A Quiet Life. Natasha Walter

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      ‘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 СКАЧАТЬ