A Quiet Life(103)
When she returned to the house, she asked Kathy, her voice urgent, if anyone at all had telephoned, but there had been nothing, and no post either. All evening Edward didn’t come home, and Laura sat watching television in a stupor of tension. He came in long after she was in bed, and although he knew she was awake they said nothing to one another.
The next morning, after breakfast, Laura telephoned Ellen. It was routine for them to talk a couple of times a week. But Ellen seemed distracted, her voice a little croaky with a cold. ‘Has Kit got in touch with you?’ she said. ‘He told Tom he wanted to come to Washington, but it all moves so fast with Jewish funerals.’
Laura’s question was immediate, and inarticulate.
‘Kit hasn’t telephoned you? Such an awful accident, Laura, I hope you won’t be too upset. They are still looking for the driver – some kind of hit and run – I can’t understand how it could have happened. Suzanne is absolutely distraught.’
Laura finished the conversation with expressions of horror that were, she thought later, sufficient without being excessive. But then she left the house without thinking, without her coat, only coming to and realising how strange she must look walking like that through the cold streets when she found herself at the banks of the river, the wind whipping at her hair, blurring her vision, her hand pressed over her mouth. Believe me, she found herself muttering into her fingers, believe me. Perhaps she meant, believe me that I am not guilty, that I did not think of this, that I did not ask for this. But who would be listening? And who would ever believe her? And hot on the heels of shock came fear, so that her body was dizzy with the sense of menace she felt from every side: the streets were too loud now, that man walking behind her was a threat, that car passing too slowly was a threat; she felt exposed, panic like glue in her throat and juddering through her chest.
When she came back into the house she went to the drinks cupboard. Straight from the bottle, burning down, meeting her panic like a friend and wrapping its warmth around it – was this how Edward felt about the first gulp of brandy before lunch? Her bowels were churning now and she ran to the lavatory. Once she was finished she washed her hands, over and over again, and then went to the telephone. She called the newspaper and got Suzanne’s telephone number, but found herself, for all her intentions, unable to dial it. She went out again, this time properly dressed in a coat and hat, and found her way, blundering through the grey city, to Monica’s house, and made her telephone Suzanne and give appropriate messages of condolence, and made her telephone Edward and Archie at work to tell them, and got her to get out the brandy bottle and distract Laura with her daughters and her gossip until she had recovered her self-control. Her self-control, which was so much greater than Monica or anyone else would ever have imagined, which she was learning to buckle on again, tightening the armour across her chest and face.
Although Joe had not, as far as Laura knew, been observant, the funeral was held two days later, as soon as the body was released, in a synagogue at the edge of the city. There she sat with the other women, in a gallery of the panelled room, looking down on the men who were weaving some kind of rhythmic process of memory and repetition that would mean something to the others there, but not to her. Laura was distant from it all, but intensely aware, in the way one might be in a dream, of Suzanne at the end of the row, and how her legs seemed restless, she kept tapping her foot or crossing her ankles. For a moment Laura felt as if she were in Suzanne’s skin and realised how unbearable her physical life had become to her, how she was only keeping herself in the room by a huge effort of will. The service had already begun when Laura saw Edward come in, unfamiliar in one of the head coverings that he must have been given at the entrance, and sit down tentatively, as if he was unsure of his movements, at the edge of a bench at the side of the men’s section.
As they walked out to the cemetery, she found herself looking again and again at Edward. There comes a time in a marriage when you stop seeing the man you are living with, and for many months now Laura had not looked straight at him. But suddenly, in that dark moment, when she would have given anything to have been able to walk away from him, and from herself, and all the horror that their relationship seemed capable of creating, Laura looked at him afresh. Was it pity that stirred in her, as she saw how lonely he looked there among those men who were all bound up in a shared ritual about which he and she knew nothing? Once they had been so sure that they were creating a new heaven on earth. And now, how uncertain he looked as he passed a hand over his mouth and listened to the men around him, but did not join their conversation. As the earth spattered down on the coffin in its newly dug trench, she saw him walk away from the mourners, back to work, alone.
Laura was told that the crowd were to go back to a relative’s apartment, not far from the synagogue, and when she got there she found the room held a dozen or so elderly Jewish men and women, and various trays of food. She sat with Suzanne for a while, their knees almost touching on the overstuffed sofa, listening to reminiscences, and at one point Laura found herself telling an old aunt of his about meeting him on the Normandie before the war. ‘He loved his work,’ Laura said, ‘being a journalist. He believed that he could tell the truth.’ The aunt nodded. ‘He was a good boy,’ she said, ‘a good, good boy.’
Even now, sitting here on the balcony and looking out over a lake in the long evening, this is the memory that flattens the horizon, that shuts down the light. You can excuse yourself, Laura tells herself, over and over again as the memories rise. Remember, you had no idea, you planned nothing, you asked for nothing except safety. They did it all. You did nothing.