A Quiet Life(93)

That evening Edward came in late, as ever, and without saying much ate the lamb casserole which Kathy had made. He took some documents out of his briefcase as he finished the meal. Laura reached out for them, and he held onto them. ‘I wish it didn’t have to be like this,’ he said. ‘Involving you. It’s so … I wanted it all to be …’

Laura shook her head. This was no time for nostalgia. That was what they were getting wrong, looking back instead of forward. She would find a way to stop that now. She took the documents and went over to the typewriter. She had tried it that afternoon. The ribbon was fine, and the action was satisfying, banging hard with every stroke; you could not be half-hearted about typing on such a heavy machine. As she rattled through the first page, Edward stood up and took another book from the shelves. Laura felt her back stiffen as she typed. She wished that she could clean this house of the brooding, alien presence that lay in the professor’s books. But she said nothing.

She typed, letter by letter. You can type without understanding what you are typing, and this was particularly hard to follow, being the details of some alien chemical processes. ‘Repeated distillation by sublimation and rapid condensation of vapors,’ she typed, ‘inversely proportional to the partial vapor pressure sustained by a molecule without condensation.’ She noted, but did not type out the headings of each page, the stamps saying Atomic Energy Commission, security level – top. Instead, she went on page by page typing the descriptions and then the long equations. After she pulled each page from the typewriter she had to check it through. It took a long while, and all the time there was no need to speak, just to be busy. When she had finished, late in the evening, she opened the top drawer of the professor’s desk, which locked with an old key, and put the copies in there, and handed the originals back to Edward.

‘I’ll go up to bed.’

He looked up from the book he was reading with eyes that seemed bloodshot. ‘I forgot: Nick – you remember Nick – is coming to stay next week, to see some American friends. He’s pretty miserable in London at the moment. I think he might be hoping for a transfer out here. I told him to come to dinner on Monday, would that be all right?’

Yes, Laura did remember Nick, although the memory came with no fondness. He had hardly ever even acknowledged her existence. But here was another plan, another thing to do, and she agreed with some energy, suggesting other guests – would Nick enjoy meeting Joe? They owed Archie and Monica so many invitations too; they were always being invited to their big apartment near the river. But as Laura ran through other possibilities, Edward was standing up, putting on his coat. ‘Where are you going?’

‘I have to get these papers back on the right desk before tomorrow. Don’t wait up.’

‘At this time?’

‘Don’t worry, I’ve got keys.’

His steps went quickly and quietly down the hall. Laura stood there for a second and then went downstairs to get a cookbook. She would make this dinner for Nick a fine evening. Ellen had given her a book of recipes for entertaining that she had never used, but now she was going to make something welcoming. She got into bed with the cookbook and read through pages of recipes that seemed much too complicated for her and Kathy to put together. By the time Edward came back she was half asleep, and he was gone early in the morning, but he reappeared on Saturday evening with more papers for her to type, and again on Sunday. She wondered what kind of excuses he was giving for haunting the office all weekend, but that was not her concern.

That week the tight heat of the Washington summer was already closing in on them. Laura woke early under its weight, lying there in their bed with the covers pushed off, but she was already full of plans for the day, plans she had been laying all weekend. She could see herself, at the head of a table of relaxed guests, white flowers, clattering knives and forks, Edward smiling; and then Suzanne and Monica and Nick too would recognise that she was not just an appendage to Edward, that she could create something – an atmosphere, an evening … but there was so much to do.

When Laura went out to the fishmongers and the flower shop, she saw in the window of a drugstore how the humidity in the air was already making her hair curl out of its set; she longed to go into its air-conditioned cool and sip a limeade and read a magazine, but she had to struggle back with the bags. One bag caught on her stocking, and the ladder ran down her leg as she walked. Kathy was at home to receive a delivery; yes, there was the fruit – grapes, dusky purple, but over-ripe, already softening, while the pears on the other hand looked woody. Laura gave Kathy instructions and went into the dining room to put the flowers into vases. Monica had mentioned in passing recently that it was not done to interrupt the gaze across the table with flower arrangements, so over the weekend she had bought three greenish glass bowls, and she cut the flower stalks short and pushed them into the bowls. In her mind the arrangement looked charming, but the heaviness of the roses’ heads made them tumble out of the bowls onto the oak dining table, and she pricked her finger on their thorns pushing them back in. In the end she took them into the living room instead, putting them on the mantelpiece where the roses could lean against the wall.

That was how the day went; she went through the list of things to do, ticking things off, making things happen, but with a sense that she was rehearsing for a play where the director was missing. At last, at about six, she went up to change. She had thought she would wear a dark dress with a low back; it had gone down well the first time she had worn it, but now she noticed that there was a mark on the skirt that she had not seen before. She should have sent it to be cleaned. She was sitting on the bed, wetting her finger with her tongue and rubbing at the mark, when she saw that on the table next to Edward’s side of the bed was a letter. She picked it up, and even when she realised it was from his mother she went on reading it. ‘… Osborne has taken the land to add to his farm, but nobody seemed to want the house as a house – in the end it’s gone to this Bristol man, who intends to turn it into a hotel. Toby is taking some bits and pieces for their London house, and I’ll put a few of the paintings into the Lodge …’