‘That was your friend, Edward,’ she said.
‘Last?’
‘He wondered if we could all meet for lunch next Wednesday.’
‘Lunch? Did he really? Odd of the old chap. I’ll be back in Scotland. Got to get back to these tests, the pressure is on.’
‘I’ll just go with Winifred then – or I’ll call him back and cancel.’
‘Funny,’ said Giles, looking down at her. ‘I could have sworn it was Winifred on the telephone as I came down – you sounded so English.’
‘Did I?’
‘Yes. You don’t usually.’
That made Laura self-conscious, so she went back into the living room where she had left Winifred playing Patience. Yet she did not mention the telephone call to her, nor did she ask Giles if he had Edward’s number so that she could telephone to cancel.
The next Wednesday she was at work in the bookshop. Her supervisor was a middle-aged man who seemed to find her an irritant rather than a help when it came to most tasks. When she had asked if her colleague Ann could cover a long lunch break for her as she had to visit the dentist, he had agreed as if her absence would hardly be a loss to him. All morning she acted as if her mouth was bothering her, and at half past twelve she told Ann she was off. She went to the lavatory at the back of the shop and peered into the small mirror. Her pores seemed enlarged, her skin oily, and she took out her powder compact. Just then there was a knock on the door. ‘Hold on,’ she called. She still needed to urinate, and found when she pulled down her underwear that she had started to menstruate, earlier than expected. It was all right, she had only just begun, and she had a pad in her bag, but in her haste she pinned it crookedly, and all the way walking up Piccadilly in the freezing wind she felt aware of her stained underwear and the pad rubbing against the top of her thigh.
She was just on time at Manzi’s, but they showed her to an empty table. As the minutes passed, she began to worry that he was not coming. Should she go without eating, without paying? How gauche would that be? She shook her head at the waiter who came to find out what she wanted to drink, and then to her relief there he was, taller than she remembered, walking through the crowded room.
‘Giles is back in Scotland, Winifred is working – it’s only me …’ She tried to sound casually amused, so that he wouldn’t be able to laugh at her or be disappointed, but she wasn’t sure she had succeeded. She was shaken by the effect of his physical presence and the blatant statement she had made by coming alone to lunch with him. She kept her gaze averted from his as she looked at the menu. ‘I didn’t have your number, you see, to cancel, so I …’ Of course he would be too polite to make her feel uncomfortable deliberately. But as he said that he was glad to see her anyway, he seemed nonplussed, or was that just his usual uncommunicative manner? She could not read him, and she was suddenly sure she had done the wrong thing.
She did not like drinking in the middle of the day, and she knew it would make the afternoon at the bookstore harder than ever, but he had ordered a bottle of hock before she had time to say so, and recommended the sardines and the Dover sole to her. ‘Yes, of course – that would be lovely,’ she said, closing the menu and letting him order. That was the way they did it in London, she already knew; the men always recommended, always ordered, always decided everything.
When two people are very bad at small talk, Laura realised, and they have nothing in common, lunch together is not easy. A silence fell almost immediately. Simply trying to fill it, she asked about his work, and he answered politely. She asked after Sybil and Toby, and as he handled and dropped her questions, she felt more and more nervous. He was less luminous here in the restaurant than he had been at night, his blond apartness less obvious. He was a civil servant in a formal suit who was friends with her cousin; his world was dark to her. Their food came, and provided some distraction. The sardines were good; now she was living with Cissie she seemed to exist on boiled eggs and toast, so the strong, salty, oily flavour burst into her mouth. But they could not go on eating forever in silence. She asked about his Christmas, and he replied politely and asked how hers had been.
‘It was my first Christmas away from home.’
‘Did you miss it?’
She did not miss her family, but there was a physical memory nagging at her all the time that had become stronger over Christmas. She would not want to be back there, in the sadness and anger of home, but you cannot deny that the place you come from leaves a bodily imprint on you. She was becoming tired of London, she thought, its growing fear and darkness. Sometimes the brightness of the Christmas lights on Main Street recurred to her, or how the snow-covered hills west of Stairbridge reflected the winter sun. You never got that clarity of light and height of sky in London. She had fallen silent, she realised, and she had to say something. ‘I miss the place a bit,’ she said. ‘It was pretty in winter. London is—’
‘I know.’
‘I mean, I don’t miss the town much. But there were hills not far away; we used to go out there at the weekends sometimes when I was a child.’ In fact, if she was honest with herself, there had only been a couple of brief vacations and they had been ruined by her parents’ fighting. She was not sure why they had occurred to her now.
To her surprise, Edward responded, telling her about his childhood home, which apparently was somewhere in the hills in the west of England. Sutton Court. She remembered Sybil talking about it. Edward was saying that it was the most beautiful place in the world, and then quickly retracting, saying that it was just hills and trees, and pouring himself more wine.
‘You should come out to Sutton one Friday. I know nobody is meant to be travelling about these days, but we get there when we can.’ She felt that he had just said that to have something to say and she did not respond.
‘Do you hear much from Quentin?’ she asked.
‘Yes. He’s still in some godforsaken training camp on the coast. He’s the only one of us doing the expected thing so far. Remind me, what are you doing? I know Sybil said you had a job.’
Laura grimaced, and explained her job in the bookstore, and how tedious it was. ‘But it does sound self-indulgent to complain about being dull when we don’t know what’s going to happen next.’
Then Edward said something about how things that seem dull at the time are not always what seem dull later, when you look back, and Laura considered this idea. ‘I suppose you never know what you are going to remember.’
‘If you look back at your childhood, some things stand out, don’t they, and you might wonder – why that, why that meal, or that teddy bear, or that moment of running through the wheat field? It’s not always the moments of great happiness or great misery, is it?’
Laura thought again and agreed with him. ‘But I don’t have very clear memories of a lot of my childhood …’
‘Neither do I.’ There was a willed briskness to Edward’s voice and Laura felt she knew that briskness, because it was something that crept into her own voice when she mentioned her home or her childhood. She would have liked to stop speaking and let herself wonder about it, but she knew that she had to go on talking.
‘But I do feel that I will remember all of this,’ she said. She meant this city, this year of her life that had been all change and newness – but the way it came out the words sounded ambiguous, as if she meant that she would remember him and the lunch, and again she found herself averting her gaze, afraid that she had gone further than she intended.
He took up the conversation again, returning to how the war would be remembered. ‘I’m sure one day some crass narrative will take over about the war, and we’ll forget the way it really felt. There will be some story that everyone will tell about the way it was.’
Laura agreed with him without really thinking about it. ‘Even though at the moment everyone experiences it quite differently,’ she said.
‘Exactly. Some people see it as a moral crusade …’
‘And some as a tragic waste.’
‘And some as a time to grin and bear it …’
‘And some as an imperialist escapade.’ It was Florence and Elsa she was thinking about, of course.
‘You know people like that? Who see it that way?’ His tone had crossed into more urgency than she had heard before. He was interested again in her, but she was silent. ‘Do you?’ he asked. A memory opened in her mind, like a frame from a film. It was Florence stirring her cocoa in a café, her brown eyes wide and her voice high as she told Laura that she should never forget that the Party was under surveillance, that they could all be being watched, at any time.
Immediately the memory nudged at her, she dismissed it. How ridiculous of her to imagine that Edward would be a government informer. But something had tripped in her mind at the thought that she should be careful about what she said, and she was self-conscious again as she nodded and then tried to turn the conversation with another query about his brother.
Edward looked at his watch and told her that he was sorry but he had to get back to the office for a meeting with some of the French chaps. Laura was smiling and nodding, reaching for her purse and standing up once he had paid the bill, and trying not to think about the fact that it had been a short lunch. No doubt he was very busy. She had to reconcile herself to the fact that the lunch had meant nothing much. She was pulling on her coat, taking her hat from the waiter’s outstretched hand, when he surprised her just before turning to the door. ‘I’ll ask Sybil, shall I, to talk to you about coming up to Sutton one Saturday?’
8
Spring had begun to touch the trees in the London streets with a tentative green as Laura walked up to Paddington station. At first there was the urgency about buying a ticket, finding the train, getting a seat, but then the journey slowed. The train came to a stop between stations and she gave up any hope of getting to the destination at the time she had been asked to arrive.
She had to change at a station where the spring wind blew cold down the platform, and the next train she stepped onto was packed with soldiers. She found a compartment of civilians, where a woman generously pulled her small boy onto her lap so that Laura could sit down. Then her knees were in reach of the boy’s feet; he kept kicking her, but Laura felt it would be rude to complain. She tried to read her book, but it was a volume of essays that Florence had lent to her months before, and its abstract discussions of working-class history could not hold her attention. All of a sudden, turning her gaze to the window, she saw the landscape open up in a way she had never seen in England before. Here, on the western side of the land, she saw the earth lift, pulling away from the flat dull plains and low bulges that she had seen as England’s inescapable physical aspect, pulling up into real hills with strong curved lines and tumbling back into valleys.
When Laura got out of the train her legs felt heavy from sitting so long. There was no one there to meet her, but she was not surprised; she was hours late, and she asked the station master if she could use the telephone to ring the number that Sybil had given her. It was a servant who answered and asked her to wait at the front of the station. Eventually, an old-fashioned Daimler pulled up and the very elderly driver came out to pick up her case.
Laura thanked him in a bright voice, but he said nothing and remained in total silence throughout the drive. Although she never usually smoked alone, Laura fumbled in her purse for an old pack of cigarettes and lit one. The lane they were driving along wound between high hedgerows, so that one couldn’t see much from side to side, and curved sharply over and over again, so that one couldn’t see far forwards. As they drove, a burst of rain came pattering on the hedgerows. But as she stepped out of the car on to the drive, light broke through the clouds and lit the raindrops to sparkles on the gravel and on the camellias that were blooming in sombre white and crimson by the russet walls of the house.
The elderly driver opened the car door and took Laura’s case, and she followed him up to the house. She was cold and stiff after the long journey, as well as thirsty and desperate for a lavatory. But as the door opened and she was ushered on through an oak-panelled hall whose ceiling was two or three storeys high, she realised that she would be immediately on show. From the hall she was led into a huge drawing room, with six large French windows that looked out onto a formal garden and the hills beyond. It was the view that dominated the room; your gaze was pulled on and on to the gauzy verdancy of the garden and the shadowy green heights beyond. It was like a dream or idea of a view. But there was no time to contemplate it, as there was Sybil on the sofa in the room and beside her was Mrs Last, Edward’s mother.
As Laura took them in, she noticed immediately, crowding out all other impressions, that the clothes she had thought would be just right for this weekend with Sybil were quite wrong. She had remembered Sybil’s queenly look, and so that morning Laura had chosen a rather formal cobalt blue skirt and silk blouse, with patent black shoes. In her mirror in the bedroom the outfit had said confidence, but now she realised she looked like a shop girl next to Edward’s sister-in-law and mother. Both Sybil and Mrs Last were wearing tweed skirts and jerseys in muted, heathery colours, and polished brogues. Around Sybil’s throat was a necklace of large cabochon amethysts, which meant that she still had that regal look, while Mrs Last wore a double row of perfectly matched pearls. In contrast, Laura felt that she looked both overdone and underdone; there was nothing of value in what she wore, and yet she had obviously tried too hard. Miserably, she sat down when asked, and told Mrs Last what a beautiful house it was and thanked her and Sybil for inviting her.
‘You can’t see the house the way it was, I’m afraid,’ Mrs Last said. ‘It’s looking so ragged now we don’t have the staff any more. And we are just using one wing – I’m afraid you’ll be in a tiny room tonight.’
Laura, still unused to the English way of constant apology, muttered something about how she was sure that it was fine. Mrs Last immediately passed her another conversational ball, asking her whether she had seen much of England, and Laura tried to respond with some sprightliness, telling her how fine the hills had looked from the train, but she was afraid that she came over as naïve, and American in the worst sense. They went on talking in this way, but there was a brittleness to their conversation that made Laura feel the oxygen was being sucked out of the air, and Sybil hardly spoke at all. That chord of sympathy she had felt with her in the London club had gone, and she felt that Sybil was already regretting having asked her down for the weekend.
All in all, she was relieved when Mrs Last said that no doubt Laura would like to go to her room. ‘We won’t dress for dinner,’ she said. ‘We haven’t, since the war started.’ It seemed a curious sacrifice to make to the patriotic cause. As they walked, Mrs Last asked Laura about her family. Laura had learned something now she had been in England for more than a year, and she gave very little away. To say her father was an architect, to say they lived in Massachusetts – this could mean so much or so little, and she knew that English people had no way of placing her. ‘Your cousin is Giles Frentham?’ Mrs Last said at last, and this placed her, she knew, and obviously not in a good way in Mrs Last’s eyes, judging by the suspicion in her voice. ‘He used to come here sometimes in the long vacation. My son is fond of him. I hear he is doing very well – in air defence, isn’t he?’
Left in the room she had been told was tiny, Laura crossed immediately to the big window under which was a deep window seat. The cushions were worn, the chintz all faded to a dim turquoise, but if you sat there you could see the view that had opened from the drawing room, miles and miles of wild slopes and open sky. Turning back to the bedroom, Laura saw there was a generosity to its structure – the high ceiling, the detailed cornices and the large white fireplace. But everything was fading, dust clinging to the little cracks in the hearth tiles and the old paintwork, even if the mahogany wardrobe was polished to a high shine.
Her nightgown was already folded on the pillow, and when she opened the wardrobe she saw the clothes she had brought
already hanging up. She regarded them now with despair. What did Mrs Last mean by saying that they would not dress for dinner? Did that mean she had to stay in her inappropriate skirt and blouse? And where was the bathroom?
She opened the door of the bedroom, and there was a young girl on the other side. ‘Sorry—’ they both said automatically. ‘Mrs Last asked me to come and help you,’ said the girl, and Laura realised that this must be the maid. She was either absurdly young or tiny for her age, so that her dress looked too big for her. She showed Laura to the bathroom and when Laura came back, there she was, standing by the fireplace, looking as lost as Laura felt.
Laura asked the girl, Edna, what she should wear that evening and together they looked at her clothes. ‘I’d wear that,’ the maid said at last, pointing at a rayon jersey dress in deep crimson. ‘Do you really think it’s all right?’ Laura asked, but Edna could not bring herself to say yes. ‘I think it’s the best one of these,’ she said. Young and untried as she was, even Edna could obviously see Laura was not really part of this milieu. Her presence made Laura feel even more ill at ease, and she was glad when the girl went away to run her a bath.
The low spirits persisted as she went back downstairs to join Sybil and Mrs Last. They had been joined by another couple, whose names Laura did not catch in her confusion. ‘The boys have just come in, they’ll be down soon,’ she heard Mrs Last say to the others, and just as she said that the door opened and Laura was caught by the gaze that she now saw when she was falling asleep at night, every night.
A Quiet Life Page 12