‘No.’ Her mind was running on how she must break with Florence. ‘I should tell her immediately – I’ll think of a reason. Immediately, don’t you think?’
‘I’m on ice until I either break off with you or you come in.’ He pulled his knuckles across his lips, and she realised how hard it was for him to speak clearly about his work after so many years of silence. He told her that they had told him that he might be no further good, having broken the primary and absolute rule of secrecy, and that he had had to spend time trying to convince them she might be trustworthy. ‘The first bad judgement I’ve ever made, that’s the way they see it.’
She was puzzled by the tension in his face as he said that. It was as though he feared the people he was talking about, and yet he must surely be their treasure, their darling, with his extraordinary fidelity to their cause despite the fact that it worked so entirely against his own self-interest.
After that brandy they had another. She was beginning to get used to the constant drinking, and to ending the evenings dazed with alcohol. Eventually, very late, they left the restaurant. Blackness, warm and dense, surrounded them; wrapped in its cloak they walked up the Strand, through Covent Garden and into Bloomsbury. They walked with the whole sides of their bodies touching, Edward’s arm around Laura’s waist, her blood flushing up at the touch of his body. Time seemed to slow, they spoke little, finishing each other’s sentences, as they walked through the hidden city.
When they entered his flat, they did not turn on any lights, they did not speak to one another. But they reached out for one another with a silent confidence. That night, she began to learn the softness and hardness of his body, and she felt those qualities mirrored what she was learning of the harshness and vulnerability of his character. She felt as though she touched his spirit as well as his body, as though his spirit was made flesh. At one point she pushed him away, holding him by his shoulders. ‘It’s too risky,’ was all she said, and he said, ‘I’ll make it safe,’ getting up and looking in a drawer. She disliked the interruption of the rhythm of their embraces, but his response to her fear was completely reassuring to her.
From listening to Winifred and Cissie and their friends, Laura had found that other women spoke of their first experiences of intercourse with a kind of resigned cynicism, but her reality, the knowledge she gained for herself in the dark room, in the cries of the night, was different. The consummation of their desire seemed to Laura a cataclysmic ending and beginning. It was as if she lost any sense of herself as an individual, and then regained it with redoubled force. After they were exhausted, she lay awake for a long time, listening to his breathing, and for the first time in her life that she could remember she felt lulled by the precious sense that she was no longer alone, that she could be entirely at rest in another’s presence. A phrase she half remembered from the reading in that Worcestershire church a few weeks earlier floated through her head. She grasped it and turned it over in her mind. Yes, she fell asleep thinking, this is the peace that passes all understanding.
11
Monday saw Laura back at work. Out of the bubble that had enclosed Edward and herself for the weekend, everything in the bookshop seemed far away and hard to understand. But nobody else seemed to notice anything different about her. At the end of the day she walked over to a left-wing bookstore that she remembered seeing near the British Museum, and looked among the shelves. A few weeks earlier she had heard Florence arguing with someone about some essays by a writer who was trying to convince the Left that the communists were a busted flush. ‘He sees communism simply as an instrument of Russian foreign policy,’ Florence had said, ‘as if this was just about one country, not the international struggle.’ The writer’s name had become hazy to Laura, and she was too shy to ask the assistant for help, but eventually she found the – thankfully slim – volume she thought would be useful.