There was no more for them to say. Social niceties were at an end. ‘I must go and get ready for skiing – it’s absurd to come all this way and not even bother to go on the slopes.’ She stood up, throwing down her napkin, and went out of the restaurant. She did not go out to the mountains, however; she could not face the great whiteness of the outdoors. She went into the crèche to find Rosa and to roll coloured balls with her, while her mind travelled back over the years.
The interest aroused by the book’s publication was intense. Laura could gauge it by the increased numbers of telephone calls she got from journalists, and when it was published in America there was another surge. Mother had tried to push Laura to go to America that summer, and every week, it seemed, she received letters from Ellen, telling her she should think of coming home. But she was very aware of Valance’s warning that she could not travel too far, and once or twice Ellen enclosed cuttings about Edward from American newspapers with her letters and Laura quailed at the anger they revealed. She wrote impersonal little notes back to Ellen, suggesting that she should come to Geneva herself.
It was not until the following spring that Ellen finally took up the invitation, without Tom and her son, but with her daughter Janet, who was now ten. As Laura saw them walking towards her, she felt she was looking at the future of motherhood – the child who grows apart from you and looks with bored eyes as you fuss with suitcases and passports. Of course one knows that it will happen, Laura thought, but it was the first time she had felt the future with that kind of physical shock: what it would be like for her and Rosa when they were no longer locked into the double step of infancy.
Although it was their mother who had been asking Ellen to come over, the first evening the chatter was mainly between the two sisters. Laura put on the bright persona that she had honed for visitors, telling them what a lovely city Geneva was, how she was so happy to be in this part of it – the shops! The restaurants! The cosmopolitan crowd! And they could go for drives along the lake, and up in the mountains. But after a day or so her mood corroded. She felt, as she always had – but worse now than ever – Ellen’s critical gaze on her life. And she could not warm to Janet, who seemed to have inherited Ellen’s negative view of the world; Laura found herself irritated by the ten-year-old’s passive attitude, her lack of enthusiasm for the holiday. Gradually the apartment, crowded with the two sisters, their mother and two little girls, began to feel impossibly claustrophobic.
The night before her second birthday, Rosa was unable to settle; it seemed that she was sickening for something, though she had no rash or fever. Whatever the reason, the broken night made the morning feel too bright and noisy, with Ellen and Mother making plans for the day and Janet trying to play with Rosa, but only succeeding in upsetting her. They went out for the day, in the little train up into the hills, with Rosa in a stroller, and at the lunch in a hilltop café Laura felt that she should drink only one glass of wine. But as soon as they returned to the apartment, she poured gin into a glass of orange juice while the others were setting the table. They had invited Winifred to come around for a birthday tea after work, and Laura could see that Ellen and Winifred took to one another immediately. That made her feel resentful rather than pleased; she realised it was childish of her, but she saw them as belonging to such different parts of her life, and she did not want Winifred to value Ellen – dull Ellen – with her terrible American sandals and her bright red nail polish. But here they were, talking in a down-to-earth way about where Ellen should go shopping the next day and about Winifred’s work. Laura cut the over-iced chocolate cake and stepped back onto a balloon whose explosive burst caused Rosa to collapse into tears.
Immediately Mother and Ellen began trying to calm her down, but Laura could see that their well-meaning distractions were only upsetting her more, so she pulled her out of her high chair and took her out onto the balcony, alone. Rosa strained away from her, her bottom lip trembling, and as Laura tried to distract her she could hear the women talking in the room, thinking she was out of earshot.
‘Why won’t she come back to America?’
‘False hopes,’ said Winifred.
‘I thought there was a problem with her passport?’
‘I thought it was hoping that Edward might turn up in Europe.’
‘She’s got to move on.’
After a while Rosa relaxed and let Laura tickle her into hiccupping giggles. Laura went back into the room, feeling a pool of silence spread around her as she did so, and put the child into her high chair. She had planned to take a photograph of Rosa for her birthday; these were the only photographs she took nowadays – studies of her daughter. But when she took the camera out, she found that nothing was going well: the light was too dim and Rosa began to complain again.