Second Honeymoon (20 page)

Kate stared at her.

‘This is
bizarre’.

‘Isn’t it just’.

‘And you living with your aunt—’ ‘Yes. So don’t go on at me about drifting and being hopeless’.

Kate put the celery down and reached across to grasp Rosa’s hand. ‘Sorry’.

‘That’s OK’.

‘It’s probably hormones,’ Kate said. ‘Everything I do at the moment seems to be hormones. I have this enormous urge to get everything sorted’.

Rosa turned her hand over to give Kate’s a squeeze, and then took it away.

‘I hope it’s catching—’

Kate grinned at her.

‘What’s it like, living with your aunt?’

Very comfortable and very restricting. It’s so funny, she’s dating—’

‘She isn’t!’

‘Well, it’s only my uncle, who she’s separated from. She keeps skipping out on Saturday nights, all kitten heels and chandelier earrings’.

‘Sweet or sickening?’

‘Oh, sweet mostly,’ Rosa said. ‘It’d only be sickening if Uncle Max was anything other than a joke’.

‘Does she come into your room and sit on your bed and tell you all about it?’

‘No, thank you’.

Kate reached awkwardly behind her, for her jacket.

‘I ought to go—’

‘Supper—’

‘Well, Barney’s cooking,’ Kate said, ‘but he does quite like to be admired’.

Rosa leaned back, holding her glass.

‘There you go,’ she said with satisfaction. ‘There’s always a price to pay’.

The door to Ben’s bedroom on the first-floor landing was open. Through it, on the bed, Russell could see a pile of cushions that looked familiar but out of context and a mauve felt elephant and a lampshade made of
strings of pink glass beads. He moved closer. On the floor by Ben’s bed was an old white numdah rug, appliquéd with naïve animals and flowers, which he recognised as the rug he and Edie had given Rosa when she was five, as a reward for stopping sucking her thumb. Now that he looked at them with more attention, he saw that the cushions – Indian brocade, Thai spangles – and the lampshade were also familiar from Rosa’s room, as was the elephant and a mirror edged with pearly shells and a gauze sari which, at one point, Rosa had pinned clumsily to the ceiling over her bed to try and create some kind of exotic canopy.

Russell went out of Ben’s room and up the stairs to the top floor. The door to Matthew’s room was closed but the one to Rosa’s room, next door, was open, almost defiantly wide open, Russell thought, as if to make an emphatic point. Through it, he could see that although the furniture in Rosa’s room hadn’t been moved, the atmosphere had been definitely changed. There was a plaid rug on the bed, new dark-blue shades on the lamps, and the chest of drawers, which had always displayed Rosa’s childhood collection of china shoes and thimbles, was empty except for a black-framed mirror propped against the wall. Edie had taken all the girl she could find out of the room and replaced it with boy. And she had done this for the benefit of someone Russell hardly knew, who appeared quite homeless and therefore liable to stay indefinitely, and who was not just homeless but penniless also, so Edie was only asking him to pay forty pounds a week, which had infuriated Matthew – who
was their own son and paying almost twice that – as well it might.

Russell walked into Rosa’s room and sat down on the edge of the bed. He put his elbows on his knees and leaned forward to stare at the carpet and a new, modern, striped cotton rug that had been laid on it. He had always, he told himself, liked the challenging quality in Edie’s nature, he enjoyed the way she wouldn’t take any form of rubbish lying down, the way she rose up to argue and rebel. But what was likeable, lovable even, in someone as a spectator sport wasn’t always as pleasurable, or even bearable, when one’s own feelings were involved. He couldn’t, in principle, object to her offering shelter to her own, or anyone else’s, child in trouble, but the difficulty was that he couldn’t be sure that filling the house up with young men, at this precise moment in time, was actually an act of altruism. The more he thought about it, the more he felt that not only was Edie asserting a right to use her house as she pleased, but that she was also making it painfully plain that the last thing she wanted was to be left alone in it with him.

Russell shifted his feet. He couldn’t remember when he had started looking forward to being alone with Edie, but it seemed to be a very long time ago. As each of his children left, he had felt an unmistakable pang, and he had also missed them, missed them, sometimes, quite keenly. But at the same time as those doors were closing, he had had a happy, anticipatory feeling about another one opening, one that led back, or perhaps led on to the relationship that had started it all, the relationship with
the short, excitable girl in a cherry-coloured beret who he’d first seen queuing for cinema tickets to see
High Society
with Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra and Grace Kelly in a chignon.

And if that feeling wasn’t reciprocated, if Edie could no longer quite stand the thought of being left alone with him, then at best he was very disappointed and at worst he was very hurt. He also felt, looking round at the walls denuded of Rosa’s posters and pictures, peculiarly powerless. Edie had set something firmly in train, which, if he disrupted it, would only make him look an unpleasant and heartless person.

He got up, sighing, and went over to the window. The garden, from up here, looked pleasingly controlled and almost cared for. Neither he nor Edie had ever been enthusiastic gardeners but it was odd how, over the years, if you owned a garden you somehow acquired some knowledge about it by osmosis, and fell into the annual rituals of sowing and pruning and clipping. If he was honest, he’d actually indulged in a little fantasy or two about Edie and him being out in the garden together that summer, companionably trimming things or drinking wine under the torn garden umbrella. Like all fantasies, he supposed, that one owed its only existence to impossibility, but it had been nice to contemplate, even more than nice, when the reality was that Edie would now be too preoccupied even to consider tranquil moments, glass in hand, admiring the roses. He shook his head. What was he thinking of, sad old fool that he was? When the play’s run began,

Edie wouldn’t be looking to right or to left, let alone at the roses.

He moved slowly back, past Rosa’s bed all ready for Lazlo, and out on to the landing. The brown stain left by a long-ago wasp’s nest under the roof tiles was still there on the once-white ceiling, as was the split in the top step of the stair carpet and the missing knob to the newel post at the turn of the banisters. Doubtless, Russell thought, there were people who made lists of things to be repaired in their houses, and then attended to those lists with efficient toolboxes filled with the right tools for every job in special compartments, but if so he definitely wasn’t one of them. His mother had always told him, finding him reading as a child yet again, that he was lazy. Possibly she was right and would therefore be amazed to know that at the age of fifty-six and faced with a situation in his personal life he could neither control nor adjust to he was resolving to devote all the energies he had planned to use for a renewed life with Edie to his work.

When Max finally kissed Vivien, she had been ready for both him and it. The steady succession of dates, the careful way in which he had refrained from startling her, the new gravity of his goodbyes had made it absolutely plain to her that when he kissed her it would not be on impulse and therefore, if she had a single wit about her, she could see it coming. And so, when he stopped the car outside her house, and switched off the ignition and turned towards her, she was very excited and quite
prepared. The kiss itself was possibly one of the best he had ever given her, being both familiar because of the past and unfamiliar because it hadn’t happened for well over four years. She received it with skill and just enough response to engage him. Then she got out of the car.

He got out too.

‘Can I come in?’

Vivien looked up at her house. Rosa’s bedroom window, above the front door, was still lit.

‘No, Max’.

Max looked up too.

‘Vivi—’

She reached out a hand and laid it flat on his chest.

‘No, Max. Not now’.

He seized her hand in both his.

‘But will you think about it?’

‘Yes’.

‘Promise, Vivi, promise. And I promise it’ll be different’.

She disengaged her hand and took a step away.

‘I said I’d think about it, Max,’ she said, ‘and I will. Thank you for a lovely evening,’ and then she stepped away from him in her heels and crossed her little front garden to the door. When she turned to wave goodnight he was standing staring after her in a way she had never dared to hope he would again.

Inside the house, Rosa had left the hall light on and a note by the telephone that said, ‘Alison rang. Can you do Tues p.m., not Wed, this week?’ and underneath, ‘Will take washing out of machine first thing, promise. X’. Vivien went past the telephone table and down the
hall to the kitchen, which Rosa had left approximately tidy in the way Edie always left things tidy, with none of the finishing details attended to and no air of conclusion. Most nights, she would have spent ten minutes brushing up crumbs and putting stray mugs in the dishwasher, but tonight, in her mood of command and composure, she merely filled a glass with water, switched off the lights and made her way carefully upstairs.

There was a line of light still, under Rosa’s door. Vivien hesitated a moment and then knocked.

‘Come!’ Rosa called.

She was sitting up in bed in a pink camisole, reading
Hello!
magazine. Her hair, newly washed, was fanned out over her shoulders.

‘You do have lovely hair,’ Vivien said.

Rosa smiled at her over the magazine.

‘And you plainly had a lovely evening’.

Vivien hitched her cream wrap over her shoulders and settled on the edge of Rosa’s bed, cradling her glass of water.

‘Fusion tonight. Sea bass and curried lentils’. ‘And champagne?’

‘Oh yes,’ Vivien said, smiling, ‘always champagne’. Rosa put down the magazine. ‘You’re costing him a fortune’. Vivien nodded. ‘Oh, I should hope so—’ ‘Is this payback time now, then?’ ‘Oh no,’ Vivien said, ‘it’s just that a man like Max only understands value for money as exactly that. That’s why
he never minded me being so literal’. She looked at the magazine. ‘Have you had a nice evening?’

‘No,’ Rosa said, ‘but that’s not what I want to talk about. I want to hear about yours’.

Vivien took a savouring swallow of water.

She said, artlessly, ‘Well, it was just dinner, you know—’

‘Just dinner,’ Rosa said. ‘So why come and tell me about it? You don’t usually’.

Vivien looked away across the room as if she were either visualising or remembering something particularly satisfying.

‘I think,’ she said, still gazing, ‘that Max hasn’t found the bachelor life all he thought it would be’.

Rosa waited. Vivien slowly retrieved her gaze and transferred it to her glass of water.

‘All those girls of his, even the working ones, well they do seem very interested in what he earns—’

Rosa said nothing.

‘Max says that none of them was prepared to look after him in any way, but at the same time they wanted him to look after them; oh yes, holidays and meals out and Centre Court tickets at Wimbledon. He said they almost made it sound like they were
entitled
to be treated like that’.

Rosa leaned back against her pillows.

She murmured, ‘How
very
shocking—’

‘Well,’ Vivien said, ‘it’s not the way your mother and I were brought up. You never expected a man to treat you like a princess and then all he expected really was to be allowed a bit of sex in return’.

‘Really?’

‘It wasn’t take, take, take, with us,’ Vivien said. ‘We were brought up to keep house and put food on the table’.

‘I thought,’ Rosa said slowly, ‘that one of the troubles with Max was that he never came home to eat the food you’d put on the table’.

Vivien raised her eyes and looked seriously at Rosa.

‘He’s changed,’ she said.

‘I saw him out of the window when he came to collect you, and he looked exactly the same—’ ‘He’s changed,’ Vivien said.
‘Inside’.

‘Oh’.

‘He knows how badly he behaved. He knows he exploited me. He knows that almost nobody would have put up with him the way I did’.

Rosa sat up suddenly.

‘Oh Vivi. Oh Vivi, do be careful—’

Vivien smiled at her.

‘He’s learnt so much in the last four years,’ she said. ‘He’s been so unhappy and he’s missed me so badly and our life together’. She let a small, eloquent pause elapse and then she said, ‘That’s why he wants to come and live with me, and try again’.

Lazlo was being very quiet. Lying on his bed against the wall between their bedrooms, Matthew wondered if he was sitting staring into space like a petrified rabbit or earnestly reading the Theban plays in his pursuit of true professionalism. He was a nice enough guy, Matthew thought, even if slightly geeky, and obviously pathetically grateful to be in Rosa’s room after his months of confinement among the cat-litter trays in Kilburn. His pathos made Matthew regret his outburst over money. He shouldn’t have done it, he shouldn’t have shouted at his father for asking for money or his mother for not asking Lazlo for more. You only had to look at Lazlo to be reminded of some student character out of Dostoyevsky, all skin and bone and burning passion, and not a penny to his name.

He shifted a little on his pillow. All those years of living a wall away from Rosa meant that every creak and thump from the other side was familiar, as was the fact that the closer to the window you moved the more audible sounds became. Rosa, of course, was something
of a banger and crasher, flinging drawers shut and slamming doors. Lazlo on the other hand made no sound at all, as if elaborately tiptoeing about, closing cupboards with stealth, inching himself on to his bed with his breath held. It was, Matthew supposed, rather like starting at boarding school, where he had never been, but which must be plagued by the consciousness of the nearness of strangers. He lifted his fist and held it up in the dusky late-spring dark. If he swung it sideways, he could thump the wall and imagine Lazlo starting up, gasping, dropping his book. It would be a childish thing to do, of course it would, but perhaps childishness was what descended on you when you found yourself back in your boyhood bedroom after years – yes, years – of living independently.