Second Honeymoon

Chapter Four

Vivien Marshall worked part-time in a bookshop. She would have liked to have worked more, but if she did her husband, Max, from whom she had been separated for four years, might notice and stop paying her the maintenance that he was perfectly entitled not to pay now that Eliot really had left home definitively, and gone to Australia. It wasn’t the money in itself that Vivien wanted, useful though it was in maintaining the cottage in Richmond, and the car, but the contact it provided with Max. When he had suggested that they separate – she had known it was coming but had chosen to shut her eyes to it, like someone in an impending car crash – she had agreed in order to prevent him reacting to any objection by insisting that they divorce.

Vivien did not want to divorce Max. She didn’t even, maddening and undependable as he had always been, much want to be separated from him. Not only was he Eliot’s father but he was also, for Vivien, an exciting and energising presence whose absence had rather drained the colour out of things, particularly other men.

‘You’d think,’ she said to Alison who managed the bookshop, ‘that you’d be thankful not to live on tenterhooks any more, whatever tenterhooks are. But actually, I rather miss them’.

Alison, who was not attracted to men of Max’s type who wore leather and denim well into middle age, said she thought they had something to do with stretched damp cloth in the dyeing trade.

‘What do?’ Vivien said.

Alison sighed. Max might not, as a type, be to her taste but there were times when she felt a sympathy for him. Vivien was someone who couldn’t help, it seemed, being a permanent small test of patience.

‘Tenterhooks,’ Alison said, and put her glasses on.

Vivien went back to dusting. When Alison had offered her the job, years ago when Eliot was still young enough to let her kiss him at the school gates, she had made it very plain that bookselling was not a white-handed occupation involving delightful literary conversations with cultivated customers.

‘It’s more like always moving house. Endless heavy boxes and books parcelled up in shrink wrap. Non-stop tidying and cleaning. Lists. Difficult people’.

Vivien had looked round the shop. Alison’s predilection for all things South American was very obvious: brilliantly coloured wool hangings, posters of Frida Kahlo and Christ of the Andes, a shelf of Chilean poets.

‘I like housework,’ Vivien said.

She always had, if she thought about it. When she and Edie had shared a bedroom as children, her side of the room – fiercely marked out by a strip of pink bias binding drawing-pinned to the carpet – had been both tidy and clean. On Saturday mornings she had dusted her ornaments with lengths of lavatory paper, and was apt to cover her favourite books in library film. It was this fondness for keeping house that she supposed drew her towards Max, towards a man who, although outwardly organised, was inwardly chaotic. He gave her the excited feeling that she was breaking rules to be with him, that she had kicked over the tidy traces of her upbringing and embarked on a heady and abandoned adventure. The trouble was that, in time, the tidiness reasserted itself and Max said he couldn’t breathe. He began to set her challenges – champagne in the middle of the night, impulse trips to New York, having sex in the car in sight of neighbours’ front windows – and, when she couldn’t rise to them, he looked at her sadly, and sighed, and told her motherhood had changed her, had made her into someone he no longer recognised.

Working her way along the travel section with a new synthetic duster that was supposed to attract dirt to it like a magnet, Vivien thought that it wasn’t motherhood that had changed her: it was Max. Motherhood had been something she felt very comfortable with, something, indeed, that she would have liked to extend to brothers and sisters for Eliot if she had not been so preoccupied with not giving Max the opportunity for straying. Max had, in truth, given her a brief and glorious holiday from herself, but he hadn’t changed her. He had tried, and part of her had hoped he would succeed, but the basic Vivien stayed the same and preferred, if she was honest, filling the freezer with puréed carrot cubes for baby Eliot to suddenly dropping everything domestic in favour of some scheme of Max’s that meant packing for an unknown destination without any certain timetable or sartorial guidelines.

Eliot, Vivien couldn’t help noticing, was not like his father. Nor was he much like her. Eliot wanted life to be as simple as possible, which meant as little pressure in it, and discussion about it, as possible. His Australian girlfriend, as far as Vivien could detect from conversations on the telephone, made laconic seem an urgent word. They had a flat five minutes from the beach, they worked lightly, played water sports and drank beer. The latest photograph Eliot had emailed back showed them both on the beach, thin and brown, with similar bleached spiky hair and bead bracelets. The girlfriend was called Ro.

‘Short for Rosemary?’ Vivien had asked.

‘No,’ Eliot said, after a pause. His voice already had a faint Australian edge to it, making every statement a question. ‘Not short for anything. Just Ro’.

When he had rung off – ‘Gotta go, Mum. Take care’ -Vivien had cried a little. Then she had got up from the kitchen table where she had been crying, blown her nose and assembled the clothes for dry-cleaning – folded, not dumped – in a carrier bag. An hour later, she had managed to recount her conversation with Eliot to his father on the telephone without crying at all.

‘That’s good,’ Max said. She could hear the faint tap of laptop keys as he spoke. ‘Good for you, Vivi. You’re getting used to him being grown-up’. He paused and the tapping stopped. Then he said, in the voice he had always used to indicate he knew he’d chosen the right sister, ‘Not like Edie’.

Vivien leant against the section on Eastern Europe. She rested the duster on top of several city guides to Prague. Maybe Max was right. Maybe what made her cry after talking to Eliot was not that he was twenty-two and had chosen to live in Cairns, Queensland, Australia, but that he wasn’t eight or ten any more, with a life that she had both detailed knowledge of and control over. And maybe that knowledge and control had, for a few years only, been absorbing enough for her not to fret about Max, about what he wanted and what she could – and more importantly, couldn’t – provide. Crying for Eliot was crying for a lost small boy, not crying for a lost role, like Edie.

Vivien put a hand up and pushed her duster to the back of the Prague guides. Edie was distraught, really, quite unhinged by the last of her children going and pretty well indifferent to poor old Russell’s feelings. Vivien liked Russell, always had, but you couldn’t compare him to Max for dash and glamour, just as his children, his and Edie’s children, were making, with the exception of Matt, who was the only one Max had ever had time for, a very amateurish business of leaving home. Poor Rosa: too proud to go home, too short of money to stay independent. And Ben living with a girl he’d met having his hair cut, one of the Saturday-morning juniors. She gave the final volumes of the travel section a little triumphant flourish of the duster. Poor Edie.

‘For how long?’ Barney Ferguson said.

He was standing at the foot of the bed wearing a bath towel wrapped around his hips. His hair was wet. Kate lay against the pillows with the tea he’d brought her, and the biscuit halves of a custard cream that she had peeled away from the filling.

‘I did ask for plain biscuits’.

Barney shook his wet head.

‘They were all I could see. Except for pink wafer things. How long is she staying?’ Kate shut her eyes.

‘A month?’

‘A month!’

Kate bit a tiny piece out of one of the biscuits. ‘Four weeks. Only’.

‘Four weeks isn’t only,’ Barney said. ‘That’s a fifth of the time we’ve been married’. Kate opened her eyes. ‘Barn, I couldn’t not ask her’.

‘Why?’

‘Because she’s my best friend and she’s on her absolute uppers’.

‘I’m your best friend’. ‘My best woman friend’. ‘Suppose she doesn’t get a job—’

‘She will. She’s got to’.

‘And supper, us having supper together—’

‘She’ll go out’.

You said,’ Barney pointed out, ‘that she’s got no money’.

Kate shut her eyes again. ‘Please, Barn’.

He moved round the bed so that he could sit close to her on the edge.

‘I just want you to myself’. ‘I know’.

‘And although I like Rosa, I do, I don’t quite like her enough to want to live with her’. Kate sighed.

‘I wanted to paint that bedroom,’ Barney said. ‘Yellow, with elephants’. ‘Why elephants?’

‘I loved elephants, when I was little’. Kate looked at him. ‘Suppose this baby likes bears?’ ‘It can have bears’.

‘Rosa can draw,’ Kate said. ‘Rosa could do bears, by way of rent’.

‘You mean you haven’t asked her for any rent?’ Kate said in a small voice, ‘Just bills. Sorry’. Barney stood up.

‘I can’t be cross with you. You look too pathetic’. ‘What a relief—’

‘But I might be cross with Miss Rosa Boyd if she doesn’t prove herself the model lodger’. ‘Guest’.

‘Guest. Too right’.

Kate gave him the half-smile he said had been the first thing he noticed about her apart from the backs of her knees.

‘Promise I won’t ask anyone else’. ‘You bloody will promise’.

He looked down at her in mock exasperation. Then he walked towards the bedroom door. ‘Barney—’ He turned. Kate smiled again. ‘Thank you’.

Barney smiled back. Neither of his married sisters had produced any children yet, and his parents were treating him as a miracle of potency.

He wagged a finger at Kate.

‘Strictly on sufferance,’ he said, still smiling.

The readings for Ghosts were held in an upstairs room above a pub on the Canonbury Road. The room was used for all kinds of purposes, including ballet classes, and along one wall ran a barre screwed into a series of huge dim mirrors, which gave an eerie effect of plunging the place under water. At one end, sharing a littered card table, the director and producer of the play – both, Edie thought, about half her age – were sitting on grey plastic chairs with tin pub ashtrays on the floor at their feet. There was also a thin girl in black sitting by an upright piano and another man, in a grey ski jacket, reading a newspaper.

Edie had decided that, as she was doing this reading to placate her agent, who had complained that Edie was not, repeat not, in a position to be choosy, she was not going to prepare meticulously. She had read the play once, quite fast, and had determinedly not decided to dress in any particular way, not to think herself, with any depth, into the mind of Mrs Alving.

She had also seen Russell look at her that morning, wondering.

‘I’m not in the mood,’ she’d said, pouring coffee. ‘Oh?’

‘I can’t apply myself. I feel too – too scattered’.

‘Pity,’ Russell said. He was putting on his mackintosh.

‘It’s a wonderful part’. ‘This is a wonderful part,’ the director said now. He had a narrow dark face and a goatee beard.

‘Oh, yes’.

‘Have you played Ibsen before?’

Edie shook her head. She’d been a non-speaking visitor once, at the spa in When We Dead Awaken, but that didn’t seem worth mentioning.

The producer looked at her.

He said, in a voice she regarded as unhelpful, ‘What do you know about Ibsen?’ Edie looked back.

‘He was Norwegian. And short. Very short’.

‘I see’.

The director turned to the man reading the newspaper.

‘Ivor will read Pastor Manders for you. Act One. The scene revealing her husband’s conduct’.

‘OK,’ Edie said. She walked to a chair by one of the huge mirrors and dumped her bag on it, before rummaging in it for her book.

‘From this copy,’ the director said. ‘If you would’.

Edie turned. He was holding out a sheaf of papers.

‘We have slightly annotated the Peter Watts translation’. He glanced at the man with the newspaper. ‘Ivor speaks Norwegian’.

Edie came slowly forward.

‘We’ll hear you read,’ the producer said. ‘But, personally, I think Mrs Alving should be taller’.

The man with the newspaper looked up for the first time.

He said, in accented English, ‘Good face’.

‘But height,’ the producer said. ‘So important for dignity. This is a woman who has suffered’.

‘How do you know I haven’t?’ Edie said.

Nobody answered her. She took the sheaf of papers from the director’s hand.

‘Are you sure you want me to do this?’

He gave her a fleeting smile.

‘Now you’re here’.

‘Is that enough reason?’

‘Miss Allen, you applied for this casting—’

Edie swallowed.

‘Sorry’.

The girl by the piano said, ‘Clare was a good height’. They all turned to look at her.

‘Yes’.

‘And she’d prepared meticulously. She understood that this was a progression from the heroine of A Doll’s House. What might have happened if Nora had stayed’.

Edie waited. She had begun to feel faintly sick, sick in the way you feel when you have told yourself that, as you don’t want something, you will make no effort to secure it, and then discover that your indifference is not as deep as you had supposed.

The producer turned back and looked at Edie.

‘Did you make that connection, Miss Allen?’

‘I do now—’

The man with the newspaper put it down and stood up. He was burly, even allowing for the ski jacket, and had light, blank blue eyes.

He said to Edie, ‘This will be the seventh time I have played Pastor Manders’.

‘Heavens’.

‘Three times in Oslo, once in Edinburgh, once in Scarborough and once in London already’. She gave him a nervous smile. ‘Are you Norwegian?’

‘Half’.

‘Your father—’ ‘My mother’. Edie nodded.

‘You have,’ Ivor said, ‘a wonderful line to read’.

‘I do?’

‘The line, “There you see the power of a bad conscience.”‘

‘Well,’ Edie said, making an effort, ‘I at least ought to know about that’. The director leaned forward. ‘We should start. There are other appointments’. Edie looked at the script in her hand. ‘Where would you like—’

‘I will start,’ Ivor said, ‘I will start with the line: “It almost makes my head reel.”‘ Edie looked at him. ‘No script?’ He smiled. ‘No need’.

Edie gave a little laugh.

‘How very disconcerting—’

‘Not at all. Quite the reverse. Reassuring for you’.

‘Oh?’

‘Like,’ Ivor said, smiling, ‘playing tennis with someone much better than you are’.

Edie swallowed. A rising tide of temper was beginning to eliminate the sensation of sickness.

‘Of course’.

‘We will begin’.

‘Very well’.

‘And I will indicate when we will stop’.

Edie glanced at the director. He was looking neither at her nor at his own copy of the script. She cleared her throat.

‘Sorry,’ he said, without moving. ‘Sorry, Ivor. I’ll tell you when to stop’. His gaze travelled slowly across the room and came to rest on some object outside the window. The producer was looking at his fingernails.

‘Fire away,’ the director said.

Ruth Munro was, as was her wont, one of the last to leave her office. She felt that, not only did her conscientiousness set a good example, but it also gave her the chance to leave everything in the state she would like to find it in the following morning: desk orderly, as many emails from the US cleared as possible, work-to-do papers assembled in a pile weighted with a large, smooth grey-and-white pebble, picked up on a north Devon beach during the first weekend that she and Matthew Boyd had ever spent away together. Being alone in the room also gave her the chance to slow the pace, to be reflective, to take advantage of that brief noman’s-land of time between the working day and the evening ahead. It also gave her time to stay in touch.

Ruth’s closest friend, Laura, had gone to Leeds two years previously, to join a law firm. In those two years, Laura had become engaged to a fellow lawyer and had bought an apartment on Leeds’ regenerated waterfront that had two bathrooms, a balcony and a basement laundry on the Swiss model. It was Laura, now owner of a Tiffany engagement diamond and with plans for Vera Wang shoes for her wedding day, who had intimated to Ruth, with the effect that only close friends can have, that if she did not buy a flat of her own soon she would be making a grave mistake.

Ruth had emailed Laura photographs of the loft on Bankside. Laura had been most approving, especially of the glass brick walls and double-height ceilings.

‘Go for it!’ she’d written.

Ruth had waited three days while she adjusted her need to confide against her loyalty to Matthew, and then she’d written, ‘I really want to. But there’s Matt’.

‘Doesn’t he like it?’

Another two days elapsed.

‘Yes,’ Ruth wrote reluctantly, ‘I think he does. But he’s worried about the money’.

Laura was marrying a lawyer who earned more than she did. Ruth sometimes thought it made her a little callous.

‘You mean he can’t afford it?’

‘Yes’.

‘Can you?’ ‘Yes,’ Ruth wrote.

‘Well?’

Ruth looked up from the screen. With no one in the office, she could hear the faint purring hum of the airconditioning system and, beyond the immediate silence of the office, the bigger hum of Liverpool Street outside. If the truth were told, Matthew had not actually said he could not afford to share equally in the loft on Bankside: he had, instead, made it very plain that he would -could? – not talk about it. He had been very busy in their present flat, fixing all kinds of things that Ruth regarded as the future tenants’ responsibility, but he had eluded any attempt at the kind of conversation Ruth was trying to have. She looked back at the screen.

‘The thing is,’ she wrote, ‘that we have never had an I-have-this and you-have-that conversation. I suppose neither of us wanted to spell out the difference. And the difference hasn’t been a factor, really, up to now. We’ve managed rather well’. She paused. Laura was bound to challenge that. ‘Don’t ask why we didn’t sort it at the beginning. You know what beginnings are like. You don’t care who earns what as long as you can be together and, by the time you start caring, it’s too late, the patterns of behaviour are in place’. She stopped and then she typed, ‘I love Matt’.

She lifted her hands off the keyboard and put them in her lap. Laura would tell her that everybody loved Matt, that Matt was the kind of thoughtful, decent, straightforward man who it would be perverse not to love. What Laura would also imply, from the current safety of her shiny new engaged situation, was that love might be about more than simply lovableness, it might include more stimulating elements like shared ambition and respect for professional achievement. She might also say – and she would be right – that Ruth and Matthew should have worked out this inequity early on in their relationship, that no amount of rapturous hand-holding on Devon beaches should have blinded Ruth to the fact that they had driven there in Ruth’s car, Matthew not possessing one, and were staying in the kind of hotel he quite candidly would not have considered.

It wasn’t, Ruth reflected, that he didn’t pay his way because he did, with sometimes almost painful eagerness, but she couldn’t help noticing that a tension about money had grown in him in the last year and, while she was genuinely sympathetic to that, she also felt that his concerns couldn’t take precedence over her ambitions, that what held him back shouldn’t hold her back too. If you made too many personal sacrifices, she and Laura had often agreed during late-night talking sessions with bottles of wine and Diana Krall on the stereo, you only ended up resenting the person you’d made the sacrifices for. Those old words, like ‘duty’ and ‘honour’, belonged to the history books, to an ancient imperial vocabulary that didn’t belong in anyone’s hearts or minds any more. You couldn’t, as a woman, make yourself into someone lesser in order to accommodate a man’s weaknesses. You couldn’t agree not to want, not to strive for, a very desirable flat on Bankside because the man you were sharing your life with quite simply couldn’t afford to match your input. She picked up a ballpoint pen.

‘Does that mean,’ she wrote across her jotting pad, ‘that I don’t love him enough?’

She tore the page off the pad and screwed it into a ball.

‘Or,’ she wrote, ‘are my values so skewed that at this moment I almost want a flat more than a man? And why do I want this particular flat so much? What is it about this one?’

She looked across her desk. There was a photograph of Matthew there, in a black bamboo frame, taken on holiday in the Maldives, a holiday he had suggested and had then – she could see it – had anxieties about paying for. He looked quite without anxiety in the photograph. He was wearing a white T-shirt and a wide smile and his hair was ruffled against a sky as blue as delphiniums.

Ruth ripped the second sheet off the jotting pad and tore it across. She glanced at her email to Laura. What possibilities it opened up for Laura to implore her – or instruct her – not to let herself down. She ran the cursor up the screen to cancel the message.

‘Do you,’ her computer asked politely, ‘wish to save the changes to this message?’

‘No,’ Ruth clicked. She looked at Matthew, laughing on his tropical beach. ‘Sorry,’ she said.

She could see, from the pavement below their building, that Matthew was home before her. She could also see, from the way the light fell, which lamps he had switched on and, from that, what sort of ambience there would be when she reached the second floor and even what kind of atmosphere. Sometimes, she wished she didn’t notice so much. Sometimes, she thought how peaceful it would be to be someone who didn’t observe so minutely and deduce so analytically. It meant, as Matthew had sometimes affectionately pointed out, that she lived her life twice, exhaustingly, once in preview, once in actuality.

‘What will you do,’ he’d said, holding her, his face against hers, ‘with the three spare days at the end of your life that you’ve lived already?’

She put her key into the main door. The communal hallway, solidly decorated in the style of a decade earlier, contained only a small reproduction side table on which all the mail for the building was piled. Matthew would already have sifted through the pile for their own mail, but something in Ruth needed to recheck it, every time she came in. Her father had been the same, she told herself consolingly, perpetually reassuring himself that everything was in order, even down to counting the change from his trouser pockets every evening before piling the coins, in precise order of size, on the chest of drawers in her parents’ bedroom. No wonder, she thought now, forcing herself past the side table without pausing, that she’d chosen someone like Matthew, someone who’d come from a family who regarded orderliness as a sadly psychotic condition. Two people like her in one relationship would simply have fossilised in their own methodicalness.

She ran up the two flights of stairs to their landing. The front door was slightly open and there was the sound of music, some of the dance-rock stuff Matthew liked.

She pushed the door wider open.

‘Hi there!’

Matthew appeared from the bedroom, feet bare on the wooden floor, but still in the shirt and trousers of his business suit. He bent to kiss her.

‘I like it,’ she said, ‘when you’re back first’.

He straightened.

He said, ‘I haven’t done anything, though, except take my jacket off—’ ‘I didn’t mean—’ ‘I know,’ he said.

She went past him into the sitting room. ‘Any mail?’ ‘Only dull things’.

She picked up the envelopes and glanced back at him. ‘Good day?’

‘So-so’.

She put the envelopes down.

She said, ‘I thought I’d go to the gym—’

Matthew leaned against the sitting-room door frame.

‘I thought you might’.

‘Want to come?’

Matthew shifted his shoulder.

‘No thanks’.

‘Then I—’

‘Ruth,’ Matthew said.

She looked down at the envelopes. Notifications of payment by direct debit every one, evidence of system and organisation, evidence of knowing that vital energies should not be dissipated in muddle and inefficiency, evidence—

‘Ruth,’ Matthew said again.

She looked at him.

‘Sit down’.

‘What are you going to say—’

‘Sit down,’ Matthew said. ‘Please’.

Ruth moved to the leather sofa – joint purchase, half-price in a January sale, excellent value – and sat down, her knees together, her back straight, as if in a business meeting.

Matthew padded past her and sat down at her side. He took her nearest hand.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘this isn’t very easy to say—’ ‘Does it have to be now?’

‘Yes. There isn’t a right time or, if there is, it mightn’t occur for weeks and I have to say this thing, I have to tell you’.

She gripped his hand.

‘What?’

He said, looking at the floor, ‘I’m really sorry’.

‘Matt—’

‘I wish it wasn’t like this. I wish I could match you in everything. You’re quite right to want to buy the flat. You’re quite right to want to climb the property ladder and I’m sure you’re right about not leaving it any later. And it’s a great flat’. He stopped and gently took his hand away. ‘It’s just,’ he said, ‘that I can’t manage it. I’ve tried and tried to see how, but I can’t afford it. I can’t, actually, afford how we’re living now and I haven’t faced up to that. Until now. I’m having to, now, because I’m having to face the fact that I can’t even think about buying the flat on Bankside with you’. He looked up from the floor and gave her a small smile. ‘So if you want to go ahead, go ahead without me’.