After dinner Laura got out her notepaper and a pen, and scribbled letters to Mother and Ellen, to Monica and to Suzanne. She told all of them that they could come and stay if they wanted; she told them about the garden; how close they were to London; how it had been quite easy to find somewhere because other people, the estate agent said, preferred the new developments closer to town; how they had bought much of the furniture with the house, but some of it was rather awful …
As she wrote, Edward sat reading. He had had his first session with Lvov that day, and he seemed amused rather than threatened by it. As she wrote, he came out from time to time with little aper?us about psychotherapy and the unconscious. Once she had finished her letters, she made them tea and they drank it sitting opposite one another on the old sofas. They must look so settled, Laura thought.
She had left the window open in the big bedroom, and as she went in she saw there were moths caught in the lampshade. She turned off the light and stood there in the dark, waiting for them to fly out. Edward came in and began to undress. They did not embrace, but the large, high iron bedstead made up with the new linen that Sybil had given her as a housewarming present was comforting in the darkness.
Almost immediately, the house itself insisted on a new rhythm to their lives. Edward’s was still mainly based in London: Monday and Thursday he attended sessions with Lvov, and afterwards he would have lunch with Toby and go to the London Library, while every Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday he played tennis at a club in Hyde Park before getting the train back to Surrey. It was Laura whom the house held close: she had to find clothes in the heathery hues that women wore here; to learn to drive so that she could go up and down to the station, to the shops; to choose new cushion covers and curtains; to find a gardener and get a book about borders so that she could learn the names of the flowers she saw in other gardens and wanted to see blooming in her own; to find someone to come in daily and help with the cleaning.
One day Edward was called up to the Foreign Office for a meeting, and she was to join him afterwards at Sybil’s for tea before they went back to Surrey together. When Laura had telephoned Sybil to arrange this, she had asked if she could come early and take some photographs of her and her children. She told Edward she thought she could give Sybil some prints as a thank you for taking them in on their return from Washington. But really it was a selfish request; she was missing the shock of satisfaction she had found in the past when the contact sheets were returned from the developer, and there among all the ordinary or muddied images were, suddenly, the sharp contrast and the memorable expression, the recreation of the chaotic world in an ordered arrangement, and the pleasure that gave her.
Laura photographed the twins, George and Alice, on their own and flanking Sybil on one of her wide sofas in the living room, which was filled with oblique light. But she couldn’t get into her stride. Sybil’s self-consciousness was so off-putting, and George had a way of bouncing up just as the shutter was about to click, so that she was sure he would be blurred and that Alice would be looking towards him.
‘Why don’t you all come down to Patsfield for lunch soon?’ she said, as she was packing the camera away. ‘I could try again then, if these don’t turn out too well.’
At that moment Ann came in with the tea. As before, her manner suggested that she hardly knew Laura, that she’d forgotten the long nights they’d shared in the stifling kitchen during the war. ‘Mr Edward is coming in,’ she told her as she set the table. As Sybil went out to find Toby in his study, Edward came in and Laura looked at him with a question in her expression.
‘Back to work next week,’ he said. And as Sybil and Toby came back into the room together, he spoke about it as if with satisfaction; something really senior again, Head of the American Department in London. Laura dropped the lens cap she was holding. Alice was asking for a scone, and she moved to the tea table to butter one, and to pour milk for the children.
‘Jam?’ Laura asked Alice, and Sybil told her that the children didn’t have jam on their scones, while at the same time Laura could hear Toby was suggesting dinner to celebrate, and Laura was relieved when Edward said they would get back to Patsfield.