‘Mrs Last, my friend has something to show you.’
There is another man in the car, whose face Laura cannot yet see. He pulls down his window and leans out; he is middle-aged, wearing a squashy grey hat and an overcoat which is too heavy for this sunny afternoon.
All of a sudden Laura is aware that there is no one else here. No cars are passing. There are two of them; their car is blocking hers. They could do anything, anyone could – her purse is on the front seat of her car, and the door is still open.
She takes two steps backwards, her hand reaching behind her for the handle of the door. The other man is holding something out of his window, and as she goes on retreating, the first man takes it and walks towards her. ‘Je suis en retard,’ she says in her unsteady French, her tongue fumbling over the words. ‘I am late for an appointment.’ Then she sees what he is holding: a piece of card, half a picture – windows, roses, a pitched roof. ‘This is yours, Mrs Last.’
She goes on opening the car door. She reaches for her purse and looks inside it. ‘Please take a look,’ he is saying, and she finds what she is looking for, folded within her black wallet. The matching half. She takes it out and holds it towards him, and he comes forward holding his half and they stand rather close as they put them clumsily join to join, a picture made whole again, a house in the sunshine.
‘Your husband gave it to my friend,’ he says.
‘Yes.’
All the questions that Laura might ask run through her mind and are lost for the moment. She leans against the warm car, and feels her heart slowing from its panic, and over the woods below her she sees an eagle hovering in the warm winds, its huge wingspan in profile, so slow that it is still, suspended.
‘I’m going away tomorrow,’ she says to the first of the two men. ‘I’ll be gone for four days.’
‘I see. Come up here on Tuesday. Just below here – you see, there, where there is a footpath into the forest – do you see?’
‘Yes. At this time?’
The two men look at each other and nod. She gets back into the car and turns the key backwards and forwards. She presses the gas too hard and it roars and jolts. They move away, and then she does too, but quite slowly, so that soon the other car disappears ahead of her. When she gets to the restaurant on the outskirts of the village, she parks the car and just sits there for a while, tracing a pattern in her print skirt with her finger, and her mind is blank. This is the fork in the road, so long awaited; but now it is here she cannot see past it. It is as if there is only darkness ahead.
Although Laura had said, time and again, that there was no need for Mother to come on board, in fact, when the moment came, she was glad that she was not embarking alone. They knew the steamer would be half empty, but half empty was quite crowded enough. Holding her smaller suitcase and pulling her muskrat coat around her, Laura had to push through a throng of middle-aged women just to get onto the pier on the Hudson River. She stumbled on an uneven step as they walked up to the tourist class entrance, and as she righted herself she realised how breathless she felt. Still, Mother being there made her determined not to show her uncertainty, or even at this last moment the whole plan might collapse, and she might be ordered home to wait out Ellen’s recovery. So once on board she tried to walk with more confidence, as if she knew where they were going, up to the information desk where a steward rattled out the directions to her cabin so quickly that she had to ask him to repeat them.
‘Take the elevator down one floor, along the corridor to the right, through the double doors …’ As he was talking, Laura couldn’t help noticing the sign above the desk: ‘The company’s regulations prohibit passengers from passing from one class to another. Passengers are therefore kindly requested to refrain from applying for this privilege and to keep within the confines of the class in which booked.’ The steward noticed the direction of her gaze. ‘We do tours, you know,’ he said.
‘Tours?’
‘Every day, you can visit the first-class deck. Or if you go to the movie, you’ll go into their side.’
‘Do they visit us?’
He laughed as if she had made some kind of joke, and then turned to the impatient elderly couple behind them.
The smell of old cigarette smoke hit her when she opened the door to her cabin and, putting her toilet case on the bed, Laura stood irresolutely beside it.
‘Look, your trunk is already here,’ Mother said, gesturing to the shiny brown box which they had given to a porter at the pier together with her cabin number. Mother always pointed out the obvious, was always fussily one step behind. But Laura was suddenly reluctant for her to leave. It would be so final, to be left here with these things that didn’t look like her things at all. They were all brand new, that was why, bought in the splurge of shopping that had followed the sudden decision that the girls must go to London. Only Laura’s name, written in her carefully neat lettering on the tag, told her the brown trunk was hers. The other bed – that would have been Ellen’s – was a rebuke, but at least it looked as though no one else had booked it. Laura had quailed at the thought of sleeping with a stranger.
Mother was once again going through things that she had told her before, about how there would be a female steward who would look out for her, how she mustn’t be afraid to let the steward know if anyone bothered her, and how Aunt Dee’s maid would be at Waterloo to meet her. The thought of the maid brought Laura’s anxiety up more sharply than ever. She was almost ready to interrupt the stream of admonitions about telegrams and underwear, food and gratitude, and say that she had changed her mind. Indeed, she had just turned to Mother, about to speak, when they heard the shout along the corridor, ‘All ashore that’s going ashore,’ and Laura’s face reverted to the still expression her mother hated. Contained, as Laura thought. Sulky, as her mother had described it only that morning. Laura opened the door to the corridor.
They walked together up to the point where the corridor split in two. All of a sudden Mother put her arms around her. They never embraced, and Laura stepped back without thinking. The abruptness of her move was tempered by the press of people converging at that very point; it was not a place to stand, not in the middle of the friends and family who were returning to the pier and the passengers making their way up to the deck. And so the two of them were carried forward in separate streams of movement. Laura thought to herself, I’ll make it better, I’ll wave. She saw herself in her mind’s eye on deck, blowing kisses, borne backwards.
And she was leaning on the rail, looking for that grey fur hat in the crowd, when a woman beside her stepped right onto her foot. ‘Sorry,’ the woman said without turning, and Laura found herself looking at the curve of a cheek and curls of hatless hair rather than out to the pier. ‘Why is leaving so—’ the woman said, her last word lost in the scream of a whistle that rent the air. Her gesture was not lost, however. She seemed to sum up and then to dismiss the jagged Manhattan skyline as she brought her hands together and flung them apart. The view was full of sunshine and watery reflections, but Laura could not make out where Mother was standing, and she narrowed her eyes at the knots of people, pulling her coat tight around her neck. Then the wind was sharp in her face as the ship began to move, and she
