A Quiet Life(56)
‘Trouble at home?’ Winifred said.
‘It’s from Ellen, she’s wondering about whether to marry this – Tom.’
Winifred was immediately interested, and started to fire off questions about him. Laura had to admit she didn’t know much; neither she nor Ellen had been great correspondents these eighteen months. But one thing she did remember, from Mother’s previous letter, was that Mother approved. She remembered thinking how lucky she was that she did not have to think about what her parents thought of Edward – or, so much worse, what he would think of them. When she told Winifred that Polly thought it was a good match, Winifred stubbed out her cigarette with a look of distaste.
‘So long as she doesn’t marry to please Aunt Polly. You should hear Mummy on the subject of Alistair. She’s so delighted with him, I can’t face telling her that our affair is breaking up.’
Laura had not known that things were going wrong with Winifred and Alistair. She sat down and touched the side of the teapot to see if it was still hot as she began to commiserate with her. Winifred reached for a clean cup, brushing off Laura’s sympathy. ‘It isn’t killing me. I’m so busy at work anyway. Promoted – not bad less than a year in.’
Laura congratulated her, but maybe she looked unconvinced. ‘No, really,’ Winifred said, ‘I’m not weeping over him.’ She explained that she didn’t really think that Alistair cared for her, and then said she wondered whether those men cared for anyone, and whether it was something about their early lives that prevented them from ever caring. Laura caught an echo in what she was saying of the words spoken by the man they had met at Alistair’s party.
‘That psychologist or therapist – what was he? – wasn’t that what he said?’
‘Yes, Lvov – I was talking to him about it. He’s very interesting on the effect of boarding schools. But you know all about it. Last is just the same, isn’t he? Does he ever talk about what he is really feeling?’
Laura said she didn’t feel he held back so much, but then changed the subject. She didn’t want to expose her feelings about Edward to Winifred; she knew that deep down Winifred was unimpressed by what she saw as Laura’s na?vety when she talked about him. Winifred was not to know, thought Laura, that their understanding was so beyond anything her cousin had experienced with Alistair. What was the point of trying to explain? It was much easier to turn back to Ellen’s letter and to read bits out to Winifred and speculate about what Tom was like.
The next day Laura only worked half a day, so in the afternoon she went to have her hair cut and then walked over to Bloomsbury. She had her own key to Edward’s flat now; he had given it to her on their way back to London, and she had told him she would be there just before he was due back from work. There was a precious intimacy about the act of putting her key into his front door, and when she was inside she automatically went over to the sideboard and poured herself a small gin and tonic, realising only after she had done so that it was what he would have done for her, that she was imitating his actions even though he wasn’t there.
Holding the drink, she went into his bedroom and pulled up the blinds. His apartment always seemed quite spartan. The landlady cleaned it, but Laura felt that even if she hadn’t he would have kept it like this: tidy and functional. Some shirts, just back from the laundry, sat folded on top of a rosewood chest of drawers. They smelt of starch and soap. There were no photographs on the mantelpiece, just a couple of old invitations and address cards pushed behind a Lalique lamp; on the desk were a few papers and a new book, a translation of Virgil’s Georgics by an English poet.
Without thinking, Laura opened one of the drawers, noting the letters folded back into envelopes, personal letters and letters from his bank stacked together. There were a few small notebooks, and she took one out. Its cover was soft thin leather that yielded under her fingers. At first the pages were uninteresting: mainly notes of people’s telephone numbers, details of train times and totting up of small accounts. Across a couple of pages, however, a poem was written, with many crossings out and then a neat copy on the next page. ‘My house’, he had written across the top in another pen.
A windowed room, a spacious lawn
A view from hill to hill
This is the breadth that gave me breath
The space that let me grow.
The slope to the sky was once alive
The curlew called with hope.
But now I see the view is framed
I feel the walls are close.
Where is the air to catch a breath?
Why is the world locked out?
The footfalls pass from room to room.
No house, but prison this.
Even Laura could see that it was not much of a poem, but it drew her back again to Edward’s anger that afternoon at the weekend when his family had broken through his conversation with Giles with silly chatter about tea and scones. Again she remembered how he had seemed to find peace with her; and again she felt a sweet confidence as she considered how they understood one another without the need for explanation. She replaced the notebook with the others, with no sense of guilt, and turned back to the room.
The wardrobe door was half open and she went to close it. Before she did so she stood looking inside, revelling in the memory of his presence that his clothes held: the dark suits he wore every day in town, tweed jackets for the weekend, pale flannels for the summer, and two tuxedos – she put her face to the sleeve of one, was it the one he had been wearing when they first met? As she did so, a tie slipped from where it had been hanging inside the door, and she bent down to pick it up. She saw something – was it another tie? – a flash of something pale, under one of his shoes. She moved the shoe. It was a slip, pink, crumpled as if it had been pushed suddenly into the closet. Laura herself had never worn such a thing – it was cheap, untrimmed. She found herself holding it, and then she dropped it and walked out of the bedroom.