As they came near to the house, she heard the sharp cry of Rosa, rising out of sleep. She went upstairs and settled her to sleep again, feeling the damp curls of her hair, kissing the soft curve of her cheek. This, she realised, was the only touch she had known in these two years, a touch that was as careful and controlled as holding a glass vase. She went back into the living room where Archie was sitting with a glass of grappa, and went towards him. She wanted to go into the lost world of sensuality, and that night she experienced sex in a way she had never done before. It had little to do with Archie and his personality; his body was pleasing and warm against hers, but her body was the centre of her experience, and by the end she felt that she was riding Archie’s body to a destination that was hers alone, the torrent of her orgasm was all that she was seeking.
Transition
August 1953
When they re-enter the apartment in the late afternoon in August, it feels close and musty. Laura pulls back the shutters with a bang. She asked the cleaning lady to leave milk and bread and fruit for them, but obviously she has forgotten. There is that puddle of water under the icebox again. Laura is tired, she wants to rest, but she has to let Aurore go home. She knows that Aurore is not pleased about the holiday; she found the group too decadent and too drunk, the weather too hot. Laura feels guilty as she pays her what she owes her, plus a little extra, and tells her to go and have a rest.
Laura takes Rosa with her and goes to the local shop, and then down to the public garden along the street with a ball, and encourages Rosa to kick it, trying to make her use up her energy so she will not resist going to bed tonight. It all seems to be working well and Laura feels that the two of them, mother and daughter, are a happy addition to the other families in the park, and then disaster strikes: Rosa screams – a bee has stung her hand. Laura gathers her up and takes her, weeping, up the street and up all the flights of stairs to the apartment. It is hard carrying her and the shopping up all that way. Cold water, kisses, cream – nothing seems to help, and when Mother comes in tired from her journey, Laura feels almost embarrassed to be here in her dark flat with her crying daughter.
Maybe that is why Laura is more dismissive than she should be when her mother says something that evening about how Ellen and Tom were talking about why Laura should move back to America to get her divorce. ‘So I can come and be pitied by them forever?’
‘You’ve always been so hard on her,’ Mother said. ‘And on me. Ellen said once, it’s almost as if you hate us.’
Those words are too shockingly honest, and Laura feels the blood beat up in her face as she insists that she is sorry, she did not mean to sound nasty. She is grateful to them both for all they have done for her, all they are doing for her. Mother seems to accept the apology, and to move on, but afterwards, when Laura is lying awake in her bed, she hears her mother’s words in her head and she realises what fidelity it has taken for Mother to stay with her, Laura, through these years, even though she knows Laura does not really want her. She does not like to give this fidelity its name, but she knows now it is love. It shames her. For the first time in her life, she thinks of the journey her mother has made, the moment when she left her family to go off with the man she adored, the slow disintegration of her dreams, how that relationship curdled into misery, and her dogged, thankless loyalty to her indifferent daughters. To her dismay, Laura sees in it an echo of her own life, but the light it casts on her own journey is not a kind one, and she turns in bed, banging at her pillow.
The next morning, she tries to cover up the awkwardness of the previous day. She tells her mother about the holiday in Pesaro, about Archie, and lets her understand how that relationship might have developed. When Laura left Pesaro, Archie had asked her if she and Rosa and Mother might join him for another holiday at the very end of the season, near Lake Annecy. ‘Talloires is meant to be so pretty,’ Laura says now. ‘We could just go for a few days.’
Her mother seems happy to fall in with this plan, but Laura feels that something is coming to a head between them. This life in limbo cannot last forever, she knows. Maybe Archie will be her way out. Maybe she will go to Ellen in Boston with Mother, and face down the fear of exposure. Maybe she will have to make her own independent way, and learn from Winifred to find work. Each path is fraught with uncertainty, with the need for endless lies. The coffee is bubbling in the coffee-maker. She picks it up. The top has not been twisted on properly. Some of it slops out as she moves it and she burns her hand. ‘Mummy sad,’ Rosa says, watching her as she screws up her face and holds her hand under the cold faucet. ‘Poor Mummy.’ When your child shows empathy, it heartens you, you realise she can care and not just be cared for. But also, there is a hard question in it. Rosa is watching her, learning from her day by day. What is she learning?
After she has put ice on her hand, Laura realises how late it is. She has the appointment to keep with Valance that he made with her before she went to Pesaro. She asks her mother to look after Rosa, as she has given Aurore a few days off, and starts to dress with great reluctance. Walking through the city up to the consulate, her legs feel heavy. Geneva itself seems in a dull mood today, the clouds are dense, the air hardly stirring, even under the trees in the Parc Beaulieu. Valance is sitting at a desk in that purple-papered room. He looks ill or hungover and he is in a bad temper. She puts on her air of injured innocence, and tells him that she tried her best with Peter, but got nowhere.
But after a while, obeying a new script that has just occurred to her, she begins to behave differently from the way she has acted the last two times they have met. She begins a false performance of openness, as if she has succumbed to his persuasiveness. She acts as if she is fishing from her mind any possible story that might interest Valance.
First of all, she confesses a couple of things she thinks he must already know – about how Edward seemed to receive some message that he was in danger a few months before he left, and about his belief that he was being followed in town. She makes much of saying these things, as if she is confiding in him. And then she takes a new turn. She talks about Robin Muir and about how close he and her husband were. As she speaks, she remembers that mild, silver-haired man in the British embassy, and in her mind she apologises to him for using his memory in this way, as she begins to weave innuendo around his readiness to send Edward home suddenly from a suspicious Washington.
At first, Laura can tell that Valance is not convinced, but gradually she can see that the idea of the involvement of Robin Muir intrigues him. Could he, the dead diplomat, another apparently impeccable member of the group, be the missing link? To her relief, she feels that his attention is moving away from her; perhaps her continued play of ignorance is beginning to convince him. After all, at the end of the day, Laura is just a woman. She forgets names and places; she has no head for politics. Valance has no doubt read Alistair’s book, has no doubt heard other people’s opinions of her. A woman. A wife. A mother. Why would her husband have confided in her? After a few hours, Valance smiles without warmth and dismisses Laura. He tells her that they will meet again in a few months, and that he will have work for her. She feels that they may have moved into a different place. For sure, it is a safer place for now. But not a comfortable place, and as she walks out, she feels hot nausea in her stomach.
She goes to pick up some photographs, ones she took before Pesaro, from the developer, and takes them home to the apartment. She realises as she opens them, sitting on the sofa in the living room, that she already knows which ones are going to be good. Before, the developing process itself had seemed a revelation of the unknown; now, the camera seems to do what she wants, the contrasts and compositions that she planned for are almost exactly what she sees. Looking through them, she is caught by a desire to see how she has improved, and she gets out a box of old photographs. Rosa is sitting beside her on the floor, playing with a toy train, but she clambers onto her lap when she sees the pictures. ‘Rosa,’ she says, putting her thumb down on the prints.
‘Don’t touch the picture, darling,’ Laura says automatically, leafing through the others. ‘Mama,’ she says, pointing at the picture that Winifred took of Laura’s wedding day. ‘And that’s Father,’ Laura says. Rosa does not respond, looking at the stranger in the picture, and Laura suddenly stands up, dislodging her from her lap so quickly that she cries out.
When Rosa is in bed that night, Laura puts the prints back in their box, looking back over them. The photographs she has taken of Rosa are such a detailed record of a child’s change and growth, her gradual strengthening and consciousness. She is surprised by some of them, even though they only document two years, but the older face of the child becomes laid over the younger one in one’s memory, so that one quickly forgets what at the time seems unforgettable, and the photographs gain this power to surprise. Love for a child is so different from love for a spouse: it rests on this transience. Could she also have learned to love change in Edward? Could they have aged and moved forwards, together? Could they have forgiven one another for all the mistakes, and built something honest out of the imperfections and littleness of everyday life?
She wonders. When she was younger, she had idealised people who seemed to possess, in their self-sufficiency and separateness, a secret path to joy, a superior knowledge of the right way to live – people like Florence, Amy and Edward. But they have fallen away from her now. None of them could teach her how to live. Maybe it is only a quiet, day-to-day loyalty that is worth having; maybe the grand love or the great gesture is always doomed. Maybe that year in Surrey was the only time that she and Edward began to fumble towards something worth having, when they started to try to be honest with one another, and gentle. She thinks about Rosa, and what she will teach her about how to live. She wonders how she can ever teach her about honesty, when she lives a series of lies, laid one on top of the other. She wonders how she can teach her about love, when she is still trying to understand herself what is illusion and what reality. She does not even have a garden, she thinks, she does not even have a proper home for her child. How can she teach her about security?
That evening, when the others are in bed, Laura sits as usual on the balcony, looking over the lake, watching the light change, talking to her ghosts. As she fills her glass, she realises she is drinking the way Edward drank – to drown out the insistent sense of an irreconcilable life, a script that she cannot make her own.
And then, a few days later, at the end of August, through the trees, up above the lake, the car is roaring, the road is ribboning into the distance, when it turns. At last. She is driving up to meet Winifred for lunch in St-Cergue, thinking of her new coat, when the car in front of her screams to a halt, and the other half of the postcard that she tore with Edward is put into her hand. She is Pigeon again, and Edward is alive.
All through lunch with Winifred she is distracted; she is used to covering up her thoughts, but now she wants to stop, she wants to be silent and to consider what has happened. Everything has changed. Everything. He has not abandoned her. But she does not yet know what this means. All she knows is that in this moment the world is sharper, the colours stand out more, the operatic Alpine landscape that she has been coldly appreciating for several years seems to be charged with energy; even the olives they eat with their first glass of wine are saltier, juicier, tastier than anything she has eaten recently, and she herself feels more awake. But she is not listening to Winifred. She must tune back into the conversation.
Winifred is at that very moment telling Laura that she thinks she could find her a job – at a rather lowly level, to be sure – in an English library that has recently opened to serve the British in Geneva. Winifred knows the woman who is setting it up, whose husband works in the United Nations. Laura expresses enthusiasm, although she is not really listening, and Winifred promises to call them for her that afternoon.
Then they start to talk about Peter. Winifred says they have broken up. Laura does not tell Winifred what she saw in Pesaro, but as they sit there the image of Amy, the attitude of sexual abandonment, the sleeping woman in flower, is there in Laura’s head. She cannot imagine how to mention that to Winifred, however, and she says nothing, although she feels the pulse between her own legs as she remembers it. Then, without being asked, Winifred says something about Amy, about how she was planning to come to Geneva in the autumn, but that she, Winifred, has told her she will find the city too dull. There is a dismissiveness in Winifred’s voice and Laura realises she has packed that experience away with the summer. Looking at Winifred there, so confident and contained in the sunlight, she thinks that perhaps this is the secret to Winifred’s happiness; that she can pack each thing into its proper place, she can retain boundaries at each point of contact, can go on learning and growing, without losing herself in pursuit of a grander dream.
When Winifred wants to know about Laura’s relationship with Archie, Laura finds it easy enough to talk about that. She remembers when Winifred first asked her about Edward, and how it all seemed too sacred for words, but this is so different. Winifred teases her a little, and says she can see that Archie is her type, by which she means that he reminds her of Edward. Yes, he is tall, and fair … Laura cannot see other similarities, but she is happy for Winifred to tease her. There are other, much more pressing things to think about now.
Although she is longing to be alone with her thoughts, when she leaves Winifred and drives back down to the city, Laura does not think directly about what has happened. She cannot. Everything has shifted, and yet she cannot see what the new direction is to be.
As she and her mother pack that evening, Laura can hardly hear what she is saying. She is moving in a dream now, and the next day, as they drive to the train station, she finds herself nearly colliding with a stationary car. Archie is there to meet them at Annecy station, and drive them to an old-fashioned family hotel in Talloires. Yes, it is a pretty place, as Archie said it would be; yes, it is perfect for families at the end of the season. Archie is polite to Mother, friendly, more talkative with her than Edward ever was; they all seem to get on so well, like a little family. Laura wonders how he can shift so easily from the hedonist she saw in Pesaro to this civilised chatter. It does not seem fake, he is just easily influenced by those around him, she thinks. She watches his pleasure in Rosa; it is not false, he does remember his own daughters, and enjoys having her there. Before supper they swim in Lake Annecy, and Rosa enjoys his physical strength, sitting on his shoulders as he swims, fast, across the cold fresh water.
But dinner flags. Again, Laura is distracted, wanting to be alone, and finds her control slipping, her attention wandering. To excuse her manner, she says she is listening out for a cry from Rosa from the room above them, that she is not sure that she would be able to hear her. She goes and checks the room a couple of times, which annoys Mother, who thinks she is being too fussy. When they go up to bed, Laura sees Archie’s hopeful smile, but she ignores it. She does not go to him. She wants to be with her memories tonight. She wants to pleasure herself, and that night she does. Just at the moment of orgasm, a face she has not seen for so long, a young woman’s face, is in her mind, and the body she glimpsed only once, in the cabin of a dark ship, in all its innocent nakedness, springs into her thoughts. For a moment, she feels a pang of longing, not just for the girl’s body, but for what she might say if she could see her now, words that could touch and tangle, as well as hands and legs. But the thought fades, and she sleeps.
The next day her mood changes. After breakfast, she asks her mother to take Rosa down to the swings at the lakeside and says she must go into the town to buy something. The way she says ‘something’, she can see that Mother thinks it is sanitary protection or contraception; something that nobody wants to talk about. This is why you can tell big lies, she thinks to herself, because people are so eager to keep all the small lies hidden. She is walking along, smoking, thinking these pointless thoughts, when suddenly she ducks into a café and asks for a brandy. She is beginning to see what is at
stake. Silence has been her friend for two long years; there is absolutely nobody in the whole world that she can talk to about what has happened. But now she begins to see the magnitude of what she is facing.
She does not know what the next step should be. For so long she held onto the fact that Stefan said he would bring her over. But gradually the promise faded. She has built a life now, a life without Edward. Is the old dream strong enough to bring her back? How can she know? The brandy should be comforting, but the doubts about Edward that have been growing are unfolding in her mind again. Why was he silent for so long? It could not have been impossible for him to communicate. There are always channels, she knows that as well as anyone – letters, whispers, codes, telegrams. Why was there that monumental silence? What did it mean? What would she be going to if she went over? What sort of life would she be giving Rosa?
She remembers how they used to imagine the Soviet Union: the visions that Florence and Edward held out to her. For Florence, although she may have talked about it intellectually, it was something emotional, the possibility of an authentic, fully lived life. For Edward, it was also something almost spiritual; it was the way, he believed, that the great guilt of the upper class could be absolved, so that he would no longer have to drag around the burden of being the one who had benefited from the toil of the working class, from the colonial oppressed, their broken, miserable lives; that he could be their servant rather than them his servants. Servants. It was funny – not funny, but ironic – that all those years she had been the one who had had to deal with the servants – Mrs Venn, Edna, Ann, Kathy, Helen, now Aurore – all the women who had cooked for her and cleaned for her and looked after her child. She would like to be in a society where she no longer had to look back into their questioning and judgemental eyes. Or would she? Laura flicks, out of her thoughts, back into the café and her situation. Why is she thinking about Ann and Helen and Aurore rather than about herself and Edward and Rosa, and what she will do now?
A Quiet Life Page 44