Authors: Joanna Trollope
He lowered his fist and laid his hand across his chest.
‘Come back,’ Ruth had said the other night. ‘Please. Come back’.
She’d been in bed with him, or he with her, whichever, they’d been in her bed – their old joint bed – in her new bedroom, where he’d never intended to be, where he wasn’t drunk enough or convinced enough to be, but where he somehow still was, holding her, with her head roughly where his hand now was, and her saying, almost into his skin, ‘Please come back. Please’.
He’d stroked her hair back from her face, saying nothing. After a while, she raised herself on one elbow and said, ‘Don’t you love me any more?’ and he said, truthfully, ‘Of course I do, but that doesn’t solve everything,’ and she said, ‘It does, it
can,’
and he said, tiredly, ‘We’ve
been through this. We’ve been through all this, over and over’.
‘But you came tonight,’ Ruth said. ‘You’ve made love to me’.
He couldn’t say it didn’t mean anything because that was neither true nor constructive. Of course going to bed with Ruth was significant, even important, but at the same time he hadn’t meant it to happen, hadn’t wanted it to happen, and now that it had, he was filled with a dreary desolation. He had only made things worse. He had only made Ruth hope again for something that couldn’t happen because it was too messy and too insoluble and, above all, too late.
He’d kissed the top of Ruth’s head and squeezed her bare shoulders and then began to disengage himself as gently as he could. He’d waited for her to start crying but she hadn’t, merely remaining where he’d left her, crumpled and silent, a picture of misery and reproach. Once dressed, he stood in the doorway of the bedroom and wrestled with what he might say. Sorry was pathetic, thank you for dinner was ludicrous, I love you was unkind and dangerous. In the end he simply said, ‘Bye,’ and went out of the flat and into the lift, and leaned against the wall of it with his eyes closed. How was it possible to get, entirely without intending to, into a position where you kept somehow inflicting pain on someone you loved? When she had rung him and begged – awful, mortifying word, but accurate for how she’d sounded – him to come round for supper, it had seemed more difficult and elaborate to refuse her than to agree. And then he had ended
up making things worse than he had ever intended, concluding by responding to some primitive urge to flee that had got him out of the flat and down to London Bridge Underground Station and then left him to trail back to North London cursing himself.
From next door came the sound of Lazlo opening his window. Matthew imagined him leaning out, breathing, marvelling at where he found himself. Perhaps he was feeling as Matthew had felt before he met Ruth, both luxuriously free and equally luxuriously lonely. Matthew turned on his side, and punched his pillow up under his neck. If you couldn’t just un-love someone, he thought, perhaps you could at least starve that love a bit, practise not allowing yourself to express it or react to its impulses. He shut his eyes. No calls from now on. No emails. No contact. Nothing.
‘We have six days,’ Freddie Cass said, ‘until press night. And I am far from happy with this scene’.
Edie did not look either at Lazlo or at Cheryl. Cheryl was probably, anyway, looking as if any imminent reprimand had nothing to do with her, and Lazlo would be expecting the worst.
‘Don’t strut, Cheryl,’ Freddie Cass said. There was a pause. Then he said, ‘Don’t bleat, Lazlo’. And then, after another silence, ‘Good, Edie’.
‘I’m supposed to strut,’ Cheryl said, boredly, ‘in this scene’.
Freddie ignored her.
He said to Lazlo, ‘You’ll be blind by the end of the
scene.
Blind
. Who’ll care about that if they’ve heard you whining for favours?’
Lazlo cleared his throat. Edie willed him not to apologise.
He said, ‘I am whining. I’m very unattractive by now. I’m completely self-centred because I’m dying’.
Freddie Cass waited. Edie glanced at him. He wasn’t looking at Lazlo, as was his wont when addressing someone, he was looking across the stage to where an electrician was dismantling a spotlight.
‘I’m not getting that’.
‘I’ll try again’.
‘Yes,’ Freddie said, ‘you will’. He sighed. ‘And you, Cheryl, will stop playing the little tart. Even if you are one’. He moved forward, towards the footlights, and touched Edie on the shoulder as he passed. ‘As you were’.
Edie went past Lazlo, upstage to the spot where the door to the garden would be when the set was up. Lazlo caught her eye as she passed him and gave her the briefest of winks. She widened her eyes at him. He looked quite undismayed by what Freddie had said, quite unlike his usual easily wounded self. He looked, astonishingly, like someone prepared to stand their ground. Perhaps, she thought, picking up the shallow flower basket that Mrs Alving was to bring in from the garden, this new energy and confidence could even be attributable to the simple fact that she had offered breakfast to Lazlo that morning and then overseen him while he ate it. He ate like Ben, with that peculiar combination of indifference and absorption that seemed
to characterise hungry young men, consuming two bowls of cereal and a banana and four slices of toast as if they were simultaneously vital and of no consequence at all. She’d felt an extraordinary satisfaction, almost a relief, sitting opposite him with her coffee mug, and watching him eat. It had been so pleasurable that she had turned to Russell, to smile that pleasure at him, and found that he was reading the paper like someone in a pantomime, with the paper held up high, a screen against the outside world.
She reached across and banged the paper with a teaspoon.
‘Oy’.
‘One moment,’ Russell said, not lowering the paper. ‘Rude,’ Edie said cheerfully. ‘Meals are for conversation’.
Russell moved the paper sideways so that only Edie could see his face. ‘Not breakfast’.
Lazlo put his second piece of toast down. ‘Sorry,’ he said contritely. Edie smiled at him. ‘Not you,’ she said, ‘him’.
Russell moved the paper back to its original position.
‘If you ever marry,’ he said, not addressing Lazlo by name, ‘you’ll discover that all roads of fault and blame lead to “him”’.
Edie put her coffee mug down. She looked at Lazlo.
‘More toast?’
‘No thank you,’ Russell said.
‘I wasn’t addressing you. You have only had one slice of toast since the dawn of time. Lazlo, more toast?’ He looked longingly at the sliced loaf on the counter.
‘Could I …’
Edie stood up.
‘Of course you could’.
Russell shook the paper out like a bed sheet, and folded it with care.
‘I’m off’.
Edie, putting bread into the toaster, turned to glance at the clock. ‘You’re early’.
‘No’.
‘You never get in before ten’.
Russell said nothing. He stood up and pushed the newspaper across the table to Lazlo. ‘Have a good day’. ‘Thank you’.
He looked briefly across the kitchen, at Edie’s back. ‘See you later’.
She turned and gave him a wide smile. Then she blew him a kiss. He went out of the room, and they could hear him treading heavily up the stairs to the bathroom.
‘If it would be easier,’ Lazlo said diffidently, ‘I could always take breakfast up to my room’.
The toaster gave a small metallic clang and ejected two slices of toast on to the counter. Edie snatched them up and tossed them hastily on to Lazlo’s plate.
‘So overenthusiastic, that thing. And nonsense. About breakfast, I mean’.
‘I don’t want to upset anyone—’
Edie looked straight at him.
‘You aren’t. Russell is fine. Eat your toast’.
He began to butter it. She walked behind his chair, giving him a tiny pat on the shoulder as she did so, and went out of the room and up the stairs to the bathroom. Russell was bent over the basin, brushing his teeth. Edie leaned against the door jamb and crossed her arms.
‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘I could always do breakfast in relays. Matthew at seven, you at eight to fit in with your new work schedule, and Lazlo at nine’.
Russell stopped brushing and picked up a wet flannel from the edge of the bath and rubbed vigorously at his face with it.
‘Very funny’.
‘There’s no need,’ Edie said, ‘to be so unwelcoming. So
rude
. That poor boy is about as intrusive as wallpaper’.
Russell tossed the flannel into the bath.
‘It’s not him,’ he said, ‘as well you know’.
‘So,’ Edie said, ‘things change. They don’t go according to plan. What you picture as the future doesn’t turn out to be the reality of the future. That’s how it is, Russell, that’s how it’s always been. That’s
life’.
He turned from the basin and walked past her into their bedroom to find his jacket. She detached herself from the bathroom doorway and went after him.
‘Russell?’
‘I am not complaining about life,’ Russell said, hunting in his jacket pockets for something. ‘I’m not objecting to the way things happen, the way things just turn
out. What I find so difficult is when changes are made deliberately and obstructively’.
‘You mean me asking Lazlo here—’
Russell found his travel card and transferred it from one pocket to another.
‘You could construe it like that—’
‘You mean yes’.
He sighed.
He said, ‘You seem to be finding every excuse not to be alone with me’.
Edie gave a small bark of incredulous laughter. ‘Really? And who urged me to audition for the Ibsen?’
‘That’s different’. ‘Is it?’
‘That doesn’t involve your personal emotions’. Edie let a small silence fall, and then she said witheringly, ‘How little you know. And you an actors’ agent’. Russell took a step towards her. He looked down at her. He said, ‘This is fruitless’.
‘If I can’t even offer a lodger more toast without getting jumped on, it probably is’.
He put his hands on her shoulders.
He said, ‘I had just hoped that we could move on from what we’d been doing for close on thirty years to something we’ve never had a chance to do’. He took his hands away. ‘I suppose I was hoping to be married. Pure and simple. Just
married’.
Edie reached out and straightened his jacket collar.
She said, ‘Maybe we have different ideas about what being married means’.
‘Not always—’
She looked up at him.
‘But this is now,’ she said. ‘We’re not dealing with always, we’re dealing with now. Which means me going downstairs now, and seeing what else I can stuff into that boy’.
Russell made a huge effort.
‘Well, he’s certainly appreciative—’
‘Yes,’ Edie said with emphasis, ‘he is,’ and then she left the room and went down to the kitchen where she found Lazlo putting plates in the dishwasher and Arsie on the table regarding the butter.
Lazlo straightened up as she came in. He was smiling.
‘That was so great,’ he said. ‘I never eat breakfast. I never thought about it’.
Now, looking at him across the stage, whether it was breakfast that was responsible or not, Edie could see that something had turned a corner in Lazlo. When he made his entrance, in five minutes or so, and stood by the table, fingering the books on it, and saying, ‘“Everything’ll burn, till there’s nothing left to remind me of my father. Here I am, burning up too,”‘ they would all know, Freddie Cass included, that the whole production had moved into another gear.
Sitting on the grass in the park in her lunch hour, Rosa texted her brothers.
‘Mum’s 1st night. All go together?’
She was not quite sure what these texts would produce. Matthew would probably say they should leave it to Russell to organise, and Ben would probably say he
was tied up, which meant that if he came he would want to bring Naomi, and he wasn’t at all sure how he felt about exposing Naomi to his family. Whatever their response, however, Rosa had felt a powerful need to contact them over the opening of the play, a need to be included, or rather, in order not to look as if she wanted to be included to be the first to organise something in a way that looked responsible and concerned for family.
It was odd, but for the last week or ten days, Rosa had felt uncomfortably preoccupied by family. She had said carelessly to Kate that it was weird the way her family were all living at present, but her real feelings, she discovered, were far from careless, especially now that Vivien was distracted by her rekindled romance with Max. She was holding him off, she told Rosa, there was no question of him getting what he was asking for right now, but it had introduced an even stronger note of impermanence into Rosa’s situation, a note that now resounded steadily in Rosa’s head, like a drum beat. The thought of Matthew back in his bedroom and Lazlo now ensconced in hers was not exactly uncomfortable, but it did serve to remind her, in a way she didn’t care for, that she too had reverted to a dependency that was hardly something to be proud of. And even if she had a job now and was proving competent at it – what she would have felt like if she hadn’t been able to demonstrate that competency didn’t even bear thinking about – and had made the first, tiny inroad upon her indebtedness, she still had the glum sensation of doing no more than bumping along the bottom.
She could produce small bursts of fierce gaiety for Kate, or for Vivien, but she had no faith in them. Any more, really, than she had in the prospect of her family turning to her with relief and delight as the organiser of a happy, conventional family party to see their mother’s first night.
She turned her phone off with a sigh, and dropped it back into her bag. It was better, she had learned in the last few months, not to be distracted by waiting for messages that never came. She could also tell herself, unconvincingly, that she was obeying office rules. She got to her feet. Rather to her manager’s surprise, she would also perhaps obey another rule, and return to work ten minutes before the end of her lunch break, rather than five minutes after it. And she would apply herself to invoicing all afternoon and, at the end of it, if she hadn’t heard from her brothers, she would ring them and establish herself as the prime mover in the suggestion that could only be applauded.