Joanna Trollope - Second Honeymoon

‘Which,’ Vivien said, switching on the kettle, ‘I can imagine. Men always want their wives to see them first. Except,’ she added lightly, ‘mine’.

Rosa looked up.

‘Perhaps that’s why you still like him’. Vivien came back to the table and sat down. ‘More wine?’

‘Yes, but no,’ Rosa said. ‘I’m selling bargain breaks to Lanzarote tomorrow’.

‘Nothing wrong with that. I sell a lot of books I wouldn’t read myself’. She picked up a fork and drew a line with it across her place mat. She said, ‘You’ll get another job’.

‘I hope so’.

‘It’s much easier to find a job if you’ve already got one’.

Rosa rolled a bruised grape around the rim of her plate.

‘It’s not really the job that worries me so much, in a way. It’s how I’m going to live. How I’m going to live so that I can start on this debt, how I—’ She broke off and then she said, in a slightly choked voice, ‘Sorry’.

Vivien drew another line to intersect with the first one.

Then she said, ‘Come here’.

‘What?’

‘Come here. Come and live here for a while’. Rosa stared at her.

‘I couldn’t—’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, you’re my aunt—’

‘Exactly’.

‘And Mum—’

‘Might be very pleased’.

‘Might she?’

They looked at each other. ‘I don’t think so,’ Rosa said. ‘Does it matter?’ ‘Oh God—’

‘Does it really matter? Just while you get yourself sorted and start paying off these cards and find another job?’

‘Maybe—’

‘She’ll calm down,’ Vivien said. ‘You know Edie. Big bang, smaller mutterings, acceptance. She’ll be fine’. Rosa said slowly, ‘It would be wonderful—’

‘Yes. I’d love it’.

‘I’d make an effort—’

Vivien got up to get the coffee.

‘We both would’. She looked at Rosa over her shoulder. She smiled. ‘It might be quite fun’.

It might, she thought now, indeed be fun. It might also, dwelling upon the prospect, be both a relief and comfort to become in some way necessary again, a provider of all those things only women who had lived lives and run houses could properly provide. Vivien picked up her tea. Rosa had kissed her warmly before she had disappeared into the spare room, with a kind of brief sudden fervour people feel when they have unexpectedly been thrown a lifeline.

‘I only really came to talk,’ Rosa said. ‘I never thought—’

‘Nor did I,’ Vivien said. ‘One seldom does’.

She smiled into her tea. There was no hurry, really, about telling Edie.

The loft on Bankside was in a vast converted Victorian warehouse. Its brick walls, newly cleaned and pierced with modern windows in matte black frames, reared up from the charmingly – and also newly – cobbled alley that separated the building from a similar one ten feet away. If you looked skywards, you could see, on the two sides that looked towards the river, that little black balconies had been hung outside some of the higher windows, and on one of those, Matthew supposed, Ruth would emerge on summer evenings, holding a glass of vodka and cranberry juice, or whatever was the drink of the moment in her circle, and admire both the view and her sense of ownership.

Thinking this was not, Matthew found, at all comfortable. In fact nothing in his mind was, at the moment, in the least comfortable, being instead a sour soup of disappointment and self-reproach and a very real and insistent sadness. It wasn’t a simple matter of resenting Ruth, or even berating himself for not facing facts, because the whole situation had crept up on him – on them both – so insidiously, fuelled by things that were not acknowledged or uttered even more than by things that were openly expressed. He might curse himself for getting into this tangle, but the curses were only the more vehement because he could, looking back, see exactly how he had got there.

When Matthew had announced that there was no way he could share in the purchase of the flat, Ruth had become very still. She had looked at him for a long time, thoughtfully, and then she had said, ‘Will you do one thing?’

‘What thing—’

‘Come and see the flat. Just see it’. He shook his head.

‘No’.

‘Matthew, please’.

‘I can’t afford it. I don’t want to have my nose rubbed in what I can’t afford’.

‘It isn’t for you, I’m afraid. It’s for me. I want you to see the flat’.

He said nothing.

She said, almost shyly, ‘I want you to see what I’m buying’.

‘Why?’

‘I want you to be part of it—’

‘I can’t be’.

‘But you’ll come there, you’ll come and see me, surely?’ He hesitated. His heart smote him. He said, not looking at her, ‘Of course’. ‘Then come’.

‘Ruth—’

She moved towards him and put her hands on his shoulders. She looked into his face as intently as if she were counting his eyelashes.

‘Matt. Matt. This isn’t the end of us’.

Now, standing uneasily on those carefully patterned cobblestones, Matthew told himself that being kind – or cowardly – once was one thing: persisting in it was quite another and could lead to desperate situations. Whatever Ruth said, however beseeching she was, he must not allow her to believe that he felt other than he did, that he could somehow cope with a situation in which he only had power in the obvious department of bed, which was not, in the end, he knew, enough.

He pushed open the heavy glass door of the warehouse and entered an immensely tall foyer, floored in granite with long windows running right up to the roof. There was an industrial steel staircase curving up behind a bank of lifts and besides that nothing, not a picture nor an ashtray nor a piece of furniture, nothing but high, quiet acres of expensively finished dark gleaming space. He stepped forward into a lift and pressed the button for the sixth floor.

When the lift doors slid open, there was a sudden flood of light.

‘I saw you!’ Ruth said. She was standing in an open doorway with apparently nothing behind her. ‘I was watching from the balcony and I saw you!’

He bent to kiss her cheek. She moved to meet his mouth and missed it. He looked past her.

‘Wow’.

‘Isn’t it wonderful?’

He nodded. The room beyond the open door was pale and high and shining, and at the end there was nothing through the huge windows but sky.

Ruth took his hand.

‘You see? You see why I had to buy it?’

She towed him through the door. Then she let go and spun down the length of the room.

‘Isn’t it great?’

‘Yes’.

‘All this space! All this air! And Central London! I can walk to work!’

‘Yes’.

‘Come and see the bathroom,’ Ruth said. ‘The shower is so cool. And in the kitchen, the microwave is built into the cooker unit. It looks like a spaceship’.

Matthew followed her across the wooden floor, through a doorway in a translucent wall of glass bricks. She was standing in a shower made of a cylinder of satin-finished metal, punctuated with little glass portholes in blue and green.

‘Did you ever see anything like it?’

‘No,’ Matthew said, ‘I never did’.

Ruth stepped out of the shower.

She said, more soberly, ‘I wish it wasn’t like this’.

He nodded.

She said, ‘I wish it wasn’t you coming to stay in my flat. I wish it was ours’.

He leaned against the wall. The glass felt solid and cold through the sleeve of his jacket.

He said, too loudly, ‘I’m afraid I won’t be coming’.

She said nothing. She walked past him very quickly and went back into the big room. He followed her. She was standing by the sliding doors to the balcony looking at her view of the river.

She said, ‘Please don’t talk like that’.

He stayed standing a little behind her.

He said, ‘Ruth, I have to. If I come and stay here, it’ll change the balance between us. It’s changed already, of course, but it’d be worse. You can imagine how it would be. It’d be pitiful’.

She said fiercely, turning round, ‘You couldn’t be pitiful. I wouldn’t let you’.

He tried to smile.

‘You couldn’t stop me. It would just happen’.

‘Matt—’

‘We’ve had a wonderful time,’ he said, ‘and it’s got nothing to do with not loving you—’ She stepped forward and seized his arms. ‘Suppose I don’t buy it! I mind far more about you—’ He stepped back, gently extricating himself. He said, shaking his head, ‘It wouldn’t work—’ She dropped her arms.

She said miserably, ‘I didn’t mean this to – be like this’.

‘I know you didn’t’.

‘Are – are my values all skewed?’

‘Nope’.

‘Please – please don’t leave’. He looked round the table. ‘It’s a wonderful place. You’ll be really happy here’.

‘Matt—’

He leaned forward and laid the palm of his hand against her cheek.

He said, ‘And you’re doing the right thing,’ and then he took his hand away and walked back across the echoing floor to the landing and the lifts.

Edie took a garden chair into the angle of the house where, if you tucked yourself right into the corner, you could elude every breath of wind. She also carried a mug of coffee, her script and, somehow, two ginger biscuits, a pen and her telephone. Behind her, sensing a sedentary moment of which he might take advantage, padded Arsie.

The sun, shining out of a washed blue sky, was quite strong. It showed up unswept post-winter garden corners, and interesting patterns of blistered paintwork and lingering blackened leaves on the clematis above Edie’s head. She thought, settling herself into the chair and arranging her mug and phone and biscuits on a couple of upturned flowerpots to hand, that this was the first time, the first moment, in the last five weeks, when she had felt the possibility of pleasure, a tiny chance for the future to hold something that could, in turn, hold a small candle to the past. She let Arsie spring into her lap, waited while he trampled himself down into position, and then rested her script on top of his purring tabby back. Sun, cat, acting, Edie thought. She patted the script. No, not quite that. Russell would put it differently. Sun, cat, work.

‘I can’t believe this is work,’ Lazlo had said to her at the first rehearsal.

She’d been looking at her lines.

Without glancing at him, she said, ‘By the end of this rehearsal, you’ll know it is’.

By the end of the rehearsal, he’d been ashen. He’d looked as if he might cry. He’d been all over the place, all the wrong emphases, no sense of timing, not listening, in panic, to what the director was saying.

‘Go away,’ Freddie Cass said to him. ‘Go away and learn those lines and come back to me empty’.

‘Empty?’

‘Empty. We’re starting again. We’re not starting from Lazlo, we’re starting from the play’.

Ivor, the Norwegian, had taken him and Edie for a consoling drink. Now that the cast was established Ivor had exchanged patronage for paternalism.

He put a hefty arm round Lazlo’s shoulders.

‘Drink that. Relax’.

Lazlo looked like a boy in a fairy tale, rescued by a genial giant. He drank his drink and shivered a little and Edie and Ivor smiled at each other across his bent head and told him that everyone had first rehearsals like this, everyone got overexcited at one point or another, and made fools of themselves.

Lazlo looked mournfully at Edie.

‘You didn’t,’ he said.

‘Not on this occasion’.

‘Tell me,’ Lazlo said miserably, ‘about a time when you did’.

They’d ended up drinking two bottles of wine and putting their arms round each other and when Edie got home, Russell took one look at her and said, ‘Shall I say I told you so?’

It was true that the play was drawing her in and therefore providing a distraction from her preoccupations, but that didn’t mean, Edie decided, tilting her face to the sun and closing her eyes, that she didn’t notice that none of the children were telephoning, nor that she didn’t feel painfully aware that she knew very little about Matthew’s new flat or Rosa’s living arrangements, or Ben’s girlfriend, or any of their working lives. She had promised herself that she wouldn’t keep ringing them, and she clung to that promise with the tenacity usually required to stick to a rigorous diet, but it didn’t mean she didn’t think and wonder and worry. And feel left out. Playing Mrs Alving was wonderful because it stopped her, sometimes for hours at a time, from waiting for the telephone to ring: but it wasn’t a solution, it was only a diversion.