A Quiet Life Read online

  Rosa cries when Laura goes back into the living room to pick up her hat and purse to go out, but Laura disengages her daughter firmly from her legs and clatters down the steps in the apartment building. There is no elevator here. It is the cheapest rental they could find that still looked elegant enough not to be embarrassing. The dark staircase smells of different people’s cooking and the paint is peeling on the walls, but out on the streets Geneva’s quiet order reasserts itself. In the café opposite the waiter is twitching paper covers straight on the metal tables and the only person drinking coffee there is a woman in an irreproachable blue toque. Laura walks her usual way to the kiosk on the corner for the Herald Tribune, and then back again to the garage where her car is kept. She has arranged to meet her cousin Winifred for lunch at a restaurant that she has found up in a mountain village, yet another clean Swiss restaurant with panoramic views of the hills. It is fair to say that she is not looking forward to the lunch; she knows that Winifred wants to talk to her about her future, and she has had to listen to her peremptory judgements too often recently.

  The brilliant August sunshine is harsh, and her little straw hat is no use against it. She rummages in her purse, but she has forgotten her sunglasses. She can’t face going back into the apartment to confront Rosa’s anger and her mother’s forced smiles again; whenever she leaves Rosa, she feels freed of some burden, and whenever she leaves her mother she is released from the part she is playing, even if only for the minutes before she meets someone else. She opens the door of the car and waits a few seconds for the hot air inside it to dissolve before she gets in and starts the engine. As she moves off into the road, she notices a small grey Citroën coming up behind her, which makes her self-conscious – she is naturally a careless driver, but even careless drivers pay more attention when there is someone close behind them.

  The streets of Geneva and the lakeside road are crowded at this time, and the grey car drops back, but when she turns onto the road that ribbons up to St-Cergue there is no one driving but Laura, and she starts to go faster and faster, her mind running on something else altogether. She is thinking of the dress she bought yesterday and whether it will go with her prize acquisition for the summer, an electric blue cotton coat with a neat cut by Schiaparelli that Winifred had passed on to her as it was too small for her. Laura is wondering whether wearing it with something else blue will look so overdone it would be cheap, or, on the contrary, whether it would be just the right kind of over statement to be really chic, when suddenly a car behind her, another small grey motor – or is it the same one? Even in the moment she registers the parallel – overtakes her and then brakes, completely without warning, in front of her. Laura brakes too, so suddenly she stalls, and she realises how carelessly she must have been driving. She flings open the door without thinking, adrenaline propelling her out.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she yells. She realises she is in the wrong language. ‘Qu’est-ce que vous faites? Vous conduisiez comme un fou!’

  ‘Mrs Last?’

  The driver says her name through his open window, and Laura just says ‘Yes’ without thinking, and then he is opening his door too and they stand for a moment, and then she is back in her tirade, ‘Vous allez nous tuer tous!’

  ‘Mrs Last, my friend has something to show you.’

  There is another man in the car, whose face Laura cannot yet see. He pulls down his window and leans out; he is middle-aged, wearing a squashy grey hat and an overcoat which is too heavy for this sunny afternoon.

  All of a sudden Laura is aware that there is no one else here. No cars are passing. There are two of them; their car is blocking hers. They could do anything, anyone could – her purse is on the front seat of her car, and the door is still open.

  She takes two steps backwards, her hand reaching behind her for the handle of the door. The other man is holding something out of his window, and as she goes on retreating, the first man takes it and walks towards her. ‘Je suis en retard,’ she says in her unsteady French, her tongue fumbling over the words. ‘I am late for an appointment.’ Then she sees what he is holding: a piece of card, half a picture – windows, roses, a pitched roof. ‘This is yours, Mrs Last.’

  She goes on opening the car door. She reaches for her purse and looks inside it. ‘Please take a look,’ he is saying, and she finds what she is looking for, folded within her black wallet. The matching half. She takes it out and holds it towards him, and he comes forward holding his half and they stand rather close as they put them clumsily join to join, a picture made whole again, a house in the sunshine.

  ‘Your husband gave it to my friend,’ he says.

  ‘Yes.’

  All the questions that Laura might ask run through her mind and are lost for the moment. She leans against the warm car, and feels her heart slowing from its panic, and over the woods below her she sees an eagle hovering in the warm winds, its huge wingspan in profile, so slow that it is still, suspended.

  ‘I’m going away tomorrow,’ she says to the first of the two men. ‘I’ll be gone for four days.’

  ‘I see. Come up here on Tuesday. Just below here – you see, there, where there is a footpath into the forest – do you see?’

  ‘Yes. At this time?’

  The two men look at each other and nod. She gets back into the car and turns the key backwards and forwards. She presses the gas too hard and it roars and jolts. They move away, and then she does too, but quite slowly, so that soon the other car disappears ahead of her. When she gets to the restaurant on the outskirts of the village, she parks the car and just sits there for a while, tracing a pattern in her print skirt with her finger, and her mind is blank. This is the fork in the road, so long awaited; but now it is here she cannot see past it. It is as if there is only darkness ahead.

  Water

  To London, January 1939

  Although Laura had said, time and again, that there was no need for Mother to come on board, in fact, when the moment came, she was glad that she was not embarking alone. They knew the steamer would be half empty, but half empty was quite crowded enough. Holding her smaller suitcase and pulling her muskrat coat around her, Laura had to push through a throng of middle-aged women just to get onto the pier on the Hudson River. She stumbled on an uneven step as they walked up to the tourist class entrance, and as she righted herself she realised how breathless she felt. Still, Mother being there made her determined not to show her uncertainty, or even at this last moment the whole plan might collapse, and she might be ordered home to wait out Ellen’s recovery. So once on board she tried to walk with more confidence, as if she knew where they were going, up to the information desk where a steward rattled out the directions to her cabin so quickly that she had to ask him to repeat them.

  ‘Take the elevator down one floor, along the corridor to the right, through the double doors …’ As he was talking, Laura couldn’t help noticing the sign above the desk: ‘The company’s regulations prohibit passengers from passing from one class to another. Passengers are therefore kindly requested to refrain from applying for this privilege and to keep within the confines of the class in which booked.’ The steward noticed the direction of her gaze. ‘We do tours, you know,’ he said.

  ‘Tours?’

  ‘Every day, you can visit the first-class deck. Or if you go to the movie, you’ll go into their side.’

  ‘Do they visit us?’

  He laughed as if she had made some kind of joke, and then turned to the impatient elderly couple behind them.

  The smell of old cigarette smoke hit her when she opened the door to her cabin and, putting her toilet case on the bed, Laura stood irresolutely beside it.

  ‘Look, your trunk is already here,’ Mother said, gesturing to the shiny brown box which they had given to a porter at the pier together with her cabin number. Mother always pointed out the obvious, was always fussily one step behind. But Laura was suddenly reluctant for her to leave. It would be so final, to be left here with these things that di
dn’t look like her things at all. They were all brand new, that was why, bought in the splurge of shopping that had followed the sudden decision that the girls must go to London. Only Laura’s name, written in her carefully neat lettering on the tag, told her the brown trunk was hers. The other bed – that would have been Ellen’s – was a rebuke, but at least it looked as though no one else had booked it. Laura had quailed at the thought of sleeping with a stranger.

  Mother was once again going through things that she had told her before, about how there would be a female steward who would look out for her, how she mustn’t be afraid to let the steward know if anyone bothered her, and how Aunt Dee’s maid would be at Waterloo to meet her. The thought of the maid brought Laura’s anxiety up more sharply than ever. She was almost ready to interrupt the stream of admonitions about telegrams and underwear, food and gratitude, and say that she had changed her mind. Indeed, she had just turned to Mother, about to speak, when they heard the shout along the corridor, ‘All ashore that’s going ashore,’ and Laura’s face reverted to the still expression her mother hated. Contained, as Laura thought. Sulky, as her mother had described it only that morning. Laura opened the door to the corridor.

  They walked together up to the point where the corridor split in two. All of a sudden Mother put her arms around her. They never embraced, and Laura stepped back without thinking. The abruptness of her move was tempered by the press of people converging at that very point; it was not a place to stand, not in the middle of the friends and family who were returning to the pier and the passengers making their way up to the deck. And so the two of them were carried forward in separate streams of movement. Laura thought to herself, I’ll make it better, I’ll wave. She saw herself in her mind’s eye on deck, blowing kisses, borne backwards.

  And she was leaning on the rail, looking for that grey fur hat in the crowd, when a woman beside her stepped right onto her foot. ‘Sorry,’ the woman said without turning, and Laura found herself looking at the curve of a cheek and curls of hatless hair rather than out to the pier. ‘Why is leaving so—’ the woman said, her last word lost in the scream of a whistle that rent the air. Her gesture was not lost, however. She seemed to sum up and then to dismiss the jagged Manhattan skyline as she brought her hands together and flung them apart. The view was full of sunshine and watery reflections, but Laura could not make out where Mother was standing, and she narrowed her eyes at the knots of people, pulling her coat tight around her neck. Then the wind was sharp in her face as the ship began to move, and she took a deep breath. The voyage had begun.

  The woman next to her was wearing only a cloth coat, open over her dress, and a drab knitted scarf, yet she didn’t seem cold. Laura turned to look at her again, but she couldn’t have been more surprised when the woman turned too, and said in a matter-of-fact tone, ‘How about getting a drink?’

  Of course Laura had imagined meeting people on board; no young woman could step onto a ship that year and not think of Elinor and her doomed onboard romance in Till My Heart Is Still, which Laura had read in a creased paperback lent to her by a school friend, but she had not imagined such a quick advance into acquaintanceship with a woman who did not seem quite her kind. A part of Laura wanted to go on standing on deck, taking the measure of her solitude and the start of her journey, but the woman’s nonchalance was appealing. So Laura found herself following her into a low-ceilinged, airless lounge on the floor below. As soon as she saw the people – mainly men – at the tables, she paused at the door, but the woman walked forward without hesitation, putting her purse and a book she was holding on a table and sitting down in one of the worn, tapestry-covered chairs.

  When the waiter came up to them, the woman ordered a beer immediately. Laura was slower. She could not pretend that ordering alcohol would be natural for her, and she was thirsty and tired. ‘A cup of coffee, please. And a glass of water.’

  ‘Funnily enough, I was here yesterday – not on the boat, on the pier – welcoming those boys home—’

  ‘You mean—’

  ‘The boys they brought back from Spain. Heroes, one and all.’

  ‘They were brave, weren’t they?’ Laura’s comment was uncertain. She came from a home that was so lacking interest in politics that her father rarely even took a daily newspaper. He voted Republican, she was pretty sure, but she had never felt able to ask him about his views, or why, whenever he mentioned Roosevelt’s name, he sounded so disparaging. As for her mother, an Englishwoman who was proud to understand little about America, she often shook her head about what the world was coming to, or expressed grave misgivings about one leader or another, but she had never – in Laura’s memory – stated any positive political view. Growing up in a home so insulated from the world had left Laura ignorant, but also curious, so she responded in a vague but friendly manner to the woman’s statement about the heroism of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. The woman continued to talk about one of the boys who had come home, and his experiences at the hands of the Fascists in Spain. ‘No,’ Laura said at the right moment, ‘How – how terrible.’ But she could tell that her responses were limp.

  ‘There are lots of them still over there, you know – desperate to get home. I’ve been helping to raise the money. Shall I tell you something else? Such a strange coincidence, I’ve been thinking and thinking about it. The last person I know who sailed this way on this actual ship was a stowaway. This guy wanted to get to Spain, he didn’t have a cent, so he crept in behind a wealthy family, just as if he were one of the entourage, and then kept walking once he was on board.’

  ‘Really?’ Again, Laura’s expression was encouraging, although she was unsure of the right thing to say. ‘Where did he sleep?’

  ‘He said there was a steward involved – sympathetic to the cause, I guess, who slipped him food too.’

  ‘It’s hardly believable,’ said Laura, whose imagination was suddenly stirred by the thought of a lonely man attempting invisibility on a crowded ship. She leant forward to ask more, but just then they were interrupted.

  ‘It’s true enough, though,’ came another voice. Laura turned. At the table next to them was a young man sitting alone. Although he wasn’t unattractive, with a mobile face and dark hair falling over his forehead, both women frowned as they realised that he had been listening to their conversation.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I remember seeing a report about them. They were arrested when they landed in Le Havre, though, poor boys. Didn’t have the papers, didn’t have any money.’

  ‘The man I’m talking about, he wasn’t arrested. He got to Spain and fought and was wounded and now he’s in southern France somewhere. Can’t get home, but he’s written to his mother to tell her he’s safe. That’s how I know all about it.’

  ‘That’s a great story – do you know his name?’

  ‘What’s it to you?’

  ‘Hey, don’t be suspicious.’ The man rose and stepped over to their table. ‘Mind if I join you?’

  ‘We’re happy as we are.’

  ‘Well, you won’t mind if I perch here,’ he said, sitting down anyway and tapping his cigarette in the empty ashtray. ‘I’ll be honest with you – I’m a journalist. Name’s Joe Segal. I like stories like that. Wouldn’t hurt the man to have the story told now.’

  ‘What if the line came back at him for the stolen passage?’

  ‘The French Line’s got more on its hands than chasing a stowaway from years back.’

  ‘Last year—’

  ‘Tell me more about the story without the name. I can tell you’re sympathetic. Wouldn’t you like to inspire others to do what he did?’

  ‘It’s a bit late for that now, isn’t it?’ The woman shook her head. ‘To be honest, I don’t know a lot more. Just what I said: he stowed away, a steward helped him, brought him food – some of the best food he ever ate, you know, stuff that the people in the top suites hadn’t bothered to touch – caviar, you name it. He had to hunker down in some equipment room most
of the time, and then when he got to Le Havre the steward tipped him off to come out only when the staff were getting off, so everyone assumed he was from the engine room. He looked pretty grubby, you can imagine, by then. Apparently the staff here is so huge that he got away without anyone really knowing him. This steward just walked alongside him – and then someone met him at Perpignan station, and you know, there were loads of boys going over then. It’s not impossible …’

  The journalist smiled, and Laura saw how the story tickled him. ‘The idea of a Red holed up in this ship – have you seen the first-class decks?’

  ‘I’ve heard about them,’ Laura said. Although in the rather down-at-heel tourist-class lounge it seemed unlikely, in fact the ship that they were travelling on was a byword for glamour. At this, the man seemed to notice Laura for the first time, turning his attention to her. He told her that he had seen someone he thought was Gloria Swanson getting onto the ship on the first-class side, and although Laura just raised her eyebrows at the thought, this, too, stirred her imagination. She thought of the lonely star, drinking martinis in her suite, perhaps, or taking a shower and feeling the warm water fall onto her ageing body, and the whole boat seemed to contain the extraordinary multiplicity of adult life and desire in a way that made her feel how right she was to have come, to have insisted to Mother that even now, even without her sister, a trip to London would be safe.

  ‘If you walk through the engine room, you come out on the first-class deck and no one’s going to stop you if you want to go have a look at those palatial surroundings …’ the man was saying.

  ‘Is that so? Will no one mind?’

  ‘They say girls do it all the time – though the stewards might not be so pleased about the boys drifting over.’

  Laura had finished her coffee by this time, and just then the boat dipped alarmingly in the swell. She felt, to her horror, a heat rise through her stomach. ‘I’m going to lie down,’ she said.