‘She’s old, she’s tired and she’s afraid. She doesn’t know what’s going to happen to Dad; doesn’t know what will happen to her when he goes.’
Louisa knew he was right, but she felt humiliated. She gestured to the shopping bag, which had slumped over, the cauliflower peeking out of the opening, like a tease, threatening to roll out through the front door and into the freedom of the streets. She knew how it felt.
‘Look. I’ve bought supper. I was going to cook it for you tonight, as a surprise. A treat.’
Louisa saw Guy consider his reply, which irked. ‘Thank you. You don’t have to make these gestures. I know when your training is done you’ll earn good money. I am proud of you.’
She knew he meant it.
‘It’s only…’ He glanced at the kitchen door. ‘I’m trying to keep the peace here.’
‘You want me to apologise to her?’
‘No. Yes.’ Guy took her hands. ‘Talk to her. She likes you, you know she does.’
‘I’ve done my fair share of hard work.’ She was defensive, but Louisa thought of her own mother, her back straining under the loads of laundry she carried from the big houses she worked for, the sheets that would be strung up in their front room.
‘I know you have,’ said Guy. ‘Like I said, I’m proud. I married you because I believe in you and I know we want the same things. I’m sorry we have to live here, with my parents. I know that’s hard on you. I promise we’ll be a family of our own, soon.’
Louisa took her hands from him and stood up. Her thighs were burning. ‘Is that what this is all about?’ She looked at him as if trying to read behind his eyes. ‘I don’t want to have a baby.’ She stopped. It wasn’t quite what she meant, but she knew it was too late.
‘You don’t want children?’ Guy stood up too, somehow taller and thinner than ever, a balloon with no air.
Louisa looked at him sadly. ‘I do, Guy. I do want children, but not now. I don’t see the rush, that’s all.’
‘You’re thirty-two years old.’
‘Does that make me over the hill?’
‘No, my darling, no it doesn’t. But it makes it more difficult.’ Guy was whispering now, though Mrs Sullivan had at last had the tact to close the kitchen door. The row was no longer about her. ‘I want us to be a family. That’s all. I love you.’ He pulled Louisa towards him and she didn’t resist, but she didn’t put her arms around him either. She felt flat, and sad.
‘What if I can’t?’
‘Then we’ll be together and we’ll love each other. But I’m sure you can.’
He kissed her on the forehead and Louisa closed her eyes.
CHAPTER FIVE
The following morning, Guy left the house at seven o’clock as usual, kissing Louisa goodbye in the kitchen, where she was finishing her toast and marmalade. He bore his usual cheerful demeanour and they had chatted lightly about the case he was on – a burglary interrupted by the house’s owners. Louisa listened and asked questions. When she heard the front door close, her shoulders slumped a little. It wasn’t that she had changed her mind about any of the fundamentals of her life, far from it: she loved Guy, she wanted a family with him, she looked forward to a long future together. It was only that she was unsure how she could get them both back on the same path again. For weeks there had been a feeling of discontent that she couldn’t shake, a feeling that only dissipated when she sat at her desk at the London School of Stenography.
Sitting on the top deck of the bus, Louisa leaned her forehead on the cool of the glass window, admiring the occasional late bursts of blossom she could see below. Every year it happened, and every year it charmed anew. The clouds of pink and white that settled on the trees, transforming the greyest streets in London to something out of a child’s drawing. She thought again about Nancy’s offer yesterday but gave it only the briefest reflection. She was grateful to the Mitfords for everything they had done for her, but she owed them no more.
By the time Louisa got off at her stop outside the school in Fulham, she was feeling a little more light-hearted. She resolved to try again with supper that night for Guy, perhaps see if they couldn’t get out of the house for a walk, to talk through how they were going to map out their future. There was time to complete the training, get her feet under the courtroom table, as it were, and after she’d had a baby or two, she could go back to work. Stenographers were allowed to be married – it wasn’t like the police service. She thanked her lucky stars that she hadn’t got into the police when she’d tried a few years ago: she’d have had to choose between her career or Guy. In some ways, that meant thanking her roguish uncle Stephen, who had led her down the wrong side of the pavement and gained her a minor record or two, enough to have her police application rejected. But she didn’t like thinking about Stephen and she wasn’t sure she could go as far as to thank him for anything, even that.
Besides, she knew she could look at the road she’d travelled since then with pride. She gazed across the street at the stenography school – nothing more than a terraced building with its name engraved on a gold square plaque at the side of the door. Yet this was enough to represent freedom and a future for her. Glancing left and right before crossing, Louisa saw a man further along on the opposite side, apparently reading the collection times on a postbox. He was wearing a trilby hat and a dark suit, in itself unremarkable, but there was something about his profile, plus the suspicion he was watching her, that unsettled Louisa. Ignoring him but feeling him there, like an actor who has mistakenly made himself visible in the wings before coming on the stage, she walked across and quick-stepped up to the front door of the school. It was only as she pushed it open that she remembered where she had seen him: in the car parked near the house at Rutland Gate yesterday, shortly after she had finished her interview with Nancy. It must be a coincidence, or he was another man altogether. She dismissed it and went through the entrance.
At lunchtime, Louisa usually went to a greasy spoon down the road with Tessa, but today she told her that she needed to swot up on the technical terms they’d been learning. There was a test the next week, so it was only half a lie. If this man was still there, she’d ask him who he was.
When Louisa went out, the sunshine after the gloomy classroom making her squint, she hesitated on the step and looked up and down the road, almost disappointed to realise that he was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps it had only been a coincidence. Or she had mistaken two men as the same. She walked on down to the café anyway, holding her book in one hand, her grey handbag in the other.
The café she favoured on North End Road, Gerry’s, was like any other to be found on almost every high street in Britain. The windows were permanently steamed up and a smell of stale, hot fat mixed with tobacco hit as soon as you opened the door. Tables were screwed to the floor and wiped down frequently with a filthy rag by the waitress, Kay, who reliably looked as pleased to be working there as a pig would to find itself in an abattoir. At any one time, several places would be occupied by men who spoke little but concentrated on shovelling their fried eggs and ham into their mouths or reading the newspaper as they smoked their postprandial cigarettes. It was, however, one of the few places a woman could eat alone, and though she suspected the daily diet might not be the healthiest of choices, Louisa took it in exchange for the chance of solitary peace. Everyone in there ignored her and she liked it that way.