Authors: Joanna Trollope
* * *
Edie was sitting sideways on a moulded plastic chair in the dimness at the edge of the hall. She had her arms along the back of the chair, and had leaned forward to rest her chin on them. About ten feet away, on the small bare stage illuminated by clumsy lights that had plainly been installed a very long time ago, Pastor Manders and the carpenter, Engstrand, were rehearsing the opening of Act Three. Engstrand was being played by an actor called Jim Driscoll who had, decades before, played Edie’s comedy sidekick when she was presenting a children’s television programme. He had been young and wiry and gingery then. He was older and skinny and greyish now, standing in front of Pastor Manders with a kind of obsequious malevolence that he seemed able to convey without uttering a syllable. He had his hands clasped in front of him, swinging slightly away from his stooped body, and his face was raised towards Ivor with a stretched and ingratiating smile. He managed to look, Edie thought, both simian and sophisticated. He managed, too, to look a very subtle kind of threat. She shifted a little in her uncompromising plastic chair. In a minute, she would have to go and join them. In a minute, Mrs Alving would come in from the garden, dazed by calamity, and say, in a voice Edie hadn’t quite decided upon yet, ‘I can’t get him away from the fire’.
The fire, Freddie Cass had explained to Lazlo, was metaphorical as well as actual. The fire that burned the orphanage built in his dead father’s name was also the fire that was consuming all the lies that had been told to protect him and, in the process, his own life as his
inherited malady began to possess and then devour him. Edie could see that Lazlo loved this kind of direction, loved falling under the spell of such fatalism. He’d come to find Edie afterwards, eyes shining.
‘I know what it’s about now, it’s not just something that’s happening, it’s something that had to happen, and you don’t know it yet, as my mother, because you’ve always thought you could protect me, by telling lies, by keeping the truth from me’. He gave Edie a quick, fervent hug. ‘This is amazing’.
He was sitting on the floor at the side of the stage now, in jeans and a shrunken grey T-shirt, hugging his knees and watching the others. His arms, wound round his knees, looked to Edie like a boy’s arms, rather than a man’s, not just because they were thin, but because they were slightly unformed, slightly tentative. Whether they were the result of Lazlo’s genetic make-up, or the result of the haphazard way he lived, was uncertain, but they lent a pathos to his absorption, a pathos that had been uppermost in Edie’s mind ever since Rosa had telephoned and said, in the throwaway way she had, at the end of a conversation, ‘D’you know where Lazlo’s living?’
‘No,’ Edie said, ‘why should I? He’s rather private about all of that. Somewhere in West London—’
‘Kilburn,’ Rosa said.
‘Well,’ Edie said, ‘not the perfect journey to work but not impossible—’
‘He lives,’ Rosa said, ‘in a room in someone’s granny’s house and she won’t open the windows because she’s panicked about burglars and it smells like a cat’s lavatory’.
‘Poor boy. Why is he living there?’ ‘It’s all he can afford—’ ‘What about family—’
‘All over the place,’ Rosa said, ‘and they don’t care’.
‘Surely—’
‘Mum,’ Rosa said, ‘he didn’t tell me all of this. I had to get it out of him’.
‘And why are you telling me?’
‘Because,’ Rosa said casually, ‘it’s the sort of thing you like to know’.
Edie sat up a little straighter and took her gaze off Lazlo’s arms. Then she put it back again. She thought of the house in Kilburn. She thought of Lazlo ravenously eating bagels after the first rehearsal. She thought of Lazlo taking off that T-shirt and devising some forlorn and unsatisfactory way to launder it. She thought of Matthew – unhappy but somehow safe – back in his own bedroom. She thought of Rosa’s empty bedroom next to it, and Ben’s, on the floor below.
Freddie Cass turned towards her from the stage. He didn’t, as was his custom, raise his voice.
‘Stage left, Edie, please,’ he said.
‘Dear Laura,’ Ruth wrote via email, ‘I need someone to talk to. Or someone to think aloud to. Please read this through to the end. Please’.
She paused and took her hands off the keyboard. She had set up a table – trestle, black, very expensive considering its construction hardly differed from the table her father used for one of his meticulous wallpapering
sessions – in the window of her new sitting room so that she could glance up from her laptop and look out at her amazing view. There was nothing else much in her sitting room except the leather sofa – which Matthew had insisted she take – and a television and two tall metal lamps that threw their light modishly on to the ceiling.
‘It isn’t that I don’t want things,’ she’d written to Laura. ‘It’s more a case of adjusting to buying them on my own. It feels as if everything in my life has suddenly sort of liquefied – it’s quite exciting but it’s unnerving too. Perhaps I should just wait until I’ve calmed down a bit’.
Laura hadn’t replied to that message for four days. Ruth knew she was writing a lot and had even explained, slightly mortifying though it was to have to do so, that without Matthew to talk to, and being in a very preoccupying and distressing situation, which required a lot of talk in order to attempt to get her thoughts in some kind of sequence, she needed both a listening ear and a response. Laura, mindful of the fact that Ruth had nursed her steadily through a variety of affairs and a broken engagement prior to the lawyer in Leeds, said that of course she was always there when needed. The trouble was, Ruth thought, staring at some gulls riding the wind above the river, that even if people were there, as it were, they weren’t always there in the right spirit. Laura, however well-intentioned, inevitably had her spirit diverted by the prospect of her future, by the right fridge in her kitchen, the right music at her wedding. And I can’t blame her, Ruth thought, I certainly can’t resent her, but I haven’t yet got to the point where I
can work through my thinking by myself. If, indeed, I ever get there.
She looked back at the screen. ‘Please,’ she’d written pleadingly. She could hear herself saying it.
‘What I mean is,’ she typed rapidly, ‘I need to get all this stuff out – issues, as human resources at work call them – and it would be very kind of you to read through to the end and even kinder to tell me if I’m mad or what passes for normal.
‘Laura, three people now have accused me of being ambitious and I mean accused, not described (no, one of them isn’t Matthew, but I think his mother is). A colleague (male) says he thinks of ambition as both a necessary and desirable part of his life, but when I think about it in relation to myself it seems to imply things I don’t like at all, like egotism and selfishness and the manipulation of other people for my own ends. I want to tell people that being good at work isn’t about me, it’s about the work. But why do I want to? And why do I feel especially compelled to, now, because I have achieved this flat and lost Matthew in the process?
‘And it gets worse. I don’t just feel guilty about what’s happened, I feel resentful about feeling guilty. Nobody, Laura, not my colleagues, not my family, not even Matthew before all this happened, said well done about getting to this level at your age. Or even well done about getting to this level. We praise children now until they can’t take failure of the smallest kind, so why can’t we praise women for being good at things that aren’t traditionally female? Why do women always, always have to
be the givers? And if they stop giving, even for a minute, why is there this unspoken accusation that they have somehow surrendered on being truly female?
‘Laura, I don’t want to give up what I’m doing, I don’t want to give up my opportunities. I can’t believe that being accepted has to mean being frustrated too, but nor can I bear the thought that, if I make choices the way I just have, I’ll end up without a man and without a family because I’m not, somehow,
allowed
to have both.
I don’t want to downsize my ambition.
I want to live in this flat.
I want Matthew back.
Love, Ruth’.
The restaurant Max had chosen to take Vivien to, for dinner, was one she had never been to before. It had a conservatory at the back, which, Max said, was opened up in summer to the paved garden behind and they put up big white Italian market umbrellas, and candle lamps in the trees, and it was really a very, very nice ambience indeed.
Vivien, walking carefully to the table in her new sandals, decided not to ask how Max knew so much about this restaurant, particularly by candlelight. In the four years they had lived apart, Vivien had been out with two men, neither of whom became more than perfunctory lovers, and Max had had, to her certain knowledge three, and to her sharp suspicion five girlfriends, all younger, all long-haired and all sexually available and active. Max had never mentioned any of them by name, but Vivien
knew that one was called Carly and one was called Emma and one was an air hostess whom Max had met on a flight back from Chicago and who had subsequently, and annoyingly, engineered a very cheap flight for Eliot to get to Australia. Maybe Emma and Carly and the air hostess had all been to the restaurant with the conservatory, with Max. And maybe, even if they had, sitting down with him as still her legal husband gave Vivien a trump card that no amount of long hair and sexual ingenuity could deprive her of.
She sank into her chair and looked at Max across the candles.
‘Lovely’.
He indicated the menu.
Take a look at that. Have what you want. Have lobster’.
She smiled at him. He wore a pale suit and a strong blue shirt and he looked, Vivien thought, very distinguished. It was always a pleasure to see a man who looked after himself.
‘I don’t like lobster, Max’.
He smiled back.
‘Nor you do’.
‘What else don’t I like?’
He closed his eyes. ‘Let me think—’
‘Green peppers,’ Vivien said. ‘Rhubarb. Coriander’. He opened his eyes. ‘Battenberg cake’. ‘Battenberg
cake?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘You don’t even know what it is—’
‘I do,’ Max said. ‘Pink and yellow squares. I bought you some once, at a motorway place, on the way up to Scotland. You threw it out of the car window’.
Vivien smiled delightedly.
‘You made that up’.
‘Never. I remember it as if it was yesterday. I’ve ordered champagne’. ‘Champagne!’
‘Why not? We’re celebrating, aren’t we?’ She turned her head a little and looked at him coquettishly.
‘Are we? What are we celebrating?’ He winked.
‘A little – rapprochement, Vivi’. Oh,’ she said, ‘is
that
what this is?’ A waiter put a small metal champagne bucket on the table between them. ‘Goodness—’
‘When did you last drink champagne?’ ‘Can’t remember’.
‘Well, it’s time you did. It’s time you
lived
again a little,
Vivi’.
The waiter poured champagne slowly into a tall, thin glass flute and set it ceremoniously in front of Vivien. ‘I bet he gives you champagne,’ Rosa had said, waving Vivi off from the sofa, in her tracksuit. ‘I bet you get the works tonight’.
Max raised his glass.
‘To—’ he said, and stopped.
Vivien waited. ‘To Eliot,’ Max said.
‘Of course,’ Vivien said, a fraction too eagerly. She raised her glass, too, and touched Max’s with it. ‘To Eliot’.
‘What about this Ro?’
Vivien made a small face.
‘Well, you have to remember that what suits an Australian beach wouldn’t suit Richmond’.
‘Come on,’ Max said, ‘this isn’t like you. Come on, Vivi’.
Vivien looked up.
‘I’ve never spoken to her’.
‘Nor me’.
‘She’s learning to be a Buddhist’. ‘A Buddhist,’ Max said. ‘Oh please’. ‘But she surfs and drinks beer—’ ‘All you could ask, really’. ‘Now, Max—’
‘We’ll let it go, shall we,’ Max said. ‘For now?’
‘We?’
‘Yes, we. He’s our son, remember’. Vivien took a small sip of her champagne. ‘And the diving?’
‘My feeling is,’ Max said, ‘to let that go for now too. If he’s still doing it, and only it, when he’s thirty, we’ll fly out and give him a rocket’.
‘Aren’t you going to see him before he’s thirty?’
Max looked straight at her.
‘Any time you’re ready, we’ll go out and see him’.
Vivien smiled at her champagne glass.
‘Oh’.
‘Say the word,’ Max said. Vivien leaned back in her chair. She said, looking away across the restaurant, ‘What happened to the air hostess?’ ‘She went back to her airline’.
‘And,’ Vivien said, feeling a small and happy surge of confidence, ‘you didn’t replace her?’
‘Oh, I tried,’ Max said, ‘I tried like anything’. ‘Should I know about this?’ He put his head on one side.
‘Only if you want to be very bored. As bored as I got. What are you going to eat?’
‘Guess’.
He looked down at the menu. ‘Avocado and red mullet’. ‘There,’ she said, ‘you haven’t forgotten’. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I haven’t’.
‘And you’ll have wild mushrooms and guinea fowl’.
‘Or duck’.
‘Oh yes, duck. I haven’t cooked a duck for four years’. Max glanced at her over the menu. ‘We should rectify that’.
‘I cook girls’ food now,’ Vivien said. ‘Fish and salads and pasta. Rosa’s on a diet’. ‘I hope you aren’t joining her’.
‘Well, I thought of it—’
‘Don’t,’ Max said, ‘you don’t need to. You’re—’ He stopped and grinned. Then he said, ‘What was I going to say, Vivi?’
‘I have no idea’.
‘What did you
hope
I’d say?’ ‘Stop it,’ Vivien said. ‘But you like it’. She lifted her chin. ‘Not any more’.
‘We’ll see’.
‘No, we won’t’. Max leaned forward.
He said, ‘Actually I am going to say something’.
‘Oh?’
‘I was going to say it later, but I think I’ll say it now’. He put the menu down and leaned towards Vivien across the table.
‘We had a good time last week, didn’t we?’
‘Yes—’
‘And you aren’t exactly miserable now—’ ‘Not exactly’.
‘Look,’ Max said, ‘look, Vivi. Things have changed, haven’t they? I’ve had a bit of freedom, you’ve had a bit of time to sort yourself out, Eliot’s grown up and gone—’ He paused and looked at her. ‘I was just wondering, Vivi, if you’d let me try again?’