A Quiet Life(18)

The walk had taken a long time and the weather was turning drizzly as they came back into her aunt’s street. Sodden, unswept leaves made the path slippery and Laura felt the shadow of the laurel bush, dark with soot, hanging over them as Winifred put her key into the door. ‘Thank goodness, Gee’s arrived already,’ Winifred said, seeing the coat and hat on the hall table. Laura could hear the rumble of a male voice from the living room. ‘He doesn’t live here then?’ she asked.

‘No, only comes back on Sundays – the prodigal.’

Giles was a big presence, fair like his sister, his voice loud in the quiet, over-furnished room. Even with Winifred supplying repartee as quickly as she could, his performance was too fast and too expansive, Laura thought. The anecdotes he was telling were about work, and although they were difficult to follow in themselves, being about some developments in radio, the main thrust of them was easy enough to understand, about how Old Stevens was standing in his way, unable to get the funding released from air defence, and that the boy Pearson kept making a mess of the data, but how Giles himself was forging ahead.

The burble of his stories was continuing as they sat down to lunch – a meal of heavy roast meat and a sort of spongy pancake and indeterminate boiled vegetables – and Laura was just wondering if this family was always so easy, so reassuringly solid, or if this was a show put on for her. Then the telephone rang in the hall, and Mrs Venn, the maid who had met Laura at Waterloo the day before, put her head around the door. ‘It’s for Miss Laura.’

‘Oh – do you mind?’ Laura was getting up and going towards the door, only thinking that it must be Mother and hoping that Ellen’s appendicitis hadn’t entered some new complication. But down the line came the strong, clear voice from the ship, Florence’s voice, dismissing Laura’s questions about how she was and telling her about a march that was happening the following weekend. Laura felt a sudden sense of disjunction, a gap cracking open between the girl who was listening to Florence’s voice, who would be expected to come to a demonstration in a few days, and the girl who would return to the dining room and pick up her spoon to eat the boiled pudding they had just been served.

‘I don’t think so,’ she said to Florence, and then, as the directions continued, she fell silent. ‘Yes – yes, all right, I’ll see you then.’ Once she had put the receiver back in its cradle, she stood for a while, wondering what to do, before going back into the dining room.

Entering the room, Laura stumbled over a lie that she had been speaking to a girl she had known from home who was visiting London with her parents. But she found that the others were not really paying attention to her. The conversation had shifted while she had been out of the room.

‘You promised!’ Winifred was saying, her voice rising, to Giles, who was spooning pudding into his mouth.

‘Can’t help it – away that week now.’

‘Giles, dear, that is a bit rough – she has been looking forward to it.’

Aunt Dee turned to Laura and started to explain that Winifred had been expecting Giles to take her away to a country-house party next week, although Aunt Dee herself had thought it wasn’t the right time for them to go away, given Laura’s arrival.

Winifred pushed her bowl away. ‘I even bought a new dress, you perfect—’

‘Shall we have coffee in the living room?’ Aunt Dee seemed eager to turn the conversation. ‘It’s rather cold in here.’ Indeed, the room felt damp and chilly, as the rain fell against the curtained windows.

‘Freezing, yes. But Giles, why couldn’t you—’

‘Vennie’s had a fire laid in the other room, as these radiators seem to have given up the ghost,’ Aunt Dee said. Her voice held a fussy, conciliatory tone. ‘And, Win, I got out a photograph album I wanted to show Laura. It’s upstairs – could you get it?’

When Winifred was out of the room, Aunt Dee turned to Giles and began to persuade him to make it up to his sister.

‘All right, all right,’ he muttered eventually, promising that he would make sure she was invited to some other gathering soon. Laura thought it odd that they were relying on Giles, whose manner did not seem particularly engaging, to help Winifred with her social life.

In the living room, Aunt Dee began to show Laura the huge leather-bound book that Winifred had brought in. To her surprise, Laura found it intriguing. Her mother had almost nothing of the family, no photographs and no objects, and Laura had always dismissed her memories of a perfect childhood in a perfect world. So it was a shock to see these images of her mother’s lost life: here was a sepia photograph of a timbered house in Oxfordshire, and here two solemnly starched little girls with their mother, whose face was long and lugubrious and who wore a tightly corseted dress. Here were the same two girls, adolescents in frilled blouses.

‘Look,’ said Aunt Dee, taking a breath as she held that one up to the light. ‘We were just leaving for school in Lucerne, that’s right – they sent us for a year, to finishing school …’ In her voice was the memory of some richness, some freedom – but the page was quickly turned and here was Aunt Dee again in a posed studio photograph, alongside a man with a little moustache who seemed much older than she was. ‘There isn’t one of Polly and your father,’ she said, and let out a breath. ‘It was all such a rush. Father was so very sad when she went. He never quite forgave your father for living so far away – and …’