A Quiet Life(67)

Downstairs, under the table, Laura and Edward both found sleep eluding them as the morning came near and the guns began to rattle. Ann got up and made tea, and they all sat, sleepless, drinking it. For some reason they began to talk about how they didn’t really know anyone who had died in the raids: some distant acquaintances, yes, the wife of one of Edward’s colleagues at work, who had been unluckily caught in a public shelter that had taken a direct hit, and a whole family in the East End whom Ann knew a little – but no close friends or family. But as they went on with the conversation, both Ann and Laura suddenly felt superstitious, and they stopped. It might be tempting fate, Ann said, to sit down under the bombardment and say that they didn’t know the dead, and Laura agreed with her.

Nobody could have remembered that conversation except Laura on the evening in early June when she and Ann were sitting in the kitchen, drinking tea after supper, and Toby came in late and tired from the House. ‘Edward in?’ he said, pausing at the door. When Laura told him that she didn’t expect him to be home until later, Toby asked if she could tell him the news, as he couldn’t get him on the telephone and he had Home Guard duty to go to. ‘Don’t want it to wait until the morning.’

For some reason Laura thought first of Mrs Last and Sybil, though it was ridiculous given that they were safe in the countryside. The actual news made much more sense. Quentin was dead, not missing in action or taken prisoner, but dead of bullet wounds in Crete on a beach, seen by his men. Sounded quite horrific, Toby said – no need to tell anyone that, though. He had heard it from one of Quentin’s fellow officers, so the news would only be getting to his father today. Toby was gabbling rather, and Laura felt she should make him sit down and give him a drink, but he was already making his way upstairs to change into his Home Guard uniform, his feet stamping as if he were pressing down on whatever he was feeling.

When he had gone out, Laura and Ann sat in silence for a while. Then Ann tried to tell Laura she was sorry, but Laura told her there was no need for condolences, that she had hardly known Quentin. It was a shock, of course it was, to think of all that confident, unquestioning energy gone, but the shock had little resonance for her. How easy it would be to romanticise the part he had played in taking her to Edward, but he had always been dismissive of her and she had hardly seen him as an individual. To her, he had just been part of the group. The worst thing was that Toby had given her the job of telling Edward, and as she waited there with Ann she thought that she must have a drink first, and she went to the cupboard to where the whisky was kept. She offered some to Ann without thinking, and Ann accepted with a look of surprise.

‘You must have seen him in the house often,’ she said to Ann, and Ann agreed. ‘Before the war I was usually in the kitchen, but still I saw him. It’s very sad for Mrs Last,’ she said. Laura knew she meant Sybil. ‘And for their father, he’ll be so cut up, his only son. They’ve got a beautiful house up in Derbyshire, was going to be his.’ Laura thought about this, and asked Ann why Sybil hadn’t gone there on the outbreak of the war rather than to Toby and Edward’s mother. Ann started to tell her that Sybil had never got on very well with her own father, and then they stopped, knowing that it wasn’t the done thing for the two of them to gossip about Sybil as though Laura was a maid too, or as though Ann was a friend of Laura’s. Laura felt the weight of embarrassment at the same time that Ann did, and the possibility of Toby’s disapproval if he were there. How ridiculous, she told herself, you know you don’t believe in these barriers. Still, the self-consciousness persisted, and Laura said she would go upstairs until Edward got in; as she went up the hall stairs she heard his key in the door.

Did he take it badly? He hardly seemed to react at all. Laura said they should have a drink and they went into the living room. He seemed almost confused, sitting there with his hands in his lap, then saying he would read a bit before going to bed, and standing in front of the bookshelves with an indecisive air. After sitting with him for a while, Laura realised her eyes were closing, and she said she would go up. She said again how sorry she was, how awful it was, but he was not looking at her, he seemed deep inside his book.

She went to bed in their own room, as the skies were unexpectedly quiet. When Edward came finally to join her, near to morning, she woke and rolled over to hold him. She wanted to wake up properly and talk to him, but he soon started to descend into sleep, snoring loudly in a way he had never done before. His breath did not hold that hint of apple which was one of his most striking physical characteristics. It was sour with the smell of whisky. He must have been sitting there drinking for hours. A good wife would have been sitting with him, she thought, but she knew that whatever it was that he and Quentin had shared, whatever memories of first steps into university or London life, this was not something that Edward had ever told her about. This grief was not something she could share.

The next day, after checking with Edward that she was doing the right thing, Laura wrote a formal letter of condolence to Sybil, and soon received a brief acknowledgement in return. She had gone to her father’s house, she said, and for a long time after that Laura heard nothing from her. Edward and Toby never mentioned Quentin again, and after a while Laura came to believe that in fact he had not meant so much to them, as they had forgotten him so quickly.

As the weeks of war continued and rationing began to bite, Laura spent more and more of her days in queues. Since that house with four people living in it created much more work than Ann could manage on her own, if Laura had not helped with the shopping they would not have had enough food in the house. One Friday in July, having missed the meat queue in their usual butcher’s after getting there just an hour or so late, Laura bought sausage rolls in a shop she had never frequented before, and they had all come down with the runs. Edward got up, grey-faced, on Saturday and went to work as usual. He didn’t come back that evening; it was no longer unusual for him to work such long hours, but Laura had to resist the temptation to telephone him at work and ask how he was feeling.