Second Honeymoon (24 page)

He raised his eyes and looked across the group. Rosa’s brother Matthew – pretty successful, from the cut of his suit – was talking to the kind of girl Barney’s father would probably have referred to as a popsie. Barney made his way over to them and stared openly at Naomi. She was like something straight out of a sweetshop.

Matthew stopped what he was saying and said to Naomi, This is Barney. He’s married to my sister’s best friend’.

Naomi looked at him as one might regard something interesting but irrelevant from another species.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ she said.

‘Likewise—’

‘Naomi,’ Matthew said, ‘is Ben’s girlfriend’. ‘Lucky Ben’. Naomi didn’t smile.

She said instead, ‘Your wife’s pregnant, isn’t she?’ ‘How did you know?’

‘I listen,’ Naomi said, ‘I pay attention. I always did, even at school’.

‘More than I ever did—’ Matthew cleared his throat.

Barney switched his gaze from Naomi to Matthew and said, ‘Your mother is amazing’. Matthew nodded.

He looked a little bright-eyed, as if he was feverish. Now that Barney was paying attention, he thought Matthew also looked a bit gaunt, older, somehow.

He smiled and said, ‘I have to say, I wouldn’t exactly have hurried here, without Kate, but I’m awfully glad I did’.

‘It’s brilliant,’ Naomi said, ‘brilliant. I’m going to tell my mum. Does he die?’

‘God,’ Barney said, ‘is this going to be like Shakespeare, stage littered with bodies at the end?’

‘I don’t know,’ Matthew said, ‘I’ve never seen it before, either. I’ve never—’ He stopped.

‘You must be so proud of her,’ Naomi said. ‘If that was my mum up there, I’d be so proud’.

Matthew nodded.

‘I just wish – everyone could see her—’

‘Everyone?’

‘Well,’ Matthew said, swirling the inch of wine left in his glass round and round, ‘everyone I know—’

‘I’d feel like that,’ Naomi said. ‘I’d make them all come. I made Ben come’.

Matthew looked sharply at her.

‘Did you?’

‘Course,’ she said. ‘Family is family, isn’t it?’ ‘Yes,’ Matthew said.

Barney looked at Naomi’s shoulders, and the sequins lying over them, like little trails of stars. Then he thought of Kate sitting upstairs with her hands resting on the mound that was their baby because there was nowhere else to put them. Amazing how different women could be, how different they could become, how – differently they could make you feel about them. He swallowed.

He put out a hand and gave Matthew’s nearest shoulder a quick cuff.

‘Better get back—’

‘OK,’ Matthew said.

Barney glanced at Naomi.

‘Nice to meet you’.

She nodded.

‘All the best for the baby’.

‘Yes,’ Matthew said. ‘Give my love to Kate. Good of you to come’.

Barney put his wine glass down on the nearest surface and made for the stairs. There was a girl standing a little way up them, staring down into the bar, a dark girl in black, with a hat on, and sunglasses. In Barney’s father’s now collectable vinyl record collection from the sixties,
there was, Barney remembered, a 45 rpm record whose cover featured a woman he’d been much struck by, when he was about fourteen, a French woman, all in black, with symmetrically cut black hair and black glasses. Her name was Juliette Greco, and Barney’s father, as an undergraduate as he called it, had hitch-hiked to Paris to hear her sing live in some dive on the Left Bank. Barney hadn’t thought about Juliette Greco for years, but this still, dark girl on the stairs, watching the crowd through the open doorway below her, had just the same cheekbones, just the same air of mystery.

‘Penny for them,’ Barney said cheerfully, as he went up past her, back to Kate.

‘I think,’ Edie said, ‘I’ll just stay down here for a bit’.

Russell, filling his nightly glass of water at the sink, turned round.

‘Really?’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’m tired but not tired. I couldn’t sleep yet. I’ll just stay down here and revel’. Russell turned the tap off. ‘Would you like me to stay with you?’ She shook her head.

‘Sure?’

‘Sure,’ Edie said.

He came across the room to where she was leaning against the cooker, and bent a little, to look into her face. ‘You were quite, quite amazing’. She looked down. ‘Thank you’.

He put the hand not holding the tumbler under her chin.

‘Look at me’.

Edie raised her chin an inch.

‘You were absolutely wonderful and I am unspeakably proud of you’.

She looked at him, saying nothing.

‘And I’m really sorry to have been such a grumpy sod about the children coming back and everything’.

‘Forget it—’

‘I loved watching their faces,’ Russell said. He let go of Edie’s chin and straightened up. ‘I loved seeing all that amazement and awe. If they’d had thought-bubbles coming out of their thick heads, they’d have read: “This is Mum? My Mum?”‘

Edie laughed.

She said, ‘They’re not thick’.

‘Only when it comes to seeing you as other than the provider of home comforts. Dear old room service’. ‘Not just them,’ Edie said, ‘guilty of that—’ ‘I know. I’m sorry. I’m truly sorry about—’ She put a hand up, across his mouth. ‘Enough’.

He nodded. She took her hand away.

She said, ‘I’ll be twenty minutes. You go up’.

He leaned forward and kissed her.

‘See you in twenty minutes, fantastic Mrs Alving’.

She smiled.

She said, stretching against the cooker, ‘You can’t imagine how it feels—’

‘No,’ he said, ‘I can’t, quite. But I can see,’ and then he turned and went humming out of the kitchen and Edie could hear him going up the stairs at a run, the way he had when they first had the house and everything seemed somehow an adventure.

She looked at the clock on the wall above the dresser. Twenty-past one. Arsie was curled up on the nearest kitchen chair, pretending, with great professionalism, that he wasn’t waiting to accompany her to bed. She stepped forward and scooped him up into her arms, and went over to unlock the kitchen door to the garden. Arsie stiffened slightly, alert to the awful possibility of spending the night outside, like any other cat.

‘Don’t worry,’ Edie said, holding him. ‘I’m only taking you out for company’.

The air outside was cool and sweet. It was only at night, Edie thought, that London somehow relaxed into its past, into the villages and huddles of huts it had once been, into a place that would quietly, un-urgently, outlive all its inhabitants. She walked slowly down the damp dark grass, holding Arsie against her neck and shoulder, admiring the way the white climbing rose whose name she could never remember shone in the gloom with an almost eerie luminousness, as if it had stored up energy in the daylight hours to use when darkness fell. There was a seat at the far end of the garden, beside Russell’s shed, a basic wooden playground bench, that they’d ordered from an offer in a Sunday newspaper without realising that Russell was going to have to assemble it, all one painful weekend, with the instruction sheets laid out on the grass,
weighted with stones, and Russell crawling round them, cursing and saying he hadn’t got the right screwdriver. Edie sat down on the bench, and settled Arsie, rather tensely, in her lap.

Down the far end of the garden, the house shone like some tableau of domestic contentment. Its black outline stood sharply against the reddish sky, and every single window was lit, oblong after oblong of clean yellow light, with a shape moving here and there, Matt perhaps, Lazlo in Rosa’s bedroom, Rosa in Ben’s, Russell in the bathroom. To look at that, to look at what she was shortly going to return to, and to remember Freddie Cass’s arm briefly round her shoulders a couple of hours ago and his unengaged voice saying clearly in her ear, ‘Outstanding, Edie. Possibility of West End transfer not a fantasy,’ gave her a feeling of such hope and such pleasure and such energy that she could only suppose it was triumph.

‘How would you like,’ Russell said, ‘a new computer?’ Maeve didn’t look up from her screen. ‘I don’t care for that kind of joke’. Russell sat on the edge of her desk. He said, ‘Haven’t you noticed anything different lately?’ ‘In what way—’ ‘About me’.

She shot him a glance. ‘About
you—
’

‘Yes’.

‘Well,’ Maeve said, taking her hands off the keyboard, ‘you’re in a little earlier’.

‘Exactly’.

‘But,’ Maeve said, ‘I put that down to sulks. Your house is full again, Edie’s making breakfast for the kids, or not making it at all because she’s sleeping in a little these days, and you’re sulking’.

Russell gave a small sigh.

‘I was a bit. But I stopped. I stopped when I saw how beautifully the next generation do it’.

Maeve typed two words. ‘Rosa,’ she said. Russell took no notice.

He said, ‘But I haven’t stopped my intention to galvanise myself. Inject some energy into the business. Buy a new computer’.

‘I may,’ Maeve said, ‘be beyond galvanising. I am fifty-two years old’.

‘Nothing’.

‘You get so’s you don’t want to learn new tricks. You get immune to curiosity. Someone in
Who’s Who
some time ago, maybe it was Elspeth Huxley, listed her main hobby as resting. I can identify with that. A new computer doesn’t sound very restful’.

Russell looked up.

‘And perhaps some new paint’. He looked down at the carpet. ‘And a new floor?’ ‘Stop right there,’ Maeve said. Russell got off her desk. ‘Perhaps—’

‘The voice of good sense’.

Russell took a step towards his own office.

‘Maeve, even if you won’t have a new computer and I never get around to re-decoration, I do want to make some changes. I do want to revive a little
vigour
round here’.

‘Why?’

‘Because otherwise,’ Russell said, ‘I shall feel everything is going backwards’.

Maeve said nothing. Russell disappeared into his office and, uncharacteristically, closed the dividing door behind
him. Maeve looked at the door in some surprise. Having it closed suddenly made her own room seem much smaller, much more isolated, as if an energy supply had been shut off. After a moment or two she could hear, indistinctly, Russell speaking on the telephone and, even though she couldn’t hear what he was saying, she could hear that he was talking animatedly, as if he were urging something, or proposing something. Then he laughed. Maeve looked at her screen. There was half a letter on it, asking why London Energy had abruptly cancelled the direct-debit mandate for the firm’s electricity bills. Would such a letter be any less tedious to compose or type on a new computer with a flat screen edged in silver? By the same token, was Russell’s disappointment in his present personal circumstances going to be mitigated by tricking out his working life with a deliberate renewal of animation and commitment? You could only admire the man for trying, you could only commend him for attempting to fashion something he could live with out of something he really didn’t want, but you couldn’t let him fool himself, not if you’d worked for Russell as long as Maeve had. She looked again at the closed door. She couldn’t – and she wouldn’t – let him delude himself that a new computer would change a single thing.

Vivien laid three heavy books of fabric samples out on her white bed. The woman who ran the local interior-design shop had said pointedly that, while it was difficult to advise precisely on the changes Vivien was after without seeing the room, she herself thought that a
strong neutral colour, such as tobacco or anthracite, often helped to make an all-white room less, well,
bridal
. She suggested plain linen curtains and possibly a valance for the bed, with maybe a dark alpaca throw and a bedside rug with a masculine feel, edged, say, in leather. Vivien opened her mouth to say that she didn’t want brown or grey in her bedroom, or a masculine feel for that matter, and then remembered why she was in the shop in the first place, and closed it again.

‘It’s not that I don’t like it,’ Max had said, lying against a pile of her white broderie anglaise pillows. ‘It’s just that I don’t feel very comfortable in it. I feel like the lodger’.

Vivien giggled. She was sitting at her dressing table -something she had only acquired after Max’s departure -and was watching him watching her in the mirror, like someone in a movie.

‘Well, you are’.

Max immediately looked dejected.

He said in a small voice, ‘Am I?’

Vivien considered. She had already persuaded him out of the gold chain round his neck (on the grounds that she hadn’t given it to him) and felt that possibly that was sufficient evidence of having the upper hand, for one day.

She smiled at him in the mirror.

‘Just teasing’.

Max said, ‘It’s a beautiful room, doll. I mean it. You’ve done it beautifully. It’s just that it makes me feel a bit out of place’. He grinned at her. ‘A bit hairy’.

She turned slowly on the dressing-table stool and crossed her legs.

‘I’m not changing the bed—’ He winked.

‘I’m not asking you to’.

She waved a hand towards the curtains.

‘Maybe those—’

Max looked at the curtains. They were heavy white voile, looped up with white cords. They reminded him of the day his sister got confirmed, and he managed -no, was allowed – to put his hand up the skirt of her friend Sheila’s white confirmation dress.

He said, ‘That’d help, doll’.

Vivien stood up. She was wearing satin backless mules he’d bought her and walking in them required concentration.

She said, ‘What do you suggest instead?’ Max looked at the curtains a bit longer, and then he said, ‘Velvet would be nice’.

‘Velvet!’

‘Yes. Why not?’

‘You,’ Vivien said, ‘are stuck in the seventies’. ‘I was young then—’ ‘I know’.

‘And in some ways,’ Max said, transferring his gaze from the curtains to Vivien’s feet, ‘I haven’t grown up at all’. He grinned again and sat up a little straighter. ‘Luckily for you’. Now, looking at the blank squares of linen laid out on her bed, Vivien tried to recall the warm feeling of acquiescence that had induced her to think of
changing her bedroom. Max hadn’t actually called it ‘our’ bedroom but, with his clothes in the cupboards and his aftershave on her bathroom shelf, she knew she had rather conceded exclusive possession. And sometimes – often even – that shared occupancy was wonderful, leaving her with a glow that lasted long enough to enable her to look with pity at women who came into the bookshop to buy novels to beguile solitary evenings. It was extraordinary not to be in that position any more, the position of buying single salmon steaks and half-bottles of wine and four-roll packs of lavatory paper. But there was also some little reservation too, some small but unmistakable loss of freedom, the freedom to have gauzy white curtains instead of plain dark ones that wouldn’t, as Max said while they were taking rather a riotous shower together, make a red-blooded man feel like a fairy.