‘Don’t let me forget the film,’ Laura said, taking it out of her bag as the car started up.
‘You have some more? They say your photographs are good, very clear. Make sure you don’t cut off the left margin, sometimes you angle a bit to the right.’
Laura considered that. She had not expected this praise, but she had already found, almost to her own surprise, that she liked using the little camera; of all the jobs and instructions she had been given, it was the only one that made sense to her. After Stefan had dropped her off at St Pancras, she walked down to Tottenham Court Road to a camera shop she had seen. She had decided she wanted to buy a proper camera, for herself. The tiny Minox was fine for the work she had to do, but it was no good for ordinary photography, and she fancied that it would be useful cover for her – if anyone found the Minox on her – if she could present herself as a real amateur photographer. She spent some time talking to the man in the shop. He was patronising towards her, but she didn’t mind, and in the end she spent a lot more than she could really afford on a Leica. He told her it was a beautiful machine, and she could believe it, as she put it back in its glossy leather case and handed over the money for it.
After that, as the dusk began to fall, she walked over to Edward’s apartment. His flatmate had recently moved out, and Edward had made no move to find someone else to share with. He was already there when she arrived, and passed her a packet of papers. As he fixed drinks for them, she pulled down the blackout blinds, moved the 100-watt lamp she had bought previously into position, and started to photograph them, one by one – sometimes taking more than one picture of a document if she wasn’t sure that she was getting everything in, and being careful to leave more of a margin on the left.
As soon as she had finished and started to put the papers back in the packet, she felt Edward’s hands around her waist. With a sense of luxuriant surrender, she turned to him.
Afterwards, as she was washing and dressing, he was standing there going through his post. ‘Look, a postcard from Giles.’ He was smiling. ‘Says they’ve moved his outfit – he can’t say where, but he says it’s not far from my childhood home. Tell you what, I’m owed a few days off, we should go down to Sutton, and I’ll get him to come down too. I think Toby and Sybil will be there as well, as the House will be on recess. But there’s masses of room.’ It felt like a reward he was offering her, an escape from the drudgery and secrecy of London.
13
This time they left London together for Worcestershire, settling down in the train carriage beside one another, Laura holding a copy of Vogue and Edward a book of French poetry. At one moment he leant over her to pull up the window. She felt so flooded by the scent of his skin that it was all she could do not to press her lips to his throat above his shirt collar, but the presence of two elderly women in the carriage prevented that. Once they were in the back seat of the Daimler, they succumbed to a brief, open-mouthed kiss, but Laura quickly pulled away, conscious of Mrs Last’s servant in front, the back of his head in a grey cap and his gloved hands on the wheel.
The house had still not been requisitioned in any way by the military, and as the car pulled to a stop in front of it, Laura saw it with a shock of recognition, as if its restrained beauty had entered deeply into her after that one previous visit. It seemed only enhanced by the growing wildness of the garden, the ivy breaking over its walls, the gravel blurred with blown leaves. Edward’s mother was not waiting for them in the drawing room, but Sybil, who had already been up there for a few days, was there. She had obviously been playing Patience, and shuffled the cards together when they walked in, yawning.
‘Your mother is busy with her war work,’ she said to Edward. She told them that she had hardly seen Mrs Last the last few days as she had taken some kind of job with the evacuees and was out of the house a lot. ‘And Toby is busy with his writing …’ There was something almost dismissive in the way Sybil talked about the work of others. ‘I asked for a cold luncheon – do you mind?’
They walked through to that dim, high-ceilinged dining room, where even without Mrs Last their behaviour became rather formal. The sunlight did not penetrate the room, but after they had eaten they went to get their bathing costumes and the warmth of the day came back with a shock as soon as they stepped onto the bright terrace. Sybil walked beside Laura through what had been the formal garden; the box hedges were ragged now but the elegant gestures of their lines were still apparent, holding the blown borders in a hopeful frame. Beyond a final hedge the ground suddenly dipped and gave way to a meadow with cows grazing at the further edge, which in turn gave way, under willows and long grasses, to the brown, slow-moving water of a river. Sybil threw a couple of blankets onto the grass and the three of them lay there, Sybil and Laura talking and Edward reading, the sun dappling through the willow leaves, spots shimmering in their eyes and then flicking away. They had been there for some hours when someone hallooed from the top of the meadow.
‘Giles! Thought you wouldn’t be here until tomorrow.’ Edward put down his book and sat up.
‘There was nothing doing at work today, the aeroplane we were meant to be running the new tests with got smashed up over the Channel last night. Pretty poor show.’ Giles sat down, unbuttoning his shirt. ‘Old Bales didn’t know where you’d got to, but I thought you’d be down here.’ He pulled off his undershirt and started unlacing his shoes. ‘I feel like I could sleep for a week and never look at a cathode ray again. You can’t imagine the way we have to work out there – in a bloody field, really. Hardly any time to develop the new stuff either, they’re trying to get us to fit as many planes as we can with what we’ve got. Sybil, you look like Titania in this sunshine.’
Laura couldn’t help noticing that other than a nod towards her, Giles didn’t greet her. She knew that Edward must have told him that she would be there, but he was behaving as though she was no more interesting to him than the manservant, Bales. Edward told him that they didn’t know what he was talking about, since he was always so secretive about what he was doing, but he said it in an affectionate way, looking at Giles with pleasure.
‘And even if I explained you would be too stupid to understand. It’s not Pindar, my dear Edward, it’s what our American friends call radar. I must swim – is the water freezing?’
‘Absolutely. I’ll go in with you.’
The water was not really deep enough, but both men managed to swim a bit. Laura found it odd seeing her cousin here, so comfortable in Edward’s territory. She remembered how Mrs Last had spoken of how Giles used to come here in the school vacations. She imagined them as boys, slipping down from the big house to their spot by the river, tasting the freedom from the grown-ups. It was as if even now, as adults, they felt the return of childish freedoms as they entered the river. Sybil splashed into the water too. She was built on a larger, firmer scale than Laura, her white body in its blue costume statuesque as she sat on a boulder, shaking back her hair. Laura looked at her tall, deep-breasted figure admiringly.
Afterwards they all lay again on the grass, lighting cigarettes to drive away the midges that were now rising from the water. Edward’s gaze rested as often on Giles as it did on Laura.
‘You’re getting quite a paunch there. Food good in – where did you say you were?’
Giles groaned. ‘Malvern – it’s not the food, it’s the lack of exercise. I’m just sitting on a bench all day, tabulating the bloody results. Sometimes I get into one of the aircraft and do the same in the air. You’re right, I’m turning into a pudding. I’ll be as fat as Quentin soon. Though I hear he has slimmed down – all that square-bashing.’
Laura told him he looked fine. ‘Let me take a photograph,’ she said. ‘A record of the perfect day,’ Giles said in a voice that seemed to be mocking her with its light, girlish tone. Laura had brought her camera with her, and she picked it up and set the shutter speed low for the light that was now falling more obliquely over the meadow. Even though she had only used the Leica a few
times, she had beginner’s luck that day. The photographs stayed with her through all the roaming years. From time to time, in Washington, in Patsfield, in Geneva, she would come across them: there was Sybil, her upright posture, her blonde hair almost white; there were the boys lounging beside her on the grass, the willow tree a blurred frame in the background. Edward’s looks did not transfer as well as Laura had expected onto celluloid, but there he was, pale hair falling across his forehead, showing off the legacy that school sports had bequeathed him in his broad shoulders and muscular arms. The shutter fell, their glances froze.
That night Toby and Mrs Last were there for supper, and the table seemed to fall naturally into two halves: at one end Laura, Edward and Giles; at the other Toby, his mother and Sybil. Giles and Toby were easy talkers, and their burbling conversation needed little stimulus. It was about food, and then it was about Churchill’s character, and then it was about the weather, and then it was about Toby’s chances of promotion: topics ranged from the large to the small, but always continued with ease. Mrs Last joined in too, handing down her judgements, but the other women and Edward said little.
Laura was quite content to concentrate on what she was eating. She liked the solid, English food: boiled gammon, peas and potatoes in buttter, followed by berry crumble and thick cream. Out here, there was no sign of the privations that affected wartime London, and Mrs Last was pleased to discuss at length with Toby how well the home farm was doing that summer. Once the dinner was finished and they went through to the drawing room, Laura made an effort to join the conversation, but at one point she said something about how bright the stars were tonight – the curtains were open and they could see the studded sky over the hills – and Giles said, again in that breathy tone, that they made him feel so small. She realised she was being mocked again, although she wasn’t sure why, and after that she lapsed into silence.
When the evening finally broke up, she felt tiredness washing over her as she opened the door to the guest bedroom, but she stayed awake, anticipation skidding through her body, until she heard Edward opening the door and all the desire that had been building since the warm train journey, since the golden hours by the river, since the long dinner, could finally find its release.
The next day, the others went down to the tennis court, and Laura, who had never learned to play, sat and watched them, an abandoned magazine beside her. Giles and Toby went on talking between strokes, sometimes arguing about politics, which they seemed to see solely in terms of clashes of ego, and sometimes discussing their friends in that way that was becoming familiar to Laura, in which harsh judgements were masked by humour. At one moment Giles asked Edward if Quentin was still as wrapped up with Nina as ever.
‘Yes – it is rather a bore.’
‘She is rather a bore, you mean.’
‘I suppose she thinks with those looks she can behave rather badly.’
Laura remembered the first time she had seen Nina, coming into Sybil’s party with Amy. She started to speak about that moment, thinking she would tell the story of how she had only been invited to Sybil’s party as a replacement for Nina and how small that had made her feel. But as soon as she started to talk, she realised that she didn’t have the confidence to go on and expose her own vulnerability to Giles and Sybil. So she turned the story around quickly, stuttering a bit as she did so, and simply said how gorgeous Nina and Amy had looked, and how she remembered seeing Amy disembarking from the Normandie a few months earlier, surrounded by photographers. ‘I suppose Amy is quite – well known?’
‘That kind of fame …’ Sybil’s tone showed what she thought of it. ‘Lately, she’s been lucky – I mean, one can’t call it luck, it’s the war – but the papers haven’t been free to take her on. Not so much interest in gossip now. And Anderson, her new husband – he’d be absolute bait to them in peacetime, but now of course he’s joined up so there isn’t much they can say.’
Sybil returned to the subject of Amy that afternoon, when the five of them – Mrs Last being absent again – were eating tea at a table set out on the terrace. She was talking about how Amy had gone up to Scotland as her new husband was in a training camp in the Highlands and wondering how on earth she was coping there. Giles agreed with her that it was absurd to think of Amy in Edinburgh.
‘The scattering – I hate it,’ Sybil said. ‘You in Malvern, Quentin God knows where now. It’s so lucky that Toby and Edward have to stay in London.’
‘Yes, we must keep the clan together as long as we can,’ Toby said rather lugubriously, drinking his tea.
Laura spread cream and jam on her scones as she listened to them. She wanted to believe that she was happy, here in the sunlight with Edward and the people he was closest to. But she was finding Sybil and Toby and Giles more rather than less forbidding as she got to know them. They had been a group for so long, so homogenous and so inward-looking, that every sentence they spoke was loaded with assumptions that they had never thought to question. How could Edward bear to live within this tight circle every day? Laura wondered, looking at them as they talked and ate and nodded and judged.
Giles had just started saying that one of the dour Scottish men he was working with had got into a terrible argument with their boss about his refusal to do any work at all on a Sunday. ‘Old Penrose’s riposte was that he should see work against the invasion as a kind of prayer. I could see that wasn’t going to cut the mustard in convincing the deluded chap. It’s funny how there is never any point arguing about really heartfelt beliefs, is there – you can’t be rational, and if you try to beat them at their own game, like Penrose did, you just end up sounding mad yourself.’
In response, Toby began to tease Edward again about his adolescent devotion to Christianity. Giles broke in with interest, and for the first time that weekend the conversation drifted onto ideas. Giles was remembering how Edward had been a passionate Christian when they had first met at school. ‘There is a Christ – not the Christ that we’re served up in school services or this war, that one has to love, that’s what you used to say.’
‘Not the Christ of the church, no,’ Edward said, putting down his teacup.
‘How can there be a Christ not of the church?’ Toby said, his voice quickening with irritation.
‘You were always trying to get me to read Tolstoy on that,’ Giles continued, talking to Edward. ‘He’s dead set against what the church made out of Christ’s actual teaching, isn’t he? Thinks it’s a joke that it’s used to justify the state and that the church colludes in that.’
‘And why are we listening to a Russian nihilist’s view of our religion?’ Toby said in that tense voice again.
‘For goodness’ sake,’ said Giles to Toby, ‘you don’t have to sound quite such an MP.’
Toby clearly wanted to shut down the conversation, but now Edward and Giles were talking further about Tolstoy and whether he would have stuck to his views if he were alive now.
‘What, if he’d seen the storming of the Winter Palace? Or Dunkirk? You think he would have seen how pure force is sometimes the only answer?’
‘Unless you want to sleepwalk towards the wreckage of our civilisation.’
‘But whether he would see it as a civilisation worth saving …’ said Edward, and there was energy in his words.
Laura was startled when she heard Mrs Last’s voice and realised that she had come onto the terrace without them noticing. ‘Are you enjoying the strawberries? Rather fine this year, I think.’
‘Very fine – enjoying them hugely, Mother, if only Edward and Giles wouldn’t depress us with talk of the wreckage of civilisation,’ said Toby.
‘Surely we don’t have to talk about France today?’
‘It wasn’t the news, Mother. You know Edward, the usual vision of a universe falling into hell if we don’t change our ways.’
‘Can I pour you some tea?’ Sybil said. ‘Actually the pot is rather cold, I’ll just go and catch Edna and have some more hot brought out.’
&
nbsp; ‘Yes, why not? Looks like we could do with some more scones too, I’m sure they baked enough to keep us going.’
‘We’ve tucked in already, but let me see if there are some more for you.’
The conversation, which had momentarily taken that turn into passion and politics, seemed to have returned safely to its old groove, and as Sybil poured Mrs Last some fresh tea Toby started to opine about whether they could stop inviting their neighbours to dinner; apparently they had done something quite unforgivable with their boundary fence.
‘I might just go and have a last bathe,’ said Edward.
He stood up and left the terrace. Laura waited for a moment, as the conversation eddied on, and then murmuring something vague she got up too. She walked down, through the box hedges, over the ha-ha and into the meadow. For a moment she thought he wasn’t there, and then she saw him, flung down on his back in the grass, his arms over his eyes. When she touched his hand, he uncovered his face and sat up. Laura sat next to him as he lit a cigarette.
‘I used to love this field so much,’ he said. ‘When things used to go wrong for me at school, whenever I felt miserable, I used to go down, in my mind, into this meadow – you know, the bees, the smells, the feel and the sound of it, the noise of the river.’
‘It is the most beautiful place.’ Did Laura really love it, or did she love the little boy who had come longingly to the light on the river, through the meadow studded with speedwell and buttercups?
‘Yes, but I thought it was paradise. It was only later I realised. It was horrible, really, to realise that everything I thought was good was rotten.’
A Quiet Life Page 17