‘But I do feel that I will remember all of this,’ she said. She meant this city, this year of her life that had been all change and newness – but the way it came out the words sounded ambiguous, as if she meant that she would remember him and the lunch, and again she found herself averting her gaze, afraid that she had gone further than she intended.
He took up the conversation again, returning to how the war would be remembered. ‘I’m sure one day some crass narrative will take over about the war, and we’ll forget the way it really felt. There will be some story that everyone will tell about the way it was.’
Laura agreed with him without really thinking about it. ‘Even though at the moment everyone experiences it quite differently,’ she said.
‘Exactly. Some people see it as a moral crusade …’
‘And some as a tragic waste.’
‘And some as a time to grin and bear it …’
‘And some as an imperialist escapade.’ It was Florence and Elsa she was thinking about, of course.
‘You know people like that? Who see it that way?’ His tone had crossed into more urgency than she had heard before. He was interested again in her, but she was silent. ‘Do you?’ he asked. A memory opened in her mind, like a frame from a film. It was Florence stirring her cocoa in a café, her brown eyes wide and her voice high as she told Laura that she should never forget that the Party was under surveillance, that they could all be being watched, at any time.
Immediately the memory nudged at her, she dismissed it. How ridiculous of her to imagine that Edward would be a government informer. But something had tripped in her mind at the thought that she should be careful about what she said, and she was selfconscious again as she nodded and then tried to turn the conversation with another query about his brother.
Edward looked at his watch and told her that he was sorry but he had to get back to the office for a meeting with some of the French chaps. Laura was smiling and nodding, reaching for her purse and standing up once he had paid the bill, and trying not to think about the fact that it had been a short lunch. No doubt he was very busy. She had to reconcile herself to the fact that the lunch had meant nothing much. She was pulling on her coat, taking her hat from the waiter’s outstretched hand, when he surprised her just before turning to the door. ‘I’ll ask Sybil, shall I, to talk to you about coming up to Sutton one Saturday?’
8
Spring had begun to touch the trees in the London streets with a tentative green as Laura walked up to Paddington station. At first there was the urgency about buying a ticket, finding the train, getting a seat, but then the journey slowed. The train came to a stop between stations and she gave up any hope of getting to the destination at the time she had been asked to arrive.
She had to change at a station where the spring wind blew cold down the platform, and the next train she stepped onto was packed with soldiers. She found a compartment of civilians, where a woman generously pulled her small boy onto her lap so that Laura could sit down. Then her knees were in reach of the boy’s feet; he kept kicking her, but Laura felt it would be rude to complain. She tried to read her book, but it was a volume of essays that Florence had lent to her months before, and its abstract discussions of working-class history could not hold her attention. All of a sudden, turning her gaze to the window, she saw the landscape open up in a way she had never seen in England before. Here, on the western side of the land, she saw the earth lift, pulling away from the flat dull plains and low bulges that she had seen as England’s inescapable physical aspect, pulling up into real hills with strong curved lines and tumbling back into valleys.
When Laura got out of the train her legs felt heavy from sitting so long. There was no one there to meet her, but she was not surprised; she was hours late, and she asked the station master if she could use the telephone to ring the number that Sybil had given her. It was a servant who answered and asked her to wait at the front of the station. Eventually, an old-fashioned Daimler pulled up and the very elderly driver came out to pick up her case.