After lunch, Tom insisted on tennis, and Laura remembered Edward and Giles playing at Sutton, and recognised echoes of the upper class from England to America – serious about their games, honing what they thought was character with boats and bats and rackets. As she sat with Ellen and Mother and Janet, she heard the men laughing as they reached for the balls and argued over points. She walked over to watch them and saw that now Edward seemed to have lost some of the weight he was carrying, he and the others were as full of their physicality as children. But it was not childish, she knew; there was status at stake as they drove the balls to one another, and she was disproportionately glad that her husband was prepared to join in these games that were only superficially trivial.
After the game Edward looked at her, his eyes crinkling around the edges. They went hurriedly upstairs, and before dressing for dinner made hungry love. What did it remind her of, the absolute surrender to his sun-warmed body? Lying there in the aftermath, she remembered. ‘It’s like that summer at Sutton in the phoney war,’ she said.
‘It’s always the phoney war,’ Edward said, and his words were enigmatic to her.
‘Why were you so awful last night?’
Edward looked puzzled. He had got out of bed and was standing naked by the closet, looking for a clean shirt. ‘Was I?’
‘Don’t wear a tie tonight—’
‘You have to wear a tie with a shirt like this.’
‘Please. You sounded so distracted last night.’
‘Was I? I’m sorry if I wasn’t much fun. I’ll be more on top of things tonight. Washington tires you out. It’s the heat, I think, and—’
‘I know, I’ve been so tired too. I think it is coming away from the war.’
‘That reminds me,’ Edward said, ‘I’ve got a message for you. It’s not Stefan, it’s—’
‘I don’t want to hear it tonight,’ Laura said. ‘Tell me tomorrow.’ It wasn’t that she had given up on the work, but something in her wanted to hold onto the mood of their love-making, the rinsed, voluptuous summer mood, for a few more hours.
But it was pointless for her to wish for pleasure, because the telephone that was now ringing in the hall was ringing for Mother, with news of Father’s death. The summer’s promise was already withdrawn.
What a horrible fraud Laura felt, sitting with Ellen and Mother through the long night in the first rush of their grief. The beat of guilt rather than sadness drummed through her. Why had she not gone straight to Stairbridge when they arrived, rather than following Edward to Washington and then coming out to the coast to see Ellen? Why had she not realised that it was not Father’s laziness that prevented him from coming to join Mother here? Why had she not come home years ago, to see if she could salvage some kind of relationship from the years of disappointment and misunderstanding? What kind of daughter had she been? She could say little of all this to the others, of course, because when she began to speak of her guilt, she could see in their eyes that they agreed she had done wrong.
The next day they began to prepare for the journey back to Stairbridge. Tom was all busyness, arranging to come with them, and telling Kit to close up the house, as they would not be back that summer. Laura went upstairs to pack her few things, the couple of new cotton dresses, the white sandals, the paperbacks she had bought for the summer. Edward was sitting on the bed as she packed, and she came over to him, letting him hold her, but she could not relax into his arms. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘You go back to Washington. I know you can’t get time off work. I’ll let you know when the funeral will be and you can come for the day.’
‘Is that all right?’ he asked, but there was relief in his voice.
2
The church was not empty. Custom and expectation cover up a man’s worst failures, and although Laura had little awareness of her father’s friends or the sporadic work he had done here and there, designing renovations for houses on the cheap, he had left enough of a trail through ordinary society for a number of people to be sitting with them the following Wednesday for his funeral.
Edward was not beside her; he had been called back to London, absurdly, for a huge conference of European leaders. He was skimming the skies with Halifax on an aeroplane while she was grounded in Stairbridge, trying to recognise familiar faces in the small group of people who came back to their childhood home for drinks after the funeral. Hands clutched hers, voices asked her about her husband. She found herself standing with two elderly men who, she thought, had once done building work to her father’s designs. Their conversation stuttered to a stop, and then she found that the two men were talking, instead, about the bombs. They could not find it in their hearts to be sorry about the deaths in Japan; one had a son who had been standing by to go across. Oh, it was kill or die, the other said, and then they realised how inappropriate their conversation might sound to Laura, and stopped. She smiled at them, and walked on.
The house itself was looking so much better than she remembered. Grandfather’s legacy had been put to good use here. Laura did not like Mother’s taste, but at least the veneer cabinets with their spindly legs and the yellow sofas were shiny and new, and there was clean decking at the back door and lilies in green vases on the mantelpieces. But even now there was a smell she remembered – what was it? Maybe the scent of the brewery blowing from the west of the town or rotting food from the trash outside the kitchen door, something bitter that the perfume of the lilies could not cover.
There was a photograph album out on the tables. Laura did not want to look at it, but at one point Ellen passed it to her, and she saw herself standing next to Father on the front steps in a forgotten green dress. Before Grandfather’s legacy had transformed her life, it had been her only party dress, and even that had been passed down from Ellen. ‘Look at you, so young,’ Mother said. She said it in a longing voice, as if they were looking at a picture of happiness. But the picture … the picture. Laura put it down.
She had forgotten that evening – no, you never forget, but you bury it deep – the night of her high school dance, how she had longed not to be the symbol of social failure. At least a boy was taking her to it, even if it was only Walt Eaves. She could not stand his flat-footed walk and the way he talked down to Cristel, their coloured maid, but at least he had asked her, it was a chance. The evening had been horrible enough – when he kissed her it was like being choked, and she had pushed him away and said, let’s go in, Father will be waiting. And he was, but as soon as they came in she saw it, she smelt it, the drink, the stumbling, and Father came too close to her, and asked what she had been up to – it was as if she had to be shamed. She would not follow the memory, down the path where Walt had looked at her with pity in his stupid eyes. Her shame – she would not allow it. How could they grieve, she thought, looking at Ellen and Mother mouthing their platitudes? The perfect façade of drinking their tea and telling half-hearted stories about Father’s favourite books would keep all the memories hidden in the dark. But the stain was spreading now in Laura’s mind, and she felt her hand shake as she picked up her cup of tea: she could not swallow it and had to put it down.
After the guests had left, they sat in the living room facing one another on the new long sofas. ‘You must come to us in Boston,’ Ellen was saying to Mother, returning to a theme that she had already opened up the previous day. ‘There’s lots of room for you. Janet will love to have you with us.’
‘It seems an awful lot for you – and for Tom.’ With Mother’s words, a gap opened in the conversation for Laura to make some offer. But she said nothing.
‘You should come back with us tomorrow,’ Ellen said again, pressing.
‘But there’s so much to do here …’ Mother gestured to the rooms around her.
‘You can come back and sort out Father’s things when you’ve had a break. You can’t do it all when you’re still in such shock. Laura or I will come back with you next month.’
Laura was still sitting in her puddle of silence. She saw
a glance pass between Ellen and Mother. She got up and picked up the teacups and took them into the kitchen. She stood at the window, looking down the street where the trees seemed dusty now at the end of summer. How often had she looked down at that view! Yet she remembered it being larger than this, the houses more looming. She realised she had dreamt about this street since she had left, and in her dreams it had had such an aura of menace that now the reality seemed oddly quotidian. She would not stay, now that her path away was clear. She went back to the living room. ‘Is there any brandy?’ she said. ‘Couldn’t we all do with some?’
On her way back to Washington, the inertia she had felt throughout the funeral stayed with her. Perhaps over the last six years she had become too used to the small scale of the English countryside, its low skies and patterned fields, because as she looked out of the train window on the way back to the city, she felt she could hardly comprehend the scale: everything looked too big and the train seemed to be tiny, scuttling through the hills and forests. And the entry into Washington itself overwhelmed her – the humid, dirty air as she left the station, the pulse and roar of the traffic. She had hardly taken in the city in their first weeks there; just the wholeness of the streets and all the brash colour in the store windows had been strange enough without noticing any details. But in the taxi back to their apartment in Connecticut Avenue she felt she was passing through streets built on too massive a scale, oppressive in their inhuman size. Except for the apartment itself, which was miniature, a little box with a clattering tiled floor. They were lucky to have it, she knew. The city was crowded. Everyone was flocking here, to the heart of the new empire.
Laura looked into the icebox, where there was nothing but some sliced cheese and a half-drunk bottle of gin, and ate and drank some of both. The air in the apartment was thick and even when she opened the windows she felt as though she could hardly breathe. It was one of those heavy days she had already come to know in Washington, when the heat beat back off the pavements all day and into the night. Away to the south, dark clouds hung in the sky and the light seemed brassy, but even when the storm broke she knew that the pressure would hardly lift. The tastes of the gin and the cheese went badly together, and she felt nauseous, sitting on the sofa and listening to the radio with a magazine on her lap when Edward’s key turned in the door late that evening. He bent to hold her, but she was unmoving in his embrace, feeling the sweat spring between their arms where they touched. ‘I am so sorry I didn’t get to the funeral,’ he said.
Laura told him it didn’t matter, and asked him for news of London. She would much rather hear about their friends there than talk about her childhood home. Edward started telling some story about how hard Toby was finding life without his parliamentary seat, but Laura was slow to respond. ‘Your mother, how is she taking it?’ Edward asked.
‘No different from what one might expect. Have you eaten?’
‘I’ve been eating round the corner. Let’s go.’
They had gone to this restaurant on their first night in Washington, but now the steaks seemed quite a normal size rather than some absurd mistake, larger than a week’s ration. At least here the air conditioning blew hard and cooled the sweat on their cheeks. Because it was so noisy it did not matter that Laura found it hard to talk, and Edward had other stories of their friends in London, as well as plans for the next few weeks. ‘I’ve got an invitation for you to the embassy luncheon this Saturday,’ he remembered at one point. ‘I was going to reply for you and say no, but then I thought maybe you’d like to have something to do – I mean, something different, new people to meet. Remind me to give the note to you.’
As they walked back, the thunder sounded and rain began to steam on the sidewalks. Neither of them had brought an umbrella, and when Laura caught sight of them in the lobby mirror as they went into the apartment block she was struck by how bedraggled they looked, her damp hair sticking to her face and her mascara smudged. Before they went to bed, Edward gave the note to her, a few impersonal lines from Lady Halifax. Laura looked at it and wondered if it would be a formal affair, but Edward said not, and that he would go over there early as Halifax liked a game of doubles before lunch. Laura turned that over in her mind: that pale, thin man playing tennis with his subalterns in the embassy garden. Strangely, she dreamt about it that night, but in her dreams Edward and the other men were playing with snowballs – ‘Don’t worry, your lordship!’ he was saying as they melted in the sun. ‘Your point, I think!’ She walked onto the court in the dream, and a snowball landed on her arm, but as it melted it left a red stain.
The next morning as Edward was about to go out of the door, he suddenly stopped. ‘Do you have the reply for Lady Halifax?’
‘I thought you’d tell them I’d be coming—’
‘If she writes, you have to write.’
He waited while Laura found a piece of paper to scrawl her acceptance on; the ink smudged, but she folded it anyway and pushed it into an envelope.
That Saturday, after Edward had left for his game of tennis, Laura found herself going through her closet without relish. The couple of summer dresses she had bought to take to Ellen’s house in Portstone seemed out of the question – they were too obviously vacation clothes – but her entire wartime wardrobe was also impossible with its shabby, skimpy lines. So she took out the only possible things she had: the clothes she had bought in Stairbridge for the funeral, a pleated black silk skirt and tight black jacket with elbow-length sleeves.
She walked the short distance over to Massachusetts Avenue, past well-kept houses with liriope and pansies blossoming by their front steps, smoking a cigarette, barely noticing the river flashing among the richly coloured trees. In the aftermath of the storm the weather had cooled a little, but in the embassy garden the air was unstirring around the English women on the garden terrace, all of them dressed in similar printed dresses, whether they were in their twenties or their sixties.
‘Mr Last is just finishing a game with my husband. He’s rather pleased that they have players for doubles now,’ Lady Halifax told Laura when they were introduced, folding her mouth down at the end of each sentence.
‘Yes, Edward likes it too – it was always hard in London to find a chance to play.’
‘Hard on the chaps if there isn’t an opportunity.’
‘It was hard in London,’ agreed another woman. ‘Very nice here, Lady Halifax, to have the space, you know.’
‘The garden is really the thing.’
‘It is, isn’t it? The garden really is something.’
‘Awfully special,’ another woman agreed, and so they went on, with Laura echoing alongside them.
When the men came up onto the terrace, however, the chorus faltered for a while.
‘Ah, so this is Mrs Last,’ said Lord Halifax, with that accidental charm that his wife failed to show. ‘And you are a born American – how nice for you to be able to come home.’
‘I grew up near Boston, not here,’ said Laura.
‘Yes, it’s rather different in America, isn’t it? So big – a native of one city feels quite out of place in another …’ Lady Halifax went on talking, and her female chorus backed her with a twitter of sentences about how different every American city is, but how if you are born in one part of England all of it is your home.
At lunch Laura was seated between two men of about Edward’s age. One of them, Archie Platt, turned to her with immediate good manners. He was fairish and tall. It was only really his poor skin, which was reddening and pimpled, which made him unattractive.
‘So, the wife of the golden boy joins us at last!’ Laura knew she should be pleased to hear Edward described that way, although she wondered whether there wasn’t a hint of mockery in Archie’s voice. ‘Last can do no wrong, you know. Not just with his backhand, either. Tell me, Last, how did you manage to write that report last week when we weren’t even allowed notebooks in the meeting? It was so top secret,’ he said, turning back to Laura, ‘that the Americans
said we couldn’t write anything in the room, but Last seemed to recall every detail. I must say I was still struggling to tell one American from another.’
Although Archie’s praise was lavish, Laura felt a particular kind of English game at work, which she had got to know in London. It was that game in which it was subtly suggested that it was bad form for the person being praised to be trying so hard to succeed, and that the one who was praising was in fact holding the power, even as he seemed to be putting himself down, by showing that he didn’t have to make such efforts. She was pleased when Archie’s wife Monica joined the conversation and moved it on, asking Laura what she was planning to do in Washington and whether she was going to get involved in charity work. Her horsey face, brightly made up, was smiling, but Laura had to say that she didn’t have any plans, and then was afraid that she might have sounded rude. ‘Do please find something for me to do,’ she said.
‘Gosh, you’ll be able to take your choice, then – it’s all funds for the wounded with me, and all displaced children if you go with Veronica. Stick with me, our supporters are much more fun,’ she said.
Laura nodded, but after a while she heard Edward mentioning to Lady Halifax that she had recently suffered a bereavement. ‘My condolences, Mrs Last,’ her fluting voice came down the table. Laura wondered why Edward, who was usually so private, had put her misery on show. After that she made even less effort to join the conversation, and sat there turning over her food with a fork, feeling like a black crow among the chattering English flocks.
When they got home, late in the afternoon, a silence fell between them. Edward walked towards the drinks cabinet. Laura asked if he really needed another drink, and wondered at the shrewish tone that seemed to have come into her voice. He put down the bottle of whisky.
A Quiet Life Page 26