A Quiet Life(36)

When the telephone rang on the morning of Boxing Day, it was Laura who went into the hall to answer it, thinking that it was sure to be Mother – they hadn’t spoken for so long and they should at least exchange Christmas wishes. At first she could not place the measured man’s voice asking to speak to Giles, but when she asked who was calling the answer seemed unsurprising.

‘Edward Last.’

She didn’t lay aside the receiver and call for Giles; instead she remained still and told him it was Laura.

‘I was ringing to see if we might all meet for luncheon,’ he said.

Without thinking, Laura imitated his tone: bland and unsurprised. ‘That would be lovely,’ she said. He suggested the following Wednesday, and she accepted, and when he said they could meet at Manzi’s, she agreed. She did not tell him that she did not know where the restaurant was or that she thought that Giles would be back in Scotland by then. His laconic manner, exaggerated on the telephone, allowed the space for her to behave in this uncharacteristic way. She thanked him, put the telephone down, and looked up to see Giles on the stairs.

‘That was your friend, Edward,’ she said.

‘Last?’

‘He wondered if we could all meet for lunch next Wednesday.’

‘Lunch? Did he really? Odd of the old chap. I’ll be back in Scotland. Got to get back to these tests, the pressure is on.’

‘I’ll just go with Winifred then – or I’ll call him back and cancel.’

‘Funny,’ said Giles, looking down at her. ‘I could have sworn it was Winifred on the telephone as I came down – you sounded so English.’

‘Did I?’

‘Yes. You don’t usually.’

That made Laura selfconscious, so she went back into the living room where she had left Winifred playing Patience. Yet she did not mention the telephone call to her, nor did she ask Giles if he had Edward’s number so that she could telephone to cancel.

The next Wednesday she was at work in the bookshop. Her supervisor was a middle-aged man who seemed to find her an irritant rather than a help when it came to most tasks. When she had asked if her colleague Ann could cover a long lunch break for her as she had to visit the dentist, he had agreed as if her absence would hardly be a loss to him. All morning she acted as if her mouth was bothering her, and at half past twelve she told Ann she was off. She went to the lavatory at the back of the shop and peered into the small mirror. Her pores seemed enlarged, her skin oily, and she took out her powder compact. Just then there was a knock on the door. ‘Hold on,’ she called. She still needed to urinate, and found when she pulled down her underwear that she had started to menstruate, earlier than expected. It was all right, she had only just begun, and she had a pad in her bag, but in her haste she pinned it crookedly, and all the way walking up Piccadilly in the freezing wind she felt aware of her stained underwear and the pad rubbing against the top of her thigh.

She was just on time at Manzi’s, but they showed her to an empty table. As the minutes passed, she began to worry that he was not coming. Should she go without eating, without paying? How gauche would that be? She shook her head at the waiter who came to find out what she wanted to drink, and then to her relief there he was, taller than she remembered, walking through the crowded room.

‘Giles is back in Scotland, Winifred is working – it’s only me …’ She tried to sound casually amused, so that he wouldn’t be able to laugh at her or be disappointed, but she wasn’t sure she had succeeded. She was shaken by the effect of his physical presence and the blatant statement she had made by coming alone to lunch with him. She kept her gaze averted from his as she looked at the menu. ‘I didn’t have your number, you see, to cancel, so I …’ Of course he would be too polite to make her feel uncomfortable deliberately. But as he said that he was glad to see her anyway, he seemed nonplussed, or was that just his usual uncommunicative manner? She could not read him, and she was suddenly sure she had done the wrong thing.

She did not like drinking in the middle of the day, and she knew it would make the afternoon at the bookstore harder than ever, but he had ordered a bottle of hock before she had time to say so, and recommended the sardines and the Dover sole to her. ‘Yes, of course – that would be lovely,’ she said, closing the menu and letting him order. That was the way they did it in London, she already knew; the men always recommended, always ordered, always decided everything.

When two people are very bad at small talk, Laura realised, and they have nothing in common, lunch together is not easy. A silence fell almost immediately. Simply trying to fill it, she asked about his work, and he answered politely. She asked after Sybil and Toby, and as he handled and dropped her questions, she felt more and more nervous. He was less luminous here in the restaurant than he had been at night, his blond apartness less obvious. He was a civil servant in a formal suit who was friends with her cousin; his world was dark to her. Their food came, and provided some distraction. The sardines were good; now she was living with Cissie she seemed to exist on boiled eggs and toast, so the strong, salty, oily flavour burst into her mouth. But they could not go on eating forever in silence. She asked about his Christmas, and he replied politely and asked how hers had been.

‘It was my first Christmas away from home.’

‘Did you miss it?’

She did not miss her family, but there was a physical memory nagging at her all the time that had become stronger over Christmas. She would not want to be back there, in the sadness and anger of home, but you cannot deny that the place you come from leaves a bodily imprint on you. She was becoming tired of London, she thought, its growing fear and darkness. Sometimes the brightness of the Christmas lights on Main Street recurred to her, or how the snow-covered hills west of Stairbridge reflected the winter sun. You never got that clarity of light and height of sky in London. She had fallen silent, she realised, and she had to say something. ‘I miss the place a bit,’ she said. ‘It was pretty in winter. London is—’