‘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.
‘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’.
Chapter Five
‘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 abou
t 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’.
Second Honeymoon Page 6
