A Quiet Life(82)
After the guests had left, they sat in the living room facing one another on the new long sofas. ‘You must come to us in Boston,’ Ellen was saying to Mother, returning to a theme that she had already opened up the previous day. ‘There’s lots of room for you. Janet will love to have you with us.’
‘It seems an awful lot for you – and for Tom.’ With Mother’s words, a gap opened in the conversation for Laura to make some offer. But she said nothing.
‘You should come back with us tomorrow,’ Ellen said again, pressing.
‘But there’s so much to do here …’ Mother gestured to the rooms around her.
‘You can come back and sort out Father’s things when you’ve had a break. You can’t do it all when you’re still in such shock. Laura or I will come back with you next month.’
Laura was still sitting in her puddle of silence. She saw a glance pass between Ellen and Mother. She got up and picked up the teacups and took them into the kitchen. She stood at the window, looking down the street where the trees seemed dusty now at the end of summer. How often had she looked down at that view! Yet she remembered it being larger than this, the houses more looming. She realised she had dreamt about this street since she had left, and in her dreams it had had such an aura of menace that now the reality seemed oddly quotidian. She would not stay, now that her path away was clear. She went back to the living room. ‘Is there any brandy?’ she said. ‘Couldn’t we all do with some?’
On her way back to Washington, the inertia she had felt throughout the funeral stayed with her. Perhaps over the last six years she had become too used to the small scale of the English countryside, its low skies and patterned fields, because as she looked out of the train window on the way back to the city, she felt she could hardly comprehend the scale: everything looked too big and the train seemed to be tiny, scuttling through the hills and forests. And the entry into Washington itself overwhelmed her – the humid, dirty air as she left the station, the pulse and roar of the traffic. She had hardly taken in the city in their first weeks there; just the wholeness of the streets and all the brash colour in the store windows had been strange enough without noticing any details. But in the taxi back to their apartment in Connecticut Avenue she felt she was passing through streets built on too massive a scale, oppressive in their inhuman size. Except for the apartment itself, which was miniature, a little box with a clattering tiled floor. They were lucky to have it, she knew. The city was crowded. Everyone was flocking here, to the heart of the new empire.
Laura looked into the icebox, where there was nothing but some sliced cheese and a half-drunk bottle of gin, and ate and drank some of both. The air in the apartment was thick and even when she opened the windows she felt as though she could hardly breathe. It was one of those heavy days she had already come to know in Washington, when the heat beat back off the pavements all day and into the night. Away to the south, dark clouds hung in the sky and the light seemed brassy, but even when the storm broke she knew that the pressure would hardly lift. The tastes of the gin and the cheese went badly together, and she felt nauseous, sitting on the sofa and listening to the radio with a magazine on her lap when Edward’s key turned in the door late that evening. He bent to hold her, but she was unmoving in his embrace, feeling the sweat spring between their arms where they touched. ‘I am so sorry I didn’t get to the funeral,’ he said.
Laura told him it didn’t matter, and asked him for news of London. She would much rather hear about their friends there than talk about her childhood home. Edward started telling some story about how hard Toby was finding life without his parliamentary seat, but Laura was slow to respond. ‘Your mother, how is she taking it?’ Edward asked.
‘No different from what one might expect. Have you eaten?’
‘I’ve been eating round the corner. Let’s go.’
They had gone to this restaurant on their first night in Washington, but now the steaks seemed quite a normal size rather than some absurd mistake, larger than a week’s ration. At least here the air conditioning blew hard and cooled the sweat on their cheeks. Because it was so noisy it did not matter that Laura found it hard to talk, and Edward had other stories of their friends in London, as well as plans for the next few weeks. ‘I’ve got an invitation for you to the embassy luncheon this Saturday,’ he remembered at one point. ‘I was going to reply for you and say no, but then I thought maybe you’d like to have something to do – I mean, something different, new people to meet. Remind me to give the note to you.’
As they walked back, the thunder sounded and rain began to steam on the sidewalks. Neither of them had brought an umbrella, and when Laura caught sight of them in the lobby mirror as they went into the apartment block she was struck by how bedraggled they looked, her damp hair sticking to her face and her mascara smudged. Before they went to bed, Edward gave the note to her, a few impersonal lines from Lady Halifax. Laura looked at it and wondered if it would be a formal affair, but Edward said not, and that he would go over there early as Halifax liked a game of doubles before lunch. Laura turned that over in her mind: that pale, thin man playing tennis with his subalterns in the embassy garden. Strangely, she dreamt about it that night, but in her dreams Edward and the other men were playing with snowballs – ‘Don’t worry, your lordship!’ he was saying as they melted in the sun. ‘Your point, I think!’ She walked onto the court in the dream, and a snowball landed on her arm, but as it melted it left a red stain.