Vivien said carefully, ‘Not exactly’.
‘What then?’
‘I wondered,’ Vivien said, recrossing her legs and turning one foot to appreciate how her instep looked in a higher heel, ‘I wondered if I could bring Max. I thought Max and I might come together, and maybe bring Rosa’.
‘You’re joking’.
Vivien decided to keep her nerve. ‘No, not at all. I’d like to come and so would he and we’d like to come together’. ‘But why?’ Edie demanded.
‘Why?’
‘Max doesn’t know a play from a puppet show and this, Vivi, is Ibsen’. Vivien leaned forward. ‘This is different’.
‘What is?’
‘Max. Max and me. It’s all going to be different’.
‘Oh God,’ Edie said in a resigned voice.
‘I want to reintroduce Max to everyone. I want you to stop sniping at him and give him a chance, and I want to remind him that I have a very interesting family’. There was a snort from Edie’s end of the telephone.
‘Russell, at least, has always been very civil to him’.
‘Civil,’ Edie said. ‘What kind of word is that?’
‘I don’t know why you’re being so dismissive. We’re not divorced, you know. He’s still my husband. You’ve known him for twenty-five years’.
‘Exactly’.
‘All I want,’ Vivien said, threading a pencil into the coil of the telephone cable, ‘is to be able to bring my husband to watch my sister as a leading lady next Tuesday in the company of my brother-in-law and my niece and nephews’.
‘Oh, all right,’ Edie said, ‘play happy families if you want to’.
‘You are so ungracious—’
‘Not ungracious,’ Edie said, ‘just realistic’. ‘Edie,’ Vivien said, ‘this feels very real to me’. There was a further pause, and then Edie said, in an altered tone, ‘Are you sure?’
‘About Max?’ ‘Yes’.
‘Yes,’ Vivien said, ‘I’m quite sure. He’s never talked to me the way he’s talked recently. He wants to do things my way, he wants to join my life, if I’ll let him, rather than try to make me join his, the way he used to’.
‘So no more girls and flash cars and daring you to do things you don’t want to do?’
‘No,’ Vivien said.
Edie said, more thoughtfully, ‘D’you think anyone can change that much?’
‘Oh yes,’ Vivien said, ‘I’ve changed, after all. I’m much stronger than I used to be’.
‘Um’.
‘I’ve told Max, Edie. I’ve told him he can only come back if there really is a change, if certain things just never happen again’.
‘Come back?’ Edie said.
‘Yes. He’s asked to come back. I’ve made him wait, of course, but I’m going to say yes’.
‘Vivi,’ Edie said, her voice sharpening, ‘is Max suggesting coming back to the cottage?’
‘I told you. I said he wanted to join my life, not the other way round, and I don’t want to leave the cottage. I like it, and I like Richmond’.
‘So Max is moving back into your virgin bower—’
‘My bedroom. Yes’.
‘And what happens to Rosa, may I ask?’
Vivien slid the pencil out of the telephone cable and began to draw a huge eye on her telephone pad, in profile, with absurdly lavish lashes.
‘Actually, that’s a bit difficult—’
‘She can’t stay there if Max is there!’
‘No’.
‘So you’re throwing her out—’
‘Well,’ Vivien said, adding lower lashes to her eye, ‘I’m going to ask her to find somewhere else. I’m cooking a special supper for her tonight and I’ll tell her then. I’m sure she’ll understand’.
‘You are amazing—’
‘I mean, she’s seen it coming. She’s been so sweet, waiting up for me and being so interested’.
‘Oh, good,’ Edie said faintly.
‘To be honest, I think she’s seen it coming’.
‘Well, not to would be like missing an elephant in your bathroom—’
‘She’s doing so well,’ Vivien said, ignoring her sister. ‘She’s working hard and not going out and—’
‘That’s enough,’ Edie said. ‘Rosa is my daughter’.
‘I’ll tell her very gently—’
‘Frankly,’ Edie said, ‘you could do it on your knees, and in a whisper, and it still wouldn’t alter the fact that you’re telling her to go’.
Everyone in the house, Edie was certain, was awake. There had been faint movements from the top floor for hours and, although Russell was very still, beside her, there was a kind of subdued alertness about his stillness that indicated he was not asleep. The clock radio beside their bed showed two-forty-five and the curtains glowed with the half-dark of summer city night-time. Only the cat, in a trim and resolute doughnut at the end of their bed, was asleep. Above and beside her, all the other occupants of the house were as restless as she was.
She turned her head on the pillow and looked at Russell. He was on his side, face turned towards her, eyes closed. His hair, worn rather long as it always had been, and thank goodness it wasn’t thinning, was ruffled. He was breathing neatly and evenly through his nose. His mouth was closed. Even in the dim light, Edie could see that really Russell had worn very well, that he hadn’t got wizened or paunchy, that he hadn’t, despite a considerable nonchalance about looking after himself, let himself go. He looked, lying there, like a real person to Edie, like someone you could trust because what you saw you got. He looked, as a man, as a human being, as far away from Vivien’s Max as if he’d come from another planet.
He’d always, in fact, been amused by Max. He’d been much kinder, if Edie was honest with herself, about Vivien’s feelings for Max than her sister had ever been able to be. When Max had appeared once in a camel-hair overcoat, Russell had been much more good-natured about it than Edie had been. He let her make jokes about second-hand car dealers but he didn’t join in. He was of the opinion that if this liaison had ever made Vivien happy then that was all that was necessary to know. Sometimes Edie had admired this forbearance; sometimes it had driven her nuts.
She reached out a hand and touched one of his.
‘Russ’.
He didn’t open his eyes. ‘Mmm,’ he said. ‘Are you awake?’
‘Mmm’.
‘I think the boys are—’ He said, ‘Nothing to do with us’. ‘Probably Matt’s thinking about Ruth and Lazlo’s thinking about Osvald’.
‘Probably’.
She took hold of the hand she had touched. ‘Vivien rang today’.
‘Mmm’.
‘She’s started it all up again with Max’. Russell opened his eyes.
‘Has she?’
‘Yes. Big time. Dates and flowers and promises it’ll all be different’.
‘Well, perhaps it will’. ‘You know Max—’
Russell gave a small yawn. He squeezed Edie’s hand and then extracted his own and tucked it under his shoulder. He closed his eyes again.
He said, ‘Maybe he’s changed’.
‘That’s what she says’.
‘Maybe she’s right’.
‘Well, I do hope so,’ Edie said, ‘because she’s letting him move back in again’. Russell opened one eye. ‘Good luck to her’.
Edie moved her face an inch or two closer to Russell’s. ‘She’s staying in her cottage. She says that’s what she wants. Max is coming to live with her’.
‘Yes’.
‘Russell. Listen. Vivien’s cottage is where Rosa is living. Rosa is living in Vivien’s spare bedroom’.
Russell opened both eyes and lifted his head from the pillow.
‘Oh my God—’
‘She’s there now,’ Edie said. ‘She’s had supper with Vivien because Vivien was cooking something special in a really weaselly Vivien-ish way before telling her she was throwing her out’.
Russell gave a groan and turned over on to his back. Edie could s
ee that he was staring straight up at the ceiling.
‘I just keep thinking about her,’ Edie said. ‘I keep picturing her lying in bed there, with Vivi all excited and starry-eyed through the wall, wondering what on earth she’s going to do now, where she’s going to go, how she’s going to tell us that yet another thing has gone wrong’.
Russell said nothing. He lifted an arm to scratch his head briefly, and then he lowered it again.
‘Look,’ Edie said, ‘I know how you feel. I know it’s difficult. I know it isn’t what you want. But I can’t bear thinking about what Rosa’s feeling, I can’t bear her thinking she’s got nowhere to go. I just can’t bear it’. She paused, and then she said, ‘I want to make it a bit easier for her. I want to make a move before she feels she has to. I want to tell her she can come home’.
Chapter Thirteen
‘One seat in the back row, please,’ Ruth said, ‘and as far to one side as possible’.
The young man in the box office, who had clearly been surprised to find Ruth waiting when he opened up, said that there were better seats in the centre of the back, for the same price.
‘I know,’ Ruth said. She had put on a black canvas bucket hat and sunglasses, and thought, glancing unhappily in the mirror as she left the flat, that she looked like a Japanese tourist. ‘I’m sure they’re better, but the side is where I’d like to sit, please’.
The young man sighed, and slid the ticket towards her. Behind him, on the back wall of the little foyer, was a blown-up grainy poster photograph of Edie and Lazlo, in profile, facing each other, and then, superimposed across their torsos, the shadowy faces of the other actors. Cheryl Smith had the looks and the air, Ruth thought, that made other women immediately feel unwomanly.
She picked up the ticket.
‘Thank you—’
The young man nodded. This was not the kind of theatre where the staff said banal, populist things like, ‘Enjoy the show’. Behind her, other people were beginning to open the glass doors from the street, other people who might at any moment include Edie’s family, and therefore Matthew, and although Ruth was there in order to catch sight of Matthew, she was not at all certain that she could handle his catching sight of her. She bent her head so that wings of hair swung forward under the brim of her hat, and went quickly into the auditorium.
It was completely empty. Admittedly, the show wouldn’t start for half an hour, but the emptiness made Ruth feel vulnerable. She crept round the back of the stalls and took her seat in the far corner. If Matthew came, he would come with his family, naturally, and they would also, naturally, have seats in the centre, towards the front, and Matthew would be preoccupied by being in company, and by his mother’s big night, so it would not occur to him to look round the small auditorium and notice that, among the comfortably North London audience, there was a young woman masquerading – badly – as Yoko Ono, who was giving out elaborate signals of wishing strenuously not to be noticed. But if he did look round, and he did notice, there was then the miserable dilemma of how she would react to his reaction. If he didn’t realise it was her, how would she feel? If he did realise, and chose to ignore her, how would she feel? If he did realise and didn’t ignore her and did say something but not what she was longing to hear, how would she feel? The answer to all three questions was, of course, terrible.
It was no good, she thought, bending her head over the programme and staring unseeingly at Edie’s theatrical CV, telling herself she shouldn’t have come. It wasn’t a question of should or shouldn’t. It was more a question of desire urgent enough to amount to need. She was sure that just the sight of the back of Matthew’s head for two hours, just the knowledge that they were breathing the same air, would replenish the fuel in her emotional tank enough to get her through another few days, another week. To see him, simply to see him, might help reassure her that she had, in truth, done nothing wrong, that she was not the reason for his leaving, that she had not failed in some essential quality of womanliness, of femininity.
‘I thought,’ Laura had emailed from Leeds, ‘that Matthew was always so supportive of your career’.
Ruth hadn’t replied. She could have said, ‘He was. He is,’ but then she could foresee the questions that would follow and she couldn’t answer those, not the ‘But why, then?’ questions. If she could, she thought now, scanning rapidly down Edie’s numerous minor television appearances, she wouldn’t be here now, skulking in the back row of the theatre rather than sitting with Matthew’s family in the secure, acknowledged place of approved-of girlfriend. She felt a prick of incipient tears. She swallowed. No self-pity, she told herself sternly, no poor little me. You’ve chosen to come here so you’ll have to take the consequences. Whatever they are.
‘In the seventeenth century,’ Russell told Rosa, ‘there weren’t any theatrical foyers. In fact, I don’t think there were any before Garrick. The audience came in off the street and made their way through narrow dark tunnels and then, wham, suddenly emerged into the candlelit glory of the auditorium. Can you imagine?’
Rosa wasn’t listening. She was distracted by the fact that her Uncle Max had turned up wearing a double-breasted blazer with white jeans, and also that Ben, having said he’d come, and that he’d bring Naomi, was still not there and might have translated into action the doubtfulness in his voice about coming.
‘I always liked this theatre,’ Russell said.
He looked round. The auditorium was filling up and across the seats he could see several well-known newspaper theatre critics in their usual places, right on the edge, so that they could spring up the moment the curtain came down – or even before – to file their copy. He waved in a general sort of way.
‘There’s Nathaniel. And Alistair. I wonder how many performances of this they’ve sat through’.
‘If Ben doesn’t show up, I’ll kill him,’ Rosa said.
‘Ben?’ ‘Yes’.
‘Ben’s coming?’
‘Dad,’ Rosa said, ‘Mum is his mother too’. Russell waved to someone else. He said, ‘So nice of people to come. Halfway to Watford, after all—’
Rosa said suddenly, ‘That must be Naomi’. Russell turned. Ben, in his beanie hat and a denim jacket, was steering a slender girl with spectacular primrose hair through the door from the foyer. She was wearing a tiny dress with sequinned straps and her legs and shoulders were bare.
‘Barbie,’ Rosa said under her breath.
Russell pushed past her and made his way towards them.
He put a hand on Ben’s shoulder.
‘Old man—’
Ben looked awkward. He said, ‘This is Naomi’.
Russell smiled. He took his hand off Ben’s shoulder and held it out to Naomi. ‘How nice to meet you’.
She transferred her doll-sized handbag from one hand to the other, and put the free hand into Russell’s.
‘Hi there,’ Naomi said. She gave a tiny smile, revealing gappy white teeth. Her skin was flawless.
‘It’s nice of you to come,’ Russell said. ‘I’m afraid this isn’t a very cheerful play’.
Ben grunted.
Naomi said, ‘We go to musicals at Christmas. My mum likes Elaine Page’.
‘Fine voice,’ Russell said. ‘No singing this evening, though—’
Naomi said coolly, ‘I wasn’t expecting it’.
Rosa appeared at Russell’s elbow. She loomed over Naomi like a Valkyrie.
‘This is Rosa,’ Ben said, slightly desperately.
Naomi looked her up and down.
‘Pleased to meet you’.
‘Me too,’ Rosa said. She glanced at Ben. ‘Glad you made it’. He shrugged. He said, ‘Mum called me’. ‘Mum did? I called you’.
Ben sighed. He rubbed his hand over his head, pushing his beanie lower over his brows.
He said, ‘She rang to ask if I minded you having my room’.
Naomi was watching Rosa with brown eyes that were extremely sharp, despite their improbable size.
‘Well,
’ she said, ‘Ben doesn’t need his bedroom now, does he?’
‘Well, no—’
‘So you can have it’. Naomi looked up at Ben with quiet possessiveness. ‘Can’t she?’ ‘Sure,’ Ben said.
Russell made a gesture for them to sit down. ‘Five minutes to curtain-up—’ Rosa looked at Naomi.
‘Won’t you be cold?’
Naomi flicked a glance over Rosa’s jacket. ‘I don’t feel the cold’. ‘Come on,’ Russell said, ‘seats time’. Ben put an arm round Naomi’s smooth narrow shoulders.
He said to Rosa, ‘She can always have my jacket’.
Rosa said nothing. She watched them turn away from her, Russell shepherding Naomi down the aisle towards her seat, bending towards her, talking, with Ben following behind with the bewildered air of someone trapped in an environment completely alien to him. Affectation, Rosa thought savagely, absolute affectation, all for Naomi’s benefit, parading independence, parading detachment from background, parading the kind of cool anyone with half an eye could see was fake. She saw Matthew – suited, with a tie – half get up from his seat to greet Naomi, and then Max leap up and bend over her hand like some afternoon-television games-show host, and then she saw them all settle down into their seats, all in a row, couple by couple, and then Matthew, in a seat next to Russell, and then a space left for her, at the end, a space with nothing on her other side but more space. Her eyes moved back along the row and rested on Vivien.
‘No hurry to go, darling,’ Vivien had said, putting the largest prawn from the seafood risotto on Rosa’s plate, ‘absolutely no hurry. Max can just wait till you’re ready to leave’. She’d giggled, and added another mussel to the prawn. ‘He can wait’.
Rosa began to walk slowly down the aisle towards her seat. There had been, really, nothing she could say but yes when Edie rang and said she’d heard about Vivien and Max and of course Rosa could come home, that day, if she needed to. But, if there had been nothing else to say, that didn’t mean that she had said yes with any relief, any thankfulness. Being grateful for the offer didn’t disguise, for a moment, the fact that the feelings of hopelessness and self-disgust, which she had, strangely, managed to escape from in Vivien’s overstuffed spare bedroom, hadn’t gone away but had merely been biding their time.
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