Second Honeymoon

Chapter Seventeen

‘She’s in reception,’ Blaise said to Matthew.

Matthew was looking determinedly at his screen. He didn’t reply.

‘She’s been there since nine’.

‘I know’.

‘She says you know she’s here’.

‘Yes’.

‘Matt,’ Blaise said, bending down to try and interpose his head between Matthew and the computer screen, ‘you can’t leave her sitting out there. You can’t’.

Matthew said, ‘The only way I’ve been coping with any of this is by not seeing her’.

‘It’s no good, you know, just ducking out—’

Matthew transferred his gaze from the screen to Blaise.

‘And d’you know what will happen if I go out to her? She’ll ask if we can go and talk and because it’ll be a public place and I can’t make a scene I’ll say yes, and we’ll go and have a coffee or something and then she’ll start saying that it can work, that she’ll do anything I want and I’ll say it’s too late, because it is, and then she’ll cry and I’ll feel a complete bastard and say I have to go and I’ll get up and come back here and everything will be even worse, yet again, than if I hadn’t gone in the first place’.

Blaise straightened up a little. Then he sat on the edge of Matthew’s desk and stretched his legs out.

He said, ‘She says she’s just got one thing to tell you and it won’t take long’.

‘It doesn’t matter what it is—’

Blaise flung his head up and looked at the ceiling.

‘Matt, you don’t have a choice’.

‘Oh I do. It’s the last thing I do have’.

‘Whatever you feel about her, you were in a relationship and you do have to listen to her, one more time. It’s humiliating for her, sitting out there, with people like me, who knew about the two of you, tramping through. She can’t be doing this because she wants to’.

‘Why not?’

‘She isn’t that kind of girl’. ‘She’s become that kind of girl,’ Matthew said. ‘Only because you’re treating her like this’. Matthew flung his chair back and shouted, ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ Several people at nearby desks looked up. One girl called, ‘Shut it!’

‘Don’t lecture me,’ Matthew hissed. ‘Don’t preach at me’. Blaise shrugged. ‘Leave you to it’. Matthew said nothing. Blaise went back to his desk.

Matthew raised his eyes to the level of his screen and became aware that some of the people who had looked up when he shouted were still looking, in the unnervingly focused way of people waiting for the next development in a drama. Matthew shot his chair back in towards his desk and leaned to peer at his screen, his hand on the mouse. He counted to fifty and then he got up and walked, as slowly and nonchalantly as he could manage, across the office towards the reception area. He did not glance at Blaise as he passed him.

Ruth, wearing a business suit, was sitting in a black leather armchair, reading a copy of the Financial Times. Her hair was pulled back in a spiky knot behind her head and she had on the red-framed reading glasses Matthew remembered her telling him she hardly needed visually but found a useful psychological barrier in some meetings. Matthew paused. Ruth glanced up, on cue, and regarded him over her newspaper.

He walked across and stood awkwardly in front of her. She was wearing a completely inscrutable expression.

He said lamely, ‘Well, here I am’.

She folded the newspaper without any particular hurry and laid it on the glass-topped table beside her. Then she stood up. Matthew suddenly felt a little shaky.

Ruth said, in a voice presumably intended for the receptionist behind her barricade of brushed steel and black acrylic, ‘This won’t take long,’ then she bent and picked up her handbag and her briefcase.

Matthew put out an automatic hand to help her.

‘No, thank you,’ Ruth said.

She moved past him and began to walk towards the bank of lifts. Her back seemed to Matthew to be emphatically straight. He turned to follow her, and as he did so it came to him, from some weird reservoir of sheer instinct, exactly what it was that she was going to tell him.

The contract cleaning company told Edie that a house the size of hers would occupy four people for a whole day and, if she wanted the windows included, would cost something in the region of three hundred and fifty pounds. Of course, that excluded any cleaning inside cupboards, and if she wanted—

‘No, thank you,’ Edie said.

‘Then I assume a basic surface clean—’

‘No, thank you’.

‘Our quotations are extremely competitive—’ ‘I don’t doubt it’. ‘Mrs Boyd—’

‘Thank you,’ Edie said loudly, ‘but no thank you. No’. She threw the telephone into the armchair opposite. Ben had left a bath towel draped over the back of it. The rest of his possessions, including a duvet and a pillow, were piled behind the sofa, where Arsie had immediately found them and made a nest. It was a neat pile but it wasn’t, however you looked at it, a small one. The mere knowledge that it was there made Edie feel rather tearful.

It was awful, really, that Ben should be reduced to sleeping on the sofa in the first place. But what was worse was that Edie’s own feelings at having him home again were so confused, so unlike the rapture she had anticipated, that she hadn’t known who to be furious with first. She had raged at Russell for being Ben’s confidant before she was and then at Rosa for being in Ben’s bedroom and had only been prevented from turning on Lazlo by Rosa’s unexpected and forceful intervention. It had seemed to her, for a few days, intolerable that something she had longed for so intensely should be granted to her in a form that effectively stripped it of all its rightful satisfaction.

‘Don’t take it out on us!’ Rosa had yelled. ‘Just because you’ve got what you wanted in the wrong way!’

Lazlo had come to find her in her cupboard of a dressing room, painting on Mrs Alving’s Norwegian pallor.

‘I just wanted to say something—’

Edie went on blending make-up down over her jawline. She didn’t glance at Lazlo’s reflection, standing behind her and looking directly at her in the mirror.

‘You know I don’t like distracting conversations before a show’.

Lazlo said tiredly, ‘There isn’t a perfect moment. This hardly suits me either’.

Edie flicked a glance upwards. Lazlo’s expression was one of weary determination, rather than anxiety.

She said, ‘So?’

‘I’m moving out,’ Lazlo said. ‘You’ve been wonderfully kind and I am truly grateful, but it isn’t working any more’.

Edie gave a little gasp and put her make-up stick down. ‘Please don’t’.

‘If I go,’ Lazlo said patiently, ‘Rosa and Ben can have their rooms back. It’s what you all need’. Edie swivelled round from the mirror. ‘You mustn’t’.

‘Mustn’t?’

Edie said unsteadily, ‘I’d feel such a failure—’ There’d been a small silence and then Lazlo said gently, ‘I’m afraid I can’t help that’.

‘I wanted it to work,’ Edie said. ‘I wanted everyone to feel they had a home’. She looked away and then she said sadly, ‘I wanted to give you all a home’.

‘You did’.

Edie turned back to the mirror and picked up her make-up again. ‘But on my terms’. Lazlo said nothing.

‘And of course,’ Edie said, ‘you’re all too old for that. And so am I’. She glanced up at Lazlo’s reflection. ‘Please don’t go just yet’.

He smiled.

He said, ‘I’ll let you know when I’ve found somewhere,’ and then he leaned forward and put a hand on Edie’s shoulder and said in Osvald Alving’s voice, ‘You’ve managed without me, Mother, all this time!’

Edie had nodded. She’d put her own hand up to touch his briefly and then he’d gone out of the room and she didn’t see him again until they were on stage together, where their familiar dynamic seemed to have transformed itself into something altogether more fragile and fevered.

Now, sitting on the sofa among Ben’s possessions, fragile was what Edie chiefly felt, fragile and vulnerable and uncertain.

She looked across at the armchair, where she had flung the telephone. Perhaps she would ring Vivien. Vivien wouldn’t be any use of course and naturally Edie wouldn’t confide to her the present turmoil of her feelings, but all the same, there seemed to be a most pressing need to talk to someone and, at the very least, Vivien would do.

‘Is this too noisy for him?’ Rosa said.

Kate peered into the baby car seat she had laid on the empty restaurant chair next to her.

‘He’s asleep’.

‘It’s terribly clattery—’

‘He’s got to learn to sleep through it. He’s got to learn to sleep through everything I do because he’s coming with me everywhere I go. For ever’.

‘Even back to work?’

Kate closed her eyes briefly.

‘Please don’t talk about it’.

‘And you intend him to be the first grown man called

Baby?’

Kate picked up a menu and studied it. ‘He’s called Finlay’. ‘But you aren’t a Scot—’ ‘Barney is’.

‘No, he isn’t. He’s the most blah-blah English—’ ‘His family are Scottish,’ Kate said, ‘and this baby is called Finlay’.

‘And by Barney?’

‘Barney calls him George. He tells everyone he’s called George. He told Ruth—’ ‘Ruth?’

Kate gave a sharp little intake of breath.

Then she said, ‘What day is it?’

‘What does that matter?’

‘What day is it?’

‘Thursday,’ Rosa said. ‘Kate—’

Kate said hurriedly, ‘That’s OK then. She’ll have told him by now’.

Rosa twitched the menu out of Kate’s hands.

‘Tell me’. ‘Guess’.

‘I don’t want to guess. Tell me’.

Kate put her hands flat on the table.

‘Ruth came to see us last week. To see the baby. Bringing presents and stuff, one of those incredibly expensive baby suits that babies are always immediately sick on—’

‘Go on’.

‘And she seemed rather agitated and wound up and she cried when she saw Finlay and I asked her what the matter was and—’

‘She’s pregnant,’ Rosa said.

Kate regarded her.

‘Yes’.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I couldn’t. She made me promise. Until she told Matthew’.

‘When was she telling Matthew?’

‘Early this week’.

Rosa looked away.

She said, ‘I haven’t seen Matthew’.

‘Haven’t you?’

‘I never do. We live in the same house and, apart from hearing him thumping about over my head, we might as well not be. It’s as if we’re all steering round each other because if we don’t we’ll row’. She stopped and then she said, in a different voice, ‘Poor Matt. He’s been so down—’

Kate leaned forward.

‘What’ll this do?’

Rosa swung her head back to look at Kate. ‘I don’t know’. ‘Make or break?’ ‘I don’t know’.

‘You’d think,’ Kate said, ‘in this day and age, we could at least get contraception right, wouldn’t you? First me, now Ruth—’

Rosa leaned sideways and looked down at the baby. ‘Ruth of all people—’

‘Yes’.

‘I wonder if Mum knows’.

‘What’ll she say?’

Rosa put out a hand and laid it on the baby. ‘Can’t tell. She’s all over the place at the moment. It’s -well, it’s a nightmare at home at the moment’.

‘Is it?’

‘Yes,’ Rosa said. She straightened up, and then she said, with a small, private smile, ‘But rather interesting, too’.

Kate waited.

Rosa went on smiling to herself. Kate said crossly, ‘Well, go on’. ‘You can guess’.

‘Something happening? Between you and Lazlo?’ ‘Not – exactly’.

‘Well, then—’

‘But,’ Rosa said, ‘I’d quite like it to’. ‘I’m surprised’.

‘So am I’.

‘I thought he was geeky’.

‘He is rather. But—’ She stopped.

Kate looked at her.

‘I see’.

Rosa looked back.

‘Kate, what about Matthew?’

‘That’s all about to be common knowledge, isn’t it?’

‘D’you know,’ Rosa said, moving about the knife and fork at her place, ‘once I’d have hit the telephone. Once I’d have immediately rushed round to Dad’s office and rung Mum and texted Ben and generally gone into overdrive. But I don’t want to now. I don’t remotely feel like it’.

‘What do you feel then?’

‘Sad,’ Rosa said.

‘Sad?’

‘Yes,’ Rosa said. She looked down at Finlay again. ‘Yes. Sad. Sad that if it’s a baby, it had to be this way’.

‘Come on,’ Kate said vehemently. The baby won’t know!’

‘No,’ Rosa said. She picked up the menu again and held it out towards Kate, ‘But we will. Won’t we?’

The afternoon in the bookshop seemed to Vivien to be taking an unusually long time. It was the end of summer after all, so customers weren’t coming in for those optimistic stacks of paperbacks to take on holiday but, all the same, the few people who did come in seemed to be passing time rather than buying a book and Vivien watched them with irritation as they drifted idly about, fingering books they would never buy and infecting her with their mild restlessness. She had taken advantage of Alison’s absence to straighten things up a bit, sort the slew of scraps of paper by the till, realign the table of summer novels, but that was all that was possible really. Alison didn’t like her actually doing housework if she was the only person in the shop: she said it was off-putting for customers to be dusted round, made them feel that they were somehow an intrusion. She liked Vivien, if not actually helping a customer, to sit by the till lightly engaged in a task that could obviously be easily set aside. Alison herself was a knitter, great scarves and sweaters in the patterns and colours of the Andes, and she would have preferred Vivien to find herself some equally encouraging-looking, unthreatening occupation. Vivien’s propensity for tidying, though undeniably useful, could too easily be interpreted, by anyone sensitive to atmosphere, as taking precedence over the mild disorder created by the necessary process of commerce.

Vivien had taken up her position next to the rack of birthday cards. These were haphazardly arranged with no particular thought given to sequences of price or size, and it was harmless enough, Vivien thought, to separate the reproductions of Jack Vettriano paintings from black-and-white art photographs of elephants or kittens. The card rack also gave her a good view of the shop, which contained, at that moment, a young mother with a toddler in a buggy looking at board books, and a man in a faded gingham shirt browsing in biography.

It was not the sort of shirt, Vivien reflected, that Max would wear. If Max wore gingham at all, it would be very new and either navy blue or pale pink. It was odd, really, to be so familiar, all over again, with Max’s shirts, especially as – Max being Max and something of a shopper when it came to clothes – most of those shirts were new to her, and acquired in that peculiar space of time when she had been excluded from knowing any details of his personal life. And in those four years, Max had, sartorially speaking, started again. His taste might not have changed, but his wardrobe had and Vivien found it was very difficult sometimes to launder with equanimity garments that had plainly been to exotic places with women who were not her. A T-shirt printed with the logo of a luxurious hotel in Cyprus, and a Malaysian sarong had already gone in the bin rather than the washing machine and Vivien couldn’t decide whether it was a comfort to her or not that Max hadn’t commented on their disappearance.

But then, Max was being very careful not to allude to his bachelor days unless it was to say something dismissive. He’d been to Jersey on business the week before, staying in a hotel he’d stayed at previously and, Vivien suspected, not alone, and had arrived home a night early, claiming that the whole place was depressing and all he wanted was to be home again.

‘Bad memories,’ Vivien said, putting a glass of whisky down in front of him.

He blew her a kiss.

‘Horrible,’ he said.

The man in the gingham shirt approached the till and slowly laid down a large single-volume life of Napoleon.

‘Please,’ he said, over his shoulder.

Vivien slipped the card she was holding into a slot and hurried across. The man, staring dreamily into the space behind the till, was holding out his credit card. As she reached to take it, her mobile phone, in her handbag under the counter, began to ring in an insistent crescendo.

‘I’ll ignore that,’ she said brightly.

The man nodded. He watched her slip the book into one of Alison’s recycled bags, and run his card briskly through the machine. Then he bent and signed his name with the elaborate care of one who has just learned to do joined-up writing. Vivien watched him leave the shop, and then she seized her bag and rummaged in it for her telephone.

The caller had been Eliot. What was Eliot doing, ringing at five-thirty on an Australian morning? Was he ill? Vivien cast a glance at the mother and toddler. The toddler was now asleep in her buggy and her mother was grazing dispiritedly along the shelf of self-help books. Vivien rapidly dialled Eliot’s number.

‘Hi, Ma,’ Eliot said. ‘Are you all right?’

There was a pause and then Eliot said, ‘I’m great, Ma.

Why?’

‘It’s five-thirty in the morning. Why are you awake at five-thirty? Why are you calling me Ma?’

‘It’s a beaut morning,’ Eliot said reasonably. ‘We’re going to the beach’.

‘So you rang to tell me it’s a lovely day?’

‘No,’ Eliot said, ‘I rang because Dad rang me and I’d forget otherwise. I’d forget if I left it’.

The young mother pushed her buggy slowly past Vivien as if Vivien did not exist. Vivien watched her without pity, as she struggled with the door.

‘What,’ Vivien said more loudly when the shop was empty, ‘what would you forget?’

‘That it doesn’t matter to Ro and me that you can’t come for Christmas. We’re going to Bali’.

‘What?’

‘We’re going to Bali for Christmas,’ Eliot said. ‘We’ve got cheap flights. So it doesn’t matter’.

Vivien pulled Alison’s stool towards her and perched on it.

‘You said Dad rang you?’

‘Yeah’.

‘And Dad said we couldn’t come for Christmas after all?’ ‘Yeah’.

‘Did – did he say why?’

‘You should know,’ Eliot said. ‘Work or something’.

‘When did he ring?’

There was a silence, and then Eliot said uncertainly, ‘Yesterday?’

‘Well,’ Vivien said, her voice not quite steady, ‘why are you ringing me?’

Eliot sounded surprised. ‘To be polite’. ‘I’m sorry—’

‘Dad said he thought you’d be a bit upset so I thought if I rang you and said we wouldn’t be here anyway you’d feel better’.

‘But as I didn’t know—’

There was another silence and to stop it becoming complicated Vivien said, with an effort, ‘How lovely. Going to Bali’.

‘Yeah,’ Eliot said, ‘we’d like a break’. In the background, on a sunny blue morning in Cairns, a girl’s voice said something Vivien couldn’t hear. Eliot said, ‘Mum? Gotta go—’

‘Yes, darling’.

‘You take care’.

‘Yes,’ Vivien said. ‘Yes’.

The shop door opened and the man in the gingham shirt came in again holding the bag with the book in it.

‘Thank you for ringing,’ Vivien said. ‘That was very -thoughtful’.

The man came slowly up to the counter and laid the bag carefully on it.

‘I’m afraid,’ he said, staring past Vivien, ‘I’m afraid I’ve changed my mind’.

Leaving the stage after the final curtain call, Cheryl Smith said to Lazlo, ‘Like a drink?’

Lazlo hesitated. Edie, untying the ribbons of Mrs Alving’s lace cap, was just ahead of them.

Cheryl followed his gaze.

‘You don’t have to go everywhere she goes’.

‘I don’t—’

‘Beg pardon,’ Cheryl said, ‘but you’ve gone home with her every bloody night’.

Lazlo said quickly, ‘I’ve been living in her house. It seemed polite’.

‘Break the habit of a lifetime,’ Cheryl said. ‘Come and have a drink with me’.

Lazlo looked at her. She managed to make Regina’s maid’s clothes, dowdy though they were, look as if they barely contained her.

‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ Cheryl said. ‘Something to your advantage’.

‘Well—’

‘Go on,’ Cheryl said, daring him. ‘Mummy’s boy’. Lazlo pushed past Cheryl in the narrow corridor behind the stage and put his hand on Edie’s shoulder.

‘Edie—’

She turned.

‘I’ll be a bit later tonight. I’m going to have a drink with Cheryl’. ‘Are you?’

‘Yes. Will you get a taxi?’

‘Probably,’ Edie said. ‘Doesn’t matter. Don’t worry’.

She gave him a faint smile. ‘Got to get used to different routines now anyway’.

‘Even if,’ Lazlo said, flattening himself against a wall for the stage manager to get by, ‘even if I wasn’t moving out, there’s only four weeks of the run to go, anyway’.

‘Unless we transfer’.

Lazlo looked away.

‘Not – much talk of a transfer lately—’ Edie glanced down at the cap in her hands. ‘Funny. I’ve got rather used to this’. ‘Me too’.

She lifted her head.

‘You go and have a drink with Cheryl. You need to talk to actors your own age’. ‘It isn’t that—’

‘Well,’ Edie said bravely, ‘it should be’.

Cheryl led the way at determined speed to the pub where Lazlo remembered almost breaking down after his first rehearsal. It was full and hot. Cheryl shouted at him that she wanted red wine and then disappeared to the ladies. When she came back, Lazlo had taken their glasses out on to the pavement and had found seats at the end of a picnic table dimly lit by a square yellow light falling from the window of the pub. Cheryl, in a denim miniskirt and her slouch boots, sat down on the bench attached to the table, and swung her legs over so that Lazlo and the two men already sitting at the table had a prolonged view of her knickers. Then she smiled graciously at them and picked up her wine glass.

She gestured with it towards Lazlo.

‘Happy days’. ‘I hope so—’

‘I’m in a film after this,’ Cheryl said, ‘on location in Norfolk, playing a single mother with a drug habit. I’ll be perfect, won’t I?’

Lazlo nodded.

She took a gulp of wine.

‘What about you?’

‘I don’t know’.

‘Come on, Laz—’

Lazlo said cautiously, ‘Russell says I can read for a couple of his accounts—’

‘Oh please,’ Cheryl said, ‘Ibsen to chicken nuggets?’

‘I—’

‘You,’ Cheryl said, ‘have a crap attitude. And a crap agent’.

‘He says he’s trying. And two others have been in touch—’

Cheryl leaned forward, folding her arms underneath her bosom and creating an impressive cleavage. ‘My agent wants to see you, sad boy’. Lazlo removed his gaze from Cheryl’s breasts.

‘What?’

‘You heard me. He’s seen you twice. He wants you to ring him. He’s told me to tell you to ring him’. ‘The others—’

Cheryl leaned forward even further and jabbed at the table beside Lazlo’s beer glass.

‘No, Laz. Not a “Come and see me sometime and maybe I’ll think about it, but probably I won’t” sort of agent. Stuart is for real. Stuart is a top agent. Stuart wants you to ring him tomorrow morning’. She paused and leaned back a little and then she said, ‘Stuart has a casting for you’. ‘He can’t—’

‘He can. He has. He wouldn’t be asking to see you if it wasn’t for something specific’.

‘But my—’

‘Ditch him,’ Cheryl said. ‘He got me this part!’

‘Ditch him,’ Cheryl said again, ‘if you’ve got any sense’.

‘But he’s only seen me in this—’

‘For God’s sake,’ Cheryl said, ‘and when did showcases get better than bloody Ibsen?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Lazlo said, ‘and thank you’.

She stretched a hand out across the table and took one of his, firmly.

‘You really are rather sweet’.

The men at the other end of the table stopped talk^ing.

‘Now your hair’s a bit longer,’ Cheryl said, ‘you’re quite attractive. Very attractive really’. She raised her eyebrows and smiled. ‘Very fanciable’.

Lazlo attempted to pull his hand away.

‘Sorry—’

‘Oh come on,’ Cheryl said. ‘Live a little. Why d’you think I go to all this trouble?’

Lazlo pulled his hand free. One of the men at the table gave a little yelp of laughter.

‘Sorry,’ Lazlo said again.

Cheryl gave him an amused glance. Then she shot a look up the table. She picked up her wine glass and struck an attitude with it.

‘Suit yourself,’ she said. ‘Mummy’s boy’.

Maeve paused in the doorway to Russell’s office. She was carrying a takeaway beaker of coffee and a complicated document from their accountant, flagged with little yellow stickers. Russell was standing in his dormer window, hands in pockets, staring out. Nothing was open on his desk: it looked as if he had not only not started work, but had also turned his back on the very idea of it.

‘Room service,’ Maeve said.

Russell turned his head.

‘You’re a good girl’.

Maeve put the coffee down carefully on his desk. ‘The line in the play is “You’re a good little pudding,

Mrs King.”‘

Russell sighed. Then he turned round completely and lowered himself into his desk chair as if he was convalescent.

Maeve laid the folder from the accountant down in front of him.

‘Three signatures. I’ve marked where. Do you think you can manage that?’ Russell nodded.

‘Shall I stay,’ Maeve said, ‘and guide your hand?’ Russell glanced at her, then he slowly reached to pick up his pen.

‘After all these years,’ Maeve said, ‘do I still have to tell you that you should never sign anything you haven’t read and understood?’

Russell put his pen down.

Maeve laid her hands on his desk and leaned on them. ‘The fight’s gone out of you,’ she said. ‘Hasn’t it?’ He said, staring at the document in front of him, ‘I’m just tired—’

‘You’ve been tired for weeks,’ Maeve said. ‘You’ve been out all hours at things a tinker wouldn’t trouble himself with, and your house isn’t your own, and nor is your wife and you can’t get up the energy to lick a stamp. Can you?’

‘It’s only age—’

‘It’s not,’ Maeve said, ‘it’s attitude. It’s circumstances. Your present circumstances are not conducive to your health and well-being. What are you trying to prove?’

There was a pause and then Russell said, clearly and slowly without looking up, ‘I was trying to fill a gap’.

‘Well,’ Maeve said, ‘there you have it’.

‘And the gap is still there’.

‘Tell her’.

‘I can’t,’ Russell said.

‘Of course you can! She’s a reasonable woman—’ ‘No,’ Russell said. ‘Why not?’

He looked up at her, his face slightly sideways. He said, ‘Because she’s got a gap of her own. One she’d never thought she’d have’.

‘Oh,’ Maeve said, ‘those children—’

‘No,’ Russell said. He picked his pen up again and pulled the folder towards him. ‘No, not the children. Work’.

‘I was going to tell you, doll,’ Max said. He drew imaginary intersecting lines on his chest. ‘Honestly I was. Cross my heart’.

Vivien sighed. Max had been an hour later home than he had promised and she had spent that hour vowing that she would not, the moment he walked through the door, confront him about not going to Australia. And then she had heard the front door slam and Max’s quick steps coming down the hall and the minute they were in the kitchen she’d spun round from the cooker and said, ‘Eliot rang today’.

Max had taken a pace backwards. He’d always done that, when attacked, as if physically retreating before gunfire, and it annoyed her quite as much as it always had done.

He then put his hands up, as if surrendering.

‘How was he?’

‘Don’t,’ Vivien said. She was holding a wooden spoon coated with sauce. ‘Don’t what, honey?’

‘Don’t,’ Vivien shouted, ‘pretend you don’t know!’

Max dropped his hands. He came forward and stood in front of her in an attitude of contrition.

‘I was going to tell you, doll. Honestly I was. Cross my heart’.

Vivien turned back to the cooker. ‘Ringing Eliot about something that concerns me isn’t just something that slips your mind. It’s deliberate’.

Behind her back, Max closed his eyes for a moment. Then he opened them and said, ‘The thing is, Vivi, I didn’t know how to tell you’.

Vivien didn’t turn.

‘Tell me what?’

‘That – oh hell, this is so embarrassing’.

‘What is?’

Max came and stood beside Vivien. He touched her arm. She shook him off. ‘It’s money, doll’. She shot him a glance.

‘What is?’

‘I’m really sorry, but I’m afraid this isn’t the year for going to Australia. I’m so ashamed. I’m so ashamed to tell you that there just isn’t the money. Simple as that’.

Vivien tasted her sauce and reached past Max for the salt.

He seized her outstretched arm. ‘I’m so sorry, Vivi. I shouldn’t have got your hopes up’.

Vivien removed her arm from Max’s grasp.

She said, ‘You’re not running the flat now. Your living expenses have halved. What d’you mean, there isn’t the money?’

Max drooped.

‘Sorry, sweetheart. Honour bright, it’s not there’.

Vivien said unsteadily, ‘You promised me’.

‘Oh, look now, doll, it wasn’t a promise. It was a great idea, a lovely idea to go out and see our boy, but it was only an idea. Be fair!’

Vivien put the saucepan to the side of the cooker and turned out the gas.

She said again, not looking at him, ‘You promised me’.

‘Look here,’ Max said, ‘we’ll go in the spring. I’m sure I’ll see my way clear in the spring—’

Vivien looked at him.

‘Where’s the money gone?’

He spread his hands.

‘Maybe it wasn’t there, doll, maybe I didn’t want you to think I couldn’t give you everything you wanted’. He tried a smile. ‘Maybe I was just being a bit over-optimistic. You know me’.

‘Yes,’ Vivien said. She took a step nearer and when her face was only a foot from his, she said loudly, ‘Liar!’

Max tried to hold her by the arms.

‘Now wait a second, Vivi—’

She flailed her arms sideways to elude him.

‘Liar!’ she said. ‘Liar! Just like you always were!’

‘Please, doll—’

‘Promises!’ Vivien shouted. ‘Promises, to get what you wanted! Promise me what you know I want! There never was the money to go and see Eliot, was there, or if there was, you’ve spent it, haven’t you, you’ve gone into some stupid venture with some stupid shyster—’

‘No!’

‘Then you’re paying off debts. Aren’t you? Who is she? Who’s the tart you’re paying to keep quiet?’

Max reached out and firmly gripped her upper arms.

‘Vivien darling, don’t. Don’t do this. Please don’t! This is just like the bad old days—’

‘Yes!’

‘There’s nothing to get steamed up about,’ Max said. ‘Nothing. It’s just a muddle, a typical Max muddle—’ ‘Then why did you ring Eliot first?’

‘Well, I—’

‘You rang him first,’ Vivien said, ‘so that I couldn’t talk you out of it. I bet you bought his flights to Bali, I bet you did that because you don’t want to go to Australia with me. You don’t want to spend all that money on me!’

‘Nonsense—’

Vivien wrenched herself free.

‘I sound like I used to,’ she screamed, ‘because you sound like you used to. Exactly like!’ ‘I didn’t buy those flights to Bali—’ Vivien glared at him.

‘Liar!’

‘Don’t keep calling me that—’

She took a step back and then she spun round and stormed across the kitchen. In the doorway, she paused, her hand on the knob, and then she said furiously, ‘I wouldn’t have to, if you weren’t!’ and crashed the door shut behind her.

Matthew’s computer case lay in the hall, as if he’d thrown it down carelessly on his way in. As far as Rosa could tell, he was the only one at home. The kitchen and sitting room were disordered but empty, and the doors to both first-floor bedrooms were open. Rosa stood in the dusky evening light on the landing and listened intently. There was no sound, no music. She looked upwards for a minute, and then made her way back downstairs to the kitchen.

It didn’t look as if anyone had had supper. It didn’t look, in fact, as if anyone had done anything in the kitchen that day except have breakfast in a scattered sort of way and then leave in a hurry. Someone had propped an untidy bunch of envelopes against a cornflakes box, but no one had opened them. There was a banana skin blackening on a plate and two half-drunk mugs of cold coffee. The spoon Rosa had stuck in the honey twelve hours before was exactly where she had left it. If Matthew had come into the kitchen that evening, he’d plainly neither had the appetite to eat nor the heart to clear up.

Rosa ran water into the kettle and switched it on. Then she assembled, on the painted wooden tray with decoupage flowers she remembered making in a craft class when she was fourteen, a cafetière and two mugs and a packet of digestive biscuits. Then she added Edie’s dusty bottle of cooking brandy and two pink Moroccan tea glasses. When the kettle boiled, she made coffee in the cafetière, took a plastic bottle of milk out of the fridge and carried the tray out of the kitchen and up the stairs.

There was complete silence on the top landing and no line of light under Matthew’s door. Rosa stooped and set the tray down on the carpet.

Then she tapped.

‘Matt?’

Silence. Rosa turned the handle very slowly and opened the door. Matthew hadn’t pulled the curtains and the queer reddish glow from the night-city sky illuminated the room enough for Rosa to see that Matthew was sitting, fully dressed, in the small armchair that matched the one in her own room.

‘Matt,’ Rosa said, ‘are you OK?’

He turned his head. In the dimness she couldn’t make out if his eyes were shining or tearful.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes’.