Second Honeymoon (8 page)

‘Or,’ she wrote, ‘are my values so skewed that at this moment I almost want a flat more than a man? And why do I want this particular flat so much? What is it about
this
one?’

She looked across her desk. There was a photograph of Matthew there, in a black bamboo frame, taken on holiday in the Maldives, a holiday he had suggested and had then – she could see it – had anxieties about paying for. He looked quite without anxiety in the photograph. He was wearing a white T-shirt and a wide smile and his hair was ruffled against a sky as blue as delphiniums.

Ruth ripped the second sheet off the jotting pad and tore it across. She glanced at her email to Laura. What possibilities it opened up for Laura to implore her – or instruct her – not to let herself down. She ran the cursor up the screen to cancel the message.

‘Do you,’ her computer asked politely, ‘wish to save the changes to this message?’

‘No,’ Ruth clicked. She looked at Matthew, laughing on his tropical beach. ‘Sorry,’ she said.

She could see, from the pavement below their building, that Matthew was home before her. She could also see, from the way the light fell, which lamps he had switched on and, from that, what sort of ambience there would be when she reached the second floor and even what kind of atmosphere. Sometimes, she wished she didn’t notice so much. Sometimes, she thought how peaceful it would be to be someone who didn’t observe so minutely and deduce so analytically. It meant, as Matthew had sometimes affectionately pointed out, that she lived her life twice, exhaustingly, once in preview, once in actuality.

‘What will you do,’ he’d said, holding her, his face against hers, ‘with the three spare days at the end of your life that you’ve lived already?’

She put her key into the main door. The communal hallway, solidly decorated in the style of a decade earlier, contained only a small reproduction side table on which all the mail for the building was piled. Matthew would already have sifted through the pile for their own mail, but something in Ruth needed to recheck it, every time she came in. Her father had been the same, she told herself consolingly, perpetually reassuring himself that everything was in order, even down to counting the change from his trouser pockets every
evening before piling the coins, in precise order of size, on the chest of drawers in her parents’ bedroom. No wonder, she thought now, forcing herself past the side table without pausing, that she’d chosen someone like Matthew, someone who’d come from a family who regarded orderliness as a sadly psychotic condition. Two people like her in one relationship would simply have fossilised in their own methodicalness.

She ran up the two flights of stairs to their landing. The front door was slightly open and there was the sound of music, some of the dance-rock stuff Matthew liked.

She pushed the door wider open.

‘Hi there!’

Matthew appeared from the bedroom, feet bare on the wooden floor, but still in the shirt and trousers of his business suit. He bent to kiss her.

‘I like it,’ she said, ‘when you’re back first’.

He straightened.

He said, ‘I haven’t done anything, though, except take my jacket off—’ ‘I didn’t mean—’ ‘I know,’ he said.

She went past him into the sitting room. ‘Any mail?’ ‘Only dull things’.

She picked up the envelopes and glanced back at him. ‘Good day?’

‘So-so’.

She put the envelopes down.

She said, ‘I thought I’d go to the gym—’

Matthew leaned against the sitting-room door frame.

‘I thought you might’.

‘Want to come?’

Matthew shifted his shoulder.

‘No thanks’.

‘Then I—’

‘Ruth,’ Matthew said.

She looked down at the envelopes. Notifications of payment by direct debit every one, evidence of system and organisation, evidence of knowing that vital energies should not be dissipated in muddle and inefficiency, evidence—

‘Ruth,’ Matthew said again.

She looked at him.

‘Sit down’.

‘What are you going to say—’

‘Sit down,’ Matthew said. ‘Please’.

Ruth moved to the leather sofa – joint purchase, half-price in a January sale, excellent value – and sat down, her knees together, her back straight, as if in a business meeting.

Matthew padded past her and sat down at her side. He took her nearest hand.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘this isn’t very easy to say—’ ‘Does it have to be now?’

‘Yes. There isn’t a right time or, if there is, it mightn’t occur for weeks and I have to say this thing, I have to tell you’.

She gripped his hand.

‘What?’

He said, looking at the floor, ‘I’m really sorry’.

‘Matt—’

‘I wish it wasn’t like this. I wish I could match you in everything. You’re quite right to want to buy the flat. You’re quite right to want to climb the property ladder and I’m sure you’re right about not leaving it any later. And it’s a great flat’. He stopped and gently took his hand away. ‘It’s just,’ he said, ‘that I can’t manage it. I’ve tried and tried to see how, but I can’t afford it. I can’t, actually, afford how we’re living now and I haven’t faced up to that. Until now. I’m having to, now, because I’m having to face the fact that I can’t even think about buying the flat on Bankside with you’. He looked up from the floor and gave her a small smile. ‘So if you want to go ahead, go ahead without me’.

‘Aren’t you going to get up?’ Kate said. She was dressed in a velour tracksuit and had pulled her hair back tightly so that she looked about thirteen and far too young to be pregnant.

‘No,’ Rosa said.

‘It’s twenty to eleven—’

‘Yesterday,’ Rosa said, ‘I went to four crappy interviews and was turned down at every one. This afternoon I have three more. This morning I have decided not to punish myself any more than life seems to be doing anyway’.

Kate kicked at a pile of clothes and bags on the floor.

‘You could clear all this up a bit—’

Rosa looked.

‘Yes, I could’.

‘You’d feel better if you didn’t keep telling yourself that life’s got it in for you’.

‘Shall I,’ Rosa said, sitting up in bed and pushing her hair back, ‘talk to you when you’re feeling less priggish?’

‘You know,’ Kate said, ‘none of this is very easy for
me. I want to help you, I want to make things nice for Barney, I want to stop feeling so awful and start feeling pleased about this baby, but it doesn’t
help
, Rosa, if you lie in bed in all this mess having the mean reds and not even
trying’.

There was a pause. Rosa twisted her hair into a rope and held it against the back of her head. ‘How do you know I’m not trying?’ Kate kicked at the bags again. ‘Look at this—’

‘No cupboards,’ Rosa said, ‘no drawers. Floor last resort. Floor it is’.

‘There’s floor and floor. There’s attempt-at-tidy floor or there’s throw-everything-about-like-a-sulky-teenager floor’.

Rosa let her hair go.

‘I can’t believe we’re having this conversation. This is like talking to my
mother’.

‘Not your mother, surely—’

‘No. Quite right. Not my mother.
Your
mother’.

‘Don’t take your spite out on my mother—’

‘Oh Kate,’ Rosa said wearily, pushing back the duvet and swinging her legs slowly out of bed, ‘don’t let’s do this’.

‘Then tidy
up,’
Kate said shrilly. ‘Stop abusing my hospitality and make an
effort’.

Rosa stood up. She looked down at Kate.

‘What would you like me to do?’

‘I would like you,’ Kate said, ‘to clear up this room. I would like you not to put washing in the machine and
then just leave it there. I would like you not to finish the milk or the yoghurt or the bananas and then not replace them’.

‘Do you know,’ Rosa said, ‘you were never like this when we were students. You didn’t, as I recall, give a stuff about washing or bananas’.

Kate sighed.

‘I was thinking about Rimbaud then. And Balzac. And the practicalities behind the traditions of courtly love’. ‘And Ed Moffat’.

‘Well, yes’.

‘Ed Moffat didn’t make you want to count bananas—’ ‘I didn’t marry Ed Moffat,’ Kate said. ‘I wasn’t
obliged
to

Ed Moffat’.

Rosa stooped for her clothes. ‘Does Barney mind about bananas?’ ‘He minds about me minding’. Rosa looked at her. ‘But
why
do you mind?’ Kate rubbed her eyes.

‘Because being married changes things. It puts you in a different place, somewhere where it just suddenly seems childish to live in a student mess’.

‘Childish’.

‘Yes,’ Kate said.

Rosa found a pair of blue lace knickers on the floor and stood on one leg to put them on.

‘I’ve had a flat, you know. I’ve bought milk and paid bills and taken washing out of machines. I’ve done all that’.

‘Then why—’

‘Because I’ve lost control of things,’ Rosa said. She pulled the knickers up under her nightshirt. ‘It’s all kind of got away for the moment, like something big and slippery, just sliding off the edge. I’d love, frankly, to be back in charge of my own fridge’.

There was a small silence. Then Kate shuffled through the bags on the floor and put her arm round Rosa.

‘Sorry’.

‘Me too’.

‘But you see—’

‘Yes,’ Rosa said, ‘I see. Of course I see’.

‘I can’t share my life with you the way I once did—’

‘I know’.

‘But I want to be there for you—’ ‘Please,’ Rosa said, pulling off her nightshirt. ‘Please don’t say that’. ‘Why not?’

‘Because it’s such an awful, meaningless phrase’. ‘But Rose, I’m your friend, I want to—’ Rosa looked at her. ‘You are’.

‘What?’

‘Helping. You’ve given me a roof and a bed and I’m grateful. I am also sorry about the bananas’. She bent and picked up a black bra. ‘I will sort this room’.

Kate watched her.

‘You’re so lucky,’ she said, ‘to have
normal-sized
breasts still. Seen mine?’

*        *        *

There had been no word from the director of
Ghosts
. From past experience, Edie knew that this meant she hadn’t got the part, but then, she told herself, she’d known that the moment she’d walked into the room for her casting and sensed the profound boredom her presence aroused. Just after the casting, she had been buoyed up by a kind of righteous indignation – how dare they be so rude, so dismissive, so unprofessional? – and then she had sunk slowly down, as she had done hundreds of times over the years, through disappointment and discouragement, to the kind of weary resignation that made her agent’s consoling platitudes sound more clichéd every time they were uttered.

‘They are a good outfit, Edie, they do pull off some marvellously fresh interpretations, but
every
one complains about the way they behave and I know really distinguished people, if you’ll forgive the comparison, dear, who’ve been simply treated like dirt and it just isn’t right or reasonable that they can fill theatres the way they do after treating people like that, but the fact is they do and that’s why I put you up in the first place because it would have been such a step up for you, but there we are.
Sorry
, dear,
sorry
. But don’t take it personally. We’ll get you there, promise. You’re just about right now for one of Shakespeare’s mad old queens. Don’t you think?’

Yes, Edie thought, lying on Ben’s bed in the middle of a Thursday afternoon, still clasping the clean towels she’d been bringing upstairs to the airing cupboard when she had spied his bed through the open door of his room and been irresistibly drawn towards it, yes,
mad certainly, and old any minute and why not a queen since being anything more realistic seemed to be, at the moment, out of the question? Why not point out, to the Royal Shakespeare Company, what they’d been missing in Edie Allen all these years and watch them throw crowns at her in an agony of remorseful recompense? Why not continue pretending that the world, as she knew it, hadn’t fallen to pieces and left her washed up somewhere alien and empty with no notion of how to proceed? Why not keep saying, as Russell kept saying, that this is a rite of passage that all mothers go through, and do not all go off their heads for ever in the process?

Edie shut her eyes. It would be luxurious, in a way, to be truly off her head, to be so much in another place mentally and emotionally that any requirement to behave conventionally was neither demanded nor expected. The difficulty for her was that she could see how much easier it would be for Russell, for herself even, if she could slide seamlessly from one stage to another, from something almost all-consuming to something still supportive but more detached, but the trouble was that these states of mind and heart did not seem to be a matter of will but more a matter of chance. There were women who could manage to be both kind and somehow still cool; and there were fierce women, women whose feelings tossed them about like corks in a storm. If you were fierce, Edie thought, you couldn’t fake cool. Nor could you think where on earth to put, let alone use up, all that
energy
.

She sat up, hugging the towels. Two towels, two adult-sized bath towels, which had washed over time from sage green to pale grey. Once there would have been five towels, plus swimming towels and – stop this, Edie said to herself, stop this
nonsense
, stop indulging yourself. She turned to look out of the window. The sun had come out, a light hard spring sun that only managed to show up just how dirty the glass was.

From downstairs, she heard the telephone ring. It was never plugged in, in her and Russell’s bedroom, unless the children were out late, and as they were no longer there to be out late, it remained unplugged. She sat where she was, her chin on the towels, listening to the cadences of Russell’s polite, easy answerphone message and then the same cadences saying something quite brief, like he’d be having a drink with someone after work or he’d be bringing something back for supper that had caught his fancy. He rang a lot now, little inconsequential messages about this or that, sometimes just to say he was thinking about her. Which was lovely of him, sweet, attentive, thoughtful. And which left her strangely, disconcertingly, guiltily unmoved.