A Quiet Life(58)

Laura had lent Winifred the Leica to take a photograph for Mother, but she had had to talk her through how to use it, and in the end none of the pictures came out well. All in all, it was lucky for Laura that a wedding day had never been at the centre of her dreams. Because if it had, the rushed ceremony, the paucity of guests and the rigid demeanour of Edward’s mother, who even refused a glass of champagne at the dull lunch in the Savoy, would have disappointed her. There was Alistair, of course, and Toby and Sybil, but Nick had gone to Washington and neither Giles nor Quentin had been able to get leave. Winifred had organised the day, and had tried her best to give it a festive air, but Laura could not help picking up the low mood of the others.

Laura had thought Aunt Dee would have been most pleased of anyone. Everything about Edward – his family, his position, his Englishness – should have delighted her. But strangely, when Laura went over to tell her, the week after Edward had proposed, Dee seemed puzzled and anxious. She kept saying that she wished Polly were here to meet Edward, and that maybe they had better wait. It was Winifred, who had gone with her, who told her how happy Laura was and how delighted Polly would be. Laura was grateful to Winifred for stepping in, even if she knew that her cousin was not entirely convinced herself. And it was Winifred who persuaded everyone that as it was wartime, a small wedding at a registry office in London, followed by lunch at the Savoy, would be the right thing rather than carting everyone off to a church in Highgate or, worse, Sutton.

But in Laura’s eyes the lack of celebration was not as important as it seemed to be for Winifred and Sybil, who looked rather glum as they embraced her at the end of the lunch. To Laura, this union had been sanctified long before. For her, their walk up the aisle had taken place through the blacked-out city in May; their honeymoon had been enjoyed in the sunshine of Sutton Court. The absolute nature of their union could not, to her, be enhanced by a public ceremony, let alone this rather ordinary day in which she was irritated by the adenoidal voice of the registrar and the way the humid weather made her hair curl out of its set. When the women asked to see the little ring that Edward had bought her, when Mrs Last presented her with an old velvet case which turned out to contain a double-strand pearl necklace and matching earrings, and particularly when Toby stood up at the end of the lunch to speak rotund phrases about how glad he was that his brother had found happiness, she felt that their conventional actions and reactions really had nothing to do with her connection to Edward.

At the end of the long afternoon, Alistair, who was unbelievably drunk on wedding champagne, came back to Edward’s apartment with them, unable to find his keys to his own, and fell asleep on the sofa in the living room. Laura found it an almost unbearable intrusion, but there was nothing she could say; it was still Edward’s flat and she felt it would be unwelcome if she questioned the ways of the group. She walked into the bedroom and asked Edward to unzip her dress. It wasn’t white; Winifred had told her that for a registry office wedding she didn’t need to wear a real wedding dress; it was pale grey. It fell off her arms, and she looked at herself in the mirror in her white slip, Edward behind her. Now she looked like a bride, alone with him.

Maybe it was because Alistair was in the living room that they felt constrained as they made love that night. Edward put one hand over Laura’s mouth, to tell her without words not to cry out. She was never aware in the moment that she did cry out when they made love, but sometimes afterwards her moans replayed in her head, to her own embarrassment. But tonight she remained just outside herself enough to control her voice, even as her body shuddered.

The next day Laura woke late, the aftermath of the champagne throbbing in her head. Neither of the men was awake, and she went and made coffee in her housecoat and took it back to bed with her. Someone was practising the piano across the square; she had heard them before on these summer days when the sash windows were pushed up. They had still not got the hang of those scales, but the waltz was going better now, and it dripped smoothly into the Sunday morning air.

Perhaps it was the contrast with the beginning of the bombardment that meant Laura remembered the sounds of that summer in the city so clearly; the whistling screams of the swifts in the evenings, the broken melodies of the piano in the mornings – how poignant they seemed in retrospect.

The first night of the raids, Edward was at the Foreign Office, working late. Ivy, the landlady of the house, called up the stairs to Laura when the siren rang out and asked her to come with her to the public shelter in the nearby square. Laura wished that Edward had been with her – for sure, he would be safer in one of the Whitehall shelters, but she missed his certainty about the right thing to do. She went with Ivy, holding a pillow, a torch and a paperback book, but the thin-walled shelter seemed more fragile than the house she had left. It was not just the doom in the sky that made her so restless; she was desperate for the lavatory, but could not contemplate using the chemical toilet, which was hardly screened from the rest of the room by a cotton curtain.

That evening she told Edward she thought they should just brave out the raids in their flat, but he refused to contemplate it. And her irrational sense of invulnerability was challenged when they emerged from the shelter a few days later to see the end of the street sheared off, water spurting from broken mains and turning the rubble into a swamp. She and Edward stood looking at it, feeling a new recognition of what might be in store for them running through their bodies.

‘Why don’t you go to Sutton too?’ he said to her. Sybil had telephoned them the previous evening to say that she was going there now the bombing had started – not to the house, since it had finally been requisitioned as a nursing home, but to the lodge, with Mrs Last.