The next day, after checking with Edward that she was doing the right thing, Laura wrote a formal letter of condolence to Sybil, and soon received a brief acknowledgement in return. She had gone to her father’s house, she said, and for a long time after that Laura heard nothing from her. Edward and Toby never mentioned Quentin again, and after a while Laura came to believe that in fact he had not meant so much to them, as they had forgotten him so quickly.
As the weeks of war continued and rationing began to bite, Laura spent more and more of her days in queues. Since that house with four people living in it created much more work than Ann could manage on her own, if Laura had not helped with the shopping they would not have had enough food in the house. One Friday in July, having missed the meat queue in their usual butcher’s after getting there just an hour or so late, Laura bought sausage rolls in a shop she had never frequented before, and they had all come down with the runs. Edward got up, grey-faced, on Saturday and went to work as usual. He didn’t come back that evening; it was no longer unusual for him to work such long hours, but Laura had to resist the temptation to telephone him at work and ask how he was feeling.
Eventually she went to bed alone, feeling rather weak and maudlin in the aftermath of the illness. Winifred had lent her a novel about a teacher in an English private school, but its humour was that of the group, and although she could now pick up some of the tones of irony, most of it baffled her. Though the sirens sounded in the night, she stayed in her own bed, a heavy inertia pinning her down, and lay there for a long time even once light pulsed through the edges of the blackout blinds, the covers pushed off because the air was already so close. At last she got up, splashed her face with cold water, and went down to breakfast feeling light-headed. Toby was there, head bent, munching through toast and margarine. ‘News,’ he said thickly, gesturing to the radio.
Laura caught the tail end of the bulletin: ‘Hitler now has new fields of slaughter, pillage and destruction.’ That gravelly voice had become familiar to everyone, but it seemed just for a second to be speaking directly to her. ‘I see the Russian soldiers standing on the threshold of their native land, the ten thousand villages of Russia where there are still primordial human joys, where maidens laugh and children play. We shall give whatever help we can to Russia and to the Russian people.’
‘There we are,’ said Toby, ‘not alone any more.’
Laura was nodding at a meaning he could not guess beyond his words, as she asked Ann if there was any more toast and coffee. They sat talking idly, and not long afterwards they heard the front door bang and Edward came down the basement stairs. The expression on his face was one Laura had not seen for so long. Without thinking of the others, she stood up and went into his arms, and he held her for a moment, smiling. ‘I am sorry,’ he said, ‘so much going on, I couldn’t get back last night. It’s a lovely day. Shall we walk up to the park?’
Laura went upstairs and put on a dress that she had not taken out of the wardrobe yet that summer. Sleeveless and low-necked, it seemed almost too bare for the city. There were no deckchairs free, so they sat on the dusty grass under a sycamore tree. At one point Edward picked a daisy and tucked it into her hair. It fell out and down the front of her dress and, without thinking of the people around them, he bent and kissed the hollow where it had fallen. They lunched at the cafeteria by the Albert Memorial and the sparrows came to their hands to be fed. It seemed easy to talk now – about everything, about politics, yes, if they had wanted to, now that the world had fallen into place, now that good and evil were ranged on opposite sides of the great conflict, but also about why the leaves of chestnut trees looked glossy and the leaves of plane trees looked dull, or whether they should go to hear this pianist that Alistair had been raving about last week. At one point Laura misheard Chopin as shopping, and Edward laughed so much that his coffee went up his nose, and when they watched some park warden sweeping the gravel path he quoted some nonsense rhyme about how many maids it would take to get a beach clean, and she made him repeat it until she’d learned it too. They felt drunk with their sense of relief.
17