A Quiet Life(79)

But as she gained her room that night, she realised how the discovery had destabilised her. Joe, smiling at her in the smoky bar, his hand warm on her leg on the dark deck. There was no escape from memories; the memories of her childhood that Mother and Ellen brought with them, and now the memory of those days when she thought she was escaping. She felt the web of the past restricting her, pulling her back when she thought she could move forwards.

She woke blearily to breakfast the next day, and found that the influx of new people into the house had energised Tom. He was insisting that they should all go sailing, and had borrowed a boat from a neighbour he had known from childhood. Ellen demurred, saying that she had to stay back with Janet, and Mother said that she didn’t see how, with her knees, she could clamber in and out of a boat. Part of Laura also longed to stay back in the shade of the garden; the air would be damp and cool under the old elm tree. But that was where Mother would be lying all day in a deckchair. It was better to get out, then, onto the sea.

When she went down to the beach, Tom and Kit were reminiscing about making exactly this same trip in the past; they were talking about their parents, about old neighbours, about the time when their boat had sunk and they had been stranded in a distant bay for a whole day and half a night. She felt out of step with them; she was just a passenger, and while they were soon busy with ropes and sails and anchors, she was clumsy and tentative in the boat which seemed so unpredictable, and she sat gingerly on the wooden benches.

The short trip in the small boat felt exposed, out on the naked water under the cloudless sky, but when they got round to the cove that Tom was aiming for, Laura could see its charm; it was enclosed, hard to scramble down to from the road. There was just one other family there already, an image of what Tom and Kit’s must have been years ago: a silver-haired father with tall adolescent boys. Laura stumbled getting out of the boat – the rocks were slippery under her sandshoes – and Kit reached out a hand to help her, but his fingers seemed inert on hers.

‘We must swim,’ Tom ordered, and obediently they shed their outer layers. Tom and Kit swam far out, as if racing one another, but there was a breeze coming off the sea now and Laura stayed standing in the shallows, goose pimples coming up on her arms. ‘Don’t you swim?’ Kit said to her as he came back in, and Laura told him not to worry about her. They wanted to recreate something from their past, and although they were polite to her, she felt that she was a drag on their enjoyment. Soon after a picnic lunch they decided to return; Laura wondered whether they would have stayed longer without her.

When the boat was moored, it was a long walk back up the shore to the house. Laura excused herself and went in, going upstairs without talking to Mother and Ellen, whom she could see on the lawn. This week, she had gotten into the lazy habit of sleeping for a while in the afternoon, and she pulled off her slacks and her bathing costume and slid into bed, realising as her sandy legs rubbed against the linen that she would have to shake the sheets out later. She had already fallen asleep when she heard a hard rap on the door – ‘Laura?’ For a moment she wasn’t sure where she was, coming too quickly out of unconsciousness into this high, hard bed and the sunlit room, but then she saw Edward standing by the bed.

‘I wasn’t expecting—’

‘I know – I managed to get away, things had quietened down for the weekend, but I have to get back Monday morning. I called from the station – your brother-in-law picked me up. Is there room for me there?’

Laura rolled to one side and opened her arms. ‘I’m all sticky and sandy,’ she said, with happy expectation, as Edward pulled off his tie and his shoes, but as soon as he got into bed he simply said, ‘I’m so tired,’ and, putting one hand on her shoulder, he closed his eyes. Laura watched his face as he fell asleep. She could relax now. Nothing in the past could touch her, not now she had her present and future beside her.

She was full of easy anticipation when they went down to dinner that evening. How patrician Edward looked, pausing at the foot of the stairs to wait for her to come down, his light hair luminous in the shadows, his green gaze resting on her. Now that they could see the quality, the beauty, the intelligence of the man who loved her, she would take on a different value in her family’s eyes. She felt released, finally, from the burden of being the old Laura as they went into the living room.

It was odd, though, to see how pale and tired Edward looked next to the other men; Kit must have picked up his bronzed sheen on the ship and Tom from the beach. What’s more, the other two were in soft-coloured shirts, without ties or blazers, and when Kit crossed his legs you could see the flash of a bare ankle above his loafers, but Edward had dressed as he always did at weekends, in a flannel jacket and white shirt and tie. In England, Laura realised, Edward had always worn precisely what all the other men of his class did, right down to the design of his shoes and the colour of his tie. There, he knew line by line whatever unspoken codes governed men’s clothes, but here he seemed to be working in another language, and its formality made him look absent-minded, as if he had not expected to find himself here, in the heat of summer and the languor of a vacation.

Tom and Kit were quick to include him in their conversation, asking him about work and telling him about people they knew in Washington. As Laura listened to them talk, she remembered how struck she had been when she first met him by the glacial pace of Edward’s conversation, and how the chatter of his friends slowed down to meet his rhythms. But what had seemed part of his unquestionable authority in London now seemed less sure-footed. Kit soon overtook his slow responses with a quick anecdote he had heard about the editor of a Washington newspaper, and when they moved to the dining room to eat, Ellen and Mother seemed to be struggling to get anything out of Edward. ‘And your ambassador?’ Kit suddenly asked, throwing a conversational ball down to Edward’s end of the table, to Laura’s relief, continuing something that Tom had said about the effect of the war. ‘What does he think of the future of the empire?’