A Quiet Life(111)
Sybil was happy for the children to sit for more photographs, and this time Laura knew it was going well. They sat among the geraniums in the wild borders, and she took close-ups of George squatting down looking seriously at a beetle he had found on a leaf, with Alice kneeling beside him. There was the evanescent sweetness that everyone wants to associate with children – there, in Alice’s wide eyes and George’s pointing finger.
After the pictures were done, Sybil let the children hide with their tea in the spaces behind the dark laurels at the back of the garden, while the women sat on the terrace. Laura had bought a fruitcake at a recent village fete, and they ate it while drinking the Earl Grey tea she had ordered from the village grocer. Sybil seemed unconscious of the effort she had made, which Laura took as a kind of tribute, but Winifred looked at her in an appraising way.
‘You are the good housewife, aren’t you? I suppose you’re not thinking of working?’
What work could I possibly do, Laura thought, imagining herself in an office now, inexperienced and ignorant. ‘It’s not like during the war, is it? In Washington, none of the wives worked.’
‘But aren’t you bored to death out here? I wouldn’t have thought village life was quite your thing. Does Edward think that you are his mother?’
Laura found Winifred’s directness invigorating. It was the idea that she had been thinking about her at all, had been wondering whether Laura was doing the right thing, which touched her.
‘It’s so much better for Edward coming down here in the evenings and weekends rather than staying in London – you know how he went under before.’
‘But you do have a life too. Wouldn’t it be more fun to be living in town? I saw Monica and Archie the other day, they said they knew you in Washington, that you were out every night there.’
Of course Winifred would know Monica and Archie, Laura thought. That was the way of the group; everyone knew everyone else. Laura said that she might look for something to do the following year, if everything was going well. She started to tell anecdotes about her efforts to fit in with village life. ‘I’ve promised to do some baking for a coffee morning next week, but as for me and cakes …’
‘I can come and teach you,’ said Sybil, surprising her. ‘It’s the only thing I can do in the whole world. Daddy didn’t think anything of education for girls, but he packed me off to a cordon bleu cooking course when I was eighteen. I still do some of it, I’m not bad – I’ll teach you how to amaze the wives of Patsfield with some fancy confections if you like. Also, Nina asked if you would come and photograph her son one day? She saw those pictures you did of us before and liked them – so much better, she said, than some she paid a fortune for in a Mayfair studio.’
This was unexpected. Laura did not know that Nina was married. Sybil explained that it was some much older divorced man whom Sybil had known all her life, and Laura could tell that she disapproved. Laura could not bear to think of going to Nina’s house, putting her and her son at ease, setting up her camera. In a stalling aside, she said she was thinking of charging for taking photographs.
‘Do you need to?’ Sybil asked.
‘I was thinking of making a little darkroom out here in that outbuilding. It would make it more of a project, you know, if I could charge a little bit – not much, obviously.’
‘I wouldn’t worry about how much,’ Sybil said. Just at that moment the children’s shouts from the back of the garden disturbed her, and she got up to check on them. The garden was physically richer when children were playing in it, Laura was thinking: you noticed the sticks on the ground they were sorting; you noticed the dandelion clocks they picked, the daisies they made into chains, the ladybugs they tried to catch – small things that were normally passed over. She was wondering how she could show that in photographs, the lines of sight that children brought with them, but Winifred was talking to her now, asking her how Edward’s sessions with Lvov were going.
Laura didn’t really know any more than that Lvov had written a report that had cleared Edward for work, but had asked if he would continue to come and see him. ‘He can’t wait to stop, says it’s all so self-indulgent.’
‘Giles loves it, he’s always trying to encourage me to go, but I don’t think I’d have a whole lot to say. I’m not like these men with their wicked secrets.’ Winifred must still believe that Edward’s problems were sexual, Laura realised. She needed to confront that now, to tell Winifred how mistaken she was. There must be a way to put her right without divulging other secrets. But just as she began to speak, Winifred was talking about how she was off to Geneva the following week and why didn’t Edward and Laura come and stay with her in the late summer. They could swim and walk in the mountains; they would enjoy the scenery. Laura liked the idea. Her mother and Aunt Dee had gone to school near Geneva when they were young women; she remembered seeing an old photograph of them against a picture postcard background of exquisite peaks. There was something so clean and charming about mountains in the sun. Winifred must be looking forward to moving there, Laura said.
Winifred agreed, clearly excited about it. She started to talk about the need for countries to come together in the face of the threat of atomic war, the importance of the United Nations – ‘as an idea,’ she said intently, ‘whatever we manage in practice’. Laura would have liked to know more about what Winifred thought of the American domination of the United Nations, but as Sybil came back the conversation moved towards the personal. It was Winifred’s new boyfriend Peter, apparently, who worked for the British mission in Geneva, who had found her this opening there. She would like Sybil and Laura to meet Peter some time. He was the son of old Bennett, Sybil must know who she meant, who used to be in the diplomatic service before the war.