One grey Thursday Laura saw the Red Flag fluttering over Selfridges; the only splash of colour she had seen for a long while in that grimy, shattered city. Later in the day, with hindsight, it seemed like a precursor of the telephone message that Ann shouted up to her. ‘It’s for you, Mrs Laura,’ she called up the stairs, and when Laura came down Ann handed her the receiver. ‘Someone called John Adams, he says your sister gave him your number.’
It had been months – no, years – since Laura had heard from any contact, and it was as hard as ever to slot herself back into that frame of mind. She had not missed her role in that secret work. The world around her had fallen into place more coherently since the chaos of the first years of the war. Now that Londoners spoke of Russians as the bravest of all, she felt more in step with the dogged hope that was the only acceptable attitude in the city. Tired and shabby, as all Londoners were after years of war, she went on day by day shopping for rationed food and doing shifts in that half-empty bookshop, but just putting one foot in front of another felt like enough of a journey. Perhaps she should have felt proud to be called back to the bigger struggle, but going into the dim café in Balham and seeing Stefan’s familiar ugly face at a back table, she was as nervous as ever. Once she had sat down at the next table, where he could hear her speak, she hoped for some words of reassurance or explanation. But there were only two muttered passwords, and then silence.
He seemed to have aged much more than a couple of years, she thought, looking sideways at him. His hair had turned greyer and he had put on weight; when he put out his hand to his cup of coffee she thought she saw it shake. She had brought The Times newspaper with her, although she had nothing to give him that day, and she saw he had one too. She assumed it held fresh film for the Minox, and she put her hand on it in a would-be casual manner as she got up, and put it into her bag as she left the café. She had been there half an hour at most.
Rattling back on the Underground, she decided to get out at Trafalgar Square and walk along Piccadilly to see if she could find a shop Winifred had mentioned that had been selling new nylon stockings. As she came out into the pale light, she heard voices raised in a song that she recognised. It was a communist rally; red flags and the plangent tones of the ‘Internationale’. A couple of passers-by had stopped beside her to watch and she heard something about the bravery of the Red Army and how they could teach other armies a thing or two. Everyone loved Uncle Joe now.
As she stood there, years disappeared for her, and she had a flash of how she’d felt when she had just arrived in London, freshly in love with the idea of freedom. She scanned the rows of people for a familiar face. Was that the back of Elsa’s head, there, by the banner? The woman Laura was watching began to turn. It was not Elsa, but then for a moment Laura thought she saw Florence’s dark hair a few rows in front of that; no, the woman she was looking at was not tall enough. She saw the banner they used to march with far across the square, but just as her body was about to push forward, going towards the familiar sight, her mind caught up. It was dangerous to stand here, waiting to be recognised. Long ago she had promised to turn her back on all of this. She walked quickly away, skirting the square and taking a long route to Piccadilly. One day soon, she said to herself, secrecy will be at an end.
Once the meetings with Stefan had been regularised again, they gradually began to induce less anxiety in her. In fact, they became routine, and gave a kind of structure to the weeks; they took place on Wednesdays and Saturdays, on her half-days from the bookstore. And gradually Stefan began to change their tone. In the past he had cut short every rendezvous, leaving immediately after the newspapers had been exchanged, his whole body exuding fear of discovery. But now, he sometimes chose spots where they could sit and talk, in the corners of Hampstead Heath or unprepossessing cafés in Balham or Elephant and Castle. He asked her about all sorts of subjects: who was staying in Toby’s house and what they were saying about the Soviet Union; what her friends felt about rationing and what Winifred’s role was in the Ministry of Food.… If she had stopped to think about it, of course Laura would have recognised that she was simply being pumped to provide useful information, but his attention felt flattering to her, as if he was interested in everything about her. Sometimes she found herself wondering about him, and what his life was like, and how his cover worked, but she knew it would not do to ask him anything. And in fact the one-way nature of their conversations was oddly seductive: Laura felt released from the feminine necessity of encouraging her male interlocutor to open up; she luxuriated in being the one who was listened to. All week she found herself saving up observations and nuggets of information for him.
One cold autumn afternoon they met on Hampstead Heath. Laura passed the film as usual under a newspaper on the bench between them. ‘If only everyone was as reliable as you, Pigeon,’ he said. Theoretically, she knew it was a breach of protocol for him to use her codename, or Edward’s, but they seemed to have become terms of endearment for him.