Second Honeymoon

Chapter Three

Edie watched the cat make a nest for himself in a basket of clean laundry. It wasn’t ironed – Edie had never been able to see ironing as other than faintly neurotic -but it was clean, or had been. The cat had dug about in the basket, tossing small items contemptuously aside, and rearranged pillowcases and shirts until there was a deep well in the centre, with comfortable, cushioned edges to rest his chin upon. Then he sank down fluidly into it and closed his eyes.

‘Arsie’s missing you,’ Edie said to Ben on the telephone.

Yeah,’ he said, ‘poor old Arse. But I can’t have him here’.

‘No, I wasn’t suggesting that’.

‘Naomi’s mum has allergies’.

‘Does she?’

‘And our room is only about big enough for the bed’. ‘It doesn’t,’ Edie said lightly, ‘sound very comfortable—’ ‘It’s ace,’ Ben said. ‘It’s fine. Brilliant. Look, I’ve got to go’.

‘Why don’t you come to supper one night?’

‘Well—’

‘Bring Naomi, of course. And her mother, if you’d like to—’

‘Mum,’ Ben said, ‘I’m late’. ‘Just supper’.

‘Going!’ Ben called. He’d taken the phone from his ear. ‘Going. Take care, Mum. Gone!’

Edie stepped over the washing basket and began to sift restlessly through papers on the kitchen table. Russell had produced catalogues in an uncharacteristic manner, catalogues about garden furniture and modern lighting and city-weekend breaks in Europe. He’d also brought flowers, a bunch of anemones that drank a jug of water a day, and a novel that had won a literary prize, and a bottle of oil to put in her bath scented with something she’d never heard of called neroli. It was touching, all this, Edie thought, shuffling items about, but it was also mildly irritating. As conduct, it reminded her of a dog her sister, Vivien, had once had, a small spaniel-ish dog, which always wanted to sit on your knee and gaze into your face with an intensity that required you to give something in return. Not only did Edie not want, particularly, to be given flowers and bath oil and weekends in Ghent, but she also, most particularly, did not want the accompanying obligation.

‘It isn’t very grateful of you,’ Vivi said, on the telephone.

‘I’d be able to be grateful,’ Edie said, ‘if there weren’t strings attached. But I can’t go from longing for Ben to be back to playing being just married all over again in a single seamless movement’.

‘Poor Russell—’ ‘Poor?’

‘Perhaps he’s been waiting, all these years, to be other than on the edge of your peripheral vision’.

‘He liked family life, you know. He liked the children. He adores Rosa’.

‘Men love women,’ Vivi said. ‘Women love children. Children love hamsters’.

‘Oh, I know. I know’.

‘You just don’t know how lucky you are’. ‘Don’t start—’

‘I have to remind you sometimes’. Edie leaned against the wall. ‘Rosa’s lost her job’. ‘No! Poor girl—’

‘She sounded completely matter of fact. Wouldn’t let me sympathise, really. I said come back home—’ ‘I bet you did—’

‘And she said no, no, she was fine, she’d got friends who were helping’. Edie paused, and then she said, ‘I do find that hard. Friends, not family’.

‘Friends are the new family’.

‘Sometimes I wonder why I bother to turn to you for consolation’.

‘I know,’ Vivi said. ‘I won’t do drama, will I? I won’t do it because, compared to mine, your life isn’t drama. Speaking of which—’

‘Yes?’

‘What about drama? What about work?’ Edie sighed.

‘Nothing much. I must be turned down twenty times for every part I get. There’s a casting for an Ibsen next week—’

‘Yes?’

‘Mrs Alving. In Ghosts. I won’t get it’. ‘Edie. Why not?’

‘Because I won’t. Because I can’t feel about it at the moment. Because I’m all jangled up and raw—’ ‘And cross with Russell for being romantic’.

‘Yes’.

‘Edie,’ Vivi said, ‘I’ll ring you again when you have the manners, never mind the empathy, to remember to ask me a single question about me’.

Edie sat down at the kitchen table now and made space for her elbows among the papers. It was not like her, she told herself, to be so hopeless, to feel herself drifting, to be miserable and – Ben’s favourite word when he was small – grumpy. He’d say stressy, now, Edie thought, if he was still seven, and Rosa was eleven and Matt was thirteen, and there were still school mornings, with their inevitable chaos of uneaten things and forgotten things and unbrushed things. She’d imagined those times were timeless somehow, that either they would never end, or that she would change, gradually and peacefully, as they changed, so that she would be ready for the difference, ready to face a new chapter, ready, even, to confront herself.

She brought her hands up to her face and held it. That was the problem, really, that was the element that was proving so difficult, this business of knowing how to arrange oneself. For years, almost thirty of them, she had known what she was for, what she was supposed to do. Sure, she’d been passionate about the theatre at school – still couldn’t, with complete equanimity, replay those scenes with her parents in which she had insisted on applying for drama school rather than university -passionate enough to appear unmoved at being turned down by the National Youth Theatre, and to persist until she gained a place at RADA. But, if she was honest, it had all been a bit sketchy since: stints in regional repertory companies, stand-in presenter on children’s television, advertisements, short runs in strange plays in tiny theatres. Nothing – nothing to boast about exactly.

‘I’m a jobbing actress,’ she’d said for years, holding a child, carrying groceries, clutching dirty bedlinen. ‘I’m up for anything. As long as it’ll fit round the children’.

Secure in the essentialness of motherhood, she’d even, she recalled, been able to lecture herself. There’ll come a time, she’d told herself, when you’ll have to identify yourself without your children. They will simply shed you, like a snakeskin, and your support for them will become a need, your need. Motherhood, she’d declared grandly, will not be a proud, public banner any more, but a quiet, private admission. Rosa will take motherhood over and you, Edie, will have to submit to her supremacy. Well, the time had now come. And, like most anticipated things, the reality did not match the imagining. Rosa was years away in both circumstances and ambition from having a baby, and she, Edie, was as unprepared to surrender positive support for negative need as she possibly could be. Motherhood had been such a solace, had acceptably papered over so many cracks, had given her, if she was honest, such a seemly excuse for not risking failure or disappointment or loss of confidence, that she could not for the moment think what she was going to do, without it.

She took her hands away from her face and laid them in front of her, palms down on the table. On top of the pile about two feet away lay the copy of Ibsen’s plays that Russell had brought down from the bookcase on the first-floor landing when he heard about the casting for Ghosts, the student copy that she had had at RADA, full of her energetic underlinings. Ibsen had been obsessed by the past. He’d written once that ‘we sail with a corpse in the cargo’. Ibsen was, Edie decided, the very last thing she needed at the moment. She picked up a copy of the Islington Gazette that was lying close to her elbow, and covered the book with it. Out of sight: out of troubled mind.

Holding a telephone between his hunched shoulder and his ear, Matthew Boyd was writing down some information.

‘Open plan. Interior walls of glass brick. View of Tate Modern and Millennium Bridge. Four hundred thou -wow,’ Matthew said. ‘Four hundred thousand?’

‘That was what Ruth told me,’ the agent said.

Matthew made a face. What was an estate agent, who hardly knew her, doing calling Ruth Ruth? He said, ‘I don’t think—’ and the agent said, ‘Admittedly, top whack. But she said she could consider that if the place was right’.

‘She—’

‘And the value of lofts in Bankside have almost tripled since the mid-nineties’.

Matthew drew an angry line under his jottings. He and Ruth had not, as far as he could remember – and he was good at remembering – discussed Bankside. They had discussed Docklands and Hoxton and Clerkenwell, but not Bankside. Bankside was much more central and therefore much more expensive. The budget – putative, but shared, obviously – had been three hundred. Tops. Matthew added teeth to his line.

‘I’ve made an appointment for Ruth to see it,’ the agent said.

‘You—’

‘She asked for Saturday morning, so this is a courtesy call’.

‘A—’

‘Saturday morning at ten-thirty. It’s about three hundred square metres, by the way. Shall I tell Ruth or will you?’

Matthew wrote ‘Sod off’ in capital letters above the teeth.

‘I will,’ he said, and rang off.

He dropped the phone on his desk and shoved his chair back so violently that it cannoned into Blaise’s desk behind him. Blaise was on the telephone, handsfree. He put his hand over the mouthpiece.

‘Oy!’

Matthew stood up. He mouthed ‘Sorry’ in Blaise’s direction. Then he bent over his desk and retrieved his phone. Ruth’s was the first number in his speed-dial address book.

‘Hello,’ her voicemail said, cool and friendly. ‘This is Ruth Munro’s telephone. I’m away from my desk just now so please leave me a message’.

‘Ring me,’ Matthew said. He took a breath. ‘Please, I mean. Please ring me’.

He dropped the phone in his pocket and turned to make coffee-drinking gestures at Blaise. Blaise nodded. Matthew went quickly across the office, threading his way between the grey plastic desks, and made for the lifts. They had all, as usual, collected on the top floor. He made a face at himself in the brass panel that lined the wall between the lifts.

‘Cross,’ Ruth had said to him at the weekend, tapping away at her laptop and not looking up. ‘You look so cross’.

He looked at himself now, stretched and blobbed by the soft reflections in the brass. Cross might be how he looked: frightened was how he felt. And frightened was how he had always hated feeling, ever since those first unnerving nights in that new ramshackle house when he was a child and they expected him to sleep, knowing that there were holes in the roof, real holes through which anything might swoop, anything clawed and fanged and malevolent. His gumboots, Matthew remembered, had been his salvation. Solid and reassuring and rubber, he had worn them in the uncarpeted house all day for years, and slept with them by his bed. When they began to cramp his toes, he would pester Edie for new ones, so great was the terror of being without a pair, without their simple reassurance. They seemed to be able to insulate him from fear, from the unknown, to protect him while still letting him see what lay ahead. When he finally had to trade them in for trainers, he’d known he’d never have such a straightforward mechanism for consolation ever again. And he’d been right.

The lift doors slid open, revealing walls and floor made of stamped silvery metal. Matthew rode down to the ground floor with his eyes shut and emerged into the immense glass foyer that in turn gave on to a vast pale outdoor concourse where architectural trees planted in concrete drums blew stiffly about in the wind from the river. Matthew buttoned up his jacket to stop his tie whipping across his face, and plunged out towards the coffee shop on a distant corner. A large latte – a girl’s drink, but sometimes it offered just the right kind of unremarkable comfort – and half an hour nudging figures about would restore him, he was sure, to a place where anxiety resolved itself into being nothing more than a very temporary state of not quite understanding.

He carried his tall white mug to a table by the window. Across the square, even though the river itself was hidden, he could see a huge, clear sweep of sky, hurrying spring sky full of racing clouds and the sharp white trails of aeroplanes. He had never liked weather much, had always seen its unpredictability as vaguely threatening, but it was a pleasure to look at from behind the safety of glass, like looking at a turbulent painting, a Turner maybe, or a Goya, securely confined within a frame. He had once confessed to Ruth, in the early days when they were still entrancedly exploring one another, that he enjoyed the idea of the presence of chaos, somewhere out there, whirling away with all its arbitrary energies, but he couldn’t actually handle it if it came too close to him.

‘Oh, I know!’ she’d said, her eyes shining. ‘We couldn’t have a world without perfect control, but please may we be allowed to control our own bit of it, for ever and ever, Amen!’

After Edie, Matthew could not believe Ruth’s sense of order: her make-up in perspex boxes, her T-shirts in piles of three, her papers filed in translucent plastic folders made meticulously – and cheaply – in Japan. There were no leftovers in her fridge, no scattered newspapers on her sofa, no jumble of tired shoes in the bottom of her cupboard. Ruth had been a business consultant when he met her, and was now, at thirty-two, a junior head hunter for a firm that specialised in finance directors. When they met, she was earning a third again as much as he was; now, her income was closer to twice his. For the sake of his dignity – undefined as a danger area, but well understood by both of them – they had shared everything as an equal financial commitment on both sides: rent, bills, entertainment, travel. To create flexibility within this equable arrangement, a further understanding grew up that if Ruth contributed more money (a cashmere sweater for Matthew, Eurostar tickets to see an exhibition in Paris), Matthew would repay, without being asked, in kind (replant the window boxes, breakfast for Ruth in bed). It was a system, Matthew thought, that had worked very well for two and a half years and that his parents would consider not just barmy, but over-controlled to a point of inhumanity.

His parents’ opinion on most things was, in fact, something Matthew never sought. He loved them in a suspended, unexamined way, and while he found their way of life hopelessly dated, it was something that was as much part of them as their personalities. When he saw Ruth – these occasions were very seldom – seated at his parents’ kitchen table in her considered weekend clothes and forming such a contrast to the evolved disorder of her surroundings, he felt an unmistakable affection for the way he had been brought up, and a profound pride in the way he was living now. It was made easier, of course, by the fact that Edie and Ruth liked each other, that each fulfilled the expectations of how the other should be.

‘Ghastly cat,’ Edie would say, snatching Arsie off Ruth’s black cashmere.

‘Bliss,’ Ruth would say, sinking into one of the deep, battered armchairs in the sitting room, full of the kind of food she would never buy herself. ‘Instant destress’.

Periodically, Matthew would urge his parents to mend the house, update their wills, reconsider their futures. Encouraged by the success of persuading his father to specialise more, he had hoped to nudge his mother towards more commitment to work and thereby – though he bore his brother no grudge – detach her from the long, long nurturing of Ben. He was actually slightly congratulating himself on the success – or rather, lack of fireworks – in initial conversations with Edie about how life might be after Ben, when Ben confounded them all by announcing he was off to live with a girl none of them really knew, in her mother’s flat in Walthamstow. When told this news by Matthew, Ruth said, ‘Heavens. Where’s Walthamstow?’

Matthew was, he supposed, glad of Ben’s initiative. But it had been impulsively done and had left all kinds of ragged ends behind, which Matthew was only just beginning to collect his thoughts about when Ruth announced, quite suddenly, that it was time they were thinking of buying somewhere to live.

‘Actually,’ she said, ‘it’s not just time. It’s overdue. I should have bought five years ago’.

Matthew was in the middle of assembling a flatpack cabinet to house the television and DVD player. At the moment Ruth spoke, he was counting the screws supplied for the door hinges, and hoping that there would be sixteen as promised and not fifteen as seemed likely.

He said stupidly, ‘You didn’t know me five years ago’.

‘I’m not talking relationships,’ Ruth said. She was sorting her gym kit. ‘I’m talking property investment’.

Matthew looked down at the screws in his hand. It would be so bloody annoying to have to go shopping for one single screw. His father, of course, would have screws of every type, mostly paint-stained and kept unsorted in old coffee jars, but at least he would have them.

‘Matt?’

‘Yes’.

‘Did you hear me?’

‘Yes. You need four screws a hinge for this and they have given me fifteen’.

Ruth put the gym kit down and came across to where Matthew was standing. She put her hand into his and scooped up the screws.

‘Just concentrate on what I’m saying’.

He looked at her.

‘It’s time we bought a flat of our own,’ Ruth said.

That was a week ago. One week. In the course of that week they had talked endlessly about the subject and Ruth had given Matthew a number of things to read. One of these was a newspaper article that asserted that there were now over three hundred thousand professional young women working in the City with liquid assets of at least two hundred thousand pounds each.

‘I’m not there yet,’ Ruth said, ‘but I’m getting there. It’s time to start buying property for the long term’.

Holding his latte mug in both hands and gazing over it now at the flying clouds, Matthew knew she was right. What Ruth was proposing was not only shrewd and sensible but also indicated, from her use of the word ‘we’ in so many of these conversations, that she saw their future as something that they would unquestionably do together. All that, her rightness, her evident commitment, should have heartened him, should have enabled him to catch her enthusiasm for this great step she was proposing, and fling himself into the process with the eagerness that she clearly – naturally even -expected to match hers. And he would have, if he could. He longed to be able to seize upon this project as the exciting next stage of their relationship. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t because – he shut his eyes and took a swallow of coffee – he couldn’t afford it.

He had been over the figures twenty times. He had rearranged them, looked at them in the short term and in the long term, and come to a point that there was no escaping from, a point that made it plain, in black and white, that in order to match Ruth’s present expenditure in their lives and therefore preserve the fragile equilibrium of modern partnership, every penny he earned was already committed. He was not, baldly, in a position to finance any borrowing whatever, and such assets as he had were so small by comparison with Ruth’s that they were hardly worth mentioning. What crowned it all was that Ruth had little or no idea of how stretched he was for the simple reason that he had preferred her not to know. And as a result, here she was proposing to embark on something she assumed, because she had no reason not to, that he could comfortably join her in.

He glanced over his shoulder. The coffee shop was filling up, filling with people in his kind of suit, his kind of haircut. They looked, as people always looked when you yourself felt out of step with humanity, painfully secure and confident. Money should not be like this, Matthew told himself, swirling the tepid last inch of his coffee round the mug, money should not dictate or stifle or divide, money should never take precedence over loyalty or love. He gave a huge sigh and thumped the coffee mug down. Money should simply not matter this much. But the trouble was, it did.

‘I would have paid,’ Rosa said. ‘I wasn’t suggesting I go home for free. I was going to offer to pay but he never gave me the chance’.

Ben, lighting a cigarette, said indistinctly, ‘I give Naomi’s mum fifty quid a week’.

‘Do you?’

‘She pays all the bills. Says she’d rather have it that way’.

Rosa examined her brother. He looked – well, more sorted, somehow, even in the dim lighting of a pub, less flung together.

She said, ‘She also plainly likes ironing—’

‘Nope’.

‘Well, you look distinctly less scruffy’. Ben drew on his cigarette and said, with elaborate modesty, ‘I iron’. Rosa gaped.

‘Didn’t know you knew how’. He grinned, not looking at her. ‘Lot of things you don’t know’. ‘Clearly’. Rosa picked up her drink. ‘So you’re now playing happy families with Naomi’s mum’.

‘Hardly ever see her. She’s a caller at the bingo hall’. ‘I thought she worked in a supermarket’. ‘She does. And cleans offices’. ‘Heavens. Poor woman’.

Ben glanced at her.

‘No, she isn’t. She likes it. She says she likes being independent’. Rosa flushed. ‘Thanks a—’

‘Don’t patronise Naomi’s mum, then’. ‘I wasn’t—’

‘Your voice was,’ Ben said. ‘Your tone’. ‘Sorry’.

‘And I’m sorry about Dad. What’s going on?’ ‘I think,’ Rosa said, taking a swallow of vodka, ‘that he doesn’t want any competition for Mum’s attention’. Ben gave a snort.

‘I only meant for a few months,’ Rosa said. ‘Till the summer. September at the latest. I’d pay rent, I’d be out all the time, I’d feed the cat—’

‘I kind of miss the cat’.

‘I was just assuming in my naïve way that home is home until you have one of your own’. Ben blew smoke out in a soft plume. ‘Have you told Matt?’ ‘No point’.

‘Why?’

‘Because he and Ruth are thinking of buying a trendy loft’.

‘Room for you then’.

‘No thank you,’ Rosa said. ‘Ruth is great but she’s so organised and professional that I don’t feel I could begin to lay the mess of my life out in front of her’.

‘She might clear it up’.

Rosa made a face. ‘Pride,’ she said.

‘So,’ Ben said, holding his beer bottle poised, ‘What are you going to do?’ ‘Not sure’.

‘Have you asked Mum?’

Rosa looked full at him, as was her wont when skimping on the truth.

‘I can’t. I can’t be turned down by Dad and go straight to Mum’.

Ben grinned again.

‘Why not? You always used to’.

‘No,’ Rosa said, ‘I got turned down by Mum and went straight to Dad’.

Ben tilted his beer bottle.

‘Mum’d have you back’.

‘How do you know?’

‘Just do’.

‘Ben,’ Rosa said again, ‘I can’t’. He shrugged.

Rosa said slowly, ‘Kate said I could stay there’. ‘Fine, then’.

‘Well, no, not really. She’s pregnant and they’ve only been married five months and Barney’s lovely, really lovely, but he wants Kate to himself, he doesn’t want—’

‘Just like Dad,’ Ben said. He looked at the clock over the bar. ‘Gotta go, Rose. Meeting Naomi’.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Catch a movie, maybe. Don’t know’.

He bent sideways and retrieved from a canvas bag at his feet a black knitted hat, which he jammed down well over his hairline.

‘You look like a peanut,’ Rosa said. ‘That hat does nothing for you’.

Ben upended his beer bottle.

‘Naomi thinks it’s cool’.

He slid off his bar stool.

‘Hope things work out, Rose’.

‘Thanks’.

He winked.

‘You’ll find another job’. ‘And a flat. And a man’.

Ben leaned forward and grazed her cheek with his unshaven one.

He said, in an Irish accent, ‘Keep the faith,’ and then he shouldered his bag and pushed his way through the happy-hour drinkers to the door.

Rosa looked down at her own drink. Before seven o’clock, if you paid for one, you got the next one free. Two vodkas might provide her with enough brief courage to ring Katie and ask if, after all, for just a short while and paying rent of course, she might sleep in the tiny room beside the front door that Barney was intending to decorate ready for the baby. She raised a hand and signalled, smiling, at the barman.