This time they left London together for Worcestershire, settling down in the train carriage beside one another, Laura holding a copy of Vogue and Edward a book of French poetry. At one moment he leant over her to pull up the window. She felt so flooded by the scent of his skin that it was all she could do not to press her lips to his throat above his shirt collar, but the presence of two elderly women in the carriage prevented that. Once they were in the back seat of the Daimler, they succumbed to a brief, open-mouthed kiss, but Laura quickly pulled away, conscious of Mrs Last’s servant in front, the back of his head in a grey cap and his gloved hands on the wheel.
The house had still not been requisitioned in any way by the military, and as the car pulled to a stop in front of it, Laura saw it with a shock of recognition, as if its restrained beauty had entered deeply into her after that one previous visit. It seemed only enhanced by the growing wildness of the garden, the ivy breaking over its walls, the gravel blurred with blown leaves. Edward’s mother was not waiting for them in the drawing room, but Sybil, who had already been up there for a few days, was there. She had obviously been playing Patience, and shuffled the cards together when they walked in, yawning.
‘Your mother is busy with her war work,’ she said to Edward. She told them that she had hardly seen Mrs Last the last few days as she had taken some kind of job with the evacuees and was out of the house a lot. ‘And Toby is busy with his writing …’ There was something almost dismissive in the way Sybil talked about the work of others. ‘I asked for a cold luncheon – do you mind?’
They walked through to that dim, high-ceilinged dining room, where even without Mrs Last their behaviour became rather formal. The sunlight did not penetrate the room, but after they had eaten they went to get their bathing costumes and the warmth of the day came back with a shock as soon as they stepped onto the bright terrace. Sybil walked beside Laura through what had been the formal garden; the box hedges were ragged now but the elegant gestures of their lines were still apparent, holding the blown borders in a hopeful frame. Beyond a final hedge the ground suddenly dipped and gave way to a meadow with cows grazing at the further edge, which in turn gave way, under willows and long grasses, to the brown, slow-moving water of a river. Sybil threw a couple of blankets onto the grass and the three of them lay there, Sybil and Laura talking and Edward reading, the sun dappling through the willow leaves, spots shimmering in their eyes and then flicking away. They had been there for some hours when someone hallooed from the top of the meadow.
‘Giles! Thought you wouldn’t be here until tomorrow.’ Edward put down his book and sat up.
‘There was nothing doing at work today, the aeroplane we were meant to be running the new tests with got smashed up over the Channel last night. Pretty poor show.’ Giles sat down, unbuttoning his shirt. ‘Old Bales didn’t know where you’d got to, but I thought you’d be down here.’ He pulled off his undershirt and started unlacing his shoes. ‘I feel like I could sleep for a week and never look at a cathode ray again. You can’t imagine the way we have to work out there – in a bloody field, really. Hardly any time to develop the new stuff either, they’re trying to get us to fit as many planes as we can with what we’ve got. Sybil, you look like Titania in this sunshine.’
Laura couldn’t help noticing that other than a nod towards her, Giles didn’t greet her. She knew that Edward must have told him that she would be there, but he was behaving as though she was no more interesting to him than the manservant, Bales. Edward told him that they didn’t know what he was talking about, since he was always so secretive about what he was doing, but he said it in an affectionate way, looking at Giles with pleasure.
‘And even if I explained you would be too stupid to understand. It’s not Pindar, my dear Edward, it’s what our American friends call radar. I must swim – is the water freezing?’
‘Absolutely. I’ll go in with you.’