A Quiet Life. Natasha Walter
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plate. As the women’s gazes meet, Laura tries to shift the tension in the room. ‘If another trip feels too much,’ she says, ‘you know you could stay here without me. Or you could always go back to Boston.’
Mother pushes at some tomato on her plate with her fork. ‘Would you like me to go?’
There is no answer to that. Yes, Laura thinks, I would like you to go; I would like not to have any need for you to be here. But her mother’s presence is essential. The idea of being quite alone with Rosa in this fragmented world, wandering around Europe, uncertain of her welcome from friends and acquaintances, seems impossible to her now. As soon as her mother mentions leaving, the reasons why they are both here, joined together in their uncomfortable little ménage à trois, are present in the room again. Laura is back in the days immediately after Edward left, the telephone ringing and ringing in the hall, the black Austin car parked in the driveway, the cameras popping as she drew back the curtains. But when she speaks again, her voice is light.
‘Why would I want you to go?’ There is even the suggestion of a laugh in her words, as though her mother is being ridiculous. ‘I think Talloires will be lovely this time of year. And you should see how much Rosa enjoys swimming now. Did I tell you what she said today? I was looking for a fresh towel and I took out the blue one that I used in Pesaro, and she said, ‘Like on holiday, I all sandy …’
What, Laura thinks, would we talk about, day in, day out, if we didn’t have Rosa, her life forcing itself up, like a tree cracking paving stones, between the hard, dulled edges of our misfortunes? As usual, the two women talk about Rosa’s new words, Rosa’s little habits, as they fork up their supper. Eventually Laura picks up the plates and carries them to the sink. In theory the nanny, Aurore, is meant to tidy the kitchen in the morning, but in practice, Laura puts away the evening meal. She hates catching Aurore’s disdainful look as she picks up the detritus from their pathetic suppers.
There is a slice of apple tart left over from lunch. Laura presses it on Mother, although her mouth waters as she looks at it. Boredom breeds greed. As soon as it is eaten, Laura refills her own wine glass and they go to sit in the little living room, on the uncomfortable slippery couch. They are talking now about whether they need to buy anything for the trip. Obviously, it is silly in their situation to waste money, but on the other hand, it is important to keep up appearances. Mother mentions that nylon is such a good material for packing, because it doesn’t crease, and Laura agrees, and wonders whether it is worth getting Rosa a new dress now, since she is growing so fast that the two sundresses bought for her at the beginning of summer are already short. They sound ordinary and at ease, for a few minutes, just a mother and grandmother chatting, the last holiday of the summer approaching. When a silence falls that seems hard to break, Laura twiddles with the knob of the big grey radio. It comes on with a rush of static. A sudden cry rises from the top of the flat, as this noise or something internal – a dream? wind? – breaks Rosa’s sleep. The tension flares in Laura’s body as she wonders whether to go upstairs, but this time she is lucky. Silence falls again, only broken by the chattering voices of a couple walking in the street below.
‘Well,’ says Mother. ‘Maybe it’s time for me to get some sleep too. It’s funny how tiring it is, doing nothing.’
‘Isn’t it?’
Mother pulls herself off the sofa. Her footfalls are so heavy, so flat. Laura recognises that she is being overly sensitive, that she is like a twitchy old husband, wincing almost deliberately at every example of his wife’s bad taste and clumsiness. But she can’t help herself. She is on edge as she listens to her mother in the bathroom, to the patter of her urine and the swoosh of the flush, and the endless coughs and rustles as she goes through her careful rituals of greasing her face and putting her hair under a net. At last her bedroom door clicks behind her. She turns in bed. She sighs. Laura walks into the kitchen and swings open the door of the icebox. Water is collecting under it, she notices for the twentieth time, and for the twentieth time she ignores it. She takes out the bottle of wine, still half full, and sloshes more into the glass.
I’m not, Laura tells herself, and never will be, one of those women who starts drinking in the morning and who looks ten years older than their age after six months of lonely self-comfort. But it surprises her how often she has to ask the wine-merchant in the rue des Alpes to deliver another crate, or a couple of bottles of whisky. A martini at lunchtime, a vermouth or two before supper, and then she finishes the evening, every evening, sitting out on the balcony, an empty bottle beside her, or a measure of whisky glowing in a tumbler.
Because the end of the day is the moment she longs for. When she can stop acting her part. When she can sit out on this iron balcony, looking out over the lake as it turns from the lucent blue of summer to the blank of complete darkness. In those empty moments she feels less alone than she does all day, because she has her past for company, and ghosts gather companionably around her in the dusk.
Until Edward left she rarely drank alone. He was the one to pour the first martini of the evening, the last whisky at night. ‘Cheers, big ears,’ he said sometimes, imitating that tedious couple who lived downstairs from them for a while in Washington. ‘Bottoms up,’ Laura would add, pretending to be the wife. She sits now, watching the darkness deepen, until she can no longer tell the mountains from the sky, until she can almost feel Edward’s presence beside her and almost believe he could hear her if she spoke.
Every day, she looks for a sign. She catches her breath on so many occasions. When the telephone rings unexpectedly, or when she comes back to the flat to find an envelope sticking up over the top of the numbered mailbox in the hall. But also when people look at her too closely, and she wonders, are they about to tell me they have a message, are they about to say, someone was looking for you yesterday? Today it was the sharp-featured woman who came into the shop where she was buying a new summer dress.
When she saw the turquoise dress with its wide white belt in the window, she had pushed open the heavy door in the overpriced boutique in the rue du Port. It was almost as good as she’d hoped, the shade taking the sallowness out of her face, and the in-and-out shape giving back to her, generously, the lines of her younger body. Just as she said, yes, I’ll take it, and turned to the changing room to put on her own clothes, another woman entered the shop. She didn’t look at the clothes, she just stood there for a second and looked at Laura through her spectacles. ‘Let me see,’ she said in French, ‘are you—?’ Laura stood, caught in the woman’s attention, hope rising as clear as a chime of music in the room. ‘No, I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘How absurd, I saw you through the window and thought that I knew you from the lycée in Montreux.’
Laura bought the dress and went out into the sunlight. She walked through the city, blinking behind her dark glasses. Soon she was by the lake. Among the swans a toy was floating, a child’s boat with a stained silk sail, and to her surprise she picked up a piece of gravel from the sidewalk and threw it hard at the boat. She missed. Her hands curled into fists, she walked away, high heels clacking on the clean Swiss street, the shopping bag on her arm with the new dress all folded up in tissue paper, back to the sparse apartment where her mother and daughter were awaiting her return.
And when she comes in, it is the same as ever. Laura sinks as quickly as she can back into Rosa’s world. She has a new doll that Mother has bought her, a rather fabulous creation that says ‘Mama’ when you punch its stomach. She punches and punches, and the curious thing says ‘Mama Mama’ in its low hiccupping tones, and every time Rosa smiles. ‘Sad baby,’ she says. ‘Sad baby.’ ‘Maybe it’s happy,’ Laura says, taking it from her and cradling it, and singing one of the nonsense songs she has made up in the long evenings. ‘Lullaby, lullaby, sleepyhead,’ Laura sings, as her daughter watches her with sharp, bright eyes. And then Rosa takes it back and starts doing the same, crooning in her out-of-pitch singing voice, enunciating the words carefully.
Mother comes in at that moment. ‘Look, Mother, how wonderfully she plays with it,’ Laura says. She gets up, and immediately Rosa punches the doll again and then drops it and holds onto Laura’s legs. ‘Sing,’ she commands, ‘sing.’ And so Laura spends the rest of the afternoon singing to her and her doll, and whenever her attention wanders, Rosa complains, vociferously. ‘You give