Every day, she looks for a sign. She catches her breath on so many occasions. When the telephone rings unexpectedly, or when she comes back to the flat to find an envelope sticking up over the top of the numbered mailbox in the hall. But also when people look at her too closely, and she wonders, are they about to tell me they have a message, are they about to say, someone was looking for you yesterday? Today it was the sharp-featured woman who came into the shop where she was buying a new summer dress.
When she saw the turquoise dress with its wide white belt in the window, she had pushed open the heavy door in the overpriced boutique in the rue du Port. It was almost as good as she’d hoped, the shade taking the sallowness out of her face, and the in-and-out shape giving back to her, generously, the lines of her younger body. Just as she said, yes, I’ll take it, and turned to the changing room to put on her own clothes, another woman entered the shop. She didn’t look at the clothes, she just stood there for a second and looked at Laura through her spectacles. ‘Let me see,’ she said in French, ‘are you—?’ Laura stood, caught in the woman’s attention, hope rising as clear as a chime of music in the room. ‘No, I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘How absurd, I saw you through the window and thought that I knew you from the lycée in Montreux.’
Laura bought the dress and went out into the sunlight. She walked through the city, blinking behind her dark glasses. Soon she was by the lake. Among the swans a toy was floating, a child’s boat with a stained silk sail, and to her surprise she picked up a piece of gravel from the sidewalk and threw it hard at the boat. She missed. Her hands curled into fists, she walked away, high heels clacking on the clean Swiss street, the shopping bag on her arm with the new dress all folded up in tissue paper, back to the sparse apartment where her mother and daughter were awaiting her return.
And when she comes in, it is the same as ever. Laura sinks as quickly as she can back into Rosa’s world. She has a new doll that Mother has bought her, a rather fabulous creation that says ‘Mama’ when you punch its stomach. She punches and punches, and the curious thing says ‘Mama Mama’ in its low hiccupping tones, and every time Rosa smiles. ‘Sad baby,’ she says. ‘Sad baby.’ ‘Maybe it’s happy,’ Laura says, taking it from her and cradling it, and singing one of the nonsense songs she has made up in the long evenings. ‘Lullaby, lullaby, sleepyhead,’ Laura sings, as her daughter watches her with sharp, bright eyes. And then Rosa takes it back and starts doing the same, crooning in her out-of-pitch singing voice, enunciating the words carefully.
Mother comes in at that moment. ‘Look, Mother, how wonderfully she plays with it,’ Laura says. She gets up, and immediately Rosa punches the doll again and then drops it and holds onto Laura’s legs. ‘Sing,’ she commands, ‘sing.’ And so Laura spends the rest of the afternoon singing to her and her doll, and whenever her attention wanders, Rosa complains, vociferously. ‘You give in to her too much,’ says Mother, with the confidence of the woman whose child-rearing days are long over and whose criticism must be accepted. Laura wonders if she is right. She sees disciplined mothers everywhere, mothers who can turn away easily from their children and pass them to the nannies or tell them to play on their own; but those mothers have lives of their own. What do I have, Laura thinks? Only these endless afternoons waiting to be filled.
Now, sitting on the balcony, in her mind she is explaining things to Edward, telling him how motherhood is so different from what they expected. For the two years of Rosa’s life she has done this day by day, saying to him in her head, ‘I cannot do this’ and ‘Look at this’ and ‘Help me’ and ‘How perfect’. She watches other fathers – disengaged, or authoritarian, or protective – and fits his character onto theirs, imagining herself telling him to let Rosa climb the slide – ‘She can do it!’ Laura says to him in her mind, ‘She did it!’ – or telling him that she is too young to learn table manners. And sometimes, when she hears Rosa in the night, and knows that she must swing her feet onto the cold floor and set off again to comfort her terrors or her thirst or her fever, Laura imagines that he will be there when she returns, to hold her as Laura is about to hold Rosa.