‘One minute you’re a couple pleasing yourselves and the next minute—’ ‘Eleven hours, actually’. ‘Everything’s changed for ever’. Kate was still gazing at the baby. ‘I can’t believe he wasn’t ever not here’. ‘Is Barney moonstruck?’ ‘Completely,’ Kate said. ‘Bought me a ring—’

‘A ring?’

‘An eternity ring’.

‘Heavens,’ Rosa said, ‘how very – established’. She sat down on the edge of Kate’s bed and looked at her. ‘Are you OK?’

Kate pushed her hair behind one ear.

‘Apart from crying and worrying about feeding and being in agony in the sitting department, I am ecstatic, thank you’.

Rosa said seriously, ‘He’s very lovely, you know’.

Kate began to cry in earnest. She hunted about blindly behind her for a tissue.

‘Here,’ Rosa said, holding one out. ‘Sorry—’

‘What d’you mean, sorry?’ ‘All this crying—’

‘I thought you were supposed to cry’. Kate blew her nose.

‘Talk to me’. ‘What about?’

‘About the outside world. About something not to do with the baby, something that won’t make me cry’. Rosa looked back at the baby.

‘I thought one of the best things about a baby was that you didn’t have to think about the outside world’.

Kate blew again. She gave Rosa a nudge through the bedclothes.

‘Do as you’re told’.

Well,’ Rosa said, ‘Vivien and Max are playing Blind Date – she has very blonde new highlights – Dad has discovered work and I am – oh God, Kate, something so funny!’

Kate bent back towards the baby.

‘What?’

‘I went to sleep on Lazlo’s bed’. Kate’s head whipped round. ‘You what?’

‘Well, the house was empty and it is my bedroom after all, and I just lay on my bed for a second and next thing I knew it was three in the morning and I was still there and he was asleep beside me on the floor’.

Kate sat bolt upright and winced. ‘Ow. Ow! What did you do?’

‘Got up,’ Rosa said, ‘really stealthily. He’d put a towel over me—’

‘That was so sweet—’

‘So I put it over him and tiptoed downstairs’. ‘And next morning?’ Rosa looked away. She said, ‘I haven’t seen him since’. ‘Have you told your mother?’ Rosa turned her head back. ‘No. I haven’t told anyone. Why should I?’ Kate screwed her tissue up and put it on her bedside locker.

‘When you do see Lazlo again, what will you say?’ ‘Oh,’ Rosa said grandly, ‘I’ll say don’t get any ideas. What else would I say?’


Lazlo was in the bathroom. He had been in the bathroom, Matthew calculated, for twenty-eight minutes. What any man could find to do in a bathroom for twenty-eight minutes was beyond Matthew, especially a man whose life seemed dedicated, in a manner that was unfairly but unquestionably irritating, to being no trouble to anyone. If he was ill, there was a perfectly good second lavatory downstairs. If he was poncing himself up, he could do that all day while Matthew was at work and he, Lazlo, was doing whatever actors did or didn’t do while waiting to go to work. Matthew bent his head towards the hinge of the bathroom door. Silence. He raised his fist and thumped the panels. ‘Hey there!’

There was a pause, and then a slight scuffle and then Lazlo opened the door. He was fully dressed and his eyes looked pink.

He said at once, ‘Sorry’.

‘You OK?’

Lazlo nodded. He stepped aside so that Matthew could go past him. He didn’t even seem to be holding a towel.

Matthew wondered, fleetingly and awkwardly, if he’d been crying.

He said gruffly, ‘Got to get to work—’ ‘Yes,’ Lazlo said, ‘of course’.

He moved away from Matthew across the landing towards the stairs.

Matthew looked after him.

He called, ‘No big deal, you know!’

Lazlo turned briefly and gave a wan smile. Then he began to climb the stairs to the top floor. Matthew shut the bathroom door and locked it. Someone – Rosa probably – had left a towel on the floor and there were red hairs – Rosa definitely – plastered to the side of the basin. The shelf above the basin and the ledge around the bath were now crammed with bottles, so crammed that several had fallen into the bath and were lying there in the shallow pool of water left by the last person’s shower. The shower curtain – was this the last bathroom in civilisation to have a horrible plastic shower curtain still? – clung to the tiled wall in clammy folds, and the plug to the basin, which Matthew attached to its chain a dozen times since returning home, had become detached again and was lying in the soap dish.

Matthew took off his bathrobe and attempted to hang it behind the door. The hook on the door, never large enough, now bore his father’s bathrobe, his mother’s cotton kimono – that must be fifteen or twenty years old now – some peculiar oriental garment of Rosa’s and a large towel mounded on top. The cork-seated chair in the corner was piled with clean but unironed laundry, several newspapers and a telephone directory. The towel rail, never adequate for a family of five in the first place, was draped with a large, drying duvet cover.

Matthew let out an exasperated breath.

‘Nowhere in this whole bloody house even to put down a towel’.

He dropped his robe and towel on the floor and yanked the shower curtain rattling along the length of the bath. It was patterned with starfish. It had always been patterned with starfish but for some reason this morning, the starfish looked completely unbearable. He leaned down, turned the bath taps on and pressed the chrome button that would divert the water through the shower-head. The button sprang out again and ice-cold water deluged Matthew’s feet. He swore and pressed again and ice-cold water cascaded on to his back.

Someone thumped on the door.

‘Sod off!’ Matthew shouted.

‘I need a shower,’ Edie called.

Matthew turned the taps off and climbed out of the bath.

‘There’s no hot water—’ ‘Nonsense’.

Matthew bent and retrieved his towel. He wound it round his waist and unlocked the door. Edie was standing outside in her nightgown and a long purple cardigan.

He said distinctly, ‘There is no hot water’. Edie looked at his towel.

‘Why all this modesty? I’m your mother, for goodness’ sake. I’ve seen it all before, I’ve—’

‘I can’t have a shower,’ Matthew said. ‘You can’t have a shower. No one can, unless they want it stone cold’.

Edie pushed the sleeves of her cardigan up.

‘Who’s taken all the water?’

‘I don’t know,’ Matthew said. ‘Dad, Rosa, Lazlo—’

Edie peered past Matthew into the bathroom.

‘Look at the state of it—’

‘Yes’.

‘It’s like living in a student flat’.

Matthew said nothing. He was aware, suddenly, of how uncomfortable he was, standing there in nothing but a bath towel with his mother three feet away in nothing but a nightie.

He said, ‘Doesn’t matter. I’ll get a shower at the gym’.

Edie stared at him.

‘Why?’

‘Because I want a shower and there’s no hot water here and there is there’.

Edie said loudly, ‘Are you intending to leave this bathroom looking like this?’

Matthew hesitated, then he said childishly, ‘It’s not my mess’.

‘Really?’

‘I keep all my things in my bedroom—’ ‘But you use the bathroom—’ ‘Of course’.

‘You all use the bathroom. But none of you seems prepared to pick up so much as a sock’.

Matthew wondered if Lazlo could hear them.

‘I pick up my socks, Mum. I’m sure Lazlo picks up his’.

‘Don’t be so idiotically literal,’ Edie said crossly.

‘Then don’t be unfair’.

‘Unfair?’

‘Yes,’ Matthew said.

Edie wrapped the edges of her cardigan tightly around her and took a step towards him.

‘Matthew,’ she said, ‘I am working, in case it’s escaped your notice. I am working six nights and two afternoons a week. If this play transfers, I shall be working like that for months. I am also, for some reason, expected to shop and cook and clean for five adults, never mind the laundry. How dare you suggest that lending a hand isn’t your responsibility?’

Matthew said, ‘It isn’t like it used to be’.

‘What isn’t?’

‘Living here. Living as a family’. ‘Well of course it isn’t,’ Edie said. ‘You’re twice the size and paying taxes’.

‘Exactly’. ‘Exactly what?’

‘Mum,’ Matthew said patiently, ‘we’re paying to live here’.

There was a short pause.

Then Edie said with incredulity, ‘You mean that absolves you from being obliged to contribute anything except money?’

‘No’.

‘What then?’

Matthew said desperately, ‘Oh get a cleaner, then. Get someone to do the ironing. Get the hot water fixed. Stop – stop being such a martyr’.

Edie watched him for a moment.

Then she said sharply, ‘Go to your gym, then’.

‘It isn’t easy,’ Matthew said. ‘None of this is. It isn’t easy for anyone. We’re all too old to live like this’.

‘Only if you want it to be like a five-star hotel’.

Matthew looked back at the bathroom. His robe was still lying on the floor. He felt a wave of rage and hopelessness flood through him.

‘I wish,’ he said bitterly.


Ruth chose a French sleepsuit for Kate’s baby. It was the only one she could find that wasn’t an unsuitable colour for a baby and that didn’t have a plasticised cartoon character stuck to the front. Instead, it was white, with a small bear outlined in grey, positioned where a breast pocket might have been, crowned with a delicate galaxy of stars. She took a long time choosing it, mooning along a rack of tiny socks and garments labelled ‘0-3 mois’ in a daze.

In addition to the sleepsuit, she bought Kate a bottle of bath oil and a candle in a glass tumbler. She had seen in a magazine at the hairdresser’s a photograph of a mother and a baby in a candlelit bath together, both, naturally, extremely beautiful and deeply contented, and the image had struck Ruth as so completely desirable that it had made her want to cry. She had taken all the presents back to her flat and wrapped them in tissue and ribbons with elaborate care and then sat looking at the package and wondering if she was, in fact, overdoing it for someone she knew as little as she knew Kate. The answer was that yes, she probably was overdoing it but the need to overdo it overshadowed even the possibility of embarrassment. The package sat on the table by the window of her sitting room for almost a week before she had the courage to take it to the hospital and, when she did finally get there, she was told that Mrs Ferguson and the baby had gone home three days ago and hadn’t the family let her know?

Ruth took the package back to her office and sat it on her desk where she could see it. It felt extremely important that she should get it to Kate, extremely important that she should see Kate, but she – she who was all boldness in her professional life – felt a disconcerting diffidence about telephoning. Supposing Kate was feeding the baby? Supposing Kate didn’t immediately recognise her voice and said, ‘Oh – Ruth!’ in that tone of voice people use when they are recovering their social balance? She looked at the baby package again. Then she looked back at her screen which, among all the work emails, showed three unanswered ones from Laura in Leeds. She hadn’t even opened them. They would, she suspected, be about weddings and washing machines and she felt no desire to hear anything about either. She took a deep breath and dialled Kate’s number.

It rang and rang and just as she was about to ring off Kate said breathlessly, ‘Hello?’

‘Kate—’ ‘Yes’.

‘It’s – Ruth’.

There was a fraction of a pause.

Then Kate said, ‘Oh – Ruth!’

Ruth swallowed.

‘Were you feeding the baby?’

‘I wouldn’t answer the phone if I was doing that,’ Kate said. ‘When I’m feeding him, the world goes away. It has to’.

‘I was wondering—’

‘Yes?’

‘Could I – could I come and see him?’ ‘Oh,’ Kate said, and then, in a different tone, ‘Of course—’

‘If it isn’t a bother—’

‘No,’ Kate said, ‘of course not’.

‘After work perhaps—’

‘Yes,’ Kate said, ‘yes. That’d be good. Come after work. What day is it?’ ‘Thursday’.

‘Come on Monday,’ Kate said. ‘Barney’s back early’. She paused and then she said, ‘It’s nice of you to ring’.

‘I wanted to,’ Ruth said. She looked at the package again. ‘I really did’.

Russell intercepted Rosa on the stairs, her arms full of the sheets she had just stripped from her bed.