A Quiet Life(104)

There are always excuses.





Air


1950–1953


1


‘You haven’t changed,’ Sybil said to Laura. ‘Except you look so – American.’

Laura only realised as she stepped into the London house how incongruous she might look now, over-perfumed, over-made up and, as she shrugged off her coat, over-dressed in one of the boldly coloured bouclé dresses that all the Washington wives had been wearing that season. Edward hung back as they came in, and Laura began to talk, telling Sybil that she hadn’t changed one bit herself. In a way of course that was true. You can see the kernel of someone’s face and personality even when they have solidified. There had always been such a density to Sybil’s body and now she seemed even heavier, not fat, but solid and unsmiling, her square jaw and prominent nose more dominant with that new chignon taking her blonde hair up and back.

‘Just like the old days,’ Laura was saying, as if the thought gave her pleasure, turning from Sybil to Toby where he was standing in the doorway of the living room. And he too was planted, but the solidity seemed borne of uncertainty, as if he needed a moment to regroup as he took in the change in his brother. He nodded at Edward. ‘Sorry to hear you’ve been unwell.’

Edward nodded back, saying that he was on the mend, and Laura suggested that they should go upstairs and wash, the flight had been so tiring. They were not in their old room, Sybil was explaining, because that was the nursery now. They were further up. And how were the children? Laura asked, injecting eagerness into her voice. They were having supper with Nanny, Sybil told her, but Laura could see them afterwards. Women’s voices, going up the stairs, while the two brothers remained silent, following them. On the landing stood a familiar figure. ‘Ann!’ said Laura, moving forwards, remembering the intimacy they had known during the war.

‘Yes, Ann is still here – housekeeper now,’ Sybil said, going on up the stairs, as Ann stepped aside from Laura as if it would be bad form for them to acknowledge one another as friends. ‘We thought we’d have a quiet evening tonight, but tomorrow, when you’ve had a chance to rest, everyone – Winifred, Alistair …’

And Giles? Laura was careful to sound happy about the plans. Yes, Giles would be there too, it would be dinner at the Savoy, it would be a celebration.

A celebration. Laura thanked Sybil and closed the door on her and Toby, leaving her with Edward in this unfamiliar room up in the eaves.

‘Here we are again,’ Edward said. In the early days of their love, how she had revelled in his silences. They had suggested they had little need for words. But now his laconic statements were painful; unsaid thoughts pushed against them. She stood at the window, looking down through the watery new glass onto the square that had been given back to ornamental shrubs, taking off her gloves, finger by finger.

‘Do you want to go down for supper?’ was all she said.

‘Yes, of course, can’t keep Toby waiting. I wouldn’t mind a bath.’

‘You go first, I’ll wait.’ We can at least be polite, Laura was always reminding herself.

The room they were in was rather shabby, as if put together from a go-round of other rooms – a too-big bedstead, a too-small wardrobe, curtains that did not quite meet in the middle of the window. But the ground floor of Sybil’s house had recovered its comfortable face, and was carpeted and well lit. The living room was now a surprisingly acid green rather than the previous turquoise, so that the old oil paintings looked out of place on the walls. As the evening dragged on, Laura realised that Sybil and Toby were reconstructing a life precisely modelled on their own parents’ and grandparents’ lives. The children had already been put to bed by their nanny, their dinner was four courses and served in the dining room where the portrait of Sybil’s mother had been restored to its pre-war place, and Sybil took Laura into the living room for a ‘little chat’ before the men joined them.

The chat, Laura was glad to discover, was not going to be about their husbands. The change in Edward and their ignominious return from Washington would not be discussed, and neither would Toby’s evident loss of direction now that he had lost his parliamentary seat. Laura could tell his heart was not in his new life as he crumbled a bread roll, talking of the biography he was working on, how the London Library was so helpful. So the two women sitting in the acid-green living room did not talk about the men as they tried to feel their way into some kind of ease. They talked about Mrs Last, and how unwell she had been ever since she had given up Sutton Court, and about Winifred, and how she had still not married, and Laura asked Sybil for all the details of her children and asked if she could photograph them one day. ‘It’s my little hobby,’ she said in a dismissive tone. ‘One has to have something,’ Sybil said, bracingly.

When they drove over to the Savoy for dinner the following evening, the city fell dimly on either side of them. Even in this, London’s richest neighbourhood, so many holes still gaped, so many fa?ades were still filthy, paving stones still uneven. But then the lobby of the hotel opened before them, polished and coloured, as though private wealth could overcome public squalor with a single confident gesture.

The four of them were earlier than the others, but there were the first martinis to be drunk in a bar where waiters fluttered and a pianist played an unfamiliar song. Here, in public, Sybil retreated into that formal manner that Laura remembered from the past. Now she read it differently, as self-consciousness rather than as a judgement on her, on Laura, but that didn’t make it easier to break through. Winifred’s arrival brought a new tension with it; Laura knew how curious she always was, and began at once to forestall her, asking her questions as they went through to the restaurant. She knew that Winifred had moved on from the Ministry of Food, but was unsure what she was doing now; her letters had become sporadic recently. That was because she had been so busy, Winifred apologised, and now she was moving on again. ‘It’s annoying that I’ll be off so soon after you’re back …’ Yes, out of London – out of England, in fact; off to Geneva and the United Nations outfit.