It lasted only until the following morning, when the doorbell rang, peal after peal, over breakfast. ‘I’ll get it,’ called Helen, opening the door, and then Laura heard voices raised in anger. The door slammed, and Helen came back in confusion, saying that someone had asked for Mrs Last, but when she had asked him to wait, he had put his foot in the door, and it was only his fault if he had got hurt as she shut it. As Laura moved to the door, the telephone began to ring, and when she picked it up she heard a stranger asking for Mrs Last. She said Mrs Last was not available, and heard the stranger on the other end saying the name of a newspaper, promising money for her side of the story. The person outside the front door was rapping hard, with his knuckles, and calling out the name of another newspaper. Laura put the chain on the door and locked it, aware as she did so how thin it was, how her body and the man’s body on the doorstep were divided only by a few inches.
People agreed later that the leak came from France, from a French policeman who told a reporter that he was looking for two missing British diplomats and understood that they had gone east. Laura never knew if that was true, but she knew that the story of a drunken jaunt to Paris had been broken with shocking suddenness. Going back into the kitchen to make coffee, she saw before Mother did a figure appear over the wall, jumping down into the laurels, a young man with longish hair and an eager expression. She pulled the blinds over the French windows and checked that they too were locked. When she got Spall on the telephone he was unhelpful, clearly bothered himself by what was happening.
‘Just refer any reporters to the Foreign Office,’ he said. ‘We’ll prepare an official statement shortly. Have you heard anything else?’
Laura insisted that she needed protection now in Patsfield, somebody to keep the reporters away, and when he said he wasn’t sure if he could do that, she put the telephone down and called Toby instead. Now, surely, his intimate knowledge of the corridors of power would be helpful. But his tone, as he promised to see what he could do, was uncertain and full of pauses, as though he was listening to something else other than her words.
All day the doorbell went on pealing. At lunchtime Aunt Dee came in a taxi and had to push through the knot of reporters, who all started to offer her money for her story, assuming she was Edward’s mother. The plan had been for the three of them to go out for lunch, but obviously that was no longer possible; instead, they were penned into the house, which was warm in the May sunshine. They opened the windows upstairs, but kept the curtains drawn and the doors locked downstairs, and sat in the living room, Laura dozing on the sofa, listening to Mother and Aunt Dee talking.
Laura had taken the telephone off the hook during the day, but when she replaced it in the evening it began to ring again: Monica, who must have heard the story from Archie; Giles, who must have heard from Toby; Winifred, who must have heard from Giles. ‘Are you all right?’ they were all asking. ‘You’re not alone, are you?’ All Laura could hear in their voices was the taint of curiosity, and she told each of them she couldn’t talk, she had to keep the line free.
‘Do tell Helen she can go now,’ Laura said to Mother. ‘And could you ask her to bring in the newspapers in the morning? I wonder what nonsense they will print.’
If only it had been nonsense, Laura thought the next day, looking at the newspapers that Helen had put on the kitchen table. ‘British diplomats missing’, ‘believed to be on their way to Moscow’ … Set down like that it was so histrionic, like the opening scene in a film that you knew would be all chases and shoot-outs and would never tell you anything about the complexities of life. Mother and Aunt Dee, reading them after Laura, seemed to be waiting for her to speak, and so she said what they wanted to hear, that it was all crazy, how anyone could believe such a thing of Edward she had no idea; the Foreign Office should put a stop to all this. They both approved the idea that the Foreign Office was in some way in the wrong, and liked to hear her expostulate about how stupid that man Spall clearly was.
But had there been enough time? That was all Laura was thinking, as she left the kitchen and crossed the hall to telephone Toby. Was Edward safely across now? Or would the massive pursuit that must now be underway catch up with them? There would be no hiding for him now if so; the attempt to go east would be too obvious, the treason too clear. Her baby pushed further into the well of her pelvis, sending a dense pressure through her vulva, just as the doorbell began to peal again. ‘Don’t answer it, Helen,’ she said. But the bell gave way to a furious knocking, and then a voice called through the letterbox, ‘Telegram for Mrs Last,’ and she let Helen go to the door to take in the message.
Misspelt, laconic, it was obviously a telegram written for public consumption more than for her eyes, and yet there was still meaning in it for her. ‘Had to leav unexpectedly. Am quite well now. Don’t worry. I love you. Please don’t stop loving me.’ ‘Am quite well now.’ Laura read those four words with hope, almost chanting them to herself. ‘I promised to tell Spall if I heard from Edward at all,’ she told Mother. ‘I can’t make this out, really, but – I must go and telephone.’
This time, Spall’s voice was distant. He would come up to Patsfield that afternoon to talk further, he said. But as he spoke, Laura felt a different sensation in her belly, not just the pressure, not just the tightening, but a clench of pain, more definite, more insistent. It was not the sudden agony she had felt five years ago, but it intruded with absolute certainty, clearing a place in her mind. She waited, listening for its return, as Spall went on talking.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I’ll be able to do that. I think I’ll be going to the hospital.’ She put down the receiver and waited for the pain to go and to return and to go, and then she picked up the telephone again to order a taxi.
6
As Laura woke, she heard another’s breath, coming and going, coming and going: a sound that was feather-light, but which bound her with a grip like steel wire into the new life. She was too tired to do anything, the anaesthetic was still swirling in her head. Where she was lying, she could not even see the baby in her crib by the wall, but the new presence filled the room. In that state of suspended animation, feeling the pain from the wound in her belly grow as the anaesthetic wore away, it was strange to hear voices at the door, breaking out in anger, ‘No, I’m sorry, Mrs Last is not yet able to have visitors.’
‘I’m her cousin, she’s expecting me.’ But it was an unfamiliar Englishman’s voice, a loose Cockney intonation, not one of Edward’s family. A bouquet of roses, bursting with freshness, came into the room, but behind them was that eager face Laura had last seen in the garden at Patsfield. Laura tried to sit up, wincing from the pull of pain in her abdomen, and as she did so the flash of the camera came with shocking brightness, and the nurse’s shriek for someone to come and help turn him away cut through the room.
‘I’m so sorry, Mrs Last, please accept our apologies.’Another nurse and a doctor were in the room, concerned, crowding out the peace.
‘Make sure it doesn’t happen again,’ Laura said, but her voice was weighted with tiredness rather than anger, and she soon fell asleep, waking only when the nurse came to help her feed Rosa. Rosa, too, seemed sleepy, but when she found the nipple and sucked a rhythm fell into place between them. Whorls of hair failed to cover that too-naked skull, her feet were too soft, her vulnerability too extreme. When the visitors Laura was expecting, Mother and Aunt Dee, came later, she found it difficult to speak to them. They bore with them fears about the rumours building outside, but Laura was slow to respond. She needed to learn the contours of a new face and the rhythms of a new life, and all her energies were being taken up by those imperatives.
This is the unanswered question of motherhood, Laura came to realise over the following few days. Had her life got bigger, enlarging itself around this new being? Or had it got smaller, fixing itself to the well-being of this tiny person, cutting out any dream of freedom? The actual physical space of her life was so constrained now
as to be claustrophobic. This was not entirely Rosa’s fault. The reporters would not give up, and even once they had driven back to Patsfield after Laura had spent a week at the hospital, they were unavoidable. The women kept the curtains closed on the ground floor; they never answered the door unless they knew who it was; they did not use the garden because reporters would hide in the shrubs to listen to them; they could not walk into the village without their footsteps being dogged. Outside, the summer was flowering and lengthening, but Rosa and Laura could see nothing of it. So it remained a close, warm, female world, in which the smallest person became the largest, and all Laura’s energy was concentrated on the feeding, the sleeping, the crying – a slow circling in which days moved on without changing shape. All the time, the telephone rang, but even when the voices of friends and acquaintances were heard, Laura put them off visiting.
The only person Laura wanted to see now was Sybil, and she was the only one who had not been in touch since the birth. Toby had telephoned, telling Laura he was off to see his mother, who was obviously quite distracted with worry. Laura asked if Sybil would come and visit, and Toby replied, absolutely, very soon. His voice was always so clipped. But Sybil’s silence continued. Laura needed to break through it, she thought, she needed Toby and Sybil; she needed the protection of the group.
So one morning, when she had slept reasonably well, Laura telephoned Sybil and asked if she could come and see her. Sybil’s voice was always flat on the telephone, but she agreed. It was odd, Laura thought, that she did not offer to come to her, but presumably she had heard about the ring of reporters around the door – who would expose themselves to that? She held onto the fact that Mother and Aunt Dee had long been insisting that they could look after Rosa for a few hours now that she was taking a bottle, and Helen had said that she could drive Laura about, since the Caesarean wound still made it impossible for her to drive herself.
Even though Helen drove Laura’s car right up to the door, and Laura rushed out with a scarf over her head, the reporters saw what was happening immediately. There were cars right behind them all the way through the village, disconcerting Helen, who began to drive erratically. Laura wanted to ask her to try some tricks on them: to drive south for a while, perhaps, and then double back, or jump a light to put distance between them. But just as she opened her mouth to speak, she stopped herself. She found Helen more trying than ever these days; there was something too watchful about her manner. So she sank back into the seat, wanting to pretend she was unaware of their followers. It was not hard just now to seem passive. This was the first time since the birth that Laura had been apart from Rosa, and her milky, aching body felt the absence.
Eventually Helen parked in Chester Square, and the reporters’ cars found places next to them. Laura realised there was no avoiding them. She agreed that Helen should remain with the car rather than come in with her, and put on her sunglasses. As she stepped out, the door of Sybil’s house swung open immediately. She must have been watching for her from the window, and there was Ann on the doorstep. Laura tried to ignore the shouts of the reporters. One of them – that long-haired young man – was offering money, absurd sums, just for a few comments. He was trying to get in front of her as she walked, to take a photograph. Laura was sweating by the time she gained the steps, but then she was standing in the hall, pulling off her sunglasses, and Sybil was at the top of the stairs.
‘Every time I come here I remember the night I first met you – and Edward …’ Laura said, walking up to meet Sybil. It was surely a statement that laid claim to a particular intimacy with her, an intimacy that had grown between them over the years, the long years that they had come to know one another little by little, up to that strange moment in the Surrey garden not so long ago when Sybil had been about to tell Laura some confidence.
But as Laura walked up to her, Sybil moved backwards, and Laura followed her heavy body in its starched dress into the living room. Sybil sat on the corner of a sofa, and nodded at Ann, who had followed them up. ‘Do bring tea now,’ she said.
Laura said how much she had wanted to talk to Sybil, feeling that surely Sybil would appreciate this appeal to her judgement. But Sybil said nothing. Laura said that Giles and Alistair had been in touch, hoping that this mention of other members of the group might move them onto common ground. ‘Alistair’s article was quite unforgivable,’ Sybil said. Laura knew that he had covered pages of a Sunday newspaper with his views on Edward’s disappearance and anecdotes about their friendship, but she had not had the stomach to read it. ‘If you haven’t read it, don’t,’ Sybil said.
‘Why did he do it, do you think?’
‘Fame. Edward’s made him famous. He’s everywhere now – the spy I knew, my friend the traitor.’ There was such bitterness in her tone.
‘But he isn’t a traitor – you know that, don’t you?’
‘Of course,’ Sybil said. But her voice was strange. It was as though she was deliberately echoing the willed blandness of Laura’s voice. Surely that was not possible. Tea came and Laura drank a little. She asked how Toby had found Mrs Last, and how the children were, and Sybil asked about Rosa and the birth. There were pauses between sentences, and gradually Laura had to accept that this went beyond Sybil’s usual stiffness. ‘Toby’s having rather a hard time of it,’ Sybil said at last. ‘He had been hoping to move into the House of Lords soon, you know.’
Laura should have felt resentful, perhaps, that Sybil seemed to be putting her husband’s career above Laura’s husband’s very existence. But she did not feel resentful. She felt ashamed, realising that the horrible mystery that surrounded Edward had made her a blot on Sybil’s world, that her presence now was an embarrassment or worse. She muttered something sympathetic, and was not surprised when Sybil did not respond. Instead, Sybil asked her a question. ‘Did you know Robin Muir?’
‘I remember the name, someone from the embassy. Yes, I met him to ask for Edward’s leave—’
‘That’s right – rather senior chap. His wife’s an old friend of the family. He died two weeks ago.’ Laura tried to voice condolences, but Sybil went on talking. ‘His wife says he had a heart attack when he saw the news about Edward. He died of it. And Lord Inverchapel is very ill. He’s been ill for years, of course, but this has pushed him over. They say he won’t be long for this world.’
Not long for this world. It was a phrase that seemed very unlike Sybil, as though she was moving into a kind of tragic cliché. Again, Laura tried to say how awful such news was.
‘Isn’t it?’
Now Laura recognised that the intimacy she thought they had found that day in Patsfield amounted to nothing; Laura was beyond the gates, she was the outsider. She could never be forgiven for the path Edward had taken away from the group, away from Sybil’s certainties and traditions. There was no bond, no loyalty now between the two women, and Laura felt the break of it as she walked to the front door and went alone and vulnerable down the broad white steps to the waiting car and the dazzle of the flashbulbs.
It was nearly three months after the birth that Laura and her mother went to Dr Turner together with Rosa, for a check-up. Dr Turner was pleased with Rosa: ‘Bright as a button,’ he said as she made pursed faces at him. But he was not pleased with Laura. Laura was startled into self-consciousness as he took her pulse and asked her questions about her diet and sleep and commented on her thinning hair and dull skin. She had spent the last few months focused on Rosa rather than on herself, and it was only now under Dr Turner’s frowning scrutiny that she realised she was failing at her own work of femininity, that she had forgotten about the face she turned to the world.
She had healed slowly from the Caesarean, so that there was often a current of physical pain running through those days, which made them all the more exhausting. Rosa was a fussy baby, always wanting to nurse or be carried, so that even with Mother and Aunt Dee and Helen to help there was never respite for Laura. Nothing, she thought, prepares one for the overwhelming physicali
ty, not so much of childbirth – the anaesthetic and the surgery had, after all, shielded her from that – but from the experience of looking after a new baby. Whenever she was not with Rosa, her skin craved her touch, and yet whenever Laura had her in her arms she felt restless, weighed down by her needs. This push and pull of desire and frustration was too extreme for her to understand; it was an intensity of sensation from which, it seemed, there was no release.
Dr Turner told her she needed to engage a nanny and get more sleep, to take a nap every afternoon, to eat more red meat and drink more milk, to go for a walk in the fresh air every day, and he enlisted her mother in the argument. Laura could not be bothered to explain to him that finding a nanny was not very easy when you had become the notorious wife of a traitor and every prospective employee who answered your advertisement for help turned out to be in the pay of some newspaper. The interest in the Last story had not died down. She still could not step outside the door without being photographed. Every time the reporters left for a day, they seemed to find a new lead or a new angle, and swarmed back again. One week, Herbert Morrison made a statement about the missing diplomats in Parliament; another week, there was a supposed sighting in Warsaw; another week, a statement by an old colleague of Edward’s that he had once boasted of being the English Hiss; another, a page of vile gossip in a Sunday newspaper that the two had fled because they were being blackmailed over allegations too depraved to repeat in a family newspaper.
A Quiet Life Page 38