A Quiet Life

‘Sybil,’ Alistair said suddenly, stopping a blonde woman who was walking past them. She was tall, in a curiously cut, stiff turquoise dress. Laura would not say she was pretty. No, her profile was too dominated by the long nose and the high forehead, but one wanted to look again at that face, to understand the secret of its attractiveness. Quentin turned.

‘I brought a new friend, Sybs – Nina was ill yet again.’

‘Nina telephoned me. I think she is still coming – and this is …?’

It was disconcerting to be addressed in the third person, Laura thought, as Quentin introduced her as carelessly as he had before. ‘Laura, Giles’s cousin,’ he said. She realised again that she was only there as a stopgap, as everyone now began talking about the woman whose place she had taken.

‘Nina takes to her bed for the attention,’ Alistair was saying.

‘Nonsense,’ Sybil stated.

‘Anyone less in need of extra attention …’ Nick said.

‘I think she is punishing me,’ Quentin said, with a theatrically pitiful expression.

‘Are you surprised? I did hear that you hadn’t treated her with chivalry, exactly.’

The comments continued in that vein, crossing and recrossing, and after a while Sybil walked on, not having acknowledged Laura or Winifred at all. Winifred raised her eyebrows at Laura, but Laura was feeling too overwhelmed to respond. To her surprise, it was Edward who addressed her next, as the others went on talking about Nina.

‘You’re not with the embassy, are you? I know some of the chaps in Grosvenor Square.’

‘No, I don’t work, I’m not – I just drifted here to visit family, you know. Not the best timing.’

Edward said nothing, but Laura pressed on, feeling the weight of her embarrassment lessen as she spoke. ‘My mother was keen for me to come – to see my cousins. But now she says I should go back. She’s cottoned on to the fact that things may not be totally safe. It’s taken her a while.’ Edward nodded, again saying nothing. ‘But it seems to be taking lots of people a while.’

‘To see what’s going on?’ Edward said.

‘Yes—’ Laura was going to say more, when she found Winifred at her elbow. She turned to her cousin, but when Winifred asked her how she was finding the party, she wasn’t sure what to say. There was glamour here, surely; the women’s backless dresses, the men in their tuxedos. And yet there was a secret to the evening’s energy that the others were responding to, as the colour grew higher in women’s faces and men’s voices became louder, which was eluding Laura. Instead, she was horribly aware of how uncomfortable she felt it was to be here as a replacement for a woman who – judging by the reactions to her illness – was clearly more of a character, more admired, than she would ever be. So she responded with some blank nothing to Winifred, and raised her glass to her lips, only realising as she did so that it was empty.

At that moment Edward took a silver cigarette case from his breast pocket. She took one when it was offered, just for something else to do with her hands. As Edward flicked the lighter, he spoke to her again.

‘This American chap I’ve got to know at the embassy told me that he thought London was the saddest place he had ever been. Do you think so?’

Laura wondered. This question resonated. She stepped backwards from the group as she considered it, looking at Edward. ‘Well, yes, – I wouldn’t know. But you do feel that people would rather not be living in these times. There is that.’

‘Rather Prince of Denmark.’

Whatever the exact meaning of his last remark, Laura took it to imply that he agreed with her. She waited for him to say more, but the pause that ensued seemed considering rather than empty. As they stood in silence, the conversations of the group continued beside them. This man’s laconic manner might seem offhand, Laura thought, but surely it was just that his rhythms were so different from the starling chatter of the others. While they were striving for effect, their voices tumbling over one another, he was driving at something else.

‘The time is out of joint,’ he said as if in elaboration of his last point, and though Laura could not catch his exact meaning, she caught, or thought she did, the thought behind his words.

‘Not for everyone, though,’ she said, and a great rush of feeling ran through her as she thought of how Florence and her friends saw opportunity even in the danger, the possibility of remaking the world in these forces sweeping over Europe. ‘Not if they see the struggle on two fronts, what it means for all of us.’ The words seemed to have risen through her, and she was not aware until she had spoken them how odd they might sound in that dimly glittering room.

‘The struggle on two fronts,’ Edward repeated the words, but she could not read his expression as he did so. Clumsily, she reached for another subject, wishing that she had not said anything so political. She had spent too long with that pamphlet this afternoon.

‘So, you were at university with Giles?’ It was a false, bright tone that came out with the words, and her tongue felt thick in her mouth. She wondered if she had already drunk too much, and if it was obvious that she had done so.

‘The struggle on two fronts: that isn’t Giles’s view,’ Edward said, and again she could not read his expression.

Laura tried to explain that she didn’t really know Giles that well, even though she was his cousin, and once Edward had made some polite response, she went on talking about staying with Winifred and how generous they had been to her. The ease she had felt between them had gone, though, and the small talk they were exchanging now was strained.

‘But, Last, didn’t Nina say to you not so long ago that if she was going to marry anyone it would be Quentin?’ That was Nick’s drawling voice breaking in over them.

‘The emphasis was very much on the if, as I remember.’ It was Giles who replied, smiling as he spoke, but there was sharpness there too.

‘We have to dance, really.’ This was Alistair. ‘Sybil told me; she said, I’m not having you all turning up and just standing there like a party of gawkers.’ Although he invoked Sybil, Laura could tell that in fact he was impatient to move away from his clique. Winifred and he moved off to the other room where a few couples were turning now to the music of a small band.

‘He only did that to get away from this lot,’ said Nick, motioning towards a couple of men who were coming towards the group, both of them in uniform. The two men who joined them seemed to be the target of some private joke in the circle, but they were perfectly friendly to Laura, and one of them was rather enthusiastic about the fact that she was American, telling her about a trip he had once taken to Boston and Maine. He was explaining to her at length the old cliché that Americans are so much more open and talkative than English people are, and then laughed with self-knowledge when he realised that she had said almost nothing as he spoke. When he asked her to dance, she was glad to move away from the little crowd around Quentin, who, she felt, had no interest in talking to her.

But after she had danced for a while she realised she had a stomach ache and, apologising to her partner, she moved away in search of a bathroom. The party was crowded now, knots of people standing everywhere in the two long rooms and in the entrance hall. A maid directed her upstairs to a bathroom, where she sat miserably for a while on the lavatory, feeling drunk and tired, before coming out and seeing herself reflected in the mirror. Just a fragment, again, just a flash; the lipstick worn off her mouth, a curl to tuck back.

Going down, she paused on the staircase, looking over at the gathering. ‘We’ll never see the like again,’ someone said, going past her, and although the person’s interlocutor quickly made clear – ‘Oh no, I think they are breeding in Shipston’ – that the comment was about horses, the words hung in the air as she looked down at the loud party.

Two women were just coming through the door from the street, one in a white satin coat, the other in grey. Laura recognised the one in white immediately. The face from the boat – unselfconscious, self-sufficient. She wore satin the same way she had worn a swimming costume, her shoulders well back and her movements quick as she shrugged her coat off into the hands of a waiting servant. Her companion was as pretty as she was, if not prettier, but it was Amy who held one’s gaze. Laura saw Sybil making her way through the guests to greet the two new arrivals.

‘Nina, you made it,’ she said to Amy’s friend. Next to her new guests Sybil looked dumpy, planted solidly on the carpet, but somehow it did not matter that she did not share their physical glamour, there was still some connection between them. The three women bent their heads together, whispering something, and then stepped back, laughing, looking at one another. They were the centre of the gathering, and as they moved through into the other room Laura saw many groups shuddering and re-forming, as people turned to greet them.

Walking down the stairs and entering the room behind them, Laura saw Quentin rushing forward to Nina, and bending almost double as he caught up her hand in an over-polite gesture. She stood irresolutely, watching them, and then walked on. She saw the RAF officer she had danced with earlier, now dancing with another woman, and she saw Nick and Giles in an entirely masculine group further on.

‘Would you like to get an ice?’ It was Winifred, taking pity on her, seeing her drifting through the party alone. Laura was glad of her company. She went with her and Alistair to eat a lemon sorbet from a silver dish and listen to them chatter. The evening dragged on like that until, very late, Winifred persuaded Giles to drive them back to Highgate. Winifred seemed to be riding high on the energy of the evening, talking over the gossip she had heard and pushing Giles for more stories about Alistair.

As she laid her cheek on the cold window of the motor car, watching the dark streets fall away as they drove, Laura felt rather ashamed of how awkward she had been all evening. What would it be like, she wondered, to feel that you belonged inside a party like that, inside the little group around Amy and Nina and Sybil, admired and envied, rather than uncomfortably wandering through the crowds in a too tight, too bright dress? Then she thought of Florence, and how scornful she would be of such a desire. Florence – she must ask her what that conversation about Halifax meant. And then she found herself remembering the odd exchange she had had with Edward Last. The struggle, why had she mentioned the struggle, so pointlessly? She had seen him again, late in the party, but he was sitting with Sybil and Amy. He had looked up at her as she walked past but had not made any move towards her. Was it his arctic blondness that seemed to set him apart from others, or that quiet manner? As she remembered their conversation, she pressed a finger on her lip, as if she could stop herself blurting out words that had already been spoken.

5

Looking back on that summer, Laura sometimes let herself think that the inertia which gripped both her and Winifred was down to the fact that, along with the whole country, they were holding their breath for the great shift in September. But really, she knew it was not that. Despite their frustration with their lives, neither of them was ready to take flight from Highgate.

Winifred’s life changed after the party. Lunch with Alistair and his publisher, tea with Alistair and his mother, theatre with Alistair and his friends; she would come in from each excursion with her energy high and the colour glowing in her face. As soon as she had spent some time with her mother, however, her energy would fade and she would recede into irritation and argument. If she wasn’t set on taking up her university place in September, she told Laura, she would move out right away. But for now, she said, she would stay.

Laura’s inertia was less explicable. She resisted all the attempts of her aunt and her mother to persuade her to book the passage home, and yet she could not take wing and leave her aunt’s house. She saw Florence as infrequently as ever, and each time she saw her she felt it like a loss rather than a gain: Florence had been the only person who had ever recognised her, who had ever shown her anything about herself and her own desires. But since they had arrived in London, Laura felt that she was losing sight of Florence, watching her drift away down a road of new struggle and activity. She was always waiting for the moment when Florence would turn to her again, as she had on the boat, and paint for her the new world. But somehow each meeting always ended with the right words unsaid, with intimacy avoided.

And so the long, slow months faded away through the turgid heat of summer. Even though Laura had been told so often by Florence and Elsa that war was inevitable and desirable, when the announcement came through on the wireless on the third day of September, the concrete fact fell like an unexpected blow.

The scream of the air raid siren that rent the air sent them all, with Mrs Venn, out to the little shelter in the garden. Sitting there, Laura became aware that she was sweating: she could smell an acrid scent from under her arms. She had started her period the day before and in the enclosed space she was also sure that she smelt of blood. When you think of war, she thought, you think of action, but this is where it is beginning for us, stuck in this closed, bad-smelling space with four females.

Aunt Dee was talking to her about the need to book a passage back as soon as possible. She could not, she said, be responsible for Laura any longer. Laura put her head in her hands, feeling unwell. ‘I was thinking of moving out …’ she said in a small voice. Winifred pushed her hard in the ribs, and Laura realised that she was trying to silence her.

When the all-clear sounded and they could emerge, they realised that the telephone was ringing and ringing in the hall. Winifred ran ahead to answer it, while Aunt Dee stayed in the garden talking to Mrs Venn. Laura hung back, listening to their conversation. Mrs Venn wanted to go down to her sister’s house, she was saying, as her own son, who lived with her sister, would now be evacuated and she needed to say goodbye.

Laura was startled. In all this time she had not imagined Mrs Venn’s own life; she was guilty – as Florence said all the rich were guilty – of seeing servants purely as instruments. She had only seen Mrs Venn as an anonymous presence in the house, and now she looked at her properly for the first time. She was standing next to the straggling bush of late white roses, and as she spoke to Aunt Dee she reached out a hand and shook one of the flowers, which spattered its petals onto the lawn. It seemed to be an angry gesture, even though her voice was soft as she explained the urgency of her situation. She was a widow, Laura knew that, but she had never heard about the son who lived with her sister before. ‘Well, I don’t know, Vennie – must you go right now?’ Aunt Dee was dithering. ‘I suppose the girls can help get the lunch and there will be enough over for tomorrow.’

Winifred came back out of the house. ‘It was Giles on the telephone,’ she said in a high voice. ‘He won’t come to lunch today; they’ve been called into work. I might go and meet him later – will you come with me, Laura?’

‘No rushing about today, Winifred.’ In Aunt Dee’s mind, it was clearly the first crisis of the war, the desire on the part of her housekeeper to take a few days off. As Mrs Venn stood waiting for her decision, Laura tried to persuade her aunt that they could easily manage without help for a few days. Mrs Venn did not express gratitude when Aunt Dee finally agreed that she could leave for a while. Instead, she frowned and then nodded at Laura in a way that Laura found puzzling.

Laura was soon in the kitchen, doing these now unfamiliar tasks that she had done so often at home: putting plates and glasses on a tray, making the gravy, draining the potatoes.

Winifred might have noticed and commented on her competence, but Winifred’s mind was elsewhere. She was pouring herself a glass of water and drinking it down as if she had been running all morning. ‘I haven’t yet told Mother, but I’m not going to the university after all.’