Alistair asked the friend he had been standing with if he was coming with them, but the young man shook his head, and Alistair and Laura went out into the exposed road, where other desperate people were beginning to emerge. As they were walking up Farringdon Road, they heard the low roar of aeroplanes again. ‘We’ll never get you back to Chester Square tonight; you should have stayed in the station.’
‘What about you?’
‘Can’t bear these nights. Tell you what, how about the Ace of Clubs, have you tried it? It’s reopened, safe as anywhere else, I would have thought, in that basement.’
Laura agreed, hardly knowing what she was agreeing to. She was limping again. She slid her feet out of her shoes and started to walk in stockinged feet.
Alistair shook his head, saying she was crazy to walk like that, in these streets. They were littered with shrapnel and glass, but she managed to pick her way in the glare of searchlights to the west. Somehow the madness of the situation made them elated, and they found themselves half laughing as more incendiaries fell to the west of them, until one bigger bomb sucked up the air as it fell too near and they were pressed against the side of a wall. But they went on like that through Holborn, with other scurrying ants who had come out of hiding. As they turned the corner into Red Lion Square, they saw two or three ambulances and muffled figures with stretchers. ‘Look where you’re going,’ said the person holding the end of one. It was a woman, whose gaze sought Laura’s, and Laura looked down at her burden.
‘Come on, Laura, we’re nearly there.’
They went on, but the sight of the bleeding body had taken away their ebullience. Could it have been a child? Eventually they made it to the club, and Laura walked down the stairs, clinging to the banisters. The room was stuffed with people, and a small band was desultorily playing songs from before the war. ‘Let me buy you a drink,’ Alistair said. ‘You look terrible.’
Laura asked for a telephone, and Alistair pointed to it at the bar. She dialled the number of Toby’s house, but the line was dead. She put out her hand to the brandy that Alistair had bought her, downed it, and then went to find the lavatory. A flagrantly exhausted face, streaks of dust on her cheeks, looked at her from the mirror. Alongside another woman Laura washed her face and hands and lipsticked her mouth. The woman beside her said something about how the noise would get you down if nothing else would, and Laura smiled the usual response.
‘They say it’s coming down hard over the East End again,’ Alistair said.
‘Any news of Belgravia?’
‘Not that I’ve heard. Another drink?’
Laura hadn’t eaten since lunchtime, but he was right, they had to keep drinking and trying not to think of what might be happening elsewhere in London. At one point the room seemed to sway, as if a high explosive had landed too near for comfort, but although the woman beside her clutched her arm, nobody left, nobody screamed. Eventually they heard, as if from far away, the all-clear.
‘I have to get back, Alistair.’
‘I’ll go with you.’
Soon after they started walking, they saw a bus coming through the lightening gloom, and Laura ran to the bus stop.
‘To Marble Arch, that will do – no need to come with me now. Thanks so much.’
‘Any time you want another drunken night …’ Alistair seemed untouched by anxiety, speaking as if they had been drinking in a city dedicated to pleasure rather than bludgeoned by war. It was the pose that many of Edward’s friends took these days, Laura knew, but no one did it with such panache as Alistair, smiling at her, overly smug, she thought, about their own courage in drinking and socialising despite the horror around them.
As the bus swung down Oxford Street, she saw the gaping holes of department stores, but that was old damage. Once she got off she started running, in stockinged feet again, longing to see the white row of houses, their ample doors, their blind windows. But when she rounded the corner she saw the worst: an ambulance at the head of the street, a fire engine, women in tin hats, dust in the air. She was running past them, forcing her way through a knot of people, calling out to ask what was gone.
There he was, walking towards her through the dust, blood running down his cheek – but it was only a cut, it was only a splinter of glass, he was unharmed. ‘Where have you been?’ It would have taken too long to explain, so Laura just shook her head and held him, revelling in the warmth of their bodies. ‘Dying to sleep,’ she said, and she went in, her feet bleeding and filthy on the once fine parquet floors. Their house only had more windows blown out, but a few doors down a house had taken a hit, and all morning, as Laura slept fitfully, she heard the sounds of digging, shovels scraping through foundations, through the London clay, into the dark.
It was weeks before a meeting came together. Finally she left a note in the dead-letter drop. A few days later a strange man stopped her on the way to the bookshop and asked her about the Quintero tobacco she wanted, and told her to come and meet him at the Lyons’ Corner House in the Strand the following day. She had never seen him before, and when she slid into the seat opposite him, he frowned at her.
‘You missed your last meeting.’