He had been over the figures twenty times. He had rearranged them, looked at them in the short term and in the long term, and come to a point that there was no escaping from, a point that made it plain, in black and white, that in order to match Ruth’s present expenditure in their lives and therefore preserve the fragile equilibrium of modern partnership, every penny he earned was already committed. He was not, baldly, in a position to finance any borrowing whatever, and such assets as he had were so small by comparison with Ruth’s that they were hardly worth mentioning. What crowned it all was that Ruth had little or no idea of how stretched he was for the simple reason that he had preferred her not to know. And as a result, here she was proposing to embark on something she assumed, because she had no reason not to, that he could comfortably join her in.
He glanced over his shoulder. The coffee shop was filling up, filling with people in his kind of suit, his kind of haircut. They looked, as people always looked when you yourself felt out of step with humanity, painfully secure and confident. Money should not be like this, Matthew told himself, swirling the tepid last inch of his coffee round the mug, money should not dictate or stifle or divide, money should never take precedence over loyalty or love. He gave a huge sigh and thumped the coffee mug down. Money should simply not matter this much. But the trouble was, it did.
‘I would have paid,’ Rosa said. ‘I wasn’t suggesting I go home for free. I was going to offer to pay but he never gave me the chance’.
Ben, lighting a cigarette, said indistinctly, ‘I give Naomi’s mum fifty quid a week’.
‘Do you?’
‘She pays all the bills. Says she’d rather have it that way’.
Rosa examined her brother. He looked – well, more sorted, somehow, even in the dim lighting of a pub, less flung together.
She said, ‘She also plainly likes ironing—’
‘Nope’.
‘Well, you look distinctly less scruffy’. Ben drew on his cigarette and said, with elaborate modesty, ‘I iron’. Rosa gaped.
‘Didn’t know you knew how’. He grinned, not looking at her. ‘Lot of things you don’t know’. ‘Clearly’. Rosa picked up her drink. ‘So you’re now playing happy families with Naomi’s mum’.
‘Hardly ever see her. She’s a caller at the bingo hall’. ‘I thought she worked in a supermarket’. ‘She does. And cleans offices’. ‘Heavens. Poor woman’.
Ben glanced at her.
‘No, she isn’t. She likes it. She says she likes being independent’. Rosa flushed. ‘Thanks a—’
‘Don’t patronise Naomi’s mum, then’. ‘I wasn’t—’
‘Your voice was,’ Ben said. ‘Your tone’. ‘Sorry’.
‘And I’m sorry about Dad. What’s going on?’ ‘I think,’ Rosa said, taking a swallow of vodka, ‘that he doesn’t want any competition for Mum’s attention’. Ben gave a snort.
‘I only meant for a few months,’ Rosa said. ‘Till the summer. September at the latest. I’d pay rent, I’d be out all the time, I’d feed the cat—’
‘I kind of miss the cat’.
‘I was just assuming in my naïve way that home is home until you have one of your own’. Ben blew smoke out in a soft plume. ‘Have you told Matt?’ ‘No point’.
‘Why?’
‘Because he and Ruth are thinking of buying a trendy loft’.
‘Room for you then’.
‘No thank you,’ Rosa said. ‘Ruth is great but she’s so organised and professional that I don’t feel I could begin to lay the mess of my life out in front of her’.
‘She might clear it up’.
Rosa made a face. ‘Pride,’ she said.
‘So,’ Ben said, holding his beer bottle poised, ‘What are you going to do?’ ‘Not sure’.
‘Have you asked Mum?’
Rosa looked full at him, as was her wont when skimping on the truth.
‘I can’t. I can’t be turned down by Dad and go straight to Mum’.
Ben grinned again.
‘Why not? You always used to’.
‘No,’ Rosa said, ‘I got turned down by Mum and went straight to Dad’.
Ben tilted his beer bottle.
‘Mum’d have you back’.
‘How do you know?’
‘Just do’.
‘Ben,’ Rosa said again, ‘I can’t’. He shrugged.
Rosa said slowly, ‘Kate said I could stay there’. ‘Fine, then’.
‘Well, no, not really. She’s pregnant and they’ve only been married five months and Barney’s lovely, really lovely, but he wants Kate to himself, he doesn’t want—’
‘Just like Dad,’ Ben said. He looked at the clock over the bar. ‘Gotta go, Rose. Meeting Naomi’.
‘What are you going to do?’
‘Catch a movie, maybe. Don’t know’.
He bent sideways and retrieved from a canvas bag at his feet a black knitted hat, which he jammed down well over his hairline.
‘You look like a peanut,’ Rosa said. ‘That hat does nothing for you’.
Ben upended his beer bottle.
‘Naomi thinks it’s cool’.
He slid off his bar stool.
‘Hope things work out, Rose’.
‘Thanks’.
He winked.
‘You’ll find another job’. ‘And a flat. And a man’.
Ben leaned forward and grazed her cheek with his unshaven one.
He said, in an Irish accent, ‘Keep the faith,’ and then he shouldered his bag and pushed his way through the happy-hour drinkers to the door.
Rosa looked down at her own drink. Before seven o’clock, if you paid for one, you got the next one free. Two vodkas might provide her with enough brief courage to ring Katie and ask if, after all, for just a short while and paying rent of course, she might sleep in the tiny room beside the front door that Barney was intending to decorate ready for the baby. She raised a hand and signalled, smiling, at the barman.
Chapter Four
Vivien Marshall worked part-time in a bookshop. She would have liked to have worked more, but if she did her husband, Max, from whom she had been separated for four years, might notice and stop paying her the maintenance that he was perfectly entitled not to pay now that Eliot really had left home definitively, and gone to Australia. It wasn’t the money in itself that Vivien wanted, useful though it was in maintaining the cottage in Richmond, and the car, but the contact it provided with Max. When he had suggested that they separate – she had known it was coming but had chosen to shut her eyes to it, like someone in an impending car crash – she had agreed in order to prevent him reacting to any objection by insisting that they divorce.
Vivien did not want to divorce Max. She didn’t even, maddening and undependable as he had always been, much want to be separated from him. Not only was he Eliot’s father but he was also, for Vivien, an exciting and energising presence whose absence had rather drained the colour out of things, particularly other men.
‘You’d think,’ she said to Alison who managed the bookshop, ‘that you’d be thankful not to live on tenterhooks any more, whatever tenterhooks are. But actually, I rather miss them’.
Alison, who was not attracted to men of Max’s type who wore leather and denim well into middle age, said she thought they had something to do with stretched damp cloth in the dyeing trade.
‘What do?’ Vivien said.
Alison sighed. Max might not, as a type, be to her taste but there were times when she felt a sympathy for him. Vivien was someone who couldn’t help, it seemed, being a permanent small test of patience.
‘Tenterhooks,’ Alison said, and put her glasses on.
Vivien went back to dusting. When Alison had offered her the job, years ago when Eliot was still young enough to let her kiss him at the school gates, she had made it very plain that bookselling was not a white-handed occupation involving delightful literary conversations with cultivated customers.
‘It’s more like always moving house. Endless heavy
boxes and books parcelled up in shrink wrap. Non-stop tidying and cleaning. Lists. Difficult people’.
Vivien had looked round the shop. Alison’s predilection for all things South American was very obvious: brilliantly coloured wool hangings, posters of Frida Kahlo and Christ of the Andes, a shelf of Chilean poets.
‘I like housework,’ Vivien said.
She always had, if she thought about it. When she and Edie had shared a bedroom as children, her side of the room – fiercely marked out by a strip of pink bias binding drawing-pinned to the carpet – had been both tidy and clean. On Saturday mornings she had dusted her ornaments with lengths of lavatory paper, and was apt to cover her favourite books in library film. It was this fondness for keeping house that she supposed drew her towards Max, towards a man who, although outwardly organised, was inwardly chaotic. He gave her the excited feeling that she was breaking rules to be with him, that she had kicked over the tidy traces of her upbringing and embarked on a heady and abandoned adventure. The trouble was that, in time, the tidiness reasserted itself and Max said he couldn’t breathe. He began to set her challenges – champagne in the middle of the night, impulse trips to New York, having sex in the car in sight of neighbours’ front windows – and, when she couldn’t rise to them, he looked at her sadly, and sighed, and told her motherhood had changed her, had made her into someone he no longer recognised.
Working her way along the travel section with a new synthetic duster that was supposed to attract dirt to it like a magnet, Vivien thought that it wasn’t motherhood that had changed her: it was Max. Motherhood had been something she felt very comfortable with, something, indeed, that she would have liked to extend to brothers and sisters for Eliot if she had not been so preoccupied with not giving Max the opportunity for straying. Max had, in truth, given her a brief and glorious holiday from herself, but he hadn’t changed her. He had tried, and part of her had hoped he would succeed, but the basic Vivien stayed the same and preferred, if she was honest, filling the freezer with puréed carrot cubes for baby Eliot to suddenly dropping everything domestic in favour of some scheme of Max’s that meant packing for an unknown destination without any certain timetable or sartorial guidelines.
Eliot, Vivien couldn’t help noticing, was not like his father. Nor was he much like her. Eliot wanted life to be as simple as possible, which meant as little pressure in it, and discussion about it, as possible. His Australian girlfriend, as far as Vivien could detect from conversations on the telephone, made laconic seem an urgent word. They had a flat five minutes from the beach, they worked lightly, played water sports and drank beer. The latest photograph Eliot had emailed back showed them both on the beach, thin and brown, with similar bleached spiky hair and bead bracelets. The girlfriend was called Ro.
‘Short for Rosemary?’ Vivien had asked.
‘No,’ Eliot said, after a pause. His voice already had a faint Australian edge to it, making every statement a question. ‘Not short for anything. Just Ro’.
When he had rung off – ‘Gotta go, Mum. Take care’ -Vivien had cried a little. Then she had got up from the kitchen table where she had been crying, blown her nose and assembled the clothes for dry-cleaning – folded, not dumped – in a carrier bag. An hour later, she had managed to recount her conversation with Eliot to his father on the telephone without crying at all.
‘That’s good,’ Max said. She could hear the faint tap of laptop keys as he spoke. ‘Good for you, Vivi. You’re getting used to him being grown-up’. He paused and the tapping stopped. Then he said, in the voice he had always used to indicate he knew he’d chosen the right sister, ‘Not like Edie’.
Vivien leant against the section on Eastern Europe. She rested the duster on top of several city guides to Prague. Maybe Max was right. Maybe what made her cry after talking to Eliot was not that he was twenty-two and had chosen to live in Cairns, Queensland, Australia, but that he wasn’t eight or ten any more, with a life that she had both detailed knowledge of and control over. And maybe that knowledge and control had, for a few years only, been absorbing enough for her not to fret about Max, about what he wanted and what she could – and more importantly, couldn’t – provide. Crying for Eliot was crying for a lost small boy, not crying for a lost role, like Edie.
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.
Second Honeymoon Page 5
