A Quiet Life(83)

The next morning as Edward was about to go out of the door, he suddenly stopped. ‘Do you have the reply for Lady Halifax?’

‘I thought you’d tell them I’d be coming—’

‘If she writes, you have to write.’

He waited while Laura found a piece of paper to scrawl her acceptance on; the ink smudged, but she folded it anyway and pushed it into an envelope.

That Saturday, after Edward had left for his game of tennis, Laura found herself going through her closet without relish. The couple of summer dresses she had bought to take to Ellen’s house in Portstone seemed out of the question – they were too obviously vacation clothes – but her entire wartime wardrobe was also impossible with its shabby, skimpy lines. So she took out the only possible things she had: the clothes she had bought in Stairbridge for the funeral, a pleated black silk skirt and tight black jacket with elbow-length sleeves.

She walked the short distance over to Massachusetts Avenue, past well-kept houses with liriope and pansies blossoming by their front steps, smoking a cigarette, barely noticing the river flashing among the richly coloured trees. In the aftermath of the storm the weather had cooled a little, but in the embassy garden the air was unstirring around the English women on the garden terrace, all of them dressed in similar printed dresses, whether they were in their twenties or their sixties.

‘Mr Last is just finishing a game with my husband. He’s rather pleased that they have players for doubles now,’ Lady Halifax told Laura when they were introduced, folding her mouth down at the end of each sentence.

‘Yes, Edward likes it too – it was always hard in London to find a chance to play.’

‘Hard on the chaps if there isn’t an opportunity.’

‘It was hard in London,’ agreed another woman. ‘Very nice here, Lady Halifax, to have the space, you know.’

‘The garden is really the thing.’

‘It is, isn’t it? The garden really is something.’

‘Awfully special,’ another woman agreed, and so they went on, with Laura echoing alongside them.

When the men came up onto the terrace, however, the chorus faltered for a while.

‘Ah, so this is Mrs Last,’ said Lord Halifax, with that accidental charm that his wife failed to show. ‘And you are a born American – how nice for you to be able to come home.’

‘I grew up near Boston, not here,’ said Laura.

‘Yes, it’s rather different in America, isn’t it? So big – a native of one city feels quite out of place in another …’ Lady Halifax went on talking, and her female chorus backed her with a twitter of sentences about how different every American city is, but how if you are born in one part of England all of it is your home.

At lunch Laura was seated between two men of about Edward’s age. One of them, Archie Platt, turned to her with immediate good manners. He was fairish and tall. It was only really his poor skin, which was reddening and pimpled, which made him unattractive.

‘So, the wife of the golden boy joins us at last!’ Laura knew she should be pleased to hear Edward described that way, although she wondered whether there wasn’t a hint of mockery in Archie’s voice. ‘Last can do no wrong, you know. Not just with his backhand, either. Tell me, Last, how did you manage to write that report last week when we weren’t even allowed notebooks in the meeting? It was so top secret,’ he said, turning back to Laura, ‘that the Americans said we couldn’t write anything in the room, but Last seemed to recall every detail. I must say I was still struggling to tell one American from another.’

Although Archie’s praise was lavish, Laura felt a particular kind of English game at work, which she had got to know in London. It was that game in which it was subtly suggested that it was bad form for the person being praised to be trying so hard to succeed, and that the one who was praising was in fact holding the power, even as he seemed to be putting himself down, by showing that he didn’t have to make such efforts. She was pleased when Archie’s wife Monica joined the conversation and moved it on, asking Laura what she was planning to do in Washington and whether she was going to get involved in charity work. Her horsey face, brightly made up, was smiling, but Laura had to say that she didn’t have any plans, and then was afraid that she might have sounded rude. ‘Do please find something for me to do,’ she said.

‘Gosh, you’ll be able to take your choice, then – it’s all funds for the wounded with me, and all displaced children if you go with Veronica. Stick with me, our supporters are much more fun,’ she said.

Laura nodded, but after a while she heard Edward mentioning to Lady Halifax that she had recently suffered a bereavement. ‘My condolences, Mrs Last,’ her fluting voice came down the table. Laura wondered why Edward, who was usually so private, had put her misery on show. After that she made even less effort to join the conversation, and sat there turning over her food with a fork, feeling like a black crow among the chattering English flocks.

When they got home, late in the afternoon, a silence fell between them. Edward walked towards the drinks cabinet. Laura asked if he really needed another drink, and wondered at the shrewish tone that seemed to have come into her voice. He put down the bottle of whisky.

‘How would you like to spend the evening?’ The words could have been interpreted as an olive branch, but Laura was in a stubborn mood after what she had sensed was her social failure at lunch, and she failed to take it, shaking her head.