‘I’m playing Osvald,’ the young man said. Edie smiled at him. ‘I guessed’.

He gave a small snort of laughter.

‘Not difficult, with a cast of five—’

He had fine features and the slight build Edie had always somehow associated with First World War poets.

He said, ‘Well, we’re the same colouring, anyway. Mother and son’.

She gave him an appraising glance.

‘I expect you got your height from your father—’

He grinned.

‘Among other things’.

‘I know,’ Edie said. ‘What a play’.

‘Not much light relief—’

‘That means rehearsals will be hilarious. They always are, if the play is dark’. The young man said, ‘My name’s Lazlo’. ‘I know. Very exotic’. ‘My sister’s called Ottolie’. ‘Is she an actor?’ Lazlo shook his head.

‘She’s almost a doctor’. He made a little gesture. ‘I’ve never played Ibsen before’.

‘Nor me. Not really’.

‘I didn’t think I had a hope—’

‘Nor me’.

‘It was an awful casting—’

‘Horrible’.

He smiled at her.

‘But here we are, Mama’.

‘I think,’ Edie said, smiling back, ‘you call me Mother dear. At least, in this version’. He bowed a little. ‘Mother dear’.

She looked across the room. A dark girl with her curls tied on top of her head with an orange scarf was standing in an extravagant dancer’s pose, feet and hips sharply angled, talking to the director.

‘What do you think of Regina?’

He turned his head.

‘Scary’.

‘You get to kiss her’. ‘Double scary’.

‘In two weeks’ time,’ Edie said, ‘you won’t be thinking that for an instant’.

He said, almost eagerly, ‘I’ve only been out of drama school a year, you see—’

She looked at him, full in the face. Then she smiled and took his hand.

‘How absolutely lovely,’ Edie said.


Barney had insisted that Kate take a taxi to work. It was her first Monday morning, after all, after feeling too terrible to leave the flat for three weeks, and he was taking no chances. He had booked the cab himself, and left a twenty-pound note weighted with an orange on the kitchen table, to pay for it. ‘Just this once,’ Kate said.

She had looked at the note and wished that he hadn’t left it. Solicitousness was all very well but the imposition of will implied by paying for something was rather different. She was extremely grateful for the thought, but not at all grateful for the money. She was still earning, after all: she would pay for her own taxi. She had picked up the orange and replaced it in the fruit bowl, and then wedged the money against it like a flag.

Sitting in the taxi, Kate felt an unmistakable rush of relief, relief at not wishing to die with such vehemence, relief at being out of the flat, relief at the prospect of the – compared to home – impersonality of work. Work was full of complications, and intractable people, but as she didn’t love them she didn’t have to take responsibility for them. Nor did she have to thank them, fervently, every time they did something properly that they were paid to do properly in the first place.

It was lovely of Rosa to have made such an effort in the flat. They had returned from a weekend in Dorset with Barney’s parents – too much food, Kate thought, too much kindness, too many cushions and anxious questions – to find the flat smelling strongly of bleach, and every room wearing a startled aspect, as if a violent upheaval had taken place without having, exactly, come to a settled conclusion afterwards. Rosa could start things and carry them energetically part of the way forward, but finishing them, calming them, tidying up tedious, final details was something she was unable to achieve because she couldn’t see that it was necessary. Her essays at university had been like that, Kate remembered, full of initial energy and enterprise and then simply stopping, some way from the end, as if a fuel supply had been cut off. Barney had looked at the sitting room.

‘It’s like someone left the window open, and a hurricane blew through’.

Kate had been very grateful – most grateful in fact -for Rosa’s not being there when they got back. She’d left a jug of pale supermarket tulips, all curved and clamped together, on the kitchen table and a note saying she’d gone away for the night. Kate, feeling treacherous, had opened Rosa’s bedroom door and looked inside. The bed was made, roughly speaking, and the floor was clear because all Rosa’s clothes had been mounded up in one corner, and covered, with its arms outstretched in a sort of bizarre embrace, by her orange tweed jacket. Kate swallowed. There was a mug and a glass on the upended wine carton Rosa was using as a bedside table. Kate resisted the urge to go and pick them up and closed the door again.

It was easier, the next morning, and with the unquestioned freedom of a working day ahead, to feel a simpler reaction to Rosa’s efforts. Losing a job, Kate reflected, was in some ways similar to the end of a relationship, even if it was a job you hadn’t exactly valued in the first place. When you were faced with rejection, in whatever situation and however deserved or undeserved, it wasn’t just your confidence that suffered, it was your faith in the future, your ability to see that any effort you might make could be a tiny investment in what would happen to you thereafter. I have to remember that, Kate thought, I have to remember how pointless daily life seems when you can’t see where you’re going. I have to remember what it must feel like when there isn’t even any wreckage to cling to.

The taxi drew into the kerb. Across a broad stretch of pavement rose the eccentric glass-and-steel façade of the broadcasting company where Kate had worked as a researcher for three interesting and purposeful years. It was the sort of job she had hoped for, all the time she was at university, all the time after university when she couldn’t find what she wanted, couldn’t seem to settle. It was, in fact, the sort of job Rosa should have had too.

Kate leaned forward and pushed a note through the glass screen in the taxi. How astonishing it was, how pleasurable, to be going back to work. She got out of the cab and stood for a moment on the pavement, her face tilted towards the sky. Married, she said to herself, pregnant, working. Go, girl.


In the coffee shop after the read-through, Lazlo said he was starving.

‘I was so nervous—’

‘It didn’t show’.

‘I kept thinking, this isn’t how I’m going to play it, this is wrong. I made him far more petulant than I want him to be. I don’t want to sound so sorry for myself. Would you like a bagel?’

‘I’ll get you a bagel,’ Edie said.

‘No, really, I asked you to have a coffee with me’.

‘And I am your mother,’ Edie said. ‘Don’t forget that’.

He regarded her. He said soberly, ‘I thought you were wonderful’.

Edie’s chin went up a little.

‘Not really. Don’t forget I’ve been doing this since you were in your pram’. ‘I don’t think so’.

She took her wallet out of her bag.

‘How old are you?’

‘Twenty-four’.

She looked satisfied.

‘I’ve been doing this since you were in your pram.

What kind of bagel?’

‘Toasted, please. Would two bagels be out of the question?’

‘Certainly not. And cream cheese?’ ‘How did you know?’ ‘Mother stuff,’ Edie said.

She threaded her way between the small metal tables to the counter. Behind it, a huge mirror reflected the room and she could see that Lazlo was watching her and that he looked as her children had looked after school examinations in subjects they were good at, exhilarated and exhausted. He was going, she thought, to be a good Osvald, just the right blend of intensity and youthful spirit, frightened enough to arouse sympathy, self-absorbed enough to be maddening. As for her – well, there was a lot to think about in Mrs Alving and most of it about lies. Watching Lazlo in the glass made her consider how rich it was going to be making those lies form the central core of violent maternal protectiveness in the way she played Mrs Alving. She could see, from where she was, how hungry Lazlo was. She could see he was watching her in admiration, certainly, but also he was watching because she would be returning to him with a tray of coffee and bagels, and something in the simplicity of that, the neediness of that, made her heart rejoice.

She went back to their table and put the tray down. ‘Can I ask you something?’ Lazlo said.

‘Yes’.

‘I want you to be honest—’

‘Oh, I am excellent at that,’ Edie said, unloading the tray, putting the bagels down in front of him. ‘I have a diploma in honest. Ask my family’.

He picked up a knife.

‘Your family—’

‘One husband. Three children, two of them older than you are’. ‘I don’t believe it—’

‘True’. She turned and put the empty tray down on a nearby table. ‘What do you want to ask?’

‘Will I—’ He stopped. ‘Will you what?’

‘Will I be any good?’


* * *

It was rather nice, Vivien thought, lying in the bath with a mug of valerian tea balanced on the edge, to think of Rosa settling down in her spare room. The room had been made up, of course, as it always was, in obedience to the dictates of Vivien and Edie’s childhoods, where whole areas of the house had been consecrated to this mythical creature called the visitor, who would expect exaggerated standards of perfection and formality were he or she ever to put in an appearance. There had not only been a front room smelling of furniture polish, but a spare bedroom upstairs that looked as if it belonged in a provincial hotel, with two beds shrouded in green candlewick covers and a wardrobe empty of everything except extra blankets and a clatter of hangers. Edie’s reaction to this arrangement had been to make sure her family lived abundantly in every corner of her house; Vivien’s, to emulate her mother. Rosa, in Vivien’s spare room, would find books and tissues and lamps with functioning bulbs. And if she chose, climbing into a bed where the sheets matched the pillowcases, to make comparisons, that was no affair of Vivien’s.

When Rosa had telephoned and asked to come and see her, Vivien had said of course, come to supper. Then she had suggested coming on Sunday and added, ‘Why don’t you stay the night?’

Rosa had hesitated.

‘Would that be all right?’

‘Of course. Wouldn’t you rather stay than trail back into Central London afterwards?’

‘Staying,’ Rosa said, ‘would actually be very wonderful’.

Vivien didn’t think Rosa looked very well. She had made an effort – clean hair, ironed shirt – but there was a kind of lustre missing, the kind that was turned up full wattage when you were in love but could equally be dimmed down according to varying degrees of distress, until it was almost extinguished.

It became plain, as supper progressed, and Vivien began to think that a single bottle of wine was looking both meagre and unhelpful, that Rosa’s current state of distress had been advancing upon her for several years. First there was the affair with Josh, and then the ending of the affair and subsequent derailment of prudence and capability, and now unemployment and debt.

‘Probably,’ Rosa said, eating grapes with the absent-mindedness of being already full, ‘I shouldn’t be telling you this’.

‘Why not? I’m your aunt—’

‘I mean, I shouldn’t be telling anyone. In a grown-up world, I should be sorting it. I should be waking up one morning full of resolve and vow to clear my life of clutter and make a list of priorities. I shouldn’t be wandering about like some hopeless animal that’s escaped from its field and can’t find the way back in’.

Vivien got up to make coffee.

‘Nice image’.

‘But not nice situation’.

‘No’. She reached up for the cafetière from a high shelf. She said, ‘Did you think of going back home?’

There was a pause and then Rosa said reluctantly,

‘I tried’.

Vivien turned round.

‘I can’t believe your mother turned you down—’

‘No—’ ‘Well, then’.

‘Dad did,’ Rosa said. ‘But nobody knows that but Ben. You’re not to say’. Vivien smiled at her.

‘Wouldn’t dream of it’. She spooned coffee into the cafetière. She said carefully, ‘Your mother couldn’t think why you chose to go and live with friends. Couldn’t understand it. Why you didn’t go home’.

‘Well,’ Rosa said, ‘I can’t, now’.

‘Can’t you?’

‘I can’t go whining to Mum after Dad said what he did’.