Second Honeymoon

Chapter Fifteen

Barney’s parents sent so many lilies to the hospital after their grandson was born that Kate had to ask the nurse on duty to put them outside the door.

‘I can’t breathe, with them in here—’

The nurse, who came from Belfast, said she quite agreed and anyway they reminded her of funerals.

‘People get so overexcited about a baby. They just want to send the biggest thing they can find’.

Kate leaned cautiously sideways – they’d given her a rubber ring to sit on, to ease the discomfort of the stitches – and peered into the Perspex crib moored beside her bed. The baby, swaddled as neatly and tightly as a chrysalis, slept with newborn absorption.

‘I’m pretty overexcited myself’.

The nurse paused, holding the lilies.

‘You’ve every right to be. That’s a lovely baby’.

‘I’m in love,’ Kate said, ‘I know I am. I’ve never felt like this before in my life’.

‘Give me babies for love any time,’ the nurse said. ‘Babies don’t let you down. And you know they’re going to get smarter’.

‘You are amazing,’ Kate said to the baby. ‘You are the most amazing baby there ever was’.

He slept on, wholly committed to his own fierce agenda of survival.

‘Well,’ the nurse said, ‘I think you’ve a visitor’.

Kate turned awkwardly and looked over her shoulder. Rosa was standing in the doorway, holding a pineapple.

She gestured at the great vase of lilies in the nurse’s hands.

‘I thought you might have enough of those—’ Kate abruptly felt rather tearful. She put an unsteady hand out.

‘Rose—’

Rosa put the pineapple down on the end of Kate’s bed.

‘They’re supposed to symbolise hospitality. So I thought that might stretch to welcome’.

‘Oh Rose,’ Kate said, sniffing, ‘he’s so perfect—’

Rosa bent and kissed Kate. Then she moved round the bed and bent over the crib.

‘Oh my God,’ she said, ‘he is minute’.

‘No he’s not, he’s huge. He was almost eight pounds’.

Rosa flicked her a glance.

‘You poor girl. You don’t weigh much more yourself’. Kate put a finger out and touched the damp dark spikes of the baby’s hair. ‘Isn’t he wonderful?’

‘Yes’.

‘I can’t believe it. When I’m not snivelling, I just hang over him and breathe him in’.

Rosa reached down to touch his solid little mound of body.

‘Does he cry?’

‘Like anything,’ Kate said proudly. ‘And – um, feeding him?’

‘Getting better. It’s not very easy but I am so determined to do it’.

Rosa straightened up.

She said, ‘This is all a bit life-changing, isn’t it—’ ‘Telling me’.

‘One minute you’re a couple pleasing yourselves and the next minute—’ ‘Eleven hours, actually’. ‘Everything’s changed for ever’. Kate was still gazing at the baby. ‘I can’t believe he wasn’t ever not here’. ‘Is Barney moonstruck?’ ‘Completely,’ Kate said. ‘Bought me a ring—’

‘A ring?’

‘An eternity ring’.

‘Heavens,’ Rosa said, ‘how very – established’. She sat down on the edge of Kate’s bed and looked at her. ‘Are you OK?’

Kate pushed her hair behind one ear.

‘Apart from crying and worrying about feeding and being in agony in the sitting department, I am ecstatic, thank you’.

Rosa said seriously, ‘He’s very lovely, you know’.

Kate began to cry in earnest. She hunted about blindly behind her for a tissue.

‘Here,’ Rosa said, holding one out. ‘Sorry—’

‘What d’you mean, sorry?’ ‘All this crying—’

‘I thought you were supposed to cry’. Kate blew her nose.

‘Talk to me’. ‘What about?’

‘About the outside world. About something not to do with the baby, something that won’t make me cry’. Rosa looked back at the baby.

‘I thought one of the best things about a baby was that you didn’t have to think about the outside world’.

Kate blew again. She gave Rosa a nudge through the bedclothes.

‘Do as you’re told’.

Well,’ Rosa said, ‘Vivien and Max are playing Blind Date – she has very blonde new highlights – Dad has discovered work and I am – oh God, Kate, something so funny!’

Kate bent back towards the baby.

‘What?’

‘I went to sleep on Lazlo’s bed’. Kate’s head whipped round. ‘You what?’

‘Well, the house was empty and it is my bedroom after all, and I just lay on my bed for a second and next thing I knew it was three in the morning and I was still there and he was asleep beside me on the floor’.

Kate sat bolt upright and winced. ‘Ow. Ow! What did you do?’

‘Got up,’ Rosa said, ‘really stealthily. He’d put a towel over me—’

‘That was so sweet—’

‘So I put it over him and tiptoed downstairs’. ‘And next morning?’ Rosa looked away. She said, ‘I haven’t seen him since’. ‘Have you told your mother?’ Rosa turned her head back. ‘No. I haven’t told anyone. Why should I?’ Kate screwed her tissue up and put it on her bedside locker.

‘When you do see Lazlo again, what will you say?’ ‘Oh,’ Rosa said grandly, ‘I’ll say don’t get any ideas. What else would I say?’

Lazlo was in the bathroom. He had been in the bathroom, Matthew calculated, for twenty-eight minutes. What any man could find to do in a bathroom for twenty-eight minutes was beyond Matthew, especially a man whose life seemed dedicated, in a manner that was unfairly but unquestionably irritating, to being no trouble to anyone. If he was ill, there was a perfectly good second lavatory downstairs. If he was poncing himself up, he could do that all day while Matthew was at work and he, Lazlo, was doing whatever actors did or didn’t do while waiting to go to work. Matthew bent his head towards the hinge of the bathroom door. Silence. He raised his fist and thumped the panels. ‘Hey there!’

There was a pause, and then a slight scuffle and then Lazlo opened the door. He was fully dressed and his eyes looked pink.

He said at once, ‘Sorry’.

‘You OK?’

Lazlo nodded. He stepped aside so that Matthew could go past him. He didn’t even seem to be holding a towel.

Matthew wondered, fleetingly and awkwardly, if he’d been crying.

He said gruffly, ‘Got to get to work—’ ‘Yes,’ Lazlo said, ‘of course’.

He moved away from Matthew across the landing towards the stairs.

Matthew looked after him.

He called, ‘No big deal, you know!’

Lazlo turned briefly and gave a wan smile. Then he began to climb the stairs to the top floor. Matthew shut the bathroom door and locked it. Someone – Rosa probably – had left a towel on the floor and there were red hairs – Rosa definitely – plastered to the side of the basin. The shelf above the basin and the ledge around the bath were now crammed with bottles, so crammed that several had fallen into the bath and were lying there in the shallow pool of water left by the last person’s shower. The shower curtain – was this the last bathroom in civilisation to have a horrible plastic shower curtain still? – clung to the tiled wall in clammy folds, and the plug to the basin, which Matthew attached to its chain a dozen times since returning home, had become detached again and was lying in the soap dish.

Matthew took off his bathrobe and attempted to hang it behind the door. The hook on the door, never large enough, now bore his father’s bathrobe, his mother’s cotton kimono – that must be fifteen or twenty years old now – some peculiar oriental garment of Rosa’s and a large towel mounded on top. The cork-seated chair in the corner was piled with clean but unironed laundry, several newspapers and a telephone directory. The towel rail, never adequate for a family of five in the first place, was draped with a large, drying duvet cover.

Matthew let out an exasperated breath.

‘Nowhere in this whole bloody house even to put down a towel’.

He dropped his robe and towel on the floor and yanked the shower curtain rattling along the length of the bath. It was patterned with starfish. It had always been patterned with starfish but for some reason this morning, the starfish looked completely unbearable. He leaned down, turned the bath taps on and pressed the chrome button that would divert the water through the shower-head. The button sprang out again and ice-cold water deluged Matthew’s feet. He swore and pressed again and ice-cold water cascaded on to his back.

Someone thumped on the door.

‘Sod off!’ Matthew shouted.

‘I need a shower,’ Edie called.

Matthew turned the taps off and climbed out of the bath.

‘There’s no hot water—’ ‘Nonsense’.

Matthew bent and retrieved his towel. He wound it round his waist and unlocked the door. Edie was standing outside in her nightgown and a long purple cardigan.

He said distinctly, ‘There is no hot water’. Edie looked at his towel.

‘Why all this modesty? I’m your mother, for goodness’ sake. I’ve seen it all before, I’ve—’

‘I can’t have a shower,’ Matthew said. ‘You can’t have a shower. No one can, unless they want it stone cold’.

Edie pushed the sleeves of her cardigan up.

‘Who’s taken all the water?’

‘I don’t know,’ Matthew said. ‘Dad, Rosa, Lazlo—’

Edie peered past Matthew into the bathroom.

‘Look at the state of it—’

‘Yes’.

‘It’s like living in a student flat’.

Matthew said nothing. He was aware, suddenly, of how uncomfortable he was, standing there in nothing but a bath towel with his mother three feet away in nothing but a nightie.

He said, ‘Doesn’t matter. I’ll get a shower at the gym’.

Edie stared at him.

‘Why?’

‘Because I want a shower and there’s no hot water here and there is there’.

Edie said loudly, ‘Are you intending to leave this bathroom looking like this?’

Matthew hesitated, then he said childishly, ‘It’s not my mess’.

‘Really?’

‘I keep all my things in my bedroom—’ ‘But you use the bathroom—’ ‘Of course’.

‘You all use the bathroom. But none of you seems prepared to pick up so much as a sock’.

Matthew wondered if Lazlo could hear them.

‘I pick up my socks, Mum. I’m sure Lazlo picks up his’.

‘Don’t be so idiotically literal,’ Edie said crossly.

‘Then don’t be unfair’.

‘Unfair?’

‘Yes,’ Matthew said.

Edie wrapped the edges of her cardigan tightly around her and took a step towards him.

‘Matthew,’ she said, ‘I am working, in case it’s escaped your notice. I am working six nights and two afternoons a week. If this play transfers, I shall be working like that for months. I am also, for some reason, expected to shop and cook and clean for five adults, never mind the laundry. How dare you suggest that lending a hand isn’t your responsibility?’

Matthew said, ‘It isn’t like it used to be’.

‘What isn’t?’

‘Living here. Living as a family’. ‘Well of course it isn’t,’ Edie said. ‘You’re twice the size and paying taxes’.

‘Exactly’. ‘Exactly what?’

‘Mum,’ Matthew said patiently, ‘we’re paying to live here’.

There was a short pause.

Then Edie said with incredulity, ‘You mean that absolves you from being obliged to contribute anything except money?’

‘No’.

‘What then?’

Matthew said desperately, ‘Oh get a cleaner, then. Get someone to do the ironing. Get the hot water fixed. Stop – stop being such a martyr’.

Edie watched him for a moment.

Then she said sharply, ‘Go to your gym, then’.

‘It isn’t easy,’ Matthew said. ‘None of this is. It isn’t easy for anyone. We’re all too old to live like this’.

‘Only if you want it to be like a five-star hotel’.

Matthew looked back at the bathroom. His robe was still lying on the floor. He felt a wave of rage and hopelessness flood through him.

‘I wish,’ he said bitterly.

Ruth chose a French sleepsuit for Kate’s baby. It was the only one she could find that wasn’t an unsuitable colour for a baby and that didn’t have a plasticised cartoon character stuck to the front. Instead, it was white, with a small bear outlined in grey, positioned where a breast pocket might have been, crowned with a delicate galaxy of stars. She took a long time choosing it, mooning along a rack of tiny socks and garments labelled ‘0-3 mois’ in a daze.

In addition to the sleepsuit, she bought Kate a bottle of bath oil and a candle in a glass tumbler. She had seen in a magazine at the hairdresser’s a photograph of a mother and a baby in a candlelit bath together, both, naturally, extremely beautiful and deeply contented, and the image had struck Ruth as so completely desirable that it had made her want to cry. She had taken all the presents back to her flat and wrapped them in tissue and ribbons with elaborate care and then sat looking at the package and wondering if she was, in fact, overdoing it for someone she knew as little as she knew Kate. The answer was that yes, she probably was overdoing it but the need to overdo it overshadowed even the possibility of embarrassment. The package sat on the table by the window of her sitting room for almost a week before she had the courage to take it to the hospital and, when she did finally get there, she was told that Mrs Ferguson and the baby had gone home three days ago and hadn’t the family let her know?

Ruth took the package back to her office and sat it on her desk where she could see it. It felt extremely important that she should get it to Kate, extremely important that she should see Kate, but she – she who was all boldness in her professional life – felt a disconcerting diffidence about telephoning. Supposing Kate was feeding the baby? Supposing Kate didn’t immediately recognise her voice and said, ‘Oh – Ruth!’ in that tone of voice people use when they are recovering their social balance? She looked at the baby package again. Then she looked back at her screen which, among all the work emails, showed three unanswered ones from Laura in Leeds. She hadn’t even opened them. They would, she suspected, be about weddings and washing machines and she felt no desire to hear anything about either. She took a deep breath and dialled Kate’s number.

It rang and rang and just as she was about to ring off Kate said breathlessly, ‘Hello?’

‘Kate—’ ‘Yes’.

‘It’s – Ruth’.

There was a fraction of a pause.

Then Kate said, ‘Oh – Ruth!’

Ruth swallowed.

‘Were you feeding the baby?’

‘I wouldn’t answer the phone if I was doing that,’ Kate said. ‘When I’m feeding him, the world goes away. It has to’.

‘I was wondering—’

‘Yes?’

‘Could I – could I come and see him?’ ‘Oh,’ Kate said, and then, in a different tone, ‘Of course—’

‘If it isn’t a bother—’

‘No,’ Kate said, ‘of course not’.

‘After work perhaps—’

‘Yes,’ Kate said, ‘yes. That’d be good. Come after work. What day is it?’ ‘Thursday’.

‘Come on Monday,’ Kate said. ‘Barney’s back early’. She paused and then she said, ‘It’s nice of you to ring’.

‘I wanted to,’ Ruth said. She looked at the package again. ‘I really did’.

Russell intercepted Rosa on the stairs, her arms full of the sheets she had just stripped from her bed.

‘Rose—’ ‘Yes’.

‘I wonder,’ Russell said in the voice of one about to make a philosophical proposition, ‘if you could take those to the launderette?’

Rosa stared at him.

‘What?’

‘Well,’ Russell said, ‘I think you heard me. In case you didn’t, I asked you, sensibly and courteously, if—’

‘Dad,’ Rosa said, ‘I’m going to put these in the machine myself, and then I’m going to take them out of the machine and put them in the dryer and when they are dry I’m going to take them upstairs again and put them back on my bed so that no one but me – I repeat, no one – will be inconvenienced by my washing my sheets’.

Russell sighed.

‘It isn’t that’.

‘What?’ Rosa said again.

‘It isn’t your self-sufficiency. It’s the number of loads going through the machine—’ ‘But it’s Saturday’.

‘Exactly. Two performances for your mother on a Saturday and everybody’s doing their washing and the kitchen is invisible under sheets and shirts’. ‘So Mum has sent you—’

‘No,’ Russell said, ‘I just watched her for ten minutes’. ‘And listened to her—’

‘And I thought she could do with a bit of a break on the laundry front at least’. Rosa considered.

‘I see’. ‘Good’.

‘So have you told Matthew and Lazlo to take their sheets to the launderette too?’

‘Unfortunately,’ Russell said, ‘Matthew has already put his sheets in, on what I gather is an unacceptably long cycle, and gone out. I am on my way to ask Lazlo the same favour as I’m asking you’.

Rosa looked down at the sheets in her arms.

‘I’ll ask him,’ she said nonchalantly.

Russell looked relieved.

‘Thank you’.

‘Dad?’

Russell, about to turn to descend the stairs, paused.

‘Yes?’

‘Why doesn’t Mum send all our sheets to the laundry?’

Russell hesitated. For a moment, Rosa thought he was going to say something, but then he simply gave a little shrug and started off downwards.

‘Just ask her,’ Rosa called.

Russell reached the foot of the stairs and she heard his feet crossing the hall and then the sound of the sitting-room door being firmly closed. She dropped her sheets on the landing and looked upwards. There was no sound from the top floor. She glanced at her watch. Eleven-fifteen. If Lazlo wasn’t up he should be: he had a matinee at two-thirty.

She went firmly up the stairs and banged on Lazlo’s door.

There was a small silence and then he said, ‘Yes?’ Rosa opened the door. ‘Only me’.

Lazlo was sitting in the small armchair, wearing jeans and a black shirt, with a book open on his lap. On the floor beside him was a bowl with a spoon in it and an empty mug.

Rosa gestured at the bowl.

‘Breakfast?’

Lazlo unfolded himself and stood up.

‘I brought it up here—’

‘Well,’ Rosa said, ‘you’re absolutely allowed’.

‘I thought I’d get myself out of the way’.

Rosa came further into the room and sat on the bed. She stretched her arms behind her, and leaned on her hands.

‘You’re hardly in it—’

Lazlo looked away. He put the book he’d been reading down on the bedside table. It was the Beckett play Rosa had noticed on the chest of drawers.

He said, quite firmly, ‘I don’t know about that’.

‘What do you mean?’

Lazlo wandered slowly round behind the armchair and leaned his shoulders against the wall. He put his hands into the pockets of his jeans.

‘I think it’s all too much for your mother. I think it’s too much for all of you. I think I’m literally the last straw’.

‘No, you’re not—’

‘It’s wearing your mother out,’ Lazlo said. ‘She should be keeping her energy for acting, not for worrying about whether she’s remembered to buy more milk. And I shouldn’t be in your room. It’s your bedroom’.

Rosa looked at the ceiling.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘that’.

Lazlo said nothing.

She turned her head, very slowly, to look at him. ‘Why did you cover me up with a towel?’ He shrugged.

He said, without returning her look, ‘I didn’t know what else to do with you’.

Rosa gave a little shout of laughter.

She said, ‘I didn’t come up here because I was missing my room. I came up here because it was trespassing. I came up for a bit of mischief’.

Lazlo gave a quick smile.

‘Really?’

‘Really. I was fed up with being alone in the house and I was just prowling about’. She sat up straighter and put her hands in her lap. ‘You’re not displacing me. Promise’.

He said awkwardly, ‘It’s not just that. It’s – well, you’re a family—’

‘Yes, we are, but we’re all in transition, we’re all in a rather temporary situation. We’re not going to stay like this’. ‘I could easily go,’ Lazlo said.

‘Where?’

He shrugged.

‘I can find a room. I’m always finding rooms’.

Rosa stood up.

‘Don’t go,’ she said.

He turned his head to look at her.

‘I don’t want you to go,’ Rosa said. ‘I like you being here. Don’t go’.

From the landing below there was the sound of some disturbance and then Edie’s voice came clearly up the stairwell.

‘Who left these bloody sheets here? I nearly broke my neck. Rosa? Rosa!’

Rosa put her finger to her lips. ‘You’d better go,’ Lazlo whispered. She shook her head. ‘Rosa!’ Edie yelled.

‘I’m not going,’ Rosa whispered, ‘and nor are you,’ and then she stepped right up to him and kissed him on the mouth.

‘I don’t know why she’s coming,’ Kate said irritably to Barney. ‘Do stop asking. I could hardly tell her not to, could I?’

‘I don’t know her—’

‘Well, I hardly do. But she sounded rather urgent, poor thing, and I—’

‘Why poor thing?’

‘She is poor thing. Because of Matthew. I expect in her mind she somehow thinks coming to see us and the baby—’

‘He’s called George’.

‘I’m not sure about that. I’m not sure about that at all. He’s just the baby to me because there is no other baby as far as I’m concerned so there’s no confusion’.

Barney pointed to the front of her T-shirt.

‘You’re leaking’.

Kate looked down.

‘Sometimes you are so like your father—’

‘No I’m not,’ Barney said. ‘My father would never have gone shopping for nipple pads and a breast pump like I did. He didn’t come near us until we were house-trained. I only said you were leaking in case you wanted to change before Ruth came’.

‘Or in case you’re embarrassed by the contrast between my stained T-shirt and her business suit’.

‘No,’ Barney said patiently. ‘In case you are’.

The doorbell rang. Kate began to dab at her chest with a tea towel.

‘I’ll go,’ Barney said.

She heard him go down the wooden floor of their small hallway, and then the click of the door being opened.

‘Hello!’ she heard Barney say, sounding just like his father. ‘You must be Ruth’.

They materialised together in the kitchen doorway, Ruth in a black trouser suit carrying a pale-blue gift bag frothing with ribbons. She put the bag on the kitchen table. ‘Hello, Kate’.

Kate put the tea towel down. ‘Nice of you to come—’

‘I just brought you and the baby something—’ ‘Thank you’.

Barney moved behind her and laid the flat of his hand against the fridge door.

‘Drink?’

Ruth shook her head. Her hair, Kate observed, was as flawlessly cut as ever. ‘Go on,’ Kate said.

‘No. Really no. Thank you. I’d just love a glimpse of the baby, if I could. That’s all—’

‘He’s called George,’ Barney said, taking a bottle of white wine out of the fridge. ‘After my father and grandfather’.

Kate smiled at Ruth.

‘He isn’t,’ she said, ‘but that needn’t trouble you. Come and see him’.

‘George,’ Barney said comfortably, pouring wine. ‘George Barnabas Maxwell Ferguson’.

‘All his family do that,’ Kate said. ‘They all have these great strings of names. Mental’.

Ruth shot a glance at Barney. He looked perfectly composed.

He said happily, picking up his wine glass, ‘He’s brilliant. You’ll see’.

Kate led Ruth across the hallway back towards the front door. The little room beside it was in darkness except for a nightlight lamp shaped like a crouched rabbit. The room smelled of something sweet and new and innocent.

‘Oh—’ Ruth said.

Kate tiptoed across to a handsome cot that stood against the far wall. In it was a carrycot, and in the carrycot the baby slept on his side under a blue knitted blanket stitched with letters of the alphabet.

Ruth stooped forward.

‘Oh,’ she said again.

‘I know,’ Kate said.

Ruth put her hands on to the rail of the cot and bent down towards the baby. ‘He’s perfect—’

‘Yes,’ Kate said, ‘he is’. She looked at Ruth’s tailored dark shoulders dipping into the cot.

‘May I – may I kiss him?’

‘Of course,’ Kate said, surprised. ‘Go ahead—’

Ruth’s sleek dark head went down over the baby’s for an instant, and then she raised it, but only a little. Kate looked at her hands on the cot rail. Even in the dimness of the room she could see that her knuckles were white with tension.

‘Ruth?’

Ruth’s head moved a little, as if she was trying to nod it.

‘Ruth, are you OK?’

‘Yes,’ Ruth said. Her voice sounded slightly strangled.

‘Yes, I’m fine’.

She straightened up slowly, and then she put the back of one hand up against one cheekbone and then the other.

Kate peered.

‘Ruth, you’re not OK, you’re crying—’ Ruth shook her head. ‘I’m fine, really’. Kate waited.

Ruth looked back into the cot. ‘He’s so lovely—’

‘Ruth—’

Ruth turned and looked straight at Kate. A strand of hair had glued itself lightly to her cheek. She gave Kate a small and hopeless smile.

‘I’m pregnant,’ she said.