Second Honeymoon (19 page)

While she was in the shower, Ruth played Mozart. It was a recording of
Don Giovanni
, and she turned it up very loud, so that she could hear it above the water, and the music and the water could combine in a way that would be briefly overwhelming and stop her thinking. Her mother had once said to her, when she was about fourteen, that it didn’t do to think too much, that you
could think yourself out of being able to cope with ordinary life, which Ruth had then considered to be her mother’s excuse for ceaseless practical activity. She now thought her mother’s theory had possibly a certain truth to it, and that her mother’s passion for organisation and committees and busyness had been a way of dealing with not being able to use her capacities to the full. It was a case, perhaps, of accommodating yourself to what was permitted, as long as – crucial, this – you didn’t start raging against whoever did the permitting in the first place and why they’d got the power.

Ruth turned off the shower and stepped out into the bathroom and a wall of singing. She’d keep it that loud, she thought, until somebody from a neighbouring flat either complained or played something she hated at equal volume. She picked up a towel and wound herself into it, like a sarong, then went barefoot across the smooth, pale wood floor of her sitting room to her desk. She bent over her computer. There would be nothing in her inbox, just as there were no messages on her answerphone, no texts on her mobile. Apart from work, there’d been a sudden cessation of all communication, as if someone had shut a soundproof door on a party.

There was one new message on her email. She sat down in her bath towel and clicked her mouse.

The message was from Laura.

‘Dear Ruth,’ it said. ‘Just ring him!’

Ruth looked up at the ceiling high above her and closed her eyes. There was a lump in her throat.

‘Just ring him!’

‘Are you sure?’ Lazlo said.

Edie pushed the sugar towards him across the café table.

‘Oh yes’.

‘But it would be your son’s room—’ ‘Or my daughter’s. We’ve had lots of actors there, over the last few years, on and off—’

‘Really’

‘Oh yes’.

‘What about,’ Lazlo said, taking two packets of white sugar, ‘your husband?’

‘He’s called Russell’.

‘I know,’ Lazlo said. ‘I just felt a bit shy’.

‘Shy?’

‘I don’t know my own father very well’. ‘Russell isn’t at all alarming. Russell is very used to actor lodgers’.

‘Have you told him?’

‘What?’

‘That,’ Lazlo said, ‘you were going to offer a room to me’.

Edie watched him tear the sugar packets across and pour the contents into the cushion of milky foam on the top of his coffee.

‘Lazlo dear, I don’t need to ask him’.

‘I said tell—’

‘I don’t need to tell him either. He likes having the house full. He likes having it
used’.
Lazlo began to stir his coffee.

‘I must say, it would be wonderful. It would make me feel—’ He stopped, and then he said, ‘Different’.

‘Good’.

He looked at her and then he looked away.

‘I would try – not to be a nuisance’.

‘If you were,’ Edie said, ‘I probably wouldn’t notice. My children, with the possible exception of Matthew, are usually a nuisance. If you don’t have any nuisance in your life, I’ve discovered, something dies in you. It all gets very bland and boring’. She leaned across the table. ‘When I was a child, I shared a bedroom with my sister, Vivien, and we fought all the time because she was very tidy and I was very messy, extra messy, probably, to annoy her, and when our mother said we could have separate rooms, I was miserable. There was no point in being messy on my own’. She looked across at Lazlo and smiled at him. ‘There still isn’t’.

He said, ‘Is that the sister that Rosa lives with?’

‘Yes’.

‘Are you still fighting?’ ‘Certainly,’ Edie said.

‘I never fight with my sister. I wouldn’t risk it. You have to have enough family to take that kind of risk’.

‘Goodness,’ Edie said, ‘what a dramatic view of family. You sound like a Russian novel. If that’s what you’re expecting, you’ll find us very dull’.

‘I don’t think so’.

She reached across the table and grasped his wrist. ‘We’ll like having you. Really’.

He shook his head and gave her a quick glance, and in the course of it, she saw he had tears in his eyes.

‘Heavens, Lazlo,’ Edie said, laughing. ‘Heavens, it’s only a
room’.

The evening paper had two columns advertising rooms and flats to let. They varied in monthly price by several hundred pounds and also in tone of advertisement, some being baldly commercial and some more haphazard, personal offers of flat sharing. Ben was certain that Naomi, even if she could be persuaded to leave her mother’s flat, would be adamant about not sharing any accommodation with anyone other than Ben. It had been an eye-opener for Ben, living with Naomi and her mother, to see the fierceness with which privacy and possessions were not just owned, but guarded. Naomi’s mother didn’t refer to ‘the’ kettle or ‘the’ bathroom: both were ‘my’. For Ben, growing up in a house where ownership of anything that wasn’t intensely personal seemed comfortably communal, this domestic demarcation and pride had been very surprising.

‘Feet off my coffee table,’ Naomi’s mother had said to him on his first evening. ‘And the way I like my toilet seat is down’.

Ben had felt little resentment about this. Faced with a rigidly organised kitchen and a tremendous expectation of conformity, he had, rather to his surprise, felt more an awed respect. Naomi’s mother spoke to him in exactly the same way that she spoke to Naomi after all, and as Naomi plainly thought her mother’s standards and requirements were as natural as breathing, Ben was, at least for a while, prepared to pick up his bath towel and replace the ironing board – ironing was a bit of a revelation – on its specially designated hooks behind the kitchen door. Only once, in his first few weeks, did he say to Naomi, watching her while she made an extremely neat cheese sandwich, ‘Has your mum always been like this?’

Naomi didn’t even glance at him.

She shook her long blonde hair back over her shoulders and said evenly, ‘It’s how she likes it’.

Living the way you liked, even Ben could see, was what you were entitled to if you owned a house or paid the rent. Indeed, one of the reasons he had left home, besides the consuming desire to spend the nights in the same bed as Naomi, was a strong, if unarticulated, understanding that he wanted to live in a way that didn’t coincide with the way his parents were living but, as it was their house, their entitlement in the matter came before his. Living with Naomi’s mother was, especially at the beginning, no problem at all because of Naomi herself and because her mother, for all her insistence on her own particular rule of law, was someone whose palpable industry and independence required – and got -Ben’s deference. In addition, and to Ben’s abiding and
grateful amazement, she seemed to find his presence in her flat and her daughter’s bed perfectly natural. There hadn’t been a syllable uttered, or even implied, that Ben could construe as an enquiry about their relationship, let alone a criticism.

All this, for some time, made Ben amenable to making his large male presence in a small female flat as invisible as possible. Indeed, it was only gradually, and not in any way triggered by a particular incident, that he began to feel a sense of being both watched and stifled. The setting down of his coffee mug or beer can, once a matter of discovery and trial and error, became insidiously more of an issue, as did the placing – or even presence – of his boots in the narrow hallway. Naomi’s mother didn’t operate by correcting her daughter or her daughter’s boyfriend more than once. After that, she took matters into her own hands and effected the changes she wanted, in silence, but in the kind of silence that made Ben, rather to his surprise, think wistfully of his own mother’s approach to domestic management. He had absolutely no desire to confront or displease Naomi’s mother, but it had begun to occur to him, several times a day, that he was on a hiding to nothing because she was, in fact, constantly changing the goalposts. That morning, the hunt for his boots had ended in discovering them in a plastic carrier bag hanging on a hook under his overcoat.

He’d said nothing to Naomi about moving out with him. With the newly hatched confidence of having had his older brother recently take his advice, he had decided
that the best course of action was to identify some flats, or even rooms in flats, and choose one or two to show her so that she would have something to visualise and also have to make a choice. If he just said to her, ‘What about a place of our own?’ she’d look at him as if he wasn’t in his right mind and say, ‘What for?’ But if he had a key to a door, and opened it, and showed her the possibilities of a way of living that lay beyond it, she might be persuaded. Or at least, he thought, staring hard at a photograph in the window in front of him, she might hesitate a little before she said, ‘What for?’

‘I’ll have tomato juice,’ Kate said. Rosa paused on her way to the bar. ‘Are you sure? I’m paying—’

‘I only half feel like “drink” drink,’ Kate said, ‘and I don’t like the way people look at me when I drink it’.

‘Do they?’

‘Well, I think they do’.

‘Right,’ Rosa said, ‘tomato juice it is’.

‘Should you be paying?’

‘Yes’.

‘Can you—’

‘I got a bonus this month,’ Rosa said. ‘Slovenia will be overflowing this summer, thanks to me’.

Kate said, smiling, ‘So you’re making headway on the money?’

Rosa shook her hair back.

‘Well, I can afford the interest on the interest’.

‘Rosa—’

‘I can afford to buy you a tomato juice’. ‘I don’t want you—’

‘I do,’ Rosa said and went away to the bar.

Kate shrugged off her jacket and pushed her shoes off, under the table. She hadn’t told Barney she was meeting Rosa for a drink because, for some reason, Barney had assumed that not having Rosa in their flat meant not having Rosa in their life, either. He maintained that this was not because he didn’t like Rosa, but only that he didn’t think Rosa was good for Kate: too demanding, he said, too exhausting, too needy. Kate, who had declined, in the course of their lavish and traditional wedding, to promise to obey him, wondered if that was, in fact, exactly what she was doing. What was it, in an emotional relationship, that constituted a loving and generous action, and what – only apparently differentiated by a whisker – an act of submission instead?

Rosa came back and put two glasses on the table. Kate’s tomato juice had a stick of celery planted in it and a wedge of lemon balanced on the rim. She took the celery out and laid it, dripping, across the ashtray on the table.

Then she said, licking tomato juice off her fingers, ‘I saw Ruth’.

Rosa looked up from her drink. ‘Why did you?’

‘It was chance,’ Kate said. ‘We were both buying fruit in Borough Market’.

‘And?’

‘She looked awful. And was sort of agitated. I think she thinks everyone disapproves of her’. ‘I do,’ Rosa said.

Kate leaned back, adjusting her T-shirt round her belly. ‘Do you now?’ ‘Uh huh’.

‘For hurting Matthew? Or for being very good at what she does and earning a lot of money?’ Rosa eyed her.

‘For hurting Matthew, of course’.

‘Really’.

‘Yes, really’.

‘I don’t believe you,’ Kate said. ‘I think you can’t handle her being ambitious’. ‘Well,
you
aren’t ambitious—’

‘Yes, I am,’ Kate said. ‘I didn’t think about it before I got pregnant, but I think about it a lot now and I know that I don’t just like my job, I want it’.

Rosa picked up her drink.

‘I don’t think I am—’

‘Maybe not. And that’s fine. What’s not fine is thinking badly of poor Ruth because she is’. ‘Poor Ruth, is it?’

‘Yes,’ Kate said, ‘poor Ruth. She looked to me like she misses Matthew like anything’.

‘Well, she chose to go ahead with this flat—’ ‘And he chose—’ ‘He had to,’ Rosa said. ‘Oh, Rosa—’

‘It was humiliation or get out’.

‘But
she
wasn’t doing the humiliating,’ Kate said. ‘Or do you think she should have taken a lesser job and earned less just to make him feel better? How humiliating is that?’

Rosa closed her eyes.

‘He’s my brother’.

‘About whom,’ Kate said, ‘you are often very rude. Of course you should be sorry for him but don’t load all the blame on Ruth just because she’s doing what a man would be praised for doing’. She leaned forward again and said, ‘What does your mother say?’

‘She’s thrilled Matt’s gone home’.

‘Is that all?’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘Is your mother’s only reaction being pleased to have Matthew back again?’ Rosa sighed.

‘Of course not. She likes Ruth but she doesn’t understand why she’s done what she’s done. It wasn’t the way she did things, it was always family first with Mum’.

‘That’s generational’.

‘Kate,’ Rosa said, ‘I thought we were going to have a quiet drink and be pleased to see each other, but all you do is want to argue’.

Kate took a swallow of tomato juice.

She said, ‘You
need
arguing with’.

‘Why, thank you—’

‘You need jolting and galvanising. You need to use that brain of yours, you need to stop just drifting along—’ ‘Oh, shut up,’ Rosa said.

‘Rose, I’m your
friend
, I’m—’

‘Sorted and organised and married and interestingly employed and pregnant and insufferable’.

Kate picked up the stick of celery and jabbed it into the ashtray for emphasis.

‘When did you last do anything decisive?’

Rosa said, without looking at her, ‘Last week’.

‘And what was it, precisely?’

‘I helped,’ Rosa said deliberately, ‘someone I don’t really like find somewhere to live’.

‘Oh?’

‘An actor. In Mum’s company. He’s going to rent my room’.

‘What?’

‘He’s going to rent my bedroom. Mum offered it to him. So she’s got two bedrooms full now and Dad is not happy’.