‘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.
<
br /> 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’.
Chapter Nine
Sitting on the underground on his way up to North London, Matthew looked at the other people in the carriage. It was early evening, just after work, so the train was full, not just with tired men holding computer cases and newspapers, but tired women with computer cases too and handbags and supermarket shopping bags. Some of the women were young, and reminded Matthew of Ruth, young women with considered haircuts and business suits and the air, which none of the men had, of having thought – or possibly had to think – about much more all day than simply the things at work they had to react to. They made him remember, unhappily, the way Ruth had kept all the strands of their life together, persistently rounding up stray aspects in a manner that, particularly when they were first together, made him marvel.
Blaise, at the desk behind him at work, said that personally he had marvelled himself to a standstill about modern women.
‘They’re too much for me,’ he’d said by way of commiseration over Matthew’s break-up. ‘Girls now, I mean. Now-girls’.
He was giving up girls for a while, he said, and concentrating on getting his pilot’s licence. He said if Matthew wanted flying lessons too he was sure he could arrange it. Flying made you feel in charge of things and, at the same time, free of demands, and people, and the business of never quite living up to others’ expectations.
‘I’m not even living up to my own expectations at the moment,’ Matthew said.
Blaise didn’t take his eyes off the screen in front of him.
‘Lower them, then,’ he said.
Matthew got out of his seat now, on the underground, and gestured towards it at a pale woman, carrying a huge professional camera case and an enormous lever-arch file clasped against her chest.
She hardly glanced at him.
‘Thank you—’
An elderly black woman beside her, in a felt hat and horn-rimmed spectacles, turned to look at her.
‘I shouldn’t think he heard that’.
The pale woman, balancing case and file with difficulty on her lap, said nothing.
There’s not many young men with the manners now—’
‘It’s all right,’ Matthew said. ‘It’s OK’.
‘So why discourage the few decent ones we’ve got?’ An ugly colour began to spread patchily up the pale woman’s neck.
Matthew bent down.
‘She did say thank you. I heard her’.
The black woman regarded him impassively. ‘She should have looked at you. She should have smiled. Why shouldn’t you be as tired as she is?’ ‘I’m not—’
‘Some woman,’ the black woman said loudly, ‘is a lucky woman to have you. Some woman is lucky to have such a gentleman’.
Matthew looked away. His neck felt as miserably inflamed as the pale woman’s looked. A fat man strap-hanging a foot away caught his eye and winked. Matthew made a face and briefly closed his eyes.
The train pulled into Moorgate Station and stopped. The black woman, crucifix swinging at her neck as she moved, rose to her feet and made for the door.
As she passed Matthew, she said distinctly, ‘You tell that lady of yours she’s a lucky woman’.
There was faint tittering round him and sweat was sliding in an unmistakable trickl
e down between his shoulder blades. He looked at the pale woman for a glance, at least, of commiseration, but she was staring rigidly at the floor.
Edie had said to meet her after rehearsals. She had described where to find her, saying he would recognise the rehearsal hall in Clerkenwell because it had a yellow poster outside advertising Pilates in Pregnancy classes. She’d said that they could go for a drink together, possibly even have supper. She’d sounded so pleased to hear him, so relieved and gratified that he’d rung, that he wondered what had happened to propel him into her personal spotlight. It was the place, after all, usually occupied by Ben, who took it, as he seemed to take most things, entirely for granted. It was also the place, Matthew realised, that he had scarcely spared a thought for, over the last couple of years, because he hadn’t needed to. He rather wished he didn’t need to now.
The rehearsal hall was, Edie said, about ten minutes from the underground station, and he should aim for the spire of St James’s Church. Matthew thought, gazing skywards from the Farringdon Road, that that was exactly the kind of directions his mother had always given, instructing you to look out for a memorable, preferably romantic landmark that was not actually visible until you were standing almost beside it because she hadn’t taken the surroundings into consideration. When they were small, Matthew remembered, Edie would often point out of the window and ask them what they could see and they would say, tepidly, oh the grass and the shed and the back of the house where the Great Dane lived and she would say no, no, no, beyond that, through that – couldn’t they see oceans and castles and deserts with camels? Edie would have no trouble, Matthew thought, standing in the Farringdon Road and seeing St James’s, Clerkenwell, far away to the north beyond the Clerkenwell Road. And perhaps, by the same token, Edie would have no trouble in seeing through the miserable thickets Matthew had got himself tangled up in, and out beyond to something altogether brighter and more hopeful. Something that would stop him feeling he had spent the last two years circling round in a huge wild loop that had merely ended in a rather lesser place than he had been in before he started.
She was waiting for him outside the hall, leaning against the Pilates poster with her arms folded, and her sunglasses on.
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