Second Honeymoon (27 page)

Someone thumped on the door.

‘Sod off!’ Matthew shouted.

‘I need a shower,’ Edie called.

Matthew turned the taps off and climbed out of the bath.

‘There’s no hot water—’ ‘Nonsense’.

Matthew bent and retrieved his towel. He wound it round his waist and unlocked the door. Edie was standing outside in her nightgown and a long purple cardigan.

He said distinctly, ‘There is no hot water’. Edie looked at his towel.

‘Why all this modesty? I’m your mother, for goodness’ sake. I’ve seen it all before, I’ve—’

‘I can’t have a shower,’ Matthew said. ‘You can’t have a shower. No one can, unless they want it stone cold’.

Edie pushed the sleeves of her cardigan up.

‘Who’s taken all the water?’

‘I don’t know,’ Matthew said. ‘Dad, Rosa, Lazlo—’

Edie peered past Matthew into the bathroom.

‘Look at the state of it—’

‘Yes’.

‘It’s like living in a student flat’.

Matthew said nothing. He was aware, suddenly, of how uncomfortable he was, standing there in nothing but a bath towel with his mother three feet away in nothing but a nightie.

He said, ‘Doesn’t matter. I’ll get a shower at the gym’.

Edie stared at him.

‘Why?’

‘Because I want a shower and there’s no hot water here and there is there’.

Edie said loudly, ‘Are you intending to leave this bathroom looking like this?’

Matthew hesitated, then he said childishly, ‘It’s not my mess’.

‘Really?’

‘I keep all my things in my bedroom—’ ‘But you
use
the bathroom—’ ‘Of course’.

‘You all
use
the bathroom. But none of you seems prepared to pick up so much as a sock’.

Matthew wondered if Lazlo could hear them.

‘I pick up my socks, Mum. I’m sure Lazlo picks up his’.

‘Don’t be so
idiotically
literal,’ Edie said crossly.

‘Then don’t be unfair’.

‘Unfair?’

‘Yes,’ Matthew said.

Edie wrapped the edges of her cardigan tightly around her and took a step towards him.

‘Matthew,’ she said, ‘I am working, in case it’s escaped your notice. I am working six nights and two afternoons a week. If this play transfers, I shall be working like that for months. I am also, for some reason, expected to shop and cook and clean for five adults, never mind the laundry. How dare you suggest that lending a hand isn’t your responsibility?’

Matthew said, ‘It isn’t like it used to be’.

‘What isn’t?’

‘Living here. Living as a family’. ‘Well of course it isn’t,’ Edie said. ‘You’re twice the size and paying taxes’.

‘Exactly’. ‘Exactly what?’

‘Mum,’ Matthew said patiently, ‘we’re paying to live here’.

There was a short pause.

Then Edie said with incredulity, ‘You mean that absolves you from being obliged to contribute
any
thing except money?’

‘No’.

‘What then?’

Matthew said desperately, ‘Oh get a
cleaner
, then. Get someone to do the ironing. Get the hot water fixed. Stop – stop being such a
martyr’.

Edie watched him for a moment.

Then she said sharply, ‘Go to your gym, then’.

‘It isn’t easy,’ Matthew said. ‘None of this is. It isn’t easy for anyone. We’re all too old to live like this’.

‘Only if you want it to be like a five-star hotel’.

Matthew looked back at the bathroom. His robe was still lying on the floor. He felt a wave of rage and hopelessness flood through him.

‘I wish,’ he said bitterly.

Ruth chose a French sleepsuit for Kate’s baby. It was the only one she could find that wasn’t an unsuitable colour for a baby and that didn’t have a plasticised cartoon character stuck to the front. Instead, it was white, with a small bear outlined in grey, positioned where a breast pocket might have been, crowned with a delicate galaxy of stars. She took a long time choosing it,
mooning along a rack of tiny socks and garments labelled ‘0-3 mois’ in a daze.

In addition to the sleepsuit, she bought Kate a bottle of bath oil and a candle in a glass tumbler. She had seen in a magazine at the hairdresser’s a photograph of a mother and a baby in a candlelit bath together, both, naturally, extremely beautiful and deeply contented, and the image had struck Ruth as so completely desirable that it had made her want to cry. She had taken all the presents back to her flat and wrapped them in tissue and ribbons with elaborate care and then sat looking at the package and wondering if she was, in fact, overdoing it for someone she knew as little as she knew Kate. The answer was that yes, she probably was overdoing it but the need to overdo it overshadowed even the possibility of embarrassment. The package sat on the table by the window of her sitting room for almost a week before she had the courage to take it to the hospital and, when she did finally get there, she was told that Mrs Ferguson and the baby had gone home three days ago and hadn’t the family let her know?

Ruth took the package back to her office and sat it on her desk where she could see it. It felt extremely important that she should get it to Kate, extremely important that she should see Kate, but she – she who was all boldness in her professional life – felt a disconcerting diffidence about telephoning. Supposing Kate was feeding the baby? Supposing Kate didn’t immediately recognise her voice and said, ‘Oh – Ruth!’ in that tone of voice people use when they are recovering their social balance?
She looked at the baby package again. Then she looked back at her screen which, among all the work emails, showed three unanswered ones from Laura in Leeds. She hadn’t even opened them. They would, she suspected, be about weddings and washing machines and she felt no desire to hear anything about either. She took a deep breath and dialled Kate’s number.

It rang and rang and just as she was about to ring off Kate said breathlessly, ‘Hello?’

‘Kate—’ ‘Yes’.

‘It’s – Ruth’.

There was a fraction of a pause.

Then Kate said, ‘Oh – Ruth!’

Ruth swallowed.

‘Were you feeding the baby?’

‘I wouldn’t answer the phone if I was doing that,’ Kate said. ‘When I’m feeding him, the world goes away. It has to’.

‘I was wondering—’

‘Yes?’

‘Could I – could I come and see him?’ ‘Oh,’ Kate said, and then, in a different tone, ‘Of course—’

‘If it isn’t a bother—’

‘No,’ Kate said, ‘of course not’.

‘After work perhaps—’

‘Yes,’ Kate said, ‘yes. That’d be good. Come after work. What day is it?’ ‘Thursday’.

‘Come on Monday,’ Kate said. ‘Barney’s back early’. She paused and then she said, ‘It’s nice of you to ring’.

‘I wanted to,’ Ruth said. She looked at the package again. ‘I really did’.

Russell intercepted Rosa on the stairs, her arms full of the sheets she had just stripped from her bed.

‘Rose—’ ‘Yes’.

‘I wonder,’ Russell said in the voice of one about to make a philosophical proposition, ‘if you could take those to the launderette?’

Rosa stared at him.

‘What?’

‘Well,’ Russell said, ‘I think you heard me. In case you didn’t, I asked you, sensibly and courteously, if—’

‘Dad,’ Rosa said, ‘I’m going to put these in the machine myself, and then I’m going to take them out of the machine and put them in the dryer and when they are dry I’m going to take them upstairs again and put them back on my bed so that
no
one but me – I repeat, no one – will be inconvenienced by my washing my sheets’.

Russell sighed.

‘It isn’t that’.

‘What?’ Rosa said again.

‘It isn’t your self-sufficiency. It’s the number of loads going through the machine—’ ‘But it’s Saturday’.

‘Exactly. Two performances for your mother on a
Saturday and everybody’s doing their washing and the kitchen is invisible under sheets and shirts’. ‘So Mum has sent you—’

‘No,’ Russell said, ‘I just watched her for ten minutes’. ‘And listened to her—’

‘And I thought she could do with a bit of a break on the laundry front at least’. Rosa considered.

‘I see’. ‘Good’.

‘So have you told Matthew and Lazlo to take their sheets to the launderette too?’

‘Unfortunately,’ Russell said, ‘Matthew has already put his sheets in, on what I gather is an unacceptably long cycle, and gone out. I am on my way to ask Lazlo the same favour as I’m asking you’.

Rosa looked down at the sheets in her arms.

‘I’ll ask him,’ she said nonchalantly.

Russell looked relieved.

‘Thank you’.

‘Dad?’

Russell, about to turn to descend the stairs, paused.

‘Yes?’

‘Why doesn’t Mum send all our sheets to the laundry?’

Russell hesitated. For a moment, Rosa thought he was going to say something, but then he simply gave a little shrug and started off downwards.

‘Just ask her,’ Rosa called.

Russell reached the foot of the stairs and she heard his feet crossing the hall and then the sound of the
sitting-room door being firmly closed. She dropped her sheets on the landing and looked upwards. There was no sound from the top floor. She glanced at her watch. Eleven-fifteen. If Lazlo wasn’t up he should be: he had a matinee at two-thirty.

She went firmly up the stairs and banged on Lazlo’s door.

There was a small silence and then he said, ‘Yes?’ Rosa opened the door. ‘Only me’.

Lazlo was sitting in the small armchair, wearing jeans and a black shirt, with a book open on his lap. On the floor beside him was a bowl with a spoon in it and an empty mug.

Rosa gestured at the bowl.

‘Breakfast?’

Lazlo unfolded himself and stood up.

‘I brought it up here—’

‘Well,’ Rosa said, ‘you’re absolutely allowed’.

‘I thought I’d get myself out of the way’.

Rosa came further into the room and sat on the bed. She stretched her arms behind her, and leaned on her hands.

‘You’re hardly in it—’

Lazlo looked away. He put the book he’d been reading down on the bedside table. It was the Beckett play Rosa had noticed on the chest of drawers.

He said, quite firmly, ‘I don’t know about that’.

‘What do you mean?’

Lazlo wandered slowly round behind the armchair
and leaned his shoulders against the wall. He put his hands into the pockets of his jeans.

‘I think it’s all too much for your mother. I think it’s too much for all of you. I think I’m literally the last straw’.

‘No, you’re not—’

‘It’s wearing your mother out,’ Lazlo said. ‘She should be keeping her energy for acting, not for worrying about whether she’s remembered to buy more milk. And I shouldn’t be in your room. It’s
your
bedroom’.

Rosa looked at the ceiling.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘that’.

Lazlo said nothing.

She turned her head, very slowly, to look at him. ‘Why did you cover me up with a towel?’ He shrugged.

He said, without returning her look, ‘I didn’t know what else to do with you’.

Rosa gave a little shout of laughter.

She said, ‘I didn’t come up here because I was missing my room. I came up here because it was trespassing. I came up for a bit of mischief’.

Lazlo gave a quick smile.

‘Really?’

‘Really. I was fed up with being alone in the house and I was just prowling about’. She sat up straighter and put her hands in her lap. ‘You’re not displacing me. Promise’.

He said awkwardly, ‘It’s not just that. It’s – well, you’re a family—’

‘Yes, we are, but we’re all in transition, we’re all in a rather temporary situation. We’re not going to stay like this’. ‘I could easily go,’ Lazlo said.

‘Where?’

He shrugged.

‘I can find a room. I’m always finding rooms’.

Rosa stood up.

‘Don’t go,’ she said.

He turned his head to look at her.

‘I don’t want you to go,’ Rosa said. ‘I like you being here. Don’t go’.

From the landing below there was the sound of some disturbance and then Edie’s voice came clearly up the stairwell.

‘Who left these bloody sheets here? I nearly broke my neck. Rosa? Rosa!’

Rosa put her finger to her lips. ‘You’d better go,’ Lazlo whispered. She shook her head. ‘Rosa!’ Edie yelled.

‘I’m not going,’ Rosa whispered, ‘and nor are you,’ and then she stepped right up to him and kissed him on the mouth.

‘I don’t know why she’s coming,’ Kate said irritably to Barney. ‘Do stop asking. I could hardly tell her not to, could I?’

‘I don’t know her—’

‘Well, I hardly do. But she sounded rather urgent, poor thing, and I—’

‘Why poor thing?’

‘She is poor thing. Because of Matthew. I expect in her mind she somehow thinks coming to see us and the baby—’

‘He’s called George’.

‘I’m not sure about that. I’m not sure about that at
all
. He’s just the baby to me because there
is
no other baby as far as I’m concerned so there’s no confusion’.

Barney pointed to the front of her T-shirt.

‘You’re leaking’.

Kate looked down.

‘Sometimes you are so like your father—’

‘No I’m not,’ Barney said. ‘My father would never have gone shopping for nipple pads and a breast pump like I did. He didn’t come near us until we were house-trained. I only said you were leaking in case you wanted to change before Ruth came’.

‘Or in case you’re embarrassed by the contrast between my stained T-shirt and her business suit’.

‘No,’ Barney said patiently. ‘In case you are’.

The doorbell rang. Kate began to dab at her chest with a tea towel.

‘I’ll go,’ Barney said.

She heard him go down the wooden floor of their small hallway, and then the click of the door being opened.

‘Hello!’ she heard Barney say, sounding just like his father. ‘You must be Ruth’.

They materialised together in the kitchen doorway, Ruth in a black trouser suit carrying a pale-blue gift bag
frothing with ribbons. She put the bag on the kitchen table. ‘Hello, Kate’.

Kate put the tea towel down. ‘Nice of you to come—’

‘I just brought you and the baby something—’ ‘Thank you’.

Barney moved behind her and laid the flat of his hand against the fridge door.