Second Honeymoon (26 page)

‘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’.

‘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.