‘How would you like to spend the evening?’ The words could have been interpreted as an olive branch, but Laura was in a stubborn mood after what she had sensed was her social failure at lunch, and she failed to take it, shaking her head.
‘I don’t know – I don’t know.’
‘This isn’t my city either, you know,’ he said.
Laura couldn’t agree. The people at the embassy were part of the group, and just as in London she was beginning to recognise that she would never be at home in it.
‘Shall we go and see a film?’ Edward asked.
‘You hate American movies, you’ve told me so.’
‘We can go and see one if you want.’
‘The night we heard,’ she said, ‘you told me you had a message for me. You never told me what it was.’
‘I thought this wasn’t the time. When you’re ready, they want you to go and visit the Botanical Gardens on Tuesday morning, any Tuesday at eleven.’
So all the wheels had gone on turning. ‘This Tuesday is fine,’ she said, and took the glass that Edward held out. ‘Let’s go see that movie.’
Out on F Street there was a rush of energy: too many people, government secretaries, young soldiers desperate for demobilisation, all drunk with the promise of Saturday night, striding in and out of the bars that were brilliant with neon. Laura had forgotten that a city could be like this; all the unquenched lights, the arrogant voices, the unbroken streets. Cinema after cinema had ‘standing room only’ signs, until at last they found one that showed second runs. Edward slept during the movie, but Laura could lose herself for a while in the satisfying dance of a thriller which suggested that people’s secrets are always knowable and explicable. Still, her mood did not lift and when they made love that night, for the first time ever she lost the rhythm of their desire. Their hands, their mouths, their bodies moved against one another, but the energy seemed mechanical. She found herself startlingly apart from Edward even as he came to the crescendo, and as he withdrew her eyes filled with tears. It seemed so wrong that they had gone through the motions without finding one another.
Who goes to the Botanical Gardens in the rain? When Laura saw the wet streets on Tuesday morning she wondered if she should wait for another week, but she remembered how she had always been Stefan’s good girl, clever Pigeon, and that drove her on. She put on a raincoat she had brought from London and found an umbrella. Out of habit she took a circuitous route, studying the map carefully before she left so that she could double back on herself once or twice, but there was nobody looking at her through those sheets of rain. Entering the gardens, she was about to walk around the sodden park and then, realising that such behaviour would be conspicuously odd, she went into the huge conservatory. Here, in her raincoat and scarf, the warmth became oppressive. She was going back towards the entrance when she became aware of someone walking a little more quickly behind her, and she stopped as if admiring the lavish display. Sure enough, the stranger, a short man with an umbrella that he was holding away from his body, came closer. They exchanged the passwords that Laura had been given in London in a half-whisper and went on walking. ‘It’s too quiet here,’ he said, ‘follow me,’ and they went up to the platform in the next room where the drumming of the rain on the roof provided some cover to their words.
Because they were both standing with heads averted, and he was wearing a hat and trench coat, Laura could hardly see him. She turned to get a good look so that she would recognise him at future meetings, and he shook his head and muttered to her not to show such interest.
‘Just in case I—’
‘We won’t be meeting again. I know you worked in England, but it’s too risky here to have you working too. I’ve been asked to thank you.’
‘So this is it?’
‘This is it.’ He was about to move off.
‘Wait – what if there is an emergency? In London I had a code.’
‘You must work through your—’
‘I mean, if he can’t—’
‘Then keep silent. This is a hard place to work. If I have to get in touch with you for any reason, the same password, the name Alex, here at this time.’
There were footsteps on the iron staircase below them, and Laura moved away from him. When she looked back, he was gone. Although she thought she had come reluctantly to this meeting, Laura was surprised at the shock of disappointment she felt after his departure, as she walked on through the hot, damp room. It was as though a thread that bound this Laura here to the Laura she had built up in London over the last few years had been cut. What would now give direction to her days?
She put up her umbrella as she left the park, and started walking back through the driving rain. This time she took a direct route back. Her shoes and stockings were already soaking, and as she walked she became more and more disheartened. She felt that she moved too slowly among these huge lines of brick and stone. Even when she got to the smaller streets near to the apartment, she felt lost in the grid of the city where nobody cared where she was or what she did.
The apartment was empty. Of course it was. Edward left early each morning and then there was only ever Laura herself to put on the radio, to turn it off again, to lie on the sofa and then plump the cushions, to scatter crumbs and wipe them up. She cut herself a sandwich and sat in the sterile kitchen, eating it. When the telephone rang, it sounded loud in the emptiness. Laura had to ask the caller’s name a couple of times before she remembered who Monica was, and why she was asking her to come to a coffee morning the following week to plan a dinner for the charity she supported.
When Laura went along to the coffee morning, she found that her oddness in being an American among the English wives was cancelled out by the fact that Monica took to her. It was that moment when Monica imitated something that Lady Halifax had said and Laura was the only woman in the room to laugh that brought them together. Monica did not take the vaunted charity work all that seriously, but it was an outlet for her energies and Laura was happy enough to execute little duties for the fundraising evening under her direction. Because she was American, Monica assumed she would know her way around Washington, but of course she knew nobody in the city yet. So when Ellen wrote to tell her that Kit had moved to Washington to pursue his vague dream of working on a newspaper, she telephoned him and invited him to the dinner. She was going to be a good sister-in-law, a good Washington wife; she was determined to play her part. Kit accepted the invitation and said he would bring a friend.
But when it came to the charity event itself, a couple of months later, Laura was surprised by how reluctant she felt to go. Edward was to meet her at the Mayflower, and Laura struggled against an odd sense of sick apprehension as she got dressed. She could not cancel, she had to go and greet Kit, who would know nobody else there. But as he entered the huge room, she saw he was not alone. Looking around the room with his eyes narrowed, lighting a cigarette, there was Joe Segal at Kit’s side. ‘Of course,’ Laura said, trying to sound at ease as they came up to greet her, ‘you said you had met in the Navy – how good of you to bring—’
‘Fate!’ Joe said, putting his hands out to touch her shoulders and smiling at her with a physical directness that seemed, despite the passage of years, familiar. His sunburnt skin and closely cropped hair were new, but he was the same man who had broken through the first conversation that she had had with Florence in the smoky bar on the Normandie. As they exchanged pleasantries, his mind was clearly moving on the same path. ‘That girl you were travelling with – what was her name? Do you still see her?’
No, Laura was not going to bring Florence into this crowded room. If you surround someone with silence for long enough, they have a life within you. ‘I was travelling alone. That girl Maisie – is that who you mean? She was a dancer, wasn’t she?’
‘Maisie!’ Joe was immediately eager to share a story with her. ‘I saw her and her sister in a show in London a couple of years later, when I was coming back from France …’ As he ta
lked, Laura remembered how he loved to arrange his experiences into tales, and despite herself she was warmed again by his social energy. Soon Monica came up to them, and had to be told the full story of the strange coincidence, of how Joe and Laura had met years ago, although she was not really listening, because really it was of interest to nobody except Laura and Joe.
When the dinner started, Joe and Kit were at a table with Laura and Edward, and beside them were a department store owner and his wife, and a senator and his wife. The men seemed to expect the women to make the social effort for them, but in fact Kit and Joe were the only ones at the table who bothered to move the conversation on. Laura noticed that Kit seemed almost anxious on Joe’s behalf, eager to introduce him to people and to explain how he worked at the newspaper, to smooth the way for him. She would not have thought of it if Kit’s own social anxiety had not suggested it, but of course, she realised, Joe was out of place here; not only a journalist, but a Jew – not even a rich Jew – and it was only his buoyant social confidence that meant he could be pulled into the evening.
Laura left the table at one point before dessert, and went into the ladies’ room. The reappearance of Joe in her life had left her unmoored; not so much, she thought, because of him as because of the memories he brought with him. She would not speak of the girl with dark hair who bestrode the boat journey in her memory, but she was all about her now. What would she say to Laura, if she were here? Laura was standing by the basins, looking blankly at her own face in the mirror but seeing another’s, when Monica came in too. ‘Goodness, you look awful,’ Monica said with characteristic frankness. ‘What’s up – hungover? Sick? Pregnant?’
‘All three, I think,’ Laura said, but it was only as she spoke that the unconscious knowledge became conscious, pushing like a plant from her body to her mind and voice. The heaviness in her breasts, the sickness in her stomach, the tiredness in her legs; she had not let herself examine those or her missed cycle, but now, in response to Monica, the knowledge became real. She avoided Monica’s eyes, suddenly guilty that she had spoken of it first in this way, and washed her hands as she cut off Monica’s cry of congratulations and made her way back to the dinner.
Now Laura began to lose the ability to concentrate on the conversations that eddied around them. She remembered the night when she thought it must have happened, and it seemed a cruel irony that it had been the only time they had made love and she had not felt close to Edward. She could not respond properly when Kit and Joe got up from the table to say they were leaving, thanking her for the invitation, making plans to see her again. She needed to get away from this crush. When the long evening of speeches and music was over, and just she and Edward were in a cab heading home, she could tell him at last. It took few words, to communicate such a momentous change.
Edward turned to her in the back seat of the taxi and crushed her into his arms. Her nose was so pushed against his shoulder that she could hardly breathe. ‘A new life,’ he whispered into her hair, ‘you are wonderful.’ Laura wanted to feel wonderful, but as she moved her face her hair caught in his watch. She sat forward to untangle it, feeling clumsy for breaking the moment.
3
‘It will be just right for us now.’ They were standing in the narrow hallway of a small house in Georgetown. ‘Don’t you think?’
Watching Edward’s unexpected happiness bloom was the best part of her pregnancy for Laura, and taking possession of this little house was only welcome because of the way that he had found it and presented it to her. Washington was an overcrowded city in those days, but somehow Edward had heard at an embassy function that a John Runcie from the university was moving from Washington to New York for a new job, and had jumped in with uncharacteristic eagerness to ask him what he was planning to do with his Washington house. The agreement was just for a year, but as Edward said, they didn’t really know where they would be in a year’s time anyway.
On this cloudy day, Georgetown looked like a corner of Chelsea or St John’s Wood, he said, and Laura could see how he liked the old-fashioned streets with their flat-fronted houses. He took her through the house room by room, up into the bedroom where she saw he had put a bunch of scentless winter roses, wrapped in cellophane, on the bed. It was the most overtly sentimental gesture that she had ever known from him, and she felt almost embarrassed as she carried them back downstairs to look for a vase in the basement kitchen.
Laura never complained to Edward, but the house was difficult for her from the very beginning. The pregnancy affected her hips, so that walking became painful, especially up and downstairs. While the apartment on Connecticut Avenue had been all on one level, this narrow house had only one or two rooms on each floor: a kitchen in the basement; a living room and dining room as you went into the house; and a bedroom on each floor above. Monica came to visit the next day, and exclaimed how darling the house was, and how lucky they were to get it, but Laura’s first unease settled into genuine irritation as the days passed, and she hauled herself up and down those stairs, up and down.
What made it worse was that Professor Runcie had not fully vacated the house, and his taste in furnishings was not hers. Faded, coloured rugs covered every floor, there were old oil paintings on every wall, tapestry cushions on velvet chairs, and despite the high ceilings and big sash windows, there was a general impression of dimness. The kitchen, which no doubt he had rarely used, was small and dark, with a worrying smell of damp. He had left his personality behind in shelves and shelves of books on political science and modern history, many of them, Laura was only half amused to see, about the Soviet Union, and in every drawer there seemed to be little traces of him – the odd handkerchief or old envelope, inkless pen or faded postcard.
Once they had moved into this house, Edward made the effort to come home earlier, and with the help of Kathy, a daily maid she had found, Laura tried to prepare meals for them in the evenings. She started working her way determinedly through an old cookbook she found in the kitchen, but since Edward never seemed to care what he ate, she soon began to repeat the easiest meals. Steak, meatloaf and roast chicken were repeated on a loop in that kitchen.
One night she had served meatloaf for the third time that week, and could hardly eat any of it. Ever since her pregnancy had started, there had been a metallic taste in her mouth, and although she nibbled at saltines and ginger cookies all day, she found most food unappetising. She sat with an empty plate as Edward ate, sipping a glass of cold white wine. ‘I had a letter from Sybil today,’ she told him. ‘She’s pregnant too.’
‘Yes, Toby told me.’
Laura commented on what a coincidence it was, but her voice sounded dull. When Edward asked her how she was feeling, she found it hard to express herself.
‘It’s funny, waiting for someone, and you know that when they arrive, everything is going to change.’
‘Why not come out a bit more, though, while you still can,’ he said, finishing his meatloaf and reaching for the salad. ‘Someone telephoned through an invitation to the newspaper man Whiteley’s party tomorrow, that house on S Street. I’ll tell you who will be there from home: Amy Parker – Amy Sandall now – she’s over here. You remember Amy, I’m sure you met her during the war. We never go to parties – but there are parties all the time here now.’
Laura said that she had never really met Amy – though of course she remembered her, disembarking the Normandie with her hat like a little flag, entering Sybil’s house in a white coat, sitting in the Dorchester in monochrome. She wondered why she was over in the States, and was surprised when Edward told her that she had married again, for a third time, to an American who wanted to get into politics. ‘You can’t stay in for the next three months. That’s why you’re feeling low, with nothing to do.’
All day Laura toyed with the idea of going to the party, and she even went out to a hairdresser in the afternoon. There had been a half-hearted snowfall in the morning, but it was already turning to slush on the sidewalks, falling in dirty
streaks off the Dupont Circle fountains. She looked into the shop windows; blush lace underwear in the window of Jean Matou, a crocodile handbag … pretty colours, soft textures, but she couldn’t summon up the energy to go in and see them more closely. In the hairdresser’s mirror, which only showed her from the chest up, she could almost slip into her other self, the girl who used to watch herself with expectation in mirrors and shop windows, wondering what people were thinking about her. The woman next to her, middle-aged with dyed aubergine hair, caught her eye in their reflection and smiled at her. ‘That style suits you,’ she said in a foreign voice, nodding at the way the hairdresser had cut Laura’s hair to just below her ears, ‘much better than when you came in.’ But when she came home to put on a grey cocktail dress that Ellen had sent her in a box of clothes she had worn in her own pregnancy, Laura felt another wave of nausea, and she telephoned Edward and told him she was too unwell to go out.
A bunch of pinks that she had left too long smelt stagnant on the hall table when she went downstairs to make herself a cup of tea, and she picked up the vase and took it down to the kitchen. The stems dripped on the grey dress as she took out the flowers. As she was walking up the long stairs to bed, pain radiated through her pelvis; she unzipped the dress and left it in a heap on the floor, and lay in her underwear on top of the bedclothes, her hands on her belly. Edward did not come in until the small hours, but although Laura woke when he got into bed, she could not stir herself to speak to him. The next morning, however, when she heard the sound of the shower, she dragged herself out of bed to make him coffee and ask how his evening had been.
‘We went on to another party – Amy is wild.’ Edward shook his head. Laura was puzzled. He must have seen a side of that collected woman that she could hardly imagine.
‘Did she get very drunk?’
‘Not just drunk. They were going on again when we left. Monica and Archie gave up when I did, though. Your brother-in-law Kit was there too. Someone said he is aiming to get into journalism. He doesn’t seem the type, to me.’
A Quiet Life Page 27