A Quiet Life(40)
This time Laura gained her bedroom with a sense of achievement. She had got through the evening, and there was only one day to go. There was a chill in the bedroom as the fire had been allowed to go out. Laura felt keyed up and a little drunk as she sat there with her coat on over her nightgown, filing her nails, remembering how Edward had looked when he walked into the room, reliving one moment when Toby had laughed at something she had said, replaying the evening as if she was trying to make sure she would not forget anything, when there was a tap on the door.
She opened it. For a moment Edward said nothing, and then he whispered, ‘Should I go?’ There was an uncertainty in his expression that she could never have imagined. She stood to one side, and he walked in. For a few moments the space between them was unpassable, and then it was passed. He bent his face to hers and there was elation, so great it overpowered her, the ecstasy of knowing that the physical hunger that she thought would never be assuaged was matched by his, that they fitted, that they could make everything right. She could hear half-sobs in the room, but they were rising from his throat as well as hers as they fumbled their way not onto the bed, for some reason, but onto the carpet in front of the cold fireplace. By the time they had made one another come to orgasm – not through intercourse, but sweating and pushing against one another, humping and fumbling – both their faces were wet with tears of relief. It wasn’t the graceful embrace that Laura had imagined to herself at night, but under the fumbling was a confident, certain rhythm of joy, a music that sang through the clumsy movements.
Afterwards they lay for a while without speaking, Edward’s hand moved down over her back and thighs over and over again, until Laura felt she lost the sense of where she ended and his hand began. Then they undressed fully, and got into the high, narrow bed, and lay holding one another. For a few moments Laura felt she would never sleep, all her nerves seemed so alert, her pulse fast, but then suddenly sleep overtook her, and at some point in the night he got up and left her, so that she woke alone.
As she emerged from sleep, she was aware of every inch of her body and how it was lying in the heavy bed linen. She felt the edge of the pillow pressing into her cheek. She felt the sheets, warm under her legs, and cold where she stretched out her arms. She sat up, and then got out of bed, naked, and walked over to the window. She pulled back the heavy curtain, feeling the raised pattern of the damask under her fingers. Everything she touched touched her back. She felt the smoothness of the floorboards under her bare feet. She saw the slopes of the hills to the sky, running like live things into the morning light.
After dressing she walked with confidence down the oak staircase, aware of each step with its slight depression where generations had walked up and down, aware of the way the banister had been rubbed to its high sheen by innumerable hands. Edward was not there when she entered the breakfast room. It was a dark room, hung with uncleaned oil paintings and papered in grey-toned greens, but even this seemed just right, a kind of harmonic counterpoint to the lightness of the drawing room. She drank her coffee and ate her toast and bacon, feeling rinsed and new for the world. When Edward came in, perhaps no one else would have seen anything different about his uncommunicative demeanour as he poured himself a cup of coffee and started on a plate of toast and bacon, but Laura felt the pause in his breath as he looked at her and felt his gaze rest on her.
Conversation between herself, Sybil and Toby was going on reasonably well as Edward read a newspaper, and then Mrs Last came in, telling them that everyone would be late for church if they didn’t hurry up. Laura got up with the others, but Edward remained at the table. ‘You don’t have to go, you know,’ he said to her.
His mother heard him. ‘You are such a heathen these days,’ she said, but it seemed like something she had said before and Edward did not react. For a moment his mother stood there, as if she would like to say more, but then she went into the hall with the others.
Laura and Sybil were putting on their hats and pulling on their gloves when Edward came out of the dining room. ‘I’ll go down with you,’ he said, addressing himself to Sybil, but Laura felt he was speaking to her.
The walk was long, first along a path bordered by two straight lines of lime trees, where the light was sifted by their still-bare branches, and then down a lane to the village. It was not sunny, but there was a warmth in the misty air. Sybil and Mrs Last strode ahead together, while the boys and Laura went more slowly, and soon there was a distance between them. Laura was still in her over-sensitive mood, and the turn in the lane that revealed the spire of the little church by the green seemed to her like a revelation of a particularly English picturesque, the possibility of cliché ironed out by the poignancy of seeing such peacefulness during these days of war. ‘Come on in,’ Toby said to Edward. ‘It would mean a lot to Mother.’
‘Hollander is such a ham. How can you stand it?’
‘Would you believe it?’ Toby said to Laura. ‘He was the most devout of us when he was a boy.’
She smiled.
‘Was he? Were you?’
Edward admitted that he had been, and Toby reminisced about how he’d used to harangue the family about correct Christian values, and how he would read the Bible and even correct the vicar over Sunday lunch. ‘You discovered Jesus as some kind of socialist – Mother didn’t think it very funny. It lasted until you went to university, as I remember. Then you seemed to forget the kingdom of heaven.’