A Quiet Life(134)

‘I’m taking a house in Italy for the summer,’ Archie said on the crackly line. ‘Cyril’s house, as he’s going off to India on some mad expedition. Why not join me? Down on the Adriatic Coast.’

‘I do come with others, you know …’

‘There’s masses of room – that’s the thing, really: too much room. I’ll see if Winifred and Peter can come too, for some of the time. Do come, with your daughter as well.’

The invitation could hardly have come at a better time, Laura thought. When she told her mother that evening that the consulate would not give immediate permission to travel to America, she was able to move on to the invitation to Pesaro and tell her that she thought she could probably get them to agree to that.

‘I’ll go to Boston for the summer, then, and see Ellen,’ Mother said, clearly relieved. ‘Tell me more about this Archie.’

In front of her, and for Aurore and Rosa, Laura had to be confident about this arrangement for the summer. Valance sent the message through a secretary. A trip to Pesaro was acceptable; a month away from Geneva was no problem if it was just to Italy. They would meet again later in the summer. So, with a manner of airy confidence, Laura made plans, bought new swimming costumes for herself and Rosa, and told Mother that it wouldn’t be long before the consulate saw sense and gave permission for her to travel to America.

But only once she’d got onto the train in the summer did she realise how uncertain she was about this trip. Aurore did not look as if she had dressed for a holiday, in a grey skirt and blouse, and there was always that tension between mother and nanny when they were alone with Rosa: which one of them would respond when Rosa cried, who was really responsible for the mistake of putting orange juice in her bottle, which was upended on her new white dress?

That sense of uncertainty deepened on their arrival at the house. It was a tall villa overlooking the ocean, bleached out in the bright afternoon light. But when one stepped out of the taxi and into the hall, the house seemed different from what one anticipated from the exterior, rather dark and faded, as though the sunlight had not permeated its huge rooms with their painted ceilings and their stone vases in tall alcoves. In the living room Laura noticed the rings that glasses had left on the coffee tables and the unemptied ashtrays. Archie was obviously casual about this borrowed house; he was talking about the friends that had been staying up until the previous day, how he was keeping the house full all summer. Rosa was whining, bored and hot from the journey, and Laura felt apologetic. Archie was no doubt expecting her to be the smiling, sociable woman he had known in Washington, and here she was, a distracted mother in a crumpled cotton skirt.

She tried to cover her uncertainty with enthusiasm. ‘What a lovely house,’ she said in a bright voice. A garden opened out from the living room, laid out in a geometric pattern, with box hedges lining beds of lemon trees and herbs and geraniums.

‘Gah-den,’ Rosa shouted, stomping along the paths. Laura scooped her up and showed her the lemons on the trees, and pulled a sprig of rosemary, crushing it in her fingers for her to sniff.

‘You are lucky to have this,’ Laura said, but Archie sounded bored as he agreed. Laura had not even planted a window box in Geneva, and breathing in the scented air she was overwhelmed by a memory of the mulchy odour that used to linger under the laurels in Surrey. The wet earth of that garden in Patsfield, with its straggling scillas and damp leaves, came into her mind like a vision of a glass of water to someone desperate with thirst.

‘Do you miss England?’ she asked Archie, in a casual way.

‘Not at all – the rain, you mean? The cold? The food?’

‘Well, and the countryside – the—’

Rosa had a new habit, when she thought Laura was talking too much, of putting her little hand hard across her mother’s mouth to stop her speaking. Laura tried to pull it off, but the child began to whine again and Laura stepped quickly towards the house, looking for Aurore.

Laura felt that the price of her holiday was to be amusing, so once she had given Rosa to Aurore and made sure that the nanny knew where everything was and was happy with the arrangements for her room and her supper, she touched up her make-up and ran down to talk to Archie before their dinner.

As she sat down and her cotton skirt flew up a little, she noticed his gaze falling on her legs. She brushed it down over her knees and felt self-conscious. For some reason she had not thought up to now that his invitation might include a sexual expectation; now, as he poured her a gin and tonic, she felt that had been na?ve. So she kept a quick artificial conversation going, asking him for details of all his travels, telling him dull stories about Winifred and other acquaintances. But the conversation did not seem to become easier between them. They were sitting on the terrace, eating figs and goats’ cheese as the sky darkened, and Laura was thinking that she might soon escape upstairs, pleading tiredness, as Archie talked about the plans for the following weeks. Winifred would come in a couple of days, with Peter, and then he was also expecting Amy to stay for a while, and there were some very amusing neighbours the other side of Pesaro. ‘You know Amy, don’t you?’ he said.

‘I don’t; Edward knows her. I saw her now and again – I didn’t know you knew her?’ Laura said. Why did her voice sound nervous? Amy Sandall, divorced again, she knew that, was still someone whose face Laura saw in magazines. She had no idea that Archie would know her, and it seemed an incongruous friendship. Archie was not nearly grand enough, surely, for that charismatic woman. He seemed to realise what Laura was thinking, and told her that they had only really met in Monte Carlo the previous summer, when Archie had just come into his inheritance and run away from London. ‘Her crowd is a bit too full of themselves really; I don’t know why I asked her. But I bumped into her last month in Bordighera and asked her to come down for a while, and she telegraphed yesterday to say she would.’