were guilty – of seeing servants purely as instruments. She had only seen Mrs Venn as an anonymous presence in the house, and now she looked at her properly for the first time. She was standing next to the straggling bush of late white roses, and as she spoke to Aunt Dee she reached out a hand and shook one of the flowers, which spattered its petals onto the lawn. It seemed to be an angry gesture, even though her voice was soft as she explained the urgency of her situation. She was a widow, Laura knew that, but she had never heard about the son who lived with her sister before. ‘Well, I don’t know, Vennie – must you go right now?’ Aunt Dee was dithering. ‘I suppose the girls can help get the lunch and there will be enough over for tomorrow.’
Winifred came back out of the house. ‘It was Giles on the telephone,’ she said in a high voice. ‘He won’t come to lunch today; they’ve been called into work. I might go and meet him later – will you come with me, Laura?’
‘No rushing about today, Winifred.’ In Aunt Dee’s mind, it was clearly the first crisis of the war, the desire on the part of her housekeeper to take a few days off. As Mrs Venn stood waiting for her decision, Laura tried to persuade her aunt that they could easily manage without help for a few days. Mrs Venn did not express gratitude when Aunt Dee finally agreed that she could leave for a while. Instead, she frowned and then nodded at Laura in a way that Laura found puzzling.
Laura was soon in the kitchen, doing these now unfamiliar tasks that she had done so often at home: putting plates and glasses on a tray, making the gravy, draining the potatoes.
Winifred might have noticed and commented on her competence, but Winifred’s mind was elsewhere. She was pouring herself a glass of water and drinking it down as if she had been running all morning. ‘I haven’t yet told Mother, but I’m not going to the university after all.’
‘I thought …’ Laura was disappointed by Winifred’s declaration. Why would she give up her dream now? But as Winifred went on talking, Laura realised that another plan had taken shape in her mind. Although Winifred had never, as far as Laura remembered, talked to her about what she would do when the war started, it was clear that she had been thinking about it for a long time and was determined to be useful rather than following her dream of studying. What was even more surprising was her next statement. ‘Cissie is looking for someone to share her flat. There would be room for you too – it would be easier to convince Mummy if we went together.’
Laura stood, startled, the gravy ladle dripping onto her apron. ‘I didn’t think—’
‘I should have discussed it with you before – I know you don’t want to go back to America, though I must admit I can’t see why.’
It was both shocking and warming, that Winifred was being so friendly and opening this road for her. Not freedom, exactly, but a step towards independence … towards adulthood. Laura was not good – would never, all her life, be good – at expressing gratitude, but in hesitant sentences she gave Winifred to understand that she would like nothing more than to move out with her. Winifred explained that they needed to go and see Giles soon, to talk to him about jobs that he might be able to help them with. ‘You worked for a time as a secretary, didn’t you say?’
Laura was surprised that Winifred had even remembered that she had been a typist; she could hardly recall telling her about that. She wondered if she had been guilty of inflating her tedious, routine job into something more interesting than it had been. But she agreed that she had worked, and that she would like to try to do something useful. ‘Will Aunt Dee ever agree?’ she asked.
The tray was piled up, the beef cooling on its plate. Laura continued to pour the gravy into the gravy boat, while Winifred was looking straight into the future.
‘How can she say no, really, if it’s war work?’
As it happened, Winifred got a job through Giles easily, despite her lack of office experience. She looked the part, Laura had to admit, when she bustled off to interviews over the next few weeks in gloves and a grey hat and a glow of energy. Giles managed to put a word in here or there, in the bar at the Reform, he said, which got her onto a lowly rung in the newly formed Ministry of Food. Winifred did not mind much where she worked, she told Laura, but the offer of the job was simply the springboard that enabled her to tell Aunt Dee how difficult it would be to come back to Highgate every evening, and how much easier it would be if the girls moved into Cissie’s flat in Regent’s Park.
It was much harder to find Laura a ‘berth’, as Giles put it. In the end she took the job that Cissie herself had just left, part-time in a bookstore near Piccadilly. Cissie was herself moving on to war work of some kind, and was eager to leave her job behind. It was dull enough, she told Laura, and the owner was so crotchety she thought he would soon give up the store altogether. But this, thought Laura on the day that she and Winifred carried their boxes up the stairs to Cissie’s little apartment, this is just the beginning. It would be pretty cramped here with the three of them, but luckily Winifred and Cissie had decided they wanted to share the big bedroom, so Laura had what they called the box room, looking over the trees. It was so different here, with the chintz cushion covers and the pot pourri in lustre bowls, from the atmosphere in Florence and Elsa’s flat. Florence … she must go and see her, she could go right now, there was nothing to stop her, Laura thought as she pulled down the blackout blinds of the little room against the greenish light that was dying in the park.
‘We’re going out too,’ Winifred said when Laura announced she was not staying in for the evening. ‘Come with us, we’re meeting Alistair and his friends.’
Winifred was drunk on the taste of freedom too, Laura could see. The two women looked at one another, complicit.
‘Not tonight,’ Laura said.
‘We’ll have to meet your secret man soon, you know.’
‘There’s no reason to keep him hidden now,’ Cissie agreed, and Laura realised they had been talking about her strange assignations. How awkward it would be to come out and tell them the truth now. How much easier to look self-conscious and reply with the kind of giggle that they expected.
As Laura rode the Underground to meet Florence at King’s Cross, she felt elated. The job in the bookstore was only two and a half days a week. The rest of the time she had free. Now, at last, she could become the girl that Florence wanted her to be, a faithful Party member who would stand by her side and contribute properly to the war against imperialism and fascism. To be sure, the day before, when Laura had telephoned Florence to tell her that she was moving out of her aunt’s, Florence had hardly reacted to the news. But she had told her to come to the Party meeting which had been suddenly scheduled that evening for six thirty, and for once Laura could come on time, could come early in fact. And so here she was, looking for Florence where she often stood selling the Worker by King’s Cross station.
Florence was there. But she was not, as she had been when Laura had seen her before, calling out ‘Daily Worker! Read the truth, not the capitalist lies!’ and holding out copies of the paper. Instead, she was standing with her hands in her pockets and a scarf muffled around her neck, and the stack of newspapers was apparently ignored on an upturned crate beside her. When Laura came up to her, she hardly responded. After a while Laura offered to carry the unsold papers back to the office with her. ‘We’ll be late otherwise,’ she said, but for once it was Florence who seemed to be half-hearted as she gathered them up, dropping a few on the sidewalk. Laura stooped to pick one up, and then she made out the headline. ‘The communist aims for peace.’
That was nonsense. It was inconceivable. Only the communists understood the absolute necessity of war, how it would bring the great struggle between fascism and communism out into the open at last. It was
