Second Honeymoon (13 page)

The door to Russell’s office stood open, as usual. Russell himself wasn’t in his office, having gone to a meeting with a television production company that had secured an advertising contract for a major bank and was in search of both actors and actors’ voices. Maeve could visualise him at the meeting, slightly rumpled amid the black T-shirts and business suits, but not to be lightly dismissed on account of having known the business, and the people in it, since before some of his competitors were born. If Russell wasn’t the kind of agent
who commuted to Los Angeles and had a country house for weekends, it was because he didn’t want to be.

‘Not blazingly ambitious,’ he’d said to Maeve when he first interviewed her all those years ago. ‘Just want to have a nice time. It’s what growing up in the North does to you – you’re either driven by the work ethic of your childhood, or you decide to react against it. What you see, Miss O’Leary, is my small rebellion’.

All the same, he probably wouldn’t come back from the meeting entirely empty-handed. He’d taken a few photographs, a few voice tapes, and he would proffer them casually, merely saying, ‘You might like to consider this,’ in the tone of voice he used to his clients when persuading them to accept a job that paid reasonably but only required a fraction of their acting skills. The clients, having reluctantly accepted, would then lie across the wicker sofas in Maeve’s office and groan to her.

‘I said I’d never be a lawn mower again. I promised myself no more cartoon bears. I
swore
not to be a tea bag. Not ever again. Not ever’.

Maeve had made a sign years before, which she had stuck on the back of her computer, the side that faced the sofa. It read: ‘Just think of the money’ and it had been there so long that the edges had stiffened and curled. It was supposed to save her saying it out loud, over and over, but of course everyone needed to be told, equally over and over, that being the voice of a northern Building society was going to pay the bills until that turning-point movie role became a happening rather than a hope.

Maeve got up from her desk and went into Russell’s office to collect the small receipts that he threw into an old leather collar box on the cluttered shelves behind his desk. The collar box had belonged to his grandfather, whose initials, the same as Russell’s, could still be seen, faintly stamped into the leather below the fastening. What would that Russell Boyd, Maeve sometimes wondered, that hard-working, God-fearing manufacturer of fish barrels for the fleets that worked off the northern coasts, close to Hull, have made of his grandson being in a poncy job like this? And what of those framed photographs, signed by some of Russell’s better-known clients, all parted lips and smouldering eyes and flourishes? Maeve took down the collar box and opened the lid. There wasn’t much in it. Russell might like a nice life in some ways, but that didn’t include, it seemed, taking many taxis.

From her own office, the street doorbell rang. Maeve put down the collar box and pressed the audio button on the intercom.

‘Russell Boyd Associates’.

‘It’s Edie,’ Edie said.

‘You come on up,’ Maeve said. ‘He’s not here, but I’m expecting him’.

She pushed the door release, and a second later heard its muffled crash, closing behind Edie. She opened the office door and waited for Edie’s steps up the stairs, light and quick, to come closer. Edie was wearing jeans, and a green wool jacket, with her hair pushed into the kind of cap Maeve remembered people wearing in the sixties, a gamine kind of cap, with a big peak.

‘I’ve to congratulate you,’ Maeve said, as Edie reached the final landing, ‘on getting that play’.

Edie gave her a pat on the arm. They had known one another for twenty-five years and had never kissed. Edie was not the kind of woman, Maeve considered, who scattered kisses about just anyhow, actor or no actor, and in any case a mutual sense of propriety had kept them friendly but formal.

‘It’s good,’ Edie said. She was panting slightly. ‘I’m enjoying it. No wonder Ibsen went to Italy. You couldn’t breathe, then, in Norway’. She looked into Russell’s office. ‘Where’s he gone?’

‘Meeting with Daydream Productions. Should be back any minute. Now, will you have a cup of coffee?’

Edie considered.

‘I don’t think so—’

‘I make it all day,’ Maeve said. ‘It’s never enough for these people just to come here and see Russell and go. They need nourishment and a sympathetic ear and I’m the provider of both’.

Edie walked over to the window of Russell’s office.

She said, almost idly, ‘I suppose Rosa hasn’t been in?’

‘Not for a while,’ Maeve said. ‘Not for a month or so. Looking at you, I can’t see where that height of hers comes from’.

Edie shrugged.

‘They’re all taller than me. I used to have to buy shoes in Chinatown’.

‘It’s modern nourishment,’ Maeve said. ‘It’s all this feeding. When I was growing up, in County Sligo, you
could have put three children into a modern one’. The street door crashed again.

‘That’ll be him,’ Maeve said. ‘You’re a family of slam-mers. Not another soul in this building slams the way he does’.

Edie took her cap off and put it on Russell’s desk. Then she sat down in his swivel chair and leaned back.

‘If you’re taking him away,’ Maeve said, ‘I’ve some letters for him to sign before you do’.

Edie shook her head.

‘I just want to ask him something’.

Russell’s footsteps could be heard on the landing and then crossing Maeve’s office.

He appeared in the doorway.

‘Well,’ he said. He was smiling. ‘How lovely’.

Edie regarded him.

Maeve said, ‘And how did it go?’

Russell was looking at Edie.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Good. Several nibbles that might well amount to a bite or two’.

He put the battered canvas bag in which he carried papers down on a chair and went round his desk, stooping to kiss Edie.

‘Hello’.

Edie said, ‘I could have rung but I was restless’. ‘Good,’ Russell said again. He perched himself on the edge of his desk. ‘You wouldn’t be here otherwise’. Maeve moved towards her office.

‘Will I shut the door?’

Russell half turned.

‘Don’t bother’. ‘Please,’ Edie said, past him. He turned back. ‘What’s happened?’

Edie waited until Maeve, with elaborate care, had closed the connecting door. Then she said, ‘Something a bit puzzling—’

‘What?’

She put a half-closed hand up near her face, as if she was examining the cuticles. ‘Vivi rang’.

‘And?’

‘She said Rosa was moving in with her’.

‘Well,’ Russell said, a shade too cheerfully, ‘isn’t that a good thing?’

‘Why didn’t I hear it from Rosa?’

‘Well, perhaps Vivi got in first—’

‘Why isn’t Rosa ringing? Why don’t I know what’s happening to Rosa?’

To be honest,’ Russell said, ‘I don’t know what’s happening to her either’.

Edie took her gaze off her cuticles and directed it at Russell.

‘Don’t you think we
should
know?’ ‘Darling, she’s twenty-six—’

‘I don’t care if she’s a hundred and six. She’s not settled or happy and we are her parents and we should

know’.

Russell stopped smiling.

‘Yes’.

Edie leaned forward so that she could look penetratingly up at Russell.

‘There was a hint in something Vivi said, just a hint, that something has been going on, to do with Rosa’.

‘Ah—’

‘And when I’d rung off and was pacing about learning my lines, it came to me that perhaps something had been going on to do with Rosa, to do with Matt too, for that matter, something that I didn’t know about, but which you possibly did’.

Russell looked out of the window and waited.

‘Well, I couldn’t go on pacing up and down, declaiming about dissolution and debauchery, I couldn’t concentrate any more, so I got on the tube, and I came.

Russell?’

‘Damn Vivi,’ Russell said lightly.

Edie put her hand on his sleeve.

‘What,’ Edie said, ‘have you and Rosa been doing?’

Russell looked down at Edie’s hand on his arm. He felt a sudden uncharacteristic and complete loss of temper, and moved his arm so that Edie’s hand fell from it.

‘Nothing,’ he said furiously. ‘Nothing. Nothing to do with you’.

‘But—’

‘Did you hear me?’ Edie stared at him.

She hesitated and then she said uncertainly, ‘If you say so—’

‘I do’.

‘But is she OK?’

Russell turned away and bent over his desk, staring deliberately at the computer screen.

‘When she isn’t,’ he said more calmly, ‘I’ll tell you’.

There were four messages on Rosa’s mobile phone, one from her mother, one from her father, one from her aunt, and one from her older brother. Only the last one did she have any inclination to return. The others – well, how depressing was it, at her age, and stuffed into the sky-blue polyester blazer with yellow plastic sunburst buttons required by the travel company, to have a string of messages on your phone that are all, but
all
, from your family? It would be all very well, of course, if there were
other
messages, messages from friends and – well, better not think about that. Better not remember how happy she had been to let Josh make her miserable, better not even start down that train of thought that began by fantasising how it might have been if she had never met him, never fallen in love with him, never been so sure that keeping him mattered more than anything else in the world. She’d hardly taken her eyes off her phone in the Josh days.

The messages were all, except for Matt’s, of a kind that she didn’t much want to hear. It was evident that her aunt had rung her mother to have a small but unmistakable gloat about Rosa’s living arrangements, and, in the course of conversation, had hinted that something had occurred to prevent Rosa’s turning at once to her parents in time of need. Her mother had then, it appeared, gone straight to find her father, who had had to confess what
had happened, and they had both subsequently left messages, her father’s apologetic but brisk, her mother’s imploring her to come home. Matthew’s, by contrast, was completely unemotional. He just said he’d like to catch up sometime soon. He was plainly calling from the office because his call took ten seconds.

Rosa dropped her phone back in the bag at her feet. She was not going to deal with any of this just now. Despite the blue polyester blazer, today had been a reasonably good day. She had sold a weekend in Venice to a party of six, booked a stag group to Vilnius and reserved several family-holiday special-offers in Croatia. If they all came good, it was the most commission she had made so far, which might translate into the first tiny repayment of debt, the first small step back to even a vestige of independence. If you coupled that with the prospect of Vivien’s spare bedroom – a bit fussy, a bit overfurnished, but comfortable and convenient and almost free – it was not, Rosa considered, quite as black an outlook as it had been a month before.

She moved the mouse for her computer to access her emails. It was not permitted, in the travel company, to use the email service for personal messages, but who was going to check on her if she bent the rule just once? She typed in Matthew’s work address.

‘Tx for message,’ Rosa wrote, one eye on the office manager eight feet away straightening the rack of brochures. ‘Yes, would be good to meet. When? Where?’ And then she added, pulling a booking form towards her in order to look like work, ‘Need to talk. Parents!!!’

The office manager turned from the brochure rack. She had ironed straight hair and favoured pearlised lip-gloss.

She looked straight at Rosa. ‘Checking your bookings?’ Rosa smiled broadly. ‘Just checking’.

‘News on flat???’ Laura’s email said. ‘Need update!’ Then, ‘We are thinking of a Smeg fridge. Would pink be idiotic and would I get tired of it?’

Ruth sighed. The notion of a huge pink fridge even existing, let alone being a preoccupation, was at this moment so irrelevant as to be fantastical. And upsetting. Ruth wasn’t sure she had ever felt this sad. There was, really, no other word for this leaden suffering, this sensation that her heart, as a muscle, actually hurt. Every time she thought about Matthew, which she did constantly, she was invaded by an aching distress, which she could recognise, even while it was happening, as one of the most
real
emotions she had ever felt.

But, at the same time, she was certain she couldn’t slow her life to accommodate his. When he had uttered the word ‘pitiful’ she had discovered that, even if she energetically listed and acknowledged all his qualities, she would always know – because
he
would always know – that in a vital area of achievement and contribution he could not at the moment begin to match her. He was afraid of being
pitied or made allowance for, and he was right. He knew what he could bear, and what he couldn’t, and – which made her throat constrict with love for him – he had more resolve in that department than she did. And not only resolve, but dignity. He had, in a way, taken quiet charge of their last meeting in the empty flat. He had told her that, even if she withdrew from buying it, the dynamic of their relationship had changed in a way that could not be changed back again. She had clutched at straws and he had not joined in. When she thought of the way he had behaved, she wasn’t at all sure she could stand missing him so much.

Her offer on the flat had been accepted. She had arranged a mortgage through the bank used by her company. What was extremely strange was that all the time she was involved in these transactions she had felt she was right in proceeding with them, and also she had not sensed any diminishment in her excitement over the flat. How could it be that one could feel such heartache and such hope at the same time? How was it that something could feel so right and so wrong simultaneously? And how could one ever know, in these shapeless days of moral codes being so much a matter of personal choice, if one was behaving in the way that one ought to be behaving? She put the heels of her hands up against her temples and closed her eyes. What, anyway, did ‘ought’ mean any more?