A Quiet Life

Fire (#ulink_405b50a0-3fdb-5149-87f1-115bcb91cf46)

London, 1939–1945 (#ulink_405b50a0-3fdb-5149-87f1-115bcb91cf46)

1

The first time Laura really spoke to her aunt was at breakfast the next morning. She was too tired when she got in to do much more than accept a cup of horribly strong tea and go early to bed. She woke with a jump, in a room heavily curtained against any light. Sitting up in bed and switching on the lamp beside her, she noted, as she had the previous evening, the solidity of her surroundings. Nothing here seemed new, or bright, or flimsy. Everything was covered in a patina of soft browns and greens, and as she pulled back the drapes the cloudy light falling through the window hardly seemed to illuminate the room.

Her watch had stopped in the night, and she found it hard to tell whether it was time to get up or not. After waiting a while she got dressed and made her way downstairs, and was relieved to find her aunt in the living room, reading a letter. Over breakfast they continued the conversation they had started the previous night, in which Aunt Dee seemed to be trying to build up a picture of their life in the States, and yet was hardly listening to Laura’s replies. Laura felt throughout that she was rather a puzzle to her aunt and thought how much easier it would all be if Ellen were with her. ‘I must send a telegram,’ she said suddenly, remembering. ‘I promised Mother that I would – to say I’d arrived safely.’

‘I did that last night, dear, don’t worry,’ said Aunt Dee. ‘I knew how Polly would worry. Sending you off on your own like this.’ Laura caught a disapproving tone in her voice and was glad when she heard the quick step on the stairs that meant her cousin Winifred had got up. She came in with a citrus scent of cologne and a demand for more coffee. A tall, angular girl with fair hair and red lipstick, she seemed to jar against that room of sombre tones.

‘Now,’ she said as she drank her coffee. ‘What to do this morning?’

Aunt Dee started to say that she hoped the girls would stay in quietly and do some reading, but Winifred shrugged her off, suggesting a walk and telling her with some impatience that of course they wouldn’t be late back for lunch. ‘Ten to one, we’ll be back before Giles gets here. We’re not going on an expedition, you know. Tomorrow, we can go into town, but now – I’ll get my coat.’

Laura was glad that Winifred was so insistent they should go out; she had seen nothing of Highgate on arrival the previous day. But as they walked down the streets, Laura only thought how subdued the edge of this city was, how the brick houses with their many-paned windows, set back behind their hedges, drew away from your gaze, closing in on themselves. They soon came to a large park, almost monochrome in this dim January light, which Winifred called the Heath. It stretched uninvitingly into the distance. Laura suddenly realised that a question was hanging in the air. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘Just wondered if it was like that – the crossing?’

Laura had missed the comparison that Winifred had made, but did her best to describe the journey. She had not until that point decided to keep Florence and her conversations a secret, but something in her held back; the effect that Florence had had on her perhaps reached too deeply into experiences that she had never spoken about, feelings that she was nervous of exposing to Winifred’s quick questions. And so she found herself mentioning Maisie instead, and the trip into first class, and Joe Segal, and how they had danced together on the last evening, and then she remembered the woman in the white swimming costume, the woman in the scarlet hat – what had her name been? ‘I think she was called Lady Reynolds,’ she remembered.

‘Amy Parker?’ Winifred said with interest. ‘Giles knows her – or, well, doesn’t know her exactly, obviously.’

Laura didn’t understand how it would be obvious to know and yet not know her. It was only later that she came to see the way Amy sat at the centre of so many circles, how many and various her satellites were. But she was glad of Winifred’s sudden spark of interest, and so she tried to recall everything that she had seen and heard of Amy. In return, Winifred told her about the speculation in the press about her marriage. While the girls’ own lives were still dark to one another, Amy seemed to stand revealed and, in their comments on her, which moved from the admiring to the moralising, they hinted at their own desires.

After that the conversation led on to other things, but they felt more warmly now towards one another. Winifred mentioned how much she liked Laura’s coat, and Laura expressed her interest in shopping with Winifred in London. ‘I have an allowance now,’ she said, almost wonderingly.

‘Mother said that Grandfather’s legacy would make a big difference to Aunt Polly – I’m sorry, that’s an awfully crass thing to say,’ said Winifred, but Laura was rather relieved that the subject had been broached and admitted to her, as if it were a mild joke rather than a humiliating shame, that it was odd for her to have money to spend.

By this time they had walked up a steep hill, and Laura felt she should say something about the view, which was confusingly vast, layer upon layer of buildings laid out under the hazy light, but still and quiet on this Sunday afternoon, and so, with an exclamation, she stopped. Winifred asked her about Boston, and Laura tried to explain that they lived far away from the city – ‘Stairbridge is a small town, way west of Boston’ – but she saw that Winifred, like Aunt Dee, was not really much interested.

The walk had taken a long time and the weather was turning drizzly as they came back into her aunt’s street. Sodden, unswept leaves made the path slippery and Laura felt the shadow of the laurel bush, dark with soot, hanging over them as Winifred put her key into the door. ‘Thank goodness, Gee’s arrived already,’ Winifred said, seeing the coat and hat on the hall table. Laura could hear the rumble of a male voice from the living room. ‘He doesn’t live here then?’ she asked.

‘No, only comes back on Sundays – the prodigal.’

Giles was a big presence, fair like his sister, his voice loud in the quiet, over-furnished room. Even with Winifred supplying repartee as quickly as she could, his performance was too fast and too expansive, Laura thought. The anecdotes he was telling were about work, and although they were difficult to follow in themselves, being about some developments in radio, the main thrust of them was easy enough to understand, about how Old Stevens was standing in his way, unable to get the funding released from air defence, and that the boy Pearson kept making a mess of the data, but how Giles himself was forging ahead.

The burble of his stories was continuing as they sat down to lunch – a meal of heavy roast meat and a sort of spongy pancake and indeterminate boiled vegetables – and Laura was just wondering if this family was always so easy, so reassuringly solid, or if this was a show put on for her. Then the telephone rang in the hall, and Mrs Venn, the maid who had met Laura at Waterloo the day before, put her head around the door. ‘It’s for Miss Laura.’

‘Oh – do you mind?’ Laura was getting up and going towards the door, only thinking that it must be Mother and hoping that Ellen’s appendicitis hadn’t entered some new complication. But down the line came the strong, clear voice from the ship, Florence’s voice, dismissing Laura’s questions about how she was and telling her about a march that was happening the following weekend. Laura felt a sudden sense of disjunction, a gap cracking open between the girl who was listening to Florence’s voice, who would be expected to come to a demonstration in a few days, and the girl who would return to the dining room and pick up her spoon to eat the boiled pudding they had just been served.

‘I don’t think so,’ she said to Florence, and then, as the directions continued, she fell silent. ‘Yes – yes, all right, I’ll see you then.’ Once she had put the receiver back in its cradle, she stood for a while, wondering what to do, before going back into the dining room.

Entering the room, Laura stumbled over a lie that she had been speaking to a girl she had known from home who was visiting London with her parents. But she found that the others were not really paying attention to her. The conversation had shifted while she had been out of the room.

‘You promised!’ Winifred was saying, her voice rising, to Giles, who was spooning pudding into his mouth.

‘Can’t help it – away that week now.’

‘Giles, dear, that is a bit rough – she has been looking forward to it.’

Aunt Dee turned to Laura and started to explain that Winifred had been expecting Giles to take her away to a country-house party next week, although Aunt Dee herself had thought it wasn’t the right time for them to go away, given Laura’s arrival.

Winifred pushed her bowl away. ‘I even bought a new dress, you perfect—’

‘Shall we have coffee in the living room?’ Aunt Dee seemed eager to turn the conversation. ‘It’s rather cold in here.’ Indeed, the room felt damp and chilly, as the rain fell against the curtained windows.

‘Freezing, yes. But Giles, why couldn’t you—’

‘Vennie’s had a fire laid in the other room, as these radiators seem to have given up the ghost,’ Aunt Dee said. Her voice held a fussy, conciliatory tone. ‘And, Win, I got out a photograph album I wanted to show Laura. It’s upstairs – could you get it?’

When Winifred was out of the room, Aunt Dee turned to Giles and began to persuade him to make it up to his sister.

‘All right, all right,’ he muttered eventually, promising that he would make sure she was invited to some other gathering soon. Laura thought it odd that they were relying on Giles, whose manner did not seem particularly engaging, to help Winifred with her social life.

In the living room, Aunt Dee began to show Laura the huge leather-bound book that Winifred had brought in. To her surprise, Laura found it intriguing. Her mother had almost nothing of the family, no photographs and no objects, and Laura had always dismissed her memories of a perfect childhood in a perfect world. So it was a shock to see these images of her mother’s lost life: here was a sepia photograph of a timbered house in Oxfordshire, and here two solemnly starched little girls with their mother, whose face was long and lugubrious and who wore a tightly corseted dress. Here were the same two girls, adolescents in frilled blouses.

‘Look,’ said Aunt Dee, taking a breath as she held that one up to the light. ‘We were just leaving for school in Lucerne, that’s right – they sent us for a year, to finishing school …’ In her voice was the memory of some richness, some freedom – but the page was quickly turned and here was Aunt Dee again in a posed studio photograph, alongside a man with a little moustache who seemed much older than she was. ‘There isn’t one of Polly and your father,’ she said, and let out a breath. ‘It was all such a rush. Father was so very sad when she went. He never quite forgave your father for living so far away – and …’

There was a pause, and Laura caught again the undertone of disapproval. Looking at Aunt Dee’s engagement photograph, seeing the frank stare of the young woman with her hand resting on her fiancé’s, Laura was struck by the thought of her mother at about the same age, and the force of desire that must have led her to follow the young man she fell in love with across the ocean at the end of the Great War. ‘I think it must have been terribly romantic,’ said Winifred, clearly also thinking of Polly’s elopement.

Once again, images arose unbidden in Laura’s mind. A window into the kitchen of her home opened in her mind, with her mother sitting there in her best blue dress, weeping. Her father had promised to take her out to dinner for her birthday, and had forgotten or got too drunk to come home. She heard Mother telling her never, never to marry beneath herself, and saw her red-knuckled hand grasping the glass of gin. Laura pushed the image away and looked back again at the photographs. Aunt Dee was pointing to one picture, and telling Laura that was her great-uncle Francis, her grandfather’s brother, who had had a fine career in India, and Laura began to realise that there were all these stories that she did not know, about this English family she hardly knew.

When the fat album had been closed and coffee brought in, Winifred and Giles went on sparring, complaining to one another about old battles. As they spoke, Laura found herself watching Aunt Dee, trying to see how the confident outward look of the girl in the photograph could have developed into the watchful manner of the woman before her now. She was not unlike her own mother, Laura thought, seeing how her gestures seemed truncated and hesitant, how she seemed more eager than was necessary to smooth over the disagreements between her children.

When Giles moved to go, saying he was meeting a friend, Winifred said goodbye to him with bad grace. Laura could see that she had still not forgiven her brother for spoiling the planned weekend. Sure enough, as soon as they were upstairs alone, Winifred started complaining about him. Apparently he had some well-connected friends that he had met at university, and Winifred rather liked one of them, but there seemed to be some resistance on Giles’s part to taking her about.

‘I think he thinks I’m not worthy. It would be all right if I could do my own thing, but he doesn’t seem to realise how little there is to do. I know, I’ve got my friends, but they are all such nice girls,’ Winifred spoke the last two words with feeling. ‘You are lucky, being allowed to travel so far – I’d love to do that.’

Laura almost asked whether she couldn’t plan a trip somewhere; but when she thought of Winifred coming to visit her family in America, her stomach tightened with fear. The idea of Winifred’s clear gaze falling on her undignified little home and miserable parents was a dreadful one. But Winifred started talking about other, more surprising, plans. Apparently she had a place at university, to study history. ‘They accepted me last year, but Mother asked me to wait a year. She wasn’t well in September. This year I won’t put it off, whatever she says. She hates the whole idea of me going – I suppose Aunt Polly is exactly the same? You didn’t go to university?’

Laura was too shy to tell Winifred quite how poor they had been, how it had been impossible, when she left school, for her to think about college, so she just shook her head and then asked Winifred more about her plans. Winifred became more and more honest about her frustrations with living at home. ‘She still thinks we exist in the pages of that photograph album – she doesn’t like me going around by myself.’

‘You’re not meant to go out alone?’ This was more than Laura expected. She remembered the telephone conversation she had just had with Florence, and Florence’s assumption that she would come to the demonstration the following weekend, and wondered hopelessly how on earth she would manage it. Winifred was explaining how her mother’s protectiveness irked her. For instance, there was a rather nice man she had met recently at the cricket club dance, and he had asked her out for supper, but he was a divorcé, and Dee would not approve, so what could she do?

The two girls were sitting in Winifred’s bedroom talking, their heads together, when Aunt Dee came in to tell them it was time to come down for tea. Winifred nodded, and once her mother had gone, she suddenly turned to Laura, her hands opening as if pulling apart a parcel, her eyes widening as if she could see a new vista. ‘But now you’re here – we could sort of chaperone each other, couldn’t we?’

2

Although the march had begun to move off by the time Laura got to Hyde Park, there were still what looked like hundreds of people, dozens of banners, waiting in line. Laura thought she would never find Florence, and began to feel foolish for having made the complicated arrangements and spoken the shocking lies that had enabled her to be there. She had not even told Winifred what she was doing, simply that she wanted to have tea with someone she had met on the boat. That Winifred assumed it was a man, and that the assumption had made her eyes crinkle up knowingly, had embarrassed Laura but had not encouraged her to reveal the whole truth. So the two girls had told Aunt Dee that they were going shopping in town and then to tea with Cissie, an old school friend of Winifred’s. Just as Laura was beginning to feel hopeless about the whole escapade, she saw the red lettering of the banner she was looking for, and then the familiar face she longed to see beside it.

Florence did not notice her immediately; she was talking to a tall, bareheaded woman who was holding one pole of the banner in her gloved hands. Laura had to push awkwardly past a couple of men and tap her on the shoulder, and then Florence only briefly acknowledged her before turning back to the tawny-haired woman. ‘Elsa, this is Laura – I told you about her.’

But just to see Florence again sent a great chime of happiness through Laura’s mind. This was where she wanted to be, even in this great crowd of people, so long as Florence was by her side.

Elsa nodded at her, heaving the pole, which seemed heavy in her hands, a little further upwards. ‘Don’t keep pulling it about, Else,’ came a yell from a young man holding the other pole.

‘Shall I take it for a bit?’ asked Florence, but just then their part of the march began to move off.