A Quiet Life(130)

After dinner, once Mother and Rosa were asleep in their rooms, Laura began Alistair’s book and went on reading it all night. While reading she remembered how Winifred had told her seven years ago that Alistair was not quite able to see another’s full humanity, and the force of this observation struck her as she saw Edward become, in his hands, a mere caricature of a traitor. But it was not an unlifelike portrait. With Alistair’s description of Edward on his return from America, Laura was plunged back into that dinner at the Savoy when they had all tried so hard to play their roles: ‘His appearance on that evening was unexpected. He had lost his serenity, his hands would tremble, his eyes were hooded and he looked as if he had spent the night sitting up in a train … Though he remained as detached and amiable as ever, I felt it was clear that he was in a very bad way. From time to time, even in mid-conversation, a kind of shutter would fall as if he had returned to some inner and incommunicable anxiety.’

But there were other, less expected cruelties in the way that he wrote about her. ‘It is clear that Laura Last is as confused as all her friends about the circumstances of his disappearance. Any latent political beliefs he had were obviously not confided in a wife whose inability to interest herself in any aspect of politics is at times painfully obvious. She is a woman dedicated to dancing and flirtation, and her eagerness for admiration could often be an embarrassment for Last, who would detach himself from her social life.’ And Laura was forced down the hidden lanes of memory again, those nights when she had insisted that Alistair took her dancing at the Dorchester, when he had been the witness to her na?ve attempts to flirt with Blanchard. Shame coursed through her, as it had done all those years ago.

The next morning Laura waited until Winifred and Peter and Mother had gone off skiing again and Aurore had taken Rosa into the hotel crèche, before turning to Giles over the breakfast table and restarting the conversation. ‘He is cruel.’

‘And the editors got him to take out Edward’s relationship with Nick …’

‘Whatever do you mean?’ Laura’s temper sparked at last; how could it be that even Giles, who claimed such knowledge of Edward, would believe such a thing?

‘We don’t have to beat around the bush any more, do we? They went off together, didn’t they – how much more obvious did they have to make it? Alistair told me that you’d known and you’d turned a blind eye, for years.’

‘That’s nonsense.’

‘I’m sorry if I offended you,’ he said, in a stiff, satisfied voice that showed he was not sorry at all. ‘Alistair said you knew. I loved him at Cambridge. Well, I fancied him, but it was Nick he cared for. We can see that now.’

There was no more for them to say. Social niceties were at an end. ‘I must go and get ready for skiing – it’s absurd to come all this way and not even bother to go on the slopes.’ She stood up, throwing down her napkin, and went out of the restaurant. She did not go out to the mountains, however; she could not face the great whiteness of the outdoors. She went into the crèche to find Rosa and to roll coloured balls with her, while her mind travelled back over the years.

The interest aroused by the book’s publication was intense. Laura could gauge it by the increased numbers of telephone calls she got from journalists, and when it was published in America there was another surge. Mother had tried to push Laura to go to America that summer, and every week, it seemed, she received letters from Ellen, telling her she should think of coming home. But she was very aware of Valance’s warning that she could not travel too far, and once or twice Ellen enclosed cuttings about Edward from American newspapers with her letters and Laura quailed at the anger they revealed. She wrote impersonal little notes back to Ellen, suggesting that she should come to Geneva herself.

It was not until the following spring that Ellen finally took up the invitation, without Tom and her son, but with her daughter Janet, who was now ten. As Laura saw them walking towards her, she felt she was looking at the future of motherhood – the child who grows apart from you and looks with bored eyes as you fuss with suitcases and passports. Of course one knows that it will happen, Laura thought, but it was the first time she had felt the future with that kind of physical shock: what it would be like for her and Rosa when they were no longer locked into the double step of infancy.

Although it was their mother who had been asking Ellen to come over, the first evening the chatter was mainly between the two sisters. Laura put on the bright persona that she had honed for visitors, telling them what a lovely city Geneva was, how she was so happy to be in this part of it – the shops! The restaurants! The cosmopolitan crowd! And they could go for drives along the lake, and up in the mountains. But after a day or so her mood corroded. She felt, as she always had – but worse now than ever – Ellen’s critical gaze on her life. And she could not warm to Janet, who seemed to have inherited Ellen’s negative view of the world; Laura found herself irritated by the ten-year-old’s passive attitude, her lack of enthusiasm for the holiday. Gradually the apartment, crowded with the two sisters, their mother and two little girls, began to feel impossibly claustrophobic.

The night before her second birthday, Rosa was unable to settle; it seemed that she was sickening for something, though she had no rash or fever. Whatever the reason, the broken night made the morning feel too bright and noisy, with Ellen and Mother making plans for the day and Janet trying to play with Rosa, but only succeeding in upsetting her. They went out for the day, in the little train up into the hills, with Rosa in a stroller, and at the lunch in a hilltop café Laura felt that she should drink only one glass of wine. But as soon as they returned to the apartment, she poured gin into a glass of orange juice while the others were setting the table. They had invited Winifred to come around for a birthday tea after work, and Laura could see that Ellen and Winifred took to one another immediately. That made her feel resentful rather than pleased; she realised it was childish of her, but she saw them as belonging to such different parts of her life, and she did not want Winifred to value Ellen – dull Ellen – with her terrible American sandals and her bright red nail polish. But here they were, talking in a down-to-earth way about where Ellen should go shopping the next day and about Winifred’s work. Laura cut the over-iced chocolate cake and stepped back onto a balloon whose explosive burst caused Rosa to collapse into tears.