A Quiet Life. Natasha Walter

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      ‘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.

       Fire

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