A Quiet Life - Natasha Walter

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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

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