A Quiet Life(37)

‘I know.’

‘I mean, I don’t miss the town much. But there were hills not far away; we used to go out there at the weekends sometimes when I was a child.’ In fact, if she was honest with herself, there had only been a couple of brief vacations and they had been ruined by her parents’ fighting. She was not sure why they had occurred to her now.

To her surprise, Edward responded, telling her about his childhood home, which apparently was somewhere in the hills in the west of England. Sutton Court. She remembered Sybil talking about it. Edward was saying that it was the most beautiful place in the world, and then quickly retracting, saying that it was just hills and trees, and pouring himself more wine.

‘You should come out to Sutton one Friday. I know nobody is meant to be travelling about these days, but we get there when we can.’ She felt that he had just said that to have something to say and she did not respond.

‘Do you hear much from Quentin?’ she asked.

‘Yes. He’s still in some godforsaken training camp on the coast. He’s the only one of us doing the expected thing so far. Remind me, what are you doing? I know Sybil said you had a job.’

Laura grimaced, and explained her job in the bookstore, and how tedious it was. ‘But it does sound self-indulgent to complain about being dull when we don’t know what’s going to happen next.’

Then Edward said something about how things that seem dull at the time are not always what seem dull later, when you look back, and Laura considered this idea. ‘I suppose you never know what you are going to remember.’

‘If you look back at your childhood, some things stand out, don’t they, and you might wonder – why that, why that meal, or that teddy bear, or that moment of running through the wheat field? It’s not always the moments of great happiness or great misery, is it?’

Laura thought again and agreed with him. ‘But I don’t have very clear memories of a lot of my childhood …’

‘Neither do I.’ There was a willed briskness to Edward’s voice and Laura felt she knew that briskness, because it was something that crept into her own voice when she mentioned her home or her childhood. She would have liked to stop speaking and let herself wonder about it, but she knew that she had to go on talking.

‘But I do feel that I will remember all of this,’ she said. She meant this city, this year of her life that had been all change and newness – but the way it came out the words sounded ambiguous, as if she meant that she would remember him and the lunch, and again she found herself averting her gaze, afraid that she had gone further than she intended.

He took up the conversation again, returning to how the war would be remembered. ‘I’m sure one day some crass narrative will take over about the war, and we’ll forget the way it really felt. There will be some story that everyone will tell about the way it was.’

Laura agreed with him without really thinking about it. ‘Even though at the moment everyone experiences it quite differently,’ she said.

‘Exactly. Some people see it as a moral crusade …’

‘And some as a tragic waste.’

‘And some as a time to grin and bear it …’

‘And some as an imperialist escapade.’ It was Florence and Elsa she was thinking about, of course.

‘You know people like that? Who see it that way?’ His tone had crossed into more urgency than she had heard before. He was interested again in her, but she was silent. ‘Do you?’ he asked. A memory opened in her mind, like a frame from a film. It was Florence stirring her cocoa in a café, her brown eyes wide and her voice high as she told Laura that she should never forget that the Party was under surveillance, that they could all be being watched, at any time.

Immediately the memory nudged at her, she dismissed it. How ridiculous of her to imagine that Edward would be a government informer. But something had tripped in her mind at the thought that she should be careful about what she said, and she was selfconscious again as she nodded and then tried to turn the conversation with another query about his brother.

Edward looked at his watch and told her that he was sorry but he had to get back to the office for a meeting with some of the French chaps. Laura was smiling and nodding, reaching for her purse and standing up once he had paid the bill, and trying not to think about the fact that it had been a short lunch. No doubt he was very busy. She had to reconcile herself to the fact that the lunch had meant nothing much. She was pulling on her coat, taking her hat from the waiter’s outstretched hand, when he surprised her just before turning to the door. ‘I’ll ask Sybil, shall I, to talk to you about coming up to Sutton one Saturday?’





8


Spring had begun to touch the trees in the London streets with a tentative green as Laura walked up to Paddington station. At first there was the urgency about buying a ticket, finding the train, getting a seat, but then the journey slowed. The train came to a stop between stations and she gave up any hope of getting to the destination at the time she had been asked to arrive.

She had to change at a station where the spring wind blew cold down the platform, and the next train she stepped onto was packed with soldiers. She found a compartment of civilians, where a woman generously pulled her small boy onto her lap so that Laura could sit down. Then her knees were in reach of the boy’s feet; he kept kicking her, but Laura felt it would be rude to complain. She tried to read her book, but it was a volume of essays that Florence had lent to her months before, and its abstract discussions of working-class history could not hold her attention. All of a sudden, turning her gaze to the window, she saw the landscape open up in a way she had never seen in England before. Here, on the western side of the land, she saw the earth lift, pulling away from the flat dull plains and low bulges that she had seen as England’s inescapable physical aspect, pulling up into real hills with strong curved lines and tumbling back into valleys.