She looked back at the screen. ‘Please,’ she’d written pleadingly. She could hear herself saying it.
‘What I mean is,’ she typed rapidly, ‘I need to get all this stuff out – issues, as human resources at work call them – and it would be very kind of you to read through to the end and even kinder to tell me if I’m mad or what passes for normal.
‘Laura, three people now have accused me of being ambitious and I mean accused, not described (no, one of them isn’t Matthew, but I think his mother is). A colleague (male) says he thinks of ambition as both a necessary and desirable part of his life, but when I think about it in relation to myself it seems to imply things I don’t like at all, like egotism and selfishness and the manipulation of other people for my own ends. I want to tell people that being good at work isn’t about me, it’s about the work. But why do I want to? And why do I feel especially compelled to, now, because I have achieved this flat and lost Matthew in the process?
‘And it gets worse. I don’t just feel guilty about what’s happened, I feel resentful about feeling guilty. Nobody, Laura, not my colleagues, not my family, not even Matthew before all this happened, said well done about getting to this level at your age. Or even well done about getting to this level. We praise children now until they can’t take failure of the smallest kind, so why can’t we praise women for being good at things that aren’t traditionally female? Why do women always, always have to be the givers? And if they stop giving, even for a minute, why is there this unspoken accusation that they have somehow surrendered on being truly female?
‘Laura, I don’t want to give up what I’m doing, I don’t want to give up my opportunities. I can’t believe that being accepted has to mean being frustrated too, but nor can I bear the thought that, if I make choices the way I just have, I’ll end up without a man and without a family because I’m not, somehow, allowed to have both.
I don’t want to downsize my ambition.
I want to live in this flat.
I want Matthew back.
Love, Ruth’.
The restaurant Max had chosen to take Vivien to, for dinner, was one she had never been to before. It had a conservatory at the back, which, Max said, was opened up in summer to the paved garden behind and they put up big white Italian market umbrellas, and candle lamps in the trees, and it was really a very, very nice ambience indeed.
Vivien, walking carefully to the table in her new sandals, decided not to ask how Max knew so much about this restaurant, particularly by candlelight. In the four years they had lived apart, Vivien had been out with two men, neither of whom became more than perfunctory lovers, and Max had had, to her certain knowledge three, and to her sharp suspicion five girlfriends, all younger, all long-haired and all sexually available and active. Max had never mentioned any of them by name, but Vivien knew that one was called Carly and one was called Emma and one was an air hostess whom Max had met on a flight back from Chicago and who had subsequently, and annoyingly, engineered a very cheap flight for Eliot to get to Australia. Maybe Emma and Carly and the air hostess had all been to the restaurant with the conservatory, with Max. And maybe, even if they had, sitting down with him as still her legal husband gave Vivien a trump card that no amount of long hair and sexual ingenuity could deprive her of.
She sank into her chair and looked at Max across the candles.
‘Lovely’.
He indicated the menu.
Take a look at that. Have what you want. Have lobster’.
She smiled at him. He wore a pale suit and a strong blue shirt and he looked, Vivien thought, very distinguished. It was always a pleasure to see a man who looked after himself.
‘I don’t like lobster, Max’.
He smiled back.
‘Nor you do’.
‘What else don’t I like?’
He closed his eyes. ‘Let me think—’
‘Green peppers,’ Vivien said. ‘Rhubarb. Coriander’. He opened his eyes. ‘Battenberg cake’. ‘Battenberg cake?’ ‘Yes,’ he said.
‘You don’t even know what it is—’
‘I do,’ Max said. ‘Pink and yellow squares. I bought you some once, at a motorway place, on the way up to Scotland. You threw it out of the car window’.
Vivien smiled delightedly.
‘You made that up’.
‘Never. I remember it as if it was yesterday. I’ve ordered champagne’. ‘Champagne!’
‘Why not? We’re celebrating, aren’t we?’ She turned her head a little and looked at him coquettishly.
‘Are we? What are we celebrating?’ He winked.
‘A little – rapprochement, Vivi’. Oh,’ she said, ‘is that what this is?’ A waiter put a small metal champagne bucket on the table between them. ‘Goodness—’
‘When did you last drink champagne?’ ‘Can’t remember’.
‘Well, it’s time you did. It’s time you lived again a little,
Vivi’.
The waiter poured champagne slowly into a tall, thin glass flute and set it ceremoniously in front of Vivien. ‘I bet he gives you champagne,’ Rosa had said, waving Vivi off from the sofa, in her tracksuit. ‘I bet you get the works tonight’.
Max raised his glass.
‘To—’ he said, and stopped.
Vivien waited. ‘To Eliot,’ Max said.
‘Of course,’ Vivien said, a fraction too eagerly. She raised her glass, too, and touched Max’s with it. ‘To Eliot’.
‘What about this Ro?’
Vivien made a small face.
‘Well, you have to remember that what suits an Australian beach wouldn’t suit Richmond’.
‘Come on,’ Max said, ‘this isn’t like you. Come on, Vivi’.
Vivien looked up.
‘I’ve never spoken to her’.
‘Nor me’.
‘She’s learning to be a Buddhist’. ‘A Buddhist,’ Max said. ‘Oh please’. ‘But she surfs and drinks beer—’ ‘All you could ask, really’. ‘Now, Max—’
‘We’ll let it go, shall we,’ Max said. ‘For now?’
‘We?’
‘Yes, we. He’s our son, remember’. Vivien took a small sip of her champagne. ‘And the diving?’
‘My feeling is,’ Max said, ‘to let that go for now too. If he’s still doing it, and only it, when he’s thirty, we’ll fly out and give him a rocket’.
‘Aren’t you going to see him before he’s thirty?’
Max looked straight at her.
‘Any time you’re ready, we’ll go out and see him’.
Vivien smiled at her champagne glass.
‘Oh’.
‘Say the word,’ Max said. Vivien leaned back in her chair. She said, looking away across the restaurant, ‘What happened to the air hostess?’ ‘She went back to her airline’.
‘And,’ Vivien said, feeling a small and happy surge of confidence, ‘you didn’t replace her?’
‘Oh, I tried,’ Max said, ‘I tried like anything’. ‘Should I know about this?’ He put his head on one side.
‘Only if you want to be very bored. As bored as I got. What are you going to eat?’
‘Guess’.
He looked down at the menu. ‘Avocado and red mullet’. ‘There,’ she said, ‘you haven’t forgotten’. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I haven’t’.
‘And you’ll have wild mushrooms and guinea fowl’.
‘Or duck’.
‘Oh yes, duck. I haven’t cooked a duck for four years’. Max glanced at her over the menu. ‘We should rectify that’.
‘I cook girls’ food now,’ Vivien said. ‘Fish and salads and pasta. Rosa’s on a diet’. ‘I hope you aren’t joining her’.
‘Well, I thought of it—’
‘Don’t,’ Max said, ‘you don’t need to. You’re—’ He stopped and grinned. Then he said, ‘What was I going to say, Vivi?’
‘I have no idea’.
‘What did you hope I’d say?’ ‘Stop it,’ Vivien said. ‘But you like it’. She lifted her chin. �
�Not any more’.
‘We’ll see’.
‘No, we won’t’. Max leaned forward.
He said, ‘Actually I am going to say something’.
‘Oh?’
‘I was going to say it later, but I think I’ll say it now’. He put the menu down and leaned towards Vivien across the table.
‘We had a good time last week, didn’t we?’
‘Yes—’
‘And you aren’t exactly miserable now—’ ‘Not exactly’.
‘Look,’ Max said, ‘look, Vivi. Things have changed, haven’t they? I’ve had a bit of freedom, you’ve had a bit of time to sort yourself out, Eliot’s grown up and gone—’ He paused and looked at her. ‘I was just wondering, Vivi, if you’d let me try again?’
While she was in the shower, Ruth played Mozart. It was a recording of Don Giovanni, and she turned it up very loud, so that she could hear it above the water, and the music and the water could combine in a way that would be briefly overwhelming and stop her thinking. Her mother had once said to her, when she was about fourteen, that it didn’t do to think too much, that you could think yourself out of being able to cope with ordinary life, which Ruth had then considered to be her mother’s excuse for ceaseless practical activity. She now thought her mother’s theory had possibly a certain truth to it, and that her mother’s passion for organisation and committees and busyness had been a way of dealing with not being able to use her capacities to the full. It was a case, perhaps, of accommodating yourself to what was permitted, as long as – crucial, this – you didn’t start raging against whoever did the permitting in the first place and why they’d got the power.
Ruth turned off the shower and stepped out into the bathroom and a wall of singing. She’d keep it that loud, she thought, until somebody from a neighbouring flat either complained or played something she hated at equal volume. She picked up a towel and wound herself into it, like a sarong, then went barefoot across the smooth, pale wood floor of her sitting room to her desk. She bent over her computer. There would be nothing in her inbox, just as there were no messages on her answerphone, no texts on her mobile. Apart from work, there’d been a sudden cessation of all communication, as if someone had shut a soundproof door on a party.
There was one new message on her email. She sat down in her bath towel and clicked her mouse.
The message was from Laura.
‘Dear Ruth,’ it said. ‘Just ring him!’
Ruth looked up at the ceiling high above her and closed her eyes. There was a lump in her throat.
‘Just ring him!’
Chapter Eleven
‘Are you sure?’ Lazlo said.
Edie pushed the sugar towards him across the café table.
‘Oh yes’.
‘But it would be your son’s room—’ ‘Or my daughter’s. We’ve had lots of actors there, over the last few years, on and off—’
‘Really’
‘Oh yes’.
‘What about,’ Lazlo said, taking two packets of white sugar, ‘your husband?’
‘He’s called Russell’.
‘I know,’ Lazlo said. ‘I just felt a bit shy’.
‘Shy?’
‘I don’t know my own father very well’. ‘Russell isn’t at all alarming. Russell is very used to actor lodgers’.
‘Have you told him?’
‘What?’
‘That,’ Lazlo said, ‘you were going to offer a room to me’.
Edie watched him tear the sugar packets across and pour the contents into the cushion of milky foam on the top of his coffee.
‘Lazlo dear, I don’t need to ask him’.
‘I said tell—’
‘I don’t need to tell him either. He likes having the house full. He likes having it used’. Lazlo began to stir his coffee.
‘I must say, it would be wonderful. It would make me feel—’ He stopped, and then he said, ‘Different’.
‘Good’.
He looked at her and then he looked away.
‘I would try – not to be a nuisance’.
‘If you were,’ Edie said, ‘I probably wouldn’t notice. My children, with the possible exception of Matthew, are usually a nuisance. If you don’t have any nuisance in your life, I’ve discovered, something dies in you. It all gets very bland and boring’. She leaned across the table. ‘When I was a child, I shared a bedroom with my sister, Vivien, and we fought all the time because she was very tidy and I was very messy, extra messy, probably, to annoy her, and when our mother said we could have separate rooms, I was miserable. There was no point in being messy on my own’. She looked across at Lazlo and smiled at him. ‘There still isn’t’.
He said, ‘Is that the sister that Rosa lives with?’
‘Yes’.
‘Are you still fighting?’ ‘Certainly,’ Edie said.
‘I never fight with my sister. I wouldn’t risk it. You have to have enough family to take that kind of risk’.
‘Goodness,’ Edie said, ‘what a dramatic view of family. You sound like a Russian novel. If that’s what you’re expecting, you’ll find us very dull’.
‘I don’t think so’.
She reached across the table and grasped his wrist. ‘We’ll like having you. Really’.
He shook his head and gave her a quick glance, and in the course of it, she saw he had tears in his eyes.
‘Heavens, Lazlo,’ Edie said, laughing. ‘Heavens, it’s only a room’.
The evening paper had two columns advertising rooms and flats to let. They varied in monthly price by several hundred pounds and also in tone of advertisement, some being baldly commercial and some more haphazard, personal offers of flat sharing. Ben was certain that Naomi, even if she could be persuaded to leave her mother’s flat, would be adamant about not sharing any accommodation with anyone other than Ben. It had been an eye-opener for Ben, living with Naomi and her mother, to see the fierceness with which privacy and possessions were not just owned, but guarded. Naomi’s mother didn’t refer to ‘the’ kettle or ‘the’ bathroom: both were ‘my’. For Ben, growing up in a house where ownership of anything that wasn’t intensely personal seemed comfortably communal, this domestic demarcation and pride had been very surprising.
‘Feet off my coffee table,’ Naomi’s mother had said to him on his first evening. ‘And the way I like my toilet seat is down’.
Ben had felt little resentment about this. Faced with a rigidly organised kitchen and a tremendous expectation of conformity, he had, rather to his surprise, felt more an awed respect. Naomi’s mother spoke to him in exactly the same way that she spoke to Naomi after all, and as Naomi plainly thought her mother’s standards and requirements were as natural as breathing, Ben was, at least for a while, prepared to pick up his bath towel and replace the ironing board – ironing was a bit of a revelation – on its specially designated hooks behind the kitchen door. Only once, in his first few weeks, did he say to Naomi, watching her while she made an extremely neat cheese sandwich, ‘Has your mum always been like this?’
Naomi didn’t even glance at him.
She shook her long blonde hair back over her shoulders and said evenly, ‘It’s how she likes it’.
Living the way you liked, even Ben could see, was what you were entitled to if you owned a house or paid the rent. Indeed, one of the reasons he had left home, besides the consuming desire to spend the nights in the same bed as Naomi, was a strong, if unarticulated, understanding that he wanted to live in a way that didn’t coincide with the way his parents were living but, as it was their house, their entitlement in the matter came before his. Living with Naomi’s mother was, especially at the beginning, no problem at all because of Naomi herself and because her mother, for all her insistence on her own particular rule of law, was someone whose palpable industry and independence required – and got -Ben’s deference. In addition, and to Ben’s abiding and grateful amazement, she seemed to find his presence in her flat and her daughter’s bed perfectly natural. There had
n’t been a syllable uttered, or even implied, that Ben could construe as an enquiry about their relationship, let alone a criticism.
All this, for some time, made Ben amenable to making his large male presence in a small female flat as invisible as possible. Indeed, it was only gradually, and not in any way triggered by a particular incident, that he began to feel a sense of being both watched and stifled. The setting down of his coffee mug or beer can, once a matter of discovery and trial and error, became insidiously more of an issue, as did the placing – or even presence – of his boots in the narrow hallway. Naomi’s mother didn’t operate by correcting her daughter or her daughter’s boyfriend more than once. After that, she took matters into her own hands and effected the changes she wanted, in silence, but in the kind of silence that made Ben, rather to his surprise, think wistfully of his own mother’s approach to domestic management. He had absolutely no desire to confront or displease Naomi’s mother, but it had begun to occur to him, several times a day, that he was on a hiding to nothing because she was, in fact, constantly changing the goalposts. That morning, the hunt for his boots had ended in discovering them in a plastic carrier bag hanging on a hook under his overcoat.
He’d said nothing to Naomi about moving out with him. With the newly hatched confidence of having had his older brother recently take his advice, he had decided that the best course of action was to identify some flats, or even rooms in flats, and choose one or two to show her so that she would have something to visualise and also have to make a choice. If he just said to her, ‘What about a place of our own?’ she’d look at him as if he wasn’t in his right mind and say, ‘What for?’ But if he had a key to a door, and opened it, and showed her the possibilities of a way of living that lay beyond it, she might be persuaded. Or at least, he thought, staring hard at a photograph in the window in front of him, she might hesitate a little before she said, ‘What for?’
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