that Elsa liked her. Florence didn’t deny it. ‘It’s not personal,’ was all she would say at first, stirring her hot chocolate.
‘She thinks I’m not good enough.’
‘She doesn’t understand … you’re under pressure from your family. I know what that’s like, I’ve had that. But you are a grown-up, Laura, you don’t have to …’
For a moment it seemed that Florence was about to be honest with her, to express her own frustration with Laura’s half-hearted commitment, and Laura felt her heart speed up as though she wanted the confrontation. But then Florence said something unexpected. ‘She thinks – she thought – you were an informer. A government spy. Because you never commit, because you watch everyone …’ Laura couldn’t help a smile breaking on her lips, and Florence’s face closed down. There is only so far you can go in criticising someone you love, and perhaps it was that evening Laura realised that Florence did love Elsa. ‘It’s not ridiculous, Laura. They’ve had to expel informers before. You shouldn’t take that lightly. We are all under surveillance. We could all be being watched, any time.’
It was such a nonsensical thing to say, like a line out of the kind of movie that Florence didn’t even go to, that Laura said nothing, spooning up the rest of her drink. ‘It’s late,’ she said. They walked together to the station, and Florence seemed to want to smooth over the oddness of the evening, making Laura promise she would come to the next meeting. Laura wanted to put out her hands and touch Florence. There was the scent of smoke from the pub in her hair, the curve of her cheek white in the darkness; but she did not, could not, embrace her, and she went down into the Underground alone.
6
‘I get along without you very well,’ Cissie was singing to the gramophone, and holding up a new dress – or rather an old dress that a girl at work had given her – and dancing with it as if it were a person.
‘Where do you get your energy from, Cis?’ Winifred asked, lying on the sofa.
‘Come on, we’re going out tonight, aren’t we?’
‘We are, we are – and you’re coming too, Laura.’
Laura said something about being too tired, from her place slumped in a green armchair. But Cissie and Winifred were having none of it. It was Cissie’s birthday and Winifred felt it was incumbent on all of them to go out.
‘You work fewer hours than we do,’ Cissie reminded her.
Laura knew that was true, she didn’t work nearly as hard as the other two, and she didn’t have their social lives either, which took them out night after night with colleagues and boyfriends.
‘Alistair said to meet him at the Ace of Clubs, if we were coming late – they’re all going for dinner first, but frankly he’d only stand me a meal, not all three of us, so let’s just go to the club.’ Winifred and Cissie were feverishly energetic about having as much fun as they could on their budget, which was not limited in the way that Florence would have recognised as a limit, but which was still no match for some of Alistair’s friends, as Laura understood from Winifred’s constant gossip about their clothes, their dinners, their drinking, all unrestricted by the war.
As Laura was pulling on the blue dress with the wide neck that she thought would be suitable, she remembered that awkward night when she had first met Alistair and his friends. She looked at herself in the mirror. Her hair had been shorter then, falling forwards over her ears, but now it was longer and she wore it with a side parting, it was better to brush it back from her face. She picked up her brush and assessed her face, bit by bit. Plucking stray hairs from her eyebrows, finding the darker shade of lipstick: you had to concentrate on the details even if the whole was wrong, as she suspected it still was.
The women went through the streets holding their blackout torches; there was no threat in the darkness when they were all together like this, and they linked arms and chattered. As they walked, Laura felt buoyed up by the female friendship that she hardly deserved. Although she had never felt really intimate with Winifred, she had to recognise her generosity in giving her the independence that she had craved and including her in her own brisk, busy life. In response, she decided that for one evening she would try to be the cousin that she felt Winifred wanted. So she asked with apparent interest who would be at the club, and whether Giles would be there.
‘Didn’t I tell you? They’ve moved Giles’s outfit out of London – too dangerous here, the risk of having it all blown up.’ Laura realised she was still not quite clear about what Giles actually did. Winifred was vague. ‘Aeroplanes, radios, you know. And Quentin won’t be there tonight either, now he’s joined up.’ It was hard to square that development with the fleshy man who had held court over dinner. Winifred seemed to know what she was thinking. ‘Anyone less likely to be the hero of the hour, I know, but apparently because he was in the Coldstream Guards for a year before university he can float back in now.’ Laura asked if Alistair was planning to do the same. ‘He can’t bear the idea, really – but he isn’t quite sure what to do. He’d like to be something really vital at the Ministry of Information, but he says they are just crammed with old Etonians … he’s feeling awfully left out of everything …’
This was the way Winifred and Cissie tended to talk, as though the war were a kind of social gathering in which it was important to find the right clique. Through the big door in a road south of Oxford Street, through the blackout curtains beyond – going through these layers of darkness into light made the expectation rise in Laura’s chest. But it was a rather drab nightclub, she was surprised to see, and the floor was tacky under her high-heeled shoes as she walked across it with Winifred and Cissie. It was crowded, and at first she thought it held nobody they knew, but then a waiter moved and there in the corner at a large table was the group: Alistair, Sybil and the man with the light hair whom she had not forgotten. He had already seen them and was rising to his feet in a way that made her wonder if he was leaving, but it was just his immediate politeness.
‘Do you know Laura?’ Winifred was saying to Edward as they sat down.
‘We met,’ he said briefly, but under cover of the chatter that accompanied their first order – champagne? Cocktails? Has everyone eaten? – he leant forwards, turning to her so that nobody else could hear his words, and said, ‘The struggle on two fronts.’
Laura nodded, her consciousness of her mistake that evening rising through her, so that she said nothing and was glad when the martini was placed in front of her. It was Alistair who spoke to her next, asking her if she was terribly busy, as everyone was these days. When she described her little job in the bookstore, he tried to make it sound refreshing that she was not doing war work. How vital for the evening that he and Winifred and Cissie were people who generously spilled conversation constantly into the air, because otherwise the rather forbidding figures of Edward and Sybil would, Laura thought, have made the table impossibly reserved.
Now Alistair had moved on to a story about how he had joined his local Air Raid Precautions wardens, just to have something to do. ‘Now the whole country is turning into an OTC camp – and you know I always was hopeless in OTC – I felt I absolutely had to … but the most exciting thing to happen so far was a false alarm when some poor old chap went to bed sozzled and set off a fire in his own bed with a cigarette … the flames leapt up just as a motor car backfired on Charing Cross Road, we thought we had a bomb at last … well, the relief when we realised …’
In return, Laura tried to overcome her awkwardness and present him with an amusing anecdote, but she had just started telling him about the night she thought she was talking to Winifred in the blackout when in
