Second Honeymoon

Chapter Seven

The loft on Bankside was in a vast converted Victorian warehouse. Its brick walls, newly cleaned and pierced with modern windows in matte black frames, reared up from the charmingly – and also newly – cobbled alley that separated the building from a similar one ten feet away. If you looked skywards, you could see, on the two sides that looked towards the river, that little black balconies had been hung outside some of the higher windows, and on one of those, Matthew supposed, Ruth would emerge on summer evenings, holding a glass of vodka and cranberry juice, or whatever was the drink of the moment in her circle, and admire both the view and her sense of ownership.

Thinking this was not, Matthew found, at all comfortable. In fact nothing in his mind was, at the moment, in the least comfortable, being instead a sour soup of disappointment and self-reproach and a very real and insistent sadness. It wasn’t a simple matter of resenting Ruth, or even berating himself for not facing facts, because the whole situation had crept up on him – on them both – so insidiously, fuelled by things that were not acknowledged or uttered even more than by things that were openly expressed. He might curse himself for getting into this tangle, but the curses were only the more vehement because he could, looking back, see exactly how he had got there.

When Matthew had announced that there was no way he could share in the purchase of the flat, Ruth had become very still. She had looked at him for a long time, thoughtfully, and then she had said, ‘Will you do one thing?’

‘What thing—’

‘Come and see the flat. Just see it’. He shook his head.

‘No’.

‘Matthew, please’.

‘I can’t afford it. I don’t want to have my nose rubbed in what I can’t afford’.

‘It isn’t for you, I’m afraid. It’s for me. I want you to see the flat’.

He said nothing.

She said, almost shyly, ‘I want you to see what I’m buying’.

‘Why?’

‘I want you to be part of it—’

‘I can’t be’.

‘But you’ll come there, you’ll come and see me, surely?’ He hesitated. His heart smote him. He said, not looking at her, ‘Of course’. ‘Then come’.

‘Ruth—’

She moved towards him and put her hands on his shoulders. She looked into his face as intently as if she were counting his eyelashes.

‘Matt. Matt. This isn’t the end of us’.

Now, standing uneasily on those carefully patterned cobblestones, Matthew told himself that being kind – or cowardly – once was one thing: persisting in it was quite another and could lead to desperate situations. Whatever Ruth said, however beseeching she was, he must not allow her to believe that he felt other than he did, that he could somehow cope with a situation in which he only had power in the obvious department of bed, which was not, in the end, he knew, enough.

He pushed open the heavy glass door of the warehouse and entered an immensely tall foyer, floored in granite with long windows running right up to the roof. There was an industrial steel staircase curving up behind a bank of lifts and besides that nothing, not a picture nor an ashtray nor a piece of furniture, nothing but high, quiet acres of expensively finished dark gleaming space. He stepped forward into a lift and pressed the button for the sixth floor.

When the lift doors slid open, there was a sudden flood of light.

‘I saw you!’ Ruth said. She was standing in an open doorway with apparently nothing behind her. ‘I was watching from the balcony and I saw you!’

He bent to kiss her cheek. She moved to meet his mouth and missed it. He looked past her.

‘Wow’.

‘Isn’t it wonderful?’

He nodded. The room beyond the open door was pale and high and shining, and at the end there was nothing through the huge windows but sky.

Ruth took his hand.

‘You see? You see why I had to buy it?’

She towed him through the door. Then she let go and spun down the length of the room.

‘Isn’t it great?’

‘Yes’.

‘All this space! All this air! And Central London! I can walk to work!’

‘Yes’.

‘Come and see the bathroom,’ Ruth said. ‘The shower is so cool. And in the kitchen, the microwave is built into the cooker unit. It looks like a spaceship’.

Matthew followed her across the wooden floor, through a doorway in a translucent wall of glass bricks. She was standing in a shower made of a cylinder of satin-finished metal, punctuated with little glass portholes in blue and green.

‘Did you ever see anything like it?’

‘No,’ Matthew said, ‘I never did’.

Ruth stepped out of the shower.

She said, more soberly, ‘I wish it wasn’t like this’.

He nodded.

She said, ‘I wish it wasn’t you coming to stay in my flat. I wish it was ours’.

He leaned against the wall. The glass felt solid and cold through the sleeve of his jacket.

He said, too loudly, ‘I’m afraid I won’t be coming’.

She said nothing. She walked past him very quickly and went back into the big room. He followed her. She was standing by the sliding doors to the balcony looking at her view of the river.

She said, ‘Please don’t talk like that’.

He stayed standing a little behind her.

He said, ‘Ruth, I have to. If I come and stay here, it’ll change the balance between us. It’s changed already, of course, but it’d be worse. You can imagine how it would be. It’d be pitiful’.

She said fiercely, turning round, ‘You couldn’t be pitiful. I wouldn’t let you’.

He tried to smile.

‘You couldn’t stop me. It would just happen’.

‘Matt—’

‘We’ve had a wonderful time,’ he said, ‘and it’s got nothing to do with not loving you—’ She stepped forward and seized his arms. ‘Suppose I don’t buy it! I mind far more about you—’ He stepped back, gently extricating himself. He said, shaking his head, ‘It wouldn’t work—’ She dropped her arms.

She said miserably, ‘I didn’t mean this to – be like this’.

‘I know you didn’t’.

‘Are – are my values all skewed?’

‘Nope’.

‘Please – please don’t leave’. He looked round the table. ‘It’s a wonderful place. You’ll be really happy here’.

‘Matt—’

He leaned forward and laid the palm of his hand against her cheek.

He said, ‘And you’re doing the right thing,’ and then he took his hand away and walked back across the echoing floor to the landing and the lifts.

Edie took a garden chair into the angle of the house where, if you tucked yourself right into the corner, you could elude every breath of wind. She also carried a mug of coffee, her script and, somehow, two ginger biscuits, a pen and her telephone. Behind her, sensing a sedentary moment of which he might take advantage, padded Arsie.

The sun, shining out of a washed blue sky, was quite strong. It showed up unswept post-winter garden corners, and interesting patterns of blistered paintwork and lingering blackened leaves on the clematis above Edie’s head. She thought, settling herself into the chair and arranging her mug and phone and biscuits on a couple of upturned flowerpots to hand, that this was the first time, the first moment, in the last five weeks, when she had felt the possibility of pleasure, a tiny chance for the future to hold something that could, in turn, hold a small candle to the past. She let Arsie spring into her lap, waited while he trampled himself down into position, and then rested her script on top of his purring tabby back. Sun, cat, acting, Edie thought. She patted the script. No, not quite that. Russell would put it differently. Sun, cat, work.

‘I can’t believe this is work,’ Lazlo had said to her at the first rehearsal.

She’d been looking at her lines.

Without glancing at him, she said, ‘By the end of this rehearsal, you’ll know it is’.

By the end of the rehearsal, he’d been ashen. He’d looked as if he might cry. He’d been all over the place, all the wrong emphases, no sense of timing, not listening, in panic, to what the director was saying.

‘Go away,’ Freddie Cass said to him. ‘Go away and learn those lines and come back to me empty’.

‘Empty?’

‘Empty. We’re starting again. We’re not starting from Lazlo, we’re starting from the play’.

Ivor, the Norwegian, had taken him and Edie for a consoling drink. Now that the cast was established Ivor had exchanged patronage for paternalism.

He put a hefty arm round Lazlo’s shoulders.

‘Drink that. Relax’.

Lazlo looked like a boy in a fairy tale, rescued by a genial giant. He drank his drink and shivered a little and Edie and Ivor smiled at each other across his bent head and told him that everyone had first rehearsals like this, everyone got overexcited at one point or another, and made fools of themselves.

Lazlo looked mournfully at Edie.

‘You didn’t,’ he said.

‘Not on this occasion’.

‘Tell me,’ Lazlo said miserably, ‘about a time when you did’.

They’d ended up drinking two bottles of wine and putting their arms round each other and when Edie got home, Russell took one look at her and said, ‘Shall I say I told you so?’

It was true that the play was drawing her in and therefore providing a distraction from her preoccupations, but that didn’t mean, Edie decided, tilting her face to the sun and closing her eyes, that she didn’t notice that none of the children were telephoning, nor that she didn’t feel painfully aware that she knew very little about Matthew’s new flat or Rosa’s living arrangements, or Ben’s girlfriend, or any of their working lives. She had promised herself that she wouldn’t keep ringing them, and she clung to that promise with the tenacity usually required to stick to a rigorous diet, but it didn’t mean she didn’t think and wonder and worry. And feel left out. Playing Mrs Alving was wonderful because it stopped her, sometimes for hours at a time, from waiting for the telephone to ring: but it wasn’t a solution, it was only a diversion.

Beside her, quivering on its upturned flowerpot, her phone began vibrating.

‘It’s me,’ Vivien said.

‘Damn’.

‘Thank you so very much—’ ‘I was hoping you were Matthew. Or Ben’. ‘At eleven-thirty in the morning?’ ‘Why not?’

‘People only ring their mothers in the early evening. It’s a sort of tradition’. ‘Vivi,’ Edie said. ‘You sound very perky’.

‘Well, the sun’s out and my new little blue clematis is flowering and Eliot has passed his first diving exam’. ‘How useful’.

‘It is, if you’re living in Australia, near interesting coral reefs’.

‘Would you call it a career?’

‘I rang,’ Vivi said, ‘to ask how you are. Actually’.

‘And actually, I’m very pleased to hear you. Nobody rings me now. Nobody. I’ve vanished. Was it Germaine Greer who said that women over fifty are invisible?’

‘Probably. But I expect she was thinking of them as sex objects’.

Edie shifted in her chair a little and the script slid to the ground. Arsie didn’t move.

‘I only want to be a mother object. I’ll think about sex again when I’ve sorted this stage. Actually, talking of mothers, I’ve got a sweet new stage son. He’s twenty-four and anxious and pads round after me like a puppy’.

‘Well,’ Vivien said, ‘there you are then. Sorted’.

‘I want to know how my real children are’.

There was a tiny pause and then Vivien said, almost cautiously, ‘I can tell you how one of them is, I think—’

‘Can you?’ Edie said sharply. She sat up, pulling her knees together. Arsie dug his claws in. ‘Ow. What do you mean?’

‘I saw Rosa—’

‘Did you?’ ‘Yes’.

‘Why did you see Rosa?’

Vivien said lightly, ‘Oh, she came to supper’.

‘Did she?’

‘And stayed the night’.

Edie opened her mouth to say, truthfully, that she didn’t know or, untruthfully, that she’d forgotten, and decided against both of them.

Instead she said, in a voice that entirely betrayed her feelings, ‘Good!’

‘I rather thought,’ Vivien said unkindly, ‘that she’d have told you’.

Edie leaned forward to detach Arsie’s claws from the fabric of her trouser knees.

She said, as normally as she could, ‘How was she?’

‘Well,’ Vivien said, ‘I thought she was putting on a bit of a brave face. I mean, this travel agency job is fine, but it isn’t really stretching her, you know. She knows that, of course, but it’s money, isn’t it?’

‘Yes—’

‘The real trouble was living with Kate and Barney. They’re too newly married, really, to cope with having anyone else there. She didn’t actually say she didn’t feel welcome, but I could tell she was having a bad time’.

‘Was?’

‘Oh yes,’ Vivien said, almost airily. ‘We sorted the living thing at least’.

Edie closed her eyes.

‘She’s coming to live with me, for the moment,’ Vivien said. ‘That’s why I’m ringing, really. I thought you should know’.

Edie opened her eyes again. She gripped the telephone.

‘Let me get this straight, Vivi. Rosa is working in a travel agency, and living with Kate and Barney didn’t work out so she – she has asked to live with you?’

‘No,’ Vivien said, ‘I asked her. I could see she was desperate’.

‘Why,’ Edie cried, wishing she could restrain herself, ‘didn’t she ask me? Why didn’t she come home?’ ‘Ah. Now that I couldn’t say. I couldn’t tell you about that’.

‘You’re a smug, manipulative cow’.

‘Edie,’ Vivien said, ‘I am your sister and Rosa’s aunt. I’m family’.

‘I don’t want to talk to you any more’.

‘Oh, don’t be so melodramatic and silly. As long as Rosa is safe and comfortable, why does it matter whose roof she’s under?’

Edie scooped her free hand under Arsie and lifted him off her lap. Then she stood up.

‘You know very well why it matters’.

‘Only if you’re possessive’.

‘I’m not possessive!’

‘Well,’ Vivien said, ‘you think of another word for it’. Edie put a hand over her eyes. ‘To cook up this plan behind my back—’ ‘I’m ringing you’.

‘Rosa didn’t’.

‘Well,’ Vivien said triumphantly, ‘can you wonder?’

Edie looked down at the ground. The sheets of her script were scattered about and the cat was sitting, washing, on some of them.

‘I must go,’ she said to her sister. ‘You—’

‘Yes,’ Edie said. ‘Can’t talk any more. Got to learn my lines’.

Maeve was sorting the invoices for Russell’s quarterly VAT return. In the days before VAT she had entered all receipts and outgoings in a series of black analysis books and there were many occasions, either battling with the geriatric computer, or shuffling sliding piles of paper on not enough desk space, when she longed for those uncomplicated handwritten days, those peaceful, simple columns of in and out with their satisfactorily clear totals, written in red, at the foot of each one. Modern business life wasn’t just more complicated; there was also more of it, more paper, more checking, more duplicating, more choices. Choice, Maeve sometimes thought, accounted for far more of the current propensity for depression than stress did. Choice, if taken to extremes, could quite simply drive you mad.

The door to Russell’s office stood open, as usual. Russell himself wasn’t in his office, having gone to a meeting with a television production company that had secured an advertising contract for a major bank and was in search of both actors and actors’ voices. Maeve could visualise him at the meeting, slightly rumpled amid the black T-shirts and business suits, but not to be lightly dismissed on account of having known the business, and the people in it, since before some of his competitors were born. If Russell wasn’t the kind of agent who commuted to Los Angeles and had a country house for weekends, it was because he didn’t want to be.

‘Not blazingly ambitious,’ he’d said to Maeve when he first interviewed her all those years ago. ‘Just want to have a nice time. It’s what growing up in the North does to you – you’re either driven by the work ethic of your childhood, or you decide to react against it. What you see, Miss O’Leary, is my small rebellion’.

All the same, he probably wouldn’t come back from the meeting entirely empty-handed. He’d taken a few photographs, a few voice tapes, and he would proffer them casually, merely saying, ‘You might like to consider this,’ in the tone of voice he used to his clients when persuading them to accept a job that paid reasonably but only required a fraction of their acting skills. The clients, having reluctantly accepted, would then lie across the wicker sofas in Maeve’s office and groan to her.

‘I said I’d never be a lawn mower again. I promised myself no more cartoon bears. I swore not to be a tea bag. Not ever again. Not ever’.

Maeve had made a sign years before, which she had stuck on the back of her computer, the side that faced the sofa. It read: ‘Just think of the money’ and it had been there so long that the edges had stiffened and curled. It was supposed to save her saying it out loud, over and over, but of course everyone needed to be told, equally over and over, that being the voice of a northern Building society was going to pay the bills until that turning-point movie role became a happening rather than a hope.

Maeve got up from her desk and went into Russell’s office to collect the small receipts that he threw into an old leather collar box on the cluttered shelves behind his desk. The collar box had belonged to his grandfather, whose initials, the same as Russell’s, could still be seen, faintly stamped into the leather below the fastening. What would that Russell Boyd, Maeve sometimes wondered, that hard-working, God-fearing manufacturer of fish barrels for the fleets that worked off the northern coasts, close to Hull, have made of his grandson being in a poncy job like this? And what of those framed photographs, signed by some of Russell’s better-known clients, all parted lips and smouldering eyes and flourishes? Maeve took down the collar box and opened the lid. There wasn’t much in it. Russell might like a nice life in some ways, but that didn’t include, it seemed, taking many taxis.

From her own office, the street doorbell rang. Maeve put down the collar box and pressed the audio button on the intercom.

‘Russell Boyd Associates’.

‘It’s Edie,’ Edie said.

‘You come on up,’ Maeve said. ‘He’s not here, but I’m expecting him’.

She pushed the door release, and a second later heard its muffled crash, closing behind Edie. She opened the office door and waited for Edie’s steps up the stairs, light and quick, to come closer. Edie was wearing jeans, and a green wool jacket, with her hair pushed into the kind of cap Maeve remembered people wearing in the sixties, a gamine kind of cap, with a big peak.

‘I’ve to congratulate you,’ Maeve said, as Edie reached the final landing, ‘on getting that play’.

Edie gave her a pat on the arm. They had known one another for twenty-five years and had never kissed. Edie was not the kind of woman, Maeve considered, who scattered kisses about just anyhow, actor or no actor, and in any case a mutual sense of propriety had kept them friendly but formal.

‘It’s good,’ Edie said. She was panting slightly. ‘I’m enjoying it. No wonder Ibsen went to Italy. You couldn’t breathe, then, in Norway’. She looked into Russell’s office. ‘Where’s he gone?’

‘Meeting with Daydream Productions. Should be back any minute. Now, will you have a cup of coffee?’

Edie considered.

‘I don’t think so—’

‘I make it all day,’ Maeve said. ‘It’s never enough for these people just to come here and see Russell and go. They need nourishment and a sympathetic ear and I’m the provider of both’.

Edie walked over to the window of Russell’s office.

She said, almost idly, ‘I suppose Rosa hasn’t been in?’

‘Not for a while,’ Maeve said. ‘Not for a month or so. Looking at you, I can’t see where that height of hers comes from’.

Edie shrugged.

‘They’re all taller than me. I used to have to buy shoes in Chinatown’.

‘It’s modern nourishment,’ Maeve said. ‘It’s all this feeding. When I was growing up, in County Sligo, you could have put three children into a modern one’. The street door crashed again.

‘That’ll be him,’ Maeve said. ‘You’re a family of slam-mers. Not another soul in this building slams the way he does’.

Edie took her cap off and put it on Russell’s desk. Then she sat down in his swivel chair and leaned back.

‘If you’re taking him away,’ Maeve said, ‘I’ve some letters for him to sign before you do’.

Edie shook her head.

‘I just want to ask him something’.

Russell’s footsteps could be heard on the landing and then crossing Maeve’s office.

He appeared in the doorway.

‘Well,’ he said. He was smiling. ‘How lovely’.

Edie regarded him.

Maeve said, ‘And how did it go?’

Russell was looking at Edie.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Good. Several nibbles that might well amount to a bite or two’.

He put the battered canvas bag in which he carried papers down on a chair and went round his desk, stooping to kiss Edie.

‘Hello’.

Edie said, ‘I could have rung but I was restless’. ‘Good,’ Russell said again. He perched himself on the edge of his desk. ‘You wouldn’t be here otherwise’. Maeve moved towards her office.

‘Will I shut the door?’

Russell half turned.

‘Don’t bother’. ‘Please,’ Edie said, past him. He turned back. ‘What’s happened?’

Edie waited until Maeve, with elaborate care, had closed the connecting door. Then she said, ‘Something a bit puzzling—’

‘What?’

She put a half-closed hand up near her face, as if she was examining the cuticles. ‘Vivi rang’.

‘And?’

‘She said Rosa was moving in with her’.

‘Well,’ Russell said, a shade too cheerfully, ‘isn’t that a good thing?’

‘Why didn’t I hear it from Rosa?’

‘Well, perhaps Vivi got in first—’

‘Why isn’t Rosa ringing? Why don’t I know what’s happening to Rosa?’

To be honest,’ Russell said, ‘I don’t know what’s happening to her either’.

Edie took her gaze off her cuticles and directed it at Russell.

‘Don’t you think we should know?’ ‘Darling, she’s twenty-six—’

‘I don’t care if she’s a hundred and six. She’s not settled or happy and we are her parents and we should know’.

Russell stopped smiling.

‘Yes’.

Edie leaned forward so that she could look penetratingly up at Russell.

‘There was a hint in something Vivi said, just a hint, that something has been going on, to do with Rosa’.

‘Ah—’

‘And when I’d rung off and was pacing about learning my lines, it came to me that perhaps something had been going on to do with Rosa, to do with Matt too, for that matter, something that I didn’t know about, but which you possibly did’.

Russell looked out of the window and waited.

‘Well, I couldn’t go on pacing up and down, declaiming about dissolution and debauchery, I couldn’t concentrate any more, so I got on the tube, and I came.

Russell?’

‘Damn Vivi,’ Russell said lightly.

Edie put her hand on his sleeve.

‘What,’ Edie said, ‘have you and Rosa been doing?’

Russell looked down at Edie’s hand on his arm. He felt a sudden uncharacteristic and complete loss of temper, and moved his arm so that Edie’s hand fell from it.

‘Nothing,’ he said furiously. ‘Nothing. Nothing to do with you’.

‘But—’

‘Did you hear me?’ Edie stared at him.

She hesitated and then she said uncertainly, ‘If you say so—’

‘I do’.

‘But is she OK?’

Russell turned away and bent over his desk, staring deliberately at the computer screen.

‘When she isn’t,’ he said more calmly, ‘I’ll tell you’.

There were four messages on Rosa’s mobile phone, one from her mother, one from her father, one from her aunt, and one from her older brother. Only the last one did she have any inclination to return. The others – well, how depressing was it, at her age, and stuffed into the sky-blue polyester blazer with yellow plastic sunburst buttons required by the travel company, to have a string of messages on your phone that are all, but all, from your family? It would be all very well, of course, if there were other messages, messages from friends and – well, better not think about that. Better not remember how happy she had been to let Josh make her miserable, better not even start down that train of thought that began by fantasising how it might have been if she had never met him, never fallen in love with him, never been so sure that keeping him mattered more than anything else in the world. She’d hardly taken her eyes off her phone in the Josh days.

The messages were all, except for Matt’s, of a kind that she didn’t much want to hear. It was evident that her aunt had rung her mother to have a small but unmistakable gloat about Rosa’s living arrangements, and, in the course of conversation, had hinted that something had occurred to prevent Rosa’s turning at once to her parents in time of need. Her mother had then, it appeared, gone straight to find her father, who had had to confess what had happened, and they had both subsequently left messages, her father’s apologetic but brisk, her mother’s imploring her to come home. Matthew’s, by contrast, was completely unemotional. He just said he’d like to catch up sometime soon. He was plainly calling from the office because his call took ten seconds.

Rosa dropped her phone back in the bag at her feet. She was not going to deal with any of this just now. Despite the blue polyester blazer, today had been a reasonably good day. She had sold a weekend in Venice to a party of six, booked a stag group to Vilnius and reserved several family-holiday special-offers in Croatia. If they all came good, it was the most commission she had made so far, which might translate into the first tiny repayment of debt, the first small step back to even a vestige of independence. If you coupled that with the prospect of Vivien’s spare bedroom – a bit fussy, a bit overfurnished, but comfortable and convenient and almost free – it was not, Rosa considered, quite as black an outlook as it had been a month before.

She moved the mouse for her computer to access her emails. It was not permitted, in the travel company, to use the email service for personal messages, but who was going to check on her if she bent the rule just once? She typed in Matthew’s work address.

‘Tx for message,’ Rosa wrote, one eye on the office manager eight feet away straightening the rack of brochures. ‘Yes, would be good to meet. When? Where?’ And then she added, pulling a booking form towards her in order to look like work, ‘Need to talk. Parents!!!’

The office manager turned from the brochure rack. She had ironed straight hair and favoured pearlised lip-gloss.

She looked straight at Rosa. ‘Checking your bookings?’ Rosa smiled broadly. ‘Just checking’.