Second Honeymoon

Chapter Fourteen

‘How would you like,’ Russell said, ‘a new computer?’ Maeve didn’t look up from her screen. ‘I don’t care for that kind of joke’. Russell sat on the edge of her desk. He said, ‘Haven’t you noticed anything different lately?’ ‘In what way—’ ‘About me’.

She shot him a glance. ‘About you—’

‘Yes’.

‘Well,’ Maeve said, taking her hands off the keyboard, ‘you’re in a little earlier’.

‘Exactly’.

‘But,’ Maeve said, ‘I put that down to sulks. Your house is full again, Edie’s making breakfast for the kids, or not making it at all because she’s sleeping in a little these days, and you’re sulking’.

Russell gave a small sigh.

‘I was a bit. But I stopped. I stopped when I saw how beautifully the next generation do it’.

Maeve typed two words. ‘Rosa,’ she said. Russell took no notice.

He said, ‘But I haven’t stopped my intention to galvanise myself. Inject some energy into the business. Buy a new computer’.

‘I may,’ Maeve said, ‘be beyond galvanising. I am fifty-two years old’.

‘Nothing’.

‘You get so’s you don’t want to learn new tricks. You get immune to curiosity. Someone in Who’s Who some time ago, maybe it was Elspeth Huxley, listed her main hobby as resting. I can identify with that. A new computer doesn’t sound very restful’.

Russell looked up.

‘And perhaps some new paint’. He looked down at the carpet. ‘And a new floor?’ ‘Stop right there,’ Maeve said. Russell got off her desk. ‘Perhaps—’

‘The voice of good sense’.

Russell took a step towards his own office.

‘Maeve, even if you won’t have a new computer and I never get around to re-decoration, I do want to make some changes. I do want to revive a little vigour round here’.

‘Why?’

‘Because otherwise,’ Russell said, ‘I shall feel everything is going backwards’.

Maeve said nothing. Russell disappeared into his office and, uncharacteristically, closed the dividing door behind him. Maeve looked at the door in some surprise. Having it closed suddenly made her own room seem much smaller, much more isolated, as if an energy supply had been shut off. After a moment or two she could hear, indistinctly, Russell speaking on the telephone and, even though she couldn’t hear what he was saying, she could hear that he was talking animatedly, as if he were urging something, or proposing something. Then he laughed. Maeve looked at her screen. There was half a letter on it, asking why London Energy had abruptly cancelled the direct-debit mandate for the firm’s electricity bills. Would such a letter be any less tedious to compose or type on a new computer with a flat screen edged in silver? By the same token, was Russell’s disappointment in his present personal circumstances going to be mitigated by tricking out his working life with a deliberate renewal of animation and commitment? You could only admire the man for trying, you could only commend him for attempting to fashion something he could live with out of something he really didn’t want, but you couldn’t let him fool himself, not if you’d worked for Russell as long as Maeve had. She looked again at the closed door. She couldn’t – and she wouldn’t – let him delude himself that a new computer would change a single thing.

Vivien laid three heavy books of fabric samples out on her white bed. The woman who ran the local interior-design shop had said pointedly that, while it was difficult to advise precisely on the changes Vivien was after without seeing the room, she herself thought that a strong neutral colour, such as tobacco or anthracite, often helped to make an all-white room less, well, bridal. She suggested plain linen curtains and possibly a valance for the bed, with maybe a dark alpaca throw and a bedside rug with a masculine feel, edged, say, in leather. Vivien opened her mouth to say that she didn’t want brown or grey in her bedroom, or a masculine feel for that matter, and then remembered why she was in the shop in the first place, and closed it again.

‘It’s not that I don’t like it,’ Max had said, lying against a pile of her white broderie anglaise pillows. ‘It’s just that I don’t feel very comfortable in it. I feel like the lodger’.

Vivien giggled. She was sitting at her dressing table -something she had only acquired after Max’s departure -and was watching him watching her in the mirror, like someone in a movie.

‘Well, you are’.

Max immediately looked dejected.

He said in a small voice, ‘Am I?’

Vivien considered. She had already persuaded him out of the gold chain round his neck (on the grounds that she hadn’t given it to him) and felt that possibly that was sufficient evidence of having the upper hand, for one day.

She smiled at him in the mirror.

‘Just teasing’.

Max said, ‘It’s a beautiful room, doll. I mean it. You’ve done it beautifully. It’s just that it makes me feel a bit out of place’. He grinned at her. ‘A bit hairy’.

She turned slowly on the dressing-table stool and crossed her legs.

‘I’m not changing the bed—’ He winked.

‘I’m not asking you to’.

She waved a hand towards the curtains.

‘Maybe those—’

Max looked at the curtains. They were heavy white voile, looped up with white cords. They reminded him of the day his sister got confirmed, and he managed -no, was allowed – to put his hand up the skirt of her friend Sheila’s white confirmation dress.

He said, ‘That’d help, doll’.

Vivien stood up. She was wearing satin backless mules he’d bought her and walking in them required concentration.

She said, ‘What do you suggest instead?’ Max looked at the curtains a bit longer, and then he said, ‘Velvet would be nice’.

‘Velvet!’

‘Yes. Why not?’

‘You,’ Vivien said, ‘are stuck in the seventies’. ‘I was young then—’ ‘I know’.

‘And in some ways,’ Max said, transferring his gaze from the curtains to Vivien’s feet, ‘I haven’t grown up at all’. He grinned again and sat up a little straighter. ‘Luckily for you’. Now, looking at the blank squares of linen laid out on her bed, Vivien tried to recall the warm feeling of acquiescence that had induced her to think of changing her bedroom. Max hadn’t actually called it ‘our’ bedroom but, with his clothes in the cupboards and his aftershave on her bathroom shelf, she knew she had rather conceded exclusive possession. And sometimes – often even – that shared occupancy was wonderful, leaving her with a glow that lasted long enough to enable her to look with pity at women who came into the bookshop to buy novels to beguile solitary evenings. It was extraordinary not to be in that position any more, the position of buying single salmon steaks and half-bottles of wine and four-roll packs of lavatory paper. But there was also some little reservation too, some small but unmistakable loss of freedom, the freedom to have gauzy white curtains instead of plain dark ones that wouldn’t, as Max said while they were taking rather a riotous shower together, make a red-blooded man feel like a fairy.

Vivien turned her back on the fabric samples and went across the landing to her guest room. Even when Rosa occupied it, it felt like Vivien’s guest room because although Rosa had a lot of possessions and was hardly tidy, she had managed, all the time she was there, to convey the sense that her living there was impermanent and therefore superficial. Max, however, had colonised the room. He had given up – ‘I only want to be with you, Vivi’ – his large flat in Barnes and, despite the fact that all his furniture and a lot of his possessions had gone into store, he had still managed to arrive at the cottage in Richmond with an astonishing number of things. Vivien’s guest room had vanished, almost completely, under piles of boxes and bags, sliding heaps of clothes on hangers, small mountains of shoes and sports kit. Some of it, Vivien thought, was familiar, but much of it, most of it really, was not. She took a little breath. The room now smelled of Max, of his aftershave. Close to her feet was a new tennis racket in a sleek black cover and a pair of tan suede driving loafers with studded backs. Vivien had never seen either of them before. She gave a little shiver of excitement. She had got Max back, certainly, and a lot of him was known of old. But there were other aspects that weren’t so known, that were changed, new almost. She glanced down at the driving shoes. They looked Italian. It was, she thought with a little internal skip of pleasure, like having a lover in the house.

It had not occurred to Rosa that, in a household of five people, she would ever find herself alone. When pondering the implications of trailing home with all her worldly goods squashed, depressingly, into black bin bags, at the shameful age of twenty-six, she had consoled herself by thinking that there would always, at least, be company. She would not, as she had in the cottage in Richmond, spend evenings on the sofa eating the wrong things out of boredom while watching programmes on television she had absolutely no recollection of next day.

Yet here she was, six days into being at home again, mooning round the kitchen by herself on a Tuesday evening, watched by Arsie from his position next to the fruit bowl, with a kind of knowing pity. Edie and Lazlo were at the theatre, Russell had gone to a reception somewhere and Matthew was having dinner with a colleague from work. It wasn’t simply that they were all out that was upsetting Rosa, but that no one had seemed to notice that she would be on her own. Of course, it wasn’t reasonable to expect a family of working adults to behave like a family of school-aged children, but reasonableness, Rosa realised, was not top of her reaction list just now. It would have made all the difference – all the difference, she was sure – if Edie had left the briefest of notes about something in the fridge for Rosa’s supper, or something she’d noticed that Rosa might like to read or watch. She couldn’t help resentfully noticing, either, that Edie rather clucked round the boys at breakfast. Did you have to be a boy, then, to get maternal attention? Was there something extra abject about being a girl who hadn’t coped with the outside world? Rosa made an angry lunge for an apple from the fruit bowl, and Arsie followed her movement with disapproval.

What added to the sense of disorientation, she decided, was that the kitchen itself was so very much the same. She could remember that blue paint going up on the walls and Edie madly machining the striped curtains on the kitchen table, so eager to see the effect of them hanging up that she had never finished the hems. The dresser was so much a fixture it had almost grown into the wall behind it, the table and chairs she’d known all her life, also the yellow pottery sugar bowl, the mismatched mugs, the Spanish ceramic jar of wooden spoons, the over-zealous toaster, the little red-handled paring knife, which was the only one that really cut anything – oh, it was all so achingly, deeply familiar, but managed, simultaneously, to be disturbingly alien because the life lived in it had changed. Rosa had been away five years, and in five years the kitchen table had stopped being a family altar and reverted to being a kitchen table. This room, this house, this street had stopped, in essence, being her home, and turned itself, slightly chillingly, into merely the place where she grew up.

She took her apple and dawdled across the hall to the sitting room. Unlike Vivien, Edie was impervious to crushed cushions, just as she was impervious to piles of old newspapers and magazines. The sitting room looked as if several people had simply walked out and left it at the end of a day. Rosa leaned in the doorway, chewing, and wondered whether anyone would notice if she shook up the sofa cushions and removed discarded papers. If they did they would no doubt tease her and make her cross. If they didn’t, she would have done it for nothing and that would equally make her cross. Was it, in any case, her sitting room any more? If this was now her parents’ house, what level of domestic responsibility would constitute interference? You could hardly, after all, as a rent-paying adult, see ‘helping’ your mother the way you had when you were twelve. She and Edie would always be mother and daughter, but the relationship was no longer one of dependency and lunch boxes. Rosa threw her apple core accurately into the wicker waste-paper basket by the fireplace and took her shoulder away from the doorframe. Edie’s sitting room was no longer automatically her daughter’s affair.

She turned away and began to trudge up the stairs. She had anticipated a small feeling of triumph in occupying Ben’s bedroom – the bedroom of the cherished baby, after all, right opposite his parents and significantly larger than either her or Matthew’s bedroom on the top floor. But the reality had been rather a disappointment. Ben’s room might be larger, but the view wasn’t as good as from higher up, and it wasn’t as private. The plumbing from the bathroom next door banged and gurgled and the door had a way of swinging quietly open as if she were stealthily being spied on. Also, the décor was dismal and the curtains ran off the rail with alacrity if drawn without the utmost delicacy. Three months ago, Rosa would have shocked herself if she’d confessed to liking the carefully considered feminine comforts of her aunt’s spare bedroom, but now, secretly, she thought of them with a certain wistfulness. Ben’s bedroom, even overlaid with her colourful and characterful possessions, remained resolutely Ben’s bedroom. It wasn’t home and it certainly wasn’t hers.

She went on slowly up the stairs to the top floor. Matthew’s bedroom door was closed. Rosa opened it a little and put her head inside. The room looked much as it had always looked, rather careless and impersonal. Matthew’s suits, hanging on an extension rail, attached to his cupboard, looked like dressing-up clothes. There was a towel thrown over a chair back and an American thriller by his bed. Rosa closed the door again. Poor

Matthew, poor Matt. She put her forehead against the door. The room had reeked of stoicism, of someone bearing something painful and inevitable. It had seemed to Rosa more like a cell than a room.

Lazlo’s door was half open. Rosa gave the door a push and looked in. Then she moved forward, stepping across a new rug on the floor, noticing a Ghosts poster on the wall and a copy of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame on the chest where she’d kept her china-shoe collection. Lazlo, she decided, was very tidy. The tracksuit on his chair was folded, the boots on the floor in a pair, the rug on his bed straight. Rosa went over to the Ghosts poster pinned to the wall and examined it. It was strange to see her mother photographed by someone who didn’t see her as a mother, didn’t know her as a person. The portrayal of Edie as Mrs Alving gave Rosa a queer little rush of possessiveness, a desire to say loudly to all those people who simply saw her as an actress giving a fine performance, ‘Excuse me, but this is my mother! She wasn’t used to feeling like this, it wasn’t what she expected to feel, it was, in fact, as unbidden a feeling as the one of pure admiration that had overcome her when she saw Lazlo on stage, when she saw the way he and Edie could make her, for a while, utterly believe in something that bore no relation to the people they were in real life. Looking at their two profiles now, pinned up on the wall by Lazlo’s bed so that she could get close enough to touch their faces with her own face if she chose, Rosa felt herself consumed by a desire to be part of whatever it was they had, whatever it was they could make between them.

She turned sideways and looked down at the bed. Then she bent and put a hand on it. His bed. Her bed. She stood on one leg and then the other and pushed her shoes off. Then she sat down on the side of the bed. It yielded just as it always had, just as she expected it to. She swung her legs up sideways and lowered her head carefully on to the pillow.

‘Goldilocks,’ Rosa said, with a giggle, to the empty room.

Naomi said she didn’t want a curry. It then transpired that she didn’t want a pizza either, or pasta. Or Chinese. By then they were, for some reason, standing outside Walthamstow Town Hall, and Naomi was facing away from Ben, and staring at the fountain in front of it as if it was as absorbing as a television.

‘What then,’ Ben said. He had his hand in his pockets.

Naomi raised her eyes from the fountain and gazed instead at the door to the Assembly Hall.

‘I’m not really hungry’.

Ben sighed. The quotation chiselled into the stone over the Assembly Hall door read: ‘Fellowship is life and lack of fellowship is death’.

He said, ‘You mean you’re pissed off with me’.

Naomi didn’t move.

‘Course I am. Upsetting my mum like that’.

Ben waited a moment, and then he said, ‘I didn’t upset her. I didn’t say anything to her. It was you that upset her’.

‘I had to tell her,’ Naomi said, ‘didn’t I?’

Ben said nothing.

‘I had to tell her you wanted me to move into a flat with you, didn’t I?’

‘But you hadn’t said yes—’

‘I had to tell her I was thinking about it. I had to’. She gave Ben a brief, withering glance. ‘I tell her everything’. Ben gave a gusty sigh. ‘You’ll have to move out one day’.

‘Why?’

‘Well, no one lives with their parents for ever. They can’t. It isn’t normal’.

‘Are you,’ Naomi said sharply, ‘calling my mum and me not normal?’

‘No, of course not, but you’ll get married one day—’ ‘Not to you’.

‘And you’ll want a gaff of your own. Everyone does. I do. I want a place with you’.

Naomi lifted one bare arm and inspected its immaculate surface.

‘I can’t leave her’.

‘What, never?’

‘Since Dad went off, it’s just been me and her. We’ve done fine’. ‘I know’.

‘We’ve done fine having you there. She’s done a lot for you. She’s made you welcome’.

Ben said, slightly shamefacedly, ‘I know’. ‘It’s not like your family—’ ‘I know’.

‘We haven’t got all that money, a big house—’

‘I know’.

‘I’m all she’s got, Ben’.

Ben took off his beanie and scratched his head. He said, ‘Don’t you want to live with me?’ She gave a tiny shrug. ‘Don’t know’.

He said, with some energy, ‘I thought you liked me’.

‘I do’.

‘Well, then’.

Naomi put her arm down again and turned to face him for the first time.

‘Liking someone isn’t the same as living with them. I’ve never lived with anyone except Mum. How do I know what it’ll be like, living with you?’

Ben opened his mouth to say, cheekily, ‘Suck it and see,’ and thought instantly better of it.

He said instead, ‘Come on, Naomi, you know what

I’m like’.

‘I know what you’re like in my place. I don’t know what you’d be like in our own, without Mum there’.

He gave an exasperated little laugh.

‘Well, how will you ever know if you won’t even try?’

‘I haven’t said I won’t try—’

‘Well, you haven’t said you will’.

Naomi looked down at her white miniskirt, at the toes of her sharp white shoes.

She said, ‘Why can’t we go on as we are?’

‘Because—’

‘Well?’

‘Because I’m getting a bit – cramped in there’.

‘Cramped?’

Ben rolled his beanie into a tube and beat lightly against his chest with it.

‘I need – to live without parents. Without anyone’s parents’.

Naomi put her chin up.

‘Mum’s my best friend’.

‘She’s still your mum’.

Naomi suddenly looked acutely miserable.

‘I can’t imagine being without her—’

Ben said slowly, ‘Could you imagine being without me?’

She stared at him. ‘What d’you mean?’

‘I mean,’ he said, ‘that if you can’t leave your mum, and I can’t stay at yours any more, would you choose your mum?’

‘You’re a bastard,’ Naomi said.

‘No, I—’

‘You’re a selfish bastard. You’re a typical man, selfish bastard—’

He took a step forward and put his arms round her. She put her own arms up, elbows against his chest, and held him off. ‘Get off me—’ ‘I didn’t mean it,’ Ben said. ‘Get off!’

‘I didn’t mean it. I shouldn’t have said that. I shouldn’t have asked you to choose—’ She relaxed a fraction.

‘I’m sorry,’ Ben said.

She tipped her smooth fair head against him. ‘I’m sorry,’ Ben said again. ‘It’s only because I like you. It’s only because I want to be alone with you’. Naomi snuffled faintly against his T-shirt. ‘It’s got nothing to do with not liking your mum—’ ‘OK’.

Ben bent his head so that he could see part of her profile.

He said, ‘I expect I’m a bit jealous’.

‘OK’.

‘I’m sorry I started this’. Naomi looked up. Ben looked at her mouth. She said in a whisper, ‘I don’t know what I’ll do about Mum—’

He tightened his hold. ‘Nothing for now’. ‘She’ll go spare—’

Ben looked up and across the road. A burger van was trundling slowly along Forest Road towards the turning to Shernhall Street.

He said, looking after it, ‘Hungry?’

Naomi sighed.

‘Starving’.

‘Burger then?’

She stirred in his arms, then began to straighten her clothes. He watched her brush imaginary specks off her tight little T-shirt.

‘No,’ Naomi said, ‘I’d really fancy a curry’.

It had been a bad audience. From the moment she stepped on stage, Edie could tell that the audience was going to be unhelpful, was going to hold itself at a distance and need to be wooed. By the end of the first act, she’d decided that it was not just unhelpful but obnoxious, laughing in all the wrong places, rustling and coughing. She’d wanted to lean over the footlights and suggest they all took themselves off to a nice easy musical instead.

‘It’s just as well,’ she said to Lazlo on the journey home, ‘that audiences don’t know the power they have. I was rubbish tonight because they were rubbish’.

Lazlo didn’t argue. He sat hunched on the night bus beside her and stared at the painted metal ceiling.

‘Are you tired?’

He nodded.

‘That’s what a bad audience does. Exhausts you, damn them, and all for nothing’.

When they reached the house, Lazlo didn’t go upstairs, as he often did, but trailed into the kitchen behind her and leaned against the cupboards.

There was a note from Russell on the table.

‘Bed. Fuddled’.

Edie gave a little exclamation and dropped the note in the bin. She went over to the sink to fill the kettle.

‘Tea?’

‘Actually,’ Lazlo said, ‘I’m a bit hungry’. There was a beat, and then Edie said, ‘You know where the bread bin is’.

‘Yes,’ Lazlo said. ‘Sorry’.

‘Bread in the bin, eggs in the fridge, fruit in the bowl’.

‘Yes,’ Lazlo said.

She turned to look at him over her shoulder.

‘Well?’

He said sheepishly, ‘I don’t know how to turn the cooker on’.

‘Goddamnit,’ Edie said, hunched theatrically over the kettle. ‘Sorry—’

She turned round. ‘Can you scramble eggs?’

‘Sort of—’

She regarded him for a moment.

Then she said, sighing, ‘Well, I suppose there’s nobody to blame but myself’. She looked round the kitchen and waved an arm expansively. ‘Nobody’s cleared up in here, I shouldn’t think anybody’s straightened the sitting room, I expect everybody has rolled upstairs and into bed—’

‘Look,’ Lazlo said, ‘I’ll just have bread and cheese’. Edie rubbed her eyes.

‘I shouldn’t take a bad evening out on you’. ‘I don’t mind—’

‘It’s just,’ she said, looking round, ‘that there seems to be more of everything than there was. More of everyone. And less of me’.

Lazlo began to move towards the fridge.

‘Would you like a sandwich?’

‘No thanks’.

‘I’ll make a sandwich,’ Lazlo said, ‘and take it up to my room’.

Edie waited for her customary sandwich-making impulse to take over. It didn’t. She thought of Russell asleep upstairs, of Matthew, of Rosa in Ben’s room with the door slightly, disconcertingly, open. All these images were, for some reason, only irritating.

She shook her head.

‘Sorry, Lazlo. I’ve been really wrong-footed this evening’.

He was laying slices of white bread out on the table in a long, even line.

He said, ‘It doesn’t matter. They were horrible’.

Edie moved two steps to give his shoulder a pat.

‘I’m going to watch television. Add rubbish to rubbish’.

‘OK—’

‘Can you turn the lights out?’ ‘Of course’.

‘Sorry,’ Edie said again. Lazlo began to slice cheese. ‘Night, night’.

He didn’t look up. ‘Night,’ he said.

Lazlo piled his sandwiches on a plate, filled a glass with milk, selected a banana and put it in his pocket. Then he dusted the crumbs off the table, put his spreading knife in the sink and looked around him. There were a number of things lying around that, had they been his, he would have arranged and ordered, but they were not his, they were Edie’s and Russell’s, and thus must be respectfully left where they were. As far as Lazlo could see, the first rule of etiquette about living in someone else’s house was to live in it as tracklessly as possible. Gratitude expressed in improvements, however minor, could so easily be interpreted as criticism.

Lazlo turned out the kitchen lights and carried his plate and glass across the hall. Edie had not closed the sitting-room door, and he could hear the squawk of the television. Arsie was sitting on the stairs, waiting for Edie. He did not acknowledge Lazlo, by the merest flicker, as he went past. The first-floor landing was in dimness. Russell and Edie’s bedroom door closed, Rosa’s slightly ajar, giving on to a deeper darkness. Lazlo didn’t even glance towards that blackness, didn’t let his imagination stray for one second to the image of Rosa lying asleep eight feet away, her red hair tossed on the pillow.

Matthew had, as usual, considerately left the light on, on the top landing. Lazlo stopped at the foot of the stairs, put down his plate and glass, and took his boots off, setting them to one side of the bottom step. Then he picked up his plate and glass again and went silently up the stairs in his socks. Matthew’s door, also as usual, was closed. His was open. He bent, in the doorway, to set his glass down and free up one hand for the light switch and, as he stooped, he caught sight of something unusual about his bed. He put the sandwiches down too, and tiptoed a little closer. Rosa, fully dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, which had ridden up to expose a few inches of pale skin, was lying on his bed, on her back, fast asleep.

Lazlo moved quietly over to the wooden chair in the corner where he had hung his bath towel, lifted the towel up, and carried it across to drape carefully down Rosa’s torso. She didn’t stir. Then Lazlo stepped elaborately back across the carpet to where he had left his supper, and transferred it to a spot beside the small armchair, close to the head of the bed. He returned to the door to close it until only a narrow line of light fell into the room, and then he sat down in the chair, next to the sleeping Rosa, and began, as noiselessly as possible, to eat.