‘I was going to tell you, doll. Honestly I was. Cross my heart’.
Vivien turned back to the cooker. ‘Ringing Eliot about something that concerns me isn’t just something that slips your mind. It’s deliberate’.
Behind her back, Max closed his eyes for a moment. Then he opened them and said, ‘The thing is, Vivi, I didn’t know how to tell you’.
Vivien didn’t turn.
‘Tell me what?’
‘That – oh hell, this is so embarrassing’.
‘What is?’
Max came and stood beside Vivien. He touched her arm. She shook him off. ‘It’s money, doll’. She shot him a glance.
‘What is?’
‘I’m really sorry, but I’m afraid this isn’t the year for going to Australia. I’m so ashamed. I’m so ashamed to tell you that there just isn’t the money. Simple as that’.
Vivien tasted her sauce and reached past Max for the salt.
He seized her outstretched arm. ‘I’m so sorry, Vivi. I shouldn’t have got your hopes up’.
Vivien removed her arm from Max’s grasp.
She said, ‘You’re not running the flat now. Your living expenses have halved. What d’you mean, there isn’t the money?’
Max drooped.
‘Sorry, sweetheart. Honour bright, it’s not there’.
Vivien said unsteadily, ‘You promised me’.
‘Oh, look now, doll, it wasn’t a promise. It was a great idea, a lovely idea to go out and see our boy, but it was only an idea. Be fair!’
Vivien put the saucepan to the side of the cooker and turned out the gas.
She said again, not looking at him, ‘You promised me’.
‘Look here,’ Max said, ‘we’ll go in the spring. I’m sure I’ll see my way clear in the spring—’
Vivien looked at him.
‘Where’s the money gone?’
He spread his hands.
‘Maybe it wasn’t there, doll, maybe I didn’t want you to think I couldn’t give you everything you wanted’. He tried a smile. ‘Maybe I was just being a bit over-optimistic. You know me’.
‘Yes,’ Vivien said. She took a step nearer and when her face was only a foot from his, she said loudly, ‘Liar!’
Max tried to hold her by the arms.
‘Now wait a second, Vivi—’
She flailed her arms sideways to elude him.
‘Liar!’ she said. ‘Liar! Just like you always were!’
‘Please, doll—’
‘Promises!’ Vivien shouted. ‘Promises, to get what you wanted! Promise me what you know I want! There never was the money to go and see Eliot, was there, or if there was, you’ve spent it, haven’t you, you’ve gone into some stupid venture with some stupid shyster—’
‘No!’
‘Then you’re paying off debts. Aren’t you? Who is she? Who’s the tart you’re paying to keep quiet?’
Max reached out and firmly gripped her upper arms.
‘Vivien darling, don’t. Don’t do this. Please don’t! This is just like the bad old days—’
‘Yes!’
‘There’s nothing to get steamed up about,’ Max said. ‘Nothing. It’s just a muddle, a typical Max muddle—’ ‘Then why did you ring Eliot first?’
‘Well, I—’
‘You rang him first,’ Vivien said, ‘so that I couldn’t talk you out of it. I bet you bought his flights to Bali, I bet you did that because you don’t want to go to Australia with me. You don’t want to spend all that money on me!’
‘Nonsense—’
Vivien wrenched herself free.
‘I sound like I used to,’ she screamed, ‘because you sound like you used to. Exactly like!’ ‘I didn’t buy those flights to Bali—’ Vivien glared at him.
‘Liar!’
‘Don’t keep calling me that—’
She took a step back and then she spun round and stormed across the kitchen. In the doorway, she paused, her hand on the knob, and then she said furiously, ‘I wouldn’t have to, if you weren’t!’ and crashed the door shut behind her.
Matthew’s computer case lay in the hall, as if he’d thrown it down carelessly on his way in. As far as Rosa could tell, he was the only one at home. The kitchen and sitting room were disordered but empty, and the doors to both first-floor bedrooms were open. Rosa stood in the dusky evening light on the landing and listened intently. There was no sound, no music. She looked upwards for a minute, and then made her way back downstairs to the kitchen.
It didn’t look as if anyone had had supper. It didn’t look, in fact, as if anyone had done anything in the kitchen that day except have breakfast in a scattered sort of way and then leave in a hurry. Someone had propped an untidy bunch of envelopes against a cornflakes box, but no one had opened them. There was a banana skin blackening on a plate and two half-drunk mugs of cold coffee. The spoon Rosa had stuck in the honey twelve hours before was exactly where she had left it. If Matthew had come into the kitchen that evening, he’d plainly neither had the appetite to eat nor the heart to clear up.
Rosa ran water into the kettle and switched it on. Then she assembled, on the painted wooden tray with decoupage flowers she remembered making in a craft class when she was fourteen, a cafetière and two mugs and a packet of digestive biscuits. Then she added Edie’s dusty bottle of cooking brandy and two pink Moroccan tea glasses. When the kettle boiled, she made coffee in the cafetière, took a plastic bottle of milk out of the fridge and carried the tray out of the kitchen and up the stairs.
There was complete silence on the top landing and no line of light under Matthew’s door. Rosa stooped and set the tray down on the carpet.
Then she tapped.
‘Matt?’
Silence. Rosa turned the handle very slowly and opened the door. Matthew hadn’t pulled the curtains and the queer reddish glow from the night-city sky illuminated the room enough for Rosa to see that Matthew was sitting, fully dressed, in the small armchair that matched the one in her own room.
‘Matt,’ Rosa said, ‘are you OK?’
He turned his head. In the dimness she couldn’t make out if his eyes were shining or tearful.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes’.
Chapter Eighteen
‘Why the silence?’ Laura emailed from Leeds. ‘What’s happening? Is it something I said?’
‘No,’ Ruth typed rapidly. ‘Nothing to do with you, don’t worry. But lots to tell you. Lots’.
She took her hands off the keyboard and looked at what she had written. Then she deleted the last six words. She would tell Laura, she thought, of course she would, if Laura could be deflected from the choice between Cuba or Mexico for her honeymoon, but she wouldn’t tell her yet. There was, after all, no need to tell Laura, no need until she had got a little further down her own path of thinking, of realising, of unpicking, stitch by stitch, everything that had happened. And, more to the point, everything that was now going to happen.
Ruth took her hands right off her desk and laid them in her lap. It was that time of the day in the office when most people had gone home, taking the possibility of interruption and urgency with them. A colleague might come in for a chat or with the suggestion of a drink but finding Ruth dreaming at her desk would be something they expected, something they might even do themselves, to postpone the disconcerting business of going home. After six in the office was a time when being beholden to an obligation melted peacefully into a choice. She could, she thought, answer all the emails from America, or she could, if she chose, leave responding until the morning when the Americans would still be asleep, and concentrate instead, with tentative wonder, on the fact that the last thing Matthew had said to her when they parted was, ‘I’ll ring you’.
He hadn’t, but she wasn’t anxious that he wouldn’t. She had, in almost a single second, shed the anxiety that had been such a burden for so long the moment she had realised he was crying. She’d been so tense about telling him about the baby, so poised for a rebuff, so braced f
or rejection that, when the words were out and he said nothing, it took her some little time to realise that he was saying nothing because he was crying. She’d put a tentative hand out towards him but he’d shaken his head and grabbed handfuls of tiny napkins out of the holder on the café table and scrubbed at his face with them while his shoulders shook.
Ruth said, immediately regretting it, ‘You’re not angry?’
He moved his head again.
‘Of course not—’
‘I thought,’ she said diffidently, ‘that you might think you’d been very unlucky’. ‘No. No—’
She gave a little laugh.
‘I did wonder if I’d been unlucky’.
He stopped mopping his face and looked at her.
‘Don’t you want a baby?’
She stared down at the tabletop.
‘I don’t know. I think I do. I think I want – your baby. But it wasn’t what I planned’.
He said, a little more sharply, ‘Does it upset your plans?’
She looked up.
‘Well, it upsets those ones. But those aren’t the only ones’.
‘Aren’t you pleased?’ She hesitated.
He said, more insistently, ‘Aren’t you pleased, that you can be pregnant?’ ‘Yes, I suppose—’
‘I think,’ Matthew said, leaning forward, sniffing, ‘I think it’s wonderful to get pregnant. I think it’s amazing to make a baby’.
She said, ‘It wasn’t very wonderful alone in the bathroom looking at that little blue line’.
‘No’.
‘And it still isn’t very wonderful not knowing what will happen. Not – knowing how you feel’. Matthew pointed to his face. ‘Look at me’.
‘Matt—’
He said quickly, ‘Don’t hurry me, Ruth, don’t push, don’t want answers now this minute’. ‘OK,’ she said reluctantly.
Matthew blew his nose into a clump of napkins.
‘It’s just knocked me out. This news’.
‘Yes’.
He looked at her.
There was a pause and then he said, ‘It’s wonderful, you – you’re wonderful,’ and then he picked up her nearest hand and kissed it and returned it to her as if he was afraid of becoming responsible for it.
When she and Matthew first met, Ruth reflected now, staring unseeingly at her half-finished email to Laura, Matthew had often told her she was wonderful. Her hair was wonderful, and her body, and her laugh and her driving and her taste in music. She was wonderful to him for what she was, for the package of a person that seemed to him desirable enough to warrant persistent and energetic pursuit. But, sitting at that café table with him and listening to him tell her she was wonderful, it had come to her, with a kind of glow, that she seemed wonderful to him at last for something she had done, rather than something she was. She felt, and had felt ever since, that Matthew had awarded her a recognition, that he had acknowledged an admiration and a pride at what she had done, in becoming pregnant. She couldn’t remember if he had ever looked at her professional efforts and accomplishments with the respect and approval he seemed all too ready to accord her now. She was inclined to think that if he ever had she would indeed remember, recognition of achievement being about as basic to human need as food and drink, and thus this extraordinary glow of approval in which she was tentatively basking was not only unexpected, but was also probably a first.
She couldn’t, of course, blame Matthew for withholding admiration in the past. For as long as she could remember she had, as so many of her girlfriends had, worked assiduously at relinquishing recognition. When she fell in love with Matthew, and the discrepancy in their earnings inevitably dictated the mechanisms of their life together, she had almost unconsciously played down her achievements, withdrawn all visible evidence of her paying power behind a barrier of standing orders and direct debits as well as ceding any available attention to Matthew whenever possible. It was only when this curiously primitive need to own her own flat expanded to become something she could not give up that she confronted him – no, both of them – with the bald fact that she did not want him to hold her back just because he couldn’t do what she could do.
And the consequence of that determination to buy the flat was that she had been made to feel – or, she thought truthfully, just found herself feeling – that in behaving in a way that was not automatically self-deprecating and deferential she had surrendered the chief defining quality of femininity, that of being the giver. Essential womanliness, that warmth and tenderness and loyalty that makes girls conventionally desirable, was, apparently, something that Ruth had turned her back on, thrown down and stamped on. Never mind the unfairness of it, never mind the way that most cherished traits of femininity always seemed to be defined within a relationship, as if possessing no value unless to others, that was how it had seemed to her. She had acted with all the self-reliant, decisive independence that would have been so much applauded in a man, and felt her very sexuality had been assailed in consequence. She might be endorsed most heartily at work for what she was achieving, but what was that endorsement worth when spread thinly across the whole of her life outside work? Who would care, in ten years’ time when all her contemporaries had families, that she was earning, at thirty-eight, more, annually, than her father had ever earned in all his working life? The Victorians had described women who were hell bent on higher education as agamic, asexual. How many people still, Ruth thought, including a shrinking part of her own outwardly accomplished self, would have agreed with them?
And now, look at her. Look at her. Deflected into carelessness about contraception by the urgency of her own need not to seem some unattractive freak, she was pregnant. She was in, by mistake, the most supremely female condition she possibly could be. And Matthew, not appalled as she feared he might be, not jubilant about his potency as men were supposed to be, had been, quite simply, moved. The news had touched him emotionally in a way she would never have predicted, a way she was not at all sure she felt herself. And that reaction meant that he would now certainly do what she had longed for him to do, and ring her.
What she would say when he did, however, she couldn’t be sure. In the perverse way of human things, especially longings, she wasn’t even sure how much she now wanted him to ring. When he did, he would ask questions, want to make plans and, as yet, she wasn’t sure what she wanted, how she saw the way ahead. What was so extraordinary, especially given the fact that babies had not even featured near the bottom of her agenda up to now, was that the painful loneliness she had felt since she and Matthew parted seemed to have subsided. Telling Matthew she was pregnant had given her a sensation of independence, as surprising as it was welcome. To her amazement, the baby, even at this stage, was a fact, and not a choice of any kind. She laid a hand carefully across her flat stomach. Perhaps she had now regained everything she had lost. Perhaps she now, oddly enough, held all the cards, all the approval. She took her hand off her stomach and put both on the keyboard.
‘I am,’ she wrote formally to Laura, ‘very well indeed’.
Rosa thought she hadn’t been to a matinee since she was small, and Edie and Russell used to take the three of them to matinee performances of musicals at Christmas. There had been something exotic about going into a theatre in daylight and coming out in the dark, as if some time travel had happened in those few hours and the world was now a different place. Twenty years later, a matinee didn’t seem so much exotic as out of step, a requirement to surrender and believe, against the evidence of all your senses, that almost amounted to a challenge.
The theatre was only a quarter full. Such people as had come sat scattered about and the girl selling programmes was yawning. Rosa went to the very back of the stalls in a belief that, even if Lazlo could see as far as that from the stage, he couldn’t see in detail. But that afternoon, it would be unlikely he’d be looking at anyone but Edie’s understudy. Edie was never ill, never missed performances, despised people who used health as an excuse for failing t
o fulfil obligations, but, all the same, Edie was in bed with a severe headache and a determination to perform that evening.
‘Miss me,’ she’d said to Lazlo, silhouetted in her bedroom doorway. ‘Mind you miss me’.
Rosa felt a twinge of disloyalty at seeing Edie’s understudy rather than Edie. But then, it wasn’t Edie she had come to see that afternoon, it was Lazlo, Lazlo with whom she’d made a plan, to meet in the interval between afternoon and evening performances. They were intervals he’d admitted were difficult to fill, as the need to conserve energy had to be balanced by an equal need not to relax down to a point from which it might be hard to rouse oneself up again. Rosa said she understood that, she could see that, and why didn’t they just have a quiet something to eat somewhere, no big deal?
Lazlo looked doubtful.
‘Usually I just read—’
‘Well this time,’ Rosa said, ‘just talk’.
‘OK,’ he said. He gave her his shy smile. ‘Thank you’.
She smiled back, but she didn’t tell him she would watch a performance first. She wanted to watch him in peace for a while, watch how he was without Edie, watch him, as it were, out of context. She wanted to see if she could discover why it was she found him so interesting and, even more, why she should want a man who was not in any way her type, and younger to boot, to think well of her. She settled back into her seat. There was a lot of the first act to get through – including the unwelcome sight of that awful Cheryl Smith acting so well – before the door on the left of the stage opened and Lazlo emerged, with his hat and his pipe, and said, with the hesitancy she had come to find so very appealing, ‘“Oh, I’m sorry – I thought you were in the study.”‘ She glanced down at the programme. He really had a very nice profile.
Vivien was lying on her bed when the telephone rang. She was lying there because she had planned to lie there anyway, to rest before Max took her to have dinner with a new client whom he said he wanted her to impress. So, when he rang and said that he was mortified but the client wanted to have dinner alone with Max because it was strictly business he wanted to discuss, Vivien had decided to go to bed anyway even if for different reasons.
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