A Quiet Life(55)

‘But whether he would see it as a civilisation worth saving …’ said Edward, and there was energy in his words.

Laura was startled when she heard Mrs Last’s voice and realised that she had come onto the terrace without them noticing. ‘Are you enjoying the strawberries? Rather fine this year, I think.’

‘Very fine – enjoying them hugely, Mother, if only Edward and Giles wouldn’t depress us with talk of the wreckage of civilisation,’ said Toby.

‘Surely we don’t have to talk about France today?’

‘It wasn’t the news, Mother. You know Edward, the usual vision of a universe falling into hell if we don’t change our ways.’

‘Can I pour you some tea?’ Sybil said. ‘Actually the pot is rather cold, I’ll just go and catch Edna and have some more hot brought out.’

‘Yes, why not? Looks like we could do with some more scones too, I’m sure they baked enough to keep us going.’

‘We’ve tucked in already, but let me see if there are some more for you.’

The conversation, which had momentarily taken that turn into passion and politics, seemed to have returned safely to its old groove, and as Sybil poured Mrs Last some fresh tea Toby started to opine about whether they could stop inviting their neighbours to dinner; apparently they had done something quite unforgivable with their boundary fence.

‘I might just go and have a last bathe,’ said Edward.

He stood up and left the terrace. Laura waited for a moment, as the conversation eddied on, and then murmuring something vague she got up too. She walked down, through the box hedges, over the ha-ha and into the meadow. For a moment she thought he wasn’t there, and then she saw him, flung down on his back in the grass, his arms over his eyes. When she touched his hand, he uncovered his face and sat up. Laura sat next to him as he lit a cigarette.

‘I used to love this field so much,’ he said. ‘When things used to go wrong for me at school, whenever I felt miserable, I used to go down, in my mind, into this meadow – you know, the bees, the smells, the feel and the sound of it, the noise of the river.’

‘It is the most beautiful place.’ Did Laura really love it, or did she love the little boy who had come longingly to the light on the river, through the meadow studded with speedwell and buttercups?

‘Yes, but I thought it was paradise. It was only later I realised. It was horrible, really, to realise that everything I thought was good was rotten.’

‘It’s still a beautiful place.’

‘But you know,’ he took her hand, ‘you can’t – you know you can’t – rely on this kind of beauty. Not when everything it relies on …’ It was as if he could not trust himself to go on, and he fell silent. Finally he muttered, ‘It’s all rotten.’

Laura felt she knew what had caused his sudden sense of despair. She had felt it too, the rift between the passion that was within him and the cold gossip of the others. ‘Did you mean what you said, about how force will carry the day?’ she asked, wanting to relive the conversation in order to understand what he thought lay ahead, but his body stiffened as she asked the question. Rather than answer, he picked up her hand and put it over his mouth. His lips moved over her palm. He inhaled her skin. There was something yearning in the gesture. Laura ran her fingers through his hair. His beauty was, to her, the gathering up of the afternoon, his hair a distillation of the golden sunlight, the warmth of his skin a giving back of its heat. She wanted to give herself up to him, to be taken up into his physical strength, into his sunlit warmth. As they kissed, she felt him relax. ‘We should go back,’ she said. He drew back from their kiss, and smiled. ‘We could stay here.’ By saying it, he had freed them from the group. They sat for a moment longer, holding one another, but there was a lightness now in their mood, and after a minute they were happy to get up and to walk back to the house.

Sutton Court was sinking back into the late afternoon light. Was its beauty rotten? She contemplated it through the eyes of Edward, the eyes of Florence, its stones built on the wealth of a cruel empire, the garden laid out by the hands of the oppressed. Its cool, ordered beauty rose up nonetheless, its perfection so studied as to have become entirely nonchalant. The others were still sitting out on the terrace with his mother.

‘Cocktail?’ Toby asked as they approached. Giles was sitting back in his chair, an unreadable expression on his face.

‘Dinner won’t be long,’ demurred Mrs Last. She was looking at them as they stood there, but Laura did not take her hand out of Edward’s, and then his mother turned and walked into the house.





14


‘Post for you – goodness, you look well. Your hair needs cutting, though.’

Winifred was sitting in the kitchen when Laura got into the flat on Monday evening. It had felt strange to leave Edward at Paddington station; being in his presence for four days had reoriented her to such an extent that she felt unbalanced now without him. She was glad that Winifred was there, smoking and drinking tea and listening to the radio and reading a magazine – Winifred never seemed to be able to do just one thing – or else, she thought, she would have felt rather maudlin. As it was, she was able to take a cigarette from Winifred’s packet and rip open the letters from home without having to think too much. But the letter she opened caught her attention.