‘I’ve made many mistakes in my life,’ he said, as his hand grasped the wine bottle and poured both of them the last of the wine. ‘Loving you was not one of them.’
Laura bent and kissed him, and he stood up and took her properly in his arms. In that moment, she was ready to find him again, and they went upstairs. It had been a long time since they had made love, and it was a different journey from the ones they had made in the past. She undressed him, undoing the buttons of his shirt, the cold buckle of his belt, as he undressed her, both of them finding the warmth of flesh and shuddering with the intimacy of the touch. They did not fumble and rush, half dressed, tumbling towards their orgasm, she allowed him to be fully naked and herself to be naked with him. Now that he was no longer drinking heavily, his skin smelled as it had done when they had first met, she realised, as she moved her mouth down his throat and chest; it had that fresh scent she remembered, something like apple peel. From time to time she was afraid of losing the shape of her desire, in this newly gentle exploration, but in the end she found the lines of her own pleasure, flowing through his responses. There was a moment, as she straddled him and he entered her from below, when she realised that they did not have to spin stars out of one another to find one another. It was different, but it was the same. It was no longer being overtaken by desire for her golden hero. They came together as equals, bringing one another through the waves of pleasure, and just at the moment of her orgasm, she lost the bitter consciousness of her divided self, she was no longer separated from herself or from him.
4
A few weeks later, in the height of summer, Sybil and Winifred came down to Patsfield one Saturday with Sybil’s children. Edward was in Rome for a conference and Laura had spent the week working on the house. They did not seem to have much money left in the bank even though Edward’s salary had now been restarted, but she had spent some of it on new curtains – olive green and dark blue – and a tea table that could go on the terrace. A climbing rose on the west wall had burst into great red splurges, and she had picked some of the bigger flowers and put them in a bowl in the hall. Inside and outside the summer scents wove together. There was no point, she thought, in trying to pretend that the house was like Sybil’s, a great accretion of intently hoarded possessions, but she tried to make it into a pretty frame for that summer day.
Sybil was happy for the children to sit for more photographs, and this time Laura knew it was going well. They sat among the geraniums in the wild borders, and she took close-ups of George squatting down looking seriously at a beetle he had found on a leaf, with Alice kneeling beside him. There was the evanescent sweetness that everyone wants to associate with children – there, in Alice’s wide eyes and George’s pointing finger.
After the pictures were done, Sybil let the children hide with their tea in the spaces behind the dark laurels at the back of the garden, while the women sat on the terrace. Laura had bought a fruitcake at a recent village fete, and they ate it while drinking the Earl Grey tea she had ordered from the village grocer. Sybil seemed unconscious of the effort she had made, which Laura took as a kind of tribute, but Winifred looked at her in an appraising way.
‘You are the good housewife, aren’t you? I suppose you’re not thinking of working?’
What work could I possibly do, Laura thought, imagining herself in an office now, inexperienced and ignorant. ‘It’s not like during the war, is it? In Washington, none of the wives worked.’
‘But aren’t you bored to death out here? I wouldn’t have thought village life was quite your thing. Does Edward think that you are his mother?’
Laura found Winifred’s directness invigorating. It was the idea that she had been thinking about her at all, had been wondering whether Laura was doing the right thing, which touched her.
‘It’s so much better for Edward coming down here in the evenings and weekends rather than staying in London – you know how he went under before.’
‘But you do have a life too. Wouldn’t it be more fun to be living in town? I saw Monica and Archie the other day, they said they knew you in Washington, that you were out every night there.’