No house, but prison this.
Even Laura could see that it was not much of a poem, but it drew her back again to Edward’s anger that afternoon at the weekend when his family had broken through his conversation with Giles with silly chatter about tea and scones. Again she remembered how he had seemed to find peace with her; and again she felt a sweet confidence as she considered how they understood one another without the need for explanation. She replaced the notebook with the others, with no sense of guilt, and turned back to the room.
The wardrobe door was half open and she went to close it. Before she did so she stood looking inside, revelling in the memory of his presence that his clothes held: the dark suits he wore every day in town, tweed jackets for the weekend, pale flannels for the summer, and two tuxedos – she put her face to the sleeve of one, was it the one he had been wearing when they first met? As she did so, a tie slipped from where it had been hanging inside the door, and she bent down to pick it up. She saw something – was it another tie? – a flash of something pale, under one of his shoes. She moved the shoe. It was a slip, pink, crumpled as if it had been pushed suddenly into the closet. Laura herself had never worn such a thing – it was cheap, untrimmed. She found herself holding it, and then she dropped it and walked out of the bedroom.
Her gin and tonic was still sitting there on the coffee table. She drank it and found herself pulling at her own fingers, twisting them. That, she realised, is what they mean by wringing your hands. Had she assumed he’d been a virgin too? No, of course not, not if she had stopped to think, but she had not stopped to think, and how long had the slip been there, and how many, and when, and … Laura had been living in the present for months. It had seemed to be a comfortable place, but suddenly the past and the future had opened up on either side of her and she realised that the present was a narrow spit of land, and she felt dizzy.
She thought of leaving. She reached for her purse and stood up, but as she went towards the door, it opened and there he was. For all these weeks, it had been such a revelation to her that this man’s attention was on her; she had experienced it as a complete loss of boundaries. Now, as he came in, she felt their separation again, and a distance that she had not felt since their first kiss seemed to arise between them. He moved towards her, but she moved back, into the living room. They exchanged some stilted sentences; she didn’t know how to bring up what she had seen, but then as he poured himself a drink and sat down on the sofa, pulling at his tie to loosen it, she was overcome with desire and sorrow. She put her head in her hands.
He did not ask her what the matter was. ‘Cheer up,’ he said and turned her face to his. She let him kiss her for a few seconds, the desire rising up in her as ever, and then she suddenly jerked away from him.
‘I was talking to some chaps at the office last week,’ he said, ‘and it would be possible to get you home on a convoy now that things are getting so hot.’ He thought she was scared by the start of the air war. He thought she was missing home. Or did he just want her to move on?
‘Do you want me to go?’
‘Do I want you to go?’ He almost laughed, and told her it was the last thing he wanted.
‘Is it? Is it really?’ She could not dissemble any more, and so she told him what she had seen. It would have been hard for her if he had been dismissive, but he immediately seemed to recognise her anguish and to want to reassure her. He spoke quickly and confidently; it had been some time ago, before the first evening she had come here, yes, definitely – and who had it been? Well, hadn’t she known? He thought she had known. Ada.
With a rush, Laura’s world was rearranged. She remembered Ada’s hostility that day in the back of the cigar shop as she had questioned her.
‘Do you still see her?’
They never talked about meetings that they had with Ada or Stefan; the need for secrecy was being drilled into Laura week by week. ‘Everything you don’t know makes you safer,’ Stefan would tell her over and over again in his flat East European accent. ‘Everything you know is a danger to yourself and those you care about.’ The direct question was a challenge to that new habit of secrecy, and Edward paused.
‘No,’ he said finally. ‘I don’t. It’s someone else now. I don’t know what’s happened to her.’