‘You were going to say something – about Edward?’
But the moment had passed. Sybil shook her head and put the key in the ignition.
Learning to bake, learning to develop her photographs, learning to prune the roses – as the weeks went on Laura began to appreciate these little physical triumphs over the shapelessness of the world. Deep within her was a sense that she and Edward did not deserve happiness now. But gradually she realised she was still determined to find some kind of contentment anyway, and maybe this was the way one built it, day by day, out of small pleasures and gentleness. It was on a fall day she had spent digging holes in the cold earth to plant what seemed absurd numbers of snowdrop, scilla and white narcissus bulbs alongside a taciturn gardener from the village, that she found herself counting days in her head, noting the changes, the sickness, the heaviness in her body, and realised she was pregnant again. When Edward came in she was in the kitchen, washing the earth from her hands in the sink, wearing a green sweater of his over an old grey dress.
On the kitchen table were some prints of the photographs that she had taken of Sybil’s children, and as Edward stood there drinking lemonade he started to look at them. ‘Funny to think that you started taking pictures of documents, and now this.’
He was looking at a photograph of Sybil’s son. It was one of the best pictures she had ever taken, Laura thought, with a very shallow depth of field so that all one’s attention was drawn to the boy’s wide eyes and slightly parted mouth. He was glancing off to one side, as if he had seen somebody he was delighted to look at. There was an inviting charm in that glance that she knew any mother would love. Under it was another that Laura had printed off to look at, although she knew she would not give it to Sybil. This time there was anger in George’s pursed mouth, and his curly hair made him look impish. Beside him was a dandelion clock, and the perspective made the dandelion as big as his head.
Edward held it up. ‘You are good, aren’t you?’
Laura said something about how mothers liked her photographs, because they captured time that passed too fast. And then she told Edward her news. The expression in his eyes was so hopeful, it hurt her.
She put the radio on, as they often did over dinner so that they did not have to think of new stories to fill all the silences, and some piano music that Laura thought she recognised fell into the room. ‘Didn’t you play that once?’ she asked, and then, struck by that thought, she suggested that they should get a piano, so that their child could learn as Edward once had. He agreed, and asked her about her plans for the darkroom in the garden. She realised, as they talked and she heated the soup and the pie she had bought from the village shop, that the news of the pregnancy had made this quiet life feel like the beginning of something rather than the end. When they were in bed that night, Laura felt a new current of exploration driving her pleasure, as if she had found a kind of confidence in her body, a confidence that she had not known before, and when Edward tried to enter her from behind she pulled herself up and turned over, embracing him again as she wanted to be embraced, and insisting through her movements that he follow her.
Those bulbs that Laura had planted with such effort did not do very well on their first spring outing. The scillas all began to raise their heads through the soil, but the snowdrops hardly made any appearance to speak of. When she asked the gardener what had gone wrong, he was clear. ‘They are hard to raise from bulbs, you should have ordered them in the green,’ he said. ‘Order them now and you can plant them later in the spring, and then next year you’ll have a pretty display.’
Laura felt irritated that he hadn’t given her this advice before, and annoyed that the display she was hoping for hadn’t arrived. But then, as she went back into the house, leaving the gardener to tie in the rambling roses, she turned and looked back into the green space and imagined how it would look next year with the snowdrops in bloom, and the year after, when the pear tree she had planted would be lifting its head above the walls. This rhythm is sustaining, she thought. Although she did not feel the mad rush she used to feel at the onset of spring, the sense of the inexorable march of the seasons and the turn of the year was in some way allied to the new life in her belly.
And out in the garden was now her own little room, her darkroom. To her, it had become the heart of the house. Whenever she went up to town for lunch with Sybil or Monica, or to the theatre or a concert with Edward, coming back to Patsfield it was always the darkroom that seemed to be pulling her home. She had no illusions about her talent for photography; it was not great, but she had the enthusiast’s ability to stick with it, to take advice, to practise, to do something that was just good enough to make it worthwhile.
She went on photographing mainly children, and the narrowness of her subject matter bore fruit, since that was the one area where other women were prepared to pay her to do a good job. In April she had completed a session with Monica’s daughters, who were now twelve and ten. It had been hard to stop Monica disrupting the afternoon with her importunate need to talk, so instead Laura had told her she would have lunch with her the following week in town. When the day came, she found herself reluctant to leave the house and the garden, there was so much to do in it and she found herself moving through her chores slowly these days.
They met in the Royal Academy; the stated intention was to look at the exhibition, but after they had eaten their chicken salad and lemon cake they walked instead into the Ritz bar and ordered a couple of martinis, while Monica smoked and cried and went on talking interminably. She had decided to leave Archie. She was taking the children. In Washington, she could pretend she didn’t like the place, but now she was home she realised that it was all about Archie. He smothered her. He bored her. She was getting old – she was still young. He hadn’t even cared when she had had an affair. ‘I think he is missing a vital part; he doesn’t seem to be able to talk about it.’
Laura listened, and tried to say the right things, reflecting Monica’s desires back to herself and helping her to muffle her fears. But what she was thinking about were Monica’s daughters; how uneasy they had seemed on the day that she had photographed them. The onlookers to unhappy lives, as she had been, as Ellen had been, as they all were. Could one ever break away from that mould? When she mentioned them, however, she could see that Monica thought she was being critical, so she just told her how beautiful they were, how the photographs had come out so well.
On the train back to Patsfield, Laura found a newspaper on the seat next to her. Death sentences for the Rosenbergs; the news fell like a dark bar across the day. Yes, the court had agreed that Ethel Rosenberg had typed up the information her husband had brought her about nuclear weapons, and yes, their judge had said their crime was worse than murder. ‘By your betrayal, you undoubtedly have altered the course of history to the disadvantage of our country.’ Laura let the newspaper drop to the floor. She would not think about that.
Instead, she found her mind turning to the contact sheets she had printed out the previous day. As soon as she was through the door she went to the darkroom, and started to make a bigger print of one of the most successful images, which showed Barbara, twelve years old, in a pose that hinted at the woman she would become. Laura was intrigued by the picture; it wasn’t beautiful, but it worked. Barbara looked self-sufficient, her eyes levelling with the viewer, a grown-up glance that was at odds with her childish cheeks and mouth. It was the face of a haughty survivor rather than a child, and Laura felt pleased as she pegged it out to dry and walked back up to the house. As she went into the kitchen she became aware of the dragging heaviness in her hips. At nearly eight months pregnant, such a long day was a strain. She was glad to sit down now, in the quiet.
So it did not bother her that Edward was late for dinner, although it was odd that he did not telephone. He had had to work late a lot recently, as the brutish standoff in Korea continued. She ate by herself, and then sat on the sofa, manicuring her nails, which were weak and splitting –
was that the pregnancy, or the chemicals she was using in the darkroom? – and listening to the radio. As dusk fell, it seemed odder to her that Edward had not telephoned, and she began to doze, listening to a radio programme about Chopin. She snapped out of the doze as soon she heard Edward’s key in the door, but was confused, sitting up on the sofa – for a moment she thought she was in the old house in Georgetown – and then she came to properly and got up, going into the hall.
It fell on her like a blow – the staggering gait, the sour breath, the clumsy movements – everything she thought was behind him. She went up to him and pushed him, her hands on his shoulders, not knowing what she was doing.
‘Why? Why can’t you stop?’ she was saying, pointlessly, angrily, but instead of coming in, he put his arms around her there in the hall and drew her out with him, back out into the front garden. It was freezing cold for April, with a damp fog in the air. Laura resisted. It was too cold, she was tired. He was maddening. Was it the Rosenbergs’ death sentence that had tripped him over the edge? Was it the threat of atomic destruction in Korea? She could not bear it. He had to learn to survive in the world as it was. He gripped her arm fiercely and pulled her to the gate, she went draggingly along, and then he put his mouth close to her ear. She still could not understand what was behind the violence of his movements – and then she realised: he was afraid to speak in the house.
‘They know.’
He was drunk, he was whispering, but nothing could hide the force of what he was saying. That they had known since the new year. No, they did not know for sure, but they suspected. She shuddered with the cold, and clung to him as he went on speaking. ‘It was when Archie said something in a meeting that made no sense to me that I realised – I’ve been pushed out of the loop. I’m not getting the blue folders any more. They’ve downgraded my security clearance. I thought I’d get to the bottom of that, brazen it out somehow if they knew about some leak. But this lunchtime, there was a tail on me. Every time I left the office he was there; I zigzagged around Green Park a few times, thought I’d lost him when I went into the Reform after work, but he was still there when I came out. They trailed me to the station. No one at this end – they’d stick out a mile in the village – but maybe they’re listening …’ They turned to look at the house, which loomed up over them in the darkness.
So it comes back, the fear that dazzles your mind, that grips your stomach. Laura was back again in the medium she had lived in for so long in Washington. Terror makes your breath shallow, it makes your jaw clench, the sweat break under your arms. Stupid, she thought to herself, stupid to think you could live a different life, stupid to think you could nurture shoots of revived love all the way to their fruit. Stupid. She leant against Edward.
‘Stefan says we might have to run,’ he said. Laura’s hands were on her belly, and Edward’s hands went round them. It was only just over a month to go. ‘I know we can’t.’
‘You must go, if it comes to it.’
‘I can’t go without you.’
‘Don’t be stupid.’ They went back into the house, and she wondered, as they re-entered and Edward began to take off his coat, whether she had put him in danger by withdrawing from the work. If he had been meeting Stefan day in, day out, passing documents, picking them up again, how much more obvious had he become? He was not as drunk as he had seemed at first, and they went through to the kitchen where Laura made cocoa and they drank it like children, with a box of cookies between them, munching and sipping. There was nothing on the radio so late. Laura told Edward about Monica. He already knew from Archie. It was sad, he said. Laura said she was thinking of the children, and Edward nodded. At last they went to bed, and lay the way they did now, with Edward’s front against her back, so that her belly was not in their way.
Laura turned her head, and whispered into his cheek. ‘Tell Stefan that if he needs to see me, I will.’
The next time Laura went into town, just after she gave up her ticket at Victoria station, she heard someone say, with quiet clarity, at her shoulder, ‘Pigeon.’
She went on walking, but her steps found pace with him. ‘You know why I had to stop.’ Stefan said nothing, and for a moment she thought he was about to go. ‘Don’t use him again – use me.’
‘If someone rings you, just rings, three rings and then stops, take the next train to Victoria. That’s where we’ll find you.’
They went on walking for a few paces, and then he spoke again from just behind her. ‘If we have to take Virgil over, we’ll take you too. We won’t forget.’
‘What are our chances?’
There was no reply. Laura went on walking for a bit, and when she turned he was nowhere to be seen.
As the days went on, everything seemed to slow down. Day after day, Edward came in late, drunk. Laura didn’t have the heart to remonstrate with him, although some nights, when he didn’t come home at all, she lay awake into the grey dawn, wondering if they had finally caught up with him. But as the days moved into weeks, she thought that maybe the danger had passed, and that maybe this low-level sense of uncertainty, this reliance on alcohol to get through each night, was simply their inescapable normality.
One Thursday evening in May Edward was home at a reasonable time, but as he walked heavily into the kitchen, Laura realised he must have been drinking all day. He pulled open the French windows and, without needing to be asked, Laura followed him into the garden, down to the tangle of shrubs at the back, where the rhododendron flowers were browning and dying. As she came up to him, he was snapping the flowers off their stems and throwing them down onto the dark earth.
‘Stefan’s heard from Washington – from another contact – they’ve broken some old codes. Old telegrams. They’ve found something that seems to point to me. They’re still not quite definite. But soon, they’ll get there for sure. They’ve got dozens of cryptographers working around the clock.’
Laura asked him, as if she was asking for the time of a train, how long he thought they had.
‘I don’t know, let’s hold on as long as we can.’
‘Not too long,’ she said, putting her hand on his arm and stilling his fierce plucking at the flowers. Dinner was almost ready, she said, and she made him come back in, eat and listen to the Schubert sonata on the radio.
The next morning they were both awake before the alarm. Laura went downstairs and made coffee, and Edward came down in his dressing gown. They sat drinking it, and talked a little at first about whether they would go to the piano store in Marylebone that weekend. It was only when the letterbox snapped that Laura realised that a silence had fallen, the noise of the post tumbling onto the mat seemed so loud. She had not really forgotten that it was Edward’s birthday today, and there were cards there from his mother, Sybil and Toby, and others. She brought them into the kitchen and he began opening them while she made toast. ‘We’ll celebrate tonight, remember,’ she told him. ‘A special meal, and your present – unless you’d rather have it now?’
‘No, no, tonight is good.’
‘I’m sorry I can’t come up to town to celebrate – I’m just such a lump now.’ It was only two weeks to go before the birth. Edward rose from the table and went upstairs to dress. Another day to get through. A birthday.
Once he had gone out, Laura gathered herself. She went into the study and wrapped his present, which she had been keeping concealed behind the desk: a new tennis racket. He had been complaining about his old one. There was a ring on the doorbell. It was just the girl Laura had found in the village, the niece of the postmistress, whom she had engaged to come in daily to clean. Really, Laura wanted to be alone, but she forced herself to be bright and easy in front of Helen. Laura had taken to her at first because she did not seem to fit easily into the role of servant; she was obviously clever and observant, and when she had first started to work in the house Laura had enjoyed talking to her. But now Laura had to watch herself to keep Helen at a distance; she did not want any intimacy at this time.
After Helen had started making the bed and dusting the rooms upstairs, Laura laid out a recipe book on the table, and started to make a Victoria sponge. She saw it in her head, golden and perfectly risen, with icing spelling out ‘Happy Birthday’. She beat the butter and sugar until her arm ached, but when she added the eggs she saw the mixture separate, flatten and curdle. She remembered when Sybil had shown her how to do it, and the smoothness of the mixture she had created. She stirred the flour disconsolately, not knowing whether to start again or use the mixture as it was. The telephone rang in the hall and she put down the spoon. As she walked towards it, it stopped, after just three rings. It was already after eleven o’clock.
‘Helen!’ Laura called, and when she came out of the living room where she had been dusting, Laura asked her to take the cakes out of the oven when they were done. ‘I’m just going to put them in now. I have to go up to town; I forgot something for tonight.’
‘But Mrs Last, are you well enough to—?’
‘I’m fine, really,’ Laura said, cutting her short, although the last thing she wanted was to get on the London train. She rang for a taxi to the station, and before it came she poured the cake mixture into two buttered tins and put them in the oven. She had just taken off her apron and brushed her hair when the taxi arrived; as it drove up to Oxted she saw one of her neighbours walking along, a tall, untidy-looking woman who had often spoken to Laura when she was out and about in the village. She was about to stop the taxi and ask her if she wanted a lift to the station, but held herself back; now was not the time.
As soon as she got to the station, she saw Stefan on a bench on the platform. She walked straight past him, knowing it would be too dangerous to speak in the open where any waiting passenger might see them. As they got into the train, they both hesitated in the corridor. ‘Do you have a light?’ she said, getting out a cigarette, and he fumbled in his pocket.
A Quiet Life Page 36