‘I don’t know what to say, doll,’ Max had said. ‘I feel just terrible. And after promising you. But this one could be quite a big one, and you know how things are with me just now. A big one could make all the difference’.
Vivien, sitting by her telephone table in the hall, said nothing. She felt herself invaded, drawn back by the Vivien of the past, the Vivien who had stopped shrieking at Max and had taken instead to stonewalling him with silence.
Vivi?’ Max said. ‘Darling?’
‘Bye,’ Vivien said. ‘Hope it works,’ and then she put the telephone down and went upstairs to her bedroom and kicked her shoes off. If she couldn’t lie on her bed in anticipation, she would at least lie on it for consolation. She settled herself, with angry little twitches, and looked at the dress hanging on the cornice of her wardrobe. It was layered chiffon, printed in grey and white (‘Love you in those cool colours, doll’) and she had been going to wear it that evening.
The telephone on her bedside table began to ring. She looked at it thoughtfully.
‘No,’ she would say to Max, ‘no, you can’t change the plans again. I’m doing something else this evening now. I’m going to the cinema’.
She let it ring six times and then she picked up the receiver and held it away from her ear and waited.
‘Vivi?’ Edie said.
Vivien shut her eyes tightly for a second, as if to squeeze back tears.
‘Why aren’t you at the theatre? Don’t you have matinees on Saturday afternoons?’
Edie said deliberately, spacing the words out, ‘I have a headache’.
Vivien made a sympathetic noise.
Then she said, ‘You never have headaches’.
‘I have one now’.
‘You should take HRT. You should just admit your age and—’
‘I’m tired,’ Edie said loudly.
‘What?’
‘I’m just tired’.
‘Of course you are. Working, the house so full—’
‘I didn’t ring up to be lectured!’
There was a short pause and then Vivien said, ‘Why did you ring up then?’
‘I was lying on my bed,’ Edie said, ‘and there’s no one in, not even Russell, and I, well, I wanted to talk to someone’.
‘So I’ll do’.
‘Yes,’ Edie said, ‘you’ll do. How are you?’
‘Fine’.
‘Ironing Max’s Jermyn Street shirts and concocting a seduction supper and planning your trip to Australia—’ ‘We aren’t going to Australia’.
‘Vivi!’
Vivien put a hand up and blotted at the skin under one eye and then the other. ‘Nope. Not going’. Vivi, why not?’
‘Max says,’ Vivien said, staring towards the window, ‘that he can’t afford it’. ‘Excuse me—’ ‘Please don’t’. ‘Don’t what?’
‘Don’t,’ Vivien said, ‘encourage me to think what I’m thinking’.
‘But he sold his flat!’
‘I know’.
‘And it was a big flat—’
‘I know, Edie. I know, don’t go on about it, don’t—’
‘Oh Vivi,’ Edie said, in a different tone, ‘oh, I’m sorry’.
‘It’s nothing. It’s just a trip’. She looked up again at the chiffon dress. ‘Nothing else,’ she said loudly, ‘to worry about’.
‘You sure?’
‘Oh yes. He’s very contrite. You can tell a really sorry man, can’t you?’
From downstairs came the two-beat tone of the doorbell.
‘Damn,’ Vivien said, sitting up. ‘Someone at the door’. ‘Ring me back, if you need to. I’m here till six—’ ‘I thought you had a headache?’ ‘It’s going,’ Edie said, ‘it’s really going. Vivi, what can I do—’
Vivien stood up and pushed her feet into her shoes.
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Thanks, but nothing. Nothing needs doing. It’s all fine’.
Outside the front door, a man from the local florist’s was waiting. In his arms he carried a bouquet of red roses, wrapped in cellophane, the size of a large baby.
He grinned at Vivien over the roses.
‘Afternoon!’ he said. ‘The lucky lady, I presume?’
Rosa had ordered a salad. It came with a ring of bread balls circling the rim of the plate, and Rosa had picked these off and piled them neatly on her side plate and pushed the plate away from her.
Lazlo paused in cutting up his pizza and eyed them.
‘Aren’t you going to eat those?’
Rosa shook her head. She had taken off whatever had been holding her hair back, and it was loose on her shoulders.
She glanced, smiling, at his pizza.
‘Isn’t that enough?’
He looked mournfully at his plate.
‘It’s never enough’.
She pushed the bread balls towards him. ‘Feel free’.
He said, in a rush, helping himself, ‘You were in the theatre this afternoon, weren’t you?’
There was a tiny beat and then Rosa said, ‘Yes. I was’.
Without looking at her, he said, ‘To see if I could cope without your mother there?’
She selected an olive from her salad and looked at it. Then she put it back.
‘I didn’t think of that’.
‘Didn’t you?’
‘No,’ she said, glancing at him, ‘I didn’t. And you could’.
He directed a small smile towards his plate.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I could, couldn’t I? I did wonder a bit. I hoped—’ He paused.
‘You hoped you could swim without your armbands’.
‘Yes,’ he said. He looked straight at her. ‘I did. Is that—’ He stopped.
‘No,’ Rosa said. ‘No. She’d want that, too. She’d want that for you’.
Lazlo cleared his throat.
‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘I’ve – well, I’ve got another part’.
‘Oh!’
‘In television,’ he said. ‘A six-parter. I’ve got quite a big role. I’m – well, I’m sort of second lead’. Rosa leaned forward. ‘This is wonderful’. ‘Do you think so?’
‘Of course it is,’ she said. ‘Of course it is! And you deserve it’.
‘Well—’
Rosa put down her knife and laid a hand on Lazlo’s wrist.
‘Mum will say the same. Mum will be thrilled’.
‘Are you sure? It’s Freddie Cass directing again. He -well, I hardly had to do a casting, it was just a formality. It seems a bit sneaky, it feels like I’m doing something behind her back, but I’m not really in a position to turn good work down’.
‘Stop it,’ Rosa said.
He gave a little intake of breath.
He said again, ‘Are you sure?’
‘Sure, sure’.
‘It’s just,’ he said, ‘that I owe her so much. Helping me, sheltering me—’
‘She was there when you needed her’. Rosa took her hand away and picked up her knife again. ‘And vice versa’.
Lazlo said nothing. He put a mouthful of pizza into his mouth and chewed.
Then he said, ‘Why did you come this afternoon?’
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘to look at you’.
‘You’d seen me’.
‘To look at you without any distractions’.
‘I’m not very good at this,’ Lazlo said, ‘but – but what did you see?’
She leaned back and folded her arms. Her hair was very preoccupying.
She said slowly, ‘Enough. I saw enough to give me courage’.
Lazlo put down his knife and fork. He had the anxious, excited sensation he’d had several times recently, that some outside force was going to come bowling into his life and make changes for him, the kind of changes he knew he didn’t have much capacity for making on his own.
Rosa said, leaning back, watching him, ‘You’re moving out’.
Lazlo nodded.
He said, ‘I must. There’s no room. I feel awful, Ben sleeping on the sofa
—’ ‘Where are you going?’ Lazlo looked at his plate.
‘I’ve started looking for a flat. Just a small one. The money will be better in television—’ ‘I’ll come with you,’ Rosa said. He felt his face flame up. ‘Come with me!’
‘Yes’.
He said clumsily, ‘I – I don’t know you—’
Rosa unfolded her arms and leaned forward. She put her elbows on the table and propped her chin on her hands.
‘Yes, you do’.
‘But I—’
‘Lazlo,’ Rosa said, ‘you know me. You’re just so much in the habit of thinking of yourself as an outsider that you don’t believe you know anyone’.
He raised his eyes very slowly and looked at her.
‘You are suggesting we live together?’
‘Yes’. ‘But—’
‘Live together,’ Rosa said, ‘as in live together. Not sleep together’. She paused and then she said lightly, ‘Necessarily’.
‘I wasn’t expecting this,’ Lazlo said. ‘I couldn’t even have imagined this. You are offering to share a flat with me?’
‘Yes’. ‘Why?’
Rosa said seriously, ‘Because I must move out and on too. Because I need the motivation to get a better job. Because I can’t afford to live on my own yet. Because I don’t want to live with another girl who’s a sort of duplicate of me. Because I like you’.
He felt his skin scorch again.
‘Do you?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘I don’t quite know what I—’
‘Don’t bother,’ Rosa said. ‘Don’t try and say anything. Or feel it, for that matter. Just think about what I’ve said’. She looked at his plate. ‘That pizza will be revolting cold’.
Russell was half turned away from Edie in bed, half asleep, when she clutched him.
‘Russell—’
Her fingers were digging into his shoulder, into his upper arm. His mind came dragging back from the soft dark place it was falling into.
‘Edie? Edie, what is it?’
He twisted himself back towards her and she shoved her face against him.
She said, almost into his skin, ‘We’re not going in’.
He extracted his arms from the folds of the duvet and put them awkwardly round her.
‘Edie love, you knew that—’
‘We’re not going in,’ Edie said again in a harsh, tearful whisper. ‘The play’s not transferring. It’s all over’. Russell adjusted his hold.
He said gently, ‘You knew that. You knew Freddie wasn’t really trying to find a theatre, you knew that was all talk. You’ve known that for weeks’.
‘I’ve only just realised it,’ Edie said. ‘I don’t want this to end. I don’t want this play to be over’.
‘There’ll be other parts—’
‘No, there won’t. This was freak luck. Freddie’s taking Lazlo with him to do this Italian detective thing and he never mentioned it to me’.
‘Perhaps there’s no part in this cast for you—’
‘I thought,’ Edie said, ‘I’d be in the West End. I thought I’d have my name—’ She stopped.
Russell said, ‘And I thought you were so tired and fed up you just wanted it all to stop’.
Edie said nothing. She moved her face slightly so that her cheek lay against his chest.
He waited a few moments and then he said, ‘You’ve loved this run, haven’t you? You’ve loved being on stage’. Edie nodded.
Then she said in a whisper, ‘I’m so afraid of it stopping’.
‘It’s not the last’.
‘You don’t know—’
‘No, but I have a pretty good hunch’.
He felt her face move as if she was looking up at him.
‘Do you?’
‘Yes,’ Russell said.
‘Do you really think I’m any good?’
‘Yes,’ Russell said, ‘and so do other people’.
‘But not Freddie Cass’.
‘Yes, he does. But there’s a part for Lazlo in his new project and not a part for you’.
‘Really?’
‘Really’.
‘I don’t think,’ Edie said, laying her cheek back against him, ‘I don’t think I could bear it if I couldn’t work again’.
Russell let a small silence fall, and then he said comfortably, ‘And I’m sure you won’t have to bear anything of the kind’.
‘I don’t feel at all certain about that—’
He said nothing. He moved slightly, to free up an arm, and then he yawned into the dimness above Edie’s head. From somewhere above them, the floorboards creaked.
Edie stiffened.
She said, in quite a different voice, ‘There’s something going on between Rosa and Lazlo’.
‘Is there?’
‘Yes, definitely’.
He felt another yawn beginning. He said, round it, ‘Does it matter?’ Edie said vigorously, ‘I don’t like it, Russell. I really don’t. Not here. Not in my house’.
‘Ah’.
‘I mean, if you take people in, take people back, it’s only fair, isn’t it, to expect a little—’ She stopped and then she said sadly, ‘I don’t mean that’.
‘I thought you didn’t. I hoped you didn’t’.
‘I didn’t’.
‘What did you mean then?’
She said, in the same dejected voice, ‘It all feels so fragile’.
‘What does?’
‘What they’re doing, both of them so uncertain, so without a proper planned future—’
‘Don’t you think,’ Russell said sleepily, ‘that we looked just as fragile in our day? That dismal flat, all those babies, me earning three thousand a year if I was lucky?’
‘Maybe—’
‘I think we did. In fact I’m sure we did. I expect our parents – mine certainly – had a version of exactly this conversation’.
‘Russell?’ ‘Yes’.
‘I just wanted,’ Edie said, ‘to keep everything safe. I just wanted to make everything all right for all of them. I wanted to be back in control of things—’
‘I know’.
‘And I can’t’.
Russell moved his head a little and gave Edie a brief kiss.
‘I know,’ he said again.
Chapter Nineteen
The trouble was, Ben reflected, that he hadn’t thought things through. He had supposed, rather vaguely, that he would go back to a few weeks of his old life – unexciting but familiar and easy – and then he would take up, in an unspecified but attractive way, his new life with Naomi. It had not occurred to him, in trying to get what he wanted while causing as little upheaval as possible, that all the wrinkles wouldn’t somehow just iron themselves out of their own accord. It had not really crossed his mind that Naomi meant exactly what she said when she told him she needed space to think, and that space included hardly being in touch with him at all beyond a few text messages of the kind you might send to any old common or garden friend. And it had certainly never struck him that ambling back home, even without his father’s full blessing, would prove to be anything but easy or familiar.
He had thought, for the first few nights, that it didn’t feel right because he was sleeping on the sofa. He told himself that there was just something pretty weird about being on the sofa when your sister was through the ceiling in your bedroom and your bed. But, as the days wore on, he suspected that, even if Rosa were to surrender his bedroom, it wouldn’t now be the bedroom he had left only a few months before, and therefore the strangeness of the sofa didn’t belong to the actual sofa: it belonged to the situation.
The situation was, as far as Ben could see, that his childhood home had changed. He might know every corner and creak, but he knew them as he supposed he would know the similar characteristics of the secondary school where he had spent seven years of his educational life. You could know a thing, it seemed, you could feel a thing to be deeply, powerfully familiar, but at the same time you were keenly aware that
this known and familiar thing was no longer in the least relevant to the place you were now at, never mind the place where you were going. When Ben put the key in the lock of the front door of the house, he knew precisely how to do it, but that was no comfort or pleasure because he didn’t, fundamentally, want to be doing it any more. It was as if the lock looked the same but had, in fact, changed its nature, just as the quirks of taps and light switches and cupboard doors had. It was like looking at a well-known face in a distorting mirror.
The same was true of his family. There were no surprises in any of them, except that they all seemed to him more shadowy. He initially supposed that this was because all of them were trying to deal with difficulties of one kind or another, which rendered them tired and preoccupied. Given everyone’s work schedules, no one saw very much of anyone else, but all the same, the household had no coherence about it any more and, instead of feeling in any way a unit, it felt like a collection of people living together without any real sense of binding unity. It was only after a few weeks, lying wakeful one night on the sofa and wishing for the hundredth time that it was even six inches longer, that it struck Ben that what was the matter with him was not really the sofa, or the accessibility of his family, but that he was missing Naomi.
Once he had considered this, he realised that he had never actually missed anyone before. He had never, all his growing up, been put in a situation of having to miss someone: no boarding school, no college years in the North of England, no opportunity to feel keenly the absence of someone important. And, once this painful and interesting revelation had broken over him, he could see that it was neither the house nor the family that had changed, it was him. He might only have been living with Naomi and her mother a short while, but it had been long enough to give him a taste of what it might – could – be like to live according to his own inclinations. Naomi’s mother, for all her rules and regulations, had unconsciously allowed him to take the first tentative steps towards independence.
The feeling of missing Naomi was, once acknowledged, extremely acute. It rendered him at once impatient with living in a temporary dossing-down way on his parents’ sofa and, at the same time, eager to mend fences with Naomi and to set about achieving what he now clearly and urgently wanted, which was a place of their own. Such a place, he could now see, would bring with it responsibilities of a kind he had once shrugged off as the dull concern of generations older than his, but he was sure he would not be daunted by that. Indeed, if that kind of obligation was the price to be paid for living with Naomi, then he would gladly pay it.
Second Honeymoon Page 27