‘Giles is back in Scotland, Winifred is working – it’s only me …’ She tried to sound casually amused, so that he wouldn’t be able to laugh at her or be disappointed, but she wasn’t sure she had succeeded. She was shaken by the effect of his physical presence and the blatant statement she had made by coming alone to lunch with him. She kept her gaze averted from his as she looked at the menu. ‘I didn’t have your number, you see, to cancel, so I …’ Of course he would be too polite to make her feel uncomfortable deliberately. But as he said that he was glad to see her anyway, he seemed nonplussed, or was that just his usual uncommunicative manner? She could not read him, and she was suddenly sure she had done the wrong thing.
She did not like drinking in the middle of the day, and she knew it would make the afternoon at the bookstore harder than ever, but he had ordered a bottle of hock before she had time to say so, and recommended the sardines and the Dover sole to her. ‘Yes, of course – that would be lovely,’ she said, closing the menu and letting him order. That was the way they did it in London, she already knew; the men always recommended, always ordered, always decided everything.
When two people are very bad at small talk, Laura realised, and they have nothing in common, lunch together is not easy. A silence fell almost immediately. Simply trying to fill it, she asked about his work, and he answered politely. She asked after Sybil and Toby, and as he handled and dropped her questions, she felt more and more nervous. He was less luminous here in the restaurant than he had been at night, his blond apartness less obvious. He was a civil servant in a formal suit who was friends with her cousin; his world was dark to her. Their food came, and provided some distraction. The sardines were good; now she was living with Cissie she seemed to exist on boiled eggs and toast, so the strong, salty, oily flavour burst into her mouth. But they could not go on eating forever in silence. She asked about his Christmas, and he replied politely and asked how hers had been.
‘It was my first Christmas away from home.’
‘Did you miss it?’
She did not miss her family, but there was a physical memory nagging at her all the time that had become stronger over Christmas. She would not want to be back there, in the sadness and anger of home, but you cannot deny that the place you come from leaves a bodily imprint on you. She was becoming tired of London, she thought, its growing fear and darkness. Sometimes the brightness of the Christmas lights on Main Street recurred to her, or how the snow-covered hills west of Stairbridge reflected the winter sun. You never got that clarity of light and height of sky in London. She had fallen silent, she realised, and she had to say something. ‘I miss the place a bit,’ she said. ‘It was pretty in winter. London is—’
‘I know.’
‘I mean, I don’t miss the town much. But there were hills not far away; we used to go out there at the weekends sometimes when I was a child.’ In fact, if she was honest with herself, there had only been a couple of brief vacations and they had been ruined by her parents’ fighting. She was not sure why they had occurred to her now.
To her surprise, Edward responded, telling her about his childhood home, which apparently was somewhere in the hills in the west of England. Sutton Court. She remembered Sybil talking about it. Edward was saying that it was the most beautiful place in the world, and then quickly retracting, saying that it was just hills and trees, and pouring himself more wine.
‘You should come out to Sutton one Friday. I know nobody is meant to be travelling about these days, but we get there when we can.’ She felt that he had just said that to have something to say and she did not respond.
‘Do you hear much from Quentin?’ she asked.
‘Yes. He’s still in some godforsaken training camp on the coast. He’s the only one of us doing the expected thing so far. Remind me, what are you doing? I know Sybil said you had a job.’
Laura grimaced, and explained her job in the bookstore, and how tedious it was. ‘But it does sound self-indulgent to complain about being dull when we don’t know what’s going to happen next.’
Then Edward said something about how things that seem dull at the time are not always what seem dull later, when you look back, and Laura considered this idea. ‘I suppose you never know what you are going to remember.’
‘If you look back at your childhood, some things stand out, don’t they, and you might wonder – why that, why that meal, or that teddy bear, or that moment of running through the wheat field? It’s not always the moments of great happiness or great misery, is it?’
Laura thought again and agreed with him. ‘But I don’t have very clear memories of a lot of my childhood …’
‘Neither do I.’ There was a willed briskness to Edward’s voice and Laura felt she knew that briskness, because it was something that crept into her own voice when she mentioned her home or her childhood. She would have liked to stop speaking and let herself wonder about it, but she knew that she had to go on talking.