‘How soon,’ Kate said, ‘are you going?’ ‘I’ve gone. I cleared my desk, mostly into a black bag, and dumped it outside his office’.
‘So you won’t get any kind of reference—’ ‘I don’t want a reference—’ Kate sighed heavily.
‘Rosa—’
‘I’ll think of something’.
‘Like what?’
‘Telemarketing, maybe—’ ‘I feel too awful,’ Kate said, ‘to cheer you up’. ‘I’m still in a rage,’ Rosa said. ‘I’m fine as long as I’m furious’.
‘Aren’t you worried?’
There was a long pause. Kate released the pillow a little.
‘Rosa?’
‘Of course I’m worried,’ Rosa said. ‘I can’t remember when I wasn’t worried. About money’. ‘But all that spending—’
‘Yes,’ Rosa said. ‘It frightens me and I can’t stop doing it. When I was with Josh—’ She stopped.
‘Yes?’
‘Well, there was a reason then. Meals, holidays—’ ‘He exploited you’. ‘So you always said’. ‘Well, at least I was right’. ‘Mmm,’ Rosa said.
‘What are you going to do?’
Rosa said slowly, pacing out the words, ‘Don’t know. Haven’t thought. Yet’. ‘I wish—’
‘You can’t do anything. I had to tell you but I didn’t tell you so’s you’d feel you had to do anything’.
‘I’ll be more use when I can think about something other than dying’.
‘You ought to be so happy—’
‘Because I’ve got everything?’ Kate said sharply.
‘I wasn’t going to say that—’
‘But you thought it’.
Rosa said crossly, ‘Of course I did. What do you expect?’
Kate closed her eyes. ‘Go away’.
‘I’m going. To find a begging pitch under a cash machine’.
‘I meant it. I meant it about coming here’. ‘I know. Thank you’.
Kate’s stomach heaved and turned. She flung the phone into the dented pillows and scrambled off the bed. ‘Bye!’ she shouted after it and fled towards the bathroom.
Rosa bought a Mexican bean wrap from the sandwich bar and took it to a bench in Soho Square. At the other end of the bench a hunched girl in a long grey overcoat and tinted glasses was speaking in a low monotone into a mobile phone. She wasn’t speaking English and in a strange, almost undefinable way, she didn’t look English, either. Perhaps, Rosa thought, she was Latvian or Romanian or even Chechen. Perhaps she was a refugee, or on the run; perhaps someone had kept her as a sex slave, sharing a windowless room with five other girls and made to service twenty men a day. Perhaps, Rosa thought, inspecting her wrap and regretting the choice of filling – unfortunate colour, somehow – she led the kind of life that would make Rosa’s current situation seem no more than a temporary and trivial blip in an otherwise indulged and comparatively prosperous one. Maybe the trouble with Rosa was not her circumstances, but her eternal expectations, her conviction that, with enough energy on her part, enough desire, enough – focus, she could bring about the kind of satisfaction that she was sure lay out there, the reward for the brave.
She peeled back the plastic film from the wrap and took an awkward bite. Three red beans immediately fell wetly on to the knee of her jeans – clean that morning -and thence to the path where they lay, bright, exotic and faintly sinister. Glancing at them, Rosa reflected how odd it was that one hardly noticed details in life – or at least, didn’t dignify them with significance – until one was forced into some heightened state of consciousness by joy or grief or disappointment or fear, at which point the whole of existence, from the largest things to the smallest, seemed to take on a kind of meaningful drama. Three red beans on a path, a girl in a grey coat speaking another language softly into a phone – suddenly, both seemed emblematic, important. And yet both were probably no more than irrelevant objects that happened to accompany a moment in Rosa’s life, which she ardently, fervently wished she wasn’t having.
She laid the wrap on the seat beside her. In these circumstances, it didn’t manage to taste exotic and foreign, only alien. Rosa leaned back and looked up at the steady grey sky and the spidery branches of the trees already lumpy with incipient leaves, and thought that one of the hardest aspects of what had just happened was that she had not reckoned on it. Any of it. She had not supposed, for one moment, that five years after leaving university she would have failed to find absorbing employment, failed to sustain a romantic relationship, and failed to gain exactly the kind of control over her life that she had assumed to be an automatic part of growing up.
Education had, by contrast, been easy. Rosa had been good at education, good at friendships, comfortable with achievement. She had negotiated, from the age of eleven, a subversive but successful pathway between intelligence and rebelliousness, a pathway that her elder brother admired and her younger brother emulated. She had cultivated, all those long, busy, channelled educational years, a subtle flamboyance, which she had believed would carry her through both dullness and difficulty. And, almost, it had, until falling for a man who preferred to believe her publicity rather than what lay beneath it in more vulnerable reality exposed her in a way that seemed to have deconstructed all those assiduously built years of showy confidence in an instant.
Everyone had taken pains to tell her how much they disliked Josh. Under the conventional but false banner of telling her that everything they were about to say was because they had her welfare at heart, family and friends told her that Josh was spoiled, unreliable, immature and selfish. In reply, she would simply say, ‘I know’. She did know. She knew from the first few exciting but unnerving dates that Josh was neither able nor prepared to give her the steady glow of supportive love that women’s magazines assured her was every girl’s absolute right. But the relationship with Josh was not about anything steady or supportive. It was about being, in every sense, bowled over – bowled over by the electricity of his unpredictable company, bowled over by desire. Falling for Josh had been the heady, unbidden moment when Rosa, up to now counting herself serenely as one of life’s adoreds, turned into a helpless adorer. Josh could have anything he wanted as long as he didn’t go.
He didn’t go for almost two years. He moved into Rosa’s flat and spent hours playing poker on her computer or ringing long-distance on her telephone. He booked seats at ballets and theatres, nights in hotels, tables in restaurants without ever, mysteriously, managing to pay for them. He left roses on her pillow and messages on the bathroom mirror and tiny, beguiling presents wrapped in tissue paper in her shoes. She was driven to every extreme of emotion and temper by his presence and, when he finally left, she was convinced for months that not only had he left her with a frightening amount of debt, but also without any capacity to feel alive to the full ever again.
‘He wasn’t drama,’ Kate said to Rosa, ‘he was melodrama’.
Rosa had looked at the list in Kate’s hand. It was the beginning of her wedding-present list and it featured saucepans and bath mats and an espresso machine.
‘Give me melodrama any day,’ Rosa had said.
She wouldn’t, she thought, sitting on her bench beside her unwanted lunch, say that now. Josh had been an addiction and, when he had gone, she missed the dark glamour of that addiction, the tension and the sense that her adrenalin was always racing. And then, hour by hour, day by day, the enthralling substance Josh had represented drained out of her veins and left her, not exactly regretful, but certainly disorientated, lost, as if she had entirely abandoned the person she grew up with and was too altered now by experience to go back and retrieve it.
She glanced along the bench. The girl in the grey coat had stopped talking into her telephone and was now reading a Greek newspaper. Rosa picked up the remains of her wrap gingerly and rose from the bench. She carried the wrap over to the nearest litter bin, dropped it in, and then set off purposefully southwards, towards Shaftesbury Avenue.
Russell was on the t
elephone. An actor, who possessed a wonderfully flexible speaking voice and no sense of obligation to any work he considered beneath him, however lucrative, was explaining at length why he had failed, for the second time, to turn up for a studio appointment to record the voice of a cartoon tiger representing a major insurance company.
‘Sorry,’ Russell said at intervals. ‘It’s no good. It’s no good my putting in effort if you won’t match it’.
The door of Russell’s office stood open. Beyond, in the small reception area, furnished with wicker sofas and copies of Spotlight and The Stage, Russell’s assistant, Maeve, who had been with him almost all his working life, administered the agency with the assistance of a computer she always referred to as the Prototype, on account of its age. Russell liked Maeve to hear most of his conversations. He liked her to be a witness to his reasonableness in the face of often great provocation.
‘I’m sorry, Gregory,’ Russell said, ‘but I shall have to send them someone else. It’s very nice of them, actually, even to agree to that’.
The doorbell to the street door rang, a peculiar vibrating growl, which, like his carpet, he refused to let anyone change.
‘Sorry,’ Russell said, ‘but you’ve blown it’.
‘Oh!’ Maeve said into the intercom with pleasure. ‘Oh, it’s you! Come up!’
Russell put his hand over the mouthpiece of his telephone. His heart had lifted a little.
‘Who, Maeve? Edie?’
Maeve’s face appeared briefly round the door. ‘No,’ she mouthed, ‘Rosa’. Russell took his hand away.
‘Go away and think about it, Greg. Go away and think about how you are going to live until you are noticed by
Anthony Minghella. Then we might have another conversation’. He took the telephone away from his ear, listened for a few more seconds to Gregory’s aggrieved voice, and replaced it softly on his desk.
There were footsteps running up the last flight of stairs.
He heard Maeve open the door.
‘Well, there’s a cheerful sight. What a wonderful colour, nobody but you—’
‘Nobody but me,’ Rosa said. ‘Anybody else would have had more sense and bought black’.
‘I’m sick to death of black,’ Maeve said. ‘Leave it to the beetles, I say—’
Rosa appeared in the doorway of Russell’s office.
‘Dad?’
He got up and leaned across the desk to kiss her.
‘Lovely surprise—’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘passing—’
‘At lunchtime’.
‘Well … Actually I’m not hungry’.
‘Even,’ Russell said, ‘if I’m paying?’
She glanced down. Her shoulders drooped a little. Then she straightened up, shook her hair back and gave him a familiarly full-on smile.
‘That would be great. Because – well, because there’s something I’d like to ask you’.
Russell looked at her over his reading spectacles.
‘Is there?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Please’. And then she smiled again,
‘Daddy’.
* * *
Rosa looked at her father’s plate. Hers was empty, but his still bore a good half of his order of gnocchi.
She raised her fork, questioningly.
‘Can I?’
Russell gave his plate a little nudge. ‘Help yourself’.
Rosa speared two gnocchi and put them in her mouth.
Then she said, round them, ‘I mean, I’m not worried about finding another job. And I’m not at all concerned by what Bill Moreton thinks of me. I know I was doing a good job. I know it’.
‘Hmm,’ Russell said. He had ordered a bottle of wine and was now wondering if Rosa’s share was giving her a fleeting and unreliable confidence.
‘It wasn’t as if I was earning a fortune there anyway,’ Rosa said, spearing more gnocchi. ‘Lots of my friends are earning well over twenty by now’.
‘Have you ever worked out,’ Russell said, ‘what you need to earn?’
Rosa stopped chewing. She gave him a quick, direct look and dropped her gaze.
‘No’.
‘Don’t you think—’
‘Did you?’ Rosa demanded. ‘Did you? At my age?’ ‘I was married—’
‘So?’
‘Two incomes—’
‘And a baby’. Rosa gave a little snort. ‘I’d love a baby’.
Russell picked his plate up and exchanged it for Rosa’s empty one. Rosa looked down. ‘I couldn’t eat all that—’
‘Rosa,’ Russell said, ‘I’ve listened to you. I’ve listened to you very patiently and I quite agree with you that Bill Moreton was a second-rate boss who behaved accordingly. But you’d been in that job eight months. He didn’t exactly owe you a pension and a gold watch’.
Rosa said nothing. It seemed to her that she was behaving exactly as she always vowed she would never behave again when with a parent. She could hear in her voice an undertone of whining and cajoling that reminded her of raging nights, when she was seven, or nine, or eleven, and had prayed fervently to be an orphan. She swallowed hard, against the plaintiveness.
‘It’s a very nasty thing to have done to you,’ Russell said, visualising Edie listening to him, ‘especially when it so plainly wasn’t justified and you were made a scapegoat. But it was just a job, wasn’t it? Not a vocation. Not even a career’.
Rosa pushed her father’s plate aside.
‘It isn’t that’.
Russell sighed.
‘No’.
‘You see,’ Rosa said, ‘I’m in debt’.
‘Ah’.
‘I owe nearly six thousand on my credit cards’.
Russell leaned back. It occurred to him to ask how the situation had arisen, but then it struck him forcibly that he did not, somehow, want to become involved in the reasons because that would mean reaction and, even, responsibility. He loved Rosa. He loved her dearly, but she was twenty-six.
He said, as gently as he could, ‘That will take a while to pay back’.
She nodded.
‘Have you thought of that?’ Russell said. ‘Have you made any plans?’
She said, in a small voice, ‘I’m beginning to’.
‘Economies,’ Russell said. He picked up his wine glass and put it down again. ‘My mother loved economies. If she could make one haddock fillet feed four she was triumphant. She thrived on economies’.
Rosa said sadly, ‘Then I don’t take after her’.
‘Frugality was rather encouraged in the fifties,’ Russell said. ‘Post-war and all that. Now, it just looks as if you are crabbed of spirit and letting life pass you by’.
Rosa leaned forward.
‘I think it was trying not to let it pass me by that got me into this mess’.
‘Josh,’ Russell said, without meaning to.
‘Oh, Dad—’
‘No,’ he said, hastily. ‘No. I shouldn’t have mentioned him. We must focus on what is rather than what was’. She gave a faint smile. ‘I knew you’d help—’ ‘It depends—’
‘On what?’
‘On what form you see that help taking’. Rosa said quickly, ‘I’m not asking for money’.
Russell gave a little sigh.
‘I don’t want money,’ Rosa said, ‘I want to straighten myself out. I want to find another job and work hard and meet new people and make a plan and change the way I do things’.
‘Mmm’.
‘Don’t you think that’s right? Don’t you think I sound like you’d like me to sound?’ ‘Oh I do—’
‘Well, then?’
‘I’m just waiting,’ Russell said. ‘Patiently, fondly even, but wearily and warily, to see what it is you are working up to say’.
Rosa fiddled a bit with the cutlery left on the table. ‘I’m not very proud of myself’.
‘No’.
‘I hate having to ask this—’
‘Yes’.
‘But can I come home?’
/>
Russell closed his eyes for a fleeting second.
‘I know it’s not what you want,’ Rosa said. ‘I don’t want it either, really, if you see what I mean, but it wouldn’t be for long, probably only a few months, but if I’m not paying rent, the rent money can go towards the credit-card debt, and it would make such a difference, it would make all the difference—’ She stopped. Then she said, much more slowly, ‘Please, Dad’.
Russell looked at her.
He said sadly, ‘I’m so sorry, darling, but no’. She stared at him.
‘No!’
‘I want to help you,’ Russell said. ‘I will help you. But you can’t come back home to live’.
Rosa said, stunned, ‘But it’s my home!’
‘Well, yes, in a way. It was your childhood home, your growing-up home. But you’re grown-up now. You need your own home’.
‘Of course!’ Rosa cried. ‘In an ideal world, that’s exactly what I’d have by now! But I can’t, can I? I can’t have what I ought to have because of what’s happened!’ She glared at him. ‘I cannot believe you said no’.
Russell sighed.
‘It isn’t about you. It’s about us, Mum and me. It’s -well, it’s our home’. ‘Your family home’. ‘Yes, when children are dependent—’ ‘Ben was allowed to stay, Ben was always—’ ‘Ben has gone,’ Russell said. ‘So there’s room for me’.
‘Rosa,’ Russell said with sudden force, ‘it’s not about room, it’s about distraction. It’s about Mum and me having time to be married again, it’s about us, having time and space for that’.
‘What?’
‘You heard me’.
‘But,’ Rosa said, gesturing wildly, ‘I’m not going to stop you! I’m not going to get in the way of your – rediscovering each other, if that’s what you want—’
Russell said carefully, ‘You may not mean to’.
There was a pause.
Then Rosa said, in a quite different voice, ‘I see’.
‘Good’.
‘I see that you don’t want Mum’s attention diverted from you for one little single, baby instant’.
‘No—’
Rosa stood up clumsily, shaking the table. ‘Fool yourself if you like, Dad,’ she said, ‘but don’t try fooling me’.
Second Honeymoon Page 3