A Quiet Life(113)
On the kitchen table were some prints of the photographs that she had taken of Sybil’s children, and as Edward stood there drinking lemonade he started to look at them. ‘Funny to think that you started taking pictures of documents, and now this.’
He was looking at a photograph of Sybil’s son. It was one of the best pictures she had ever taken, Laura thought, with a very shallow depth of field so that all one’s attention was drawn to the boy’s wide eyes and slightly parted mouth. He was glancing off to one side, as if he had seen somebody he was delighted to look at. There was an inviting charm in that glance that she knew any mother would love. Under it was another that Laura had printed off to look at, although she knew she would not give it to Sybil. This time there was anger in George’s pursed mouth, and his curly hair made him look impish. Beside him was a dandelion clock, and the perspective made the dandelion as big as his head.
Edward held it up. ‘You are good, aren’t you?’
Laura said something about how mothers liked her photographs, because they captured time that passed too fast. And then she told Edward her news. The expression in his eyes was so hopeful, it hurt her.
She put the radio on, as they often did over dinner so that they did not have to think of new stories to fill all the silences, and some piano music that Laura thought she recognised fell into the room. ‘Didn’t you play that once?’ she asked, and then, struck by that thought, she suggested that they should get a piano, so that their child could learn as Edward once had. He agreed, and asked her about her plans for the darkroom in the garden. She realised, as they talked and she heated the soup and the pie she had bought from the village shop, that the news of the pregnancy had made this quiet life feel like the beginning of something rather than the end. When they were in bed that night, Laura felt a new current of exploration driving her pleasure, as if she had found a kind of confidence in her body, a confidence that she had not known before, and when Edward tried to enter her from behind she pulled herself up and turned over, embracing him again as she wanted to be embraced, and insisting through her movements that he follow her.
Those bulbs that Laura had planted with such effort did not do very well on their first spring outing. The scillas all began to raise their heads through the soil, but the snowdrops hardly made any appearance to speak of. When she asked the gardener what had gone wrong, he was clear. ‘They are hard to raise from bulbs, you should have ordered them in the green,’ he said. ‘Order them now and you can plant them later in the spring, and then next year you’ll have a pretty display.’
Laura felt irritated that he hadn’t given her this advice before, and annoyed that the display she was hoping for hadn’t arrived. But then, as she went back into the house, leaving the gardener to tie in the rambling roses, she turned and looked back into the green space and imagined how it would look next year with the snowdrops in bloom, and the year after, when the pear tree she had planted would be lifting its head above the walls. This rhythm is sustaining, she thought. Although she did not feel the mad rush she used to feel at the onset of spring, the sense of the inexorable march of the seasons and the turn of the year was in some way allied to the new life in her belly.
And out in the garden was now her own little room, her darkroom. To her, it had become the heart of the house. Whenever she went up to town for lunch with Sybil or Monica, or to the theatre or a concert with Edward, coming back to Patsfield it was always the darkroom that seemed to be pulling her home. She had no illusions about her talent for photography; it was not great, but she had the enthusiast’s ability to stick with it, to take advice, to practise, to do something that was just good enough to make it worthwhile.
She went on photographing mainly children, and the narrowness of her subject matter bore fruit, since that was the one area where other women were prepared to pay her to do a good job. In April she had completed a session with Monica’s daughters, who were now twelve and ten. It had been hard to stop Monica disrupting the afternoon with her importunate need to talk, so instead Laura had told her she would have lunch with her the following week in town. When the day came, she found herself reluctant to leave the house and the garden, there was so much to do in it and she found herself moving through her chores slowly these days.
They met in the Royal Academy; the stated intention was to look at the exhibition, but after they had eaten their chicken salad and lemon cake they walked instead into the Ritz bar and ordered a couple of martinis, while Monica smoked and cried and went on talking interminably. She had decided to leave Archie. She was taking the children. In Washington, she could pretend she didn’t like the place, but now she was home she realised that it was all about Archie. He smothered her. He bored her. She was getting old – she was still young. He hadn’t even cared when she had had an affair. ‘I think he is missing a vital part; he doesn’t seem to be able to talk about it.’
Laura listened, and tried to say the right things, reflecting Monica’s desires back to herself and helping her to muffle her fears. But what she was thinking about were Monica’s daughters; how uneasy they had seemed on the day that she had photographed them. The onlookers to unhappy lives, as she had been, as Ellen had been, as they all were. Could one ever break away from that mould? When she mentioned them, however, she could see that Monica thought she was being critical, so she just told her how beautiful they were, how the photographs had come out so well.