A Quiet Life - Natasha Walter

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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

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