Second Honeymoon (12 page)

Thinking this was not, Matthew found, at all comfortable. In fact nothing in his mind was, at the moment, in the least comfortable, being instead a sour soup of disappointment and self-reproach and a very real and insistent sadness. It wasn’t a simple matter of resenting Ruth, or even berating himself for not facing facts, because the whole situation had crept up on him – on
them both – so insidiously, fuelled by things that were not acknowledged or uttered even more than by things that were openly expressed. He might curse himself for getting into this tangle, but the curses were only the more vehement because he could, looking back, see exactly how he had got there.

When Matthew had announced that there was no way he could share in the purchase of the flat, Ruth had become very still. She had looked at him for a long time, thoughtfully, and then she had said, ‘Will you do one thing?’

‘What thing—’

‘Come and see the flat. Just see it’. He shook his head.

‘No’.

‘Matthew, please’.

‘I can’t afford it. I don’t want to have my nose rubbed in what I can’t afford’.

‘It isn’t for you, I’m afraid. It’s for me.
I
want you to see the flat’.

He said nothing.

She said, almost shyly, ‘I want you to see what I’m buying’.

‘Why?’

‘I want you to be part of it—’

‘I can’t be’.

‘But you’ll come there, you’ll come and see me,
surely?’
He hesitated. His heart smote him. He said, not looking at her, ‘Of course’. ‘Then come’.

‘Ruth—’

She moved towards him and put her hands on his shoulders. She looked into his face as intently as if she were counting his eyelashes.

‘Matt.
Matt
. This isn’t the end of
us’.

Now, standing uneasily on those carefully patterned cobblestones, Matthew told himself that being kind – or cowardly – once was one thing: persisting in it was quite another and could lead to desperate situations. Whatever Ruth said, however beseeching she was, he must not allow her to believe that he felt other than he did, that he could somehow cope with a situation in which he only had power in the obvious department of bed, which was not, in the end, he knew, enough.

He pushed open the heavy glass door of the warehouse and entered an immensely tall foyer, floored in granite with long windows running right up to the roof. There was an industrial steel staircase curving up behind a bank of lifts and besides that nothing, not a picture nor an ashtray nor a piece of furniture, nothing but high, quiet acres of expensively finished dark gleaming space. He stepped forward into a lift and pressed the button for the sixth floor.

When the lift doors slid open, there was a sudden flood of light.

‘I saw you!’ Ruth said. She was standing in an open doorway with apparently nothing behind her. ‘I was watching from the balcony and I saw you!’

He bent to kiss her cheek. She moved to meet his mouth and missed it. He looked past her.

‘Wow’.

‘Isn’t it wonderful?’

He nodded. The room beyond the open door was pale and high and shining, and at the end there was nothing through the huge windows but sky.

Ruth took his hand.

‘You see? You see why I had to buy it?’

She towed him through the door. Then she let go and spun down the length of the room.

‘Isn’t it great?’

‘Yes’.

‘All this space! All this air! And Central London! I can walk to work!’

‘Yes’.

‘Come and see the bathroom,’ Ruth said. ‘The shower is so cool. And in the kitchen, the microwave is built into the cooker unit. It looks like a spaceship’.

Matthew followed her across the wooden floor, through a doorway in a translucent wall of glass bricks. She was standing in a shower made of a cylinder of satin-finished metal, punctuated with little glass portholes in blue and green.

‘Did you ever see anything like it?’

‘No,’ Matthew said, ‘I never did’.

Ruth stepped out of the shower.

She said, more soberly, ‘I wish it wasn’t like this’.

He nodded.

She said, ‘I wish it wasn’t you coming to stay in my flat. I wish it was ours’.

He leaned against the wall. The glass felt solid and cold through the sleeve of his jacket.

He said, too loudly, ‘I’m afraid I won’t be coming’.

She said nothing. She walked past him very quickly and went back into the big room. He followed her. She was standing by the sliding doors to the balcony looking at her view of the river.

She said, ‘Please don’t talk like that’.

He stayed standing a little behind her.

He said, ‘Ruth, I have to. If I come and stay here, it’ll change the balance between us. It’s changed already, of course, but it’d be worse. You can imagine how it would be. It’d be pitiful’.

She said fiercely, turning round, ‘You couldn’t be pitiful. I wouldn’t
let
you’.

He tried to smile.

‘You couldn’t stop me. It would just happen’.

‘Matt—’

‘We’ve had a wonderful time,’ he said, ‘and it’s got nothing to do with not loving you—’ She stepped forward and seized his arms. ‘Suppose I don’t buy it! I mind far more about you—’ He stepped back, gently extricating himself. He said, shaking his head, ‘It wouldn’t work—’ She dropped her arms.

She said miserably, ‘I didn’t mean this to – be like this’.

‘I know you didn’t’.

‘Are – are my values all skewed?’

‘Nope’.

‘Please –
please
don’t leave’. He looked round the table. ‘It’s a wonderful place. You’ll be really happy here’.

‘Matt—’

He leaned forward and laid the palm of his hand against her cheek.

He said, ‘And you’re doing the right thing,’ and then he took his hand away and walked back across the echoing floor to the landing and the lifts.

Edie took a garden chair into the angle of the house where, if you tucked yourself right into the corner, you could elude every breath of wind. She also carried a mug of coffee, her script and, somehow, two ginger biscuits, a pen and her telephone. Behind her, sensing a sedentary moment of which he might take advantage, padded Arsie.

The sun, shining out of a washed blue sky, was quite strong. It showed up unswept post-winter garden corners, and interesting patterns of blistered paintwork and lingering blackened leaves on the clematis above Edie’s head. She thought, settling herself into the chair and arranging her mug and phone and biscuits on a couple of upturned flowerpots to hand, that this was the first time, the first moment, in the last five weeks, when she had felt the possibility of pleasure, a tiny chance for the future to hold something that could, in turn, hold a small candle to the past. She let Arsie spring into her lap, waited while he trampled himself down into position, and then rested her script on top of his purring tabby back. Sun, cat, acting, Edie thought. She patted the script. No, not quite that. Russell would put it differently. Sun, cat,
work
.

‘I can’t believe this is work,’ Lazlo had said to her at the first rehearsal.

She’d been looking at her lines.

Without glancing at him, she said, ‘By the end of this rehearsal, you’ll know it is’.

By the end of the rehearsal, he’d been ashen. He’d looked as if he might cry. He’d been all over the place, all the wrong emphases, no sense of timing, not listening, in panic, to what the director was saying.

‘Go away,’ Freddie Cass said to him. ‘Go away and learn those lines and come back to me
empty’.

‘Empty?’

‘Empty. We’re starting again. We’re not starting from Lazlo, we’re starting from the
play’.

Ivor, the Norwegian, had taken him and Edie for a consoling drink. Now that the cast was established Ivor had exchanged patronage for paternalism.

He put a hefty arm round Lazlo’s shoulders.

‘Drink that. Relax’.

Lazlo looked like a boy in a fairy tale, rescued by a genial giant. He drank his drink and shivered a little and Edie and Ivor smiled at each other across his bent head and told him that everyone had first rehearsals like this, everyone got overexcited at one point or another, and made fools of themselves.

Lazlo looked mournfully at Edie.

‘You didn’t,’ he said.

‘Not on this occasion’.

‘Tell me,’ Lazlo said miserably, ‘about a time when you did’.

They’d ended up drinking two bottles of wine and putting their arms round each other and when Edie got home, Russell took one look at her and said, ‘Shall I say I told you so?’

It was true that the play was drawing her in and therefore providing a distraction from her preoccupations, but that didn’t mean, Edie decided, tilting her face to the sun and closing her eyes, that she didn’t notice that none of the children were telephoning, nor that she didn’t feel painfully aware that she knew very little about Matthew’s new flat or Rosa’s living arrangements, or Ben’s girlfriend, or any of their working lives. She had promised herself that she wouldn’t keep ringing them, and she clung to that promise with the tenacity usually required to stick to a rigorous diet, but it didn’t mean she didn’t think and wonder and worry. And feel left out. Playing Mrs Alving was wonderful because it stopped her, sometimes for hours at a time, from waiting for the telephone to ring: but it wasn’t a solution, it was only a diversion.

Beside her, quivering on its upturned flowerpot, her phone began vibrating.

‘It’s me,’ Vivien said.

‘Damn’.

‘Thank you so very much—’ ‘I was hoping you were Matthew. Or Ben’. ‘At eleven-thirty in the morning?’ ‘Why not?’

‘People only ring their mothers in the early evening. It’s a sort of tradition’. ‘Vivi,’ Edie said. ‘You sound very perky’.

‘Well, the sun’s out and my new little blue clematis is flowering and Eliot has passed his first diving exam’. ‘How useful’.

‘It is, if you’re living in Australia, near interesting coral reefs’.

‘Would you call it a career?’

‘I rang,’ Vivi said, ‘to ask how you are. Actually’.

‘And actually, I’m very pleased to hear you. Nobody rings me now. Nobody. I’ve vanished. Was it Germaine Greer who said that women over fifty are invisible?’

‘Probably. But I expect she was thinking of them as sex objects’.

Edie shifted in her chair a little and the script slid to the ground. Arsie didn’t move.

‘I only want to be a mother object. I’ll think about sex again when I’ve sorted this stage. Actually, talking of mothers, I’ve got a sweet new stage son. He’s twenty-four and anxious and pads round after me like a puppy’.

‘Well,’ Vivien said, ‘there you are then. Sorted’.

‘I want to know how my
real
children are’.

There was a tiny pause and then Vivien said, almost cautiously, ‘I can tell you how one of them is, I think—’

‘Can you?’ Edie said sharply. She sat up, pulling her knees together. Arsie dug his claws in. ‘Ow. What do you mean?’

‘I saw Rosa—’

‘Did you?’ ‘Yes’.

‘Why did you see Rosa?’

Vivien said lightly, ‘Oh, she came to supper’.

‘Did she?’

‘And stayed the night’.

Edie opened her mouth to say, truthfully, that she didn’t know or, untruthfully, that she’d forgotten, and decided against both of them.

Instead she said, in a voice that entirely betrayed her feelings, ‘Good!’

‘I rather thought,’ Vivien said unkindly, ‘that she’d have told you’.

Edie leaned forward to detach Arsie’s claws from the fabric of her trouser knees.

She said, as normally as she could, ‘How was she?’

‘Well,’ Vivien said, ‘I thought she was putting on a bit of a brave face. I mean, this travel agency job is fine, but it isn’t really stretching her, you know. She knows that, of course, but it’s money, isn’t it?’

‘Yes—’

‘The real trouble was living with Kate and Barney. They’re too newly married, really, to cope with having anyone else there. She didn’t actually say she didn’t feel welcome, but I could tell she was having a bad time’.

‘Was?’

‘Oh yes,’ Vivien said, almost airily. ‘We sorted the living thing at least’.

Edie closed her eyes.

‘She’s coming to live with me, for the moment,’ Vivien said. ‘That’s why I’m ringing, really. I thought you should know’.

Edie opened her eyes again. She gripped the telephone.

‘Let me get this straight, Vivi. Rosa is working in a travel agency, and living with Kate and Barney didn’t work out so she – she has asked to live with you?’

‘No,’ Vivien said, ‘I asked her. I could see she was desperate’.

‘Why,’ Edie cried, wishing she could restrain herself, ‘didn’t she ask me? Why didn’t she come
home?’
‘Ah. Now that I couldn’t say. I couldn’t tell you about that’.

‘You’re a smug, manipulative cow’.

‘Edie,’ Vivien said, ‘I am your sister and Rosa’s aunt. I’m
family’.

‘I don’t want to talk to you any more’.

‘Oh, don’t be so melodramatic and
silly
. As long as Rosa is safe and comfortable, why does it matter whose roof she’s under?’

Edie scooped her free hand under Arsie and lifted him off her lap. Then she stood up.

‘You know very well why it matters’.

‘Only if you’re possessive’.

‘I’m not possessive!’

‘Well,’ Vivien said, ‘you think of another word for it’. Edie put a hand over her eyes. ‘To cook up this plan behind my back—’ ‘I’m
ringing
you’.

‘Rosa didn’t’.

‘Well,’ Vivien said triumphantly, ‘can you wonder?’

Edie looked down at the ground. The sheets of her script were scattered about and the cat was sitting, washing, on some of them.

‘I must go,’ she said to her sister. ‘You—’

‘Yes,’ Edie said. ‘Can’t talk any more. Got to learn my lines’.

Maeve was sorting the invoices for Russell’s quarterly VAT return. In the days before VAT she had entered all receipts and outgoings in a series of black analysis books and there were many occasions, either battling with the geriatric computer, or shuffling sliding piles of paper on not enough desk space, when she longed for those uncomplicated handwritten days, those peaceful, simple columns of in and out with their satisfactorily clear totals, written in red, at the foot of each one. Modern business life wasn’t just more complicated; there was also more of it, more paper, more checking, more duplicating, more choices. Choice, Maeve sometimes thought, accounted for far more of the current propensity for depression than stress did. Choice, if taken to extremes, could quite simply drive you mad.