‘Come on, it’s time.’ He turned properly to her, hitching one knee up on the bench and hooking that foot under the other leg, putting his right arm along the bench and touching her shoulder with his hand. It was a gesture both open and controlling. ‘Tell me. Here you are, with your decidedly revolutionary political views, but looking like a debutante at a tea party …’
She was shocked. He had noticed, had been thinking about everything she had said to him that she thought had gone unnoticed or been misunderstood. She was so used to being the dullest person in the room that this caused a strange shift in her sense of herself. He was still talking.
‘There wasn’t anyone else at Sybil’s party that night that could have told me about the struggle on two fronts – not that you did tell me. You clammed up right away, which said more than anything. What did you feel about the struggle on two fronts, then? Why were things less clear in November? Do you think the war is an imperialist escapade, or aren’t you sure?’
Laura felt as though the breath was being squeezed out of her. What was behind this forensic questioning? And then she realised that in fact it was a relief. She didn’t have to hide or pretend any more. For the first time, she could tell someone, and so she did. She told him about Florence, about the protest she had seen when she first came to London, the pamphlets she had read, the speeches she had heard. He listened and then asked her how open she had been about what she was doing. ‘I didn’t tell my aunt and Winifred,’ she confessed. ‘It seems silly, doesn’t it – but I thought they would never understand.’
Edward nodded, as though this made absolute sense to him. ‘And you – are you a Party member? Do they know you, does the Party know you?’ His pressure on this point seemed strange. Again she remembered Florence, intent on warning her, her high, energetic voice telling her that she might always be under surveillance. So she was under surveillance, was she? This irreproachable civil servant was a government informer, spying on radical elements?
‘You tell me first,’ she said. She said the words without any particular forethought, but when he reacted so quickly, pulling back from her with such shock in his eyes, she pushed on in a way that was more intuitive than rational. ‘Tell me – go on – your secret is safe with me.’
‘My secret.’
She had not expected him to react like this, turning away from her and leaning forwards, putting his hands on his knees. She spoke again, thinking from his reaction that her guess must be right, he must be trawling for information. However terrible that truth was, she wanted to clear the air between them. ‘You can tell me—’
But she broke off from what she was about to say, as he suddenly stood up. Pulling her hand, he was dragging her down the gravel path and towards the artificial lake, down to where the trees grew thick and there were no walkers, further on, off the path. He was pulling her still, too quickly, between the trees, she was stumbling as she walked, the brambles snagging at her stockings. Then he stopped, and held her by the shoulders. ‘To tell you – my God, it would be …’ And then he did tell her.
Of course she had had no idea. How could she? Nobody could ever have guessed. It was only a misunderstanding that had made him think that she had an inkling of the way he lived. The secret was so much larger than anyone would have imagined. It was almost beyond Laura’s comprehension, even when he spelled it out. At first she was unable to judge it. She judged him, however, as he finished telling her. He looked exhausted and stood there lighting a cigarette, smoothing back the blond hair that was always falling across his forehead. As he put the cigarette to his mouth, Laura saw his lips tremble. She reached out her hand, took the cigarette away and kissed his trembling mouth.
As they held one another, Laura heard a blackbird singing from a nearby tree. She felt as though she had lost all her boundaries. The song ran through her, through her mouth and thighs. Edward’s hand was hooked inside the top of her stockings, pushing her thighs apart almost too roughly. She straddled as wide as she could in her narrow skirt, rocking back on her heels. She would have fallen if it hadn’t been for his other hand, around her back, pressing her chest into his. She grasped his thighs with hers, moving her body up his so that his erection was in the right place, in what she experienced just then as the entirely open, entirely wet centre of her body, even though their bodies were touching through layers of clothes. The blackbird’s call, liquid, honeyed, sprang through them before falling into the green spaces of the park. Laura felt the song running through her, she felt Edward’s closeness, she groaned, his mouth was so hard on hers that it hurt, and tears came into her eyes.
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