A Quiet Life(139)
The next morning, she tries to cover up the awkwardness of the previous day. She tells her mother about the holiday in Pesaro, about Archie, and lets her understand how that relationship might have developed. When Laura left Pesaro, Archie had asked her if she and Rosa and Mother might join him for another holiday at the very end of the season, near Lake Annecy. ‘Talloires is meant to be so pretty,’ Laura says now. ‘We could just go for a few days.’
Her mother seems happy to fall in with this plan, but Laura feels that something is coming to a head between them. This life in limbo cannot last forever, she knows. Maybe Archie will be her way out. Maybe she will go to Ellen in Boston with Mother, and face down the fear of exposure. Maybe she will have to make her own independent way, and learn from Winifred to find work. Each path is fraught with uncertainty, with the need for endless lies. The coffee is bubbling in the coffee-maker. She picks it up. The top has not been twisted on properly. Some of it slops out as she moves it and she burns her hand. ‘Mummy sad,’ Rosa says, watching her as she screws up her face and holds her hand under the cold faucet. ‘Poor Mummy.’ When your child shows empathy, it heartens you, you realise she can care and not just be cared for. But also, there is a hard question in it. Rosa is watching her, learning from her day by day. What is she learning?
After she has put ice on her hand, Laura realises how late it is. She has the appointment to keep with Valance that he made with her before she went to Pesaro. She asks her mother to look after Rosa, as she has given Aurore a few days off, and starts to dress with great reluctance. Walking through the city up to the consulate, her legs feel heavy. Geneva itself seems in a dull mood today, the clouds are dense, the air hardly stirring, even under the trees in the Parc Beaulieu. Valance is sitting at a desk in that purple-papered room. He looks ill or hungover and he is in a bad temper. She puts on her air of injured innocence, and tells him that she tried her best with Peter, but got nowhere.
But after a while, obeying a new script that has just occurred to her, she begins to behave differently from the way she has acted the last two times they have met. She begins a false performance of openness, as if she has succumbed to his persuasiveness. She acts as if she is fishing from her mind any possible story that might interest Valance.
First of all, she confesses a couple of things she thinks he must already know – about how Edward seemed to receive some message that he was in danger a few months before he left, and about his belief that he was being followed in town. She makes much of saying these things, as if she is confiding in him. And then she takes a new turn. She talks about Robin Muir and about how close he and her husband were. As she speaks, she remembers that mild, silver-haired man in the British embassy, and in her mind she apologises to him for using his memory in this way, as she begins to weave innuendo around his readiness to send Edward home suddenly from a suspicious Washington.
At first, Laura can tell that Valance is not convinced, but gradually she can see that the idea of the involvement of Robin Muir intrigues him. Could he, the dead diplomat, another apparently impeccable member of the group, be the missing link? To her relief, she feels that his attention is moving away from her; perhaps her continued play of ignorance is beginning to convince him. After all, at the end of the day, Laura is just a woman. She forgets names and places; she has no head for politics. Valance has no doubt read Alistair’s book, has no doubt heard other people’s opinions of her. A woman. A wife. A mother. Why would her husband have confided in her? After a few hours, Valance smiles without warmth and dismisses Laura. He tells her that they will meet again in a few months, and that he will have work for her. She feels that they may have moved into a different place. For sure, it is a safer place for now. But not a comfortable place, and as she walks out, she feels hot nausea in her stomach.
She goes to pick up some photographs, ones she took before Pesaro, from the developer, and takes them home to the apartment. She realises as she opens them, sitting on the sofa in the living room, that she already knows which ones are going to be good. Before, the developing process itself had seemed a revelation of the unknown; now, the camera seems to do what she wants, the contrasts and compositions that she planned for are almost exactly what she sees. Looking through them, she is caught by a desire to see how she has improved, and she gets out a box of old photographs. Rosa is sitting beside her on the floor, playing with a toy train, but she clambers onto her lap when she sees the pictures. ‘Rosa,’ she says, putting her thumb down on the prints. ‘Don’t touch the picture, darling,’ Laura says automatically, leafing through the others. ‘Mama,’ she says, pointing at the picture that Winifred took of Laura’s wedding day. ‘And that’s Father,’ Laura says. Rosa does not respond, looking at the stranger in the picture, and Laura suddenly stands up, dislodging her from her lap so quickly that she cries out.
When Rosa is in bed that night, Laura puts the prints back in their box, looking back over them. The photographs she has taken of Rosa are such a detailed record of a child’s change and growth, her gradual strengthening and consciousness. She is surprised by some of them, even though they only document two years, but the older face of the child becomes laid over the younger one in one’s memory, so that one quickly forgets what at the time seems unforgettable, and the photographs gain this power to surprise. Love for a child is so different from love for a spouse: it rests on this transience. Could she also have learned to love change in Edward? Could they have aged and moved forwards, together? Could they have forgiven one another for all the mistakes, and built something honest out of the imperfections and littleness of everyday life?