‘It’s still a beautiful place.’
‘But you know,’ he took her hand, ‘you can’t – you know you can’t – rely on this kind of beauty. Not when everything it relies on …’ It was as if he could not trust himself to go on, and he fell silent. Finally he muttered, ‘It’s all rotten.’
Laura felt she knew what had caused his sudden sense of despair. She had felt it too, the rift between the passion that was within him and the cold gossip of the others. ‘Did you mean what you said, about how force will carry the day?’ she asked, wanting to relive the conversation in order to understand what he thought lay ahead, but his body stiffened as she asked the question. Rather than answer, he picked up her hand and put it over his mouth. His lips moved over her palm. He inhaled her skin. There was something yearning in the gesture. Laura ran her fingers through his hair. His beauty was, to her, the gathering up of the afternoon, his hair a distillation of the golden sunlight, the warmth of his skin a giving back of its heat. She wanted to give herself up to him, to be taken up into his physical strength, into his sunlit warmth. As they kissed, she felt him relax. ‘We should go back,’ she said. He drew back from their kiss, and smiled. ‘We could stay here.’ By saying it, he had freed them from the group. They sat for a moment longer, holding one another, but there was a lightness now in their mood, and after a minute they were happy to get up and to walk back to the house.
Sutton Court was sinking back into the late afternoon light. Was its beauty rotten? She contemplated it through the eyes of Edward, the eyes of Florence, its stones built on the wealth of a cruel empire, the garden laid out by the hands of the oppressed. Its cool, ordered beauty rose up nonetheless, its perfection so studied as to have become entirely nonchalant. The others were still sitting out on the terrace with his mother.
‘Cocktail?’ Toby asked as they approached. Giles was sitting back in his chair, an unreadable expression on his face.
‘Dinner won’t be long,’ demurred Mrs Last. She was looking at them as they stood there, but Laura did not take her hand out of Edward’s, and then his mother turned and walked into the house.
14
‘Post for you – goodness, you look well. Your hair needs cutting, though.’
Winifred was sitting in the kitchen when Laura got into the flat on Monday evening. It had felt strange to leave Edward at Paddington station; being in his presence for four days had reoriented her to such an extent that she felt unbalanced now without him. She was glad that Winifred was there, smoking and drinking tea and listening to the radio and reading a magazine – Winifred never seemed to be able to do just one thing – or else, she thought, she would have felt rather maudlin. As it was, she was able to take a cigarette from Winifred’s packet and rip open the letters from home without having to think too much. But the letter she opened caught her attention.
‘Trouble at home?’ Winifred said.
‘It’s from Ellen, she’s wondering about whether to marry this – Tom.’
Winifred was immediately interested, and started to fire off questions about him. Laura had to admit she didn’t know much; neither she nor Ellen had been great correspondents these eighteen months. But one thing she did remember, from Mother’s previous letter, was that Mother approved. She remembered thinking how lucky she was that she did not have to think about what her parents thought of Edward – or, so much worse, what he would think of them. When she told Winifred that Polly thought it was a good match, Winifred stubbed out her cigarette with a look of distaste.
‘So long as she doesn’t marry to please Aunt Polly. You should hear Mummy on the subject of Alistair. She’s so delighted with him, I can’t face telling her that our affair is breaking up.’
Laura had not known that things were going wrong with Winifred and Alistair. She sat down and touched the side of the teapot to see if it was still hot as she began to commiserate with her. Winifred reached for a clean cup, brushing off Laura’s sympathy. ‘It isn’t killing me. I’m so busy at work anyway. Promoted – not bad less than a year in.’
Laura congratulated her, but maybe she looked unconvinced. ‘No, really,’ Winifred said, ‘I’m not weeping over him.’ She explained that she didn’t really think that Alistair cared for her, and then said she wondered whether those men cared for anyone, and whether it was something about their early lives that prevented them from ever caring. Laura caught an echo in what she was saying of the words spoken by the man they had met at Alistair’s party.
‘That psychologist or therapist – what was he? – wasn’t that what he said?’
‘Yes, Lvov – I was talking to him about it. He’s very interesting on the effect of boarding schools. But you know all about it. Last is just the same, isn’t he? Does he ever talk about what he is really feeling?’
Laura said she didn’t feel he held back so much, but then changed the subject. She didn’t want to expose her feelings about Edward to Winifred; she knew that deep down Winifred was unimpressed by what she saw as Laura’s naïvety when she talked about him. Winifred was not to know, thought Laura, that their understanding was so beyond anything her cousin had experienced with Alistair. What was the point of trying to explain? It was much easier to turn back to Ellen’s letter and to read bits out to Winifred and speculate about what Tom was like.
The next day Laura only worked half a day, so in the afternoon she went to have her hair cut and then walked over to Bloomsbury. She had her own key to Edward’s flat now; he had given it to her on their way back to London, and she had told him she would be there just before he was due back from work. There was a precious intimacy about the act of putting her key into his front door, and when she was inside she automatically went over to the sideboard and poured herself a small gin and tonic, realising only after she had done so that it was what he would have done for her, that she was imitating his actions even though he wasn’t there.
Holding the drink, she went into his bedroom and pulled up the blinds. His apartment always seemed quite spartan. The landlady cleaned it, but Laura felt that even if she hadn’t he would have kept it like this: tidy and functional. Some shirts, just back from the laundry, sat folded on top of a rosewood chest of drawers. They smelt of starch and soap. There were no photographs on the mantelpiece, just a couple of old invitations and address cards pushed behind a Lalique lamp; on the desk were a few papers and a new book, a translation of Virgil’s Georgics by an English poet.
Without thinking, Laura opened one of the drawers, noting the letters folded back into envelopes, personal letters and letters from his bank stacked together. There were a few small notebooks, and she took one out. Its cover was soft thin leather that yielded under her fingers. At first the pages were uninteresting: mainly notes of people’s telephone numbers, details of train times and totting up of small accounts. Across a couple of pages, however, a poem was written, with many crossings out and then a neat copy on the next page. ‘My house’, he had written across the top in another pen.
A windowed room, a spacious lawn
A view from hill to hill
This is the breadth that gave me breath
The space that let me grow.
The slope to the sky was once alive
The curlew called with hope.
But now I see the view is framed
I feel the walls are close.
Where is the air to catch a breath?
Why is the world locked out?
The footfalls pass from room to room.
No house, but prison this.
Even Laura could see that it was not much of a poem, but it drew her back again to Edward’s anger that afternoon at the weekend when his family had broken through his conversation with Giles with silly chatter about tea and scones. Again she remembered how he had seemed to find peace with her; and again she felt a sweet confidence as she considered how they understood one another without the need for explanation. She replaced the notebook with the others, with no sense of guilt, and turned back to the room.
>
The wardrobe door was half open and she went to close it. Before she did so she stood looking inside, revelling in the memory of his presence that his clothes held: the dark suits he wore every day in town, tweed jackets for the weekend, pale flannels for the summer, and two tuxedos – she put her face to the sleeve of one, was it the one he had been wearing when they first met? As she did so, a tie slipped from where it had been hanging inside the door, and she bent down to pick it up. She saw something – was it another tie? – a flash of something pale, under one of his shoes. She moved the shoe. It was a slip, pink, crumpled as if it had been pushed suddenly into the closet. Laura herself had never worn such a thing – it was cheap, untrimmed. She found herself holding it, and then she dropped it and walked out of the bedroom.
Her gin and tonic was still sitting there on the coffee table. She drank it and found herself pulling at her own fingers, twisting them. That, she realised, is what they mean by wringing your hands. Had she assumed he’d been a virgin too? No, of course not, not if she had stopped to think, but she had not stopped to think, and how long had the slip been there, and how many, and when, and … Laura had been living in the present for months. It had seemed to be a comfortable place, but suddenly the past and the future had opened up on either side of her and she realised that the present was a narrow spit of land, and she felt dizzy.
She thought of leaving. She reached for her purse and stood up, but as she went towards the door, it opened and there he was. For all these weeks, it had been such a revelation to her that this man’s attention was on her; she had experienced it as a complete loss of boundaries. Now, as he came in, she felt their separation again, and a distance that she had not felt since their first kiss seemed to arise between them. He moved towards her, but she moved back, into the living room. They exchanged some stilted sentences; she didn’t know how to bring up what she had seen, but then as he poured himself a drink and sat down on the sofa, pulling at his tie to loosen it, she was overcome with desire and sorrow. She put her head in her hands.
He did not ask her what the matter was. ‘Cheer up,’ he said and turned her face to his. She let him kiss her for a few seconds, the desire rising up in her as ever, and then she suddenly jerked away from him.
‘I was talking to some chaps at the office last week,’ he said, ‘and it would be possible to get you home on a convoy now that things are getting so hot.’ He thought she was scared by the start of the air war. He thought she was missing home. Or did he just want her to move on?
‘Do you want me to go?’
‘Do I want you to go?’ He almost laughed, and told her it was the last thing he wanted.
‘Is it? Is it really?’ She could not dissemble any more, and so she told him what she had seen. It would have been hard for her if he had been dismissive, but he immediately seemed to recognise her anguish and to want to reassure her. He spoke quickly and confidently; it had been some time ago, before the first evening she had come here, yes, definitely – and who had it been? Well, hadn’t she known? He thought she had known. Ada.
With a rush, Laura’s world was rearranged. She remembered Ada’s hostility that day in the back of the cigar shop as she had questioned her.
‘Do you still see her?’
They never talked about meetings that they had with Ada or Stefan; the need for secrecy was being drilled into Laura week by week. ‘Everything you don’t know makes you safer,’ Stefan would tell her over and over again in his flat East European accent. ‘Everything you know is a danger to yourself and those you care about.’ The direct question was a challenge to that new habit of secrecy, and Edward paused.
‘No,’ he said finally. ‘I don’t. It’s someone else now. I don’t know what’s happened to her.’
He seemed lost in thought for a moment, and then when Laura picked up his drink and drained it, he spoke again, telling her that there was no need for her to be jealous. ‘She meant a lot to me at one time. I suppose, like Florence for you. All the questions I had, she seemed to have the answers. I think I relied on her. When she was photographing …’
Laura’s fingers slipped on the glass. So Ada had been the one who had photographed his papers before Laura showed up, and then Ada had been moved on – or maybe she had asked to be moved – and Stefan had had to find some other solution. There were so many questions Laura wanted to ask – about how long they had been together, and why on earth the slip was here when she knew that it would threaten all the protocols of his secret world for Edward to have brought Ada to his own flat.
But as knowledge flashed through her, she saw how Edward was looking out over her shoulder towards a past she could not share. A rift had opened between them. It was a rift that she wanted to close, and it seemed that Edward felt the same. They reached for one another gently at first, and then as the passion took over they made love with a curious, almost angry abandon, Laura’s nails scoring down his back as he pushed inside her.
Maybe Laura’s uncertainty would have stayed with her, but later that evening when they were lying naked in bed, Edward said something she did not expect. He was smoking, the window was open, and the noises of London were magnified to Laura in the aftermath of love-making; she could hear the rush of buses down Gower Street, a swing band on the radio from a room below, a rattling clang as someone pulled down the shutter on a shop. They should get married, Edward said. He thought they should get married soon. If he wanted to bring her back into the present, she was ready to be there with him. She luxuriated in the moment. Above the sounds of the streets she could hear the soft screaming of the swifts as they chased each other in the still-peaceful London skies. She ran a finger down the line of Edward’s throat, where the sandpapery shaved neck gave way to the silk of his collarbone. Yes, she said, breathing in the scent of his skin and relishing the fact that doubt had disappeared.
15
Laura stood on the steps of the registry office, her husband beside her.
‘Stop!’ Winifred said. They stopped and Laura smiled into the sun. Across the road a woman pushing a pram looked at her with a weary face. A few scraps of confetti were thrown.
Laura had lent Winifred the Leica to take a photograph for Mother, but she had had to talk her through how to use it, and in the end none of the pictures came out well. All in all, it was lucky for Laura that a wedding day had never been at the centre of her dreams. Because if it had, the rushed ceremony, the paucity of guests and the rigid demeanour of Edward’s mother, who even refused a glass of champagne at the dull lunch in the Savoy, would have disappointed her. There was Alistair, of course, and Toby and Sybil, but Nick had gone to Washington and neither Giles nor Quentin had been able to get leave. Winifred had organised the day, and had tried her best to give it a festive air, but Laura could not help picking up the low mood of the others.
Laura had thought Aunt Dee would have been most pleased of anyone. Everything about Edward – his family, his position, his Englishness – should have delighted her. But strangely, when Laura went over to tell her, the week after Edward had proposed, Dee seemed puzzled and anxious. She kept saying that she wished Polly were here to meet Edward, and that maybe they had better wait. It was Winifred, who had gone with her, who told her how happy Laura was and how delighted Polly would be. Laura was grateful to Winifred for stepping in, even if she knew that her cousin was not entirely convinced herself. And it was Winifred who persuaded everyone that as it was wartime, a small wedding at a registry office in London, followed by lunch at the Savoy, would be the right thing rather than carting everyone off to a church in Highgate or, worse, Sutton.
But in Laura’s eyes the lack of celebration was not as important as it seemed to be for Winifred and Sybil, who looked rather glum as they embraced her at the end of the lunch. To Laura, this union had been sanctified long before. For her, their walk up the aisle had taken place through the blacked-out city in May; their honeymoon had been enjoyed in the sunshine of Sutton Court. The absolute nature of their union could n
ot, to her, be enhanced by a public ceremony, let alone this rather ordinary day in which she was irritated by the adenoidal voice of the registrar and the way the humid weather made her hair curl out of its set. When the women asked to see the little ring that Edward had bought her, when Mrs Last presented her with an old velvet case which turned out to contain a double-strand pearl necklace and matching earrings, and particularly when Toby stood up at the end of the lunch to speak rotund phrases about how glad he was that his brother had found happiness, she felt that their conventional actions and reactions really had nothing to do with her connection to Edward.
At the end of the long afternoon, Alistair, who was unbelievably drunk on wedding champagne, came back to Edward’s apartment with them, unable to find his keys to his own, and fell asleep on the sofa in the living room. Laura found it an almost unbearable intrusion, but there was nothing she could say; it was still Edward’s flat and she felt it would be unwelcome if she questioned the ways of the group. She walked into the bedroom and asked Edward to unzip her dress. It wasn’t white; Winifred had told her that for a registry office wedding she didn’t need to wear a real wedding dress; it was pale grey. It fell off her arms, and she looked at herself in the mirror in her white slip, Edward behind her. Now she looked like a bride, alone with him.
Maybe it was because Alistair was in the living room that they felt constrained as they made love that night. Edward put one hand over Laura’s mouth, to tell her without words not to cry out. She was never aware in the moment that she did cry out when they made love, but sometimes afterwards her moans replayed in her head, to her own embarrassment. But tonight she remained just outside herself enough to control her voice, even as her body shuddered.
The next day Laura woke late, the aftermath of the champagne throbbing in her head. Neither of the men was awake, and she went and made coffee in her housecoat and took it back to bed with her. Someone was practising the piano across the square; she had heard them before on these summer days when the sash windows were pushed up. They had still not got the hang of those scales, but the waltz was going better now, and it dripped smoothly into the Sunday morning air.
A Quiet Life Page 18