She goes to pick up some photographs, ones she took before Pesaro, from the developer, and takes them home to the apartment. She realises as she opens them, sitting on the sofa in the living room, that she already knows which ones are going to be good. Before, the developing process itself had seemed a revelation of the unknown; now, the camera seems to do what she wants, the contrasts and compositions that she planned for are almost exactly what she sees. Looking through them, she is caught by a desire to see how she has improved, and she gets out a box of old photographs. Rosa is sitting beside her on the floor, playing with a toy train, but she clambers onto her lap when she sees the pictures. ‘Rosa,’ she says, putting her thumb down on the prints. ‘Don’t touch the picture, darling,’ Laura says automatically, leafing through the others. ‘Mama,’ she says, pointing at the picture that Winifred took of Laura’s wedding day. ‘And that’s Father,’ Laura says. Rosa does not respond, looking at the stranger in the picture, and Laura suddenly stands up, dislodging her from her lap so quickly that she cries out.
When Rosa is in bed that night, Laura puts the prints back in their box, looking back over them. The photographs she has taken of Rosa are such a detailed record of a child’s change and growth, her gradual strengthening and consciousness. She is surprised by some of them, even though they only document two years, but the older face of the child becomes laid over the younger one in one’s memory, so that one quickly forgets what at the time seems unforgettable, and the photographs gain this power to surprise. Love for a child is so different from love for a spouse: it rests on this transience. Could she also have learned to love change in Edward? Could they have aged and moved forwards, together? Could they have forgiven one another for all the mistakes, and built something honest out of the imperfections and littleness of everyday life?
She wonders. When she was younger, she had idealised people who seemed to possess, in their self-sufficiency and separateness, a secret path to joy, a superior knowledge of the right way to live – people like Florence, Amy and Edward. But they have fallen away from her now. None of them could teach her how to live. Maybe it is only a quiet, day-to-day loyalty that is worth having; maybe the grand love or the great gesture is always doomed. Maybe that year in Surrey was the only time that she and Edward began to fumble towards something worth having, when they started to try to be honest with one another, and gentle. She thinks about Rosa, and what she will teach her about how to live. She wonders how she can ever teach her about honesty, when she lives a series of lies, laid one on top of the other. She wonders how she can teach her about love, when she is still trying to understand herself what is illusion and what reality. She does not even have a garden, she thinks, she does not even have a proper home for her child. How can she teach her about security?
That evening, when the others are in bed, Laura sits as usual on the balcony, looking over the lake, watching the light change, talking to her ghosts. As she fills her glass, she realises she is drinking the way Edward drank – to drown out the insistent sense of an irreconcilable life, a script that she cannot make her own.
And then, a few days later, at the end of August, through the trees, up above the lake, the car is roaring, the road is ribboning into the distance, when it turns. At last. She is driving up to meet Winifred for lunch in St-Cergue, thinking of her new coat, when the car in front of her screams to a halt, and the other half of the postcard that she tore with Edward is put into her hand. She is Pigeon again, and Edward is alive.
All through lunch with Winifred she is distracted; she is used to covering up her thoughts, but now she wants to stop, she wants to be silent and to consider what has happened. Everything has changed. Everything. He has not abandoned her. But she does not yet know what this means. All she knows is that in this moment the world is sharper, the colours stand out more, the operatic Alpine landscape that she has been coldly appreciating for several years seems to be charged with energy; even the olives they eat with their first glass of wine are saltier, juicier, tastier than anything she has eaten recently, and she herself feels more awake. But she is not listening to Winifred. She must tune back into the conversation.
Winifred is at that very moment telling Laura that she thinks she could find her a job – at a rather lowly level, to be sure – in an English library that has recently opened to serve the British in Geneva. Winifred knows the woman who is setting it up, whose husband works in the United Nations. Laura expresses enthusiasm, although she is not really listening, and Winifred promises to call them for her that afternoon.