A Quiet Life(25)
After lunch Aunt Dee suggested that the girls should rest in their rooms before the evening’s outing. Winifred scorned the idea, and stayed reading in the living room, but Laura was thankful to be able to go upstairs. Lying on the big, high bed, she started re-reading old letters from her mother and Ellen. ‘I think you should book a passage for April,’ her mother had written. And now April was here. Laura laid the letters aside and wondered whether she was foolish to want to stay in London. It was true that nobody could ignore the sandbags on the streets and the trenches dug into the parks, not to mention the constant talk about what aerial warfare would be like and the Armageddon that would ensue. But despite the fatalistic talk, despite the physical reality of the city’s preparations, there was nothing concrete for Laura in the thought of war.
She looked into a drawer of the little desk where she had put the most recent pamphlet she had borrowed from Florence, Will It Be War?, which she had already started, but not finished. Its grand rhetoric, ‘Never, never will we bow the knee to fascism’, seemed too distant from her. Again she cast her mind back to the boat, and the moment when Florence painted for her a picture of what family and work might be like without false authority. That made sense to her; she felt it again, a taste of freedom, a world made in line with human desire. But the story of how they were all to fight as never before seemed dark to her, a summoning of something too large for her to comprehend. She found herself muttering some phrases from the pamphlet under her breath, as if she would commit them to memory to hold her to the right path.
Just then the handle of her door turned and Winifred came in, but to Laura’s relief she did not seem to notice her confusion as she shoved the pamphlet under her pillow. She had just come to suggest that Laura might want to start getting ready for the evening and that the bathroom was free. Shortly afterwards, lying in the warm water and looking down at her body, her skin greenish in the water that was reflecting the tiles around the bath, Laura felt a huge reluctance weighing her down. The little she had heard about Giles’s friends had not endeared her to the idea of meeting them.
Back in her room, she realised that the cherry-red velvet of the dress smelt of mothballs, as everything in this house did after a while. But it slithered with a cool touch over her breasts and legs as she pulled it on and zipped it tightly up the side. Lipsticking her mouth, looking for her pearl earrings, she was seeing herself only bit by bit in the mirror. Her lips – was the colour even? Her waist – did her garter belt show through the velvet? Her hair – should she push it behind her ears or fluff the curls forwards? But then, just as she was about to leave the room, she turned and saw her full reflection, as she had seen Winifred suddenly in the dressmaker’s, and was startled. It was such a complete picture, it was so finished. It was only for a second that she saw herself like that, and as soon as she walked out and Aunt Dee commented on her dress and asked her if she had a wrap, she lost the image completely. She was fragmented again; she had no idea how others saw her.
Giles was waiting for them in the living room, and she and Winifred followed him to his motor car, which was waiting outside. Laura had never seen London from a car before, and the city surprised her, rolling past the windows with a kind of emphatic repleteness, as if it were being unfurled particularly for them. Giles and Winifred talked in their usual sparring way in the front seats, but she was hardly listening and was surprised when finally the car stopped outside a terrace of vast white houses rising sheer into the dimming sky.
Once inside, Winifred introduced Laura to the man who she understood was her partner for the evening, whose girlfriend had been taken unwell. Tall, thickset, with a ruddy face and even, for all he was only Giles’s age, the suggestion of jowls.
‘Good of you to come out at such short notice,’ Quentin said to her. There was a note of condescension in his voice, clear enough for Laura to pick it out even in that room in which all the men seemed to speak with the same amused, arrogant tones. She was introduced to his father, who was a study in the fleshiness and loudness that Quentin himself was going to achieve, and to a Mrs Bertrand, a middle-aged woman with the most impressive black pearl necklace, who ignored Winifred and Laura and went on talking to the other two women who were already in the room.
Alongside Giles and Quentin was a young man who was bending to put a record on the gramophone. He introduced himself as soon as the needle started to whirl, and Laura realised that this was Alistair, the man who was partnering Winifred. He was the most engaging of the men, with elastic, exaggerated hand movements and round blue eyes that seemed to take in everything about the two girls. There was a generosity in that; to him, they did register, even if their presence was a matter of indifference to the others in the room. Behind him was an untidy, good-looking man who did not even bother to come forward to be introduced, but put his arm around Giles and started telling him what was obviously a racy story, judging by the way he lowered his voice as he came to the end of it.
Despite the presence of Quentin’s father and three other women, all the energy of the room came from the four young men, who seemed to be performing for one another, all talking at once, or almost, in quick, truncated sentences that would suddenly give way to protracted anecdotes, sustained as long as each could keep the floor. Laura had never been in such a relentlessly masculine atmosphere, she thought as they all moved to the dinner table. The women provided the colour between the black and white of the men’s tuxedos, but that was all they seemed to be there for; these flashes – green, scarlet, blush and blue – between the black coats.