Second Honeymoon (7 page)

Vivien put a hand up and pushed her duster to the back of the Prague guides. Edie was distraught, really, quite unhinged by the last of her children going and pretty well indifferent to poor old Russell’s feelings. Vivien liked Russell, always had, but you couldn’t compare him to Max for dash and glamour, just as his children, his and Edie’s children, were making, with the exception of Matt, who was the only one Max had ever had time for, a very amateurish business of leaving home. Poor Rosa: too proud to go home, too short of money to stay independent. And Ben living with a girl he’d met having his hair cut, one of the Saturday-morning juniors. She gave the final volumes of the travel section a little triumphant flourish of the duster. Poor Edie.

*        *        *

‘For how long?’ Barney Ferguson said.

He was standing at the foot of the bed wearing a bath towel wrapped around his hips. His hair was wet. Kate lay against the pillows with the tea he’d brought her, and the biscuit halves of a custard cream that she had peeled away from the filling.

‘I did ask for
plain
biscuits’.

Barney shook his wet head.

‘They were all I could see. Except for pink wafer things. How long is she staying?’ Kate shut her eyes.

‘A month?’

‘A
month!’

Kate bit a tiny piece out of one of the biscuits. ‘Four weeks. Only’.

‘Four weeks isn’t only,’ Barney said. ‘That’s a fifth of the time we’ve been married’. Kate opened her eyes. ‘Barn, I couldn’t not ask her’.

‘Why?’

‘Because she’s my best friend and she’s on her absolute uppers’.

‘I’m your best friend’. ‘My best woman friend’. ‘Suppose she doesn’t get a job—’

‘She will. She’s got to’.

‘And supper, us having supper together—’

‘She’ll go out’.

You said,’ Barney pointed out, ‘that she’s got no money’.

Kate shut her eyes again. ‘Please, Barn’.

He moved round the bed so that he could sit close to her on the edge.

‘I just want you to myself’. ‘I know’.

‘And although I like Rosa, I
do
, I don’t quite like her enough to want to live with her’. Kate sighed.

‘I wanted to paint that bedroom,’ Barney said. ‘Yellow, with elephants’. ‘Why elephants?’

‘I loved elephants, when I was little’. Kate looked at him. ‘Suppose this baby likes bears?’ ‘It can have bears’.

‘Rosa can draw,’ Kate said. ‘Rosa could do bears, by way of rent’.

‘You mean you haven’t asked her for
any
rent?’ Kate said in a small voice, ‘Just bills. Sorry’. Barney stood up.

‘I can’t be cross with you. You look too pathetic’. ‘What a relief—’

‘But I might be cross with Miss Rosa Boyd if she doesn’t prove herself the
model
lodger’. ‘Guest’.

‘Guest. Too right’.

Kate gave him the half-smile he said had been the first thing he noticed about her apart from the backs of her knees.

‘Promise I won’t ask anyone else’. ‘You bloody
will
promise’.

He looked down at her in mock exasperation. Then he walked towards the bedroom door. ‘Barney—’ He turned. Kate smiled again. ‘Thank you’.

Barney smiled back. Neither of his married sisters had produced any children yet, and his parents were treating him as a miracle of potency.

He wagged a finger at Kate.

‘Strictly on sufferance,’ he said, still smiling.

The readings for
Ghosts
were held in an upstairs room above a pub on the Canonbury Road. The room was used for all kinds of purposes, including ballet classes, and along one wall ran a barre screwed into a series of huge dim mirrors, which gave an eerie effect of plunging the place under water. At one end, sharing a littered card table, the director and producer of the play – both, Edie thought, about half her age – were sitting on grey plastic chairs with tin pub ashtrays on the floor at their feet. There was also a thin girl in black sitting by an upright piano and another man, in a grey ski jacket, reading a newspaper.

Edie had decided that, as she was doing this reading to placate her agent, who had complained that Edie was not, repeat not, in a position to be choosy, she was not going to prepare meticulously. She had read the play
once, quite fast, and had determinedly not decided to dress in any particular way, not to think herself, with any depth, into the mind of Mrs Alving.

She had also seen Russell look at her that morning, wondering.

‘I’m not in the mood,’ she’d said, pouring coffee. ‘Oh?’

‘I can’t apply myself. I feel too – too
scattered’.

‘Pity,’ Russell said. He was putting on his mackintosh.

‘It’s a wonderful part’. ‘This is a wonderful part,’ the director said now. He had a narrow dark face and a goatee beard.

‘Oh, yes’.

‘Have you played Ibsen before?’

Edie shook her head. She’d been a non-speaking visitor once, at the spa in
When We Dead Awaken
, but that didn’t seem worth mentioning.

The producer looked at her.

He said, in a voice she regarded as unhelpful, ‘What do you know about Ibsen?’ Edie looked back.

‘He was Norwegian. And short. Very short’.

‘I see’.

The director turned to the man reading the newspaper.

‘Ivor will read Pastor Manders for you. Act One. The scene revealing her husband’s conduct’.

‘OK,’ Edie said. She walked to a chair by one of the huge mirrors and dumped her bag on it, before rummaging in it for her book.

‘From this copy,’ the director said. ‘If you would’.

Edie turned. He was holding out a sheaf of papers.

‘We have slightly annotated the Peter Watts translation’. He glanced at the man with the newspaper. ‘Ivor speaks Norwegian’.

Edie came slowly forward.

‘We’ll hear you read,’ the producer said. ‘But, personally, I think Mrs Alving should be taller’.

The man with the newspaper looked up for the first time.

He said, in accented English, ‘Good face’.

‘But height,’ the producer said. ‘So important for dignity. This is a woman who has
suffered’.

‘How do you know I haven’t?’ Edie said.

Nobody answered her. She took the sheaf of papers from the director’s hand.

‘Are you sure you want me to do this?’

He gave her a fleeting smile.

‘Now you’re here’.

‘Is that enough reason?’

‘Miss Allen, you
applied
for this casting—’

Edie swallowed.

‘Sorry’.

The girl by the piano said, ‘Clare was a good height’. They all turned to look at her.

‘Yes’.

‘And she’d prepared meticulously. She understood that this was a progression from the heroine of
A Doll’s House
. What might have happened if Nora had stayed’.

Edie waited. She had begun to feel faintly sick, sick in the way you feel when you have told yourself that, as
you don’t want something, you will make no effort to secure it, and then discover that your indifference is not as deep as you had supposed.

The producer turned back and looked at Edie.

‘Did you make that connection, Miss Allen?’

‘I do now—’

The man with the newspaper put it down and stood up. He was burly, even allowing for the ski jacket, and had light, blank blue eyes.

He said to Edie, ‘This will be the seventh time I have played Pastor Manders’.

‘Heavens’.

‘Three times in Oslo, once in Edinburgh, once in Scarborough and once in London already’. She gave him a nervous smile. ‘Are you Norwegian?’

‘Half’.

‘Your father—’ ‘My mother’. Edie nodded.

‘You have,’ Ivor said, ‘a wonderful line to read’.

‘I do?’

‘The line, “There you see the power of a bad conscience.”‘

‘Well,’ Edie said, making an effort, ‘I at least ought to know about
that’.
The director leaned forward. ‘We should start. There are other appointments’. Edie looked at the script in her hand. ‘Where would you like—’

‘I will start,’ Ivor said, ‘I will start with the line: “It almost makes my head reel.”‘ Edie looked at him. ‘No script?’ He smiled. ‘No need’.

Edie gave a little laugh.

‘How very disconcerting—’

‘Not at all. Quite the reverse. Reassuring for you’.

‘Oh?’

‘Like,’ Ivor said, smiling, ‘playing tennis with someone much better than you are’.

Edie swallowed. A rising tide of temper was beginning to eliminate the sensation of sickness.

‘Of course’.

‘We will begin’.

‘Very well’.

‘And I will indicate when we will stop’.

Edie glanced at the director. He was looking neither at her nor at his own copy of the script. She cleared her throat.

‘Sorry,’ he said, without moving. ‘Sorry, Ivor.
I’ll
tell you when to stop’. His gaze travelled slowly across the room and came to rest on some object outside the window. The producer was looking at his fingernails.

‘Fire away,’ the director said.

Ruth Munro was, as was her wont, one of the last to leave her office. She felt that, not only did her conscientiousness set a good example, but it also gave her the
chance to leave everything in the state she would like to find it in the following morning: desk orderly, as many emails from the US cleared as possible, work-to-do papers assembled in a pile weighted with a large, smooth grey-and-white pebble, picked up on a north Devon beach during the first weekend that she and Matthew Boyd had ever spent away together. Being alone in the room also gave her the chance to slow the pace, to be reflective, to take advantage of that brief noman’s-land of time between the working day and the evening ahead. It also gave her time to stay in touch.

Ruth’s closest friend, Laura, had gone to Leeds two years previously, to join a law firm. In those two years, Laura had become engaged to a fellow lawyer and had bought an apartment on Leeds’ regenerated waterfront that had two bathrooms, a balcony and a basement laundry on the Swiss model. It was Laura, now owner of a Tiffany engagement diamond and with plans for Vera Wang shoes for her wedding day, who had intimated to Ruth, with the effect that only close friends can have, that if she did not buy a flat of her own soon she would be making a grave mistake.

Ruth had emailed Laura photographs of the loft on Bankside. Laura had been most approving, especially of the glass brick walls and double-height ceilings.

‘Go for it!’ she’d written.

Ruth had waited three days while she adjusted her need to confide against her loyalty to Matthew, and then she’d written, ‘I really want to. But there’s Matt’.

‘Doesn’t he like it?’

Another two days elapsed.

‘Yes,’ Ruth wrote reluctantly, ‘I think he does. But he’s worried about the money’.

Laura was marrying a lawyer who earned more than she did. Ruth sometimes thought it made her a little callous.

‘You mean he can’t afford it?’

‘Yes’.

‘Can you?’ ‘Yes,’ Ruth wrote.

‘Well?’

Ruth looked up from the screen. With no one in the office, she could hear the faint purring hum of the airconditioning system and, beyond the immediate silence of the office, the bigger hum of Liverpool Street outside. If the truth were told, Matthew had not actually said he could not afford to share equally in the loft on Bankside: he had, instead, made it very plain that he would -could? – not talk about it. He had been very busy in their present flat, fixing all kinds of things that Ruth regarded as the future tenants’ responsibility, but he had eluded any attempt at the kind of conversation Ruth was trying to have. She looked back at the screen.

‘The thing is,’ she wrote, ‘that we have never had an I-have-this and you-have-that conversation. I suppose neither of us wanted to spell out the difference. And the difference hasn’t been a factor, really, up to now. We’ve managed rather well’. She paused. Laura was bound to challenge that. ‘Don’t ask why we didn’t sort it at the beginning. You know what beginnings are like. You don’t
care who earns what as long as you can be together and, by the time you start caring, it’s too late, the patterns of behaviour are in place’. She stopped and then she typed, ‘I love Matt’.

She lifted her hands off the keyboard and put them in her lap. Laura would tell her that everybody loved Matt, that Matt was the kind of thoughtful, decent, straightforward man who it would be perverse not to love. What Laura would also imply, from the current safety of her shiny new engaged situation, was that love might be about more than simply lovableness, it might include more stimulating elements like shared ambition and respect for professional achievement. She might also say – and she would be right – that Ruth and Matthew should have worked out this inequity early on in their relationship, that no amount of rapturous hand-holding on Devon beaches should have blinded Ruth to the fact that they had driven there in Ruth’s car, Matthew not possessing one, and were staying in the kind of hotel he quite candidly would not have considered.

It wasn’t, Ruth reflected, that he didn’t pay his way because he did, with sometimes almost painful eagerness, but she couldn’t help noticing that a tension about money had grown in him in the last year and, while she was genuinely sympathetic to that, she also felt that his concerns couldn’t take precedence over her ambitions, that what held him back shouldn’t hold her back too. If you made too many personal sacrifices, she and Laura had often agreed during late-night talking sessions with bottles of wine and Diana Krall on the stereo, you only
ended up resenting the person you’d made the sacrifices for. Those old words, like ‘duty’ and ‘honour’, belonged to the history books, to an ancient imperial vocabulary that didn’t belong in anyone’s hearts or minds any more. You couldn’t, as a woman, make yourself into someone lesser in order to accommodate a man’s weaknesses. You couldn’t agree not to want, not to strive for, a very desirable flat on Bankside because the man you were sharing your life with quite simply couldn’t afford to match your input. She picked up a ballpoint pen.

‘Does that mean,’ she wrote across her jotting pad, ‘that I don’t love him enough?’

She tore the page off the pad and screwed it into a ball.