fast and too expansive, Laura thought. The anecdotes he was telling were about work, and although they were difficult to follow in themselves, being about some developments in radio, the main thrust of them was easy enough to understand, about how Old Stevens was standing in his way, unable to get the funding released from air defence, and that the boy Pearson kept making a mess of the data, but how Giles himself was forging ahead.
The burble of his stories was continuing as they sat down to lunch – a meal of heavy roast meat and a sort of spongy pancake and indeterminate boiled vegetables – and Laura was just wondering if this family was always so easy, so reassuringly solid, or if this was a show put on for her. Then the telephone rang in the hall, and Mrs Venn, the maid who had met Laura at Waterloo the day before, put her head around the door. ‘It’s for Miss Laura.’
‘Oh – do you mind?’ Laura was getting up and going towards the door, only thinking that it must be Mother and hoping that Ellen’s appendicitis hadn’t entered some new complication. But down the line came the strong, clear voice from the ship, Florence’s voice, dismissing Laura’s questions about how she was and telling her about a march that was happening the following weekend. Laura felt a sudden sense of disjunction, a gap cracking open between the girl who was listening to Florence’s voice, who would be expected to come to a demonstration in a few days, and the girl who would return to the dining room and pick up her spoon to eat the boiled pudding they had just been served.
‘I don’t think so,’ she said to Florence, and then, as the directions continued, she fell silent. ‘Yes – yes, all right, I’ll see you then.’ Once she had put the receiver back in its cradle, she stood for a while, wondering what to do, before going back into the dining room.
Entering the room, Laura stumbled over a lie that she had been speaking to a girl she had known from home who was visiting London with her parents. But she found that the others were not really paying attention to her. The conversation had shifted while she had been out of the room.
‘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