Second Honeymoon (2 page)

He went over to the fridge and took out a bottle of Belgian beer. The boys would drink it straight out of the bottle. Russell went across the kitchen, behind Edie, to the cupboard where the glasses were kept.

He said, his back to her, ‘What were you doing then?’ ‘Nothing,’ Edie said. ‘Thinking’. Russell took a glass out of the cupboard. He said, his back still turned, holding the glass and the bottle, ‘They just do grow up. It’s what happens’. ‘Yes,’ Edie said. ‘It’s what’s
meant
to happen’.

‘Yes’.

Russell turned. He put down the glass and the bottle and came to stand behind her. ‘He’s doing what he wants to do’. Edie sliced through the pepper.

‘I know’. ‘You can’t—’

‘I know!’ Edie shouted. She flung the knife across the table.

Russell moved to retrieve it. He held it out to her.

‘Stop chucking things. It’s so childish’.

Edie took the knife and laid it down on the chopping board with elaborate care. Then she leaned on her hands and looked down into her salad.

‘I love Ben as much as you do,’ Russell said. ‘But he’s twenty-two. He’s a man. When I—’

‘Please don’t,’ Edie said.

‘I met you when I was twenty-two’.

‘Twenty-three’.

‘All right, then. Twenty-three. And you were twenty-one’.

‘Just,’ Edie said.

‘I seem to remember us thinking we were quite old enough to get married’.

Edie straightened up and folded her arms.

‘We’d left home. We wanted to leave home. I left home at seventeen’.

‘Ben didn’t’.

‘He liked it here, he loved it—’ ‘And now he loves Naomi’. Edie gave a little snort. Russell went back to his beer.

He said, pouring it, ‘This happens to everyone. Everyone with children. It started with Matt, remember. Matt left at twenty-two’.

Edie moved away from the table and leaned instead against the sink, staring out into the garden.

‘You just don’t think,’ she said, ‘that it’s going to end’.

‘God!’ Russell said. He tried a little yelp of laughter. ‘End! Does parenthood ever,
ever
end?’

Edie turned round and looked at the table.

‘If you want any lunch,’ she said, ‘you finish that’.

‘OK’.

‘I’m going out’.

‘Are you? Where are you going?’ ‘A film maybe. Sit in a café. Buy a forty-watt light bulb’.

‘Edie—’

She began to walk towards the door to the hall. ‘Better practise, hadn’t I? For the next chapter?’

Outside the shed, Russell made a pile of things to keep, a pile of things to throw away, and a pile to ask Edie about. He had made a cheese-and-pickle sandwich from the last of the white sliced loaf – there would presumably be no more of those, without Ben around to indulge with them – and had eaten it sitting in a mouldy Lloyd Loom chair that had belonged to his mother, in the pale April sunshine. He would also have added a newspaper or two if the sunshine hadn’t been qualified by a sharp breeze blowing intermittently through the gap between the semi-detached houses that backed on to his own. They were much grander houses than his – broad steps to the front doors, generous windows to the floor, gravelled car-parking spaces – in a much grander road, but
they faced east, rather than west, so they got the wind before he did, and only early sun.

Edie wasn’t back. She had returned briefly to the kitchen, wearing a cast-off denim jacket of Rosa’s, and kissed his cheek. He had wanted to say something, to hold her for a moment, but had decided against it. Instead, he let her bump her face against his, fleetingly, and watched her go. The cat watched her too, from a place on the crowded dresser where he was not supposed to sit, next to the fruit bowl. When the front door slammed, the cat gave Russell a quick glance and then went back to washing. He waited half an hour after Russell went out to the garden and then he came out to see what was happening, stepping fastidiously over the damp grass. As soon as Russell left the Lloyd Loom chair, he leaped into it and sat there, watching, his tail curled trimly round his paws and his expression inscrutable.

He was really Ben’s cat. Ben had been the only one of their children who had longed for an animal, who had gone badgering on about everything from a hippo to a hamster until, on his tenth birthday, Russell had gone to a dingy pet shop somewhere in Finsbury Park, and come home with a tabby kitten in a wire basket. Ben called the kitten Arsenal, after his chosen football club, and remained indifferent to the implications of this being inevitably shortened to Arsie. Arsie was now twelve and as cool as a tulip.

‘Look,’ Russell said to Arsie, ‘Rosa’s tricycle. She loved that’.

Arsie looked unmoved. Rosa’s tricycle, once metallic lilac with a white plastic basket on the front, was now mostly rust.

‘Keep or chuck?’ Russell said.

Arsie yawned.

‘Chuck,’ Russell said. ‘Chuck, but inform Rosa’.

He crouched and inspected the tricycle. Rosa had stuck stickers everywhere, glitter stickers of cartoon animals and fairies. She had looked sweet on that tricycle, pedalling furiously, straight red hair flapping, the white plastic basket crammed with all the stuffed animals she carried everywhere, lining them up at meals round her place, putting them in a circle round her pillow. Sometimes when he looked at her now, twenty-six years old and working for a public relations company, he caught a glimpse of the child on the tricycle, like a ghost in a mirror. She had been a turbulent little girl full of noise and purpose. Some of the noise and purpose were still there, but the turbulence had translated itself into something closer to emotional volatility, a propensity to swerve crazily in and out of relationships. At least one had to be thankful that she did swerve out again, particularly in the case of the appalling Josh.

Russell straightened up and looked at the house. Rosa’s window was on the top floor, on the left. Since Rosa had left home, they’d had the odd lodger in that room, and in Matt’s, next to it: drama students Edie was teaching or impoverished actors she’d once been in repertory with who had small parts in plays in little North London theatres. They were good lodgers on the whole,
never awake too early, never short of something to say, and they provided, unconsciously, the perfect excuse to postpone any decision about moving to something smaller. The house might be shabby, in places very shabby, but it was not something Russell could imagine being without. It was, quite simply, a given in his life, in their lives, the result of being left a miraculous small legacy in his twenties, when he and Edie were living in a dank flat, with two children and a baby, above an ironmonger’s off the Balls Pond Road.

‘Four bedrooms,’ Edie had said, whispering as if the house could hear her. ‘What’ll we ever do with four bedrooms?’

It had been in a terrible state, of course, damp and neglected, with mushrooms up the stairwell and a hole in the roof you could see the stars through. But somehow, then, with Edie enjoying a steady spell of television work, and the agency getting going, the house had seemed to them needy rather than daunting, more theirs, somehow, because it was crying out for rescue. They had no kitchen for a year, no finished bathroom for two, no carpets for five. Matt wore gumboots all his childhood, from the moment he got out of bed. It was perhaps no surprise that Matt should turn out to be the most orthodox of their children, the one with an electronic diary and polished shoes. When he came home, he was inclined to point out that the crack in the sitting-room ceiling was lengthening, that the smell of damp in the downstairs lavatory was not just a smell, that regular outside painting was a sound investment.

‘It’s hard,’ Russell said, ‘for us old bohemians to get worked up about such things’. ‘Then listen to me,’ Matt said.

He said that often, now. He had started saying it after he left home, and returned, just for occasional meals, with a newly critical eye. ‘Listen to me,’ he’d say to Edie about a part she was reading for, to Russell about some new direction the agency might take, to Ben about his A-level choices.

‘You’re so adult,’ Edie would say, looking at him fondly. ‘I love it’.

She loved it, of course, because she didn’t listen to him. She loved it the way she loved his regular haircuts and well-mannered clothes and competence with technology. It was amusing to her, and endearing, to see this well-put-together grown man in her kitchen, explaining to her how to send text messages on her mobile phone, and visualise him, simultaneously, once asleep in his cot or sitting, reading earnestly, on his potty. She could play games like that, Russell thought, because she still had Ben; the security of Ben gave her the licence not to take Matt seriously, not to see his maturity as anything other than sweet play-acting.

If Matt was irritated by her attitude, he gave no sign. He treated her as he had always treated both his parents, as very well-meaning people of whom he was fond and who he needed to take practical care of because they seemed to decline to do it for themselves. It was plain he thought Edie indulged Ben, just as it was plain he thought Rosa indulged herself, but he kept these opinions to
their proper place, on the edges of his own rightly preoccupying life. He worked for a mobile-telephone company, had a girlfriend with a job in the City, and with whom he shared a flat. He was entitled, Russell thought, inspecting a neat stack of broken lampshades and wondering why they had ever been considered worthy of salvage, to say, every so often, and to a family who lived so much more carelessly than he did, ‘Listen to me’.

Russell did listen. He might not often take advice, but he listened. He had listened while Matt had explained, at tremendous length one evening in a cramped bar in Covent Garden, that Russell should specialise. Matt described his father’s agency, which represented actors who were particularly interested in film and television work, as ‘limping along’. Russell, nursing a glass of red wine, had been mildly affronted. After the next glass, he had felt less affronted. After the third glass, Matt’s proposal that Russell should specialise in providing actors for advertising voice-over work seemed less alien, less unattractively practical than it had an hour before.

‘I know it’s not theatre,’ Matt had said, ‘but it’s money’.

‘It’s
all
about money!’ Edie had cried, two hours later, brushing her teeth. ‘Isn’t it? That’s all it’s about!’

‘Possibly,’ Russell said carefully, ‘it has to be’.

‘It’s sordid. It’s squalid. Where’s the acting in bouncing on sofas?’

‘Not bouncing on them. Talking about them’.

Edie spat into the basin.

‘Well, if you can
bring
yourself—’

‘I rather think I can’.

‘Well, just don’t ask
me’.

Russell let a pause fall. He climbed into bed and picked up his book, a biography of Alexander the Great. He put his spectacles on.

‘No,’ he said. ‘No. I rather think I shan’t’.

Since 1975, Russell Boyd Associates (there were none) had occupied three attic rooms behind Shaftesbury Avenue. For almost thirty years, Russell had worked in a room that had undoubtedly once been a maid’s bedroom. It had a dormer window and sloping ceilings and was carpeted with the Turkey carpet that had once been in Russell’s grandparents’ dining room in Hull, now worn to a grey blur of weft cotton threads, garnished here and there with a few brave remaining tufts of red and blue and green. Matt, encouraged by Russell’s acceptance of his advice about the agency, then tried to persuade him to modernise the office, to put down a wooden floor and install halogen lights on gleaming metal tracks.

‘No,’ Russell said.

‘But, Dad—’

‘I like it. I like it just as it is. So do my clients’.

Matt had kicked at several straining cardboard folders piled like old bolsters against the bookshelves.

‘It’s awful. It’s like your old shed’.

Russell looked now, at his shed. It was half empty, but what remained looked intractable, as if prepared to resist movement. Arsie had left the chair and returned to the house and the sun had sunk behind the houses leaving a raw dankness instead. He glanced down at Rosa’s tricycle, on its side in the stack to be discarded.

‘Rosa’s bike’, she had always called it. Not ‘mine’ but

‘Rosa’s’.

‘Russell!’ Edie called. He raised his head.

She was standing at the corner of the house, where the side door to the kitchen was. She had Arsie in her arms.

‘Tea!’ Edie shouted.

‘Look,’ Edie said, ‘I’m sorry’.

She had made tea in the big pot with cabbage roses on it. It was extremely vulgar but it had intense associations for Edie, as everything in her life did, everything that reminded her of a place, a person, a happening.

She said, ‘I was fed up with you because you wouldn’t understand’.

‘I do understand,’ Russell said.

‘Do you?’

He nodded, tensing slightly.

‘Then tell me,’ Edie demanded. ‘Explain what is the matter’.

Russell paused.

Then he said, ‘It’s the end of a particularly compelling – and urgent – phase of motherhood. And it’s very hard to adjust to’.

‘I don’t want to adjust,’ Edie said. She poured tea into the huge cracked blue cups she had found in a junk shop in Scarborough, touring with – what was it? A Priestley play, perhaps.

‘I want Ben back,’ Edie said.

Russell poured milk into his tea.

‘I want him back,’ Edie said fiercely. ‘I want him back to make me laugh and infuriate me and exploit me and make me feel
necessary’.

Russell picked up his teacup and held it, cradling it in his palms. The aroma of the tea rose up to him, making him think of his grandmother. She had saved Darjeeling tea for Sundays. ‘The champagne of teas,’ she said, every time she drank it.

‘Are you listening?’ Edie said.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but you forget I know’.

She leaned forward.

She said, ‘How do I make you
mind?’

‘Good question’.

‘What?’

He put his cup down.

He said, seriously, not looking at her, ‘How do I make
you
mind?’ She stared.

‘What?’ she said again.

‘I’ve been out there,’ Russell said, ‘for about three hours. I’ve been sifting through all sorts of rubbish, things that mattered once and don’t any more. And that’s quite painful, knowing things won’t come again, knowing things are over for ever’.