‘We’re out of sugar,’ Florence called to Elsa.
‘Open the condensed milk instead,’ she heard Elsa order her from the bedroom, ‘and help me up, for goodness’ sake.’
4
‘I get the feeling your boyfriend is not treating you well,’ Winifred said to Laura the next day as the two girls walked up to Highgate High Street to do some errands. ‘And I must say – my last dinner with Colin was dull as ditchwater. The wages of sin are boredom, don’t you think?’
‘Well,’ said Laura, ‘it’s true – it’s not …’ But she tailed off.
What could she say? After the last meeting with Florence, she had gone once or twice to other gatherings of the Party in King’s Cross or Holborn. They had been full of speeches that constantly returned to abstraction, that never delved into the experiences that had brought her and, she assumed, others into the room. Even when she had sat with the other comrades over tea in the basement office, the conversations had been so far from the exquisite insights of Florence’s discussions on the Normandie that she had almost cried with frustration. Instead, they had been mainly about procedure, with a great deal of discussion about who was on the right lines, and who was being bourgeois or deviationist or showing ‘Trotskyist tendencies’ in their approach. In all of this Laura sat in unbroken silence, and Florence herself said little, while Elsa was almost the only woman who raised her voice at all.
And the more she saw of Elsa, the less Laura could warm to her. There was the obvious scorn she showed towards those who did not come up to scratch, her grey serge dresses that smelled of sweat, the glasses she kept twitching up her nose. Laura knew she was wrong to judge Elsa in what Florence would tell her was a petty, individualist way, but she could not help herself, as she sat watching Elsa, and watched Florence watching Elsa, and saw Florence take on – without, Laura thought, knowing that she was doing so – some of the little mannerisms and turns of phrase that characterised Elsa’s speech.
‘Don’t worry – you can keep him secret if you like.’ Winifred broke in on her long silence.
Laura realised she had to say something, given how generous Winifred was being in helping her to meet her imaginary boyfriend, and so she began to tell a story in which the boyfriend took on the face and opinions of Joe Segal. At one point she mentioned something that he had said about communism, and Winifred laughed and told her she had been having a similar conversation with a friend of hers the other day.
‘Cissie – can you believe, not a political bone in her body, really – had picked up some of that stuff. I told her to leave it well alone. Communism – can you imagine a more humourless, miserable way to live? I don’t just mean no shopping. But the point is, some people really are special, that’s the truth, and those are the ones who need to run the show. I don’t know why it is that so many people at the moment seem to think it’s the answer to bring everyone down to the lowest level.’
Laura was about to jump in, about to tell Winifred that communists didn’t think that nobody was special, but luckily she caught herself in time. The last thing she wanted was for Winifred to start arguing with her about communism even before she had it straight in her own head, and when she was feeling so … what was she feeling? Just then they came to the bookshop where Winifred was to find a particular novel for Aunt Dee, and Laura was able to go to the back of the shop where the poetry was kept, and under the pretence of browsing she went on with her train of thought.
Why was it that she had kept Florence and Elsa and the Party secret from Winifred all this time? Deep down, she realised this could not go on. Sometimes everything came straight. The pamphlet that Florence had lent her recently had laid things out for her in a beautiful order, showing that one did not have to accept the corruption and dishonesty and the stifling soullessness of the world as it was. While she was reading, she had said to herself, I’ll join the Party properly, and tell Winifred, and move out and throw in my lot with Elsa and Florence. That’s what I’ll do. But once she had put the pamphlet away and gone out of her bedroom, she could not even form the words in her head that she would say to Winifred. The great impetus left her whenever she thought about living in the way that Florence and Elsa lived, rushing from tedious meeting to meeting, and returning to that cheerless apartment in the evenings. Just then, Winifred called to her and she put the book that she was pretending to look at back on the shelf.
After leaving the bookshop they walked up to the top of the hill where there was a dressmaker above a flower shop. Winifred bought most of her clothes ready-made, but wanted a dress altered for a dinner party that she was going to that weekend. They stood in the dusty light of the dressmaker’s room while Miss Spark pinned up the hem of the dress.
‘And I think I want these ruffled sleeves taken off,’ Winifred said. ‘What do you think, Laura? I could have it sleeveless.’
Laura had hardly been looking, but then she suddenly saw Winifred turning to view herself in the mirror, her neck rising out of the stiff green silk like a straight narcissus breaking out of its leaves. Miss Spark was trying to convince her to put some trimming in place of the sleeves, taking out a length of white net that she thought would be right, and some small white silk roses, but Winifred looked at them and discarded them, turning around again in front of the mirror, lifting her arms. No, not a flower, Laura thought. A bird.
‘I’m sorry you can’t come to the dinner,’ Winifred said as they walked down the stairs back to the street. ‘Giles was reluctant enough to take me – not that he’s taking me, of course, his friend Alistair is. One of the Initiates.’
Laura looked rather than asked the question, and Winifred explained how Giles and his very best friends had belonged to a society at university called the Initiates. ‘All they mean, I think, is that they are initiated into adoration of one another; it’s not that they are all that special, or all that gorgeous, or that successful, but you know what men are like – they need these secret societies, these movements and cliques, to feel comfortable. Wouldn’t life be nicer if people didn’t need all of that? Clubs.’ Winifred’s voice dropped into scorn on her last word.
Just at that moment the two girls had entered the park between the high street and Aunt Dee’s house, and Laura stopped in surprise. On the way up, a morning fog had covered it, but now the air had cleared. For the first time she saw London revealed as a place of potential beauty, in this park full of its layers and layers of different greens, both deep and transparent, opening onto that now almost familiar view of a secretive city down below. She said how lovely it was, and Winifred casually agreed. As they walked on, Laura kept looking out at the city, its promise of energy, its distant song of movement, and she wished that she were able to go into it that afternoon rather than do what they were expected to do – go home and be idle in the over-upholstered living room, reading and playing cards. She knew that Florence and Elsa were preparing for a big concert for aid for Spain, and she longed to be with them. Even if in practice the preparation only meant the repetitive business of stuffing envelopes and typing out address labels, still it might hold purpose within it, and on this day full of the brimming hope of spring she longed for a sense of purpose.
As soon as they got into the house, Laura realised she was not the only one who was feeling out of step with the Highgate house. Winifred had seemed good-humoured while they were walking outside, but when her mother told her she had got her the wrong novel she slammed it down on the table and insisted that this had been the title they had discussed. Although Laura had seen Winifred irritated before, this was the first time that her voice had crackled into real anger. Perhaps, Laura thought as Winifred ran upstairs to her room, shouting about her mother’s unreasonableness, the decorum of the household had been partly a response to her presence, as if everyone had been determined to put on a good show