He responded in kind, telling her a story about a man he worked with who had picked up the book Edward was reading, which happened to be Madame Bovary, and said, ‘Any good?’ Laura did not quite understand the humour in this story, but it did not matter, she still appreciated the spirit in which it was told. As they talked, their gazes were constantly drawn to one another, and a small smile kept coming and going on Edward’s face.
Because she was so determined not to question him, but to show that she fully accepted him as he was, and was satisfied with whatever he wanted to tell her, Laura only gradually came to understand how Edward’s double life was organised. Details came slowly, dropping now and again into their conversation and always after a hesitation, as though he was eyeing a gate that looked closed and only gradually realising that it could swing open. That evening, for instance, he reminisced about his interview with the Foreign Office when he had first applied to them. ‘They asked me about my interest in communism …’
‘How did they know?’
‘I hadn’t kept it a secret at university, not at the beginning. So obviously they had to ask. I said that I had been interested, but I had come less and less to admire it. I was ready to go on, you know, if I’d been asked, but the odd thing was, I don’t think they were even listening to my answer. The chap who interviewed me, he’d been at the same college as my father, and he’d seen my father the night before the interview, in the bar at Pratt’s. So it wasn’t as though they wondered about me, it wasn’t as though … I was never outside …’
Never outside – was that what he said? Laura hadn’t quite heard the end of the sentence in the noise of the restaurant where they were sitting, and was about to ask more, when he asked her something instead, about the last time she had been to a Party meeting.
In fact, strangely enough, he seemed more interested in the details of her world than she allowed herself to be in his. He kept asking her about the Party members she had met, about the meetings, about what they had talked about, what was in the Worker that day, what people said about this or that writer or event. Laura sometimes struggled to answer, and often she felt that her anecdotes fell short of his expectations. If she tried to express to him her sense of the impotence of the British communist movement, he seemed not to understand her. She came to realise that he thought she was lucky to be openly part of that world.
One evening they talked about the change of line on the war. They were walking arm in arm back to Cissie’s flat after going to see an American film. He listened to her confusion, her account of how the Party members had tried to adjust themselves to the new line, but how uneasy it had all felt, and then he told her that it wasn’t Stalin’s job to pull the imperialists’ chestnuts out of the fire for them. ‘It won’t be long, though,’ he said. ‘Really, Britain drove the Russians into Hitler’s arms. If we’d only been able to create a united front … but when the Soviet Union has built up its strength and can confront fascism and imperialism – it won’t be long.’
‘I know,’ Laura said, warmed by hearing from him the same arguments that she had heard from Florence and realising that he would have heard them from some inner Party source.
They did not talk about world events all that much, however, even in those first few weeks. Politics might be the key in which their love song was placed, but it wasn’t the melody itself. That lay in the rhythm of their bodies. They were intensely aware of one another from moment to moment, their blood beating up at any touch – knee to knee as they sat in the cinema, or hand to arm as he steered her out of a restaurant, or during the brief luxury of an embrace as they said goodbye in a blacked-out street. Somehow those fleeting touches were enough, during those first weeks. More than enough, at least for Laura. For her they added up to an unexpected excess of happiness.
In May it was her birthday, and when Edward discovered the date he made a point of asking her to meet him at a more expensive restaurant. He had also mentioned to her, in a tone whose carelessness seemed studied, that his flatmate was away for a few days.