Joanna Trollope - Second Honeymoon

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.

He lowered his fist and laid his hand across his chest.

‘Come back,’ Ruth had said the other night. ‘Please. Come back’.

She’d been in bed with him, or he with her, whichever, they’d been in her bed – their old joint bed – in her new bedroom, where he’d never intended to be, where he wasn’t drunk enough or convinced enough to be, but where he somehow still was, holding her, with her head roughly where his hand now was, and her saying, almost into his skin, ‘Please come back. Please’.

He’d stroked her hair back from her face, saying nothing. After a while, she raised herself on one elbow and said, ‘Don’t you love me any more?’ and he said, truthfully, ‘Of course I do, but that doesn’t solve everything,’ and she said, ‘It does, it can,’ and he said, tiredly, ‘We’ve been through this. We’ve been through all this, over and over’.

‘But you came tonight,’ Ruth said. ‘You’ve made love to me’.

He couldn’t say it didn’t mean anything because that was neither true nor constructive. Of course going to bed with Ruth was significant, even important, but at the same time he hadn’t meant it to happen, hadn’t wanted it to happen, and now that it had, he was filled with a dreary desolation. He had only made things worse. He had only made Ruth hope again for something that couldn’t happen because it was too messy and too insoluble and, above all, too late.

He’d kissed the top of Ruth’s head and squeezed her bare shoulders and then began to disengage himself as gently as he could. He’d waited for her to start crying but she hadn’t, merely remaining where he’d left her, crumpled and silent, a picture of misery and reproach. Once dressed, he stood in the doorway of the bedroom and wrestled with what he might say. Sorry was pathetic, thank you for dinner was ludicrous, I love you was unkind and dangerous. In the end he simply said, ‘Bye,’ and went out of the flat and into the lift, and leaned against the wall of it with his eyes closed. How was it possible to get, entirely without intending to, into a position where you kept somehow inflicting pain on someone you loved? When she had rung him and begged – awful, mortifying word, but accurate for how she’d sounded – him to come round for supper, it had seemed more difficult and elaborate to refuse her than to agree. And then he had ended up making things worse than he had ever intended, concluding by responding to some primitive urge to flee that had got him out of the flat and down to London Bridge Underground Station and then left him to trail back to North London cursing himself.

From next door came the sound of Lazlo opening his window. Matthew imagined him leaning out, breathing, marvelling at where he found himself. Perhaps he was feeling as Matthew had felt before he met Ruth, both luxuriously free and equally luxuriously lonely. Matthew turned on his side, and punched his pillow up under his neck. If you couldn’t just un-love someone, he thought, perhaps you could at least starve that love a bit, practise not allowing yourself to express it or react to its impulses. He shut his eyes. No calls from now on. No emails. No contact. Nothing.

‘We have six days,’ Freddie Cass said, ‘until press night. And I am far from happy with this scene’.

Edie did not look either at Lazlo or at Cheryl. Cheryl was probably, anyway, looking as if any imminent reprimand had nothing to do with her, and Lazlo would be expecting the worst.

‘Don’t strut, Cheryl,’ Freddie Cass said. There was a pause. Then he said, ‘Don’t bleat, Lazlo’. And then, after another silence, ‘Good, Edie’.

‘I’m supposed to strut,’ Cheryl said, boredly, ‘in this scene’.

Freddie ignored her.

He said to Lazlo, ‘You’ll be blind by the end of the scene. Blind. Who’ll care about that if they’ve heard you whining for favours?’

Lazlo cleared his throat. Edie willed him not to apologise.

He said, ‘I am whining. I’m very unattractive by now. I’m completely self-centred because I’m dying’.

Freddie Cass waited. Edie glanced at him. He wasn’t looking at Lazlo, as was his wont when addressing someone, he was looking across the stage to where an electrician was dismantling a spotlight.

‘I’m not getting that’.

‘I’ll try again’.

‘Yes,’ Freddie said, ‘you will’. He sighed. ‘And you, Cheryl, will stop playing the little tart. Even if you are one’. He moved forward, towards the footlights, and touched Edie on the shoulder as he passed. ‘As you were’.

Edie went past Lazlo, upstage to the spot where the door to the garden would be when the set was up. Lazlo caught her eye as she passed him and gave her the briefest of winks. She widened her eyes at him. He looked quite undismayed by what Freddie had said, quite unlike his usual easily wounded self. He looked, astonishingly, like someone prepared to stand their ground. Perhaps, she thought, picking up the shallow flower basket that Mrs Alving was to bring in from the garden, this new energy and confidence could even be attributable to the simple fact that she had offered breakfast to Lazlo that morning and then overseen him while he ate it. He ate like Ben, with that peculiar combination of indifference and absorption that seemed to characterise hungry young men, consuming two bowls of cereal and a banana and four slices of toast as if they were simultaneously vital and of no consequence at all. She’d felt an extraordinary satisfaction, almost a relief, sitting opposite him with her coffee mug, and watching him eat. It had been so pleasurable that she had turned to Russell, to smile that pleasure at him, and found that he was reading the paper like someone in a pantomime, with the paper held up high, a screen against the outside world.

She reached across and banged the paper with a teaspoon.

‘Oy’.

‘One moment,’ Russell said, not lowering the paper. ‘Rude,’ Edie said cheerfully. ‘Meals are for conversation’.