A Quiet Life. Natasha Walter
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accepted. Laura wonders if she is right. She sees disciplined mothers everywhere, mothers who can turn away easily from their children and pass them to the nannies or tell them to play on their own; but those mothers have lives of their own. What do I have, Laura thinks? Only these endless afternoons waiting to be filled.
Now, sitting on the balcony, in her mind she is explaining things to Edward, telling him how motherhood is so different from what they expected. For the two years of Rosa’s life she has done this day by day, saying to him in her head, ‘I cannot do this’ and ‘Look at this’ and ‘Help me’ and ‘How perfect’. She watches other fathers – disengaged, or authoritarian, or protective – and fits his character onto theirs, imagining herself telling him to let Rosa climb the slide – ‘She can do it!’ Laura says to him in her mind, ‘She did it!’ – or telling him that she is too young to learn table manners. And sometimes, when she hears Rosa in the night, and knows that she must swing her feet onto the cold floor and set off again to comfort her terrors or her thirst or her fever, Laura imagines that he will be there when she returns, to hold her as Laura is about to hold Rosa.
She is leaning against the iron balcony now, her cheek pressed against its cold hard edge. Down below, on the sidewalk, a young woman walks quickly. She is wearing a red dress and her shoulders are hunched, but as she passes under the street lamp her face jumps clearly into the light – she seems to be smiling. A memory of herself, a memory she cannot quite place, drifts through Laura’s mind, but before she can catch it Rosa’s cry rises again, and as she gets up she stumbles a little, and puts her hands to her temples, trying to press the drunkenness out of her mind. It doesn’t do to go drunk to a crying child, it makes you clumsy and angry. Is this another reason why I want my mother with me now? Laura wonders. Can I be trusted, even with the daughter I love?
As soon as she is picked up, Rosa pushes her hot face into Laura’s shoulder; if her sleep was disrupted by some dream, then her mother’s huge, warm presence is immediately reassuring. But although she stops crying, she refuses to go back to sleep for a long time; every time she is put down, she sits up again and when Laura tries to leave the room she yells furiously. ‘Sing, sing.’ Laura sings a melange of songs without rhyme or reason. ‘Saturday night is the loneliest night of the week,’ she ends up singing, but she can’t remember the rest of it, and goes on crooning vaguely, stroking Rosa’s tense, warm back with her palm.
When at last Laura feels her daughter’s muscles loosen and her breathing become stertorous, she gets up and realises how light her head feels and how heavy her limbs are. She is exhausted. She goes into her own room, drops her clothes to the floor and falls into bed. She hasn’t slept properly for a while, but tonight sleep comes with smothering power, as though somebody is pulling a blanket over her face. And when she wakes the next day, she is sweating, twisted up in the covers.
It is a bad morning; everything seems wrong. Rosa has slept too long and her diaper has given out, her bed is soaked. That is for Aurore to do, but it puts her in a terrible mood. Aurore is a skinny Swiss girl with a fierce manner, but when Laura first interviewed her she could see that she genuinely liked Rosa. Even now, although she grumbles about everything else, she strokes the little girl’s hair with a soft, light touch as she asks what to buy for lunch.
When Laura goes out onto the balcony, a cup of strong coffee in her hand, she sees the glass and empty bottle from the night before. She knows that Mother, who is sitting there, has seen them too. Mother is false and hearty, planning out loud what she is going to write in her weekly letter to Laura’s sister in Boston. ‘How do you spell Talloires?’ she says, as though eager to tell Ellen about the trip that is weighing heavily on both of them, and Laura spells it out laboriously as she drinks her coffee.
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