Joanna Trollope - Second Honeymoon

‘No, of course not, but you’ll get married one day—’ ‘Not to you’.

‘And you’ll want a gaff of your own. Everyone does. I do. I want a place with you’.

Naomi lifted one bare arm and inspected its immaculate surface.

‘I can’t leave her’.

‘What, never?’

‘Since Dad went off, it’s just been me and her. We’ve done fine’. ‘I know’.

‘We’ve done fine having you there. She’s done a lot for you. She’s made you welcome’.

Ben said, slightly shamefacedly, ‘I know’. ‘It’s not like your family—’ ‘I know’.

‘We haven’t got all that money, a big house—’

‘I know’.

‘I’m all she’s got, Ben’.

Ben took off his beanie and scratched his head. He said, ‘Don’t you want to live with me?’ She gave a tiny shrug. ‘Don’t know’.

He said, with some energy, ‘I thought you liked me’.

‘I do’.

‘Well, then’.

Naomi put her arm down again and turned to face him for the first time.

‘Liking someone isn’t the same as living with them. I’ve never lived with anyone except Mum. How do I know what it’ll be like, living with you?’

Ben opened his mouth to say, cheekily, ‘Suck it and see,’ and thought instantly better of it.

He said instead, ‘Come on, Naomi, you know what

I’m like’.

‘I know what you’re like in my place. I don’t know what you’d be like in our own, without Mum there’.

He gave an exasperated little laugh.

‘Well, how will you ever know if you won’t even try?’

‘I haven’t said I won’t try—’

‘Well, you haven’t said you will’.

Naomi looked down at her white miniskirt, at the toes of her sharp white shoes.

She said, ‘Why can’t we go on as we are?’

‘Because—’

‘Well?’

‘Because I’m getting a bit – cramped in there’.

‘Cramped?’

Ben rolled his beanie into a tube and beat lightly against his chest with it.

‘I need – to live without parents. Without anyone’s parents’.

Naomi put her chin up.

‘Mum’s my best friend’.

‘She’s still your mum’.

Naomi suddenly looked acutely miserable.

‘I can’t imagine being without her—’

Ben said slowly, ‘Could you imagine being without me?’

She stared at him. ‘What d’you mean?’

‘I mean,’ he said, ‘that if you can’t leave your mum, and I can’t stay at yours any more, would you choose your mum?’

‘You’re a bastard,’ Naomi said.

‘No, I—’

‘You’re a selfish bastard. You’re a typical man, selfish bastard—’

He took a step forward and put his arms round her. She put her own arms up, elbows against his chest, and held him off. ‘Get off me—’ ‘I didn’t mean it,’ Ben said. ‘Get off!’

‘I didn’t mean it. I shouldn’t have said that. I shouldn’t have asked you to choose—’ She relaxed a fraction.

‘I’m sorry,’ Ben said.

She tipped her smooth fair head against him. ‘I’m sorry,’ Ben said again. ‘It’s only because I like you. It’s only because I want to be alone with you’. Naomi snuffled faintly against his T-shirt. ‘It’s got nothing to do with not liking your mum—’ ‘OK’.

Ben bent his head so that he could see part of her profile.

He said, ‘I expect I’m a bit jealous’.

‘OK’.

‘I’m sorry I started this’. Naomi looked up. Ben looked at her mouth. She said in a whisper, ‘I don’t know what I’ll do about Mum—’

He tightened his hold. ‘Nothing for now’. ‘She’ll go spare—’

Ben looked up and across the road. A burger van was trundling slowly along Forest Road towards the turning to Shernhall Street.

He said, looking after it, ‘Hungry?’

Naomi sighed.

‘Starving’.

‘Burger then?’

She stirred in his arms, then began to straighten her clothes. He watched her brush imaginary specks off her tight little T-shirt.

‘No,’ Naomi said, ‘I’d really fancy a curry’.

* * *

It had been a bad audience. From the moment she stepped on stage, Edie could tell that the audience was going to be unhelpful, was going to hold itself at a distance and need to be wooed. By the end of the first act, she’d decided that it was not just unhelpful but obnoxious, laughing in all the wrong places, rustling and coughing. She’d wanted to lean over the footlights and suggest they all took themselves off to a nice easy musical instead.

‘It’s just as well,’ she said to Lazlo on the journey home, ‘that audiences don’t know the power they have. I was rubbish tonight because they were rubbish’.

Lazlo didn’t argue. He sat hunched on the night bus beside her and stared at the painted metal ceiling.

‘Are you tired?’

He nodded.

‘That’s what a bad audience does. Exhausts you, damn them, and all for nothing’.

When they reached the house, Lazlo didn’t go upstairs, as he often did, but trailed into the kitchen behind her and leaned against the cupboards.

There was a note from Russell on the table.

‘Bed. Fuddled’.

Edie gave a little exclamation and dropped the note in the bin. She went over to the sink to fill the kettle.

‘Tea?’

‘Actually,’ Lazlo said, ‘I’m a bit hungry’. There was a beat, and then Edie said, ‘You know where the bread bin is’.

‘Yes,’ Lazlo said. ‘Sorry’.

‘Bread in the bin, eggs in the fridge, fruit in the bowl’.

‘Yes,’ Lazlo said.

She turned to look at him over her shoulder.

‘Well?’

He said sheepishly, ‘I don’t know how to turn the cooker on’.

‘Goddamnit,’ Edie said, hunched theatrically over the kettle. ‘Sorry—’

She turned round. ‘Can you scramble eggs?’

‘Sort of—’

She regarded him for a moment.

Then she said, sighing, ‘Well, I suppose there’s nobody to blame but myself’. She looked round the kitchen and waved an arm expansively. ‘Nobody’s cleared up in here, I shouldn’t think anybody’s straightened the sitting room, I expect everybody has rolled upstairs and into bed—’

‘Look,’ Lazlo said, ‘I’ll just have bread and cheese’. Edie rubbed her eyes.

‘I shouldn’t take a bad evening out on you’. ‘I don’t mind—’

‘It’s just,’ she said, looking round, ‘that there seems to be more of everything than there was. More of everyone. And less of me’.

Lazlo began to move towards the fridge.

‘Would you like a sandwich?’

‘No thanks’.

‘I’ll make a sandwich,’ Lazlo said, ‘and take it up to my room’.

Edie waited for her customary sandwich-making impulse to take over. It didn’t. She thought of Russell asleep upstairs, of Matthew, of Rosa in Ben’s room with the door slightly, disconcertingly, open. All these images were, for some reason, only irritating.

She shook her head.

‘Sorry, Lazlo. I’ve been really wrong-footed this evening’.

He was laying slices of white bread out on the table in a long, even line.

He said, ‘It doesn’t matter. They were horrible’.

Edie moved two steps to give his shoulder a pat.

‘I’m going to watch television. Add rubbish to rubbish’.

‘OK—’

‘Can you turn the lights out?’ ‘Of course’.

‘Sorry,’ Edie said again. Lazlo began to slice cheese. ‘Night, night’.

He didn’t look up. ‘Night,’ he said.

Lazlo piled his sandwiches on a plate, filled a glass with milk, selected a banana and put it in his pocket. Then he dusted the crumbs off the table, put his spreading knife in the sink and looked around him. There were a number of things lying around that, had they been his, he would have arranged and ordered, but they were not his, they were Edie’s and Russell’s, and thus must be respectfully left where they were. As far as Lazlo could see, the first rule of etiquette about living in someone else’s house was to live in it as tracklessly as possible. Gratitude expressed in improvements, however minor, could so easily be interpreted as criticism.

Lazlo turned out the kitchen lights and carried his plate and glass across the hall. Edie had not closed the sitting-room door, and he could hear the squawk of the television. Arsie was sitting on the stairs, waiting for Edie. He did not acknowledge Lazlo, by the merest flicker, as he went past. The first-floor landing was in dimness. Russell and Edie’s bedroom door closed, Rosa’s slightly ajar, giving on to a deeper darkness. Lazlo didn’t even glance towards that blackness, didn’t let his imagination stray for one second to the image of Rosa lying asleep eight feet away, her red hair tossed on the pillow.

Matthew had, as usual, considerately left the light on, on the top landing. Lazlo stopped at the foot of the stairs, put down his plate and glass, and took his boots off, setting them to one side of the bottom step. Then he picked up his plate and glass again and went silently up the stairs in his socks. Matthew’s door, also as usual, was closed. His was open. He bent, in the doorway, to set his glass down and free up one hand for the light switch and, as he stooped, he caught sight of something unusual about his bed. He put the sandwiches down too, and tiptoed a little closer. Rosa, fully dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, which had ridden up to expose a few inches of pale skin, was lying on his bed, on her back, fast asleep.

Lazlo moved quietly over to the wooden chair in the corner where he had hung his bath towel, lifted the towel up, and carried it across to drape carefully down Rosa’s torso. She didn’t stir. Then Lazlo stepped elaborately back across the carpet to where he had left his supper, and transferred it to a spot beside the small armchair, close to the head of the bed. He returned to the door to close it until only a narrow line of light fell into the room, and then he sat down in the chair, next to the sleeping Rosa, and began, as noiselessly as possible, to eat.

Barney’s parents sent so many lilies to the hospital after their grandson was born that Kate had to ask the nurse on duty to put them outside the door.

‘I can’t breathe, with them in here—’

The nurse, who came from Belfast, said she quite agreed and anyway they reminded her of funerals.

‘People get so overexcited about a baby. They just want to send the biggest thing they can find’.

Kate leaned cautiously sideways – they’d given her a rubber ring to sit on, to ease the discomfort of the stitches – and peered into the Perspex crib moored beside her bed. The baby, swaddled as neatly and tightly as a chrysalis, slept with newborn absorption.

‘I’m pretty overexcited myself’.

The nurse paused, holding the lilies.

‘You’ve every right to be. That’s a lovely baby’.

‘I’m in love,’ Kate said, ‘I know I am. I’ve never felt like this before in my life’.

‘Give me babies for love any time,’ the nurse said. ‘Babies don’t let you down. And you know they’re going to get smarter’.

‘You are amazing,’ Kate said to the baby. ‘You are the most amazing baby there ever was’.

He slept on, wholly committed to his own fierce agenda of survival.

‘Well,’ the nurse said, ‘I think you’ve a visitor’.

Kate turned awkwardly and looked over her shoulder. Rosa was standing in the doorway, holding a pineapple.

She gestured at the great vase of lilies in the nurse’s hands.

‘I thought you might have enough of those—’ Kate abruptly felt rather tearful. She put an unsteady hand out.

‘Rose—’

Rosa put the pineapple down on the end of Kate’s bed.

‘They’re supposed to symbolise hospitality. So I thought that might stretch to welcome’.

‘Oh Rose,’ Kate said, sniffing, ‘he’s so perfect—’

Rosa bent and kissed Kate. Then she moved round the bed and bent over the crib.

‘Oh my God,’ she said, ‘he is minute’.

‘No he’s not, he’s huge. He was almost eight pounds’.

Rosa flicked her a glance.

‘You poor girl. You don’t weigh much more yourself’. Kate put a finger out and touched the damp dark spikes of the baby’s hair. ‘Isn’t he wonderful?’

‘Yes’.

‘I can’t believe it. When I’m not snivelling, I just hang over him and breathe him in’.

Rosa reached down to touch his solid little mound of body.

‘Does he cry?’

‘Like anything,’ Kate said proudly. ‘And – um, feeding him?’

‘Getting better. It’s not very easy but I am so determined to do it’.

Rosa straightened up.

She said, ‘This is all a bit life-changing, isn’t it—’ ‘Telling me’.