A Quiet Life(120)

‘Do tell Helen she can go now,’ Laura said to Mother. ‘And could you ask her to bring in the newspapers in the morning? I wonder what nonsense they will print.’

If only it had been nonsense, Laura thought the next day, looking at the newspapers that Helen had put on the kitchen table. ‘British diplomats missing’, ‘believed to be on their way to Moscow’ … Set down like that it was so histrionic, like the opening scene in a film that you knew would be all chases and shoot-outs and would never tell you anything about the complexities of life. Mother and Aunt Dee, reading them after Laura, seemed to be waiting for her to speak, and so she said what they wanted to hear, that it was all crazy, how anyone could believe such a thing of Edward she had no idea; the Foreign Office should put a stop to all this. They both approved the idea that the Foreign Office was in some way in the wrong, and liked to hear her expostulate about how stupid that man Spall clearly was.

But had there been enough time? That was all Laura was thinking, as she left the kitchen and crossed the hall to telephone Toby. Was Edward safely across now? Or would the massive pursuit that must now be underway catch up with them? There would be no hiding for him now if so; the attempt to go east would be too obvious, the treason too clear. Her baby pushed further into the well of her pelvis, sending a dense pressure through her vulva, just as the doorbell began to peal again. ‘Don’t answer it, Helen,’ she said. But the bell gave way to a furious knocking, and then a voice called through the letterbox, ‘Telegram for Mrs Last,’ and she let Helen go to the door to take in the message.

Misspelt, laconic, it was obviously a telegram written for public consumption more than for her eyes, and yet there was still meaning in it for her. ‘Had to leav unexpectedly. Am quite well now. Don’t worry. I love you. Please don’t stop loving me.’ ‘Am quite well now.’ Laura read those four words with hope, almost chanting them to herself. ‘I promised to tell Spall if I heard from Edward at all,’ she told Mother. ‘I can’t make this out, really, but – I must go and telephone.’

This time, Spall’s voice was distant. He would come up to Patsfield that afternoon to talk further, he said. But as he spoke, Laura felt a different sensation in her belly, not just the pressure, not just the tightening, but a clench of pain, more definite, more insistent. It was not the sudden agony she had felt five years ago, but it intruded with absolute certainty, clearing a place in her mind. She waited, listening for its return, as Spall went on talking.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I’ll be able to do that. I think I’ll be going to the hospital.’ She put down the receiver and waited for the pain to go and to return and to go, and then she picked up the telephone again to order a taxi.





6


As Laura woke, she heard another’s breath, coming and going, coming and going: a sound that was feather-light, but which bound her with a grip like steel wire into the new life. She was too tired to do anything, the anaesthetic was still swirling in her head. Where she was lying, she could not even see the baby in her crib by the wall, but the new presence filled the room. In that state of suspended animation, feeling the pain from the wound in her belly grow as the anaesthetic wore away, it was strange to hear voices at the door, breaking out in anger, ‘No, I’m sorry, Mrs Last is not yet able to have visitors.’

‘I’m her cousin, she’s expecting me.’ But it was an unfamiliar Englishman’s voice, a loose Cockney intonation, not one of Edward’s family. A bouquet of roses, bursting with freshness, came into the room, but behind them was that eager face Laura had last seen in the garden at Patsfield. Laura tried to sit up, wincing from the pull of pain in her abdomen, and as she did so the flash of the camera came with shocking brightness, and the nurse’s shriek for someone to come and help turn him away cut through the room.

‘I’m so sorry, Mrs Last, please accept our apologies.’Another nurse and a doctor were in the room, concerned, crowding out the peace.

‘Make sure it doesn’t happen again,’ Laura said, but her voice was weighted with tiredness rather than anger, and she soon fell asleep, waking only when the nurse came to help her feed Rosa. Rosa, too, seemed sleepy, but when she found the nipple and sucked a rhythm fell into place between them. Whorls of hair failed to cover that too-naked skull, her feet were too soft, her vulnerability too extreme. When the visitors Laura was expecting, Mother and Aunt Dee, came later, she found it difficult to speak to them. They bore with them fears about the rumours building outside, but Laura was slow to respond. She needed to learn the contours of a new face and the rhythms of a new life, and all her energies were being taken up by those imperatives.

This is the unanswered question of motherhood, Laura came to realise over the following few days. Had her life got bigger, enlarging itself around this new being? Or had it got smaller, fixing itself to the well-being of this tiny person, cutting out any dream of freedom? The actual physical space of her life was so constrained now as to be claustrophobic. This was not entirely Rosa’s fault. The reporters would not give up, and even once they had driven back to Patsfield after Laura had spent a week at the hospital, they were unavoidable. The women kept the curtains closed on the ground floor; they never answered the door unless they knew who it was; they did not use the garden because reporters would hide in the shrubs to listen to them; they could not walk into the village without their footsteps being dogged. Outside, the summer was flowering and lengthening, but Rosa and Laura could see nothing of it. So it remained a close, warm, female world, in which the smallest person became the largest, and all Laura’s energy was concentrated on the feeding, the sleeping, the crying – a slow circling in which days moved on without changing shape. All the time, the telephone rang, but even when the voices of friends and acquaintances were heard, Laura put them off visiting.