Second Honeymoon

Chapter Eleven

‘Are you sure?’ Lazlo said.

Edie pushed the sugar towards him across the café table.

‘Oh yes’.

‘But it would be your son’s room—’ ‘Or my daughter’s. We’ve had lots of actors there, over the last few years, on and off—’

‘Really’

‘Oh yes’.

‘What about,’ Lazlo said, taking two packets of white sugar, ‘your husband?’

‘He’s called Russell’.

‘I know,’ Lazlo said. ‘I just felt a bit shy’.

‘Shy?’

‘I don’t know my own father very well’. ‘Russell isn’t at all alarming. Russell is very used to actor lodgers’.

‘Have you told him?’

‘What?’

‘That,’ Lazlo said, ‘you were going to offer a room to me’.

Edie watched him tear the sugar packets across and pour the contents into the cushion of milky foam on the top of his coffee.

‘Lazlo dear, I don’t need to ask him’.

‘I said tell—’

‘I don’t need to tell him either. He likes having the house full. He likes having it used’. Lazlo began to stir his coffee.

‘I must say, it would be wonderful. It would make me feel—’ He stopped, and then he said, ‘Different’.

‘Good’.

He looked at her and then he looked away.

‘I would try – not to be a nuisance’.

‘If you were,’ Edie said, ‘I probably wouldn’t notice. My children, with the possible exception of Matthew, are usually a nuisance. If you don’t have any nuisance in your life, I’ve discovered, something dies in you. It all gets very bland and boring’. She leaned across the table. ‘When I was a child, I shared a bedroom with my sister, Vivien, and we fought all the time because she was very tidy and I was very messy, extra messy, probably, to annoy her, and when our mother said we could have separate rooms, I was miserable. There was no point in being messy on my own’. She looked across at Lazlo and smiled at him. ‘There still isn’t’.

He said, ‘Is that the sister that Rosa lives with?’

‘Yes’.

‘Are you still fighting?’ ‘Certainly,’ Edie said.

‘I never fight with my sister. I wouldn’t risk it. You have to have enough family to take that kind of risk’.

‘Goodness,’ Edie said, ‘what a dramatic view of family. You sound like a Russian novel. If that’s what you’re expecting, you’ll find us very dull’.

‘I don’t think so’.

She reached across the table and grasped his wrist. ‘We’ll like having you. Really’.

He shook his head and gave her a quick glance, and in the course of it, she saw he had tears in his eyes.

‘Heavens, Lazlo,’ Edie said, laughing. ‘Heavens, it’s only a room’.

The evening paper had two columns advertising rooms and flats to let. They varied in monthly price by several hundred pounds and also in tone of advertisement, some being baldly commercial and some more haphazard, personal offers of flat sharing. Ben was certain that Naomi, even if she could be persuaded to leave her mother’s flat, would be adamant about not sharing any accommodation with anyone other than Ben. It had been an eye-opener for Ben, living with Naomi and her mother, to see the fierceness with which privacy and possessions were not just owned, but guarded. Naomi’s mother didn’t refer to ‘the’ kettle or ‘the’ bathroom: both were ‘my’. For Ben, growing up in a house where ownership of anything that wasn’t intensely personal seemed comfortably communal, this domestic demarcation and pride had been very surprising.

‘Feet off my coffee table,’ Naomi’s mother had said to him on his first evening. ‘And the way I like my toilet seat is down’.

Ben had felt little resentment about this. Faced with a rigidly organised kitchen and a tremendous expectation of conformity, he had, rather to his surprise, felt more an awed respect. Naomi’s mother spoke to him in exactly the same way that she spoke to Naomi after all, and as Naomi plainly thought her mother’s standards and requirements were as natural as breathing, Ben was, at least for a while, prepared to pick up his bath towel and replace the ironing board – ironing was a bit of a revelation – on its specially designated hooks behind the kitchen door. Only once, in his first few weeks, did he say to Naomi, watching her while she made an extremely neat cheese sandwich, ‘Has your mum always been like this?’

Naomi didn’t even glance at him.

She shook her long blonde hair back over her shoulders and said evenly, ‘It’s how she likes it’.

Living the way you liked, even Ben could see, was what you were entitled to if you owned a house or paid the rent. Indeed, one of the reasons he had left home, besides the consuming desire to spend the nights in the same bed as Naomi, was a strong, if unarticulated, understanding that he wanted to live in a way that didn’t coincide with the way his parents were living but, as it was their house, their entitlement in the matter came before his. Living with Naomi’s mother was, especially at the beginning, no problem at all because of Naomi herself and because her mother, for all her insistence on her own particular rule of law, was someone whose palpable industry and independence required – and got -Ben’s deference. In addition, and to Ben’s abiding and grateful amazement, she seemed to find his presence in her flat and her daughter’s bed perfectly natural. There hadn’t been a syllable uttered, or even implied, that Ben could construe as an enquiry about their relationship, let alone a criticism.

All this, for some time, made Ben amenable to making his large male presence in a small female flat as invisible as possible. Indeed, it was only gradually, and not in any way triggered by a particular incident, that he began to feel a sense of being both watched and stifled. The setting down of his coffee mug or beer can, once a matter of discovery and trial and error, became insidiously more of an issue, as did the placing – or even presence – of his boots in the narrow hallway. Naomi’s mother didn’t operate by correcting her daughter or her daughter’s boyfriend more than once. After that, she took matters into her own hands and effected the changes she wanted, in silence, but in the kind of silence that made Ben, rather to his surprise, think wistfully of his own mother’s approach to domestic management. He had absolutely no desire to confront or displease Naomi’s mother, but it had begun to occur to him, several times a day, that he was on a hiding to nothing because she was, in fact, constantly changing the goalposts. That morning, the hunt for his boots had ended in discovering them in a plastic carrier bag hanging on a hook under his overcoat.

He’d said nothing to Naomi about moving out with him. With the newly hatched confidence of having had his older brother recently take his advice, he had decided that the best course of action was to identify some flats, or even rooms in flats, and choose one or two to show her so that she would have something to visualise and also have to make a choice. If he just said to her, ‘What about a place of our own?’ she’d look at him as if he wasn’t in his right mind and say, ‘What for?’ But if he had a key to a door, and opened it, and showed her the possibilities of a way of living that lay beyond it, she might be persuaded. Or at least, he thought, staring hard at a photograph in the window in front of him, she might hesitate a little before she said, ‘What for?’

‘I’ll have tomato juice,’ Kate said. Rosa paused on her way to the bar. ‘Are you sure? I’m paying—’

‘I only half feel like “drink” drink,’ Kate said, ‘and I don’t like the way people look at me when I drink it’.

‘Do they?’

‘Well, I think they do’.

‘Right,’ Rosa said, ‘tomato juice it is’.

‘Should you be paying?’

‘Yes’.

‘Can you—’

‘I got a bonus this month,’ Rosa said. ‘Slovenia will be overflowing this summer, thanks to me’.

Kate said, smiling, ‘So you’re making headway on the money?’

Rosa shook her hair back.

‘Well, I can afford the interest on the interest’.

‘Rosa—’

‘I can afford to buy you a tomato juice’. ‘I don’t want you—’

‘I do,’ Rosa said and went away to the bar.

Kate shrugged off her jacket and pushed her shoes off, under the table. She hadn’t told Barney she was meeting Rosa for a drink because, for some reason, Barney had assumed that not having Rosa in their flat meant not having Rosa in their life, either. He maintained that this was not because he didn’t like Rosa, but only that he didn’t think Rosa was good for Kate: too demanding, he said, too exhausting, too needy. Kate, who had declined, in the course of their lavish and traditional wedding, to promise to obey him, wondered if that was, in fact, exactly what she was doing. What was it, in an emotional relationship, that constituted a loving and generous action, and what – only apparently differentiated by a whisker – an act of submission instead?

Rosa came back and put two glasses on the table. Kate’s tomato juice had a stick of celery planted in it and a wedge of lemon balanced on the rim. She took the celery out and laid it, dripping, across the ashtray on the table.

Then she said, licking tomato juice off her fingers, ‘I saw Ruth’.

Rosa looked up from her drink. ‘Why did you?’

‘It was chance,’ Kate said. ‘We were both buying fruit in Borough Market’.

‘And?’

‘She looked awful. And was sort of agitated. I think she thinks everyone disapproves of her’. ‘I do,’ Rosa said.

Kate leaned back, adjusting her T-shirt round her belly. ‘Do you now?’ ‘Uh huh’.

‘For hurting Matthew? Or for being very good at what she does and earning a lot of money?’ Rosa eyed her.

‘For hurting Matthew, of course’.

‘Really’.

‘Yes, really’.

‘I don’t believe you,’ Kate said. ‘I think you can’t handle her being ambitious’. ‘Well, you aren’t ambitious—’

‘Yes, I am,’ Kate said. ‘I didn’t think about it before I got pregnant, but I think about it a lot now and I know that I don’t just like my job, I want it’.

Rosa picked up her drink.

‘I don’t think I am—’

‘Maybe not. And that’s fine. What’s not fine is thinking badly of poor Ruth because she is’. ‘Poor Ruth, is it?’

‘Yes,’ Kate said, ‘poor Ruth. She looked to me like she misses Matthew like anything’.

‘Well, she chose to go ahead with this flat—’ ‘And he chose—’ ‘He had to,’ Rosa said. ‘Oh, Rosa—’

‘It was humiliation or get out’.

‘But she wasn’t doing the humiliating,’ Kate said. ‘Or do you think she should have taken a lesser job and earned less just to make him feel better? How humiliating is that?’

Rosa closed her eyes.

‘He’s my brother’.

‘About whom,’ Kate said, ‘you are often very rude. Of course you should be sorry for him but don’t load all the blame on Ruth just because she’s doing what a man would be praised for doing’. She leaned forward again and said, ‘What does your mother say?’

‘She’s thrilled Matt’s gone home’.

‘Is that all?’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘Is your mother’s only reaction being pleased to have Matthew back again?’ Rosa sighed.

‘Of course not. She likes Ruth but she doesn’t understand why she’s done what she’s done. It wasn’t the way she did things, it was always family first with Mum’.

‘That’s generational’.

‘Kate,’ Rosa said, ‘I thought we were going to have a quiet drink and be pleased to see each other, but all you do is want to argue’.

Kate took a swallow of tomato juice.

She said, ‘You need arguing with’.

‘Why, thank you—’

‘You need jolting and galvanising. You need to use that brain of yours, you need to stop just drifting along—’ ‘Oh, shut up,’ Rosa said.

‘Rose, I’m your friend, I’m—’

‘Sorted and organised and married and interestingly employed and pregnant and insufferable’.

Kate picked up the stick of celery and jabbed it into the ashtray for emphasis.

‘When did you last do anything decisive?’

Rosa said, without looking at her, ‘Last week’.

‘And what was it, precisely?’

‘I helped,’ Rosa said deliberately, ‘someone I don’t really like find somewhere to live’.

‘Oh?’

‘An actor. In Mum’s company. He’s going to rent my room’.

‘What?’

‘He’s going to rent my bedroom. Mum offered it to him. So she’s got two bedrooms full now and Dad is not happy’.

Kate stared at her.

‘This is bizarre’.

‘Isn’t it just’.

‘And you living with your aunt—’ ‘Yes. So don’t go on at me about drifting and being hopeless’.

Kate put the celery down and reached across to grasp Rosa’s hand. ‘Sorry’.

‘That’s OK’.

‘It’s probably hormones,’ Kate said. ‘Everything I do at the moment seems to be hormones. I have this enormous urge to get everything sorted’.

Rosa turned her hand over to give Kate’s a squeeze, and then took it away.

‘I hope it’s catching—’

Kate grinned at her.

‘What’s it like, living with your aunt?’

Very comfortable and very restricting. It’s so funny, she’s dating—’

‘She isn’t!’

‘Well, it’s only my uncle, who she’s separated from. She keeps skipping out on Saturday nights, all kitten heels and chandelier earrings’.

‘Sweet or sickening?’

‘Oh, sweet mostly,’ Rosa said. ‘It’d only be sickening if Uncle Max was anything other than a joke’.

‘Does she come into your room and sit on your bed and tell you all about it?’

‘No, thank you’.

Kate reached awkwardly behind her, for her jacket.

‘I ought to go—’

‘Supper—’

‘Well, Barney’s cooking,’ Kate said, ‘but he does quite like to be admired’.

Rosa leaned back, holding her glass.

‘There you go,’ she said with satisfaction. ‘There’s always a price to pay’.

The door to Ben’s bedroom on the first-floor landing was open. Through it, on the bed, Russell could see a pile of cushions that looked familiar but out of context and a mauve felt elephant and a lampshade made of strings of pink glass beads. He moved closer. On the floor by Ben’s bed was an old white numdah rug, appliquéd with naïve animals and flowers, which he recognised as the rug he and Edie had given Rosa when she was five, as a reward for stopping sucking her thumb. Now that he looked at them with more attention, he saw that the cushions – Indian brocade, Thai spangles – and the lampshade were also familiar from Rosa’s room, as was the elephant and a mirror edged with pearly shells and a gauze sari which, at one point, Rosa had pinned clumsily to the ceiling over her bed to try and create some kind of exotic canopy.

Russell went out of Ben’s room and up the stairs to the top floor. The door to Matthew’s room was closed but the one to Rosa’s room, next door, was open, almost defiantly wide open, Russell thought, as if to make an emphatic point. Through it, he could see that although the furniture in Rosa’s room hadn’t been moved, the atmosphere had been definitely changed. There was a plaid rug on the bed, new dark-blue shades on the lamps, and the chest of drawers, which had always displayed Rosa’s childhood collection of china shoes and thimbles, was empty except for a black-framed mirror propped against the wall. Edie had taken all the girl she could find out of the room and replaced it with boy. And she had done this for the benefit of someone Russell hardly knew, who appeared quite homeless and therefore liable to stay indefinitely, and who was not just homeless but penniless also, so Edie was only asking him to pay forty pounds a week, which had infuriated Matthew – who was their own son and paying almost twice that – as well it might.

Russell walked into Rosa’s room and sat down on the edge of the bed. He put his elbows on his knees and leaned forward to stare at the carpet and a new, modern, striped cotton rug that had been laid on it. He had always, he told himself, liked the challenging quality in Edie’s nature, he enjoyed the way she wouldn’t take any form of rubbish lying down, the way she rose up to argue and rebel. But what was likeable, lovable even, in someone as a spectator sport wasn’t always as pleasurable, or even bearable, when one’s own feelings were involved. He couldn’t, in principle, object to her offering shelter to her own, or anyone else’s, child in trouble, but the difficulty was that he couldn’t be sure that filling the house up with young men, at this precise moment in time, was actually an act of altruism. The more he thought about it, the more he felt that not only was Edie asserting a right to use her house as she pleased, but that she was also making it painfully plain that the last thing she wanted was to be left alone in it with him.

Russell shifted his feet. He couldn’t remember when he had started looking forward to being alone with Edie, but it seemed to be a very long time ago. As each of his children left, he had felt an unmistakable pang, and he had also missed them, missed them, sometimes, quite keenly. But at the same time as those doors were closing, he had had a happy, anticipatory feeling about another one opening, one that led back, or perhaps led on to the relationship that had started it all, the relationship with the short, excitable girl in a cherry-coloured beret who he’d first seen queuing for cinema tickets to see High Society with Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra and Grace Kelly in a chignon.

And if that feeling wasn’t reciprocated, if Edie could no longer quite stand the thought of being left alone with him, then at best he was very disappointed and at worst he was very hurt. He also felt, looking round at the walls denuded of Rosa’s posters and pictures, peculiarly powerless. Edie had set something firmly in train, which, if he disrupted it, would only make him look an unpleasant and heartless person.

He got up, sighing, and went over to the window. The garden, from up here, looked pleasingly controlled and almost cared for. Neither he nor Edie had ever been enthusiastic gardeners but it was odd how, over the years, if you owned a garden you somehow acquired some knowledge about it by osmosis, and fell into the annual rituals of sowing and pruning and clipping. If he was honest, he’d actually indulged in a little fantasy or two about Edie and him being out in the garden together that summer, companionably trimming things or drinking wine under the torn garden umbrella. Like all fantasies, he supposed, that one owed its only existence to impossibility, but it had been nice to contemplate, even more than nice, when the reality was that Edie would now be too preoccupied even to consider tranquil moments, glass in hand, admiring the roses. He shook his head. What was he thinking of, sad old fool that he was? When the play’s run began,

Edie wouldn’t be looking to right or to left, let alone at the roses.

He moved slowly back, past Rosa’s bed all ready for Lazlo, and out on to the landing. The brown stain left by a long-ago wasp’s nest under the roof tiles was still there on the once-white ceiling, as was the split in the top step of the stair carpet and the missing knob to the newel post at the turn of the banisters. Doubtless, Russell thought, there were people who made lists of things to be repaired in their houses, and then attended to those lists with efficient toolboxes filled with the right tools for every job in special compartments, but if so he definitely wasn’t one of them. His mother had always told him, finding him reading as a child yet again, that he was lazy. Possibly she was right and would therefore be amazed to know that at the age of fifty-six and faced with a situation in his personal life he could neither control nor adjust to he was resolving to devote all the energies he had planned to use for a renewed life with Edie to his work.

When Max finally kissed Vivien, she had been ready for both him and it. The steady succession of dates, the careful way in which he had refrained from startling her, the new gravity of his goodbyes had made it absolutely plain to her that when he kissed her it would not be on impulse and therefore, if she had a single wit about her, she could see it coming. And so, when he stopped the car outside her house, and switched off the ignition and turned towards her, she was very excited and quite prepared. The kiss itself was possibly one of the best he had ever given her, being both familiar because of the past and unfamiliar because it hadn’t happened for well over four years. She received it with skill and just enough response to engage him. Then she got out of the car.

He got out too.

‘Can I come in?’

Vivien looked up at her house. Rosa’s bedroom window, above the front door, was still lit.

‘No, Max’.

Max looked up too.

‘Vivi—’

She reached out a hand and laid it flat on his chest.

‘No, Max. Not now’.

He seized her hand in both his.

‘But will you think about it?’

‘Yes’.

‘Promise, Vivi, promise. And I promise it’ll be different’.

She disengaged her hand and took a step away.

‘I said I’d think about it, Max,’ she said, ‘and I will. Thank you for a lovely evening,’ and then she stepped away from him in her heels and crossed her little front garden to the door. When she turned to wave goodnight he was standing staring after her in a way she had never dared to hope he would again.

Inside the house, Rosa had left the hall light on and a note by the telephone that said, ‘Alison rang. Can you do Tues p.m., not Wed, this week?’ and underneath, ‘Will take washing out of machine first thing, promise. X’. Vivien went past the telephone table and down the hall to the kitchen, which Rosa had left approximately tidy in the way Edie always left things tidy, with none of the finishing details attended to and no air of conclusion. Most nights, she would have spent ten minutes brushing up crumbs and putting stray mugs in the dishwasher, but tonight, in her mood of command and composure, she merely filled a glass with water, switched off the lights and made her way carefully upstairs.

There was a line of light still, under Rosa’s door. Vivien hesitated a moment and then knocked.

‘Come!’ Rosa called.

She was sitting up in bed in a pink camisole, reading Hello! magazine. Her hair, newly washed, was fanned out over her shoulders.

‘You do have lovely hair,’ Vivien said.

Rosa smiled at her over the magazine.

‘And you plainly had a lovely evening’.

Vivien hitched her cream wrap over her shoulders and settled on the edge of Rosa’s bed, cradling her glass of water.

‘Fusion tonight. Sea bass and curried lentils’. ‘And champagne?’

‘Oh yes,’ Vivien said, smiling, ‘always champagne’. Rosa put down the magazine. ‘You’re costing him a fortune’. Vivien nodded. ‘Oh, I should hope so—’ ‘Is this payback time now, then?’ ‘Oh no,’ Vivien said, ‘it’s just that a man like Max only understands value for money as exactly that. That’s why he never minded me being so literal’. She looked at the magazine. ‘Have you had a nice evening?’

‘No,’ Rosa said, ‘but that’s not what I want to talk about. I want to hear about yours’.

Vivien took a savouring swallow of water.

She said, artlessly, ‘Well, it was just dinner, you know—’

‘Just dinner,’ Rosa said. ‘So why come and tell me about it? You don’t usually’.

Vivien looked away across the room as if she were either visualising or remembering something particularly satisfying.

‘I think,’ she said, still gazing, ‘that Max hasn’t found the bachelor life all he thought it would be’.

Rosa waited. Vivien slowly retrieved her gaze and transferred it to her glass of water.

‘All those girls of his, even the working ones, well they do seem very interested in what he earns—’

Rosa said nothing.

‘Max says that none of them was prepared to look after him in any way, but at the same time they wanted him to look after them; oh yes, holidays and meals out and Centre Court tickets at Wimbledon. He said they almost made it sound like they were entitled to be treated like that’.

Rosa leaned back against her pillows.

She murmured, ‘How very shocking—’

‘Well,’ Vivien said, ‘it’s not the way your mother and I were brought up. You never expected a man to treat you like a princess and then all he expected really was to be allowed a bit of sex in return’.

‘Really?’

‘It wasn’t take, take, take, with us,’ Vivien said. ‘We were brought up to keep house and put food on the table’.

‘I thought,’ Rosa said slowly, ‘that one of the troubles with Max was that he never came home to eat the food you’d put on the table’.

Vivien raised her eyes and looked seriously at Rosa.

‘He’s changed,’ she said.

‘I saw him out of the window when he came to collect you, and he looked exactly the same—’ ‘He’s changed,’ Vivien said. ‘Inside’.

‘Oh’.

‘He knows how badly he behaved. He knows he exploited me. He knows that almost nobody would have put up with him the way I did’.

Rosa sat up suddenly.

‘Oh Vivi. Oh Vivi, do be careful—’

Vivien smiled at her.

‘He’s learnt so much in the last four years,’ she said. ‘He’s been so unhappy and he’s missed me so badly and our life together’. She let a small, eloquent pause elapse and then she said, ‘That’s why he wants to come and live with me, and try again’.