A Quiet Life(143)

Now, she clatters up to the apartment with a little more energy. She hears the telephone ringing as she puts her key in the door. ‘I’ll get it!’ she calls to Aurore. It is Archie. ‘Thank you for a lovely weekend,’ she says. ‘Yes, I’d love to meet next week.’ When she comes off the telephone, Aurore is telling her about the new playground they have found in the Parc Beaulieu, the other nannies she knows go there, Rosa had so much fun playing with little Marcel. Laura scoops Rosa up, nuzzling her neck as Aurore speaks. She has kept her safe all this time. She is not such a bad mother. She smiles widely at Aurore, thanking her, and tells Rosa she must show Mama the new park soon.

It’s the usual salad and cold meat for supper, once Rosa is in bed, but Laura finds herself humming along to the radio as she is preparing it. She is aware that she must say something to cover her change of mood, her elation and alertness. ‘Mother,’ she says, ‘I’ve been thinking – you are right, it’s time for us to go back home. We can’t stay here forever. I’ve got to start thinking about getting that divorce – it’s been more than two years.’ Her mother is so pleased. They sit a long while over dinner, talking about how they will go back to America and how Tom will help with the divorce, and Laura enjoys helping Mother imagine this new future.

The next day Laura goes to the hairdresser. She has her hair washed and set. She picks up some clothes from the dry cleaners, and goes to a lingerie shop to buy some new underwear. She goes back home, and still the decision is not quite made, the time is running out. The next day, when her mother goes to meet a friend for lunch, Laura packs most of her and Rosa’s clothes into two big cases and puts them into the trunk of the car. She watches herself doing it. So, she says to herself, you have decided.

When Mother comes back, Laura tells her that she has met Charles and Tamara Hamilton in the market. ‘You remember Tamara, don’t you?’ she says. Her mother is puzzled, as well she might be, because Tamara is nobody, but Laura reminds her impatiently about their children and how Winifred introduced them last winter in St-Gervais. ‘They’ve asked me to come and stay with them in Montreux tomorrow, just to catch some last sunshine. They’ve got a nice pool for the children. I said I would go with Rosa, I hope you won’t be lonely here by yourself.’ Mother insists she will be fine, and the next day in the late afternoon Laura packs a small case, just right for three days, in front of her, and puts on a grey skirt and white blouse, and the blue Schiaparelli coat.

‘You’ve dressed up,’ says her mother, noticing that she is wearing her pearl necklace too.

‘Tamara is quite elegant, isn’t she, though?’ Laura says. Mother comes down with her, holding Rosa’s hand on the stairs as Laura has the case to carry. They walk over to the square where Laura has parked the car. Mother kisses Rosa and settles her into the back seat. It would be odd for Laura to embrace her mother now, here, in this crowded city square, as they never do, or to encourage Rosa to do more than pucker her lips at her. Laura is suddenly shocked by the thought of the parting of grandmother and grand-daughter, much more than by her own parting, and unexpected tears prick her eyes as she starts the car.

All the way to Lausanne, the tears will not go. That heartless mood that had infected her the day before has gone. What will this do to Mother, and how … but the road is unfurling.

Laura begins to drive more and more slowly, as she feels the pull of the daily round of life, dragging her backwards to her mother, to Archie, to Geneva. She realises that nobody will understand what she has done, and why she has done it. Nobody will believe that she was in full control of her actions. She is too fixed in everyone’s minds now as the dupe in a manipulative relationship. They will think that she was threatened by Soviet agents; they will think that she was fooled. Nobody’s opinion will really be changed, nobody will let themselves be surprised. They will continue down their fixed paths, only one or two of them saddened by her long betrayal and her sudden departure.

But as the road to Lausanne unspools, she realises that she fell in love too early and too late to go back on her wager now. It is no longer the golden ideal that sustains her, but the dogged hope. We all realise sooner or later that love does not last, Laura thinks as she drives, just as we realise that utopia does not exist, but it still seems right to her to live as if they do. She can no longer put all her faith in Edward, or in the Soviet Union: she knows too much, she has worked out too much. But there across the border is the one place where she may be able to live honestly, and build a truthful life for her daughter, and she cannot now turn away from that imperfect and desirable future.

And so she parks the car at Lausanne station. She drags the bags out of the trunk and shouts for a porter. She sees another car drawing up beside her, and the usual fear beats in her, but she knows that Stefan said they would have watchers every step of the way, and sure enough the driver is a passive spectator of her departure. She holds Rosa’s hand, and they go slowly under the station’s great arch of an entrance, but then the porter calls to her to hurry, the train to Zurich is already waiting.

She looks for an empty compartment, but they have to share, and they have to sit with their backs to the engine. Laura gets in, settles Rosa beside her and takes out the bottle of milk for her. As the child begins to drink, the train starts up. The exquisite, unseeing Swiss landscape fans out past the window. Laura pulls Rosa onto her lap, and tells her about what they are passing. ‘Moun-ten,’ Rosa says, naming her world, as she always does, object by new object.