A Quiet Life

At one point he stopped and looked at the newspaper which Laura had put down at her feet. ‘You’re not a Red too, are you?’

‘Florence gave it to me—’

‘Still, they’re right about some things,’ Joe said, taking the newspaper and looking at the front page. ‘At least they get what’s going on in Europe. They don’t do the “if only, if only” – you know, “if only he was a nicer guy or he would accept this or that” – they can see that kind of stuff is all baloney, that there’s got to be a showdown sooner or later.’

At this, Laura said nothing. She and her mother and sister had all convinced one another that war was a long way off, and even if they had done so simply because they wanted to believe that a trip to London was still possible, the conviction was now hard to throw off. Joe went on talking, about what he couldn’t stand about communism, how they wanted everyone to toe the line. ‘They want everyone to be the same,’ he was saying.

To her own surprise, Laura found herself shaking her head. She had only that one article to go on, but she found herself saying something, which sounded inarticulate even to herself, about how it was everyone else who wanted women to be the same, and it was good if the communists thought that they could be free. Almost as soon as she had started to speak, she tailed off, and Joe laughed and started to tell her she was wrong, and that women wanted to be real women, not workers, but she was hardly listening. It was as though only on saying the word ‘free’ had she realised what she had been thinking all night – and not just that night, but forever, for as long as she could remember – about her home life, about her mother … yes, it was Mother who loomed in her mind, Mother’s nagging, her carping, and even, from time to time, on dark nights full of awful yells and worse silences, her sobbing. She had always resented Mother, always blamed her, but that word ‘free’ had hurt her as soon as she had tried to say it, because it was the word that Mother had spoken once, on the one occasion she had tried to speak to Laura seriously, she had told her not to give up her freedom as she had done. Freedom. What had Mother given up? As the unbidden memories crackled through Laura’s mind, she closed her eyes, the cracker she was eating an inedible lump in her mouth, and she heard Joe asking if she was going to be ill, and she made herself open her eyes and smile. That’s what you do, you stay quiet, you open your eyes, you smile. Whatever you do, you never open the door to the place where the yells and the sobbing can be heard. ‘I guess you’re right,’ she said quietly, as Joe told her that women didn’t want to have to work in the same way men did, and that communists had no idea what women really wanted. ‘Fashion, families, you know.’

‘They have fashion in the paper,’ Laura said, looking down at the newspaper that had caused the argument, and then knowing that she had been much too combative already, she smiled a dismissive little smile and asked Joe another question about what he was going to do when he got to Southampton – or Le Havre? He was happy to keep talking, and Laura found she didn’t have to speak much more, while he was so eager to air his views and experiences.

As the swell did indeed die down, and the sun appeared weakly, one of the auburn-haired girls, Maisie, joined them. She complained of a headache, but she was still breezy company, one of those people who worked hard to match each anecdote in a conversation with one of her own, so that between the two of them Laura could sit more or less in silence, her fur coat buttoned up to her chin, beginning to feel better as the wind blew over them.

‘Florence!’ she called, seeing a tall figure, her hair whipping back, walking along the deck.

‘Did I have a bad night …’ Florence said, sitting down heavily beside them.

‘Me too.’

‘The woman in my cabin was being ill all night … ugh. Listening to sounds of someone else vomiting when you’re trying to sleep … It stinks in there this morning, too.’

Laura commiserated with her, but Florence seemed less friendly than she had the day before, shrunk into herself. ‘It’s too cold to sit here, how can you stand it?’ she asked and Laura could see her shivering in her cloth coat.

‘We did the journey the other way in the summer – much better,’ Maisie said. ‘We went swimming – look at it now.’

They all looked down at the open tourist-class swimming pool, its water whipped into waves by the wind.

‘Didn’t you say that people go over to the first-class side to swim?’ Laura asked, and Joe told them again that he had heard from other passengers that there was an easy way to the indoor swimming pool through the engine room. She found herself unexpectedly intrigued by the idea, and so, clearly, did Maisie.

‘We could go,’ she said, glancing at Laura. ‘Not to swim, I suppose – just to look.’

‘Are you coming, Florence?’ Laura asked.

‘You’ll have to change – you can’t go over in that dress, they’ll see through you in an instant,’ said Maisie, eyeing Florence’s drab dress and worn shoes.

‘I’m not going to dress up and pretend to be something – for what?’ Florence said crossly. ‘I’ve got a headache, anyway.’

‘Why don’t you lie down?’ Laura said, regretting the words once they were said, for their fussy tone.

‘Go back to that cabin? The smell of vomit?’

Laura was delighted by her next thought, which was to offer Florence her own room, since there was an unused bed in it. Florence accepted without any particular graciousness. All three women got up, and Laura walked back to her cabin with Florence while Maisie went to change, telling Laura to meet her by the engine room. Laura opened up her brown trunk to find a better dress than the one she was wearing.

‘You have so many clothes.’ There was a kind of rebuke in Florence’s voice, and Laura looked awkwardly down at the folded piles of jersey and velvet and crepe, cerise and grey and peacock blue.

If she hadn’t been with Maisie, there was no way that Laura would have crossed into first class. The roar in the engine room echoed in her stomach and almost seemed to lift her into the air. The couple of men at work on the engines did not seem to think it was their job to ask what they were doing, and when the two slipped through the huge double doors on the other side, it reminded Laura of being in a school play and coming suddenly out of the dusty, dark wings onto a brightly lit and confusing stage. Now the ceiling was twice as high above them, and the musty smell of cigarettes and old food was replaced by scents of lilies and polish. The wide, gilded corridors seemed to have been designed by a film director with delusions of grandeur, but you felt as though it had been flimsily realised, as if the marble might turn out to be painted and the inlaid wood just veneer. There were few people around, and they were moving slowly, a couple of elderly men walking with shaky steps down a staircase, a very overweight woman standing uncertainly in a doorway, as if each of them was overwhelmed by the decor. The pool room was the icing on this heavily sugared cake, a sweep of blue lined with multicoloured mosaics.

Once there, the girls perched on two of the white and gilt chairs by the side of the pool. Maisie got out her cigarettes and Laura found herself imitating the way that Maisie was sitting, with her legs crossed and her hand holding the cigarette out to one side, but it was a poor pretence of nonchalance. She asked Maisie questions about what she was going to do back in London, and learned how she had tried to start a career in the New York shows over the last few years, but things had not gone according to plan. After a while they lapsed into silence, and Laura found her gaze arrested by a woman who was swimming determined laps, up and down, up and down. Eventually she stopped and got out, a tall, straight figure in a belted white swimming costume, who removed her cap to show a bob of almost white blonde hair.

‘Who’s she?’ said Maisie. ‘I’m sure I’ve seen her before. Is she in the movies?’ Laura didn’t know. ‘Or is she some society girl?’

It seemed more than likely. The woman walked to the side of the pool, her chin lifted, her shoulders back. ‘Hughie,’ she called to a tall man, who was reading a newspaper at the bar with a friend. ‘I’m off to the hairdresser. See you for cocktails later.’

‘At the bar upstairs?’

‘Absolutely not. Come to my suite. The Landers will be along too.’

Ebslutly naut … Her voice was struck glass, ringing with a brittle tone, and as she walked past them again, her towel trailing slightly on the ground, her gaze hovered about a foot above their heads. Laura could swear she knew they were in the wrong place. She felt that it was time to go back, but Maisie started talking to her again, this time about London, and despite herself Laura started to ask her questions about the city they were steaming towards, which she had never seen.

‘Is this yours?’ It was one of the men to whom the blonde woman had spoken, a man with a young face but thinning hair, and Laura automatically shook her head and avoided his eyes. But Maisie was leaning forward, looking at the silver cigarette lighter he was holding.

‘No, it’s not mine,’ she said, smiling up at him.

‘I say, I haven’t seen you around before.’

‘Haven’t you?’

Laura flushed. The man’s voice had sounded mocking to her and it seemed clear that he knew they were not in the right class, but Maisie was oblivious as she introduced them.

‘Are you having a good voyage, Miss May?’ The man sat down next to them, unbidden, and Laura noticed him raise his eyebrows at his friend by the bar, who drained his drink and walked over to them. The conversation between Maisie and the first man seemed to be moving along quite easily. They were even laughing by the time the other man sat down. ‘And we have drinks and you don’t,’ he was saying. ‘Martinis?’

‘I’ll have a whisky sour,’ Maisie said.

‘I’m fine. I don’t need a thing,’ Laura said, in a voice that was too quiet perhaps to be heard, as the man seemed to take no notice and ordered them all drinks, which came quickly. In Laura’s mouth, the spirits were bitterly strong, but she drank anyway, because it seemed to be expected of her.

‘You’re a quiet one, aren’t you?’ the other man said, leaning towards her, and Laura smiled, but it was a tight little smile.

Maisie and the first man, Hughie, were by now discussing various shows in New York, and he was talking about which of the actresses he had seen had the best shape, as he put it. He looked very obviously at Maisie’s breasts as he spoke, and Maisie arched her back. ‘I’ll tell you who does better martinis than you’ll get at the bar,’ he said and his friend laughed. ‘Mine are the best on the boat.’

Maisie immediately said something with a double entendre that Laura did not understand, but from the roar of the men, Laura could see it went down well. Before she quite realised it was happening, Maisie was getting up and the men were putting down their drinks, and they were all walking together from the pool room. Laura fell into step with Maisie and told her she was going to go back, and Maisie told her not to be a spoilsport. She turned away from her as she did so, and towards the men, and Laura felt hot with embarrassment and uncertainty. The suite turned out to be even more oppressively ostentatious than the public rooms – all gilt and glass and satin curtains, and even a baby grand piano at the edge of the room. Maisie sat down immediately on one of the blue velvet sofas, and crossed her legs so that her dress rode up to her knees.

Maisie asked them about the woman they had seen at the swimming pool. ‘Amy?’ Hughie said, as if they obviously knew who she was. ‘She’ll be at the hairdressers for the next couple of hours.’ It was that statement, as though he had been let off by Amy for a little amusement, and his amusement was going to be these girls from tourist class, that made Laura flush up with embarrassment again. She replied monosyllabically to everything that was said to her, until the second man gave up on her and lay down on the floor, smoking a cigar.

Meanwhile, Hughie was talking to Maisie about shapes again and how he had once known a dancer with ‘curves like watermelons’. ‘Are you saying mine aren’t?’ Maisie said, and the man leant over and cupped his hands around her breasts and pretended to judge. ‘That’s just your brassiere, isn’t it?’ he said at last, and she laughed in a high, yelping voice.

At this, Laura got up. ‘I must go,’ she said, ‘my friend’s waiting for me,’ but the man on the rug seemed to have fallen asleep, while Hughie was now engaged in a struggle with Maisie. Just as he managed to release Maisie’s breasts from her dress, immediately putting his head down to lick one rosy nipple, Laura turned the handle of the door and went out into the corridor.

Out of the room, she realised that she was unsure where to go. She started walking to her left, but the corridor split in two. Seeing a steward coming towards her with a large tray, she stepped to the right, but after a while she realised she was walking down a passage she had not seen before. She saw an elderly gentleman walking towards her, and finally summoned the courage to ask where the pool room was. Once there she managed to retrace her steps back through the engine room and into tourist class again. The smell, the low ceiling and the dingy felt carpet in her cabin seemed more lowering than before. Florence was asleep in the spare bed, her face squashed into a flat pillow, and Laura sat down heavily. After a while, she watched Florence wake up, yawning.

Although she had thought that she was dying to tell Florence about the experience she had just had, and about the way Maisie had behaved, once she was awake Laura realised she didn’t want to talk about it. She was no longer sure that she had behaved in the right way, leaving Maisie there. Part of her wondered if Maisie was all right, and the other part of her was full of hot anger. In her confusion, she said nothing about it.

‘The other side of the boat … you wouldn’t believe …’ was all she said in a blank voice, ‘more gilt than you can imagine.’

Florence sat up and stretched. ‘Why aren’t you travelling on that side anyway – your family must have quite a bit of dough?’ Laura realised that she was looking again at the pile of dresses on the trunk.

‘We’re okay now. Not rich like those women in first class. But it was only last year we got our money. And we have been struggling.’ Laura felt as though she were trying to excuse herself, to explain away the clothes, the earrings and the fur coat hanging on the back of the door. It was true, they had struggled. It wasn’t the kind of poverty that Florence would be used to, of course – being hungry or cold – it was nice people’s poverty. It meant that your clothes were last year’s, faded and mended when the girls at your school came to class every term in clothes that were fresh and scented and glossy with newness. It meant that when there was a leak from the bathroom into the living room, there wasn’t the money to make it better, and the ceiling and wallpaper stayed stained and a piece had to be cut out of the carpet, so that you didn’t invite girls home. It was about saying no to invitations that you longed for – to the theatre, to parties – because you couldn’t return them. It was about not going to college, but taking a secretarial course and then a little job at a real estate office, where you ate your lunch out of a paper bag every day. It was about your father being out of work and coming home smelling of drink late at night, every night. And it had gone on, day after day, year after year, the little miseries of nice people’s poverty.

Until suddenly, last year, with the death of her English grandfather whom she had never met, there was a lurch into a kind of wealth: shopping trips into Boston, the planned vacation in Europe, so many plans, so much chatter, which should have drowned out those years of humiliation. All that is behind you now, Laura reminded herself. Across miles of water now. This is where you are now, with this new friend.

At that thought, Laura smiled at Florence, and asked her if she wanted to stay in her cabin for the rest of the journey. Florence responded in a characteristically matter-of-fact way, and went to her old room to get her things – which turned out to be just a big old carpet bag, and when she came back in she said she was going to shower. Putting the bag down on the floor, she stripped carelessly. Laura and her sister had always observed a careful propriety with one another, and Florence’s beautifully modelled back and buttocks and legs and, as she turned, the slopes of her breasts and stomach flashed into Laura’s sight and stayed there even after Florence had gone into the shower room.

That evening they went up to the deck again after dinner and found a place behind a glass screen, where the wind was less bitter and they could sit for hours. Laura told Florence about the article that had made such an impression on her, and Florence immediately responded by agreeing that this was what things were like in Russia for men and women. ‘A friend of mine made a trip there last year,’ she said. ‘She told me all about it.’ The way Florence described her friend’s experiences, everyone was able to participate in the happy-ever-after of equality. ‘Everything that’s so demeaning about relationships between men and women in America – gone.’ Laura tried to grasp what this would mean, but Florence had already moved off onto other themes – dignity, fair wages, work.

Work. Florence asked Laura if she had ever worked. The memory of those months in the real estate office flooded back into Laura’s mind. Of course she had been told many times how lucky she was to find a job, any job, that summer of 1937. It had been a humid, languid August to start with, and in Stairbridge almost everyone she had known from school was off on vacation, out on airy hills or beaches. Only Laura, it seemed to her, was condemned to this miserable office, where the summer days fell away pointlessly, unfulfilled, behind the windowpanes. She typed invoices and contracts line after line, page after page, rattle, rattle, rattle and bang, until she felt like a vase fretted all over with fine cracks, as though she would shatter at a touch. ‘I hated it,’ she said, a little shamefaced. ‘I don’t think I’m any good at working. It was so – repetitive.’

‘That’s the whole point.’

‘What is?’

‘There’s so much …’ and for a moment Florence seemed to hesitate, as if everything she wanted to tell Laura was too large to contemplate – and then she plunged in. She told Laura about the alienation of labour, and how capitalism reduced the worker to being an instrument rather than a person, and made work an endless sequence of repetitive actions. She told her that in a communist society every man and woman would be able to engage in meaningful work that really did spring from their personality. The alienation of labour. For some reason this abstract idea suddenly sprang into life for Laura, as she remembered those summer days and the sense, new to her and one she would never forget, that she was looking down at herself from far above, that she was not part of the life mapped out for her.

She made Florence talk more and more, as the swell rose and fell beneath them, and even when Joe stopped to speak to them, she shrugged him off. As Florence spoke, a gull momentarily landed on the railing like a white emissary from the future and the pared moon was suddenly naked as the clouds left it behind. Or was that just how Laura remembered the scene afterwards? Because she replayed the conversation in her mind for weeks and years to come, remembering over and over how she listened to Florence’s words and how freighted with meaning they seemed. The promise of the new world that was mapped out for her that night seemed almost like a personal promise that Florence was making to her, that the petty humiliations of the life she had left behind would never return. More, that the bitter failures and pointless successes of ordinary middle-class life were unimportant, and there was a place ahead of them where women and men could find nobler and more vivid activities.

They went to their cabin late. But that night the sea was calmer, or maybe it was just that the girls were used to the motion. They slept deeply and woke more refreshed. There was an impatience in the air when they went up to the deck after breakfast, Laura thought, as if everyone was eager to get to the end of the voyage. But Laura did not want it to end. She watched Florence as she walked fast, as if with some purpose, around the deck. Bareheaded, her hair’s natural curl tended, in the damp wind that blew constantly, to frizz around her temples and the nape of her neck. But the way black and brown and auburn seemed to mingle in the curls of her hair, the way the wind blowing at her eyes made them water and sparkle – something of the sea itself, some deliquescent light, ran over her and through her. In years to come, when events had irrevocably parted them, it would always be this Florence, this girl blown by the salty wind, who came back into Laura’s mind.

Suddenly Laura saw Maisie and Lily talking to Joe, and felt a shyness rise up in her. But Joe called her over. They were all talking about what time the boat was likely to get into Southampton the following day, about how the bad weather at the start of the journey had held them back.

‘You rushed off yesterday,’ Maisie said in an aside to her.

‘Well …’

‘We had a wild time,’ Maisie said confidently, and Joe said, ‘So I heard.’ Laura found Maisie’s face hard to read. Was it all pleasure, or was there knowledge of how Laura had judged her? Laura could not be sure, but at least there was no anger there, and so Laura was able to stay talking. As they stood there together, Laura saw how intimate Joe seemed with Lily, touching her hand as he lit her cigarette and teasing her about how she seemed unable to throw off what she would call seasickness but he would call a plain old hangover. As she noticed how Lily shook her head at him in a mixture of laughter and annoyance, Laura wondered if there was something more than friendship now between the two of them.

But when Joe turned to Laura and started to ask her about whether she was going back into first class, his energy moved easily away from Lily and towards her, and she realised that there was no particular intimacy between him and Lily. He was just one of those people who wanted to create a flirtatious warmth with everyone he met. It was unusual in a man, Laura thought as she answered him, to see this constant attentiveness to every person. No wonder he had collected this little group around him in the few days on the boat.

And so she stood quite happily, chatting with the others, until she saw Florence again, now in conversation with a steward on the other side of the deck, and moved away to join her. The steward was, to Laura’s mind, a rather unprepossessing man, a short dark boy with a bad squint. Florence and he had spoken briefly to one another before, Laura had noticed, and now with a transparent pretence of asking for coffee, Florence was talking to him again. As Laura walked up to them, she heard the words ‘conditions’, ‘hours’ and ‘wages’ and knew that Florence was becoming exercised about some injustice that the boy was telling her about. She should have been pleased, she knew, that this was what Florence was doing, but instead she felt irritated that Florence’s attention had shifted away from her, and was not sorry when the boy moved off as she approached.

In the evening a band was playing in the tourist-class restaurant, and after eating their steaks and apple tart Florence and Laura sat watching a few couples on the little dance floor. Florence was talking when Joe stopped at their table to ask her if she wanted to dance, and she shook her head. He raised his eyebrows at Laura, and she bit her lip. ‘I can’t dance like that,’ she said, motioning to where Maisie and Lily were dancing with a couple of men. They were fast and slick, turning and turning on neat lines.

‘Who cares?’ Joe said, catching her hand, and on an impulse Laura stood up. He was not a great dancer either, and Laura felt that they were the clumsiest people moving in the room. There was something so exposed about dancing while people were dining, looking up from their plates to watch you turn and step. At one point she looked back at their table and saw that Florence was no longer there, and she loosed her hand from Joe’s. ‘I must just find Florence—’ and then turned to smile at him politely, ‘but thank you.’

She walked up the stairs to the deck, and sure enough there was Florence, her voice was clear in the night air. ‘I think that you should be standing up to them,’ she said. She was talking to the steward again. ‘If they are really trying to bring down your wages because of that, well—’

‘Florence!’

Florence waved to her, but turned back to the steward. Their voices were lowered as Laura walked towards them, but she heard Florence tell the man something about someone he needed to talk to in New York. As Laura came to stand next to them, she told them not to mind her, but the man looked at her with some embarrassment and then moved off.

‘Was I interrupting?’ She heard how her voice sounded, reedy and uncertain. Florence shrugged. They stood at the rails, but the urgency of their conversations over the last few days seemed to have left them. As they stood there, the music from the swing band downstairs was heard through an open door, spilling out onto the deck and the ocean. Laura felt its rhythms again, and remembered the touch of Joe’s hand and his clumsy energy as they danced.

‘There will be so much to do when we’re in London,’ Florence said, and Laura realised all of a sudden how near her aunt’s house was. Her aunt, and the cousins, Winifred and Giles, who had sounded so formal in the letters they had written, were waiting for her in that grey city, ready to take her back into the embrace of family life. Florence, she knew, was thinking of a different London, a city that she thought was readying itself for war, a city where she thought she could be useful. They talked idly for a while about when the boat was likely to get to Southampton the next day, and then Florence said that she thought she would go back to the cabin and finish her book. ‘Damn, I left my scarf in the restaurant,’ she said.

‘I left my handkerchief too,’ Laura said, although she knew perfectly well that her handkerchief was in the pocket of her coat, back in their cabin, ‘I’ll go.’ She left Florence on the dark windy deck and went back down. Through the doors to the restaurant, it was all warmth and light. A number of couples were dancing now, but in the centre of them were Maisie and Lily dancing together, moving even more sharply than when they’d danced with the men, the fastest rumba Laura could imagine. The music seemed to be shaking off their bodies as they tripped backwards and forwards.

‘They’re not bad,’ said Joe, suddenly at her elbow. ‘You rushed off …’

Laura apologised. ‘I had to find Florence.’ She saw Florence’s scarf on the back of a chair, but rather than moving over to pick it up, she turned back to Joe. ‘Dance again?’ she said. This time they moved together with more ease, and as the number ended Laura could feel the sweat springing up under her arms. ‘I must take Florence her scarf,’ she said, but she said so looking at Joe, and this time they went together out of the restaurant. Upstairs, however, the deck was empty. Instead of moving back downstairs to look for Florence, Laura paused.

‘Smoke?’ Joe’s voice was very near to her ear.

She took one although she hardly wanted it, the freshness of the salt air was so keen. As he lit it, Joe looked into her face, and Laura felt that their bodies were even closer than they had been when they were dancing.

‘So, your comrade’s preparing another lecture for you?’

‘She doesn’t lecture me.’

‘I’ve heard her.’ Joe flicked a match into the water. It spun, a tiny bead of light, in the darkness. Laura caught anger under his words, but before she could ask him about it, he turned back to her and smiled. ‘Your eyes are shining in the moonlight. Has anyone ever told you what pretty eyes you have?’

Nobody ever had, but Laura laughed in what she hoped was a sophisticated way. She didn’t know what to say, and felt shaken by the desire that rose up suddenly in her, a desire for his compliment to be not just an easy line but something that he had found hard to say, something that bore testament to his view of her. And then he did what she realised she was waiting for him to do, and put a hand behind her back and slid it down, over her dress, over her buttocks. Laura was unable to move as pleasure, so forceful it seemed to deny her a sense of consciousness, flooded through her, loosening her joints and heating her skin.

‘What your friend wants,’ he was whispering, ‘I can see that … But what you want – what do you want?’

She hardly heard his words, she was so focused on his touch. He threw his cigarette away over the side, and put his right hand up to Laura’s face, stroking his thumb over her cheek and then putting it against her mouth. To Laura’s own surprise, she did not move away from him, and her lips opened against his thumb, and tentatively her tongue touched it. ‘So you do know what you want,’ he whispered urgently into her ear. The hand that had been on her back was now between her thighs, and as it moved up to the skin above her stocking top her mouth opened suddenly wider, and a groan escaped her.