Joanna Trollope - Second Honeymoon

‘But—’

‘Wait,’ Russell said, ‘just wait. Rosa’s not going to ride that trike again, Matt’s not going to hit with that bat, you’re not going to read under that lampshade. That’s not comfortable, that’s not easy to know, to have to accept. But we have to, because we have no choice. And we also have something left’.

Edie took a long swallow of tea and looked at him over the rim of her cup.

‘Yes?’

‘You talk about wanting Ben back. You talk about his energy and neediness and that way it makes you feel. Well, just think for a moment about how I feel. I didn’t marry you in order to have Matt and Rosa and Ben, though I’m thankful we did. I married you because I wanted to be with you, because you somehow make things shine for me, even when you’re horrible. You want Ben back. Well, you’ll have to deal with that as best you can. And while you’re dealing with it, I’ll give you something else to think about, something that isn’t going to go away. Edie – I want you back. I was here before the children and I’m here now’. He put his cup down with finality. ‘And I’m not going away’.

When it came to business, Bill Moreton prided himself on his firing technique. His father, who had died before Bill was twenty, thereby bequeathing his son the luxury of mythologising him, had been a general surgeon. His basic belief had been ‘Cut deeply, but only once’, and Bill had adopted this mantra as his own, and had carried it, grandiosely, into the world of public relations where, in the process of building up a company, there had been a good deal of hiring and firing to do.

Because many of Bill’s hiring choices were disastrous, he got in plenty of practice at subsequently firing them. He was impervious to any suggestions, however diplomatically put, about his judgement, and equally resistant to criticism about the manner in which he eradicated his own errors. The sight of an inadequate employee was a living reminder of Bill’s own inadequacies, and he could not endure it. The only way, he had discovered, to avoid confronting his mistakes was to summon the employee in question to his office – paperwork already in place – smile, sack them, smile again and show them the door.

Which was exactly what he planned to do, this cool April day, to Rosa Boyd. Rosa was twenty-six, perfectly capable at her job, and a good-looking redhead if you liked your women on the big side and redheaded into the bargain. The reason for sacking Rosa was not the one Bill planned to give her, smilingly and briefly. He was going to tell her that she was not, he regretted, suited to public relations work because she lacked the patience to build up a relationship with a client that could take, oh, five or six years in some cases, with the client behaving most capriciously from the outset. What he was not going to tell her was that the company’s figures, drawn up as they always were in anticipation of the end of a tax year, were alarmingly poor, and that he had decided -against his accountant’s advice – to sack two members of staff because to sack one would have looked like victimisation. And so, Victor Basinger was to take early retirement – fifty-four was too old, anyway, for the PR game – and Rosa Boyd was to go.

Bill stood by the window of his office, contemplating the blank view of the adjoining building it afforded, and rehearsed what he would say to Rosa. He had to be careful to adjust his tone to precisely the right pitch because even a hint of too much of anything might betray his uncomfortable knowledge that, for all professional and practical reasons, it should not be Rosa Boyd walking into his office to be sacked, but Heidi Kingsmill. The difficulty was that Heidi was an aggressive and volatile personality who had, five years before and by sheer fluke, brought the company one of its most reliably lucrative accounts. The fact that Heidi had done absolutely nothing constructive since, and was an emotional liability, could not be admitted. Nor could the fact that Bill had spent an energetic night with Heidi after an office Christmas party four years before and, although Heidi had not as yet exploited this fact, she made it perfectly plain that she always – if pushed – could. Bill’s wife had invested some of her private money in his company, and might be required, shortly, to invest more, and she was a woman who set a great, even hysterical, store by fidelity. So, all in all, it was Rosa Boyd who had to go, in order to keep a space of clear blue water between Heidi Kingsmill and Mrs Moreton.

Bill heard a sound behind him. Rosa Boyd was standing in his office doorway, her right hand resting on the doorknob. She wore jeans and an orange tweed jacket and boots with immensely high heels. Her hair was loose. She looked to Bill about eight foot tall and mildly alarming.

‘Rosa!’ Bill said. He smiled. ‘Hello’.

Rosa said nothing.

Bill moved round his desk and patted the chair nearest to Rosa invitingly. ‘Sit down’. Rosa didn’t move.

‘Sit, Rosa,’ Bill said, still smiling. ‘This won’t take a minute’.

Rosa gave a small sigh, and relaxed on to one leg.

‘Come in,’ Bill said. ‘Come in and shut the door. This is just between you and me. We don’t want the office hearing, do we?’

‘They know,’ Rosa said.

Bill swallowed. He patted the chair again.

He opened his mouth to speak, but Rosa said, before he could begin, ‘They’re taking bets. On how quickly you’ll do it’.

Bill looked at the opposite wall.

‘I’m going to win,’ Rosa said. ‘I said it’d be under a minute. And I’m right’.

And then she stepped backwards and pulled the door shut behind her with a slam.

Kate Ferguson lay on the bathroom floor waiting to be sick again. She had been well prepared, she thought, for morning sickness in early pregnancy to afflict her in the mornings when Barney could bring her tea and a biscuit (Kate’s mother had sworn by Rich Tea) and hover round her in a clumsy, husbandly way. But she was not at all prepared to feel sick all day, every day, too sick to go to work, too sick to allow brown bread or coffee to tiptoe anywhere near her mind, let alone her kitchen cupboard, too sick to be even remotely civil to people who wanted to congratulate her, soppily, on being pregnant so soon after getting married.

‘So lovely,’ her mother’s best friend had said, ‘to see someone doing it properly. None of this heartless careergirl stuff, leaving having babies until you’re practically old enough to be a granny’.

At this rate, Kate thought, moaning faintly against the floor tiles, she’d never be a granny because she’d never even be a mother if this is what it took to get there. It was such a terrible kind of nausea too, so engulfing, so endless, so devoid of any possibility of relief. The baby, down somewhere in those tortured realms, felt like an enemy, a malevolent walnut-sized goblin, remorselessly pursuing its own determined path of development. Barney had the photograph from the first ultrasound scan in his wallet but Kate didn’t really even want to look at it, didn’t want to give herself the chance to visualise this tiny thing that was making itself so violently unlovable. One minute, it seemed, she and Barney had been honeymooning in Malaysia and planning their excited, newly married lives back in London, and the next she was lying on the bathroom floor, clammy and ashen, whining and snivelling to herself without even a tissue for comfort.

The phone rang.

‘Sod off!’ Kate shouted.

The phone rang four times, and then stopped. Then it started again. It would be Rosa. Kate and Rosa had started a four-ring pattern as a kind of signal to one another, at university, first as a let-out for dates that were either dull or dangerous and then simply as a demonstration of consciousness of the other. Kate began to pull herself, whimpering, across the bathroom floor and into the bedroom next door where her phone lay, muffled in the duvet.

‘I want to die,’ Kate said into it.

‘Still? Poor babe’.

‘Four weeks, nearly five. I hate this baby’. ‘Try hating your hormones instead’. ‘I can’t picture them. I can’t hate something I can’t picture’.

‘I’ll give you something to picture,’ Rosa said, ‘and you can hate him all you like. Bill Moreton’.

Kate crawled up on to the bed and fell into the folds of the duvet.

‘What’s he done?’

‘Sacked me,’ Rosa said.

Kate groaned.

‘Rosa—’

‘I know’.

‘What did you do?’ ‘Nothing’.

‘People don’t get sacked for nothing—’

‘In Bill Moreton’s skin-saving world they do. He can’t sack Heidi because he screwed her and she’d squeal. And the business isn’t doing well enough to support us all’.

Kate rolled on to her side and crushed a pillow against her stomach.

‘Rosa, you needed that job’.

‘Yes’.

‘What did you say, five thousand on your credit cards?’ ‘Nearer six’.

‘You’d better come and live with us—’

‘No’.

‘Barney wouldn’t mind—’

‘He would. So would you. So would I’.

‘But thank you, Kate, all the same’. ‘Thank you, Kate’.

‘How soon,’ Kate said, ‘are you going?’ ‘I’ve gone. I cleared my desk, mostly into a black bag, and dumped it outside his office’.

‘So you won’t get any kind of reference—’ ‘I don’t want a reference—’ Kate sighed heavily.

‘Rosa—’

‘I’ll think of something’.

‘Like what?’

‘Telemarketing, maybe—’ ‘I feel too awful,’ Kate said, ‘to cheer you up’. ‘I’m still in a rage,’ Rosa said. ‘I’m fine as long as I’m furious’.

‘Aren’t you worried?’

There was a long pause. Kate released the pillow a little.

‘Rosa?’

‘Of course I’m worried,’ Rosa said. ‘I can’t remember when I wasn’t worried. About money’. ‘But all that spending—’

‘Yes,’ Rosa said. ‘It frightens me and I can’t stop doing it. When I was with Josh—’ She stopped.

‘Yes?’

‘Well, there was a reason then. Meals, holidays—’ ‘He exploited you’. ‘So you always said’. ‘Well, at least I was right’. ‘Mmm,’ Rosa said.

‘What are you going to do?’

Rosa said slowly, pacing out the words, ‘Don’t know. Haven’t thought. Yet’. ‘I wish—’

‘You can’t do anything. I had to tell you but I didn’t tell you so’s you’d feel you had to do anything’.

‘I’ll be more use when I can think about something other than dying’.

‘You ought to be so happy—’

‘Because I’ve got everything?’ Kate said sharply.

‘I wasn’t going to say that—’

‘But you thought it’.

Rosa said crossly, ‘Of course I did. What do you expect?’

Kate closed her eyes. ‘Go away’.

‘I’m going. To find a begging pitch under a cash machine’.

‘I meant it. I meant it about coming here’. ‘I know. Thank you’.

Kate’s stomach heaved and turned. She flung the phone into the dented pillows and scrambled off the bed. ‘Bye!’ she shouted after it and fled towards the bathroom.

Rosa bought a Mexican bean wrap from the sandwich bar and took it to a bench in Soho Square. At the other end of the bench a hunched girl in a long grey overcoat and tinted glasses was speaking in a low monotone into a mobile phone. She wasn’t speaking English and in a strange, almost undefinable way, she didn’t look English, either. Perhaps, Rosa thought, she was Latvian or Romanian or even Chechen. Perhaps she was a refugee, or on the run; perhaps someone had kept her as a sex slave, sharing a windowless room with five other girls and made to service twenty men a day. Perhaps, Rosa thought, inspecting her wrap and regretting the choice of filling – unfortunate colour, somehow – she led the kind of life that would make Rosa’s current situation seem no more than a temporary and trivial blip in an otherwise indulged and comparatively prosperous one. Maybe the trouble with Rosa was not her circumstances, but her eternal expectations, her conviction that, with enough energy on her part, enough desire, enough – focus, she could bring about the kind of satisfaction that she was sure lay out there, the reward for the brave.

She peeled back the plastic film from the wrap and took an awkward bite. Three red beans immediately fell wetly on to the knee of her jeans – clean that morning -and thence to the path where they lay, bright, exotic and faintly sinister. Glancing at them, Rosa reflected how odd it was that one hardly noticed details in life – or at least, didn’t dignify them with significance – until one was forced into some heightened state of consciousness by joy or grief or disappointment or fear, at which point the whole of existence, from the largest things to the smallest, seemed to take on a kind of meaningful drama. Three red beans on a path, a girl in a grey coat speaking another language softly into a phone – suddenly, both seemed emblematic, important. And yet both were probably no more than irrelevant objects that happened to accompany a moment in Rosa’s life, which she ardently, fervently wished she wasn’t having.