Over dinner Laura was separated from Edward, sitting between Toby and the other man, and the conversation of the table was dominated by local gossip. There was a great deal of discussion about what would happen to the house for the duration of the war. Apparently this was part of a conversation that had been going on for months: whether Mrs Last would have to take in evacuees, whether the house would be requisitioned for a hospital or training camp, and what effect this would have on Sutton Court itself. Laura was struck by the tone of the conversation, which disguised bitter complaint under a pretence of being game for anything. It was a tone she had already heard a great deal of in London. ‘Of course we are prepared to do anything …’ Mrs Last kept saying, ‘but it does seem a pity if …’ And everyone kept agreeing with her, telling her that it was an awful shame that Sutton might be spoilt, and how sad it was that the garden was already being ploughed up, and how the evacuees in the village didn’t appreciate anything at all that was done for them.
The dinner was served by the elderly man who had driven Laura to the house, and Edna, the very young girl who had helped her in her bedroom. Their presence threw the complaints of the diners into sharper relief, Laura thought – though she was aware that it might only be her consciousness of what Florence would say if she were there that made her think that. Laura knew about the custom of the women leaving the dining table before the men, but after dinner everyone moved back into the drawing room together, and Mrs Last clicked on the wireless, as everyone always did nowadays, evening after evening after evening.
There was little to add to the previous day’s news of the capitulation of Finland, and as the light died in the garden and the little maid drew the curtains across the French windows, the wireless was turned off. For a moment Laura saw them as a huddled, scared group, gathered on the faded sofas, intent on one another as the world collapsed outside, but then her vision cleared and she saw the youth and beauty of Sybil and Toby and Edward, the confidence of the older people and the solidity of the room’s gracious lines. The double vision that was induced by news of the war often took her like that, bringing on a transitory clouding of her mind.
‘You’ll play?’ A game had been suggested, the kind of thing that Laura was not very familiar with but had played a couple of times with Winifred and Aunt Dee. Everyone had to think of a character to be, real or fictional, and then others would ask them questions that could only be answered with yes or no. Laura was at a great disadvantage in such games, not sharing any of the literature and lore that the others took for granted. But when Alice’s cat, Peter Pan, Antigone, Demosthenes and Pitt the Younger had been unmasked, there was only Laura and Edward left in the game. ‘He’s a he, a real person, dead, foreign, not a king or queen, has written books, not a book that is in this house, books that we are unlikely to have read, books we are certain to have heard of,’ said Toby, counting off on his fingers the answers to the questions that had been asked of Edward.
‘Are you Karl Marx?’ Laura asked, surprising no one as much as herself, and Edward nodded.
‘Jolly well done, Laura,’ Toby said in a hearty voice, obviously trying to encourage her. ‘Now your turn, come on, what do we know about you? A woman, fictional, not in a book, not played by a famous movie star, never seen on stage.’
‘We give up,’ Sybil said, and Laura felt a kind of rebuke that she had not chosen something more knowable.
‘Betty Boop,’ she said, and was not surprised to see a look of bemusement cross Mrs Last’s face. After that, Mrs Last said she didn’t feel like more games and the conversation became stilted, until Sybil stood up, yawning, and said she would go to bed. She was wearing a strangely cut dress in green and yellow, with long sleeves and a wide skirt; not quite an evening dress, but nothing Laura could imagine wearing during the day either. The other couple stood up too, saying something about seeing everyone at church tomorrow, and the good nights were all general. Laura felt the cue too, and stood, but she noticed that Toby and Edward were not leaving the room. Rooted, holding their drinks, it was as though they felt called to an audience with their mother, who was still sitting on one of the sofas, her knees and ankles pressed together, one finger moving up and down her pearl necklace as she said good night to everyone.
This time Laura gained her bedroom with a sense of achievement. She had got through the evening, and there was only one day to go. There was a chill in the bedroom as the fire had been allowed to go out. Laura felt keyed up and a little drunk as she sat there with her coat on over her nightgown, filing her nails, remembering how Edward had looked when he walked into the room, reliving one moment when Toby had laughed at something she had said, replaying the evening as if she was trying to make sure she would not forget anything, when there was a tap on the door.
She opened it. For a moment Edward said nothing, and then he whispered, ‘Should I go?’ There was an uncertainty in his expression that she could never have imagined. She stood to one side, and he walked in. For a few moments the space between them was unpassable, and then it was passed. He bent his face to hers and there was elation, so great it overpowered her, the ecstasy of knowing that the physical hunger that she thought would never be assuaged was matched by his, that they fitted, that they could make everything right. She could hear half-sobs in the room, but they were rising from his throat as well as hers as they fumbled their way not onto the bed, for some reason, but onto the carpet in front of the cold fireplace. By the time they had made one another come to orgasm – not through intercourse, but sweating and pushing against one another, humping and fumbling – both their faces were wet with tears of relief. It wasn’t the graceful embrace that Laura had imagined to herself at night, but under the fumbling was a confident, certain rhythm of joy, a music that sang through the clumsy movements.
Afterwards they lay for a while without speaking, Edward’s hand moved down over her back and thighs over and over again, until Laura felt she lost the sense of where she ended and his hand began. Then they undressed fully, and got into the high, narrow bed, and lay holding one another. For a few moments Laura felt she would never sleep, all her nerves seemed so alert, her pulse fast, but then suddenly sleep overtook her, and at some point in the night he got up and left her, so that she woke alone.
As she emerged from sleep, she was aware of every inch of her body and how it was lying in the heavy bed linen. She felt the edge of the pillow pressing into her cheek. She felt the sheets, warm under her legs, and cold where she stretched out her arms. She sat up, and then got out of bed, naked, and walked over to the window. She pulled back the heavy curtain, feeling the raised pattern of the damask under her fingers. Everything she touched touched her back. She felt the smoothness of the floorboards under her bare feet. She saw the slopes of the hills to the sky, running like live things into the morning light.
After dressing she walked with confidence down the oak staircase, aware of each step with its slight depression where generations had walked up and down, aware of the way the banister had been rubbed to its high sheen by innumerable hands. Edward was not there when she entered the breakfast room. It was a dark room, hung with uncleaned oil paintings and papered in grey-toned greens, but even this seemed just right, a kind of harmonic counterpoint to the lightness of the drawing room. She drank her coffee and ate her toast and bacon, feeling rinsed and new for the world. When Edward came in, perhaps no one else would have seen anything different about his uncommunicative demeanour as he poured himself a cup of coffee and started on a plate of toast and bacon, but Laura felt the pause in his breath as he looked at her and felt his gaze rest on her.
Conversation between herself, Sybil and Toby was going on reasonably well as Edward read a newspaper, and then Mrs Last came in, telling them that everyone would be late for church if they didn’t hurry up. Laura got up with the others, but Edward remained at the table. ‘You don’t have to go, you know,’ he said to her.
His mother heard him. ‘You are such a heathen these days,’ she said
, but it seemed like something she had said before and Edward did not react. For a moment his mother stood there, as if she would like to say more, but then she went into the hall with the others.
Laura and Sybil were putting on their hats and pulling on their gloves when Edward came out of the dining room. ‘I’ll go down with you,’ he said, addressing himself to Sybil, but Laura felt he was speaking to her.
The walk was long, first along a path bordered by two straight lines of lime trees, where the light was sifted by their still-bare branches, and then down a lane to the village. It was not sunny, but there was a warmth in the misty air. Sybil and Mrs Last strode ahead together, while the boys and Laura went more slowly, and soon there was a distance between them. Laura was still in her over-sensitive mood, and the turn in the lane that revealed the spire of the little church by the green seemed to her like a revelation of a particularly English picturesque, the possibility of cliché ironed out by the poignancy of seeing such peacefulness during these days of war. ‘Come on in,’ Toby said to Edward. ‘It would mean a lot to Mother.’
‘Hollander is such a ham. How can you stand it?’
‘Would you believe it?’ Toby said to Laura. ‘He was the most devout of us when he was a boy.’
She smiled.
‘Was he? Were you?’
Edward admitted that he had been, and Toby reminisced about how he’d used to harangue the family about correct Christian values, and how he would read the Bible and even correct the vicar over Sunday lunch. ‘You discovered Jesus as some kind of socialist – Mother didn’t think it very funny. It lasted until you went to university, as I remember. Then you seemed to forget the kingdom of heaven.’
Laura felt Edward’s sudden discomfort. He reached out a hand and broke off a thin branch from a bush of white flowers next to them. ‘I’ll see you at lunch,’ he said, turning away. In the church Laura sat in rainbow lozenges of light that fell from the stained-glass window above, and all of a sudden, in the middle of a hymn, she imagined Edward as a little boy in the pew, turning his face to the windows and feeling faith rise in him.
Sunday lunch was another long, tasteless meal, this time with other neighbours to join them. Afterwards a kind of languor descended on everyone. Edward sat down at the piano and began to play something with only the slightest melody; repetitive chains of notes that rose and fell on disciplined lines, but the music seemed to irritate rather than calm the room. Sybil suggested cards and a game of bridge began. Laura, who did not play, got up and wandered around the room, looking at the photographs in tarnished silver frames that sat on the small tables. One she thought was Edward, that arctic blondness and indifferent expression, but when she lifted it up to look, she realised it was not him but a slighter man, older, without the broad shoulders and with a more delicate cast to his mouth and chin.
‘He’s terribly like Edward, isn’t he?’
It was Toby, standing near to Laura, the game of cards having finished.
‘Yes – exactly like, who is—?’
‘My father.’
‘He was a politician like you, wasn’t he?’
‘Not at all like me. He was one of the inner circle. Mother—’
And then Mrs Last spoke. ‘I don’t know why we are all stuffing in here – the sun’s shining at last. Sybil, why don’t you take our American visitor and show her the gardens?’
Sybil rose and opened the French windows, and she and Laura stepped out onto the wide terrace. It was not particularly warm, but feeling that they should go on, they walked down a path towards the pond. Soon it became too muddy. ‘The rose garden was wonderful last year,’ Sybil said, but of course they were just stumps right now, frilled with the beginnings of their new leaves. Laura could see how even this part of the garden was already ragged – the grass unkempt, the borders beginning to spurt with spring weeds – and beyond this formal part were now beds of vegetables. The two of them stood for a while by a large stone fountain, dry now and green with lichen, looking up at the hills. All this weekend Sybil had been absolutely reserved, only polite, and nothing more. Why had she invited Laura if she had not even wanted to talk to her?
‘It was sweet of you to invite me to join you this weekend,’ Laura said, hoping to break through the reserve.
‘Toby remembered how you hadn’t been out of London at all. I think the boys felt sorry for you – they believe country life lifts the spirits. These Sundays in the country …’ It did not sound as if she agreed with the boys’ opinion of a weekend at Sutton. ‘You mustn’t mind if Mrs Last isn’t very friendly. She bullied me rather, when I first visited.’
Laura was unnerved by this criticism of Edward’s mother. Was it allowed, then, to speak about how cold she was, and how her sons seemed to be unable to relax in her presence? That would go against all Laura’s instincts, which were to act as though such an uncomfortable family life was merely normal. And so she said something formal about how it must have been hard for Mrs Last since her husband died.
Sybil said nothing for a few moments. ‘Yes, it must have been hard,’ she said finally.
‘And for the boys,’ Laura said.
‘Yes, Toby took it hard. It was quite unexpected, quite recent, you know.’ She said nothing about Edward. ‘Your parents are both alive, aren’t they? They must miss you so much.’
‘I’m not really sure that they do,’ Laura said. For some reason, her words came out in a kind of imitation of Sybil’s, and the rather regal judgement that had dominated Sybil’s tone when she spoke about Mrs Last crept into Laura’s own voice. It surprised her. She had never spoken like that about her parents, however resentful she had felt about them. But she felt it was the right thing to do in that moment.
‘I know,’ Sybil agreed with her. ‘I haven’t seen my father since the war began and, frankly, I don’t think he cares.’ The two women stood there, looking up at the grandeur of the Malvern Hills, and Laura realised that her pale imitation of Sybil had brought them back into sympathy with one another.
‘But the boys love it here, don’t they?’ Laura said, wanting Sybil to go on talking about Edward.
‘They do. It’s the bond, isn’t it? Hard to break.’
Not long after, they all left, squashed into the Daimler to the station. Laura had been told by Winifred that she should tip the servants, but when it came to it she could not meet the eye of the little girl who closed her case or the old man who took it to the car, and she preferred to pretend she did not know about this convention. The train was crowded again and they could not sit together. In the end Sybil and Laura took seats in a carriage with a large family who were prepared to squash up, and Edward and Toby stood in the corridor, smoking and talking. Laura didn’t mind sitting apart from him. She felt that she was moving tentatively, but with growing confidence, through a new medium, like a child who has just learnt to swim, buoyed up by the memory of sensual pleasure.
9
It was a few days before she heard from Edward again. Should this have worried her? For a time she could not imagine worrying ever again. At night, on waking, or at odd moments stepping off a bus or wrapping a book for a customer, the wealth of pleasure she had been given suddenly recurred to her and she felt her senses sway and her stomach clench. She relived that night so often that she hardly noticed the hours and days passing. But even so it was a relief when she came back to the flat one evening and saw that Cissie had written Edward’s name and a telephone number on the pad that they used for messages. When she rang him they arranged to meet that Sunday, at a public house he knew. She knew it too, as it happened to be in Highgate, near to her aunt’s house; she had seen it once on a walk with Winifred.
That it was another fine spring day was an unnecessary boon. The pub was dark, and they sat in an alcove, eating something that Laura hardly noticed. Edward drank beer, and then brandy, and this time Laura enjoyed the feeling of drinking at lunchtime, the shuddery warmth engendered by the glasses of wine that Edward ordered for her. After l
unch they walked out onto the Heath, where they sat on a bench looking out over a small hill and artificial lake below them. The crocuses scattered all over the green lawn, and the child suddenly running by with a red kite, his mother calling after him – images danced past Laura’s eyes. Greatly daring, she touched the side of her hand to Edward’s, and he took her hand, crushing it in his, and lifted it to his lips, inhaling the scent of her skin, closing his eyes. She closed her eyes for a moment too, and when she opened them he was looking at her, still holding her hand.
‘Here we are,’ she said. Or did he say it? They were both smiling.
‘At last,’ he said. ‘Now I might find out who Laura is, this mystery.’
It was extraordinary to her, that he saw her as a mystery, that he wanted to know about her.
‘Come on, it’s time.’ He turned properly to her, hitching one knee up on the bench and hooking that foot under the other leg, putting his right arm along the bench and touching her shoulder with his hand. It was a gesture both open and controlling. ‘Tell me. Here you are, with your decidedly revolutionary political views, but looking like a debutante at a tea party …’
She was shocked. He had noticed, had been thinking about everything she had said to him that she thought had gone unnoticed or been misunderstood. She was so used to being the dullest person in the room that this caused a strange shift in her sense of herself. He was still talking.
‘There wasn’t anyone else at Sybil’s party that night that could have told me about the struggle on two fronts – not that you did tell me. You clammed up right away, which said more than anything. What did you feel about the struggle on two fronts, then? Why were things less clear in November? Do you think the war is an imperialist escapade, or aren’t you sure?’
Laura felt as though the breath was being squeezed out of her. What was behind this forensic questioning? And then she realised that in fact it was a relief. She didn’t have to hide or pretend any more. For the first time, she could tell someone, and so she did. She told him about Florence, about the protest she had seen when she first came to London, the pamphlets she had read, the speeches she had heard. He listened and then asked her how open she had been about what she was doing. ‘I didn’t tell my aunt and Winifred,’ she confessed. ‘It seems silly, doesn’t it – but I thought they would never understand.’
A Quiet Life Page 13