The words were bland, but Laura felt their hard undertone. She had come alone to where Ellen was spending the summer on Cape Ann, because Edward was too busy, in his first months in Washington, to get away. For the week she had been there, she had felt her solitude as a failure. So often she had rehearsed her re-entry to her family, and in her mind she had been an object of admiration, with her husband by her side, her tales of living through the bombardment and her European experience putting distance between herself and them.
But as soon as she had arrived she felt a different reality surround her. She had not moved on from the way she had always been seen by Ellen. She was still the little sister who needed to be corrected and pitied; the same little sister whose dress always seemed to be dirty and crumpled after a day at school, while Ellen’s remained pristine; whose breasts remained flat while Ellen blossomed into curves; who stood alone for hours at the first evening party Ellen had taken her to when she was just fifteen, until Ellen had got some unwilling boy to dance with her. Laura did not speak about such memories with Ellen, but they were there, and sometimes an echo would become almost painful.
That afternoon she had tried to amuse Ellen’s daughter while Ellen and her maid prepared the house for Mother’s arrival. It was the first time she had looked after such a young child, and when Janet began romping around the living room, pulling cushions off the sofa, Laura sat happily in the middle, glad to see her laugh. There was a wildness about her that came unexpectedly from her small frame. Then Ellen burst in and was irritated by the mess and the noise, and she remembered how Ellen had always been so angry when Laura played with her things when they were children. That doll that Laura had been so jealous of, the one with the long hair made of yellow wool – once Laura had tried to comb the hair and pieces of it had fallen out in chunks. The memory stuck like a barb as Laura asked in a meek voice if there was anything else she could do, paying tribute to Ellen’s competence.
Ellen asked her to put a couple of lanterns out on the porch while she gave Janet her bath. It was at that moment that she said what a pity it was that Edward could not be with them, and Laura found herself apologising again for his absence. Surely Ellen understood, Laura thought to herself, that the needs of the embassy in the endgame of the war might overtake the need to come and introduce himself to his sister-in-law.
After tying the lanterns onto the wooden frame of the porch, Laura stayed out in the garden, sucking her finger where a splinter had lodged under the nail. It was too early to light the lanterns, the day was not yet fading. It was as though the ocean were giving up a last luminosity to the sky, and everything was bathed in a salty light. This house that Ellen and Tom were renting for the summer, a worn family home filled with braided rugs and old bric-a-brac, was in a fine setting. Its yard ran all the way down to where grass gave way to pebbles at the edge of the shore. But all she had heard from Ellen during the week she had been there were complaints: the living room was too small, the bathrooms too few, the kitchen too inconvenient down that narrow corridor, and their hired maid too lazy.
Laura recalled how, when they were at school, the most envied girl of all, Mary-Lou Bellingham, had always taken her summer vacation along this part of the coast. She had come back every autumn bearing the physical marks of her privilege – the tan on her long legs, the bleached streaks in her fair hair – and with tales of parties on the beach, flirtations with cousins, sailing and tennis. It had seemed, then, a world away, but now Ellen was a part of it. Laura sat on the porch, looking into the garden, and considered how their lives had moved on and yet between herself and Ellen there was still the same weight of frustration and anger, even if unacknowledged.
Ellen was upstairs settling Janet, and Laura heard Tom’s car returning from the station in a crush of gravel, yet she remained outside, listening to Ellen come downstairs to greet Mother. She heard the chatter in the hall, she heard Mother saying, ‘So how is she?’ and she heard Ellen say, ‘Oh, you know Laura,’ with a bitterness in her voice. She stayed still, eager to hear what they did know, but then they all came out onto the porch and saw her standing there, and their conversation was overtaken in the embrace that Laura and Mother had failed to complete more than six years ago.
‘Well,’ said Tom as they broke away from one another, ‘you can’t miss the family resemblance here.’