A Quiet Life(86)
3
‘It will be just right for us now.’ They were standing in the narrow hallway of a small house in Georgetown. ‘Don’t you think?’
Watching Edward’s unexpected happiness bloom was the best part of her pregnancy for Laura, and taking possession of this little house was only welcome because of the way that he had found it and presented it to her. Washington was an overcrowded city in those days, but somehow Edward had heard at an embassy function that a John Runcie from the university was moving from Washington to New York for a new job, and had jumped in with uncharacteristic eagerness to ask him what he was planning to do with his Washington house. The agreement was just for a year, but as Edward said, they didn’t really know where they would be in a year’s time anyway.
On this cloudy day, Georgetown looked like a corner of Chelsea or St John’s Wood, he said, and Laura could see how he liked the old-fashioned streets with their flat-fronted houses. He took her through the house room by room, up into the bedroom where she saw he had put a bunch of scentless winter roses, wrapped in cellophane, on the bed. It was the most overtly sentimental gesture that she had ever known from him, and she felt almost embarrassed as she carried them back downstairs to look for a vase in the basement kitchen.
Laura never complained to Edward, but the house was difficult for her from the very beginning. The pregnancy affected her hips, so that walking became painful, especially up and downstairs. While the apartment on Connecticut Avenue had been all on one level, this narrow house had only one or two rooms on each floor: a kitchen in the basement; a living room and dining room as you went into the house; and a bedroom on each floor above. Monica came to visit the next day, and exclaimed how darling the house was, and how lucky they were to get it, but Laura’s first unease settled into genuine irritation as the days passed, and she hauled herself up and down those stairs, up and down.
What made it worse was that Professor Runcie had not fully vacated the house, and his taste in furnishings was not hers. Faded, coloured rugs covered every floor, there were old oil paintings on every wall, tapestry cushions on velvet chairs, and despite the high ceilings and big sash windows, there was a general impression of dimness. The kitchen, which no doubt he had rarely used, was small and dark, with a worrying smell of damp. He had left his personality behind in shelves and shelves of books on political science and modern history, many of them, Laura was only half amused to see, about the Soviet Union, and in every drawer there seemed to be little traces of him – the odd handkerchief or old envelope, inkless pen or faded postcard.
Once they had moved into this house, Edward made the effort to come home earlier, and with the help of Kathy, a daily maid she had found, Laura tried to prepare meals for them in the evenings. She started working her way determinedly through an old cookbook she found in the kitchen, but since Edward never seemed to care what he ate, she soon began to repeat the easiest meals. Steak, meatloaf and roast chicken were repeated on a loop in that kitchen.
One night she had served meatloaf for the third time that week, and could hardly eat any of it. Ever since her pregnancy had started, there had been a metallic taste in her mouth, and although she nibbled at saltines and ginger cookies all day, she found most food unappetising. She sat with an empty plate as Edward ate, sipping a glass of cold white wine. ‘I had a letter from Sybil today,’ she told him. ‘She’s pregnant too.’
‘Yes, Toby told me.’
Laura commented on what a coincidence it was, but her voice sounded dull. When Edward asked her how she was feeling, she found it hard to express herself.
‘It’s funny, waiting for someone, and you know that when they arrive, everything is going to change.’
‘Why not come out a bit more, though, while you still can,’ he said, finishing his meatloaf and reaching for the salad. ‘Someone telephoned through an invitation to the newspaper man Whiteley’s party tomorrow, that house on S Street. I’ll tell you who will be there from home: Amy Parker – Amy Sandall now – she’s over here. You remember Amy, I’m sure you met her during the war. We never go to parties – but there are parties all the time here now.’
Laura said that she had never really met Amy – though of course she remembered her, disembarking the Normandie with her hat like a little flag, entering Sybil’s house in a white coat, sitting in the Dorchester in monochrome. She wondered why she was over in the States, and was surprised when Edward told her that she had married again, for a third time, to an American who wanted to get into politics. ‘You can’t stay in for the next three months. That’s why you’re feeling low, with nothing to do.’
All day Laura toyed with the idea of going to the party, and she even went out to a hairdresser in the afternoon. There had been a half-hearted snowfall in the morning, but it was already turning to slush on the sidewalks, falling in dirty streaks off the Dupont Circle fountains. She looked into the shop windows; blush lace underwear in the window of Jean Matou, a crocodile handbag … pretty colours, soft textures, but she couldn’t summon up the energy to go in and see them more closely. In the hairdresser’s mirror, which only showed her from the chest up, she could almost slip into her other self, the girl who used to watch herself with expectation in mirrors and shop windows, wondering what people were thinking about her. The woman next to her, middle-aged with dyed aubergine hair, caught her eye in their reflection and smiled at her. ‘That style suits you,’ she said in a foreign voice, nodding at the way the hairdresser had cut Laura’s hair to just below her ears, ‘much better than when you came in.’ But when she came home to put on a grey cocktail dress that Ellen had sent her in a box of clothes she had worn in her own pregnancy, Laura felt another wave of nausea, and she telephoned Edward and told him she was too unwell to go out.