He wondered whether it was that he looked a wreck or whether it was just that Laura knew him so well. It occurred to him that he would not mind Laura’s knowing about his bondage of fear. It was odd that where he had shrunk from exhibiting his weakness to Tommy he should not care that Laura might learn about it. It should have been the other way about.
‘I have put you in the other bedroom this time,’ she said preceding him up the stairs, ‘because the west one has been done up and it still stinks a bit.’
She was in truth putting on weight a little, he noticed; but her ankles were as good as ever. And then, with that native detachment that never quite deserted him, he realised that his lack of any desire to conceal from Laura his childish fits of panic was proof that no small remote part of him was still in love with her. The need of the male to look well in the eyes of the beloved one was no part of his relation with Laura.
‘People always say about east bedrooms that they get the morning sun,’ she said, standing in the middle of the east bedroom and looking at it as if she had never seen it before. ‘As if it were a recommendation. I think myself it’s much nicer to be able to look out on a sunny landscape. Which you can’t do with the sun in your eyes.’ She stuck her thumbs in her waistband and eased the belt that was growing too tight. ‘But the west room will be habitable in a day or two, so you can change over then if you want to. How is my dear Sergeant Williams?’
‘Pink and clean.’
He had an instant picture of Williams, sitting solid and shy at the tea-table in the lounge of the Westmorland. He had been on his way out after a session with the manager and had come across Laura and Grant having tea, and had been persuaded to join them. He had made a great success with Laura.
‘You know, whenever this country is in one of its periodic messes, I think of Sergeant Williams and am quite sure on the instant that everything is going to be all right.’
‘I suppose I don’t reassure you at all,’ Grant said, busy unstrapping luggage.
‘Not noticeably. Not that way, anyway. You’d only be a comfort if everything wasn’t going to be all right.’ With which cryptic statement she left him. ‘Don’t come down until you want to. Don’t come down at all, if it comes to that. Just ring when you waken.’
Her footsteps went away down the passage, and the silence flooded in behind her.