A Quiet Life

‘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 like stepping through a mirror, seeing the headline there that night, and as Laura stood looking down at it, she realised why Florence was looking as if a spring had been wound down. What pushed them to the meeting? She could not remember how they walked, through indifferent streets full of people on pointless errands, their limbs weighted and words dying in their mouths before they spoke.

The room was already full, too full. But Elsa had saved Florence a seat near the front and Laura managed to squeeze in next to her. When Bill began to speak, a page of his notes slipped from his hands and he had to stop and retrieve it. It was heavily written and overwritten, Laura noticed, and as he was speaking he kept screwing up his eyes to read the next sentence. ‘We must be clear …’ The rolling timbre of his voice could always fill a room, but today there seemed to be resistance in the air and his words did not reverberate. ‘This is not a just war, this is an out-and-out imperialist war to which no working-class member can give any support.’

Beside her, Florence was slumped down in her chair, not looking at Elsa or at Laura. Her legs were twisted around one another in a way, Laura thought, that must be uncomfortable. She wanted to put out a hand to those tense legs, to remind Florence that she was not alone. But they had never been physically close, had never been those girls you saw who walked with linked arms or who stroked one another’s hair when they were ill, and Laura kept her hands in her lap, linking the fingers together, noticing how sweat slipped on her palms even though the room was chilly.

‘The central committee has thoroughly endorsed the new line, and calls upon every member to endorse it too. There can be no room for wavering here: we must pay allegiance to this line not through mere lip service, but through conviction.’

As the meeting closed, Elsa and a couple of other women began the usual singing of ‘The Red Flag’ in their thin sopranos. Their dutiful octaves tried to enfold the crowd, but people remained separate, lost in individual thought. The girls did not usually go drinking after a meeting. There was not the money, after paying for rent and food, for Florence and Elsa to sit and drink beer in the evenings with the comrades; they were more likely to go back to their rooms for a cup of tea. But tonight it seemed necessary to remain with the group, to find places in the smoke-filled room, to sit down at a stained table, to shove along as more people joined them. They found themselves sitting next to Bill and two other middle-aged men. Drinks were being bought, cigarettes shared. A glass of what turned out to be beer mixed with lemonade was put down in front of Laura and, to her surprise, she rather liked the taste. Conversation stuttered around them.

‘You’ll accept the change of line publicly, but privately hold out against it?’ Elsa’s voice was already heard. ‘That’s ridiculous.’ Her glance went to Bill’s face for reassurance, and he nodded at her.

‘A communist doesn’t have a sanctum of privacy that they can hold out against the collective.’ It was the way their conversations always fell, Laura thought, into phrases that seemed complicated, but in fact had always revealed themselves up to now to be straightforward in their certainties. Now nothing was certain, nothing was straightforward.

‘But what is Pollitt’s line on all this?’ Florence asked. Laura remembered the pamphlet, Will It Be War?, with its grand rhetorical certainties, and one of the men beside her nodded, saying how well the pamphlet had been selling, how it cut through all the other nonsense.

‘Comrade Pollitt has apologised,’ Bill said, and put his hands down on the table in front of him, on either side of his pint of beer. ‘He’s confessed that he played into the hands of the class enemy by pressing the wrong position for so long. He’s resigned as General Secretary.’ Laura took another sip of her drink. Drops slopped onto her blue wool skirt. ‘Comrade Dutt has started on a replacement pamphlet. We’ll be getting it out as soon as possible. Explaining the need for the change of line. We cannot support an imperialist war. The International has made that quite clear. The directives arrived last week. We have been too slow at getting this out in public.’

Laura had been led here, to this London pub, by the light that Florence had shown her on the ocean crossing, when she had become convinced that a better world was possible. She was not giving up yet. But she felt suspended, unsure about what was happening now. This pact between the Soviet Union and Germany made too many things dark to her; and looking around her she saw she was not alone in her confusion. The table was breaking down now into separate conversations, and Elsa’s rather hoarse voice suddenly fell into a silence as she told one man: ‘Well, that’s that. Either you accept the idea of a centralised world party, or you will find yourself in the camp of the enemy.’

The conversation that Florence had started with another man was different. They were talking about air raid precautions. It was a long-running concern in the Party, Laura knew – how the rich parts of London were well provided with shelters in basements and gardens, but in the poorer parts people were being left completely undefended, and the government was refusing to say that they would be able to use the Underground stations when the time came. Laura knew that; she had already been well briefed on that, on the fact that hundreds of poor people were going to die for every rich person. Florence was talking about the idea of direct action and how they could lead a protest to one of the big hotels where there were huge basement shelters that were apparently being fitted out comfortably for politicians and businessmen. Laura imagined such disruption in the Savoy, where she had been once for lunch for Winifred’s birthday, and felt a ripple of – was it dismay, or excitement?

Meanwhile Elsa was now talking to a man on her left about the importance of showing workers how wages and conditions were being driven down by talk of patriotism. That made sense too. The man was saying that he had just come back from a tour of the Midlands where the factory workers had been up in arms about attempts to make them work longer hours for the ‘war effort’ rather than for extra money. ‘You can’t eat rhetoric,’ he said.

There was nothing strange about any of these conversations. They were the conversations the comrades always had. But who would have thought that the massive disruption of the change of line would be so quickly laid aside? Laura felt too confused to join in the discussions and got up to go, and Elsa said something that Laura did not quite hear, about how Laura always had somewhere she had to be. To Laura’s surprise, Florence got up too and walked with Laura to the entrance of the pub.

They stood there for a second, and then Florence asked her if she was all right going back in the blackout. Laura thought it an odd thing to say, since the moon was large in the sky. But Florence left the pub with her anyway, and walked alongside her back to the station. They were rarely alone, and some of the magic, for Laura, had gone out of those snatched moments when they were together like this. She had spent too long, she thought, waiting for Florence’s sudden warmth to return, for her to look at Laura again, intently, energetically, as she had done on the ship.

But to her surprise it was Florence who seemed to want her company tonight, and she asked Laura if she wanted to go to the café near the station before she went home. They sat for a long while over their hot chocolate, and it seemed to Laura that they talked about everything except what had been said at the meeting. They talked about Laura’s new job, and about Florence’s desire to find a new job; they talked about when America might join the war and whether they should go down to Richmond on Sunday for a special fundraiser. If they were avoiding something, they did so with such energy that there were no spaces in their conversation, and it seemed that they were reaching for an intimacy which they had lost. At one point Laura even asked Florence about Elsa, and got her to talk about why it was that she was so in thrall to the older woman.

‘It’s always men who want to teach you,’ Florence said. ‘I don’t want to be always taught by men. It’s good when a girl feels she can speak too – not that the men in the Party like her speaking …’

Yes, Laura thought, she could see why Florence wanted to see her own potential strength reflected in that figure. She remembered the first time she had seen Elsa, carrying a banner at the march, and she had to admit that there had been power in that image. She couldn’t tell Florence how much she disliked Elsa, of course, so instead she said in a rather pathetic way that she didn’t think 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.