Laura knew that despite the bombs, behind closed doors the clubs and grand hotels of London went on with their chattering, swaying life. She stood irresolutely in front of her closet on that Friday evening, and in the end took out the cherry-red dress she had been wearing two years ago on the night they first met. The zip moved more easily than she remembered; perhaps rationing meant that she had slimmed down a little. First she pulled her hair back, but she felt that looked much too severe, so she curled it and rolled it in front in a way that she had seen in a fashion magazine that Winifred had left behind the last time she had come over. They walked to the Dorchester in the darkening city. ‘Do you like this dress?’ she said in a flirtatious tone, and in a vague voice he asked if it was new and said how pretty it was. When she reminded him it was what she had been wearing when they first met, he stopped and looked at her, and smiled, and said that of course he would never forget, he had just been distracted by something that had happened that day at work. But when she asked what it was, he said it was a long story and fell silent.
The ballroom was crowded, but it did not take long for Laura to notice, across the room, two women picked out by the way that the gazes of others turned to them – Amy and Nina. Both of them were in black. Nina was wearing heavy amethyst earrings and a silver scarf around her shoulders, but Amy seemed to have no accessories, and her white-blonde hair was brushed back severely. Immediately Laura was conscious of her too-bright dress with its pre-war style and the absurd way she had dressed her hair, and she was not eager to go and say hello to them. When Edward saw them, however, he rose without hesitating and steered her across to their table. She was not surprised that they hardly acknowledged her. Presumably the man next to Amy was the husband that Sybil had once spoken about, the one that the newspapers would have mocked if he had not acquitted himself in some distinguished way in a theatre of war. He hardly looked the part, while Nina’s partner was an overweight man who had not even bothered to wear evening clothes.
‘This is Michel Blanchard,’ Nina said, and the man merely nodded at them before saying something to her in an undertone. They did not ask Laura and Edward to sit with them, and Laura was relieved when they went back to their own table. She tried not to let their chilly manner bother her; neither of them had a partner to match her husband, she thought as they sat down. And in the noise and energy of the room it did not matter if there was still a pool of silence around her and Edward as they drank and danced. It was well into the small hours when they paid their extortionate bill and went into the lobby, where Edward stopped short.
‘Good evening,’ he said, as an elderly man with a hollow-cheeked face stopped in front of them and greeted him in a polite way, asking what brought him there. ‘Celebrating my wife’s birthday – Laura, have you met Lord Halifax?’
The protest that she had once seen at his door danced through Laura’s mind as she took Halifax’s hand. She remembered what they had called him in the Party: the old appeaser, the old snake; she had expected someone with an air of devilish certainty. But he seemed to hold his power in the distracted, accidental way of all the men in Edward’s class, there in his evening clothes in the lobby of the hotel, shaking her hand in a distant manner and muttering that the pleasure was all his. As they walked on, she noticed that Edward was tense with irritation, and she asked him what the matter was.
‘Of all the people to meet …’
‘But he lives here, doesn’t he? Hard to avoid him.’
It seemed strange, stepping out of the hotel and into the city’s blind blackness, to think that he lived in that gilded interior, but she remembered hearing that from Toby or Winifred.
‘I see enough of him at work – you’d think we could go for a drink without bumping into him. No doubt he’ll have something to say about me dancing all night if I don’t go in at dawn tomorrow.’
At first Laura was surprised that he felt so rebuked by being seen by his boss. But as they walked on and he put his arm around her, she realised that his reaction wasn’t rational, that there was something about always being surrounded by his work that was eating into him. So as they walked she tried to steer the conversation elsewhere, and for a few moments it worked; they talked about after the war and how they might one day have a small house where they could be together – in the hills, Laura said, or by the sea; or in the forest, Edward said. They left open which country their idyll might be in – maybe the hills of Worcestershire or Massachusetts came into their minds, or some unidentified snowy valleys or birch woods in a country they had not yet seen. But they would be free there of the bitter secrecy which made Edward so miserable, Laura thought as they opened the door in Chester Square. The evening had been quiet so far, but as soon as they began walking upstairs the sirens sounded.