Second Honeymoon (17 page)

He’d hesitated.

‘Wednesday—’

‘I’m afraid,’ Rosa said, ‘it’s the only night I can manage’.

‘You aren’t rehearsing,’ Cheryl said to Lazlo. ‘Not Wednesday’. She glanced at Rosa. ‘You could go wild on Wednesday’.

Lazlo nodded.

‘Thank you. I’d like it’.

So here she was, in the refurbished bar of a central hotel, sitting on a black leather stool with her elbows on a tall metal table, waiting for Lazlo. Edie had not heard them make the arrangements, and Rosa had said nothing on the subject. She hoped that Lazlo, despite his puppylike devotion to Edie, hadn’t said anything, either. She wanted to have one drink, and leave, and somehow make it not at all possible for him to suggest either another one, or another meeting. After he’d told her he thought she was spoilt, it was difficult to think of him without dislike, but also, rather disconcertingly, without feeling distinctly interested. It was awful, really, what flashes of temper compelled you to do, flashes of temper induced by seeing other people apparently more at home with your parents than you were yourself.

She saw Lazlo before he saw her. He was in black, with a brilliant turquoise-blue scarf looped round his neck, and for a moment, she thought – indignantly, as if he had no business to be so – that he looked almost attractive. She waved. It took him some time to see her and when he did, he only gave the smallest of smiles.

‘I hope you haven’t been waiting—’

She indicated her glass.

‘I needed a drink’.

He dropped a black canvas rucksack under the metal table.

‘Can I get you another?’

‘Thanks,’ Rosa said. ‘Vodka and tonic’.

He nodded and went off to the bar. She wondered if
he had enough money to pay for their drinks and then reflected, rather grimly, that she hardly had, either. But Lazlo would be on the minimum Equity wage, and as he wouldn’t, like everyone else, be legally entitled to an adult wage until he was twenty-five, that would be the barest minimum.

When he came back with her vodka and a bottle of beer, she said, rather shortly, ‘Sorry. I should have paid for those’.

‘No, you shouldn’t’.

‘I asked you for a drink’.

He shrugged.

She added, ‘And now you’ll think I’m even more spoilt’. He hitched himself on to the stool opposite her. He said quietly, ‘It wasn’t about that. I shouldn’t have said it anyway’.

‘Why not, if it’s true?’

He picked up his beer bottle.

‘It isn’t the kind of thing you ought to say to anyone twenty minutes after meeting them’.

‘OK,’ Rosa said. She raised her glass. ‘Cheers’. He tipped his bottle towards her. She said, ‘Well, what did you mean?’ ‘Please forget it—’

‘I meant not to mention it but now I have and I’d like an answer. What did you mean?’

He hunched forward over the table. He looked weirdly glamorous. Perhaps it was the exoticism of the scarf. It was made of silk, the kind of rough silk that came from somewhere in the Far East.

‘I’d really rather—’ ‘Lazlo,’ Rosa said, ‘please’. He gave her a quick glance.

‘Well, I suppose I just thought you – you gave the impression of taking things for granted’.

‘What things?’

He shrugged.

Your mother. Your parents. Having a home, somewhere to go to’.

Rosa put her hands in her lap. She looked directly at him.

‘Haven’t you?’

‘Not really. Not like that’.

‘Haven’t you got parents?’

‘My father lives in Arizona. My mother married a Russian and they have two children and live in Paris. My sister is a medical student, nearly a doctor, and she lives in hospital accommodation’.

‘And you?’

Lazlo looked sheepish.

‘This is turning into a sort of pathetic Dickens-style sob story—’

‘Where do you live?’ Rosa said. ‘In a room—’

‘Where?’ ‘Maida Vale’. ‘Well, that’s—’

‘Kilburn, actually,’ Lazlo said. ‘In a room in a house belonging to my sister’s ex-boyfriend’s grandmother’. Rosa leaned forward.

‘Why?’

‘Because she charges me almost nothing because she likes having a man in the house. She’s panicked about security’.

‘Is it awful?’

Lazlo was silent. ‘Depressing?’ Rosa said.

‘Well,’ Lazlo said, ‘I don’t have hang-ups about old people, but this is pretty extreme. She won’t ever open the windows’.

Rosa took a swallow of her drink.

‘Does it smell?’

Lazlo nodded.

‘So when this play is on, you’ll be travelling from Kilburn to Islington?’

‘Lots of people do,’ Lazlo said. ‘Theatre people all have to live in awkward places’.

‘Theatre people,’ Rosa said mockingly.

He flushed.

‘I
am
one,’ he said, ‘I’m an actor. So is your mother. I don’t know why you feel the need to sneer’. ‘I’m not sneering—’ ‘Well, that’s what it sounds like’. ‘Sorry’.

‘OK’.

‘I am sorry,’ Rosa said. ‘Truly’.

Lazlo said nothing.

‘Please,’ Rosa said, ‘I am truly sorry’.

He looked up slowly.

‘I believe in it,’ he said.

‘The theatre?’

‘In acting,’ Lazlo said seriously. ‘In – in its radiant energy. In being possessed, and passionate, yet still yourself after a performance. I like having to concentrate this way, I like having chosen something so difficult it makes me display fortitude’.

‘Well,’ Rosa said, ‘I certainly hadn’t thought of any of that’.

‘You didn’t listen to your mother’.

‘My mother never said anything like that in all her life’.

‘She didn’t need to,’ Lazlo said vehemently. ‘She didn’t need to
say
it. If you’d ever taken her acting seriously, you’d have
seen
it’.

Rosa said nothing. She fidgeted with her glass. Rising up in her, unwanted but not to be denied, was a peculiar wish to say sorry again somehow, to show herself in a better light.

She said slowly, ‘Your room. Your room in Kilburn—’ He looked irritated, as if dragged back to banality from something much more compelling and important.

‘What about it?’

‘Have you told my mother?’

‘What?’

‘Have you told my mother,’ Rosa said, ‘about how you have to live?’

‘I hope you’ll be comfortable,’ Russell said from the doorway.

Matthew was standing by the window of his old bedroom, looking down into the garden. His cases, all very orderly, were on the floor. He had his hands in his pockets and the set of his shoulders from behind was not one that Russell could deduce anything from.

He looked at the walls. Edie had not removed a single childhood picture.

‘Of course,’ Russell said, ‘you can change anything you want to. No need to live with Manchester United 1990’.

Matthew said, without turning, ‘I don’t mind’.

Russell said, ‘I am so very sorry about what’s happened’.

‘Thanks’.

‘Anything we can—’

‘It’s much harder than I thought it’d be,’ Matthew said. ‘Emptier’.

‘Yes’.

Matthew turned. He looked as if he hadn’t slept for days.

‘When you go back somewhere, it’s not the same—’ ‘Or perhaps,’ Russell said, ‘you aren’t’. Matthew looked at the bed. ‘I haven’t slept in that for nearly seven years’. Russell moved into the room and put his hands on Matthew’s shoulders.

‘Poor Matthew. Poor old man—’ Matthew shook his head. ‘It’s not that I’m not grateful—’ ‘I know’.

‘I just feel – such a bloody
failure—
’ ‘Try not to. Things are much harder now’.

‘Are they?’

‘I think so. We were stifled by too little choice, you are panicked by too much’. Matthew looked round the room. Russell said gently, ‘You don’t want to be here—’

‘I thought I did’.

‘Maybe it won’t be for long. You have a job, after all’. Matthew nodded. He pulled a face. ‘Flat sharing—’ ‘Perhaps’.

‘Hard,’ Matthew said, ‘to go back to’. ‘Harder than this?’ Matthew nodded. ‘For the moment’.

Russell took his hands away. He said, ‘Sorry, old son, but we do have to talk about money’. Matthew looked puzzled. ‘Money’.

‘Well,’ Russell said, ‘as you say, coming back somewhere is never the same as when you were first there. Coming back home as a salaried twenty-eight-year-old isn’t the same as living at home as a student’.

Matthew took a step backwards.

‘I thought,’ Russell said, ‘that you and Mum had discussed it’.

‘No’. ‘Well—’

‘I see,’ Matthew said, ‘I see. Of course I do. I was just a bit taken aback—’

‘To have me mention it?’

‘Well,’ Matthew said uncomfortably, ‘maybe mention it even before I’d opened a suitcase’. Russell sighed.

‘Like all awkward topics, I want to get it over with’.

‘You do—’

‘Yes’.

‘Couldn’t you have waited,’ Matthew said, slightly desperately, ‘until we were having a beer or something?’

Russell sighed again.

‘All right,’ he said, ‘let’s postpone the topic until later. Stupid me. As usual’.

Matthew bent to retrieve a chequebook from his briefcase.

‘No, Dad. The subject’s broached now. Why don’t I write you a cheque for the first month?’ ‘Matt, I really didn’t—’

‘What d’you want?’ Matthew demanded. He looked
suddenly rather feverish. ‘Two hundred pounds a month? Two hundred and fifty? Three hundred?’

‘Don’t be—’

‘All in?’ Matthew almost shouted. ‘Two hundred and fifty all in and do my own ironing?’ Russell shut his eyes.

‘Stop it’. ‘Stop what?’

‘Stop being so melodramatic and putting me in the wrong’.

‘Melodramatic? Couldn’t you have waited, knowing how I was feeling,
seeing
how I was feeling? Couldn’t you just have exercised a bit of bloody tact?’

Russell opened his eyes.

‘Probably,’ he said tiredly.

Matthew stooped to find a pen in his briefcase.

‘How much do you want?’

‘It really doesn’t—’

‘Look,’ Matthew said, ‘you started this, and it’s all gone wrong, so let’s finish it and get it over with. How much?’

‘I haven’t talked to Mum—’

‘Mum probably wouldn’t talk about it anyway. This can be between you and me’.

‘You manage,’ Russell said, ‘to make a perfectly reasonable adult request sound very sordid’.

Matthew sat down on the edge of the bed and opened his chequebook and looked up at his father.

‘Dad?’

Russell didn’t look at him.

‘Two fifty all in, and as you know no ironing is done in this house unless you do it yourself’.

Matthew wrote rapidly and then tore the cheque out of the book. He held it out.

‘Here’.

‘I do not want to take this—’ ‘You asked for it’.

‘But not this way. I didn’t want it now. I just wanted to talk about it, raise the subject. I never meant it to get out of hand—’

‘In my experience,’ Matthew said, ‘the danger of things getting out of hand is there whenever anyone opens their mouths’.

Russell folded the cheque into his hand.

‘Thank you’.

Matthew said nothing. He stood up and watched his father slowly turn and walk out of the room. Then he moved forward and closed the door firmly behind him.

‘It’s Ruth, isn’t it?’ Kate Ferguson said.

Ruth turned round. She was holding a small melon she had just taken from a pyramid on a market stall.

‘I’m Kate,’ Kate said. ‘You probably don’t remember. I’m a friend of Rosa’s, Matthew’s sister. We met once, ages ago, at that concert in Brixton, we—’

‘Oh,’ Ruth said. She transferred the melon to her other hand. ‘Oh yes. Kate. Sorry, I was sort of concentrating—’

‘What are you doing here?’ Kate asked. ‘I thought you worked in the City—’

Ruth put the melon back in its place on the pyramid.

‘I do. But I live here now’. She gestured out towards the edge of the market. She said, with a complicated kind of pride, ‘I’ve got a flat on Bankside’.

Kate hesitated. Something in Ruth’s expression and tone was half expecting her to say, ‘Wow. Lucky you’. But something else, at the same time, suggested that, even if Ruth would have loved such a straightforward reaction, she knew it was too luxurious to hope for.

Kate put out a hand and briefly touched Ruth’s sleeve.

‘Actually,’ she said, ‘Rosa told me. Just a bit’.

Ruth said quickly, ‘It’s so brilliant here, all this air and views and location. And then, Borough Market on my doorstep—’

‘I always shop here on Fridays,’ Kate said. ‘I leave work early and come here’.

‘Yes’.

‘Goodness knows what I’ll do when I can’t’.

‘Can’t?’

‘After the baby’.

Ruth looked at the swell under Kate’s jacket. ‘Oh, congratulations—’

‘It’s a bit of a surprise,’ Kate said. ‘We’ve only been married a minute. I’m still rather shell-shocked. I keep thinking about being away from work, not coming here, not zipping out to the movies—’ She looked at Ruth’s black briefcase bag. ‘Sorry—’

‘Why sorry?’

‘Not very tactful’.

Ruth said, ‘Rosa told you about Matthew and me?’

‘Yes’.

‘We’ll have to see how things work out—’ Kate nodded.

‘It’s just,’ Ruth said in a rush, ‘that however enlightened you are, you
both
are, you still seem to be swimming against the norm. If you’re a woman earning more than a man’. She glanced at Kate. ‘Sorry. I don’t know why I said that’. She looked round, at the fruit-and-vegetable stalls, at the surging crowds of people. ‘You must think I’m mad—’

‘It’s on your mind,’ Kate said, ‘like being pregnant’s on mine’.

‘Will you go back to work?’

‘Yes,’ Kate said, and then, in a different tone, ‘probably’.

‘I hope it’s easy,’ Ruth said earnestly.

‘So do I. I’m hopeless at being uncomfortable, never mind in pain—’

‘No, I didn’t mean that. I didn’t mean having the baby. I meant afterwards. I meant I hope it’s easy deciding what to do after the baby’.

Kate gave her a smile.

‘Thank you’.

‘I mean it’.

‘I know—’

‘I never knew,’ Ruth said, ‘that deciding was going to throw up such problems. I always thought decisions meant the end of something difficult, not the beginning’. She put a hand out and picked up the melon again. ‘Why is the only way you learn something the hard way?’