Second Honeymoon

Chapter Sixteen

Vivien had decided that she would treat Edie to lunch. It would be on a Monday or a Friday so as to avoid her bookshop afternoons and Edie’s theatre ones, and she would take her to the rather nice restaurant in the basement of an upmarket clothes shop in Bond Street where they could, for once, Vivien told Max, lunch together like civilised sisters ought to do. Max was reading a sports-car magazine.

‘Bond Street?’

‘Yes,’ Vivien said. ‘Bond Street’.

Max shook the magazine slightly. He was still, Vivien noticed, wearing a bracelet.

‘I don’t quite see our Edie in Bond Street. Charlotte Street maybe, or Frith Street. But Bond Street—’

‘I like Bond Street,’ Vivien said.

Max eyed her. She was stretching across the sink to open the window behind it, and he could see every minute contour under her thin white trousers.

‘Whatever you say, doll’.

When Vivien telephoned Edie later in the day, Edie said, ‘Lunch?’ as if she’d never heard of it.

‘We ought to catch up,’ Vivien said. ‘We ought to have time together to catch up face to face instead of always talking on the telephone’.

‘You’re lucky to get that,’ Edie said. ‘I’ve hardly got time to brush my teeth at the moment’.

Vivien, admiring the pillar-box-red roses Max had brought her in their tall glass vase on the hall table, said she had booked a table in Bond Street.

‘Bond Street!’

‘Yes’.

‘I don’t know where that is’.

‘Edie,’ Vivien said, ‘this is my treat so please don’t behave like a child’.

‘Oo-er,’ Edie said childishly, ‘I haven’t got clothes for Bond Street’.

Vivien leaned forward and tweaked a rose.

‘Twelve-thirty Monday and no excuses’.

She put the telephone down and went back into the kitchen. Max was on his mobile when she came in and, when he saw her, he whipped it away from his ear and snapped it shut.

He grinned at her.

‘Caught red-handed—’

She affected not to notice.

‘Oh yes?’

‘A quick call to my bookie,’ Max said. ‘Thought I’d get away with it’. He put an arm out and patted her bottom. ‘And I nearly did’.

Edie arrived for lunch dressed entirely in black. She touched one earlobe as she sat down.

‘Even diamond studs. How Bond Street is that?’

Vivien put her reading glasses on.

‘Did Russell give you diamonds?’

‘No. Cheryl lent them to me. And they’re zircons’.

‘Zircons?’

‘Posh glass, I gather’. Edie looked round her. ‘This is very posh glass, isn’t it?’

‘Edie,’ Vivien said, ‘please don’t play-act all over the place and spoil our lunch’.

‘I can’t actually,’ Edie said, ‘I’m too tired’.

Vivien looked sympathetic.

‘Are you?’

Edie picked up the menu. ‘What do you think?’

‘I’ll only think wrong,’ Vivien said, ‘so why don’t you tell me?’

Edie said, staring at the menu, ‘I’m shattered. You’d think five adults living together would lead five fully adult lives’.

Vivien said, with a small smile, thinking of Max, ‘People like to be looked after’. ‘Including me’.

‘What about,’ Vivien said, summoning a waiter, ‘some ground rules?’

‘Like?’

‘Like do your own washing, clean your own room—’ Edie put the menu down.

She said tiredly, ‘It’s more than that, really. It’s five people wanting five people’s separate space’.

The waiter paused by their table. ‘Two glasses of champagne, please’.

‘Vivi—’

‘Why not?’

Edie looked at her carefully. ‘I suppose you do look – happy’.

‘I am’.

‘Good,’ Edie said. ‘Max behaving—’

‘Oh yes’.

‘You’re sure—’

‘Flowers,’ Vivien said. ‘Treats, naughty shoes’.

‘Oh Lord’.

‘It’s like being at the beginning again, only it’s better because I know what I’m doing this time’. Edie folded her arms. ‘Is he staying in?’

‘Oh yes,’ Vivien said. ‘If we aren’t out, it’s candles on the kitchen table. Why don’t you bring Russell down to supper?’

Edie sighed.

‘Because I only have one evening a week free at the moment’. Vivien gave a stifled giggle. ‘Oops! Silly me’.

Edie said nothing. The waiter came back with two flutes of champagne. Vivien picked hers up and held it out towards Edie. ‘Happy days. Why don’t you just throw some of them out?’

Edie stiffened.

‘Oh no’.

‘Why not?’

‘I love having them there. I love having the house full again. It’s what I wanted’. ‘Even if it’s killing you?’

Edie picked up her own glass and took a tiny swallow.

‘It isn’t killing me’. ‘But you said—’

‘Oh,’ Edie said, picking up the menu again and leaning back in her chair, ‘you know me. Always saying things I don’t mean for effect’.

Vivien looked at her. Then she looked down at her own menu.

‘What about the scallops?’ she said.

Because they cost him nothing and simultaneously made him feel he was achieving something, Lazlo had begun taking long walks in the afternoon, accompanied by Russell’s copy of The Blue Guide to London. He had walked to Noel Road, to look at the house Joe Orton had once lived in, and then to Duncan Terrace to imagine Charles Lamb going in and out with perhaps his sister Mary watching for him from an upstairs window. He had been several times to the Estorick Collection to gaze anxiously at the Italian Futurist paintings and wonder exactly what made them so alarming. He had walked round Aberdeen Park and Highbury Fields, he had looked at churches and chapels and libraries and prisons, he had followed rivers and canals and handsome Georgian and Victorian terraces. And when he returned, after two or three hours of walking and thinking, he was struck both by how glad he was to be home and by how painfully impermanent that home inevitably was.

What was particularly disconcerting about this state of affairs was that his life was, really, going better than it ever had. He might still be on close to Equity minimum wage because Ghosts was hardly a lavish production, but he had had excellent notices, two better-known agents were offering their services, and he was, thanks to Edie and her family, living in the least hand-to-mouth circumstances he had known. Even his student debt, incurred in order to go to drama school, was beginning to look less like an unwelcome, unavoidable companion for the next twenty years. Yet an anxiety possessed him about what would happen next, about whatever happened next being sure to be inferior to what was happening now, which made him despair of ever possessing the capacity to appreciate good things when they happened to turn up. He had never been consumed by this disquiet while living in Kilburn. Maybe it was because living in Kilburn, in those particular circumstances, had been so bad that there was comfort to be drawn from being very certain that nothing could ever be worse. And now, living as he was, he could remember and visualise the downward slide back to somewhere like Kilburn very easily, and that prospect could reduce him, to his shame, to clinging to the edge of the basin in Edie’s bathroom, as he had the other morning, and panicking at the sight of his own frightened face in the mirror above it. What Matthew must have thought, Lazlo couldn’t, and daren’t, imagine. He had looked at Lazlo with the sort of look Lazlo remembered the older boys at school giving the younger ones when they hurt themselves playing rugby. Matthew was obviously the sort of guy who knew what to do with his inner demons.

Not knowing what to do with his own was one of the reasons, Lazlo was sure, that made him able to play Osvald. Maybe that was also what made him so certain that if he couldn’t be an actor then he couldn’t be anything. Freddie Cass had said to him that acting wasn’t something you wanted to do, it was something you had to do. Lazlo had been very happy to hear that, had felt a relief and a gratitude at having his own need sanctioned, but it hadn’t, oddly, assuaged the feeling of being an outsider in some way, a person who could only fully engage with other people if he was pretending to be someone else.

Which is why it was so very astonishing to have been kissed by Rosa. At first, he had simply thought she was teasing him, that kissing him was just a little more of the mischief that had led her to lie on his bed and fall asleep there. But although she had been flirtatious and light-hearted before she kissed him, she was quite different when she stepped back again. She had looked, fleetingly and amazingly, as if she was dreading that he might laugh at her. She had even almost said sorry.

‘Typical Rosa—’

‘What?’

She’d looked away, pushing her hair back.

She muttered, ‘Always blundering in where she’s not wanted—’

He’d been in too much of a turmoil even to consider saying, ‘You are wanted’. Anyway, at that moment, would such a statement have been true? Was it true now? What, in fact, did he feel about being kissed by her? What had he felt when he found her lying, quite unselfconsciously, on his bed? He couldn’t believe how many walks were occupied in wondering about this. He couldn’t believe the miles he seemed able to cover while asking himself if this girl, whom he’d rather dismissed as spoiled and careless and unappreciative of the solid support of her background, was actually and appealingly something of a fellow wanderer.

He’d shaken his head at Rosa. He’d meant her to infer that kissing him wasn’t a blunder. She’d put the back of her hand up against her mouth, and then taken it away and said, with a slightly uncertain smile, ‘Better go and sort the sheet crisis’.

He’d nodded. He hadn’t moved from where he was standing by the wall. She went over to the door and hesitated for a moment. He waited for her to turn so that he could at least smile at her, but she didn’t. She went out of the room and down the stairs to the landing below, and Lazlo heard Edie say, ‘I wonder, Rosa, if the sheets on the floor could possibly be yours?’ He waited for Rosa to scream something in reply, but she didn’t. Perhaps she was bundling the sheets up in her arms and taking them silently downstairs. Perhaps she had stepped over them and shut herself quietly in her room. Perhaps she was looking at herself in her bedroom mirror and wondering why anyone should want to return her kiss. Lazlo closed his eyes and slumped against the wall. Nil points, he told himself. Nil points to self.

‘Look at this diary,’ Maeve said.

Russell looked up. Maeve was standing in the doorway between their offices holding up the large cloth-bound book she preferred to use instead of anything more up to date.

‘You look at it,’ Russell said in a friendly voice. ‘It’s one of the things I pay you for’.

‘You are out,’ Maeve said, in the tone of one reprimanding a student about an overdraft, ‘every single night this week’.

‘Yes’.

‘And last week. And four nights next week’. ‘Yes. So is Edie’.

Maeve slapped her hand against the diary. ‘These are invitations you wouldn’t have countenanced accepting six months ago’. ‘Probably not’.

‘Why,’ Maeve said, ‘don’t you do something worthwhile, like going to a lecture? Why don’t you broaden your horizons?’

Russell reached across his desk for the telephone.

‘You mean well,’ he said, ‘but I have enough to bear without you adding to it’.

‘I’m trying to alleviate it—’

Russell was pressing buttons.

‘I’m trying,’ Maeve said, ‘to help’.

‘Hello?’ Russell said into the telephone. ‘Hello? Russell Boyd here. I was hoping to speak to Gregory—’

Maeve backed out of Russell’s office in time to hear the bell to the street door ring. She pressed the intercom, and on the tiny television screen that filmed whoever was standing outside she saw an unpromising-looking boy in a parka with a knitted hat.

‘Yes?’

The knitted hat leaned nearer the mouthpiece.

‘It’s Ben’. ‘Is it?’

‘Yes,’ Ben said without rancour. ‘It’s me’. ‘Take your hat off’.

Ben pulled off his beanie and pushed his face towards the camera. Maeve pressed the door-release buzzer to let him in. He came up the stairs at a slow and heavy trudge.

Maeve met him in the doorway.

‘Sorry, dear. You looked like one of those posters for Brixton Academy’.

Ben grinned at her.

‘Good’.

‘I’m afraid your father’s on the phone’. Ben shrugged.

‘I thought we might go out for a beer—’ ‘Well,’ Maeve said, returning briskly behind her desk, ‘all he ever does at the moment is go out for beers, so I don’t see why one of them shouldn’t be with you’.

‘OK,’ Ben said amiably. He wandered over to his father’s office and gestured through the doorway. Russell waved and motioned to his son to sit down. Ben leaned against the door jamb and folded his arms and looked at all the photographs of Russell’s clients slowly and consideringly.

‘Come away,’ Maeve said behind him.

Ben took no notice.

Russell said, ‘Well, let’s be in touch at the end of the week,’ and put the phone down. Then he looked at Ben. Ben was gazing at the picture of an actress who’d been photographed, for some reason, in a leopard-print trilby.

‘Well,’ Russell said, loudly enough for Maeve to hear him quite clearly, ‘what brings you here?’

It was early still, so the bar was only occupied by a few people left blurrily over from lunch. Russell put his glass and Ben’s beer bottle down on a table below a mirror engraved with art nouveau lilies.

‘Is this an emergency?’

‘Not really—’

‘I mean, no phone call, no warning, you just turn up in the office, which I seem to recall you only ever doing once before when you were out all night after your A levels—’

‘I just thought I would,’ Ben said. ‘It just occurred to me. Going home would have been such a big deal’.

‘What do you mean, going home?’

‘I mean going to the house would have been such a big deal’.

‘Six stops down the line—’

Ben sighed.

‘Not geography, Dad. Other stuff’.

Russell picked up his glass and took a swallow.

‘I don’t know why it is, but when any of you children come and seek me out I feel instantly defensive. Have you come to tell me that you and Naomi have broken up?’

‘Only sort of—’

‘What d’you mean, sort of?’

Ben turned his beer bottle round as if he needed to read the label on the back.

‘It’s just,’ he said, ‘that we need a bit of space’. ‘You have broken up’.

‘No,’ Ben said patiently, ‘we haven’t. We’re going to live together’.

‘I thought you were living together’.

‘We’re going to live together,’ Ben said, ‘in our own place’.

‘Good for you’.

‘Yeah. Well’.

‘So I suppose you need money for a deposit?’

Ben shook his head.

‘We haven’t found the place yet’.

‘Ah’.

‘We can’t start looking until things are a bit calmer’. Russell closed his eyes briefly.

‘What things?’

Ben said carefully, ‘Naomi and her mum have never been apart before’.

Russell gave Ben a long look.

‘I see’.

‘It might take her a bit of time to come round to the idea’.

‘Of Naomi leaving to live with you’.

‘Yeah’.

‘Sometimes,’ Russell said, ‘I get the feeling that I’m living in one of those unfunny family comedy series on television’.

‘Why?’

‘Because you’re going to ask me something to which I’m going to say no and I can write the scenario for both speeches in advance—’

‘Dad—’

Russell sighed.

‘Ask me anyway’.

‘It’s hard for Naomi,’ Ben said.

‘I’m sure it is’.

‘Her dad walked out years ago and it’s just been her and her mum’. ‘Plus you’.

‘She’s cool with it,’ Ben said. ‘It’s more me. I want to live like I want to live. It’s not her’. ‘But Naomi can’t decide?’ Ben took a mouthful of beer.

‘She’s decided. It’s doing it that’s hard. So—’ He paused.

‘Yes?’

‘I thought I’d give her some space. For a while’. ‘And come home’.

‘Yes’.

‘No,’ Russell said loudly. He looked down at the table. ‘It’s appalling at home, already’.

Ben said nothing.

‘There are too many people and too much laundry and too many what you would call “issues,“ already. Mum is exhausted. I am – well, never mind what I am. But there is no room for you to come home, Ben, there is no more energy’.

‘I could,’ Ben said calmly, ‘sleep on the sofa’.

‘No!’ Russell said, almost shouting. ‘No! The sofa is the last indoor space left’.

‘OK, Dad’. ‘What?’

‘I said,’ Ben said, just as calmly, ‘OK, Dad. It’s OK. I won’t come home’.

‘What?’

‘I thought it was worth asking. That’s all. No big deal. I’ll sleep on Andy’s floor’. ‘You can’t—’ ‘Why not?’

‘Your mother will never forgive me’. Ben said kindly, ‘She won’t know’. Russell stared at him. ‘Won’t you go straight to her?’

‘No’.

‘Why not?’

‘Why should I?’

‘Good Lord,’ Russell said.

Ben looked at the lilies on the mirror.

‘It’s not a big deal, Dad’.

‘I thought it might be’.

‘Nope’.

‘But I wish you didn’t have to sleep on Andy’s floor’. Ben glanced from the lilies to his father. ‘Done it before’.

‘Not for long. Not for possibly weeks’. ‘Doesn’t bother me’. Russell gave a faint groan. ‘Ben, I’m so sorry—’ ‘It’s OK’.

‘No, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. And I’m wrong, quite wrong. Mum will kill me. I’ll kill myself. Have the sodding sofa. Have it’.

Ben stirred uneasily in his chair.

‘It’s OK, Dad, honest—’

‘No!’ Russell said almost shouting again. ‘I can’t turn you away to sleep on the floor, of course I can’t. What am I thinking of?’ He put a hand out and clasped Ben’s arm firmly. ‘Come home, Ben, and have the sofa’.

Ben looked at his father’s hand, and then at his face. Then he smiled. ‘Cool, Dad,’ he said.

Rosa telephoned Kate to say that she’d been made employee of the month. Her photograph had been put in a frame on the manager’s desk and she had been given a metal badge, like an elaborate medallion on a pin, to wear on her uniform jacket.

‘Brilliant!’ Kate said. She had the telephone held to one ear and the baby was asleep on her other shoulder. As long as he was on her shoulder, he slept deeply; the moment she transferred him, however gingerly, to the carrycot, he woke up and cried. ‘Thank you,’ Rosa said.

‘Rose,’ Kate said, summoning all the generous energy she could manage, ‘this is good! I mean this is progress, real progress. You’ll be able to think about your own place again any minute’.

There was a beat and then Rosa said, ‘Oh, I don’t think so’.

‘Why not?’

‘Oh,’ Rosa said again, ‘you know. The old reason’.

‘Debt?’ ‘Mmm’.

‘D’you mean you’re intending to stay at home until you’ve paid off everything?’

There was another brief pause and then Rosa said, ‘Not – entirely just that,’ and then she said quickly,

‘How’s the baby?’

‘Asleep. As long as I hold him’. ‘Goodness—’

‘It’s amazing the things you can do with one hand. I even put my jeans on this morning, except the zip won’t do up. Not by miles’.

‘Has he got a name yet?’

‘No,’ Kate said, ‘he’s called Baby. Barney calls him George’.

‘I’ll be round soon,’ Rosa said, ‘or he’ll be old enough for school and I’ll have missed him’.

‘Rosa—‘

‘What?’

‘Nothing,’ Kate said.

‘What nothing? Are you OK?’

‘Yes,’ Kate said, ‘I’m fine. I’m going to ring off now because my arm is aching. Bye bye, star saleswoman’. ‘Bye,’ Rosa said.

Kate dropped the telephone on to the sofa and collapsed beside it, transferring the baby from her shoulder to her lap. He opened his eyes to check on his surroundings and then, satisfied, closed them again. It was so hard, so abidingly hard not to tell Rosa about Ruth’s visit, but Ruth had been so fierce in making Kate promise to tell no one that she had had to agree.

‘No one knows,’ Ruth had said. ‘No one. Only you. I only told you because you’ve just had a baby’.

‘But you must tell Matthew, if, that is, if it’s—’

‘Of course it’s Matthew’s,’ Ruth said, ‘of course it is. And I will tell him. I will. But nobody must know before he does. Nobody’.

‘But,’ Kate said pleadingly, ‘this is so lonely for you—’

‘Yes,’ Ruth said.

She had left soon after. She had left before Kate could ask her what she planned to do after she had told Matthew, what she was going to do about her flat, her job, her future. She had left as abruptly as she had come, and after she had gone and Barney had said, in some surprise, ‘What was that all about?’ Kate had had to go back and check on the baby as if some disruptive high wind had whirled through the flat and left chaos in its wake.

Very gradually, she eased the baby off her lap and on to the sofa. Then she lay down beside him and put her face as close to his as she could get it.

‘You have no idea,’ she said, her mouth almost touching his cheek, ‘the difference you’ve made. You have no idea how hard you’ve made some things, how you’ve made me feel, how impossible it is to imagine what it was like before you were here’.

The baby yawned in his sleep, unclenching one hand in the process.

‘I said I’d go back to work,’ Kate told him, ‘I said I would. I want to. I don’t want not to. But I can’t. I can’t do anything but be with you’.

She put a finger into the baby’s hand. He grasped it, never opening his eyes.

‘Just don’t grow up,’ Kate said. ‘Just don’t get any bigger and then we won’t have to do any of it. Either of us’.

‘Goodness,’ Edie said, ‘you still up?’ ‘Obviously,’ Russell said.

She dropped her bag on the kitchen table and took off her jacket. She didn’t look at Russell.

‘Good tonight?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

He put his hand on the wine bottle in front of him.

‘Drink?’

She nodded. She went over to the sink and ran water into a mug and drank it. Then she came back to the table and sat down, at the opposite end to Russell.

He filled the wine glass for her and pushed it a foot along the table.

‘Here’.

She didn’t move.

‘Thanks’.

‘What,’ Russell said, ‘is the matter?’

Edie reached for the wine glass, failed to, and sat back.

‘I’m just so dog tired’.

‘Um’.

‘It was a nice audience,’ Edie said. ‘Lovely, really. Not a bad house in numbers terms either. They were paying attention. It was – well, it was me’.

‘What was?’

‘It was me,’ Edie said, ‘not paying attention’. Russell got up and moved Edie’s wine glass so that she could reach it.

‘There’.

‘Thank you’.

‘I think,’ Russell said, ‘that you know so clearly what you are doing that, even when you aren’t paying attention, it doesn’t matter’.

Edie sighed.

‘It does’.

Russell looked round the kitchen. He said guardedly, ‘Well, I think you should go straight to bed now, and I’ll do whatever needs to be done’. Edie took a gulp of her wine. ‘Are they all in?’ ‘I have no idea’.

‘I can’t go to bed unless they’re all in’.

‘Edie—’

‘I can’t,’ Edie said idiotically. ‘I never could and I never will be able to’.

Russell closed his eyes.

He said under his breath, ‘Mad and untrue’.

‘What?’ ‘Nothing’.

‘Don’t mutter at me,’ Edie said. ‘Don’t wait up for me just to mutter’.

Russell took a breath. ‘What needs doing?’

Edie let out a little yelp of sarcastic laughter.

‘It would be quicker to make a list of what doesn’t need doing—’

‘Look,’ Russell said. ‘Look. This is worse than when they were at school. This is worse than when they were students. Just stop trying to do everything. Just stop. They’ll all do more if they only know what you want!’

Edie turned her face aside.

‘I can’t let them’.

‘Why not?’

‘Because they’re poor and broken-hearted and in a mess of one kind or another and it’s all my fault’.

‘Rubbish,’ Russell said vehemently. ‘Absolute rubbish bloody crap. You’re behaving like this because you need to justify not wanting to let go’.

Edie put her face down sideways on the table.

‘Give me strength—’

‘Me too,’ Russell said.

Edie sniffed.

Russell ignored her.

She said, not moving from the table, ‘Why on earth did you stay up if you only want to bawl me out?’

There was a silence. Russell cleared his throat. Edie stared at the cooker and thought how the tiles on the wall behind it needed cleaning.

Then Russell said, ‘There’s something I have to tell you’.