Second Honeymoon (28 page)

‘Drink?’

Ruth shook her head. Her hair, Kate observed, was as flawlessly cut as ever. ‘Go on,’ Kate said.

‘No. Really no. Thank you. I’d just love a glimpse of the baby, if I could. That’s all—’

‘He’s called George,’ Barney said, taking a bottle of white wine out of the fridge. ‘After my father and grandfather’.

Kate smiled at Ruth.

‘He isn’t,’ she said, ‘but that needn’t trouble you. Come and see him’.

‘George,’ Barney said comfortably, pouring wine. ‘George Barnabas Maxwell Ferguson’.

‘All his family do that,’ Kate said. ‘They all have these great strings of names. Mental’.

Ruth shot a glance at Barney. He looked perfectly composed.

He said happily, picking up his wine glass, ‘He’s brilliant. You’ll see’.

Kate led Ruth across the hallway back towards the front door. The little room beside it was in darkness
except for a nightlight lamp shaped like a crouched rabbit. The room smelled of something sweet and new and innocent.

‘Oh—’ Ruth said.

Kate tiptoed across to a handsome cot that stood against the far wall. In it was a carrycot, and in the carrycot the baby slept on his side under a blue knitted blanket stitched with letters of the alphabet.

Ruth stooped forward.

‘Oh,’ she said again.

‘I know,’ Kate said.

Ruth put her hands on to the rail of the cot and bent down towards the baby. ‘He’s perfect—’

‘Yes,’ Kate said, ‘he is’. She looked at Ruth’s tailored dark shoulders dipping into the cot.

‘May I – may I kiss him?’

‘Of course,’ Kate said, surprised. ‘Go ahead—’

Ruth’s sleek dark head went down over the baby’s for an instant, and then she raised it, but only a little. Kate looked at her hands on the cot rail. Even in the dimness of the room she could see that her knuckles were white with tension.

‘Ruth?’

Ruth’s head moved a little, as if she was trying to nod it.

‘Ruth, are you OK?’

‘Yes,’ Ruth said. Her voice sounded slightly strangled.

‘Yes, I’m fine’.

She straightened up slowly, and then she put the back of one hand up against one cheekbone and then the other.

Kate peered.

‘Ruth, you’re not OK, you’re crying—’ Ruth shook her head. ‘I’m fine, really’. Kate waited.

Ruth looked back into the cot. ‘He’s so lovely—’

‘Ruth—’

Ruth turned and looked straight at Kate. A strand of hair had glued itself lightly to her cheek. She gave Kate a small and hopeless smile.

‘I’m pregnant,’ she said.

Vivien had decided that she would treat Edie to lunch. It would be on a Monday or a Friday so as to avoid her bookshop afternoons and Edie’s theatre ones, and she would take her to the rather nice restaurant in the basement of an upmarket clothes shop in Bond Street where they could, for once, Vivien told Max, lunch together like civilised sisters ought to do. Max was reading a sports-car magazine.

‘Bond Street?’

‘Yes,’ Vivien said. ‘Bond Street’.

Max shook the magazine slightly. He was still, Vivien noticed, wearing a bracelet.

‘I don’t quite see our Edie in Bond Street. Charlotte Street maybe, or Frith Street. But Bond Street—’

‘I like Bond Street,’ Vivien said.

Max eyed her. She was stretching across the sink to open the window behind it, and he could see every minute contour under her thin white trousers.

‘Whatever you say, doll’.

When Vivien telephoned Edie later in the day, Edie
said,
‘Lunch?’
as if she’d never heard of it.

‘We ought to catch up,’ Vivien said. ‘We ought to have time together to catch up face to face instead of always talking on the telephone’.

‘You’re lucky to get that,’ Edie said. ‘I’ve hardly got time to brush my teeth at the moment’.

Vivien, admiring the pillar-box-red roses Max had brought her in their tall glass vase on the hall table, said she had booked a table in Bond Street.

‘Bond Street!’

‘Yes’.

‘I don’t know where that is’.

‘Edie,’ Vivien said, ‘this is my treat so please don’t behave like a child’.

‘Oo-er,’ Edie said childishly, ‘I haven’t got clothes for
Bond Street’.

Vivien leaned forward and tweaked a rose.

‘Twelve-thirty Monday and no excuses’.

She put the telephone down and went back into the kitchen. Max was on his mobile when she came in and, when he saw her, he whipped it away from his ear and snapped it shut.

He grinned at her.

‘Caught red-handed—’

She affected not to notice.

‘Oh yes?’

‘A quick call to my bookie,’ Max said. ‘Thought I’d get away with it’. He put an arm out and patted her bottom. ‘And I nearly did’.

Edie arrived for lunch dressed entirely in black. She
touched one earlobe as she sat down.

‘Even diamond studs. How Bond Street is that?’

Vivien put her reading glasses on.

‘Did Russell give you
diamonds?’

‘No. Cheryl lent them to me. And they’re zircons’.

‘Zircons?’

‘Posh glass, I gather’. Edie looked round her.
‘This
is very posh glass, isn’t it?’

‘Edie,’ Vivien said, ‘please don’t play-act all over the place and spoil our lunch’.

‘I can’t actually,’ Edie said, ‘I’m too tired’.

Vivien looked sympathetic.

‘Are you?’

Edie picked up the menu. ‘What do you think?’

‘I’ll only think wrong,’ Vivien said, ‘so why don’t you tell me?’

Edie said, staring at the menu, ‘I’m shattered. You’d think five adults living together would lead five fully adult lives’.

Vivien said, with a small smile, thinking of Max, ‘People like to be looked after’. ‘Including me’.

‘What about,’ Vivien said, summoning a waiter, ‘some ground rules?’

‘Like?’

‘Like do your own washing, clean your own room—’ Edie put the menu down.

She said tiredly, ‘It’s more than that, really. It’s five people wanting five people’s separate space’.

The waiter paused by their table. ‘Two glasses of champagne, please’.

‘Vivi—’

‘Why not?’

Edie looked at her carefully. ‘I suppose you do look – happy’.

‘I am’.

‘Good,’ Edie said. ‘Max behaving—’

‘Oh yes’.

‘You’re sure—’

‘Flowers,’ Vivien said. ‘Treats, naughty shoes’.

‘Oh Lord’.

‘It’s like being at the beginning again, only it’s better because I know what I’m doing this time’. Edie folded her arms. ‘Is he staying in?’

‘Oh yes,’ Vivien said. ‘If we aren’t out, it’s candles on the kitchen table. Why don’t you bring Russell down to supper?’

Edie sighed.

‘Because I only have one evening a week free at the moment’. Vivien gave a stifled giggle. ‘Oops! Silly me’.

Edie said nothing. The waiter came back with two flutes of champagne. Vivien picked hers up and held it out towards Edie. ‘Happy days. Why don’t you just throw some of them out?’

Edie stiffened.

‘Oh no’.

‘Why not?’

‘I love having them there. I love having the house full again. It’s what I wanted’. ‘Even if it’s killing you?’

Edie picked up her own glass and took a tiny swallow.

‘It isn’t killing me’. ‘But you said—’

‘Oh,’ Edie said, picking up the menu again and leaning back in her chair, ‘you know me. Always saying things I don’t mean for effect’.

Vivien looked at her. Then she looked down at her own menu.

‘What about the scallops?’ she said.

Because they cost him nothing and simultaneously made him feel he was achieving something, Lazlo had begun taking long walks in the afternoon, accompanied by Russell’s copy of
The Blue Guide to London
. He had walked to Noel Road, to look at the house Joe Orton had once lived in, and then to Duncan Terrace to imagine Charles Lamb going in and out with perhaps his sister Mary watching for him from an upstairs window. He had been several times to the Estorick Collection to gaze anxiously at the Italian Futurist paintings and wonder exactly what made them so alarming. He had walked round Aberdeen Park and Highbury Fields, he had looked at churches and chapels and libraries and prisons, he had followed rivers and canals and handsome Georgian and Victorian
terraces. And when he returned, after two or three hours of walking and thinking, he was struck both by how glad he was to be home and by how painfully impermanent that home inevitably was.

What was particularly disconcerting about this state of affairs was that his life was, really, going better than it ever had. He might still be on close to Equity minimum wage because
Ghosts
was hardly a lavish production, but he had had excellent notices, two better-known agents were offering their services, and he was, thanks to Edie and her family, living in the least hand-to-mouth circumstances he had known. Even his student debt, incurred in order to go to drama school, was beginning to look less like an unwelcome, unavoidable companion for the next twenty years. Yet an anxiety possessed him about what would happen next, about whatever happened next being sure to be inferior to what was happening now, which made him despair of ever possessing the capacity to appreciate good things when they happened to turn up. He had never been consumed by this disquiet while living in Kilburn. Maybe it was because living in Kilburn, in those particular circumstances, had been so bad that there was comfort to be drawn from being very certain that nothing could ever be worse. And now, living as he was, he could remember and visualise the downward slide back to somewhere like Kilburn very easily, and that prospect could reduce him, to his shame, to clinging to the edge of the basin in Edie’s bathroom, as he had the other morning, and panicking at the sight of his own frightened face in the mirror above it. What
Matthew must have thought, Lazlo couldn’t, and daren’t, imagine. He had looked at Lazlo with the sort of look Lazlo remembered the older boys at school giving the younger ones when they hurt themselves playing rugby. Matthew was obviously the sort of guy who knew what to do with his inner demons.

Not knowing what to do with his own was one of the reasons, Lazlo was sure, that made him able to play Osvald. Maybe that was also what made him so certain that if he couldn’t be an actor then he couldn’t be anything. Freddie Cass had said to him that acting wasn’t something you wanted to do, it was something you had to do. Lazlo had been very happy to hear that, had felt a relief and a gratitude at having his own need sanctioned, but it hadn’t, oddly, assuaged the feeling of being an outsider in some way, a person who could only fully engage with other people if he was pretending to be someone else.

Which is why it was so very astonishing to have been kissed by Rosa. At first, he had simply thought she was teasing him, that kissing him was just a little more of the mischief that had led her to lie on his bed and fall asleep there. But although she had been flirtatious and light-hearted before she kissed him, she was quite different when she stepped back again. She had looked, fleetingly and amazingly, as if she was dreading that he might laugh at her. She had even almost said sorry.

‘Typical Rosa—’

‘What?’

She’d looked away, pushing her hair back.

She muttered, ‘Always blundering in where she’s not wanted—’

He’d been in too much of a turmoil even to consider saying, ‘You are wanted’. Anyway, at that moment, would such a statement have been true? Was it true now? What, in fact, did he feel about being kissed by her? What had he felt when he found her lying, quite unselfconsciously, on his bed? He couldn’t believe how many walks were occupied in wondering about this. He couldn’t believe the miles he seemed able to cover while asking himself if this girl, whom he’d rather dismissed as spoiled and careless and unappreciative of the solid support of her background, was actually and appealingly something of a fellow wanderer.

He’d shaken his head at Rosa. He’d meant her to infer that kissing him wasn’t a blunder. She’d put the back of her hand up against her mouth, and then taken it away and said, with a slightly uncertain smile, ‘Better go and sort the sheet crisis’.

He’d nodded. He hadn’t moved from where he was standing by the wall. She went over to the door and hesitated for a moment. He waited for her to turn so that he could at least smile at her, but she didn’t. She went out of the room and down the stairs to the landing below, and Lazlo heard Edie say, ‘I wonder, Rosa, if the sheets on the floor could
possibly
be yours?’ He waited for Rosa to scream something in reply, but she didn’t. Perhaps she was bundling the sheets up in her arms and taking them silently downstairs. Perhaps she had stepped over them and shut herself quietly in her room. Perhaps she
was looking at herself in her bedroom mirror and wondering why anyone should want to return her kiss. Lazlo closed his eyes and slumped against the wall. Nil points, he told himself. Nil points to self.

‘Look at this diary,’ Maeve said.

Russell looked up. Maeve was standing in the doorway between their offices holding up the large cloth-bound book she preferred to use instead of anything more up to date.

‘You look at it,’ Russell said in a friendly voice. ‘It’s one of the things I pay you for’.

‘You are out,’ Maeve said, in the tone of one reprimanding a student about an overdraft, ‘every single night this week’.

‘Yes’.

‘And last week. And four nights next week’. ‘Yes. So is Edie’.

Maeve slapped her hand against the diary. ‘These are invitations you wouldn’t have countenanced accepting six months ago’. ‘Probably not’.

‘Why,’ Maeve said, ‘don’t you do something worthwhile, like going to a lecture? Why don’t you broaden your horizons?’

Russell reached across his desk for the telephone.

‘You mean well,’ he said, ‘but I have enough to bear without you adding to it’.

‘I’m trying to alleviate it—’

Russell was pressing buttons.

‘I’m trying,’ Maeve said, ‘to
help’.

‘Hello?’ Russell said into the telephone. ‘Hello? Russell Boyd here. I was hoping to speak to Gregory—’

Maeve backed out of Russell’s office in time to hear the bell to the street door ring. She pressed the intercom, and on the tiny television screen that filmed whoever was standing outside she saw an unpromising-looking boy in a parka with a knitted hat.