A Quiet Life(118)
The next morning, she went to church. She had been in once or twice before, for Easter and carol services. She liked the whitewashed simplicity of its interior, the airy setting up on the hill. But the regular congregants were standoffish with her, since neither she nor Edward were regulars. There was no presence there for her in the coloured glass and the scent of lilac, but it was good to be with other people and she stayed this time for the coffee and cookies, seeing again the woman who had talked to her about the amateur theatrics. When she got back to the house, she went straight to the darkroom. She had found some old negatives among Edward’s papers, old photographs from school. As she printed the pictures, she saw his young face looking up at her, unshadowed.
It was another sleepless night, characterised by fear and heartburn. But finally she could act: at nine in the morning she telephoned the Foreign Office and asked for Edward, and when she was told he was not there, she asked if she could speak to Archie Platt. Her mouth seemed dry as she said that she had not seen Edward since Friday evening and had thought he must have stayed the weekend in town. ‘I hope he’s not ill or …’
‘God, what a time for him to behave like this,’ Archie said. ‘I’ll pass the word along and we’ll have him ring as soon as he gets in.’
The prints in the darkroom were dry. She brought one to the house and propped it on the mantelpiece. She did not think Edward had taken a photograph of her with him. But maybe that was a sign that he didn’t think they would be long parted. She threw the stale cake in the bin before Helen came and changed her dress which, she suddenly realised, catching sight of herself in the hall mirror, she had worn all weekend; it had a stain on the front. She must look normal; she must look as though she had slept, as though she was the usual Laura.
It was after lunch when Archie finally rang back, a new tension in his usually lazy voice. ‘Look, everyone’s a bit concerned that he hasn’t turned up here either. Could I put Spall on the telephone? He’s one of our chaps – looks after this kind of thing.’ The receiver was slippery in Laura’s hand as she waited for Bill Spall to come on the telephone and introduce himself. He asked her when she had last seen Edward and where he had said he was going.
The next day, in the consulting room, the doctor measured and listened. His hands were cold on her skin. Turning away from her, looking at papers on his desk as she pulled down her dress, Dr Turner said that they would go ahead with the Caesarean as planned, a week on Thursday. Laura felt dismissed; she had liked that momentary sensation of being looked after. Outside the consulting room the world returned, too sharp, too loud, as she walked down the steps into Harley Street.
She drove the short distance through London to Sybil’s house. When Bill Spall had asked her to meet him the following day she had immediately suggested that they could go to Chester Square. Would Toby and Sybil not be a kind of protection for her? They both sat with her as Spall talked, and often interrupted him in their confident tones. Spall asked Laura to describe what had happened on Friday evening, and Laura told it the way she knew she would be telling it from now on: Nick, an old friend, nothing to that, the two of them coming back for a drink after work, then back to town in Nick’s car for dinner – and why not, it was Edward’s birthday; she could not do much in her condition. Yes, Edward often went to the club after work with his friends; yes, he was rather unreliable; certainly, if he had wanted to stay up in town for the weekend it was unusual of him not to telephone her, but she had assumed nothing was wrong. She had been rather tired out recently, it was nice for her to be able to rest. She had only really begun to worry on Sunday, and then …
It was Toby who tried to turn the interview around. Irritable and impatient, he began to question Spall, wanting to know exactly what the Foreign Office was doing to find Edward and Nick. So Spall told them that Nick’s car had been traced to St Malo, and two men answering the description of Edward and Nick had been seen on the ferry that connected with the train to Paris. There, he said, the trail had gone cold – but the French police were involved now. The French police, Toby said with a groan, as if they were talking about comedy characters. Paris! Sybil said, folding her lips together and straightening her back. Laura could see the judgement forming in her expression. Had Edward gone off on an unforgivable alcoholic binge with a well-known pervert and drunk? Was he right now sleeping it off in some French gutter? If Edward had not been one of them, her own brother-in-law, the verdict might have escaped her lips. As it was, there was enough bad feeling in the room to bring the conversation to a halt quite quickly.
After Spall had gone, Laura found herself longing to go too. She had to stay for a while, though, to allow Toby and Sybil to circle around what had happened and try to situate it in everyday life. Toby remembered how he had once gone with a friend to a house party in Cumberland, and Sybil had mistaken the date, and hadn’t known where he was all Saturday. ‘It came out all right in the end,’ he said, and Laura felt a deep coldness within her as she thought that, for the very first time in their lives, something was not going to come out all right. She had to escape their expectation that she would stay with them, now that the house in Patsfield was empty. ‘My mother is arriving tomorrow, you know,’ she had to say more than once. ‘I’d rather be there, really – in case Edward telephones, or comes back tonight.’
‘Surely he’ll guess where you are,’ Sybil said, but her insistence on this point seemed to be tempered, Laura thought, by her own growing anger with what she thought Edward had done, and after tea Laura was able to escape.