Second Honeymoon

Chapter Five

‘Aren’t you going to get up?’ Kate said. She was dressed in a velour tracksuit and had pulled her hair back tightly so that she looked about thirteen and far too young to be pregnant.

‘No,’ Rosa said.

‘It’s twenty to eleven—’

‘Yesterday,’ Rosa said, ‘I went to four crappy interviews and was turned down at every one. This afternoon I have three more. This morning I have decided not to punish myself any more than life seems to be doing anyway’.

Kate kicked at a pile of clothes and bags on the floor.

‘You could clear all this up a bit—’

Rosa looked.

‘Yes, I could’.

‘You’d feel better if you didn’t keep telling yourself that life’s got it in for you’.

‘Shall I,’ Rosa said, sitting up in bed and pushing her hair back, ‘talk to you when you’re feeling less priggish?’

‘You know,’ Kate said, ‘none of this is very easy for me. I want to help you, I want to make things nice for Barney, I want to stop feeling so awful and start feeling pleased about this baby, but it doesn’t help, Rosa, if you lie in bed in all this mess having the mean reds and not even trying’.

There was a pause. Rosa twisted her hair into a rope and held it against the back of her head. ‘How do you know I’m not trying?’ Kate kicked at the bags again. ‘Look at this—’

‘No cupboards,’ Rosa said, ‘no drawers. Floor last resort. Floor it is’.

‘There’s floor and floor. There’s attempt-at-tidy floor or there’s throw-everything-about-like-a-sulky-teenager floor’.

Rosa let her hair go.

‘I can’t believe we’re having this conversation. This is like talking to my mother’.

‘Not your mother, surely—’

‘No. Quite right. Not my mother. Your mother’.

‘Don’t take your spite out on my mother—’

‘Oh Kate,’ Rosa said wearily, pushing back the duvet and swinging her legs slowly out of bed, ‘don’t let’s do this’.

‘Then tidy up,’ Kate said shrilly. ‘Stop abusing my hospitality and make an effort’.

Rosa stood up. She looked down at Kate.

‘What would you like me to do?’

‘I would like you,’ Kate said, ‘to clear up this room. I would like you not to put washing in the machine and then just leave it there. I would like you not to finish the milk or the yoghurt or the bananas and then not replace them’.

‘Do you know,’ Rosa said, ‘you were never like this when we were students. You didn’t, as I recall, give a stuff about washing or bananas’.

Kate sighed.

‘I was thinking about Rimbaud then. And Balzac. And the practicalities behind the traditions of courtly love’. ‘And Ed Moffat’.

‘Well, yes’.

‘Ed Moffat didn’t make you want to count bananas—’ ‘I didn’t marry Ed Moffat,’ Kate said. ‘I wasn’t obliged to

Ed Moffat’.

Rosa stooped for her clothes. ‘Does Barney mind about bananas?’ ‘He minds about me minding’. Rosa looked at her. ‘But why do you mind?’ Kate rubbed her eyes.

‘Because being married changes things. It puts you in a different place, somewhere where it just suddenly seems childish to live in a student mess’.

‘Childish’.

‘Yes,’ Kate said.

Rosa found a pair of blue lace knickers on the floor and stood on one leg to put them on.

‘I’ve had a flat, you know. I’ve bought milk and paid bills and taken washing out of machines. I’ve done all that’.

‘Then why—’

‘Because I’ve lost control of things,’ Rosa said. She pulled the knickers up under her nightshirt. ‘It’s all kind of got away for the moment, like something big and slippery, just sliding off the edge. I’d love, frankly, to be back in charge of my own fridge’.

There was a small silence. Then Kate shuffled through the bags on the floor and put her arm round Rosa.

‘Sorry’.

‘Me too’.

‘But you see—’

‘Yes,’ Rosa said, ‘I see. Of course I see’.

‘I can’t share my life with you the way I once did—’

‘I know’.

‘But I want to be there for you—’ ‘Please,’ Rosa said, pulling off her nightshirt. ‘Please don’t say that’. ‘Why not?’

‘Because it’s such an awful, meaningless phrase’. ‘But Rose, I’m your friend, I want to—’ Rosa looked at her. ‘You are’.

‘What?’

‘Helping. You’ve given me a roof and a bed and I’m grateful. I am also sorry about the bananas’. She bent and picked up a black bra. ‘I will sort this room’.

Kate watched her.

‘You’re so lucky,’ she said, ‘to have normal-sized breasts still. Seen mine?’

There had been no word from the director of Ghosts. From past experience, Edie knew that this meant she hadn’t got the part, but then, she told herself, she’d known that the moment she’d walked into the room for her casting and sensed the profound boredom her presence aroused. Just after the casting, she had been buoyed up by a kind of righteous indignation – how dare they be so rude, so dismissive, so unprofessional? – and then she had sunk slowly down, as she had done hundreds of times over the years, through disappointment and discouragement, to the kind of weary resignation that made her agent’s consoling platitudes sound more clichéd every time they were uttered.

‘They are a good outfit, Edie, they do pull off some marvellously fresh interpretations, but everyone complains about the way they behave and I know really distinguished people, if you’ll forgive the comparison, dear, who’ve been simply treated like dirt and it just isn’t right or reasonable that they can fill theatres the way they do after treating people like that, but the fact is they do and that’s why I put you up in the first place because it would have been such a step up for you, but there we are. Sorry, dear, sorry. But don’t take it personally. We’ll get you there, promise. You’re just about right now for one of Shakespeare’s mad old queens. Don’t you think?’

Yes, Edie thought, lying on Ben’s bed in the middle of a Thursday afternoon, still clasping the clean towels she’d been bringing upstairs to the airing cupboard when she had spied his bed through the open door of his room and been irresistibly drawn towards it, yes, mad certainly, and old any minute and why not a queen since being anything more realistic seemed to be, at the moment, out of the question? Why not point out, to the Royal Shakespeare Company, what they’d been missing in Edie Allen all these years and watch them throw crowns at her in an agony of remorseful recompense? Why not continue pretending that the world, as she knew it, hadn’t fallen to pieces and left her washed up somewhere alien and empty with no notion of how to proceed? Why not keep saying, as Russell kept saying, that this is a rite of passage that all mothers go through, and do not all go off their heads for ever in the process?

Edie shut her eyes. It would be luxurious, in a way, to be truly off her head, to be so much in another place mentally and emotionally that any requirement to behave conventionally was neither demanded nor expected. The difficulty for her was that she could see how much easier it would be for Russell, for herself even, if she could slide seamlessly from one stage to another, from something almost all-consuming to something still supportive but more detached, but the trouble was that these states of mind and heart did not seem to be a matter of will but more a matter of chance. There were women who could manage to be both kind and somehow still cool; and there were fierce women, women whose feelings tossed them about like corks in a storm. If you were fierce, Edie thought, you couldn’t fake cool. Nor could you think where on earth to put, let alone use up, all that energy.

She sat up, hugging the towels. Two towels, two adult-sized bath towels, which had washed over time from sage green to pale grey. Once there would have been five towels, plus swimming towels and – stop this, Edie said to herself, stop this nonsense, stop indulging yourself. She turned to look out of the window. The sun had come out, a light hard spring sun that only managed to show up just how dirty the glass was.

From downstairs, she heard the telephone ring. It was never plugged in, in her and Russell’s bedroom, unless the children were out late, and as they were no longer there to be out late, it remained unplugged. She sat where she was, her chin on the towels, listening to the cadences of Russell’s polite, easy answerphone message and then the same cadences saying something quite brief, like he’d be having a drink with someone after work or he’d be bringing something back for supper that had caught his fancy. He rang a lot now, little inconsequential messages about this or that, sometimes just to say he was thinking about her. Which was lovely of him, sweet, attentive, thoughtful. And which left her strangely, disconcertingly, guiltily unmoved.

She stood up. Vivien had said, in a rare moment of not needing to score a point, that Edie should just wait, that this was a kind of grief, and that griefs of all kinds were susceptible to time and that, even if time didn’t heal them, it made them possible to accommodate to.

‘Just wait,’ Vivien said, shouting into her mobile against traffic noise. ‘That’s what I’m doing, just waiting’.

‘What do I do,’ Edie said, ‘while I’m waiting?’

‘Be nice to Russell!’ Vivien shouted. ‘Try that, why don’t you?’

There was a pause and then Vivien said, ‘Why do you have to make such a drama out of it, Edie? People leave home all the time! They’re supposed to!’

Edie moved slowly out of Ben’s bedroom and across the landing to the airing cupboard. There was a trick to opening the door, a trick involving lifting the handle slightly as one pulled, while pulling slowly in order not to precipitate an avalanche of towels and duvet covers, which had been stacked, for twenty years now, on slatted shelves that were neither level nor deep enough. Holding a bulging pile back with one hand, Edie half threw the clean towels up towards a space near the top of the cupboard, shut the door hastily and leaned against it. Then she peeled herself gingerly away, waited for ten seconds to make sure the catch would hold, and went downstairs to the kitchen. She glanced at the telephone. There was something slightly pressured about being thought about by the wrong person. Sweet though it was, imaginative, loving, kind – Russell’s message could wait.

Russell decided he would go home early. He had been invited, with Edie, to the preview of a remake of a classic Hitchcock film, starring a hot new young Hollywood actor, who thought, as hot new young actors had probably thought since Sophocles, that they had invented bad behaviour as a statement of wild independence. Russell had not mentioned the preview to Edie simply because she had never liked Hitchcock much and because the number of invitations he now received each month was so great that it had bred, even in Russell, brought up to standards of meticulous courtesy in that terraced house in Hull, a correspondingly great casualness in both responding and attending. He dropped the invitation on Maeve’s desk.

She gave it the merest glance.

‘It’s a bit last-minute—’

‘Now, there’s grateful—’

‘I’d be grateful if I needed to be,’ Maeve said. ‘As well you know’. She looked up. ‘Why aren’t you going?’

Russell unhooked his jacket from the bamboo hatstand behind the door.

‘I’m away to my wife’.

Maeve stopped typing but didn’t look up.

‘Is she OK?’

‘To be truthful,’ Russell said, ‘not very’.

‘There’s no dress rehearsal for these stages of life—’

‘No’.

‘And no way that I can see of knowing how you’ll conduct yourself—’

‘No’.

Maeve began typing again.

‘How’s Rosa?’

‘Don’t know,’ Russell said.

‘Only asking. Pretty girl. Striking, even. And clever. Now, if Rosa was mine—’

‘Good night, Maeve,’ Russell said. He opened the door. ‘See you in the morning’.

She gave a tiny smile to her keyboard.

‘Enjoy your evening’.

Descending to the underground, Russell wondered when he had last attempted to travel not in the rush hour. At four in the afternoon, the underground was strangely easy and accessible, and the people using it looked altogether less driven and self-absorbed. He even found a seat, and extracted the books section of the previous weekend’s newspaper for a leisurely read about books he would never read himself only to discover that he couldn’t somehow concentrate. It wasn’t leaving work early that was troubling – although he couldn’t remember when he had last done that – nor even some residual nagging consciousness that he should be going to the preview because you never knew who else might be in the audience. It was Edie, really. However unresponsive she was being, however unhelpful both to herself and to him, however – well, exasperating was the word that came to mind – she was, one way and another, worrying to Russell. It was natural, perhaps, to feel the final departure of your youngest child as keenly as she felt Ben’s, but was it natural to go on feeling it so keenly, to sink so deeply into the effects of loss that you couldn’t see the point of, or colour in, anything else? And, equally, was it fair to have to restrain oneself from telling one’s wife that she was overreacting, on a daily basis, because one feared the inevitable subsequent explosion?

She hadn’t, it was perfectly obvious, made any effort for the Ibsen casting. She had only gone in the end because Russell and her agent had almost forced her to, and this in itself was worrying because, in the past, however busy, however preoccupied with family life, Edie had displayed an eagerness about every chance that came her way, a kind of optimistic determination that Russell had marvelled at, admired, especially in the face of so much inevitable rejection. She had even said every so often while yanking clothes out of the dryer or dumping mountains of groceries on the kitchen table, ‘Just think what it’ll be like when I can think about lines and not lavatory paper!’ And now that time had come, and she seemed utterly indifferent to it, indifferent indeed to almost everything except tending to this furious small flame of longing for Ben – metaphor for the children’s childhoods – to be back again.

Perhaps, Russell thought, it was just a matter of time. Perhaps – more disconcertingly – it was a kind of depression. Perhaps – more disconcertingly still – Edie had been so changed by all those years of nurture that she couldn’t now remember how it was to be just married, how it was to want to be still married. He shook his paper a little. So many books on the bestseller lists, on the review pages, were about love. Well, of course. In all its myriad forms. What else mattered, really? If it wasn’t for love, indeed, why was he sitting on an afternoon train going home to someone whose current unhappiness he would gladly have shouldered himself? The train pulled into his station and stopped with a jerk. Russell helped a pregnant black girl get herself and a buggy and a sleepy toddler dressed as Spider-Man off the train and on to the platform.

She looked at him. Her eyes were as dark and round as her Spider-Man child’s. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

He badly wanted to say something back. He opened his mouth and then realised that what he hopelessly wanted to say was whole paragraphs of confused thinking about parenthood and letting go and not being able to and having to. He closed his mouth again and smiled. She looked at him for a moment longer and then bent and lifted the child into the buggy.

‘Bye, Spider-Man,’ Russell said.

He let the front door fall shut behind him with a bang. The hall inside was very quiet and the cat, who had been washing in a small patch of sunlight on the stairs, stopped to look at him.

‘Edie?’

She came slowly out of the kitchen holding a mug.

‘Edie—’

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Oh my God, sorry. I didn’t listen to it’. Russell put his bag down. ‘Didn’t listen to what?’

‘Your message. I was fiddling about upstairs and I heard the telephone and I didn’t do anything about it. And then I got deflected. As you do’.

Russell came closer and gave her a brief kiss on the cheek.

‘I didn’t leave you a message. I came home on impulse’. Edie looked suspicious. ‘What impulse?’

‘Uneasiness,’ Russell said. He looked into her mug. ‘Can I have some of that?’

‘It’s green tea,’ Edie said. ‘It is supposed to be invigorating and it’s filthy’.

‘Brown tea, then’.

Edie turned.

‘What are you uneasy about?’

Russell went past her and crossed the kitchen towards the kettle.

‘You know perfectly well’.

‘I am waiting for it to pass,’ Edie said. ‘Like glandular fever’.

‘Ben left a month ago’.

‘What’s a month?’

Russell ran water into the kettle. ‘Quite a long time’.

‘What do you want of me?’ Edie demanded. Russell plugged the kettle into the wall and switched it on.

‘When Ben left, I wanted you to look my way again. Now I would settle for you being able just to rouse yourself, climb out of this – this inertia’.

‘Inertia,’ Edie repeated calmly.

‘Yes’.

‘Like – like not jumping up and down, every time you come home—’

‘No!’ Russell shouted.

‘Then—’

‘Like,’ he said more calmly, ‘not even bothering to listen to your telephone messages’.

He went back past her out of the kitchen to the answer-phone in the hall. Edie drifted to the window and thought, without any urgency, that, if anything, the glass downstairs was even dirtier than the glass upstairs.

‘It was Freddie Cass,’ Russell said, from the doorway.

Edie said, not turning round, ‘I don’t know anyone called Freddie Cass’.

‘Freddie Cass, the director,’ Russell said. His voice was excited. ‘The director of Ghosts’.

Edie turned.

‘He wants you to ring him. He wants you to ring him now’.

Ben had been on an assignment as assistant photographer taking pictures of a major newspaper editor at Canary Wharf. The editor was being photographed for a feature piece in a business magazine that had wanted independent pictures, which was something of a coup for Ben’s boss, and one he had taken very seriously. The editor had been polite but had clearly had a thousand other things on his mind beyond being photographed in such a way as to ensure similar future commissions for Ben’s boss, so the session had had a kind of tension to it, which resulted in Ben’s boss giving Ben a needlessly hard time about every last little thing. As a consequence, Ben had dropped a still-damp Polaroid, mixed up the sequence of some black-and-white film, and held a reflector at an angle which, his boss said, any amateur prat could see bounced light off the ceiling and not the subject. As the subject was still in the room, trying to look simultaneously relaxed and in charge in his double-cuffed shirtsleeves, Ben could not point out that he was only obeying instructions and, if they were wrong, they were hardly his fault.

In the midst of all of this, Ben remembered, in the slow, amazed way he often did remember things, that his brother, Matthew, also worked somewhere in Canary Wharf. He couldn’t remember where or who for, but the idea of Matthew suddenly seemed a most attractive alternative to returning on the Docklands Light Railway with his boss, who would have been stressed out by the photographic session and consequently anxious to take his stress out on somebody else. Ben mumbled that he needed a pee, and went out into the corridor outside the newspaper boardroom, and scrolled to Matthew’s number on his mobile.

‘Wow,’ Matthew said, ‘Ben?’

‘Mmm’.

‘Where are you?’

‘I’m here’. ‘Where?’

‘In your office’.

‘What are you doing here?’

Ben leaned against the nearest wall.

‘Working. Nearly done’.

‘Right—’ ‘You free?’ ‘What, now?’

‘Half an hour or so—’

‘Well, yes. Yes, I could be’.

‘I need a beer,’ Ben said. ‘This afternoon has pretty well done my head in’.

‘Fine. Fine. It – it would be good to see you’. ‘You too, bruv’. ‘Don’t do that’.

‘What?’

‘Don’t,’ Matthew said, ‘use that fake East End talk’.

“Scuse me’.

‘It’s phoney crap—’

‘What’s eating you?’ Ben said.

‘Nothing’.

Ben looked down the corridor. A girl was walking away from him, silhouetted against the light from the window at the end. She was a lovely sight, tall, high heels. Naomi was tall too, nearly as tall as Ben. He suddenly felt rather better.

‘Half an hour,’ Ben said. ‘OK?’

‘Yes,’ Matthew said. His voice had dropped a little. He sounded, abruptly, very tired. ‘See you’.

‘ We can drink in here,’ Matthew said. Ben peered through the glass doors. ‘Looks a bit posh—’

‘It’s all posh round here,’ Matthew said. ‘Artificial and posh’.

He pushed the door open, leaving it to swing in Ben’s face. Ben followed him and seized his arm. ‘What are you like?’

‘What?’

‘What are you in such a strop about?’

Matthew sighed. He looked, Ben thought, not just tired but drained and without that air of confident togetherness that Ben had supposed, for the last five years or so, to be inbuilt. He watched Matthew order, and pay for, a couple of bottles of beer, and then he followed him to a table in a corner, under a plasma television screen showing a picture of some giant freeway interchange, photographed from directly above. Matthew put the beer bottles on the table and glanced up at the screen.

‘I watched the rugby World Cup on that’.

Ben grunted. He put his duffel bag down on the floor and eased himself into an Italian metal chair.

‘How’s things—’

Matthew went on looking at the screen. ‘OK’.

Ben said, ‘My afternoon was shite. He just put me down the whole time over stuff he’d told me to do anyway’.

Matthew glanced away.

‘But apart from this afternoon, everything’s OK?’

‘Aren’t you going to sit down?’

‘Yes’.

‘Well, sit then. I can’t talk to you if you’re standing’.

‘Sorry,’ Matthew said. He sat down slowly, on the chair next to Ben’s. Then he said, ‘Sorry to snap at you’.

Ben took a swallow of beer. He pulled off his knitted hat and ruffled his hair.

‘That’s OK’.

Matthew looked at him.

‘And you really are OK? Apart from this afternoon’. ‘I’m great’. ‘And Naomi—’

‘Great. And the flat. It’s cool. I really like it’. ‘You look as if you do’.

‘Don’t tell Mum,’ Ben said, ‘but I should have gone before, two years ago, three’. Matthew picked up his beer.

‘We all do that’. ‘Do what?’

‘Stay too long’. Ben eyed him.

‘At home?’ ‘And the rest’.

‘Matt,’ Ben said, ‘what’s happened?’ Matthew put the neck of the bottle in his mouth and took it out again. ‘I’m not sure’.

‘You and Ruth—’

‘I think it’s over,’ Matthew said abruptly.

‘Christ’.

‘It just happened. It was so sudden. And I didn’t see it coming’. He took a mouthful of beer and shut his eyes tightly, as if swallowing it was an effort. ‘And I should have’.

‘Hey,’ Ben said. He leaned towards his brother. ‘Hey, Matt. Mate—’

‘She wants to buy a flat,’ Matthew said, ‘and I can’t afford to. I can’t afford to because it’s been costing me every penny I earn to live the way we do and I’m a stupid bloody idiot to have got in this mess. I am twenty-eight years old, Ben, and I’m back where I was at your age. I feel – I feel—’ He stopped and then he said in a furious whisper, ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter’.

Ben said slowly, ‘It’s hard to say—’

Matthew looked at him.

‘It’s hard to say, to a woman, that you haven’t got enough money’.

‘Yes’.

‘And if the woman has more than you do—’ ‘Yes. Does Naomi?’

‘No,’ Ben said, ‘and I tell her I wouldn’t mind if she did. But I’m not so sure’.

‘It isn’t good,’ Matthew said. ‘You may not have failed, but it feels as if you have. So you don’t say, and she makes assumptions. She’s perfectly entitled to make assumptions, if you don’t say’.

Ben drank some more beer.

‘Don’t you want to live in her flat?’

‘Not under those circumstances. I’d feel like a lodger’.

‘So—’

‘So I’ve said to her that if she wants the flat – and she should be buying a flat, earning what she does – she should go ahead and buy it, but that I can’t come with her’.

‘Why,’ Ben said, ‘does it have to be this flat?’

‘She’s set her heart on it—’

‘But if you had a cheaper flat, then you could manage it, maybe’. Matthew frowned.

‘I tried that’.

Ben gave him a quick look.

‘What did she say?’

‘She said she wanted me to come too. To this flat. She wants this flat’.

‘Well then’.

‘But I can’t. And she knows I can’t’.

‘So you’re making her choose—’

‘No,’ Matthew said, ‘I’m setting her free to choose’.

Ben stared ahead.

Then he said, ‘I’m sorry’.

‘Thanks’.

‘Will you tell the parents?’

‘I’ll have to’.

‘Why have to—’ Matthew looked down.

He said, almost bitterly, ‘I may need a bit of help. For a while’.

Ben adjusted his gaze from the distance to his beer. This was the moment, if he was going to take it, to tell Matthew that Rosa had already asked for help from their father, and been, however reasonably, turned down. But it occurred to Ben that Matthew wasn’t like Rosa and that, in any case, his older brother and sister had to do things their own way, fight their own battles. If he mentioned Rosa, it might just be one more depressing thing for Matthew to have to factor in, one more difficulty in an already difficult situation.

He picked his bottle up again.

‘Talk to Mum’.

Matthew turned to look at him.

‘Really? I was going to talk to Dad’.

Ben shook his head. He was conscious of feeling something he had never felt in his life before, a sensation of not just, at last, being the same age as his brother but also, headily, almost older. He put an arm briefly across Matthew’s shoulders.

‘No. Talk to Mum,’ Ben said. ‘Trust me’.