Second Honeymoon

Chapter Eight

‘News on flat???’ Laura’s email said. ‘Need update!’ Then, ‘We are thinking of a Smeg fridge. Would pink be idiotic and would I get tired of it?’

Ruth sighed. The notion of a huge pink fridge even existing, let alone being a preoccupation, was at this moment so irrelevant as to be fantastical. And upsetting. Ruth wasn’t sure she had ever felt this sad. There was, really, no other word for this leaden suffering, this sensation that her heart, as a muscle, actually hurt. Every time she thought about Matthew, which she did constantly, she was invaded by an aching distress, which she could recognise, even while it was happening, as one of the most real emotions she had ever felt.

But, at the same time, she was certain she couldn’t slow her life to accommodate his. When he had uttered the word ‘pitiful’ she had discovered that, even if she energetically listed and acknowledged all his qualities, she would always know – because he would always know – that in a vital area of achievement and contribution he could not at the moment begin to match her. He was afraid of being pitied or made allowance for, and he was right. He knew what he could bear, and what he couldn’t, and – which made her throat constrict with love for him – he had more resolve in that department than she did. And not only resolve, but dignity. He had, in a way, taken quiet charge of their last meeting in the empty flat. He had told her that, even if she withdrew from buying it, the dynamic of their relationship had changed in a way that could not be changed back again. She had clutched at straws and he had not joined in. When she thought of the way he had behaved, she wasn’t at all sure she could stand missing him so much.

Her offer on the flat had been accepted. She had arranged a mortgage through the bank used by her company. What was extremely strange was that all the time she was involved in these transactions she had felt she was right in proceeding with them, and also she had not sensed any diminishment in her excitement over the flat. How could it be that one could feel such heartache and such hope at the same time? How was it that something could feel so right and so wrong simultaneously? And how could one ever know, in these shapeless days of moral codes being so much a matter of personal choice, if one was behaving in the way that one ought to be behaving? She put the heels of her hands up against her temples and closed her eyes. What, anyway, did ‘ought’ mean any more?

She clicked on ‘Reply’ to Laura’s message.

‘Forget fridge,’ she wrote, ‘I need advice. No, I don’t. I need comfort. I thought if I showed Matthew the flat – and it is stunning – it would somehow persuade him that we could work it out together in a place like that. But he was wiser than me. He saw what I didn’t want to see, and he’s gone. Laura, he’s gone. And I am devastated. But I am still thrilled about the flat. Laura, am I a freak?’

‘Like the blazer,’ Matthew said, nodding at the sunburst buttons.

‘It would be kinder not to mention it’. ‘I can’t not mention it’.

‘Yes, you can,’ Rosa said. ‘Unless you want to make even more of a point about contrasting my life with yours’.

There was a tiny pause and then Matthew said, indicating the menu, ‘What d’you want to eat?’

‘Are you paying?’

‘Yes’.

Well, I’ll have the courgette-and-broad-bean thing with a grilled chicken breast’.

‘Please’.

Rosa smiled at him.

‘Please’.

Matthew turned and gestured for a waiter. Rosa said, ‘And possibly a glass of Sauvignon?’ Matthew glanced at her.

‘All right’.

‘Matt, one glass—’ He turned back.

‘I don’t begrudge you a glass, Rose. You can have a bottle if you want. It isn’t that’.

‘What isn’t what?’

A waiter appeared, in a long black apron, holding a pad. He smiled at Rosa. She held up her menu, so that he could see, pointing at what she wanted. Then she looked up at him and smiled back.

‘I’ll have the kedgeree,’ Matthew said, ‘and a salad. And one glass of house Sauvignon’.

‘Aren’t you having any?’

‘No’.

‘Why not?’

‘Because,’ Matthew said, ‘I really don’t feel like it’. ‘Why not?’ Rosa said again. ‘Tummy? Head?’ Matthew picked up the menus and handed them to the waiter.

‘Heart,’ he said shortly. Rosa sat up. ‘What’s happened?’

Matthew picked up a basket of bread and offered it to his sister.

She ignored it.

‘Matt. What’s happened?’

‘Well,’ Matthew said, putting the bread down and leaning his arms on the table, ‘Ruth and I are – over’.

‘Oh no’.

‘Yes’.

‘Not you two—’

‘Yes’.

‘Same outlook, same interests, same ambition—’

‘No’.

‘Has she met someone else?’

‘No’.

‘Well, from the look of you, you haven’t’.

‘No’.

‘Matt—’

‘I’ll tell you,’ Matthew said, ‘if you’ll just shut up a minute’.

The waiter put a glass of wine down in front of Rosa. She said, ‘I can’t believe it, I can’t grasp—’ ‘Nor can I’.

‘This flat—’

‘That’s it really,’ Matthew said, ‘the flat. The bottom line is that she can afford it and I can’t. And she should be on the property ladder. It’s the right decision for her, I’ve told her so. But I can’t join her’.

Rosa said slowly, ‘I thought you were earning a shed of money’.

Matthew made a face.

‘Half what Ruth earns’.

‘Half?’ ‘Yes’.

‘Heavens, I always thought—’

‘I know. I didn’t stop anyone thinking that. But the truth is, it’s been a struggle to keep up and lately – well, lately I haven’t been keeping up. And I certainly can’t begin on fancy flat buying’.

Rosa’s gaze moved, item by item, over as much of her brother as she could see above the table.

He said, ‘Say stupid if you want to’.

‘I don’t want to. And I’m hardly in a position to say anything anyway’. She paused and took a mouthful of wine and then she said, ‘Poor you’.

He shrugged.

‘What – what if she doesn’t buy the flat?’ ‘Too late,’ Matthew said. ‘You mean too late, she’s bought it?’ He shook his head.

‘No, too late to retrieve where we were. The flat was just the catalyst. It made us face the disparity’. ‘Did she throw you out?’ ‘No!’ he said angrily. ‘Sorry—’ ‘I threw myself’.

‘Oh Matt,’ Rosa said, ‘I wish I’d done that’. He said sadly, ‘It’s awful, whatever you do’. She leaned forward. ‘Do you still love her?’

The waiter appeared again, holding their plates of food. Matthew leaned back.

He waited until the kedgeree was in front of him and then he said, ‘Of course I do. You don’t just switch that off in an instant. You should know that’.

Rosa looked at her plate.

She said hesitantly, ‘I meant, do you still love her enough to try again?’ Matthew sighed.

‘Not under present circumstances’.

‘But Ruth will just go on being successful. Won’t she?’

‘Yes. And she ought to’.

‘What, put work before relationships?’

‘Well,’ Matthew said, putting his fork into the rice and taking it out again, ‘you’ve got to put something first, haven’t you? Not everything can take priority’.

Rosa waited a moment. She cut a strip off her chicken.

‘Matt, what about you? Couldn’t you have compromised?’

Matthew sighed.

‘Apparently not’.

‘A cheaper flat—’

‘Ben said that. But I couldn’t afford even a cheaper flat. And she was – kind of stuck on this one. Elated’.

Rosa stopped cutting chicken and looked soberly across the table at her brother.

‘Matt, what about you?’

He said, not looking up, ‘I’ve still got a job’.

‘Do you like it?’

‘I don’t mind it. In fact, I do quite like it. But it feels different now, if there isn’t going to be Ruth. It was just one part of life and now it’s got to be almost all of it. So – well, it doesn’t feel like it used to. I can’t quite remember what it’s for’.

‘D’you think,’ Rosa said, ‘that having Mum and Dad still together makes us feel we ought to be in a relationship?’

Matthew took a tiny mouthful.

‘I don’t think that’s got anything to do with it’.

‘Have you told them?’

‘It’s only just happened,’ Matthew said. ‘Ben knows, that’s all’.

‘Before me?’

‘He just rang me,’ Matthew said patiently. ‘He just happened to be around’.

Rosa picked her wine glass up. ‘Where are you sleeping?’ ‘On the sofa’.

‘Ruth in the bedroom, you on the sofa—’

‘Yup’.

‘You can’t do that—’ ‘No. Not for long’.

Rosa said, as if an idea was slowly dawning, ‘Maybe, if you got a flat, we could share’. Matthew put his fork down. ‘Sorry, Rose’.

‘What?’

He looked at her.

‘I just feel – a bit demoralised, I suppose. As if everything has come to a halt, as if I can’t decide anything for a while. I never thought I’d say this, I mean, I left about seven years ago, for God’s sake, but I think I might go home. Just for a while’.

‘I wonder,’ Freddie Cass said to Edie at the end of rehearsal, ‘if I could ask you something’.

Edie was putting on her jacket.

‘Of course’.

Freddie put out an arm to hold a shoulder of the jacket. ‘It’s Regina’.

‘Ah’.

Regina was being played by the defiant girl called Cheryl Smith who chain-smoked and stamped about rehearsals in slouched pirate boots.

‘She’s good,’ Freddie said. ‘She knows what she’s doing. But Lazlo’s frightened of her’.

Edie shrugged her jacket round her neck.

‘She’s in-your-face sort of sexy—’

‘Exactly. That’s what I wanted. Especially for Act Three. But there’s no chemistry between the two of them because she’s contemptuous and he’s scared’.

Edie said, ‘Well, you’re the director—’

‘Well, indeed I am’. He smiled at Edie. He smiled so seldom, showing long, greyish teeth, that she was startled. ‘But you could do something for me’.

‘I said of course—’

‘You’re mothering Lazlo so excellently’.

‘Don’t ask me to mother Cheryl—’

‘Oh no. Just have her to supper’.

Edie looked across the room. Cheryl, her legs arranged in their distinct dancer’s pose, was smoking and talking to Ivor.

‘She’d never come’.

‘Oh, I think so’. ‘With – with Lazlo?’

‘That was my idea’.

‘She’d certainly never come if he came’. Freddie switched his smile off. Edie felt a sense of relief.

‘She’d come,’ Freddie said, ‘if you told her your husband’s an agent’.

Edie said indignantly, ‘Look, sorry, but this is your job!’

He leaned forward and gripped her arm.

‘In a production like this, dear, it’s our job. I’ll buy the wine’.

Later, on the bus going home, Edie found herself having to work hard at staying indignant. Freddie should never have asked her to help him out and she should never have agreed, but once they had both done so there was little point in nursing outrage. In any case, the energy outrage would have consumed seemed to want to be channelled into thinking about having Lazlo and Cheryl to supper and how their presence in the kitchen – both in their twenties, both in a precarious profession – might serve as a useful bait for tempting Rosa to come back, just for the evening, just for supper. And once Rosa was there, it might be possible – or, at any rate, less impossible – to discover why she had chosen to seek help from her friends and her aunt rather than her mother.

Edie looked at the script in the bag on her knee. That afternoon, she and Lazlo had made a first attempt at their final, terrible scene. She had flung out her hands and cried Mrs Alving’s words, ‘But I gave you your life!’ and Lazlo had looked back at her and said, as if he hardly knew her, ‘I never asked you for life’. She had burst into tears. Mrs Alving’s wail of ‘Help! Help!’ had been no trouble at all. Freddie Cass had strolled over and looked into her face with his removed, observant grey gaze.

‘Nice,’ he’d said.

Vivien had emptied all the cupboards and drawers in her spare room, for Rosa. The drawers, Rosa noted with awe, were lined with sprigged paper and the hangers were solid and purposeful, not simply a motley collection left over from chain stores and dry-cleaners’. There were also two sizes of towel, a new cake of soap and a copy of Glamour magazine. It was kind, Rosa thought, bundling her sweaters on to the sprigged paper, it was really very kind, but in the context of complicated family loyalties it was also making a point, a point Rosa was going to have to ignore if she was to live with her aunt in any kind of equity. It would be perfectly acceptable to thank Vivien for making her so welcome, but it wouldn’t be acceptable at all to applaud her for it. Applause would imply that a comparison with Edie had been made in which Vivien was the victor. Rosa sighed.

‘How could you,’ Edie had demanded over the telephone, ‘turn to friends rather than to me? I am your mother!’

‘That’s why,’ Rosa had wanted to say. Instead she’d said, lamely, despising herself, ‘Sorry’. ‘And now Vivien—’ ‘Sorry’.

‘Rose,’ Edie said, ‘Rose. I just want to know why?’ ‘They didn’t ask me anything’.

‘What?’

‘They didn’t keep on at me. Kate and Vivien. They didn’t keep asking questions’.

There’d been a long pause and then Edie had said, with much diminished energy, ‘Oh,’ and then, after another pause, ‘Goodbye, darling,’ in a voice of such pathos that for five minutes afterwards Rosa wrestled with the urge to ring Vivien and say that after all, for family reasons, she couldn’t come and live in her spare room. It was enough to make anyone sigh; it was enough, as she’d said to Kate, to make anyone wonder if the obligations attendant upon having family support made that support actually hardly worth the candle.

‘It’s like presents,’ Kate said, eating a salade Niçoise with gusto. ‘The way people give you what they want to give you. It’s a sort of conditional generosity’.

‘Yes’.

‘But then, you have to, don’t you? I mean, if you help someone, you have to do it your way. You can’t give the help only the way the receiver wants it because that’s asking too much of anyone, it isn’t human’.

Rosa watched Kate spearing anchovy fillets.

‘I’m glad you’re hungry’.

‘Starving. Every two hours. Especially salty things. Do you want your olives?’

Rosa pushed her plate forward.

‘Mum sounded so forlorn’.

‘Isn’t that better than angry? Or offended?’

‘Not as far as guilt goes’.

‘If this baby’s a girl,’ Kate said, ‘I vow not to make her feel guilty’.

‘I think women just do. Even when it isn’t reasonable. I mean, Matt and his girlfriend have just split up and, although he’s devastated, he doesn’t feel guilty. But I bet she does’.

Kate stopped chewing.

‘How awful. Poor them’.

‘Yes’.

‘Is it this woman and ambition thing?’ Rosa sighed.

‘Well, she earns twice what he does’.

‘And I bet,’ Kate said, ‘however successful, she’s afraid that makes her unlovable’.

Rosa picked a cherry tomato off her plate.

‘Unsuccessful isn’t very lovable, either’.

Does moving into your aunt’s spare bedroom count as unsuccessful? she thought now. If by successful you mean financial independence, probably yes. But if you mean still having other humans in your life who’ll speak to you, probably no. She picked up an armful of shoes and boots and dumped them in the bottom of the wardrobe. They looked terrible, with the sad intimate terribleness that worn shoes always have. And in addition, if Vivien were to come into Rosa’s room while she was at work – not a happy thought, but not one that could be discounted, either – she would expect to see Rosa’s possessions in sufficient order to denote gratitude for housing them. Rosa bent down, her head muffled in the hanging folds of her clothes, and began to sort her shoes into pairs.

Below her, in the hallway, Vivien’s telephone started to ring. Vivien still had a landline with a cord, a cream plastic handset that sat on a little table with a shelf for directories and a pad and a pot of pens. Vivien drew mouths and eyes on the pad while she talked on the telephone, curvy mouths and thick-lashed eyes, swimming about the page as if they had an eerie life of their own.

‘Hello?’ Rosa heard Vivien say. Her voice was perfectly clear, even from a floor below and with Rosa’s door closed.

‘Oh,’ Vivien said, her voice lifting a little. ‘Oh! Max—’

Rosa got up from her knees and went quietly to the door, a red canvas basketball boot in one hand.

‘Saturday,’ Vivien said. ‘Saturday. Let me see. I’ll have to look’. Then she laughed. ‘I know. So old-fashioned. But you know me. Can’t even work the video machine. I’ll never get beyond paper and pencil’.

There was a rustling of paper.

Then Vivien said, ‘I’m working in the shop on Saturday. Yes, I do have to. Alison’s going to some literary festival for the weekend. Max, I – Well, the evening would be lovely. Goodness. Are you asking me out to dinner? What’s the etiquette for that, if we’re separated?’ She laughed again and then she said, in a fond tone Rosa recognised, ‘You don’t change. See you Saturday’.

There was the sound of the receiver being replaced, and then a small silence, and then Vivien’s heels went clicking down the wood floor of the hall with an unmistakable jauntiness. Rosa looked down at the boot in her hand. Josh had given her those. Or at least he’d been going to, right up to the moment of standing by the till in the shoe shop and Josh discovering, as he always discovered, that he had no means of paying for them except a crumpled five-pound note and a few coins. After she’d paid for them, he spent the five pounds on a single yellow rose for her, a rose so large and long-stemmed that people stared at her on the underground, going home.

A rose as showy as that must mean that something had happened, something romantic and definitive. Rosa dropped the boot on the carpet. All that had actually happened was that she had paid for yet another thing she didn’t want.

Her phone, lying on one of the twin beds in a slew of socks and tights, began to ring. Rosa glanced at the screen and picked it up.

‘Mum’.

‘Darling,’ Edie said, ‘how are you getting on?’ Rosa looked round the room. It remained somehow very much Vivien’s spare room.

‘Fine’.

‘I wondered,’ Edie said, her voice nonchalant, ‘if you’d help me out?’ ‘In what way—’

‘I have to have two members of the cast to supper. To help them bond. You know. The director asked me’.

‘I thought that’s exactly what directors are supposed to do’.

‘Not this one. Will you come? Will you come for supper and help make a crowd?’ Rosa frowned down at her socks.

‘When?’

‘Saturday. Are you busy on Saturday?’

‘No,’ Rosa said, shutting her eyes. ‘No, I’m not busy’.

‘Will you come?’

‘Um …’

‘No strings. No thin end of wedging. Promise’. ‘I’ve never been to an Ibsen—’

‘Doesn’t matter. Please’.

Rosa opened her eyes again. She could always stay here, of course, sitting in front of Vivien’s television watching Saturday-night rubbish while Vivien skipped out in a cloud of scent and anticipation. And how sad would that be?

‘OK,’ Rosa said.

Cheryl Smith arrived for supper wearing red satin jeans tucked into her pirate boots and a black off-the-shoulder sweater so far off her shoulders that Russell wondered if it would preoccupy him all evening. She kissed him warmly, leaving a shiny cherry-coloured streak on his cheek and said he’d been wonderful to her friend, Mitch Morris, whom Russell couldn’t remember ever having heard of, and maybe she could come and see him sometime.

He handed her a glass of red wine.

‘Anyone with talent who is prepared to work and to pay me ten per cent of their earnings is very welcome to come and see me’.

She laughed and drank half her glass in a swallow.

She said to Edie, ‘Great house’.

Edie was stirring coconut milk into a pan of curry.

‘When we bought this house, houses were affordable. It wasn’t surprising to have a house when you got married, it was normal’.

Cheryl arranged herself in her dancer’s pose.

‘I can’t see me ever owning anything’.

Russell looked at her, strictly above the shoulders.

‘What would you like to own?’

‘Oh, a car. A Morgan’.

Edie picked up a flat plastic box of kaffir lime leaves. ‘How many of these, do you think?’ Cheryl twirled her wine.

‘I never cook. At drama school I lived on vodka and cheese sandwiches. Now it’s red wine and pizza slices’.

‘Disgusting,’ Russell said, smiling.

Cheryl smiled back. She held her glass out to him.

Edie said, crumbling leaves into her pot, ‘Your mother would be horrified’.

‘My mother doesn’t cook either. It was my father that cooked. No wonder he left, really. Five kids refusing to eat the same thing’. She looked at Edie for the first time properly. ‘Wasn’t Lazlo supposed to be coming?’

Russell gestured towards the window.

‘He’s here’. ‘Where?’

‘In the garden. Talking to my daughter, Rosa’. ‘Our daughter,’ Edie said.

Cheryl moved over to the window and leaned to look out, stretching the red satin tight over her bottom as she did so.

‘He’s quite good,’ she said.

Russell looked at Edie.

Edie said, without turning, ‘Then why are you making it so hard for him?’

‘Because he’s only just out of drama school. It’s no good them thinking it’s easy’.

Russell hitched his leg across the corner of the table and regarded Cheryl’s bottom.

‘But possibly it isn’t very helpful for them to think it’s impossible and unpleasant either’. Cheryl turned.

She said, smiling, ‘Unpleasant? Oo, what a word’. ‘I would think,’ Russell said, ‘that you’d be rather good at unpleasant’. Cheryl winked. ‘Very good’.

‘Can you do pleasant too?’

‘Duller’.

‘But better,’ Edie said, coming across the kitchen with a wooden spoon held out for Russell to taste, ‘if trying to work with other people, which is, on the whole, what actors in a theatre are trying to do. Is that rather sweet?’

Russell took the spoon from Edie’s hand.

‘I think,’ he said, ‘that if I were Freddie Cass I’d have told you I could find another Regina very easily’.

Cheryl laughed.

‘Really?’

Russell handed the spoon back to Edie.

‘No. It’s the right sort of sweet’. He glanced at Cheryl.

‘Really’.

She put her nose in her glass.

‘Do you speak to all the people you represent like this?’ ‘All of them,’ Russell said. He got off the table. ‘They love it’.

‘Cheryl’s here,’ Lazlo said miserably to Rosa.

Rosa was wearing a sweater of Russell’s over her own clothes and had pulled the sleeves down well beyond her knuckles. She could see, in the reflection of the kitchen window, that she had a Neanderthal look, a huge body and endless arms.

‘Well, you knew she was coming—’

‘Look what she’s wearing’.

Rosa peered.

‘I expect that’s deliberate’.

‘She said to me in rehearsal the other day, “I’m not kissing you until I absolutely have to.” ‘That wasn’t very nice’.

‘I don’t know,’ Lazlo said, ‘what I’d do without your mother’.

Rosa looked at him. He was taller than she was, but as thin as a lath, with one of those sensitive handsome faces that looked somehow neither girl nor boy. Not her type. She shrugged herself down inside the sweater. Not her type at all.

‘It’s not just that she’s so nice to me,’ Lazlo said, ‘it’s that she knows what she’s doing and that helps me surrender to the part. D’you know what I mean?’

‘I’m not an actress’.

He glanced at her quickly.

He said politely, ‘What do you do?’

Rosa looked away.

She said in an offhand way, ‘I’m in the travel business’. ‘You don’t sound as if you like it very much’.

‘I don’t’.

‘That’s what’s so extraordinary about acting. It isn’t a choice’. He stopped and then he said, apologetically, ‘But you know that. Because of your mother’.

Rosa looked towards the kitchen window again. Edie was gesturing at them to come in. First she’d sent them out so that she could soften Cheryl up without Lazlo to persecute and now she was summoning them back again. Rosa sighed.

‘She wasn’t like that. She did jobs around us, we sort of knew she did it, but I suppose we didn’t take it in much—’

Lazlo stared at her.

‘Don’t you know how good she is?’

Rosa stared back.

‘Oh yes’.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘it just sounded as if you weren’t quite aware—’

‘She’s my mother,’ Rosa said. Lazlo said nothing.

Rosa began to move away from him across the damp grass towards the house.

She said, ‘That didn’t come out as I meant it to’.

‘No’.

Rosa stopped.

She said, without meaning to, ‘I sound spoilt—’ There was a long pause, and then Lazlo said, from behind her, in the spring dusk, ‘Actually, you do’.