The following Saturday, the day that Winifred was going to the big dinner party, Laura came down to breakfast to find the atmosphere between mother and daughter had curdled completely. ‘I can’t believe that you’d try to stop me again …’ Winifred was saying.
‘It isn’t me, dear; it’s the way that the world is. Laura, we should really talk about this too … Polly’s last letter was definitely concerned, and I think she’s right, that we should think about booking you a passage back quite soon. There’s no hope of visiting the Continent while things are as they are, and I really think that—’
‘Just because we can’t go to France in the summer doesn’t mean that I have to give up my place at university.’
‘Do you mean you’d like me to go back?’ Laura was, to her surprise, horrified at the thought. Suddenly she realised how she had got used to the pleasures of this life – on the one hand, the comfortable round of shopping and gossip, social engagements and visits, in which the expectations on her were easy and undemanding; and on the other hand, all the time there was the possibility of her next meeting with Florence, the sporadic crossings into a world where the future was being made and her growing familiarity with their discussions of the new world to come. But her horror was silent, confined inside her head, while Winifred was openly furious, the words tumbling out of her.
‘I know, you say it’s the war coming, and before it was because of your chest pains, but don’t you see, Mother, it can’t always be about other things – it has to be about me too. I can’t stop living, I can’t just sit here my whole life because you sat at home all of yours …’
Laura stood at the table, unable to sit down, riveted by Winifred’s sudden honesty. How brave she seemed, in her green jersey, her hair pinned into curls in readiness for the evening’s party, arguing with her mother while coffee cooled in their cups. Laura was not surprised, however, when Dee said nothing at all in response. It was as though Winifred had not spoken, as she turned to Laura and asked if she would like a boiled egg with her toast. Even when Winifred stood up and, throwing down her napkin, stamped out of the room, Dee simply folded her lips together and told Laura she was probably over-excited about the evening. To her shame, Laura colluded in pretending that Winifred did not know what she was saying. She sat down and ate her breakfast, and listened to Aunt Dee talking about whether the gardener had been right to plant the lilies right up against the house like that – how would they get enough sunshine? Aunt Dee wondered.
After breakfast Laura went to find Winifred, who was sitting in the garden in the thin sunshine, pretending to read a book. She listened to Winifred’s complaints about her mother for a long while, and then reminded her that Dee had said it was time for Laura to go back. ‘I don’t want to,’ Laura said. ‘I really don’t want to.’
She wanted Winifred to say, I don’t want you to go either, but Winifred looked puzzled.
‘Don’t you? Is it about this man?’
‘I don’t know.’ Laura wished she could tell Winifred about Florence and all she meant to her, but she still held back. It would seem ridiculous now to confess that she had not been meeting some dashing man from the boat, and also she was afraid that Winifred would find Florence and Elsa and their politics absurd and would never understand the importance of what Florence had offered her. ‘Do you think I should go back?’
‘God knows. Mother thinks – like your mother I suppose – that it’s going to be 1914 and worse. Father was almost an old man, so he didn’t have to go, but the men they had danced with … I don’t have to explain, I’m sure you’ve heard enough stories from Aunt Polly.’
Laura could not tell her that her mother had never mentioned the war.
‘No wonder they married where they could – sorry, I’m sure your father is … it’s just Mother is such a snob, she thinks your mother only fell in with him because there wasn’t anyone left in England.’ Winifred turned to Laura, but she was unsmiling. ‘And this time – you know what they’re saying. Aerial bombs, all of that – but what are we supposed to do? We can’t stop the world.’
Just then Mrs Venn came into the garden, saying Giles was on the telephone for Winifred. ‘God, if he’s cancelling this evening, I tell you …’ and she stalked off.
But he was telephoning to ask if Laura could come with Winifred. Apparently the girlfriend of one of his friends was unwell, and so there was a gap for another woman at the dinner, and at the dance afterwards as well. Winifred accepted without even consulting her, and immediately she came off the telephone she called to Laura to come upstairs and look over what she would wear.
‘I suppose it is a bit of a winter dress, but it’s the right one,’ Winifred said eventually, after Laura had put on each of her two evening dresses and she had vetoed the grey one. ‘You don’t want to look like Jane Eyre,’ she said, and although Laura wasn’t sure of the reference, she could see that the dress she had thought of as silvery and subtle was in fact drab and drained her face of colour. Nobody could say that the red velvet dress was dull. Laura had bought it in Boston and had never worn it, but had been aware of it hanging up in the closet here in London, a brilliant rebuke to the dullness of most of her days. She wasn’t sure that she wanted to wear it. Looking at herself in the mirror, she could only see the dress, not herself, but Winifred was so certain that she gave it to Mrs Venn to be pressed.
After lunch Aunt Dee suggested that the girls should rest in their rooms before the evening’s outing. Winifred scorned the idea, and stayed reading in the living room, but Laura was thankful to be able to go upstairs. Lying on the big, high bed, she started re-reading old letters from her mother and Ellen. ‘I think you should book a passage for April,’ her mother had written. And now April was here. Laura laid the letters aside and wondered whether she was foolish to want to stay in London. It was true that nobody could ignore the sandbags on the streets and the trenches dug into the parks, not to mention the constant talk about what aerial warfare would be like and the Armageddon that would ensue. But despite the fatalistic talk, despite the physical reality of the city’s preparations, there was nothing concrete for Laura in the thought of war.
She looked into a drawer of the little desk where she had put the most recent pamphlet she had borrowed from Florence, Will It Be War?, which she had already started, but not finished. Its grand rhetoric, ‘Never, never will we bow the knee to fascism’, seemed too distant from her. Again she cast her mind back to the boat, and the moment when Florence painted for her a picture of what family and work might be like without false authority. That made sense to her; she felt it again, a taste of freedom, a world made in line with human desire. But the story of how they were all to fight as never before seemed dark to her, a summoning of something too large for her to comprehend. She found herself muttering some phrases from the pamphlet under her breath, as if she would commit them to memory to hold her to the right path.
Just then the handle of her door turned and Winifred came in, but to Laura’s relief she did not seem to notice her confusion as she shoved the pamphlet under her pillow. She had just come to suggest that Laura might want to start getting ready for the evening and that the bathroom was free. Shortly afterwards, lying in the warm water and looking down at her body, her skin greenish in the water that was reflecting the tiles around the bath, Laura felt a huge reluctance weighing her down. The little she had heard about Giles’s friends had not endeared her to the idea of meeting them.
Back in her room, she realised that the cherry-red velvet of the dress smelt of mothballs, as everything in this house did after a while. But it slithered with a cool touch over her breasts and legs as she pulled it on and zipped it tightly up the side. Lipsticking her mouth, looking for her pearl earrings, she was seeing herself only bit by bit in the mirror. Her lips – was the colour even? Her waist – did her garter belt show through the velvet? Her hair – should she push it behind her ears or fluff the curls forwards? But then, just as she was about to leave the room, she turned and saw her full reflection, as she had seen Winifred suddenly