Laura recalled how, when they were at school, the most envied girl of all, Mary-Lou Bellingham, had always taken her summer vacation along this part of the coast. She had come back every autumn bearing the physical marks of her privilege – the tan on her long legs, the bleached streaks in her fair hair – and with tales of parties on the beach, flirtations with cousins, sailing and tennis. It had seemed, then, a world away, but now Ellen was a part of it. Laura sat on the porch, looking into the garden, and considered how their lives had moved on and yet between herself and Ellen there was still the same weight of frustration and anger, even if unacknowledged.
Ellen was upstairs settling Janet, and Laura heard Tom’s car returning from the station in a crush of gravel, yet she remained outside, listening to Ellen come downstairs to greet Mother. She heard the chatter in the hall, she heard Mother saying, ‘So how is she?’ and she heard Ellen say, ‘Oh, you know Laura,’ with a bitterness in her voice. She stayed still, eager to hear what they did know, but then they all came out onto the porch and saw her standing there, and their conversation was overtaken in the embrace that Laura and Mother had failed to complete more than six years ago.
‘Well,’ said Tom as they broke away from one another, ‘you can’t miss the family resemblance here.’
Laura was not flattered. As they sat down, she looked at Mother’s over-made-up face, in which a determined girlishness kept warring with the lines that age and sadness had drawn on it – was that really what she looked like? Or was that her future face? Mother was thinner – she had always wanted to stay slim, disapproving of women who got fat – but there was a slackness now about her slenderness, as though by losing flesh she had lost energy. Tom offered them drinks, and Laura asked for a highball, which was what she knew Tom usually drank, though Mother and Ellen stuck to lemonade.
As she sucked down the first cold gulps, Laura asked about Father; she knew already from Ellen that his chest was worse and he was very sick now. Laura remembered his cough from the past. It had been deep and rasping, though his voice was light for a man’s, and he would try to suppress it over breakfast as he lit his first cigarette.
‘I don’t know why you didn’t insist he come,’ Ellen was saying to Mother, ‘the sea air would have done him good, and Laura hasn’t seen him for so long.’ That was characteristic of Ellen; she was always the one whose self-righteous certainty made others doubt themselves. Mother said little, and Laura found herself unexpectedly in sympathy with her; she seemed almost to quail under Ellen’s critical voice. Laura looked at Tom as she thought about Ellen’s character; how rigid she always was, unable to see anyone else’s point of view. How would it be to fall in love with someone like that?
But from their first meeting Tom had been opaque to Laura. She had learned something from Ellen’s letters during the war about his background, his connection to those envied Bellinghams, and about how he had been excused military service due to a heart murmur. Those facts had led Laura to invest him with some aura of glamour or delicacy; his actual presence, red-faced and inarticulate, was puzzling, as was his attitude to Ellen. He seemed not to notice her complaints, but treated her with a kind of casual dismissiveness.
After a while they stood up to go into dinner and Laura felt the drink weighing down her movements, but when she sat down she asked Tom if she could have a beer along with him. She said it in a light tone, as though she simply wanted to try what he was drinking, but in fact she felt thirsty for the cold bubbles. She did not see how she could get through evening after evening here, already she could feel a needling pain rising up through her shoulders, which were hunched up to her neck as if to protect herself. She looked at Ellen, and saw that her mouth was folded together as if she too was struggling for composure. But then Laura felt rebuked when Ellen caught her eye and smiled, and said something about how wonderful it was that they were all back together again.
‘All except Father,’ said Laura.
‘Yes, things aren’t really very good with him,’ Mother said, but then she was distracted, or chose to be distracted, by the plate that the maid, Ora, was passing her. ‘Not so much for me, and no sauce – my stomach can’t take such rich food, Ellen.’
‘You don’t have to watch your figure, Mother,’ Laura said. Her mother shook her head.
‘You know it isn’t that, Laura, but …’
But yes, God forbid that you should ever relax, Laura thought, drinking the beer Tom had brought her and taking the rejected plate for herself. Already, Ellen was into her usual complaints about how much work this summer was creating for her. Tom’s brother was to arrive that evening; he had been wounded – a shattered wrist – in the Pacific, Tom was explaining, although both Laura and Mother already knew the story. His month’s convalescence leave had just started, and the hope was that he would not have to return to service, that demobilisation would overtake the end of his stay. Ellen was wondering if he would mind that dark room at the end of the corridor, and Laura was saying in a small voice that maybe it would be easier if she went into a hotel. Tom talked over them, enthusiastic about the possibility of more people in the house. He wanted to get the tennis courts rolled. It was a pity the garden here had become such a mess; he remembered it from years back, it had been a great place then.
Laura remembered the garden at Sutton Court, and started to tell them about it – the long formal hedges and the rose garden all turned over to vegetables for the war, the meadow given to grazing. She realised almost as soon as she started speaking that it was as though she was telling a fairy tale, something childish, about a distant and uninteresting land. She had noticed this reaction time and again whenever she started to say something about England and the war. It was natural, she told herself – why would her family want to hear about the wartime deprivations she had known; as if America had not made its sacrifices, was not still making its sacrifices? She stayed almost silent for the rest of the meal, and as they went into the living room she realised that her back was damp with sweat, even in her cotton dress.
In the living room the windows had been left open, and moths were blundering around the lamps. Ellen exclaimed in irritation, pulling the blinds down over the windows and flapping a magazine at the insects. Laura had quite forgotten about Tom’s brother, and when they heard a taxi drawing up, for a moment she thought it could be Edward after all, and she went out to the door with Tom. There was a tangle of roses by the door, and as she brushed past them their scent seemed almost wet, it was so refreshing in the night air.
‘God, this is a nice spot, Tom – just like the old days.’ Kit was at first glance rather like Tom, the same fairish, freckly colouring. But there was grace in his manner as he threw the butt of the cigarette he was smoking onto the gravel and advanced into the house with what was almost a dancer’s posture, his feet turned out.
Once in the living room and furnished with a cold beer and another cigarette, Kit was the centre of attention, as Ellen and Tom began to quiz him about his health and his plans after demobilisation. His wrist, he said, was completely recovered. It was his left hand anyway, and as good as new now. As he talked in a rather diffident way about how he was thinking of going into journalism, Laura realised that the attention bothered him. She sympathised with his obvious shyness and wondered what he had been living through; it was much harder to imagine him in active service than it was to imagine Tom there – particularly dressed as he was tonight, in a pale lavender shirt and cream pants. Now he was talking about a friend of his who was also eager for demobilisation, a man called Joe, who had been a newspaper man until he had enlisted, who was planning to go back into it, probably in Washington; it sounded like a good life – Kit was thinking of something like that.
Laura found her mind travelling back to the Joe she had known, with his anecdotes about reporting and travelling, and without thinking she said, ‘I met a journalist called Joe,’ and although Ellen obviously thought she was interrupting the conversation, Kit turned to her and they started
discussing the journalists they knew until they realised it was the same man, one Joe Segal, and that the strange vagaries of fate had led them to know him at different times, on different boats, six years apart from one another. Laura thought little of it in the moment, simply smiling and nodding, exclaiming about the coincidence.
But as she gained her room that night, she realised how the discovery had destabilised her. Joe, smiling at her in the smoky bar, his hand warm on her leg on the dark deck. There was no escape from memories; the memories of her childhood that Mother and Ellen brought with them, and now the memory of those days when she thought she was escaping. She felt the web of the past restricting her, pulling her back when she thought she could move forwards.
She woke blearily to breakfast the next day, and found that the influx of new people into the house had energised Tom. He was insisting that they should all go sailing, and had borrowed a boat from a neighbour he had known from childhood. Ellen demurred, saying that she had to stay back with Janet, and Mother said that she didn’t see how, with her knees, she could clamber in and out of a boat. Part of Laura also longed to stay back in the shade of the garden; the air would be damp and cool under the old elm tree. But that was where Mother would be lying all day in a deckchair. It was better to get out, then, onto the sea.
When she went down to the beach, Tom and Kit were reminiscing about making exactly this same trip in the past; they were talking about their parents, about old neighbours, about the time when their boat had sunk and they had been stranded in a distant bay for a whole day and half a night. She felt out of step with them; she was just a passenger, and while they were soon busy with ropes and sails and anchors, she was clumsy and tentative in the boat which seemed so unpredictable, and she sat gingerly on the wooden benches.
The short trip in the small boat felt exposed, out on the naked water under the cloudless sky, but when they got round to the cove that Tom was aiming for, Laura could see its charm; it was enclosed, hard to scramble down to from the road. There was just one other family there already, an image of what Tom and Kit’s must have been years ago: a silver-haired father with tall adolescent boys. Laura stumbled getting out of the boat – the rocks were slippery under her sandshoes – and Kit reached out a hand to help her, but his fingers seemed inert on hers.
‘We must swim,’ Tom ordered, and obediently they shed their outer layers. Tom and Kit swam far out, as if racing one another, but there was a breeze coming off the sea now and Laura stayed standing in the shallows, goose pimples coming up on her arms. ‘Don’t you swim?’ Kit said to her as he came back in, and Laura told him not to worry about her. They wanted to recreate something from their past, and although they were polite to her, she felt that she was a drag on their enjoyment. Soon after a picnic lunch they decided to return; Laura wondered whether they would have stayed longer without her.
When the boat was moored, it was a long walk back up the shore to the house. Laura excused herself and went in, going upstairs without talking to Mother and Ellen, whom she could see on the lawn. This week, she had gotten into the lazy habit of sleeping for a while in the afternoon, and she pulled off her slacks and her bathing costume and slid into bed, realising as her sandy legs rubbed against the linen that she would have to shake the sheets out later. She had already fallen asleep when she heard a hard rap on the door – ‘Laura?’ For a moment she wasn’t sure where she was, coming too quickly out of unconsciousness into this high, hard bed and the sunlit room, but then she saw Edward standing by the bed.
‘I wasn’t expecting—’
‘I know – I managed to get away, things had quietened down for the weekend, but I have to get back Monday morning. I called from the station – your brother-in-law picked me up. Is there room for me there?’
Laura rolled to one side and opened her arms. ‘I’m all sticky and sandy,’ she said, with happy expectation, as Edward pulled off his tie and his shoes, but as soon as he got into bed he simply said, ‘I’m so tired,’ and, putting one hand on her shoulder, he closed his eyes. Laura watched his face as he fell asleep. She could relax now. Nothing in the past could touch her, not now she had her present and future beside her.
She was full of easy anticipation when they went down to dinner that evening. How patrician Edward looked, pausing at the foot of the stairs to wait for her to come down, his light hair luminous in the shadows, his green gaze resting on her. Now that they could see the quality, the beauty, the intelligence of the man who loved her, she would take on a different value in her family’s eyes. She felt released, finally, from the burden of being the old Laura as they went into the living room.
It was odd, though, to see how pale and tired Edward looked next to the other men; Kit must have picked up his bronzed sheen on the ship and Tom from the beach. What’s more, the other two were in soft-coloured shirts, without ties or blazers, and when Kit crossed his legs you could see the flash of a bare ankle above his loafers, but Edward had dressed as he always did at weekends, in a flannel jacket and white shirt and tie. In England, Laura realised, Edward had always worn precisely what all the other men of his class did, right down to the design of his shoes and the colour of his tie. There, he knew line by line whatever unspoken codes governed men’s clothes, but here he seemed to be working in another language, and its formality made him look absent-minded, as if he had not expected to find himself here, in the heat of summer and the languor of a vacation.
Tom and Kit were quick to include him in their conversation, asking him about work and telling him about people they knew in Washington. As Laura listened to them talk, she remembered how struck she had been when she first met him by the glacial pace of Edward’s conversation, and how the chatter of his friends slowed down to meet his rhythms. But what had seemed part of his unquestionable authority in London now seemed less sure-footed. Kit soon overtook his slow responses with a quick anecdote he had heard about the editor of a Washington newspaper, and when they moved to the dining room to eat, Ellen and Mother seemed to be struggling to get anything out of Edward. ‘And your ambassador?’ Kit suddenly asked, throwing a conversational ball down to Edward’s end of the table, to Laura’s relief, continuing something that Tom had said about the effect of the war. ‘What does he think of the future of the empire?’
Laura knew that Edward would shine, as he always did, with his inside knowledge of the powerful players in British government. But he simply forked up another piece of duck, and said in a rather toneless voice, ‘There’s an inevitability about the way things are moving.’
Kit said something about Halifax’s point of view being moulded by his own career, and when Tom asked him what he meant, he explained that Halifax had once run India.
‘I heard someone say that the Indians are the biggest problem that Britain will face after the war,’ Tom said.
‘I don’t know about that,’ Edward said in his slow manner. ‘You don’t have any problem with your Indians, of course. You killed them all.’
For a moment Laura did not pick up the extraordinary rudeness of his statement, as it was delivered with such diffidence, but when she did she turned to Mother and said, ‘It was so lovely going out sailing today. You should try it before you go. It’s a pity we never learned to sail.’
‘There are so many things we didn’t learn,’ said Ellen. ‘I can’t even play tennis.’
‘I always wish I’d learned to play the piano,’ said Laura, but she was only talking for the sake of it, trying to move the conversation away from her husband.
The next morning the light seemed to have shifted up to a different wattage. Was it just her hangover that made it so ferociously bright, Laura wondered as she drew back the curtains? Over breakfast Tom insisted that everyone should come out to swim that day. The preparations seemed to take so much time and so much discussion about what was needed, from Janet’s hat to bottles of lemonade. It was a little way, just far enough to feel tiresome to walk, to the beach that was good for swimming, and each of them
felt as though they were carrying too heavy a load.
This time Laura went into the sea, walking into the great greenish waves until they reached her shoulders, and swam until the cold clamped her chest too fiercely. Even in the sunlight, the ocean water was freezing at depth. She swam back in and walked up the sand, shuddering.
‘Your mouth is blue,’ said Ellen, who was beached in a deckchair. Laura flung herself down on a towel, and looked back into the rinsing sea, and saw Edward swimming further out than all the others, right into the horizon that was too bright to look at. He came out last, when everyone else was already lying on towels and deckchairs under the three big beach umbrellas pushed into the sand. As he came towards them, he seemed transfigured by his swim. There were droplets running all over his shoulders and his hair was slicked back; he was framed in light.
For the first time since leaving London, Laura felt the cloud of war lift from her. Was it going to be all right, would peace inflect their lives again, in a country ready to re-dedicate itself to comfort? The sky was high and silent, and all along the shore they could see families playing in places they had known from childhood.
‘Would you like to build a sandcastle?’ Edward asked little Janet. She was too shy to reply at first, and it surprised Laura, who had never seen him with a child before, when Edward took her spade and started to mark out and dig a moat. Then Janet responded with pleasure, toddling up and down to the water with her bucket. ‘It won’t stay in the moat, wait till the tide comes up,’ Ellen admonished her. Laura began to sort the stones beneath her fingers, picking out white ones for the castle walls. Smooth, rough, small, big, the pebbles fell through her fingers in their uncountable diversity.
The sun began to strike fiercely at their faces, and Laura rummaged in her bag for a hat. It was a big straw hat that she had borrowed from Ellen, having nothing suitable herself, and unexpectedly Edward bent under it and touched her nose. ‘I believe you’re getting freckles,’ he said. As they walked up the beach back to the house for lunch, Janet put her hand into Laura’s: a sudden shock of sweetness, this touch of small fingers.
A Quiet Life Page 25