‘What’ll this do?’
Rosa swung her head back to look at Kate. ‘I don’t know’. ‘Make or break?’ ‘I don’t know’.
‘You’d think,’ Kate said, ‘in this day and age, we could at least get contraception right, wouldn’t you? First me, now Ruth—’
Rosa leaned sideways and looked down at the baby. ‘Ruth of all people—’
‘Yes’.
‘I wonder if Mum knows’.
‘What’ll she say?’
Rosa put out a hand and laid it on the baby. ‘Can’t tell. She’s all over the place at the moment. It’s -well, it’s a nightmare at home at the moment’.
‘Is it?’
‘Yes,’ Rosa said. She straightened up, and then she said, with a small, private smile, ‘But rather interesting, too’.
Kate waited.
Rosa went on smiling to herself. Kate said crossly, ‘Well, go on’. ‘You can guess’.
‘Something happening? Between you and Lazlo?’ ‘Not – exactly’.
‘Well, then—’
‘But,’ Rosa said, ‘I’d quite like it to’. ‘I’m surprised’.
‘So am I’.
‘I thought he was geeky’.
‘He is rather. But—’ She stopped.
Kate looked at her.
‘I see’.
Rosa looked back.
‘Kate, what about Matthew?’
‘That’s all about to be common knowledge, isn’t it?’
‘D’you know,’ Rosa said, moving about the knife and fork at her place, ‘once I’d have hit the telephone. Once I’d have immediately rushed round to Dad’s office and rung Mum and texted Ben and generally gone into overdrive. But I don’t want to now. I don’t remotely feel like it’.
‘What do you feel then?’
‘Sad,’ Rosa said.
‘Sad?’
‘Yes,’ Rosa said. She looked down at Finlay again. ‘Yes. Sad. Sad that if it’s a baby, it had to be this way’.
‘Come on,’ Kate said vehemently. The baby won’t know!’
‘No,’ Rosa said. She picked up the menu again and held it out towards Kate, ‘But we will. Won’t we?’
* * *
The afternoon in the bookshop seemed to Vivien to be taking an unusually long time. It was the end of summer after all, so customers weren’t coming in for those optimistic stacks of paperbacks to take on holiday but, all the same, the few people who did come in seemed to be passing time rather than buying a book and Vivien watched them with irritation as they drifted idly about, fingering books they would never buy and infecting her with their mild restlessness. She had taken advantage of Alison’s absence to straighten things up a bit, sort the slew of scraps of paper by the till, realign the table of summer novels, but that was all that was possible really. Alison didn’t like her actually doing housework if she was the only person in the shop: she said it was off-putting for customers to be dusted round, made them feel that they were somehow an intrusion. She liked Vivien, if not actually helping a customer, to sit by the till lightly engaged in a task that could obviously be easily set aside. Alison herself was a knitter, great scarves and sweaters in the patterns and colours of the Andes, and she would have preferred Vivien to find herself some equally encouraging-looking, unthreatening occupation. Vivien’s propensity for tidying, though undeniably useful, could too easily be interpreted, by anyone sensitive to atmosphere, as taking precedence over the mild disorder created by the necessary process of commerce.
Vivien had taken up her position next to the rack of birthday cards. These were haphazardly arranged with no particular thought given to sequences of price or size, and it was harmless enough, Vivien thought, to separate the reproductions of Jack Vettriano paintings from black-and-white art photographs of elephants or kittens. The card rack also gave her a good view of the shop, which contained, at that moment, a young mother with a toddler in a buggy looking at board books, and a man in a faded gingham shirt browsing in biography.
It was not the sort of shirt, Vivien reflected, that Max would wear. If Max wore gingham at all, it would be very new and either navy blue or pale pink. It was odd, really, to be so familiar, all over again, with Max’s shirts, especially as – Max being Max and something of a shopper when it came to clothes – most of those shirts were new to her, and acquired in that peculiar space of time when she had been excluded from knowing any details of his personal life. And in those four years, Max had, sartorially speaking, started again. His taste might not have changed, but his wardrobe had and Vivien found it was very difficult sometimes to launder with equanimity garments that had plainly been to exotic places with women who were not her. A T-shirt printed with the logo of a luxurious hotel in Cyprus, and a Malaysian sarong had already gone in the bin rather than the washing machine and Vivien couldn’t decide whether it was a comfort to her or not that Max hadn’t commented on their disappearance.
But then, Max was being very careful not to allude to his bachelor days unless it was to say something dismissive. He’d been to Jersey on business the week before, staying in a hotel he’d stayed at previously and, Vivien suspected, not alone, and had arrived home a night early, claiming that the whole place was depressing and all he wanted was to be home again.
‘Bad memories,’ Vivien said, putting a glass of whisky down in front of him.
He blew her a kiss.
‘Horrible,’ he said.
The man in the gingham shirt approached the till and slowly laid down a large single-volume life of Napoleon.
‘Please,’ he said, over his shoulder.
Vivien slipped the card she was holding into a slot and hurried across. The man, staring dreamily into the space behind the till, was holding out his credit card. As she reached to take it, her mobile phone, in her handbag under the counter, began to ring in an insistent crescendo.
‘I’ll ignore that,’ she said brightly.
The man nodded. He watched her slip the book into one of Alison’s recycled bags, and run his card briskly through the machine. Then he bent and signed his name with the elaborate care of one who has just learned to do joined-up writing. Vivien watched him leave the shop, and then she seized her bag and rummaged in it for her telephone.
The caller had been Eliot. What was Eliot doing, ringing at five-thirty on an Australian morning? Was he ill? Vivien cast a glance at the mother and toddler. The toddler was now asleep in her buggy and her mother was grazing dispiritedly along the shelf of self-help books. Vivien rapidly dialled Eliot’s number.
‘Hi, Ma,’ Eliot said. ‘Are you all right?’
There was a pause and then Eliot said, ‘I’m great, Ma.
Why?’
‘It’s five-thirty in the morning. Why are you awake at five-thirty? Why are you calling me Ma?’
‘It’s a beaut morning,’ Eliot said reasonably. ‘We’re going to the beach’.
‘So you rang to tell me it’s a lovely day?’
‘No,’ Eliot said, ‘I rang because Dad rang me and I’d forget otherwise. I’d forget if I left it’.
The young mother pushed her buggy slowly past Vivien as if Vivien did not exist. Vivien watched her without pity, as she struggled with the door.
‘What,’ Vivien said more loudly when the shop was empty, ‘what would you forget?’
‘That it doesn’t matter to Ro and me that you can’t come for Christmas. We’re going to Bali’.
‘What?’
‘We’re going to Bali for Christmas,’ Eliot said. ‘We’ve got cheap flights. So it doesn’t matter’.
Vivien pulled Alison’s stool towards her and perched on it.
‘You said Dad rang you?’
‘Yeah’.
‘And Dad said we couldn’t come for Christmas after all?’ ‘Yeah’.
‘Did – did he say why?’
‘You should know,’ Eliot said. ‘Work or something’.
‘When did he ring?’
There was a silence, and then Eliot said uncert
ainly, ‘Yesterday?’
‘Well,’ Vivien said, her voice not quite steady, ‘why are you ringing me?’
Eliot sounded surprised. ‘To be polite’. ‘I’m sorry—’
‘Dad said he thought you’d be a bit upset so I thought if I rang you and said we wouldn’t be here anyway you’d feel better’.
‘But as I didn’t know—’
There was another silence and to stop it becoming complicated Vivien said, with an effort, ‘How lovely. Going to Bali’.
‘Yeah,’ Eliot said, ‘we’d like a break’. In the background, on a sunny blue morning in Cairns, a girl’s voice said something Vivien couldn’t hear. Eliot said, ‘Mum? Gotta go—’
‘Yes, darling’.
‘You take care’.
‘Yes,’ Vivien said. ‘Yes’.
The shop door opened and the man in the gingham shirt came in again holding the bag with the book in it.
‘Thank you for ringing,’ Vivien said. ‘That was very -thoughtful’.
The man came slowly up to the counter and laid the bag carefully on it.
‘I’m afraid,’ he said, staring past Vivien, ‘I’m afraid I’ve changed my mind’.
* * *
Leaving the stage after the final curtain call, Cheryl Smith said to Lazlo, ‘Like a drink?’
Lazlo hesitated. Edie, untying the ribbons of Mrs Alving’s lace cap, was just ahead of them.
Cheryl followed his gaze.
‘You don’t have to go everywhere she goes’.
‘I don’t—’
‘Beg pardon,’ Cheryl said, ‘but you’ve gone home with her every bloody night’.
Lazlo said quickly, ‘I’ve been living in her house. It seemed polite’.
‘Break the habit of a lifetime,’ Cheryl said. ‘Come and have a drink with me’.
Lazlo looked at her. She managed to make Regina’s maid’s clothes, dowdy though they were, look as if they barely contained her.
‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ Cheryl said. ‘Something to your advantage’.
‘Well—’
‘Go on,’ Cheryl said, daring him. ‘Mummy’s boy’. Lazlo pushed past Cheryl in the narrow corridor behind the stage and put his hand on Edie’s shoulder.
‘Edie—’
She turned.
‘I’ll be a bit later tonight. I’m going to have a drink with Cheryl’. ‘Are you?’
‘Yes. Will you get a taxi?’
‘Probably,’ Edie said. ‘Doesn’t matter. Don’t worry’.
She gave him a faint smile. ‘Got to get used to different routines now anyway’.
‘Even if,’ Lazlo said, flattening himself against a wall for the stage manager to get by, ‘even if I wasn’t moving out, there’s only four weeks of the run to go, anyway’.
‘Unless we transfer’.
Lazlo looked away.
‘Not – much talk of a transfer lately—’ Edie glanced down at the cap in her hands. ‘Funny. I’ve got rather used to this’. ‘Me too’.
She lifted her head.
‘You go and have a drink with Cheryl. You need to talk to actors your own age’. ‘It isn’t that—’
‘Well,’ Edie said bravely, ‘it should be’.
Cheryl led the way at determined speed to the pub where Lazlo remembered almost breaking down after his first rehearsal. It was full and hot. Cheryl shouted at him that she wanted red wine and then disappeared to the ladies. When she came back, Lazlo had taken their glasses out on to the pavement and had found seats at the end of a picnic table dimly lit by a square yellow light falling from the window of the pub. Cheryl, in a denim miniskirt and her slouch boots, sat down on the bench attached to the table, and swung her legs over so that Lazlo and the two men already sitting at the table had a prolonged view of her knickers. Then she smiled graciously at them and picked up her wine glass.
She gestured with it towards Lazlo.
‘Happy days’. ‘I hope so—’
‘I’m in a film after this,’ Cheryl said, ‘on location in Norfolk, playing a single mother with a drug habit. I’ll be perfect, won’t I?’
Lazlo nodded.
She took a gulp of wine.
‘What about you?’
‘I don’t know’.
‘Come on, Laz—’
Lazlo said cautiously, ‘Russell says I can read for a couple of his accounts—’
‘Oh please,’ Cheryl said, ‘Ibsen to chicken nuggets?’
‘I—’
‘You,’ Cheryl said, ‘have a crap attitude. And a crap agent’.
‘He says he’s trying. And two others have been in touch—’
Cheryl leaned forward, folding her arms underneath her bosom and creating an impressive cleavage. ‘My agent wants to see you, sad boy’. Lazlo removed his gaze from Cheryl’s breasts.
‘What?’
‘You heard me. He’s seen you twice. He wants you to ring him. He’s told me to tell you to ring him’. ‘The others—’
Cheryl leaned forward even further and jabbed at the table beside Lazlo’s beer glass.
‘No, Laz. Not a “Come and see me sometime and maybe I’ll think about it, but probably I won’t” sort of agent. Stuart is for real. Stuart is a top agent. Stuart wants you to ring him tomorrow morning’. She paused and leaned back a little and then she said, ‘Stuart has a casting for you’. ‘He can’t—’
‘He can. He has. He wouldn’t be asking to see you if it wasn’t for something specific’.
‘But my—’
‘Ditch him,’ Cheryl said. ‘He got me this part!’
‘Ditch him,’ Cheryl said again, ‘if you’ve got any sense’.
‘But he’s only seen me in this—’
‘For God’s sake,’ Cheryl said, ‘and when did showcases get better than bloody Ibsen?’
‘I’m sorry,’ Lazlo said, ‘and thank you’.
She stretched a hand out across the table and took one of his, firmly.
‘You really are rather sweet’.
The men at the other end of the table stopped talking.
‘Now your hair’s a bit longer,’ Cheryl said, ‘you’re quite attractive. Very attractive really’. She raised her eyebrows and smiled. ‘Very fanciable’.
Lazlo attempted to pull his hand away.
‘Sorry—’
‘Oh come on,’ Cheryl said. ‘Live a little. Why d’you think I go to all this trouble?’
Lazlo pulled his hand free. One of the men at the table gave a little yelp of laughter.
‘Sorry,’ Lazlo said again.
Cheryl gave him an amused glance. Then she shot a look up the table. She picked up her wine glass and struck an attitude with it.
‘Suit yourself,’ she said. ‘Mummy’s boy’.
Maeve paused in the doorway to Russell’s office. She was carrying a takeaway beaker of coffee and a complicated document from their accountant, flagged with little yellow stickers. Russell was standing in his dormer window, hands in pockets, staring out. Nothing was open on his desk: it looked as if he had not only not started work, but had also turned his back on the very idea of it.
‘Room service,’ Maeve said.
Russell turned his head.
‘You’re a good girl’.
Maeve put the coffee down carefully on his desk. ‘The line in the play is “You’re a good little pudding,
Mrs King.”‘
Russell sighed. Then he turned round completely and lowered himself into his desk chair as if he was convalescent.
Maeve laid the folder from the accountant down in front of him.
‘Three signatures. I’ve marked where. Do you think you can manage that?’ Russell nodded.
‘Shall I stay,’ Maeve said, ‘and guide your hand?’ Russell glanced at her, then he slowly reached to pick up his pen.
‘After all these years,’ Maeve said, ‘do I still have to tell you that you should never sign anything you haven’t read and understood?’
Russell put his pen down.
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Maeve laid her hands on his desk and leaned on them. ‘The fight’s gone out of you,’ she said. ‘Hasn’t it?’ He said, staring at the document in front of him, ‘I’m just tired—’
‘You’ve been tired for weeks,’ Maeve said. ‘You’ve been out all hours at things a tinker wouldn’t trouble himself with, and your house isn’t your own, and nor is your wife and you can’t get up the energy to lick a stamp. Can you?’
‘It’s only age—’
‘It’s not,’ Maeve said, ‘it’s attitude. It’s circumstances. Your present circumstances are not conducive to your health and well-being. What are you trying to prove?’
There was a pause and then Russell said, clearly and slowly without looking up, ‘I was trying to fill a gap’.
‘Well,’ Maeve said, ‘there you have it’.
‘And the gap is still there’.
‘Tell her’.
‘I can’t,’ Russell said.
‘Of course you can! She’s a reasonable woman—’ ‘No,’ Russell said. ‘Why not?’
He looked up at her, his face slightly sideways. He said, ‘Because she’s got a gap of her own. One she’d never thought she’d have’.
‘Oh,’ Maeve said, ‘those children—’
‘No,’ Russell said. He picked his pen up again and pulled the folder towards him. ‘No, not the children. Work’.
‘I was going to tell you, doll,’ Max said. He drew imaginary intersecting lines on his chest. ‘Honestly I was. Cross my heart’.
Vivien sighed. Max had been an hour later home than he had promised and she had spent that hour vowing that she would not, the moment he walked through the door, confront him about not going to Australia. And then she had heard the front door slam and Max’s quick steps coming down the hall and the minute they were in the kitchen she’d spun round from the cooker and said, ‘Eliot rang today’.
Max had taken a pace backwards. He’d always done that, when attacked, as if physically retreating before gunfire, and it annoyed her quite as much as it always had done.
He then put his hands up, as if surrendering.
‘How was he?’
‘Don’t,’ Vivien said. She was holding a wooden spoon coated with sauce. ‘Don’t what, honey?’
‘Don’t,’ Vivien shouted, ‘pretend you don’t know!’
Max dropped his hands. He came forward and stood in front of her in an attitude of contrition.
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