But perhaps, if she was honest, it wasn’t her sister or her parents she missed so much as the lost rhythms of speech of her home country. Sometimes, when she talked to Americans in London, she felt a shock of what she realised was nostalgia. She was about to tell Edward this, but stopped. He would find it odd, she thought, if she talked about how American she sometimes felt. She knew what the group thought of Americans: so crass, so uncultured – and ‘so frightened all the time’, as Alistair used to say about the American officers in the Dorchester. And as new battle lines were being drawn, surely in Edward’s eyes any loyalty to her country would become more and more absurd.
Her thoughts had made her fall silent again. She tried to say something honest about how she did miss home, and her mother and sister, even though she knew how little she really got on with them. Edward listened for a while, and then got up to pour another whisky. Over the glug and gurgle of the new bottle being poured, he told her the news. They were to leave London. They were to go to Washington. In May. A shock to him as well as to her. Though obviously they had always known he would not be in London forever. Working for the Foreign Office meant a certain amount of moving around. And this was a good, an enviable posting.
‘It’s quite a promotion, actually.’
‘And I’ll see Mother, and Ellen …’ Laura’s voice sounded uncertain even to herself.
‘You were just saying how much you missed them.’
Laura was not sure what to say to that, and asked more about the job. Edward told her that it was Halifax’s doing. Laura knew that the elderly man who was forever tainted by his attempts to prevent war was now in Washington, dispatched there to try to charm the Americans. And he had called on Edward to be by his side. She felt Edward’s uncertainty. As they went on speaking, he tried to frame his hesitation as the thought of leaving London at this time, at the end of the long war. She told him it was a good time to leave, and they brushed over, with silent understanding, the real meaning of the new job. There, he would be perfectly placed for all the secrets Stefan could ever want; as the trusted subaltern of the British ambassador, he would go like an arrow into the heart of the new empire – targeted, precise. But they did not talk about that.
‘My father would have been pleased,’ Edward said at one point. ‘He talked about Washington when I first went into the Foreign Office.’ He spoke, Laura thought, as if he were fulfilling his father’s dreams rather than blowing them to dust. But Laura too, in the moment, talked about it as if it were a straightforward promotion and suggested opening one of the old bottles of champagne that were being stored for the end of the war.
As he went to get it, Laura felt that now was not the time to tell him about her evening. Here was enough strangeness. When he came back with the champagne and gave her a glass, he put out his hand and stroked back her hair with that familiar gentle gesture. ‘Yes, we’ll get away,’ he said. For a moment she believed he knew, and understood, why she wanted to leave London, why they needed to reach a new world. And so she chose to let the horror of the evening recede, and drank her champagne while they talked about planning for the journey.
A few weeks before they left for America, Sybil returned to her house. Laura worked with Ann to try to make it look its best, but it was so dilapidated now, scuffed and scarred, paint peeling, half the windows boarded up and the doors no longer fitting properly into their jambs. The mice on the top floors scurried and scratched all night, and there was a suspicious smell to the hot water in the faucets, Laura had noticed, as though something had fallen into the tank and died. As Sybil came up the stairs to the front door, both Laura and Ann stood in the hall, and Laura felt almost as though she too were a kind of maid or caretaker, a failed one.
Sybil walked slowly with her up to the first floor, running her hand over the dented banisters. ‘It’s good to be back,’ was all she said at last, and then asked Ann to bring tea to the drawing room, as if it were a pre-war spring Sunday in Belgravia. Laura and Sybil sat together on the one sofa in the room. At first conversation was difficult, and then Laura said how very sorry she had been to hear about Quentin. As soon as the words left her mouth, she was unsure that she had said the right thing, but Sybil turned to her.
‘Nobody talks about him. Father never talks about him. Toby never talks about him. It was such an awful waste, you know, they were all retreating …’ She got up, as though it hurt her to keep still. ‘He was the only person I could ever talk to.’