A Quiet Life(141)

The next day her mood changes. After breakfast, she asks her mother to take Rosa down to the swings at the lakeside and says she must go into the town to buy something. The way she says ‘something’, she can see that Mother thinks it is sanitary protection or contraception; something that nobody wants to talk about. This is why you can tell big lies, she thinks to herself, because people are so eager to keep all the small lies hidden. She is walking along, smoking, thinking these pointless thoughts, when suddenly she ducks into a café and asks for a brandy. She is beginning to see what is at stake. Silence has been her friend for two long years; there is absolutely nobody in the whole world that she can talk to about what has happened. But now she begins to see the magnitude of what she is facing.

She does not know what the next step should be. For so long she held onto the fact that Stefan said he would bring her over. But gradually the promise faded. She has built a life now, a life without Edward. Is the old dream strong enough to bring her back? How can she know? The brandy should be comforting, but the doubts about Edward that have been growing are unfolding in her mind again. Why was he silent for so long? It could not have been impossible for him to communicate. There are always channels, she knows that as well as anyone – letters, whispers, codes, telegrams. Why was there that monumental silence? What did it mean? What would she be going to if she went over? What sort of life would she be giving Rosa?

She remembers how they used to imagine the Soviet Union: the visions that Florence and Edward held out to her. For Florence, although she may have talked about it intellectually, it was something emotional, the possibility of an authentic, fully lived life. For Edward, it was also something almost spiritual; it was the way, he believed, that the great guilt of the upper class could be absolved, so that he would no longer have to drag around the burden of being the one who had benefited from the toil of the working class, from the colonial oppressed, their broken, miserable lives; that he could be their servant rather than them his servants. Servants. It was funny – not funny, but ironic – that all those years she had been the one who had had to deal with the servants – Mrs Venn, Edna, Ann, Kathy, Helen, now Aurore – all the women who had cooked for her and cleaned for her and looked after her child. She would like to be in a society where she no longer had to look back into their questioning and judgemental eyes. Or would she? Laura flicks, out of her thoughts, back into the café and her situation. Why is she thinking about Ann and Helen and Aurore rather than about herself and Edward and Rosa, and what she will do now?

As she finishes her drink, she is thrown back to the past. Thrown back to the dark times in Washington. It is nonsense, surely, to think that she was in any way responsible for Joe’s death. It came hot on the heels of her meeting with Alex, yes, but it is the stuff of a cheap thriller, a fast movie, to think that the two were connected. It makes no sense. Why did Alex not bring them out then? Why did she not talk to Edward about what it all meant? She and Edward were so schooled into secrecy by those instructions, she thinks sadly, and then she begins to wonder. Was it really the orders of their handlers that made them so silent even with one another, or was it simply his character, his desire to live without revelation, keeping himself to himself, even when he was naked with her? Whatever the reason, she can see clearly now that they never had the conversations they should have had.

Even if she is not guilty of that horror, what was she really doing all those years? She thought she was on the straight path to justice, but it all faded and snarled. Is that why Edward found it all unbearable, she wonders? Was it just the threat of exposure that unhinged him – or was it the nature of their work? They were passing the secrets of death, the ways to kill, from one empire to another. No, she stops herself. There is still the hope, everything Florence and Edward believed, the authentic life, equality, freedom – the hope is not dead. But how tinny those slogans sound now, after all she has read, all she has heard, over these years. She thought she was on a path to truth, but it led her to a world where every step, every word, is false.

If she goes, maybe she will be safe at last. She will be able to relax, finally, for once. And Rosa will no longer be the daughter of the traitor; she will be the daughter of a hero. She at least might be able to live a life free of secrecy. Surely Laura owes her that. Laura remembers the trial of Hiss, the imprisonment of Fuchs, the death of the Rosenbergs. She does not have to think of them directly; they are always with her. In Geneva, in London, in Boston, she and Rosa will never be safe. But she has been cleverer than all of them, she thinks to herself. No one suspects her. Valance even thinks that she will work for him, if he needs her. Even Mother, even Ellen, even Winifred; nobody thinks that she was anything but an innocent wife. Her mask has been a good one. Has her face stayed intact behind it?

In her mind a huge battle has begun, an enormous fight of two opposing forces. Consciously, she flutters away from it again, she stands up and walks away from the café and goes back to the others. They swim again before lunch; she wants to fold into the water and be lost in it. They have a delicious lunch of perch, on the lakeside terrace; ice cream with real plums in it. Rosa is in such a good mood, she is happy to play on the swings in the little park in the afternoon and Mother agrees to watch her in the evening when Archie asks Laura if she will come dancing at a neighbouring hotel.

All the physical pleasures are a welcome distraction; she throws herself into them, and even, yes, after the dancing, she goes up to Archie’s room and tries to lose herself in sexual pleasure again. But it is elusive to her. What is she doing, rubbing herself against this man? He knows nothing of her; her mind is a blank to him. He is holding a naked woman in his arms, he does not care who she is, and this makes her self-conscious – if he does not care for her, for her personality, for all she has given and all she has lost, then is it just her small breasts, the slope of her stomach, he wants? Again she is thrown back through the years, to the time when she believed erotic joy meant perfect communion. She remembers how she felt entirely taken over by Edward and his ability to rouse passion in her. And now … now she sees sex the way others have always seen it. They could be any woman, any man lying there. There is nothing unique, nothing irreplaceable, in this. She cannot find her pleasure tonight, but she lets him have his. He says how wonderful it was, how lovely she is. She realises that he does not know that she was not there for him. She rolls away from him, burying her head in the pillow, and he puts out a hand and strokes her back.