A Quiet Life(4)
The brilliant August sunshine is harsh, and her little straw hat is no use against it. She rummages in her purse, but she has forgotten her sunglasses. She can’t face going back into the apartment to confront Rosa’s anger and her mother’s forced smiles again; whenever she leaves Rosa, she feels freed of some burden, and whenever she leaves her mother she is released from the part she is playing, even if only for the minutes before she meets someone else. She opens the door of the car and waits a few seconds for the hot air inside it to dissolve before she gets in and starts the engine. As she moves off into the road, she notices a small grey Citro?n coming up behind her, which makes her self-conscious – she is naturally a careless driver, but even careless drivers pay more attention when there is someone close behind them.
The streets of Geneva and the lakeside road are crowded at this time, and the grey car drops back, but when she turns onto the road that ribbons up to St-Cergue there is no one driving but Laura, and she starts to go faster and faster, her mind running on something else altogether. She is thinking of the dress she bought yesterday and whether it will go with her prize acquisition for the summer, an electric blue cotton coat with a neat cut by Schiaparelli that Winifred had passed on to her as it was too small for her. Laura is wondering whether wearing it with something else blue will look so overdone it would be cheap, or, on the contrary, whether it would be just the right kind of over statement to be really chic, when suddenly a car behind her, another small grey motor – or is it the same one? Even in the moment she registers the parallel – overtakes her and then brakes, completely without warning, in front of her. Laura brakes too, so suddenly she stalls, and she realises how carelessly she must have been driving. She flings open the door without thinking, adrenaline propelling her out.
‘What are you doing?’ she yells. She realises she is in the wrong language. ‘Qu’est-ce que vous faites? Vous conduisiez comme un fou!’
‘Mrs Last?’
The driver says her name through his open window, and Laura just says ‘Yes’ without thinking, and then he is opening his door too and they stand for a moment, and then she is back in her tirade, ‘Vous allez nous tuer tous!’
‘Mrs Last, my friend has something to show you.’
There is another man in the car, whose face Laura cannot yet see. He pulls down his window and leans out; he is middle-aged, wearing a squashy grey hat and an overcoat which is too heavy for this sunny afternoon.
All of a sudden Laura is aware that there is no one else here. No cars are passing. There are two of them; their car is blocking hers. They could do anything, anyone could – her purse is on the front seat of her car, and the door is still open.
She takes two steps backwards, her hand reaching behind her for the handle of the door. The other man is holding something out of his window, and as she goes on retreating, the first man takes it and walks towards her. ‘Je suis en retard,’ she says in her unsteady French, her tongue fumbling over the words. ‘I am late for an appointment.’ Then she sees what he is holding: a piece of card, half a picture – windows, roses, a pitched roof. ‘This is yours, Mrs Last.’
She goes on opening the car door. She reaches for her purse and looks inside it. ‘Please take a look,’ he is saying, and she finds what she is looking for, folded within her black wallet. The matching half. She takes it out and holds it towards him, and he comes forward holding his half and they stand rather close as they put them clumsily join to join, a picture made whole again, a house in the sunshine.
‘Your husband gave it to my friend,’ he says.
‘Yes.’
All the questions that Laura might ask run through her mind and are lost for the moment. She leans against the warm car, and feels her heart slowing from its panic, and over the woods below her she sees an eagle hovering in the warm winds, its huge wingspan in profile, so slow that it is still, suspended.
‘I’m going away tomorrow,’ she says to the first of the two men. ‘I’ll be gone for four days.’
‘I see. Come up here on Tuesday. Just below here – you see, there, where there is a footpath into the forest – do you see?’
‘Yes. At this time?’
The two men look at each other and nod. She gets back into the car and turns the key backwards and forwards. She presses the gas too hard and it roars and jolts. They move away, and then she does too, but quite slowly, so that soon the other car disappears ahead of her. When she gets to the restaurant on the outskirts of the village, she parks the car and just sits there for a while, tracing a pattern in her print skirt with her finger, and her mind is blank. This is the fork in the road, so long awaited; but now it is here she cannot see past it. It is as if there is only darkness ahead.
Water
To London, January 1939
Although Laura had said, time and again, that there was no need for Mother to come on board, in fact, when the moment came, she was glad that she was not embarking alone. They knew the steamer would be half empty, but half empty was quite crowded enough. Holding her smaller suitcase and pulling her muskrat coat around her, Laura had to push through a throng of middle-aged women just to get onto the pier on the Hudson River. She stumbled on an uneven step as they walked up to the tourist class entrance, and as she righted herself she realised how breathless she felt. Still, Mother being there made her determined not to show her uncertainty, or even at this last moment the whole plan might collapse, and she might be ordered home to wait out Ellen’s recovery. So once on board she tried to walk with more confidence, as if she knew where they were going, up to the information desk where a steward rattled out the directions to her cabin so quickly that she had to ask him to repeat them.