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 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