Second Honeymoon

Chapter Eighteen

‘Why the silence?’ Laura emailed from Leeds. ‘What’s happening? Is it something I said?’

‘No,’ Ruth typed rapidly. ‘Nothing to do with you, don’t worry. But lots to tell you. Lots’.

She took her hands off the keyboard and looked at what she had written. Then she deleted the last six words. She would tell Laura, she thought, of course she would, if Laura could be deflected from the choice between Cuba or Mexico for her honeymoon, but she wouldn’t tell her yet. There was, after all, no need to tell Laura, no need until she had got a little further down her own path of thinking, of realising, of unpicking, stitch by stitch, everything that had happened. And, more to the point, everything that was now going to happen.

Ruth took her hands right off her desk and laid them in her lap. It was that time of the day in the office when most people had gone home, taking the possibility of interruption and urgency with them. A colleague might come in for a chat or with the suggestion of a drink but finding Ruth dreaming at her desk would be something they expected, something they might even do themselves, to postpone the disconcerting business of going home. After six in the office was a time when being beholden to an obligation melted peacefully into a choice. She could, she thought, answer all the emails from America, or she could, if she chose, leave responding until the morning when the Americans would still be asleep, and concentrate instead, with tentative wonder, on the fact that the last thing Matthew had said to her when they parted was, ‘I’ll ring you’.

He hadn’t, but she wasn’t anxious that he wouldn’t. She had, in almost a single second, shed the anxiety that had been such a burden for so long the moment she had realised he was crying. She’d been so tense about telling him about the baby, so poised for a rebuff, so braced for rejection that, when the words were out and he said nothing, it took her some little time to realise that he was saying nothing because he was crying. She’d put a tentative hand out towards him but he’d shaken his head and grabbed handfuls of tiny napkins out of the holder on the café table and scrubbed at his face with them while his shoulders shook.

Ruth said, immediately regretting it, ‘You’re not angry?’

He moved his head again.

‘Of course not—’

‘I thought,’ she said diffidently, ‘that you might think you’d been very unlucky’. ‘No. No—’

She gave a little laugh.

‘I did wonder if I’d been unlucky’.

He stopped mopping his face and looked at her.

‘Don’t you want a baby?’

She stared down at the tabletop.

‘I don’t know. I think I do. I think I want – your baby. But it wasn’t what I planned’.

He said, a little more sharply, ‘Does it upset your plans?’

She looked up.

‘Well, it upsets those ones. But those aren’t the only ones’.

‘Aren’t you pleased?’ She hesitated.

He said, more insistently, ‘Aren’t you pleased, that you can be pregnant?’ ‘Yes, I suppose—’

‘I think,’ Matthew said, leaning forward, sniffing, ‘I think it’s wonderful to get pregnant. I think it’s amazing to make a baby’.

She said, ‘It wasn’t very wonderful alone in the bathroom looking at that little blue line’.

‘No’.

‘And it still isn’t very wonderful not knowing what will happen. Not – knowing how you feel’. Matthew pointed to his face. ‘Look at me’.

‘Matt—’

He said quickly, ‘Don’t hurry me, Ruth, don’t push, don’t want answers now this minute’. ‘OK,’ she said reluctantly.

Matthew blew his nose into a clump of napkins.

‘It’s just knocked me out. This news’.

‘Yes’.

He looked at her.

There was a pause and then he said, ‘It’s wonderful, you – you’re wonderful,’ and then he picked up her nearest hand and kissed it and returned it to her as if he was afraid of becoming responsible for it.

When she and Matthew first met, Ruth reflected now, staring unseeingly at her half-finished email to Laura, Matthew had often told her she was wonderful. Her hair was wonderful, and her body, and her laugh and her driving and her taste in music. She was wonderful to him for what she was, for the package of a person that seemed to him desirable enough to warrant persistent and energetic pursuit. But, sitting at that café table with him and listening to him tell her she was wonderful, it had come to her, with a kind of glow, that she seemed wonderful to him at last for something she had done, rather than something she was. She felt, and had felt ever since, that Matthew had awarded her a recognition, that he had acknowledged an admiration and a pride at what she had done, in becoming pregnant. She couldn’t remember if he had ever looked at her professional efforts and accomplishments with the respect and approval he seemed all too ready to accord her now. She was inclined to think that if he ever had she would indeed remember, recognition of achievement being about as basic to human need as food and drink, and thus this extraordinary glow of approval in which she was tentatively basking was not only unexpected, but was also probably a first.

She couldn’t, of course, blame Matthew for withholding admiration in the past. For as long as she could remember she had, as so many of her girlfriends had, worked assiduously at relinquishing recognition. When she fell in love with Matthew, and the discrepancy in their earnings inevitably dictated the mechanisms of their life together, she had almost unconsciously played down her achievements, withdrawn all visible evidence of her paying power behind a barrier of standing orders and direct debits as well as ceding any available attention to Matthew whenever possible. It was only when this curiously primitive need to own her own flat expanded to become something she could not give up that she confronted him – no, both of them – with the bald fact that she did not want him to hold her back just because he couldn’t do what she could do.

And the consequence of that determination to buy the flat was that she had been made to feel – or, she thought truthfully, just found herself feeling – that in behaving in a way that was not automatically self-deprecating and deferential she had surrendered the chief defining quality of femininity, that of being the giver. Essential womanliness, that warmth and tenderness and loyalty that makes girls conventionally desirable, was, apparently, something that Ruth had turned her back on, thrown down and stamped on. Never mind the unfairness of it, never mind the way that most cherished traits of femininity always seemed to be defined within a relationship, as if possessing no value unless to others, that was how it had seemed to her. She had acted with all the self-reliant, decisive independence that would have been so much applauded in a man, and felt her very sexuality had been assailed in consequence. She might be endorsed most heartily at work for what she was achieving, but what was that endorsement worth when spread thinly across the whole of her life outside work? Who would care, in ten years’ time when all her contemporaries had families, that she was earning, at thirty-eight, more, annually, than her father had ever earned in all his working life? The Victorians had described women who were hell bent on higher education as agamic, asexual. How many people still, Ruth thought, including a shrinking part of her own outwardly accomplished self, would have agreed with them?

And now, look at her. Look at her. Deflected into carelessness about contraception by the urgency of her own need not to seem some unattractive freak, she was pregnant. She was in, by mistake, the most supremely female condition she possibly could be. And Matthew, not appalled as she feared he might be, not jubilant about his potency as men were supposed to be, had been, quite simply, moved. The news had touched him emotionally in a way she would never have predicted, a way she was not at all sure she felt herself. And that reaction meant that he would now certainly do what she had longed for him to do, and ring her.

What she would say when he did, however, she couldn’t be sure. In the perverse way of human things, especially longings, she wasn’t even sure how much she now wanted him to ring. When he did, he would ask questions, want to make plans and, as yet, she wasn’t sure what she wanted, how she saw the way ahead. What was so extraordinary, especially given the fact that babies had not even featured near the bottom of her agenda up to now, was that the painful loneliness she had felt since she and Matthew parted seemed to have subsided. Telling Matthew she was pregnant had given her a sensation of independence, as surprising as it was welcome. To her amazement, the baby, even at this stage, was a fact, and not a choice of any kind. She laid a hand carefully across her flat stomach. Perhaps she had now regained everything she had lost. Perhaps she now, oddly enough, held all the cards, all the approval. She took her hand off her stomach and put both on the keyboard.

‘I am,’ she wrote formally to Laura, ‘very well indeed’.

Rosa thought she hadn’t been to a matinee since she was small, and Edie and Russell used to take the three of them to matinee performances of musicals at Christmas. There had been something exotic about going into a theatre in daylight and coming out in the dark, as if some time travel had happened in those few hours and the world was now a different place. Twenty years later, a matinee didn’t seem so much exotic as out of step, a requirement to surrender and believe, against the evidence of all your senses, that almost amounted to a challenge.

The theatre was only a quarter full. Such people as had come sat scattered about and the girl selling programmes was yawning. Rosa went to the very back of the stalls in a belief that, even if Lazlo could see as far as that from the stage, he couldn’t see in detail. But that afternoon, it would be unlikely he’d be looking at anyone but Edie’s understudy. Edie was never ill, never missed performances, despised people who used health as an excuse for failing to fulfil obligations, but, all the same, Edie was in bed with a severe headache and a determination to perform that evening.

‘Miss me,’ she’d said to Lazlo, silhouetted in her bedroom doorway. ‘Mind you miss me’.

Rosa felt a twinge of disloyalty at seeing Edie’s understudy rather than Edie. But then, it wasn’t Edie she had come to see that afternoon, it was Lazlo, Lazlo with whom she’d made a plan, to meet in the interval between afternoon and evening performances. They were intervals he’d admitted were difficult to fill, as the need to conserve energy had to be balanced by an equal need not to relax down to a point from which it might be hard to rouse oneself up again. Rosa said she understood that, she could see that, and why didn’t they just have a quiet something to eat somewhere, no big deal?

Lazlo looked doubtful.

‘Usually I just read—’

‘Well this time,’ Rosa said, ‘just talk’.

‘OK,’ he said. He gave her his shy smile. ‘Thank you’.

She smiled back, but she didn’t tell him she would watch a performance first. She wanted to watch him in peace for a while, watch how he was without Edie, watch him, as it were, out of context. She wanted to see if she could discover why it was she found him so interesting and, even more, why she should want a man who was not in any way her type, and younger to boot, to think well of her. She settled back into her seat. There was a lot of the first act to get through – including the unwelcome sight of that awful Cheryl Smith acting so well – before the door on the left of the stage opened and Lazlo emerged, with his hat and his pipe, and said, with the hesitancy she had come to find so very appealing, ‘“Oh, I’m sorry – I thought you were in the study.”‘ She glanced down at the programme. He really had a very nice profile.

Vivien was lying on her bed when the telephone rang. She was lying there because she had planned to lie there anyway, to rest before Max took her to have dinner with a new client whom he said he wanted her to impress. So, when he rang and said that he was mortified but the client wanted to have dinner alone with Max because it was strictly business he wanted to discuss, Vivien had decided to go to bed anyway even if for different reasons.

‘I don’t know what to say, doll,’ Max had said. ‘I feel just terrible. And after promising you. But this one could be quite a big one, and you know how things are with me just now. A big one could make all the difference’.

Vivien, sitting by her telephone table in the hall, said nothing. She felt herself invaded, drawn back by the Vivien of the past, the Vivien who had stopped shrieking at Max and had taken instead to stonewalling him with silence.

Vivi?’ Max said. ‘Darling?’

‘Bye,’ Vivien said. ‘Hope it works,’ and then she put the telephone down and went upstairs to her bedroom and kicked her shoes off. If she couldn’t lie on her bed in anticipation, she would at least lie on it for consolation. She settled herself, with angry little twitches, and looked at the dress hanging on the cornice of her wardrobe. It was layered chiffon, printed in grey and white (‘Love you in those cool colours, doll’) and she had been going to wear it that evening.

The telephone on her bedside table began to ring. She looked at it thoughtfully.

‘No,’ she would say to Max, ‘no, you can’t change the plans again. I’m doing something else this evening now. I’m going to the cinema’.

She let it ring six times and then she picked up the receiver and held it away from her ear and waited.

‘Vivi?’ Edie said.

Vivien shut her eyes tightly for a second, as if to squeeze back tears.

‘Why aren’t you at the theatre? Don’t you have matinees on Saturday afternoons?’

Edie said deliberately, spacing the words out, ‘I have a headache’.

Vivien made a sympathetic noise.

Then she said, ‘You never have headaches’.

‘I have one now’.

‘You should take HRT. You should just admit your age and—’

‘I’m tired,’ Edie said loudly.

‘What?’

‘I’m just tired’.

‘Of course you are. Working, the house so full—’

‘I didn’t ring up to be lectured!’

There was a short pause and then Vivien said, ‘Why did you ring up then?’

‘I was lying on my bed,’ Edie said, ‘and there’s no one in, not even Russell, and I, well, I wanted to talk to someone’.

‘So I’ll do’.

‘Yes,’ Edie said, ‘you’ll do. How are you?’

‘Fine’.

‘Ironing Max’s Jermyn Street shirts and concocting a seduction supper and planning your trip to Australia—’ ‘We aren’t going to Australia’.

‘Vivi!’

Vivien put a hand up and blotted at the skin under one eye and then the other. ‘Nope. Not going’. Vivi, why not?’

‘Max says,’ Vivien said, staring towards the window, ‘that he can’t afford it’. ‘Excuse me—’ ‘Please don’t’. ‘Don’t what?’

‘Don’t,’ Vivien said, ‘encourage me to think what I’m thinking’.

‘But he sold his flat!’

‘I know’.

‘And it was a big flat—’

‘I know, Edie. I know, don’t go on about it, don’t—’

‘Oh Vivi,’ Edie said, in a different tone, ‘oh, I’m sorry’.

‘It’s nothing. It’s just a trip’. She looked up again at the chiffon dress. ‘Nothing else,’ she said loudly, ‘to worry about’.

‘You sure?’

‘Oh yes. He’s very contrite. You can tell a really sorry man, can’t you?’

From downstairs came the two-beat tone of the doorbell.

‘Damn,’ Vivien said, sitting up. ‘Someone at the door’. ‘Ring me back, if you need to. I’m here till six—’ ‘I thought you had a headache?’ ‘It’s going,’ Edie said, ‘it’s really going. Vivi, what can I do—’

Vivien stood up and pushed her feet into her shoes.

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Thanks, but nothing. Nothing needs doing. It’s all fine’.

Outside the front door, a man from the local florist’s was waiting. In his arms he carried a bouquet of red roses, wrapped in cellophane, the size of a large baby.

He grinned at Vivien over the roses.

‘Afternoon!’ he said. ‘The lucky lady, I presume?’

Rosa had ordered a salad. It came with a ring of bread balls circling the rim of the plate, and Rosa had picked these off and piled them neatly on her side plate and pushed the plate away from her.

Lazlo paused in cutting up his pizza and eyed them.

‘Aren’t you going to eat those?’

Rosa shook her head. She had taken off whatever had been holding her hair back, and it was loose on her shoulders.

She glanced, smiling, at his pizza.

‘Isn’t that enough?’

He looked mournfully at his plate.

‘It’s never enough’.

She pushed the bread balls towards him. ‘Feel free’.

He said, in a rush, helping himself, ‘You were in the theatre this afternoon, weren’t you?’

There was a tiny beat and then Rosa said, ‘Yes. I was’.

Without looking at her, he said, ‘To see if I could cope without your mother there?’

She selected an olive from her salad and looked at it. Then she put it back.

‘I didn’t think of that’.

‘Didn’t you?’

‘No,’ she said, glancing at him, ‘I didn’t. And you could’.

He directed a small smile towards his plate.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I could, couldn’t I? I did wonder a bit. I hoped—’ He paused.

‘You hoped you could swim without your armbands’.

‘Yes,’ he said. He looked straight at her. ‘I did. Is that—’ He stopped.

‘No,’ Rosa said. ‘No. She’d want that, too. She’d want that for you’.

Lazlo cleared his throat.

‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘I’ve – well, I’ve got another part’.

‘Oh!’

‘In television,’ he said. ‘A six-parter. I’ve got quite a big role. I’m – well, I’m sort of second lead’. Rosa leaned forward. ‘This is wonderful’. ‘Do you think so?’

‘Of course it is,’ she said. ‘Of course it is! And you deserve it’.

‘Well—’

Rosa put down her knife and laid a hand on Lazlo’s wrist.

‘Mum will say the same. Mum will be thrilled’.

‘Are you sure? It’s Freddie Cass directing again. He -well, I hardly had to do a casting, it was just a formality. It seems a bit sneaky, it feels like I’m doing something behind her back, but I’m not really in a position to turn good work down’.

‘Stop it,’ Rosa said.

He gave a little intake of breath.

He said again, ‘Are you sure?’

‘Sure, sure’.

‘It’s just,’ he said, ‘that I owe her so much. Helping me, sheltering me—’

‘She was there when you needed her’. Rosa took her hand away and picked up her knife again. ‘And vice versa’.

Lazlo said nothing. He put a mouthful of pizza into his mouth and chewed.

Then he said, ‘Why did you come this afternoon?’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘to look at you’.

‘You’d seen me’.

‘To look at you without any distractions’.

‘I’m not very good at this,’ Lazlo said, ‘but – but what did you see?’

She leaned back and folded her arms. Her hair was very preoccupying.

She said slowly, ‘Enough. I saw enough to give me courage’.

Lazlo put down his knife and fork. He had the anxious, excited sensation he’d had several times recently, that some outside force was going to come bowling into his life and make changes for him, the kind of changes he knew he didn’t have much capacity for making on his own.

Rosa said, leaning back, watching him, ‘You’re moving out’.

Lazlo nodded.

He said, ‘I must. There’s no room. I feel awful, Ben sleeping on the sofa—’ ‘Where are you going?’ Lazlo looked at his plate.

‘I’ve started looking for a flat. Just a small one. The money will be better in television—’ ‘I’ll come with you,’ Rosa said. He felt his face flame up. ‘Come with me!’

‘Yes’.

He said clumsily, ‘I – I don’t know you—’

Rosa unfolded her arms and leaned forward. She put her elbows on the table and propped her chin on her hands.

‘Yes, you do’.

‘But I—’

‘Lazlo,’ Rosa said, ‘you know me. You’re just so much in the habit of thinking of yourself as an outsider that you don’t believe you know anyone’.

He raised his eyes very slowly and looked at her.

‘You are suggesting we live together?’

‘Yes’. ‘But—’

‘Live together,’ Rosa said, ‘as in live together. Not sleep together’. She paused and then she said lightly, ‘Necessarily’.

‘I wasn’t expecting this,’ Lazlo said. ‘I couldn’t even have imagined this. You are offering to share a flat with me?’

‘Yes’. ‘Why?’

Rosa said seriously, ‘Because I must move out and on too. Because I need the motivation to get a better job. Because I can’t afford to live on my own yet. Because I don’t want to live with another girl who’s a sort of duplicate of me. Because I like you’.

He felt his skin scorch again.

‘Do you?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘I don’t quite know what I—’

‘Don’t bother,’ Rosa said. ‘Don’t try and say anything. Or feel it, for that matter. Just think about what I’ve said’. She looked at his plate. ‘That pizza will be revolting cold’.

Russell was half turned away from Edie in bed, half asleep, when she clutched him.

‘Russell—’

Her fingers were digging into his shoulder, into his upper arm. His mind came dragging back from the soft dark place it was falling into.

‘Edie? Edie, what is it?’

He twisted himself back towards her and she shoved her face against him.

She said, almost into his skin, ‘We’re not going in’.

He extracted his arms from the folds of the duvet and put them awkwardly round her.

‘Edie love, you knew that—’

‘We’re not going in,’ Edie said again in a harsh, tearful whisper. ‘The play’s not transferring. It’s all over’. Russell adjusted his hold.

He said gently, ‘You knew that. You knew Freddie wasn’t really trying to find a theatre, you knew that was all talk. You’ve known that for weeks’.

‘I’ve only just realised it,’ Edie said. ‘I don’t want this to end. I don’t want this play to be over’.

‘There’ll be other parts—’

‘No, there won’t. This was freak luck. Freddie’s taking Lazlo with him to do this Italian detective thing and he never mentioned it to me’.

‘Perhaps there’s no part in this cast for you—’

‘I thought,’ Edie said, ‘I’d be in the West End. I thought I’d have my name—’ She stopped.

Russell said, ‘And I thought you were so tired and fed up you just wanted it all to stop’.

Edie said nothing. She moved her face slightly so that her cheek lay against his chest.

He waited a few moments and then he said, ‘You’ve loved this run, haven’t you? You’ve loved being on stage’. Edie nodded.

Then she said in a whisper, ‘I’m so afraid of it stopping’.

‘It’s not the last’.

‘You don’t know—’

‘No, but I have a pretty good hunch’.

He felt her face move as if she was looking up at him.

‘Do you?’

‘Yes,’ Russell said.

‘Do you really think I’m any good?’

‘Yes,’ Russell said, ‘and so do other people’.

‘But not Freddie Cass’.

‘Yes, he does. But there’s a part for Lazlo in his new project and not a part for you’.

‘Really?’

‘Really’.

‘I don’t think,’ Edie said, laying her cheek back against him, ‘I don’t think I could bear it if I couldn’t work again’.

Russell let a small silence fall, and then he said comfortably, ‘And I’m sure you won’t have to bear anything of the kind’.

‘I don’t feel at all certain about that—’

He said nothing. He moved slightly, to free up an arm, and then he yawned into the dimness above Edie’s head. From somewhere above them, the floorboards creaked.

Edie stiffened.

She said, in quite a different voice, ‘There’s something going on between Rosa and Lazlo’.

‘Is there?’

‘Yes, definitely’.

He felt another yawn beginning. He said, round it, ‘Does it matter?’ Edie said vigorously, ‘I don’t like it, Russell. I really don’t. Not here. Not in my house’.

‘Ah’.

‘I mean, if you take people in, take people back, it’s only fair, isn’t it, to expect a little—’ She stopped and then she said sadly, ‘I don’t mean that’.

‘I thought you didn’t. I hoped you didn’t’.

‘I didn’t’.

‘What did you mean then?’

She said, in the same dejected voice, ‘It all feels so fragile’.

‘What does?’

‘What they’re doing, both of them so uncertain, so without a proper planned future—’

‘Don’t you think,’ Russell said sleepily, ‘that we looked just as fragile in our day? That dismal flat, all those babies, me earning three thousand a year if I was lucky?’

‘Maybe—’

‘I think we did. In fact I’m sure we did. I expect our parents – mine certainly – had a version of exactly this conversation’.

‘Russell?’ ‘Yes’.

‘I just wanted,’ Edie said, ‘to keep everything safe. I just wanted to make everything all right for all of them. I wanted to be back in control of things—’

‘I know’.

‘And I can’t’.

Russell moved his head a little and gave Edie a brief kiss.

‘I know,’ he said again.