A Quiet Life

‘Who cares?’ Joe said, catching her hand, and on an impulse Laura stood up. He was not a great dancer either, and Laura felt that they were the clumsiest people moving in the room. There was something so exposed about dancing while people were dining, looking up from their plates to watch you turn and step. At one point she looked back at their table and saw that Florence was no longer there, and she loosed her hand from Joe’s. ‘I must just find Florence—’ and then turned to smile at him politely, ‘but thank you.’

She walked up the stairs to the deck, and sure enough there was Florence, her voice was clear in the night air. ‘I think that you should be standing up to them,’ she said. She was talking to the steward again. ‘If they are really trying to bring down your wages because of that, well—’

‘Florence!’

Florence waved to her, but turned back to the steward. Their voices were lowered as Laura walked towards them, but she heard Florence tell the man something about someone he needed to talk to in New York. As Laura came to stand next to them, she told them not to mind her, but the man looked at her with some embarrassment and then moved off.

‘Was I interrupting?’ She heard how her voice sounded, reedy and uncertain. Florence shrugged. They stood at the rails, but the urgency of their conversations over the last few days seemed to have left them. As they stood there, the music from the swing band downstairs was heard through an open door, spilling out onto the deck and the ocean. Laura felt its rhythms again, and remembered the touch of Joe’s hand and his clumsy energy as they danced.

‘There will be so much to do when we’re in London,’ Florence said, and Laura realised all of a sudden how near her aunt’s house was. Her aunt, and the cousins, Winifred and Giles, who had sounded so formal in the letters they had written, were waiting for her in that grey city, ready to take her back into the embrace of family life. Florence, she knew, was thinking of a different London, a city that she thought was readying itself for war, a city where she thought she could be useful. They talked idly for a while about when the boat was likely to get to Southampton the next day, and then Florence said that she thought she would go back to the cabin and finish her book. ‘Damn, I left my scarf in the restaurant,’ she said.

‘I left my handkerchief too,’ Laura said, although she knew perfectly well that her handkerchief was in the pocket of her coat, back in their cabin, ‘I’ll go.’ She left Florence on the dark windy deck and went back down. Through the doors to the restaurant, it was all warmth and light. A number of couples were dancing now, but in the centre of them were Maisie and Lily dancing together, moving even more sharply than when they’d danced with the men, the fastest rumba Laura could imagine. The music seemed to be shaking off their bodies as they tripped backwards and forwards.

‘They’re not bad,’ said Joe, suddenly at her elbow. ‘You rushed off …’

Laura apologised. ‘I had to find Florence.’ She saw Florence’s scarf on the back of a chair, but rather than moving over to pick it up, she turned back to Joe. ‘Dance again?’ she said. This time they moved together with more ease, and as the number ended Laura could feel the sweat springing up under her arms. ‘I must take Florence her scarf,’ she said, but she said so looking at Joe, and this time they went together out of the restaurant. Upstairs, however, the deck was empty. Instead of moving back downstairs to look for Florence, Laura paused.

‘Smoke?’ Joe’s voice was very near to her ear.

She took one although she hardly wanted it, the freshness of the salt air was so keen. As he lit it, Joe looked into her face, and Laura felt that their bodies were even closer than they had been when they were dancing.

‘So, your comrade’s preparing another lecture for you?’

‘She doesn’t lecture me.’

‘I’ve heard her.’ Joe flicked a match into the water. It spun, a tiny bead of light, in the darkness. Laura caught anger under his words, but before she could ask him about it, he turned back to her and smiled. ‘Your eyes are shining in the moonlight. Has anyone ever told you what pretty eyes you have?’

Nobody ever had, but Laura laughed in what she hoped was a sophisticated way. She didn’t know what to say, and felt shaken by the desire that rose up suddenly in her, a desire for his compliment to be not just an easy line but something that he had found hard to say, something that bore testament to his view of her. And then he did what she realised she was waiting for him to do, and put a hand behind her back and slid it down, over her dress, over her buttocks. Laura was unable to move as pleasure, so forceful it seemed to deny her a sense of consciousness, flooded through her, loosening her joints and heating her skin.

‘What your friend wants,’ he was whispering, ‘I can see that … But what you want – what do you want?’

She hardly heard his words, she was so focused on his touch. He threw his cigarette away over the side, and put his right hand up to Laura’s face, stroking his thumb over her cheek and then putting it against her mouth. To Laura’s own surprise, she did not move away from him, and her lips opened against his thumb, and tentatively her tongue touched it. ‘So you do know what you want,’ he whispered urgently into her ear. The hand that had been on her back was now between her thighs, and as it moved up to the skin above her stocking top her mouth opened suddenly wider, and a groan escaped her.

‘Come on then,’ he said, pushing his hand up to her underwear, which had become so wet that his fingers slid on the silk. Lost in the molten pleasure that his touch was giving her, Laura was unaware of anything but the pressure of his fingers, but then he stepped away and took her hand. ‘Come on,’ he said again. ‘No need to provide the entertainment,’ and to her shame she saw a steward walking past them and realised that Joe was smiling at her, as though she was amusing him. ‘Let’s get some privacy – my cabin mate is drinking in the restaurant, we can be alone for a bit. Long enough, anyway.’ He raised his eyebrows at her, and suddenly his obvious amusement at what was happening made her feel ashamed.

‘I must go and find Florence,’ she said. Her words were clipped.

‘Come on,’ his hand held her wrist now, and it was too tight. Laura tried to pull away, but his grip tightened even more.

‘Stop it,’ she said, horribly aware that she could still feel the wetness between her thighs, that she wanted his hand back there, and that her voice sounded half-hearted.

‘Don’t go back to the lectures.’

‘She doesn’t—’

‘What, does she give you any of this?’ His left hand pushed up again, under her dress. ‘Does she? Or is she just teaching you about how to be a good little worker, how to forget what you want for the good of the masses?’ The hand still gripping her wrist was hurting her, and the other one was pushing her legs apart again, and though the sparks of pleasure were intense, so too was the anger, coming hard on the heels of the pleasure. He was smiling at her, and his teeth, which looked yellowy with nicotine stains in the daylight, were white.

Making a huge effort, she pulled away from him and smoothed down her dress. ‘You have no idea—’

‘No, Laura, you have no idea. You have no idea what she’s talking about, all that claptrap that the Reds are trying to feed people while they knock down everything that’s good in the world.’

‘You’re telling me about being good?’ It was a quicker comeback than Laura knew she was capable of, and Joe laughed.

He went on talking, but he had lost her. She shook her head and told him she was going inside. As they walked to the stairs, Maisie and Lily came up laughing with another man, and Joe joined them. The four of them started dancing drunkenly on the deck, and Laura felt heavy and disappointed as she turned away from them to go down the metal staircase and back through the corridor to her cabin. She walked slowly, dragging one hand against the felted walls. There was something that had shocked her not just about the embrace and her overwhelming reaction to it, but in the lightness with which Joe had treated the sudden surge of desire. She felt confused, wrong-footed. How could he experience that energy, which had come across her with such an all-consuming force, as if it would fuse them together if they gave into it, as something so light and impersonal?

She opened the door to the cabin. Florence was sitting in her bed, her knees drawn up, reading. ‘I’ve got your scarf,’ Laura said.

‘I thought you were still dancing.’

‘No, I – I stopped.’

Florence said nothing, turning a page. Laura walked over to her and put the scarf down on her bed. ‘Do you think—’

‘What?’ Florence’s voice was not unfriendly, but it was rather clipped, as though whatever she was reading was more interesting to her than what Laura was thinking, and so Laura said nothing. She took off her clothes, facing the wall and pulling her nightdress over her body before taking off her underclothes. As she took off her garter belt, she remembered Joe’s fingers, and she looked over her shoulder at Florence, but all her attention was on whatever she was reading, and Laura got into bed.

‘Tell me if you want me to turn out the light,’ Florence said in the same tight, reasonable voice. Laura told her not to worry and lay in the light with her eyes closed for a while.

But the rustling of Florence’s pages and the shivery sense of her own body’s warmth made sleep elusive, and she pulled herself up on an elbow and opened her eyes. ‘Tell me about what you’re reading,’ she said to Florence sleepily, and as the girls’ conversation began again and footsteps and laughter came and went in the corridors, the steamer pressed forward through the night ocean, and England came nearer in the dark.

When they went out on deck the next day, the coast of England was visible on the horizon. Clouds had come up in the night, and a drizzle obscured Laura’s view as she stood watching the grey streak of land come into focus. About half of the passengers were disembarking, and in the crush to get down to the landing boats and the muddle of finding porters and a place in the queue for customs, Laura and Florence lost one another. After they had all gone through customs, she found Florence again, and Joe and Maisie and Lily, standing beside her, on the station platform. She saw that Joe looked terrible, as though he had been drinking all night. His face was dull and oily, and when he spoke a little line of spittle from his top lip to the bottom gleamed in the station lights. And yet there was a clench of desire in her stomach as she looked at him.

Suddenly the train came in with its great roar and shadow, and at the same time there was a press of urgent movement on the platform. It was the woman whose self-assurance had impressed Laura at the pool, walking swiftly, a maid and a porter behind her with stacks of luggage, a small red hat pulled down over her forehead. A pop of flashbulbs was going off in front of her. ‘Amy!’ ‘Lady Reynolds!’ came the shouts.

As the ripple of interest spread along the platform, the woman was being pressed on to the train with a man holding her arm, trying to push back the photographers. ‘Do you remember her?’ Maisie said to Laura. ‘That Hughie told me all about her. She went away without her husband. The reporters will want to know if she’s getting a divorce. They think she won’t be Lady Reynolds much longer – but Hughie, he said her husband will forgive her anything. He said, she can do whatever she likes, and she does. Hey Joe,’ she persisted as they found their seats together in one carriage. ‘Call yourself a journalist? You missed the only story on board – these reporters have been waiting and waiting for Amy Parker.’

‘I’m not here to do society gossip,’ Joe said. ‘I’m here because of the war.’

Maisie was scornful, sitting down and taking out her compact to check her face, as though the sight of Amy Parker had made her self-conscious. ‘You’d think some people actually wanted a war.’

Joe started to tell Maisie that she couldn’t bury her head in the sand forever, but there was a desultory feel to their talk. Laura was remembering Amy by the pool, and just now. ‘She is lovely,’ she said.

‘She’s got charisma, all right,’ Joe allowed.

‘Charisma – phooey!’ Florence said, thumping her old carpet bag onto the rack above them. ‘She’s got money. Money, money, money – and they all come running to sniff it.’

‘It’s not just money,’ Maisie said. ‘There were rich girls used to come to our show, lots of them nobody would look twice at, for all their minks and diamonds. Someone like Amy Parker, you’d look at her even if she was wearing your dress – though not so much, I give you.’ They all looked at Florence’s old purple smock dress, and even Florence laughed.

Laura said nothing, thinking both of them were right. There was the glistening, acidic aura of money around Amy, which gave her essential components of her glamour – the desirable brightness of her fashionable clothes, the scurrying maid, the piles of luggage. But there was also the strange character of the woman, the way she forged through that crowd, her tiny hat like a flag, daring the photographers to follow her rather than submitting to the shame she was meant to feel. In a way, Laura thought, that lack of self-consciousness was not entirely unlike Florence’s, although in other ways they could hardly be more different. But both had a confidence born out of complete self-sufficiency, as though the approval of others meant nothing to them.

Once the train started, Florence closed her eyes and fell into a doze. But Laura looked out to the country that her mother had always spoken of as a kind of dreamland. There was the desolate flatness of the fields and the lowness of the sky which ran from grey to subtle turquoise, but seemed to be devoid of light, even though the fields themselves gleamed here and there with an almost unearthly sheen. By the time they reached London the shine had gone out of the air, and a heavy, freezing rain had begun to fall against the windows.

At Waterloo, people everywhere were hugging and saying their goodbyes. Laura put out one hand to Florence, but instead of embracing her, Florence smiled in her matter-of-fact way, picking up her big carpet bag and shaking her head at the porter who had moved towards her.

‘You’ve got my aunt’s telephone number,’ Laura said. ‘You will call?’

‘Well, of course, there’s so much to do – I’ll let you know exactly what’s going on.’

Laura nodded, unable to say more. As Joe wished her goodbye, she saw a questioning look in his eyes, but she turned away. She saw a dark, neat figure walking up the platform towards her with a porter, and as the woman approached her, calling her name, a current of knowledge of what was expected of her ran through her and she straightened her back and walked forwards.