‘Back to work next week,’ he said. And as Sybil and Toby came back into the room together, he spoke about it as if with satisfaction; something really senior again, Head of the American Department in London. Laura dropped the lens cap she was holding. Alice was asking for a scone, and she moved to the tea table to butter one, and to pour milk for the children.
‘Jam?’ Laura asked Alice, and Sybil told her that the children didn’t have jam on their scones, while at the same time Laura could hear Toby was suggesting dinner to celebrate, and Laura was relieved when Edward said they would get back to Patsfield.
The train was crowded at this time, London spilling its workers back into the suburbs before gathering them in again the next day, and it felt impossible to talk with those men and women listening to every word as they read their newspapers and sweated into their dark suits and dresses. But Edward always left the car at the station, and as they drove home through the midge-laden dusk, he could tell her more about the job. She heard the energy return to his voice; it would mean going back to the centre of things, she realised, he would have knowledge again, he would be precious again. Apprehension gathered in her as he spoke.
Back in the kitchen, Laura took some chops out of the icebox. She could not be bothered to peel potatoes, but the bread she had bought the day before was still soft, and there were ripe tomatoes for a salad, the remains of a cauliflower cheese that she had cooked the day before that could warm through in the oven. He stood looking out of the window as she moved around the kitchen, looking into the garden where the shadows were lengthening under the trees.
‘So you start next week—’
‘You remember Stefan—’
Their voices tangled, and then Edward’s statement that Stefan wanted to see her fell into the silence she left.
‘I won’t,’ she said.
As if he was reassuring her, Edward told her that he hadn’t been followed, and neither was Stefan, that they had met for a few seconds on the way to Lvov’s rooms this morning. Laura could not understand why he was talking in such detail – it was not allowed, and she said again, ‘I won’t.’
Edward rubbed his hands over his eyes. ‘We couldn’t have known.’ His statement was ambiguous, and Laura chose not to straighten it out. Left as it was, it might suggest that he knew Laura had told Alex about Joe, but that she could not have foreseen the outcome; that he believed she was not to blame. How she longed for that to be the case.
She went to the icebox and got out a bottle of wine. ‘Just one?’
They drank together, as the chops sizzled in the pan.
‘I’ll tell you something else – Archie’s coming to London too. Monica will be pleased, won’t she?’ Edward was clearly responding to Laura’s desire to change the subject, and she tried to join in, discussing with him how much Monica disliked Washington, how good it would be to see them again. They went on talking inconsequentially as she dished up the supper, and then as they ate Laura finally said what was on her mind, what had been on her mind for so long.
‘If you wanted to, would there be another way – I mean, could you—?’
‘There isn’t a way out, for me. But I’ll tell Stefan you won’t meet him again.’
‘Is that really true? Is there no other way for you?’
‘How could there be? I’m sorry, though. For you.’
It was hard to hear him say that, and to realise how alone he must feel now, in his pursuit of his goal. Laura could not tell if he had also lost faith that the goal could be there, ahead, on the infinitely receding horizon. ‘Don’t be sorry for me,’ she said.
‘But you regret it all, don’t you? You wish you’d never started. Never met me.’
This honesty was a place they had never been before, a place beyond all the fury and drunkenness in Washington, beyond their recent politeness and their attempts to create a show of a new life. Laura pushed her chair back and its wooden feet caught on the slate floor with a horrible squeal. She took his plate. His hand went out to the wine bottle. She put the plate down and covered his hand with hers.
‘No. I don’t.’ As soon as she said it, she realised it was true. Up to now in Patsfield, although she had been playing the part of the dutiful wife, she had not been doing so with any conviction; really she had felt that she was only playing a temporary role, biding time until Edward was back on his feet. But tonight, as she saw how he was trying to make something good and decent for them, even within the trap they had made for themselves, she was filled with pity and protectiveness. Any mistakes he had made, after all, she had also made – and worse. The disintegration was mutual. It was not something he had brought upon her. And then she wondered, hot on the heels of the softening she felt, was she the drag on his happiness now? Would he feel freer without her? ‘Do you regret me?’ she made herself say, matching his honesty with hers. He took his hand from hers.
‘I’ve made many mistakes in my life,’ he said, as his hand grasped the wine bottle and poured both of them the last of the wine. ‘Loving you was not one of them.’
Laura bent and kissed him, and he stood up and took her properly in his arms. In that moment, she was ready to find him again, and they went upstairs. It had been a long time since they had made love, and it was a different journey from the ones they had made in the past. She undressed him, undoing the buttons of his shirt, the cold buckle of his belt, as he undressed her, both of them finding the warmth of flesh and shuddering with the intimacy of the touch. They did not fumble and rush, half dressed, tumbling towards their orgasm, she allowed him to be fully naked and herself to be naked with him. Now that he was no longer drinking heavily, his skin smelled as it had done when they had first met, she realised, as she moved her mouth down his throat and chest; it had that fresh scent she remembered, something like apple peel. From time to time she was afraid of losing the shape of her desire, in this newly gentle exploration, but in the end she found the lines of her own pleasure, flowing through his responses. There was a moment, as she straddled him and he entered her from below, when she realised that they did not have to spin stars out of one another to find one another. It was different, but it was the same. It was no longer being overtaken by desire for her golden hero. They came together as equals, bringing one another through the waves of pleasure, and just at the moment of her orgasm, she lost the bitter consciousness of her divided self, she was no longer separated from herself or from him.
4
A few weeks later, in the height of summer, Sybil and Winifred came down to Patsfield one Saturday with Sybil’s children. Edward was in Rome for a conference and Laura had spent the week working on the house. They did not seem to have much money left in the bank even though Edward’s salary had now been restarted, but she had spent some of it on new curtains – olive green and dark blue – and a tea table that could go on the terrace. A climbing rose on the west wall had burst into great red splurges, and she had picked some of the bigger flowers and put them in a bowl in the hall. Inside and outside the summer scents wove together. There was no point, she thought, in trying to pretend that the house was like Sybil’s, a great accretion of intently hoarded possessions, but she tried to make it into a pretty frame for that summer day.
Sybil was happy for the children to sit for more photographs, and this time Laura knew it was going well. They sat among the geraniums in the wild borders, and she took close-ups of George squatting down looking seriously at a beetle he had found on a leaf, with Alice kneeling beside him. There was the evanescent sweetness that everyone wants to associate with children – there, in Alice’s wide eyes and George’s pointing finger.
After the pictures were done, Sybil let the children hide with their tea in the spaces behind the dark laurels at the back of the garden, while the women sat on the terrace. Laura had bought a fruitcake at a recent village fete, and they ate it while drinking the Earl Grey tea she had ordered from the village grocer. Sybil seemed unconscious of the effort she had made, which Laura took as a kind
of tribute, but Winifred looked at her in an appraising way.
‘You are the good housewife, aren’t you? I suppose you’re not thinking of working?’
What work could I possibly do, Laura thought, imagining herself in an office now, inexperienced and ignorant. ‘It’s not like during the war, is it? In Washington, none of the wives worked.’
‘But aren’t you bored to death out here? I wouldn’t have thought village life was quite your thing. Does Edward think that you are his mother?’
Laura found Winifred’s directness invigorating. It was the idea that she had been thinking about her at all, had been wondering whether Laura was doing the right thing, which touched her.
‘It’s so much better for Edward coming down here in the evenings and weekends rather than staying in London – you know how he went under before.’
‘But you do have a life too. Wouldn’t it be more fun to be living in town? I saw Monica and Archie the other day, they said they knew you in Washington, that you were out every night there.’
Of course Winifred would know Monica and Archie, Laura thought. That was the way of the group; everyone knew everyone else. Laura said that she might look for something to do the following year, if everything was going well. She started to tell anecdotes about her efforts to fit in with village life. ‘I’ve promised to do some baking for a coffee morning next week, but as for me and cakes …’
‘I can come and teach you,’ said Sybil, surprising her. ‘It’s the only thing I can do in the whole world. Daddy didn’t think anything of education for girls, but he packed me off to a cordon bleu cooking course when I was eighteen. I still do some of it, I’m not bad – I’ll teach you how to amaze the wives of Patsfield with some fancy confections if you like. Also, Nina asked if you would come and photograph her son one day? She saw those pictures you did of us before and liked them – so much better, she said, than some she paid a fortune for in a Mayfair studio.’
This was unexpected. Laura did not know that Nina was married. Sybil explained that it was some much older divorced man whom Sybil had known all her life, and Laura could tell that she disapproved. Laura could not bear to think of going to Nina’s house, putting her and her son at ease, setting up her camera. In a stalling aside, she said she was thinking of charging for taking photographs.
‘Do you need to?’ Sybil asked.
‘I was thinking of making a little darkroom out here in that outbuilding. It would make it more of a project, you know, if I could charge a little bit – not much, obviously.’
‘I wouldn’t worry about how much,’ Sybil said. Just at that moment the children’s shouts from the back of the garden disturbed her, and she got up to check on them. The garden was physically richer when children were playing in it, Laura was thinking: you noticed the sticks on the ground they were sorting; you noticed the dandelion clocks they picked, the daisies they made into chains, the ladybugs they tried to catch – small things that were normally passed over. She was wondering how she could show that in photographs, the lines of sight that children brought with them, but Winifred was talking to her now, asking her how Edward’s sessions with Lvov were going.
Laura didn’t really know any more than that Lvov had written a report that had cleared Edward for work, but had asked if he would continue to come and see him. ‘He can’t wait to stop, says it’s all so self-indulgent.’
‘Giles loves it, he’s always trying to encourage me to go, but I don’t think I’d have a whole lot to say. I’m not like these men with their wicked secrets.’ Winifred must still believe that Edward’s problems were sexual, Laura realised. She needed to confront that now, to tell Winifred how mistaken she was. There must be a way to put her right without divulging other secrets. But just as she began to speak, Winifred was talking about how she was off to Geneva the following week and why didn’t Edward and Laura come and stay with her in the late summer. They could swim and walk in the mountains; they would enjoy the scenery. Laura liked the idea. Her mother and Aunt Dee had gone to school near Geneva when they were young women; she remembered seeing an old photograph of them against a picture postcard background of exquisite peaks. There was something so clean and charming about mountains in the sun. Winifred must be looking forward to moving there, Laura said.
Winifred agreed, clearly excited about it. She started to talk about the need for countries to come together in the face of the threat of atomic war, the importance of the United Nations – ‘as an idea,’ she said intently, ‘whatever we manage in practice’. Laura would have liked to know more about what Winifred thought of the American domination of the United Nations, but as Sybil came back the conversation moved towards the personal. It was Winifred’s new boyfriend Peter, apparently, who worked for the British mission in Geneva, who had found her this opening there. She would like Sybil and Laura to meet Peter some time. He was the son of old Bennett, Sybil must know who she meant, who used to be in the diplomatic service before the war.
That Bennett, Sybil remembered, whose house was near theirs in Derbyshire? Hadn’t he had to resign in disgrace, though? That was all nonsense, Winifred said; Peter said he had taken the rap for someone else. So the conversation drifted into the social meanderings where Sybil was happiest; anecdotes were told that framed people in the group, judgements were handed down, until Winifred said she had to go, she was meeting a friend later. She got into the little car she drove, blowing a kiss to Laura out of the window, making her promise she would see her soon in Geneva.
Laura expected her departure to trigger Sybil and the children to leave too, but Sybil showed no sign of wanting to go. As the children scrambled back under the rhododendrons and out of sight at the back of the garden, she went on sitting on the terrace, crumbling a last slice of fruitcake. The sun was weaker now and Laura was cold, but she was also pleased that Sybil wanted to stay. She had never got over that sense that Sybil looked down on her; that Sybil felt that however long Laura was married to Edward, however well she served tea in her English garden, she would never belong inside the group. But now, by showing no sign of wanting to go, it was as though Sybil had decided to move for a moment into Laura’s world.
‘Don’t let Winifred make you feel unsatisfied with your life,’ she said, clearly thinking about Winifred’s critical observations. ‘Obviously you have to look after Edward right now.’
Laura was glad that Sybil wanted to support her, but she had to admit that she thought Winifred had a point. After all, it was not as though she had children. She had only this house, this garden, empty while Edward was at work. She said something about how it was different for Sybil, who had a family to look after.
‘Well, I don’t do that much – Nanny does most of that side, you know. Which is a blessing, given that they run rings around me. I can’t understand how she keeps them under control.’
Laura had never heard Sybil say anything against herself, anything that suggested that she was not entirely the arbiter of all that was good. She quickly moved into the role that Sybil was presumably asking her to occupy, that of reassurance, telling her how beautifully the children were behaving. But Sybil’s voice in response was raw.
‘Because you’re here. That’s why I can’t face going home till bedtime, when Nanny will be back from her day off. They’ll just rampage if it’s only me and them. I don’t know why – it’s as though they sense some weakness in me. They know I can’t say no to anything.’
Laura reassured her again, saying that wasn’t weakness, it was love, a mother’s love.
‘I don’t know.’ Laura knew that Sybil’s own mother had died when Sybil was very young, but she would not have dared to mention that herself. It was Sybil who gestured towards that knowledge. ‘I just don’t know whether I can be that. I didn’t have it. And Toby, he’s like my father, he hardly sees them. Not that they seem to care. They only like one another.’
Laura was disoriented by this new Sybil, angry and vulnerable, sitting there on the terrace because she was relu
ctant to go home with her children. She knew that she should feel sorry for her, but in some way Laura felt energised; Sybil had always been so confident, so removed from Laura’s own awkwardness and mistakes, but now the power balance in their relationship seemed to be shifting. Sybil was still talking, and for some reason she was talking about Edward and Toby and their mother. Laura and Edward had been up to see Mrs Last in her new home the previous week, and Laura had found the visit excruciating. ‘Of course she can’t bear us, taking her sons away,’ Sybil said grimly. Laura asked whether that was it, and said that Mrs Last didn’t seem to care much about whether Edward was happy or not; she didn’t seem to care for him at all.
Sybil was silent for a moment, and then her words were puzzling to Laura. ‘The first time I met her, there was something so strange in the atmosphere – it was as though … Laura, can I say something? When I got to know Edward, I’m not sure, I felt …’ Laura was held, riveted by the sense of a confession coming. ‘It’s been on my mind so long,’ Sybil went on, and then she stood up without warning. ‘Alice! Stop that!’
The children’s play had degenerated; there was shouting, tears, stamped feet and folded arms. Sybil rushed forward and tried to find out what had gone wrong, and tried to make Alice say sorry to George, but Laura could see how the children screened out her words, that her repeated reprimands were melting before their intransigence. In the end Sybil had to drag George towards the car, as he yelled in crescendos. Laura heard her muttered threats, felt her embarrassment, and tried to look as though it was all nothing, that she had hardly noticed the children’s bad behaviour.
When the children were both pushed into the car, Sybil got into the front seat and Laura saw her shoulders sag as she got out the key. But she rolled down the window. ‘Thank you for a lovely afternoon,’ she said, reverting to her usual formal manner. ‘Sorry it had to end so abruptly.’
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