A Quiet Life(19)
There was a pause, and Laura caught again the undertone of disapproval. Looking at Aunt Dee’s engagement photograph, seeing the frank stare of the young woman with her hand resting on her fiancé’s, Laura was struck by the thought of her mother at about the same age, and the force of desire that must have led her to follow the young man she fell in love with across the ocean at the end of the Great War. ‘I think it must have been terribly romantic,’ said Winifred, clearly also thinking of Polly’s elopement.
Once again, images arose unbidden in Laura’s mind. A window into the kitchen of her home opened in her mind, with her mother sitting there in her best blue dress, weeping. Her father had promised to take her out to dinner for her birthday, and had forgotten or got too drunk to come home. She heard Mother telling her never, never to marry beneath herself, and saw her red-knuckled hand grasping the glass of gin. Laura pushed the image away and looked back again at the photographs. Aunt Dee was pointing to one picture, and telling Laura that was her great-uncle Francis, her grandfather’s brother, who had had a fine career in India, and Laura began to realise that there were all these stories that she did not know, about this English family she hardly knew.
When the fat album had been closed and coffee brought in, Winifred and Giles went on sparring, complaining to one another about old battles. As they spoke, Laura found herself watching Aunt Dee, trying to see how the confident outward look of the girl in the photograph could have developed into the watchful manner of the woman before her now. She was not unlike her own mother, Laura thought, seeing how her gestures seemed truncated and hesitant, how she seemed more eager than was necessary to smooth over the disagreements between her children.
When Giles moved to go, saying he was meeting a friend, Winifred said goodbye to him with bad grace. Laura could see that she had still not forgiven her brother for spoiling the planned weekend. Sure enough, as soon as they were upstairs alone, Winifred started complaining about him. Apparently he had some well-connected friends that he had met at university, and Winifred rather liked one of them, but there seemed to be some resistance on Giles’s part to taking her about.
‘I think he thinks I’m not worthy. It would be all right if I could do my own thing, but he doesn’t seem to realise how little there is to do. I know, I’ve got my friends, but they are all such nice girls,’ Winifred spoke the last two words with feeling. ‘You are lucky, being allowed to travel so far – I’d love to do that.’
Laura almost asked whether she couldn’t plan a trip somewhere; but when she thought of Winifred coming to visit her family in America, her stomach tightened with fear. The idea of Winifred’s clear gaze falling on her undignified little home and miserable parents was a dreadful one. But Winifred started talking about other, more surprising, plans. Apparently she had a place at university, to study history. ‘They accepted me last year, but Mother asked me to wait a year. She wasn’t well in September. This year I won’t put it off, whatever she says. She hates the whole idea of me going – I suppose Aunt Polly is exactly the same? You didn’t go to university?’
Laura was too shy to tell Winifred quite how poor they had been, how it had been impossible, when she left school, for her to think about college, so she just shook her head and then asked Winifred more about her plans. Winifred became more and more honest about her frustrations with living at home. ‘She still thinks we exist in the pages of that photograph album – she doesn’t like me going around by myself.’
‘You’re not meant to go out alone?’ This was more than Laura expected. She remembered the telephone conversation she had just had with Florence, and Florence’s assumption that she would come to the demonstration the following weekend, and wondered hopelessly how on earth she would manage it. Winifred was explaining how her mother’s protectiveness irked her. For instance, there was a rather nice man she had met recently at the cricket club dance, and he had asked her out for supper, but he was a divorcé, and Dee would not approve, so what could she do?
The two girls were sitting in Winifred’s bedroom talking, their heads together, when Aunt Dee came in to tell them it was time to come down for tea. Winifred nodded, and once her mother had gone, she suddenly turned to Laura, her hands opening as if pulling apart a parcel, her eyes widening as if she could see a new vista. ‘But now you’re here – we could sort of chaperone each other, couldn’t we?’
2
Although the march had begun to move off by the time Laura got to Hyde Park, there were still what looked like hundreds of people, dozens of banners, waiting in line. Laura thought she would never find Florence, and began to feel foolish for having made the complicated arrangements and spoken the shocking lies that had enabled her to be there. She had not even told Winifred what she was doing, simply that she wanted to have tea with someone she had met on the boat. That Winifred assumed it was a man, and that the assumption had made her eyes crinkle up knowingly, had embarrassed Laura but had not encouraged her to reveal the whole truth. So the two girls had told Aunt Dee that they were going shopping in town and then to tea with Cissie, an old school friend of Winifred’s. Just as Laura was beginning to feel hopeless about the whole escapade, she saw the red lettering of the banner she was looking for, and then the familiar face she longed to see beside it.
Florence did not notice her immediately; she was talking to a tall, bareheaded woman who was holding one pole of the banner in her gloved hands. Laura had to push awkwardly past a couple of men and tap her on the shoulder, and then Florence only briefly acknowledged her before turning back to the tawny-haired woman. ‘Elsa, this is Laura – I told you about her.’