A Quiet Life(122)
Not long for this world. It was a phrase that seemed very unlike Sybil, as though she was moving into a kind of tragic cliché. Again, Laura tried to say how awful such news was.
‘Isn’t it?’
Now Laura recognised that the intimacy she thought they had found that day in Patsfield amounted to nothing; Laura was beyond the gates, she was the outsider. She could never be forgiven for the path Edward had taken away from the group, away from Sybil’s certainties and traditions. There was no bond, no loyalty now between the two women, and Laura felt the break of it as she walked to the front door and went alone and vulnerable down the broad white steps to the waiting car and the dazzle of the flashbulbs.
It was nearly three months after the birth that Laura and her mother went to Dr Turner together with Rosa, for a check-up. Dr Turner was pleased with Rosa: ‘Bright as a button,’ he said as she made pursed faces at him. But he was not pleased with Laura. Laura was startled into self-consciousness as he took her pulse and asked her questions about her diet and sleep and commented on her thinning hair and dull skin. She had spent the last few months focused on Rosa rather than on herself, and it was only now under Dr Turner’s frowning scrutiny that she realised she was failing at her own work of femininity, that she had forgotten about the face she turned to the world.
She had healed slowly from the Caesarean, so that there was often a current of physical pain running through those days, which made them all the more exhausting. Rosa was a fussy baby, always wanting to nurse or be carried, so that even with Mother and Aunt Dee and Helen to help there was never respite for Laura. Nothing, she thought, prepares one for the overwhelming physicality, not so much of childbirth – the anaesthetic and the surgery had, after all, shielded her from that – but from the experience of looking after a new baby. Whenever she was not with Rosa, her skin craved her touch, and yet whenever Laura had her in her arms she felt restless, weighed down by her needs. This push and pull of desire and frustration was too extreme for her to understand; it was an intensity of sensation from which, it seemed, there was no release.
Dr Turner told her she needed to engage a nanny and get more sleep, to take a nap every afternoon, to eat more red meat and drink more milk, to go for a walk in the fresh air every day, and he enlisted her mother in the argument. Laura could not be bothered to explain to him that finding a nanny was not very easy when you had become the notorious wife of a traitor and every prospective employee who answered your advertisement for help turned out to be in the pay of some newspaper. The interest in the Last story had not died down. She still could not step outside the door without being photographed. Every time the reporters left for a day, they seemed to find a new lead or a new angle, and swarmed back again. One week, Herbert Morrison made a statement about the missing diplomats in Parliament; another week, there was a supposed sighting in Warsaw; another week, a statement by an old colleague of Edward’s that he had once boasted of being the English Hiss; another, a page of vile gossip in a Sunday newspaper that the two had fled because they were being blackmailed over allegations too depraved to repeat in a family newspaper.
And with the press camped by her door Laura could not imagine how Stefan was ever going to reach her. How would she receive any message that was more informative than Edward’s anodyne telegram? There could be no straightforward escape for her now, no flight over the borders under cover of night. No wonder she looked strung out, but of course she could say nothing of that to Dr Turner. She smiled and said yes, she would try to rest more, she would think about where they could go for a holiday.
On the way back to Patsfield, Rosa whining on her grandmother’s lap as Laura drove, Mother picked up the subject. ‘He’s right,’ she said. ‘Never being able to have a normal day – not able to go for a walk or go shopping or anything – you can’t go on like this. He said your nerves are all to pieces, that you’re not recovering properly from the birth.’ Out of the window Laura saw that reporter with the longish hair, whose face she might have found quite attractive had he not posed such a threat to her, walking down the village high street, talking to the woman who had been keen on amateur dramatics. Laura realised that she never stopped watching out in this way now, she was never unaware of being watched, of watching the watchers. Her mother was right, it could not go on.
When they got into the house, it was nearly lunchtime. Rosa began to get restless, and while Mother and Aunt Dee ate, Laura was pacing the floor, trying to calm her. ‘Let Helen take her for a while,’ her mother said, but Laura believed that Helen would unsettle her, and it was easier to hold her herself, carrying her through the maze of her tiredness until she reached sleep and Laura could go upstairs and put her into her cot. Then she went down and ate some cold, tasteless chicken pie while Mother and Aunt Dee talked.
She had noticed how the relationship between Mother and Aunt Dee had grown over the last few months here. They liked to drift back into the past, and Laura could catch echoes of the young girls of the Edwardian age they had once been, the dreams and ideas that had fuelled their youth. But then Laura would hear them talk about the excruciating present, and they were unable to sidestep the dead ends of their lives: the unfulfilling marriages and bereavements, the children lost to a strange confusion of modernity and abandonment. Giles and Winifred and herself all became rolled up into the same narrative of anxiety, while only Ellen, with her apparently perfect family life, was outside their complicated tales of worry and woe.