back to Cissie’s flat and read novels in bed, or sit in cinemas with other Londoners hungry for news and dreams. The long-awaited entry into an independent life seemed to have drifted into another kind of inertia.
Just then Winifred broke in on her thoughts, reminding her to put a coin into the collection. Laura did so obediently and hung back on the way out as Winifred and Aunt Dee greeted old friends and neighbours. Does one ever really take a decision, she was wondering as she pulled on her fur-lined gloves, or do outside forces – a chance infection, a chance encounter – conspire to place Ellen there and me here, one of us in this beleaguered city, the other at the Bellinghams’ dance, without either of us actually deciding that this is where we want to be? But some people seem to be able to control their lives, she thought, remembering Winifred’s decisiveness when she had planned their move into Cissie’s flat. Is it my failing that I cannot do the same?