‘Is it waiting?’ he said to Arsie. ‘Is it just waiting for them all to come in?’
Arsie yawned. The inside of his mouth was as immaculate as the rest of him. He stretched one paw upwards and laid it, claws only just sheathed, on the skin of Russell’s neck, just above his shirt collar.
‘Don’t,’ Russell said.
Arsie took no notice.
‘Please oblige me,’ Russell said. ‘Please take pity on how weary I am. Please don’t behave like all the others’.
Arsie unfolded his second paw and stretched it up to join the first one. Then he slowly curled his claws over the edge of Russell’s shirt and into his skin.
‘Get off!’ Russell yelled, flinging himself upright.
Arsie flew in a neat semicircle and landed lightly on the rug. He composed himself at once into a tidy sitting position, with his back to Russell, and began to wash.
‘I’m sorry,’ Russell said, ‘but that was the limit. You had been warned’.
He swung his legs off the sofa to the floor, and put his elbows on his knees. In an hour, Edie would be home and, however tempting it was to think of going to bed, it was a temptation he must resist. He got stiffly to his feet and picked up the plate and glass. Part of the hour might be beguiled by making some very strong coffee.
‘Aren’t you in bed?’ Edie said from the doorway.
Russell swam dizzily through half-sleep to consciousness.
‘No, I—’ ‘Isn’t Ben in?’ ‘No’.
‘Lazlo’s having supper with Rosa, Matt’s out somewhere with Ruth and I thought at least Ben—’
Russell began to struggle out of his armchair. ‘I think some of his stuff’s gone’. Edie looked sharply at the sofa.
‘Has it?’
Russell went across to the doorway and bent to kiss her.
‘Would you like a drink?’ She thought for a moment. ‘Not much’.
‘Why don’t you,’ Russell said, ‘why don’t you just be accommodating for once and have a drink while we talk?’ Edie hesitated.
‘Talk—’
‘Yes,’ Russell said, ‘unless you’d like to make an appointment for the purpose on Sunday?’
He moved past her and went across the hall to the kitchen.
‘Coffee? Wine? Whisky?’
Edie went slowly after him. ‘Wine perhaps—’
He glanced at her, then jerked his head towards one of the chairs by the table. ‘Sit down’. ‘I’m going to—’
‘White? Red?’
‘Anything,’ Edie said, ‘anything. I feel too stunned after this week to make decisions that size’. She pulled her arms out of her jacket and let it slump on the chair behind her. Then she leaned them on the table and let her head fall forward. ‘Matt, Rosa, Lazlo, Ruth, Vivi—’ She paused and then she said, ‘Poor Vivi’.
Russell put a glass of white wine on the table in front of her. She looked at it without enthusiasm.
‘I thought you couldn’t stand Max’.
‘I can’t. It’s not Max, it’s the situation, Vivien’s situation. Divorce and everything. She’s going to have to sell the house’.
There was a short pause and then Russell, standing at the other side of the table with the wine bottle in his hand, said with emphasis, ‘Yes’.
Slowly, Edie raised her eyes to look at him.
He said, ‘May I say something?’
‘Go on’.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘if the children are all branching out like this, if they really are going to do the things they seem to be doing, well, it would – it would be nice to help them, wouldn’t it?’
Edie’s gaze didn’t waver from his face. He put the bottle down on the table, and leaned on his hands.
He said, in a different tone, ‘I know how hard this might be for you even to contemplate, heaven knows, it isn’t very easy for me, but I’ve been thinking and the thought I’ve come up with, the thought that won’t somehow go away, is that, in order to give the children a bit of help and rearrange our own lives, we ought, really, if you think about it, to – to sell up too. We ought to sell this house’.
Edie went on looking at him.
There was a silence that seemed to go on for a disconcerting length of time, and then she said, ‘I know’.
Chapter Twenty
The estate agent had said that, on the plus side, it was very rare for a house of this size and quality, and still unconverted, to come up in this particular area. However, he said – and he was quite difficult to take seriously, Edie thought, because of looking rather younger than Matthew and wearing a childishly terrible tie – the minus side, which was quite a significant minus, was that the house was so very unconverted that most buyers with the kind of cash they were envisaging would find it difficult to visualise it in an improved and modernised state.
They had both looked at him when he finished speaking as if he must be about to say more.
After a silence, he’d said, ‘You get my drift?’
Edie had looked at Russell.
Russell said politely, ‘No. Actually’.
The agent had taken a breath. Perhaps, Edie thought, we remind him of his own parents, and how he has to talk to them.
She said, to try and help him, ‘Are you saying it’s good or bad?’
He took another breath, and then he said what he had already said, only more elaborately.
‘I see,’ Russell said. ‘The house is in too bad a state to sell’.
‘No, no, it’s a very desirable house in a good area. It’s just that’ – he glanced round the kitchen – ‘it’s just that, the way it is, just now, the way it looks, because it looks so – very much of, um, well, it’s time, of course, it’s family life and all that, that the kind of purchaser we have in mind, well, we would like to have in mind for this kind of property, might, you see, have difficulty in, well, in seeing the potential’.
Edie had leaned forward.
She said, in a very kind voice, ‘You think we should tidy it up’.
The agent had stared at her with something approaching violent relief.
‘Yes’.
‘Well, that’s easy—’
‘No,’ he said, suddenly desperate again. ‘No. Not tidy up. Empty. Just – almost empty it’. He waved his arms. This room—’ He gestured out of the window. ‘That shed—’
‘Empty it—’
‘Yes’.
Edie said tolerantly, ‘You’ve watched too many television makeover programmes’.
He looked at her. He was almost glaring.
‘It’s not me,’ he said, ‘it’s them’.
And so, because of them, because of all those unknown, feared but longed-for people who would tramp round the house as if it belonged to no one but possibly to their futures, Edie was in Ben’s bedroom on a Saturday afternoon, with a roll of black bags and a bucket of water in which floated a new green pot scourer. If she looked out of the window – which she did a great deal as if trying to imprint the view from it on her mind as a kind of talisman – she could see the piles of peculiar objects that were growing at the end of the garden as Russell emptied the shed. Sometimes he stopped and gazed at the house and, if she was looking out of the window, he waved at her. She waved back, but she didn’t smile. This was, she felt, no moment, no time in their lives, for smiling.
She had expected to be taken over by emotion. She had relied upon the fact that every great event in her life so far had swept her up on a huge wave of blazing feeling, feeling so strong in essence and operatic in effect that she didn’t have to decide how to behave, she just surrendered and was swept away. But, for some reason she couldn’t fathom, this event, this business of moving house and thereby moving everything in their lives – except, Russell had pointed out, hopefully each other – wasn’t knocking her out, bowling her over. It was instead presenting her with a whole range of reactions, some of which were painful in a way she had anticipated, and some of which were extremely surprising. She could feel something close to an
guish at the thought of, perhaps, not going up and down those stairs in six months’ time, but she could also feel that not having to go up and down the stairs might simultaneously spring her from years of habit which had, over time, quietly and insidiously become a prison.
‘Not an actual prison,’ she said to Russell. ‘Of course not. Just a prison of me going on and on being me’.
If she thought about people coming round the house and staring speculatively at the pale blotches on the walls that she was making by scrubbing the adhesive gum off so hard, she felt a dislike of them that almost amounted to loathing. But if, on the other hand, she turned that idea around and thought of nobody coming, nobody even wanting the house, she felt worse. She felt, she supposed, close to something Vivien had said, crying down the telephone one night after Edie had returned from her last but one night in Ghosts.
‘When I think,’ Vivien had said between sniffs, ‘when I think of Max deceiving me again, leaving me again, I feel awful. But when I think of him coming back, what it would be like if I had to have him back, I feel really, really terrible’.
Edie moved Ben’s bed away from the wall in order to attack the gum marks left by his Kate Moss poster. There were several socks nesting furrily against the skirting board and a gold-coloured earring like a flower and a sticky teaspoon. She picked them up gingerly and flung them across the bed on to the carpet. Ben was buying new socks now, new socks and bedlinen and a screwdriver for this little flat he’d found in Walthamstow, two streets away from the flat Naomi shared with her mother. It wasn’t much of a place, he said, but it had a sitting room and a bedroom and he was going to paint it with the help of another photographer’s assistant and then he was going to lay siege to Naomi.
‘What do you mean, lay siege?’
‘I’m going to make it really nice and then I’m going to wait’.
‘Wait? For what?’
He’d been filling his rucksack with possessions from behind the sofa. ‘Wait for her to see’.
‘Will she?’
Ben spread out a faded black T-shirt with a skull printed on the front and then he tossed it on the floor. ‘Oh yes,’ he said.
‘D’you mean,’ Edie said, ‘that you’ll cook supper and light candles and buy flowers?’
Ben inspected another black T-shirt.
‘Might do’.
‘And if it doesn’t work?’
‘Then,’ Ben said, chucking the second T-shirt after the first, ‘I’ll still end up with my own gaff and I’ll think again’.
Edie began on the next batch of gum patches with her scourer. Ben wouldn’t let her see this flat of his any more than Rosa and Lazlo would let her see the one they’d found in Barons Court.
‘Barons Court!’ Edie had said. ‘But that’s the other side of London!’
‘It’s a very nice flat,’ Lazlo said seriously. He looked at Rosa. ‘Piccadilly Line’. Rosa looked at Edie. ‘Good for work’.
‘Oh yes,’ Lazlo said, ‘very good for work’.
‘But why can’t I see it?’
‘You can,’ Rosa said, ‘in time. When we’ve – done something about the bathroom’.
She looked at Lazlo. They both giggled. He said, ‘And the kitchen’. They giggled again.
Edie said, ‘I really don’t see why you have to be so secretive’.
‘Not secretive, Mum. Just private’.
‘They’re paying two hundred pounds a week,’ Edie said to Russell, ‘and Ben’s paying a hundred and twenty-five. How will they manage?’
‘We don’t ask them,’ Russell said, ‘and we don’t worry. Certainly not until this fails to sell’. He put a hand on the nearest wall. ‘Which it won’t because I am going to paint the front door’.
‘I really think,’ Matthew had said, surveying the house from the street, ‘that you should at least paint the front door’.
‘It’s always been that colour’.
‘It isn’t the colour,’ Matthew said patiently, ‘it’s the chips’.
‘But—’
‘Do it, Dad,’ Matthew said. ‘Just bite the bullet and do it. Like the damp in the downstairs loo’.
Matthew, Edie thought, aiming her scouring pad towards the bucket, and missing, was different. He was, in one way, back to the Matthew he had been when he first met Ruth, the Matthew who had kindly, if patronisingly, told his parents how much better their lives might be if only they followed his advice. But there were new elements now, as well, elements that were softer and more sympathetic, elements induced, it seemed, by his knowledge that he was going to be a father. He had, for example, gone, almost at once, to live with Ruth in the flat that had been such a bone of contention between them, in order, he said, to look after her.
‘But she isn’t ill,’ Edie said. ‘Pregnancy isn’t an illness. It’s a – well, it’s a very natural state of being but she isn’t an invalid’.
Matthew was standing by the kitchen table, dressed for work and drinking orange juice.
‘I want to look after her. I want to make sure she eats the right things and gets enough rest. I’m going to the doctor with her’.
‘Are you?’
Matthew drained his glass.
‘I’m going for every ultrasound. I’m going whenever I need to know what Ruth knows’.
He had left his room as if he had never been in it. In fact, he had left it so completely that in order to visualise him in it at all Edie had to remember all the way back to the serious-minded boy in gumboots who had so feared the leak in the roof that going up and down the staircase had been a real test of courage for him. That was the boy who was now proposing not only to devote himself to his girlfriend’s pregnancy but also to put his own career on hold when Ruth’s maternity leave was over in order to care for their child. He said it was his choice to do that, he said it was what he wanted.
‘Is it – is it what Ruth wants?’ ‘Of course’.
‘But I thought you couldn’t bear the flat—’
‘What I couldn’t bear,’ Matthew said, ‘was the situation. And then I could hardly bear what followed it. But now it’s changed. Everything’s changed. Everything’.
Edie looked at him.
‘Yes,’ she said faintly.
She sat down now, on the edge of Ben’s bed, and then she lay back and contemplated the ceiling. When she and Vivien were growing up, she had always prided herself on being like their father, a restless man who found any kind of routine not so much anathema as impossible. Vivien, of course, was like their mother, the kind of person who sees change as some malevolent plot deliberately devised to distress her. But look at Vivien now, staring into the wreckage of the fragile edifice she’d spent so much of her life patching and mending, and not, repeat not, falling to pieces. It was Vivien who, in between looking for flats in Fulham for herself -’Why shouldn’t I live further in? Who’s to stop me living exactly where I want?’ – was urging Edie to think of where she and Russell might live after the house was sold. ‘Why don’t you think about Clerkenwell? Or Little Venice? Why don’t you have an adventure?’ It was Vivien who had said to Edie, ‘Going on is hard, but going back would be a whole lot worse’.
Going back. Edie stretched her eyes wide and focused on a long, wavering crack in the plaster above her head. To think now how she had longed to go back, how fiercely she had told herself that all she wanted, all she was truly able to do, lay in what she had already done, in the way she had lived her life since they had moved into the house. But if she was completely truthful with herself and somebody, some fairy godmother, materialised out of the battered walls of Ben’s bedroom and offered her the chance to go back, she would have to make sure of where she was going back to. Not, now, to maternal supremacy, not, now, to that beguiling power of sustenance and control, that luxurious simplicity of society-approved choice: children first, everything else second. What she would have to say, slightly embarrassedly, to the fairy godmother, was that she would indeed like to go back, but not very far back, back in fact
only as far as the first night of the production of Ghosts, when she had known that she had done something exceptionally well, and been applauded for it.
‘How odd,’ she’d say to the fairy godmother, ‘to have one hunger almost replaced by one so very different’.
‘Not replaced,’ the fairy godmother would reply, adjusting her gauzy skirts, ‘merely augmented by, added to. Nothing, you see, stands still’.
Russell had said that. He’d been shuffling through some property brochures that Vivien had zealously sent and he said, ‘I never thought we’d leave this house, I never thought I could, but now I wonder if I could stay. Nothing stands still, does it, and I suppose, if it did, we’d stop breathing. It’s not change that’s so painful, it’s just getting used to it’.
Edie sat up slowly. It actually wasn’t getting used to change that hurt, it was getting used to the truth, or whatever that element was that wasn’t the illusions you’d clung to and comforted yourself with for more years than you’d care to remember. And once you’d started doing without the illusions, you got braver, you could breathe the thinner air, take longer strides, allow yourself to make claims. And the claim I want to make, Edie thought, getting to her feet and moving towards the window again, is to work. I want to act again, I want to be on a stage or in front of a camera, and I mind very much indeed that nobody has asked me, since Ghosts.
She looked down the garden. Russell was standing outside the shed holding Rosa’s old fairy cycle. Russell had said she must keep the faith, that there would be other parts, that he would help her to change agents if she thought that would make a difference. She leaned her forehead against the glass of the window and stared at him. He had put the bike down now and was pulling out of the shed yards and yards of crumpled green plastic netting that they had once used in an attempt to stop the boys’ footballs flying over the fence into neighbouring gardens. He looked purposeful and determined and, at the same time, as if this task was far from easy. He looked like someone who was doing something he didn’t want to do in order to be able to move on to something better. He looked like the kind of person Edie was going to have to be when she ate all the hard words and thoughts she had uttered and believed in the past about his agency, and asked him for work to tide her over until – until something better came up.
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