A Quiet Life(131)

Immediately Mother and Ellen began trying to calm her down, but Laura could see that their well-meaning distractions were only upsetting her more, so she pulled her out of her high chair and took her out onto the balcony, alone. Rosa strained away from her, her bottom lip trembling, and as Laura tried to distract her she could hear the women talking in the room, thinking she was out of earshot.

‘Why won’t she come back to America?’

‘False hopes,’ said Winifred.

‘I thought there was a problem with her passport?’

‘I thought it was hoping that Edward might turn up in Europe.’

‘She’s got to move on.’

After a while Rosa relaxed and let Laura tickle her into hiccupping giggles. Laura went back into the room, feeling a pool of silence spread around her as she did so, and put the child into her high chair. She had planned to take a photograph of Rosa for her birthday; these were the only photographs she took nowadays – studies of her daughter. But when she took the camera out, she found that nothing was going well: the light was too dim and Rosa began to complain again.

After Janet and Rosa were finally in bed, the four women sat in the living room, eating more birthday cake. At least Winifred’s presence gave Laura an excuse to open a bottle of wine. It was not long before Ellen moved into the open. Clearly, she had been emboldened by the agreement of Winifred and Mother that it was time for Laura to move on.

‘I’ve found out, Laura, that if you come back to the States you could get a divorce from Edward quite easily – don’t, don’t, please listen,’ Ellen said, irritated that as soon as she started talking, Laura stood up.

‘I am listening,’ Laura said, although she had such a headache that it was hard to concentrate on her words. ‘I’m just getting another drink.’

‘It doesn’t mean that you couldn’t be with him again if he comes back, but at least it will regularise your position. It’s impossible like this. If you come to Boston, I could help with Rosa, and she’d have her cousins to grow up with.’

Laura tried to sound reasonable. ‘It’s kind of you, but I can’t decide just like that. The Foreign Office agreed to Geneva, but it took some persuading. They would never let me go to the States. And I can’t bear the thought – you can’t imagine what the press was like in England. They’d all be out again in full force in America. He was secretary of the Combined Policy Committee, you know. It meant he knew everything about the bomb. I’d never hear the end of it there.’

‘Nonsense, Laura. I’m not saying it wouldn’t be bad for a bit – but you faced it down in England—’

‘I didn’t. I ran away. It was impossible.’

‘It was impossible,’ their mother agreed.

‘Mother,’ cried Ellen. ‘I thought you were on my side!’

‘I am,’ their mother said. ‘But, Ellen, you’ve no idea. We couldn’t leave the house.’

‘That was two years ago, it’s not a new story any more. Come on, Laura, you can’t stay here forever. It’s not fair on Mother, or Rosa.’

‘Who says it’s going to be forever?’

In the face of Laura’s continued faith in her absent husband, Ellen and Mother fell silent. Winifred spoke next.

‘They do have a point, darling. Maybe you should look for a job? It’s not good just brooding all the time.’

Again, Laura tried to sound reasonable, and talked to Winifred about what might be possible during the time that Rosa could spend with Aurore, and given Laura’s minimal experience. The women were glad that Laura seemed open, at least, to letting them discuss her impossible, rudderless life, and so they went on talking in circles for a while longer, and then Laura said she had to go to bed.

Once in her room, she lay fully dressed on her bed, looking up at the ceiling, which was painted a pale, shiny grey. There were cobwebs in the corners, she noticed, and on the ceiling light. She should get a broom and knock them down. She should tell the cleaning lady tomorrow. Her headache was growing at the back of her eyes. She felt isolated by the way that Mother and Ellen and Winifred had attacked her, all wanting to change her life. She could see herself through their eyes: drinking too much, a nervous and irritable mother, wandering through life with a vain, stupid hope, not thinking about how her choices affected those around her, selfishly making her mother stay with her when she wanted to be back in America.

If only she could just give in, go to Boston, let Rosa grow up with her cousins. A normal, suburban life; wasn’t that what she wanted, really? Maybe it was all she had ever wanted, maybe her other dreams had been only adolescent illusions. But as soon as she thought of it, she knew how distant that was from her now. She had seen something of the temper of the times in Washington; she could not return to the fire that had destroyed Hiss. The silences of the British secret services chilled her, but their cold inertia gave her a way of surviving.

And then there was the pure physical distance such a move would put between her and Edward. If he was now in Russia, silenced for some reason but still alive, he was not so very far. There was always the possibility that Stefan would walk into her life again, passing her in a narrow Swiss street, handing a card to her in a crowded train. In Boston, miles and oceans would divide her from them.

But as Laura thought of this, and the possibility of Edward’s presence just across the borders, or Stefan in this very city, the silence, unbroken for two years, screamed in her ears. What had Stefan’s promise actually meant? When he had said that they would bring her over, was he just reassuring her with empty words so that she would let the precious Virgil go without her? She thought of the network of contacts that had been knitted around Edward. Thinking back, unpicking conversations, she recognised that Nick was not the only one. There must have been one other source in Washington, with a link to the cryptographers’ discoveries, and another one in London, who knew when Edward would be brought in and who would interrogate him. Laura had never been given the keys to that kingdom of secrets. She had not realised it all these years, but she had always been an appendage, locked outside the masculine relationships that they said might endanger her, but which, she also saw, could have been the route to her survival. Outside one group, she had also been outside another. She really was alone, as Edward had never been alone.