The days dragged slowly over the next fortnight. Laura could not quite believe that she and Edward had been forbidden from seeing one another, but she was so keen to prove that she could be trusted that she would not have thought of trying to get in touch with him. Cut off from Florence as well, she spent a lot of time in the flat, bored and restless. She threw away all the political books and pamphlets that Florence had lent her, and went back to reading magazines and the paperback novels that Winifred left around.
As it happened, Laura had to return only once to the tobacco shop. This time she had to wait for a while before it was clear, pretending to look along the rows of pipes and cigar boxes. And when she was ushered through to the backroom, there was somebody already waiting, but it was not Ada. It was a short man with receding dark hair, wearing a worn grey suit, who introduced himself as Stefan.
Perhaps the words he spoke were no more friendly than Ada’s had been. But somehow, Laura thought, there was not the same hostility. He went through again the need for extreme secrecy, and asked a couple of other questions about her feelings about the Soviet line on the war, but that was all. She did not mention her sense of confusion, but repeated Edward’s phrases, and found as she did so she longed for the certainties she had found in the old communist pamphlets before the war. He told her that she would not now have to come back at any time unless she received a telephone call from a John Adams, in which case she should return the first Saturday after the call, using the same words as before. ‘But we should have no need to meet,’ he finished shortly. ‘That is just a back-up.’
Laura felt dismissed, but relieved by the dismissal. ‘And I can see Edward again?’
He laughed. ‘Why would I stop you and Edward meeting? I am not some ogre.’
Laura felt puzzled as she realised that Ada might have been overly zealous in keeping them, even temporarily, apart. Walking into the street, she looked for the reassuring red box of a public telephone and went in and dialled Edward’s office number, as she knew he worked Saturdays now. That evening they met in a cheap little restaurant in Bloomsbury, and although they didn’t discuss anything that either of them had been told by these emissaries from the other world, the knowledge of what Laura had passed through was there. A barrier had been lifted, and they had been allowed through.
And once that had happened, other things began to shift. One evening Edward asked her to go with him to a party the following week to celebrate the publication of Alistair’s first book. Quentin, apparently, would be expected too, as he had a few days’ leave coming up. ‘It’s a pity that Giles can’t make it,’ Edward said, ‘but he says that there is no way he can get to London mid-week, his work is so busy now.’
Laura understood that this invitation constituted a kind of presentation of their relationship to his circle, and she felt that she should at least match his frankness, so that evening when she got in, she told Winifred that she would be going to Alistair’s party with Edward. Winifred was immediately fascinated.
‘You are the secretive one,’ she said, with an almost admiring tone. ‘What happened to your other boyfriend?’
Laura screwed up her mouth in a dismissive expression, hoping Winifred would not probe further.
‘Last – I wouldn’t have thought he was your type …’
Laura was, as ever, keen to know what others thought of her and pressed Winifred to say more, but Winifred shook her head and seemed uncharacte?ristically reticent.
On the day of the party, Laura met Edward beforehand in a hotel bar in Bloomsbury, and they walked to the party together. Now, she thought, stepping into the crowded room next to him, for the first time she was part of the group, she was at its heart.
That sensation did not last long. Edward was quickly claimed by his male friends – by Alistair, who was eager to hear what he thought of the book, and by Nick, that untidy-looking man she had not seen since that first party at Sybil’s, who started whispering some gossip in Edward’s ear and roaring with laughter, in a way she felt was almost calculated to exclude her.