A Quiet Life

‘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 fact she was talking to a complete stranger, when Edward took her by surprise by leaning over again. ‘Dance?’ he said. There were only a few couples on the floor, and it seemed strange of him to ask her, at odds with what she had seen of his character so far. When they started dancing, she was not prepared for the physical resonance of his touch, which left her unable to speak and even took away, briefly, any real awareness of the room around her.

Eventually he broke their silence. ‘Things have changed so much since the spring,’ he said.

She did not pause before replying. ‘Everything seemed much clearer then.’

That was all she said, but the words seemed to satisfy him. They went on dancing for a while in silence, and then Laura began to find the silence was making her self-conscious; she should speak again. She made some vague enquiry about his work, and he gave her to understand there was not much he could say about it. Unlike Alistair, he had no easy conversation to offer her, and they soon fell back into silence. But when he dropped her hand at the end of the dance she felt it like a loss.

She felt Sybil’s glance at her as they sat down, and without thinking she put her hand up to her hair, feeling how it had begun to frizz out of its careful wave in the damp atmosphere of the club. Sybil looked as impressive as she’d remembered her, her pale hair standing back from that aquiline face. Her dress was not fashionable, was not something that Laura would ever have picked out in a shop, but its silvery jacquard pattern and high neck gave her an almost queenly look. As Edward sat down, Sybil claimed him as her own, asking him for a cigarette, but Winifred was bolder.

‘Do give us a dance, Edward. Alistair says he hurt his foot last week tumbling down some steps in the blackout, though I’m sure it was drink rather than darkness that was his undoing, but anyway now he can’t stumble round the dance floor …’

Edward was all graciousness, and Cissie was deep in conversation now with Alistair about a mutual acquaintance of theirs who was in the same regiment as Quentin. Yet Laura felt unexpectedly loosed and confident, sprung into the dark air after dancing with Edward, and she turned to Sybil without thinking and asked her – it was the dullest opening in the world – if she had always lived in London.

She was surprised by how enthusiastically Sybil responded. She spoke of the park near to her house, and how her earliest memories included being taken there by her nanny, about how she always used to be sad when summer came and they moved to their house in the country, and how wonderfully lucky she had been that getting married had only meant moving around the corner from her childhood home. ‘To think it could all be wiped out,’ she said as her hand grasped her drink automatically and raised it to her lips.

As Sybil gulped her martini, Laura realised that she was living in a state of horror at the thought of aerial warfare and the possible destruction of a city that she clearly loved as much as anyone ever loved a place. Laura had never loved anywhere she had lived. Perhaps she had internalised her parents’ own dissatisfaction with Stairbridge, the small town where she had grown up; at any rate, whenever she remembered it, a sense of looming claustrophobia attached to its tidy grey streets. And she had not fallen for London and its grim pride in its own ugliness. But it did not matter that she could not empathise with Sybil; something in her made her determined to seem sympathetic, and she went on asking Sybil about her childhood, murmuring appreciation at everything she said. ‘Lots of people are moving out of London for the duration of the war,’ she said, ‘but you haven’t—’

‘I couldn’t,’ Sybil said, ‘but I have sent some of our things to the country. It’s very hard, though, to live without them, you know. There’s a painting of Mummy by de László, Daddy gave it to me when she died, and I must say I want to cry whenever I see the gap on the wall.’

Laura felt the vibration of Sybil’s sorrow and also her expectation – the expectation of the extremely privileged – that her sorrow could be paraded in public without mockery. But Laura did what was expected of her, telling Sybil how sensitive she was and how awful it must be for her to live without her lovely things. Laura had had a glimpse of the things that evening at the party, after all, and while at the time they had seemed no more meaningful than objects in a museum, the paintings and mirrors and carpets and tables in those rooms, now she realised what gorgeous evidence they must have been of Sybil’s taste and wealth and family, and how hard it would be, if you were given that evidence every day, suddenly to lose it.

‘You do understand,’ said Sybil surprisingly, looking at Laura. Laura, who only understood that suddenly there was a vibrating chord of sympathy between them that she did not want to lose, nodded, and went on asking Sybil about her house.

When Edward and Winifred returned to the table, the conversation became general. They were talking about rationing for a while, and how grim life would be if it were imposed. Winifred, who was working for the Ministry of Food, had another view, the view that Laura had heard many times from Florence and Elsa, that rationing would be helpful for the working classes. ‘You cannot imagine how poor their diet is,’ she said incongruously in this room dedicated to hedonism. Unsurprisingly Alistair teased her immediately, asking her about the gospel of porridge, but Laura rather admired her courage for talking so inappropriately.

‘You live in Highgate, don’t you?’ Edward’s comment seemed not to follow anything, as he looked at Winifred and Laura. ‘It’s awfully far out – how do you manage in the blackout?’ Winifred explained that they were now all living in Cissie’s flat, although her mother had made them promise that they would move back if the aerial raids began. And they would go back for Christmas.

Christmas … was the year already so far advanced? The last letters that Laura had had from her mother had insisted that she must come home before Christmas, and now it was almost upon them.

‘And will Giles be back in Highgate then too?’ Edward asked.

‘It’s been so long! Quentin and Giles – how our circle is depleted,’ Alistair said with a little moan. There had been another man in their circle when she had first met them, Laura remembered, an untidy, rude man who had not even spoken to her. But nobody seemed to be missing him as Winifred said that yes, she thought Giles would be back for Christmas.

‘But you’ll be at Sutton with us, won’t you?’ Sybil asked Edward.

‘You all spend Christmas together?’ Laura asked Sybil, trading on the intimacy that had sprung up between them when they had been talking about London, and she was not disappointed. Sybil turned to her and explained a new facet of these relationships, one which reoriented the people around her. Sybil’s husband Toby was Edward’s brother. And so every Christmas they went to Toby and Edward’s childhood home in the country.

Toby … Laura had no sense of who he was; she had not remembered any man at Sybil’s side at the party. ‘He’ll be here later,’ Sybil said, ‘or he said he would be. They are sitting late at the House, and this place isn’t really his cup of tea. Too rackety.’

As if to underline her point, a woman in a rather bedraggled boa had just joined the small band and was singing in a voice that seemed flat on the high notes and sharp on the low ones. But under the music Laura was content to sit in silence, drinking the glass of champagne that was now in front of her, recognising that these people were no longer complete strangers to her.

Later in the evening Toby did arrive, and Laura looked at him, trying to pinpoint the similarity to Edward. Although he was fair, it was a sandy, freckly fairness, and rather than Edward’s stillness there was something fidgety about him – he was constantly turning from one person to another, patting his face or straightening his tie, moving his glass or his napkin. But the group felt a little more balanced after he arrived, since he was happy enough to dance once or twice with Cissie and to bring Alistair new gossip from Parliament to refresh the conversation. It was late into the night when Sybil asked the waiter if taxis could be found. They were a long time coming, so all of them, except Edward, squashed into one – he would walk, he said, he liked walking in the blackout. The darkness was shockingly deep on that moonless night and he was quickly swallowed up into it.