Second Honeymoon (30 page)

He said, ‘She says she’s just got one thing to tell you and it won’t take long’.

‘It doesn’t matter
what
it is—’

Blaise flung his head up and looked at the ceiling.

‘Matt, you don’t have a choice’.

‘Oh I do. It’s the last thing I do have’.

‘Whatever you feel about her, you were in a relationship and you do have to listen to her, one more time. It’s humiliating for her, sitting out there, with people like me, who knew about the two of you, tramping through. She can’t be doing this because she
wants
to’.

‘Why not?’

‘She isn’t that kind of girl’. ‘She’s
become
that kind of girl,’ Matthew said. ‘Only because you’re treating her like this’. Matthew flung his chair back and shouted, ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ Several people at nearby desks looked up. One girl called, ‘Shut it!’

‘Don’t
lecture
me,’ Matthew hissed. ‘Don’t
preach
at me’. Blaise shrugged. ‘Leave you to it’. Matthew said nothing. Blaise went back to his desk.

Matthew raised his eyes to the level of his screen and became aware that some of the people who had looked up when he shouted were still looking, in the unnervingly focused way of people waiting for the next development in a drama. Matthew shot his chair back in towards his desk and leaned to peer at his screen, his hand on the mouse. He counted to fifty and then he got up and walked, as slowly and nonchalantly as he could manage, across the office towards the reception area. He did not glance at Blaise as he passed him.

Ruth, wearing a business suit, was sitting in a black leather armchair, reading a copy of the
Financial Times
. Her hair was pulled back in a spiky knot behind her head and she had on the red-framed reading glasses Matthew remembered her telling him she hardly needed visually but found a useful psychological barrier in some meetings. Matthew paused. Ruth glanced up, on cue, and regarded him over her newspaper.

He walked across and stood awkwardly in front of her. She was wearing a completely inscrutable expression.

He said lamely, ‘Well, here I am’.

She folded the newspaper without any particular hurry and laid it on the glass-topped table beside her. Then she stood up. Matthew suddenly felt a little shaky.

Ruth said, in a voice presumably intended for the receptionist behind her barricade of brushed steel and black acrylic, ‘This won’t take long,’ then she bent and picked up her handbag and her briefcase.

Matthew put out an automatic hand to help her.

‘No, thank you,’ Ruth said.

She moved past him and began to walk towards the bank of lifts. Her back seemed to Matthew to be emphatically straight. He turned to follow her, and as he did so it came to him, from some weird reservoir of sheer instinct, exactly what it was that she was going to tell him.

The contract cleaning company told Edie that a house the size of hers would occupy four people for a whole day and, if she wanted the windows included, would cost something in the region of three hundred and fifty pounds. Of course, that excluded any cleaning inside cupboards, and if she wanted—

‘No, thank you,’ Edie said.

‘Then I assume a basic surface clean—’

‘No, thank you’.

‘Our quotations are extremely competitive—’ ‘I don’t doubt it’. ‘Mrs Boyd—’

‘Thank you,’ Edie said loudly, ‘but no thank you.
No’.
She threw the telephone into the armchair opposite. Ben had left a bath towel draped over the back of it. The rest of his possessions, including a duvet and a pillow, were piled behind the sofa, where Arsie had immediately found them and made a nest. It was a neat pile but it wasn’t, however you looked at it, a small one. The mere knowledge that it was there made Edie feel rather tearful.

It was awful, really, that Ben should be reduced to sleeping on the sofa in the first place. But what was worse was that Edie’s own feelings at having him home
again were so confused, so unlike the rapture she had anticipated, that she hadn’t known who to be furious with first. She had raged at Russell for being Ben’s confidant before she was and then at Rosa for being in Ben’s bedroom and had only been prevented from turning on Lazlo by Rosa’s unexpected and forceful intervention. It had seemed to her, for a few days, intolerable that something she had longed for so intensely should be granted to her in a form that effectively stripped it of all its rightful satisfaction.

‘Don’t take it out on us!’ Rosa had yelled. ‘Just because you’ve got what you wanted in the wrong way!’

Lazlo had come to find her in her cupboard of a dressing room, painting on Mrs Alving’s Norwegian pallor.

‘I just wanted to say something—’

Edie went on blending make-up down over her jawline. She didn’t glance at Lazlo’s reflection, standing behind her and looking directly at her in the mirror.

‘You know I don’t like distracting conversations before a show’.

Lazlo said tiredly, ‘There isn’t a perfect moment. This hardly suits me either’.

Edie flicked a glance upwards. Lazlo’s expression was one of weary determination, rather than anxiety.

She said, ‘So?’

‘I’m moving out,’ Lazlo said. ‘You’ve been wonderfully kind and I am truly grateful, but it isn’t working any more’.

Edie gave a little gasp and put her make-up stick down. ‘Please don’t’.

‘If I go,’ Lazlo said patiently, ‘Rosa and Ben can have their rooms back. It’s what you all need’. Edie swivelled round from the mirror. ‘You mustn’t’.

‘Mustn’t?’

Edie said unsteadily, ‘I’d feel such a failure—’ There’d been a small silence and then Lazlo said gently, ‘I’m afraid I can’t help that’.

‘I wanted it to work,’ Edie said. ‘I wanted everyone to feel they had a home’. She looked away and then she said sadly, ‘I wanted to give you all a home’.

‘You did’.

Edie turned back to the mirror and picked up her make-up again. ‘But on my terms’. Lazlo said nothing.

‘And of course,’ Edie said, ‘you’re all too old for that. And so am I’. She glanced up at Lazlo’s reflection. ‘Please don’t go just yet’.

He smiled.

He said, ‘I’ll let you know when I’ve found somewhere,’ and then he leaned forward and put a hand on Edie’s shoulder and said in Osvald Alving’s voice, ‘You’ve managed without me, Mother, all this time!’

Edie had nodded. She’d put her own hand up to touch his briefly and then he’d gone out of the room and she didn’t see him again until they were on stage together, where their familiar dynamic seemed to have transformed itself into something altogether more fragile and fevered.

Now, sitting on the sofa among Ben’s possessions, fragile was what Edie chiefly felt, fragile and vulnerable and uncertain.

She looked across at the armchair, where she had flung the telephone. Perhaps she would ring Vivien. Vivien wouldn’t be any use of course and naturally Edie wouldn’t confide to her the present turmoil of her feelings, but all the same, there seemed to be a most pressing need to talk to someone and, at the very least, Vivien would do.

‘Is this too noisy for him?’ Rosa said.

Kate peered into the baby car seat she had laid on the empty restaurant chair next to her.

‘He’s asleep’.

‘It’s terribly clattery—’

‘He’s got to learn to sleep through it. He’s got to learn to sleep through everything I do because he’s coming with me everywhere I go. For ever’.

‘Even back to work?’

Kate closed her eyes briefly.

‘Please don’t talk about it’.

‘And you intend him to be the first grown man called

Baby?’

Kate picked up a menu and studied it. ‘He’s called Finlay’. ‘But you aren’t a Scot—’ ‘Barney is’.

‘No, he isn’t. He’s the most blah-blah English—’ ‘His family are Scottish,’ Kate said, ‘and this baby is called Finlay’.

‘And by Barney?’

‘Barney calls him George. He tells everyone he’s called George. He told Ruth—’ ‘Ruth?’

Kate gave a sharp little intake of breath.

Then she said, ‘What day is it?’

‘What does that matter?’

‘What day is it?’

‘Thursday,’ Rosa said. ‘Kate—’

Kate said hurriedly, ‘That’s OK then. She’ll have told him by now’.

Rosa twitched the menu out of Kate’s hands.

‘Tell me’. ‘Guess’.

‘I don’t want to guess. Tell me’.

Kate put her hands flat on the table.

‘Ruth came to see us last week. To see the baby. Bringing presents and stuff, one of those incredibly expensive baby suits that babies are always immediately sick on—’

‘Go
on’.

‘And she seemed rather agitated and wound up and she cried when she saw Finlay and I asked her what the matter was and—’

‘She’s pregnant,’ Rosa said.

Kate regarded her.

‘Yes’.

‘Why didn’t you
tell
me?’

‘I couldn’t. She made me promise. Until she told Matthew’.

‘When was she telling Matthew?’

‘Early this week’.

Rosa looked away.

She said, ‘I haven’t seen Matthew’.

‘Haven’t you?’

‘I never do. We live in the same house and, apart from hearing him thumping about over my head, we might as well not be. It’s as if we’re all steering round each other because if we don’t we’ll row’. She stopped and then she said, in a different voice, ‘Poor Matt. He’s been so down—’

Kate leaned forward.

‘What’ll this do?’

Rosa swung her head back to look at Kate. ‘I don’t know’. ‘Make or break?’ ‘I don’t know’.

‘You’d think,’ Kate said, ‘in this day and age, we could at least get contraception right, wouldn’t you? First me, now Ruth—’

Rosa leaned sideways and looked down at the baby. ‘Ruth of all people—’

‘Yes’.

‘I wonder if Mum knows’.

‘What’ll she say?’

Rosa put out a hand and laid it on the baby. ‘Can’t tell. She’s all over the place at the moment. It’s -well, it’s a nightmare at home at the moment’.

‘Is it?’

‘Yes,’ Rosa said. She straightened up, and then she said, with a small, private smile, ‘But rather interesting, too’.

Kate waited.

Rosa went on smiling to herself. Kate said crossly, ‘Well, go on’. ‘You can guess’.

‘Something happening? Between you and Lazlo?’ ‘Not – exactly’.

‘Well, then—’

‘But,’ Rosa said, ‘I’d quite like it to’. ‘I’m surprised’.

‘So am I’.

‘I thought he was geeky’.

‘He is rather. But—’ She stopped.

Kate looked at her.

‘I see’.

Rosa looked back.

‘Kate, what about Matthew?’

‘That’s all about to be common knowledge, isn’t it?’

‘D’you know,’ Rosa said, moving about the knife and fork at her place, ‘once I’d have hit the telephone. Once I’d have immediately rushed round to Dad’s office and rung Mum and texted Ben and generally gone into overdrive. But I don’t want to now. I don’t remotely feel like it’.

‘What do you feel then?’

‘Sad,’ Rosa said.

‘Sad?’

‘Yes,’ Rosa said. She looked down at Finlay again. ‘Yes. Sad. Sad that if it’s a baby, it had to be this way’.

‘Come on,’ Kate said vehemently. The baby won’t know!’

‘No,’ Rosa said. She picked up the menu again and held it out towards Kate, ‘But we will. Won’t we?’

*        *        *

The afternoon in the bookshop seemed to Vivien to be taking an unusually long time. It was the end of summer after all, so customers weren’t coming in for those optimistic stacks of paperbacks to take on holiday but, all the same, the few people who did come in seemed to be passing time rather than buying a book and Vivien watched them with irritation as they drifted idly about, fingering books they would never buy and infecting her with their mild restlessness. She had taken advantage of Alison’s absence to straighten things up a bit, sort the slew of scraps of paper by the till, realign the table of summer novels, but that was all that was possible really. Alison didn’t like her actually doing housework if she was the only person in the shop: she said it was off-putting for customers to be dusted round, made them feel that they were somehow an intrusion. She liked Vivien, if not actually helping a customer, to sit by the till lightly engaged in a task that could obviously be easily set aside. Alison herself was a knitter, great scarves and sweaters in the patterns and colours of the Andes, and she would have preferred Vivien to find herself some equally encouraging-looking, unthreatening occupation. Vivien’s propensity for tidying, though undeniably useful, could too easily be interpreted, by anyone sensitive to atmosphere, as taking precedence over the mild disorder created by the necessary process of commerce.

Vivien had taken up her position next to the rack of birthday cards. These were haphazardly arranged with
no particular thought given to sequences of price or size, and it was harmless enough, Vivien thought, to separate the reproductions of Jack Vettriano paintings from black-and-white art photographs of elephants or kittens. The card rack also gave her a good view of the shop, which contained, at that moment, a young mother with a toddler in a buggy looking at board books, and a man in a faded gingham shirt browsing in biography.

It was not the sort of shirt, Vivien reflected, that Max would wear. If Max wore gingham at all, it would be very new and either navy blue or pale pink. It was odd, really, to be so familiar, all over again, with Max’s shirts, especially as – Max being Max and something of a shopper when it came to clothes – most of those shirts were new to her, and acquired in that peculiar space of time when she had been excluded from knowing any details of his personal life. And in those four years, Max had, sartorially speaking, started again. His taste might not have changed, but his wardrobe had and Vivien found it was very difficult sometimes to launder with equanimity garments that had plainly been to exotic places with women who were not her. A T-shirt printed with the logo of a luxurious hotel in Cyprus, and a Malaysian sarong had already gone in the bin rather than the washing machine and Vivien couldn’t decide whether it was a comfort to her or not that Max hadn’t commented on their disappearance.

But then, Max was being very careful not to allude to his bachelor days unless it was to say something dismissive. He’d been to Jersey on business the week before,
staying in a hotel he’d stayed at previously and, Vivien suspected, not alone, and had arrived home a night early, claiming that the whole place was depressing and all he wanted was to be home again.