The difficulty was, how. Naomi’s texts had not suggested, in any way, that she was missing him as he was missing her. In fact, the brevity and scarcity of her communications might have led a fainter heart to think that she had definitively chosen an immediate future with her mother rather than her boyfriend. But Ben’s heart, buoyed up with his new self-knowledge, did not feel faint. It felt that, even if it did not succeed, it was going to make stupendous efforts first, before acknowledging even the possibility of failure. He would shower and shave, he decided, put on clean clothes, buy flowers for both Naomi and her mother – a significantly larger bunch for her mother – and take the tube, that very day, to Walthamstow.
The water in the shower changed abruptly from tepid to gaspingly cold. Edie, her eyes tightly shut against the shampoo cascading down her face, gave a scream. Then she gave another, a scream of rage this time, rather than shock. They had all had showers, of course, they had all showered and gone out, even Lazlo, and left her to do battle with the aftermath of their leaving. Also, she thought, stumbling out of the shower and fumbling about for a towel, to deal with an elderly boiler and a water tank designed for the needs of a small nuclear family who bathed by rota.
She found a damp towel and wrapped it tightly round her. Then she ran a basin of cold water and dipped her hair into it and rinsed her eyes. There was a perverse relief, somehow, in being able to cry because she had soap in her eyes, being able to blame some small, tangible element for the need to howl away to herself, wrapped in an already used towel, in the forlorn middle of a weekday morning. She straightened up a little and peered at herself in the mirror. Her hair hung in wet dark snakes. Her eyes looked as if they’d been buried. She looked, she decided, more like the embodiment of a state of mind than a human being. She reached out and pulled another dank towel off the pile on the chair and wound it round her head. Now she looked like a huge blue towelling thumb.
From downstairs, the doorbell rang.
‘Go away!’ Edie shouted.
It rang again, politely but firmly. Edie dropped the towel she had tucked round her armpits and clawed her way into Russell’s ancient bathrobe that was hanging on the back of the door. Then she went cautiously out on to the landing and pressed her forehead against the glass to see down into the street.
On the step directly below her a young woman was standing. She wore a dark suit and was carrying a briefcase and there were sunglasses perched on top of her head. Edie looked at the briefcase. It seemed familiar, familiar enough to picture it propped against the wall inside the front door. It was Ruth’s briefcase. Edie unscrewed the security bolt on the window and put her head out.
Ruth glanced up.
‘Edie,’ she said uncertainly.
Edie put her hand up to her immense blue turban. ‘Just – washing my hair—’
‘I’m sorry,’ Ruth said, ‘not to tell you I was coming, but Matt said you’d be in, and I—’ ‘Matt did?’
‘Yes,’ Ruth said. ‘Matt suggested I just come. When I said I wanted to’.
‘Wait,’ Edie said.
‘Look, if it really—’
‘Wait,’ Edie said. She slammed the window shut and tore off her turban. Then she ran downstairs. Arsie was sitting in the hall, affecting indifference to whoever had come. Edie picked him up and held him against her while she opened the door.
Ruth said at once, ‘I’m so sorry—’
‘Don’t be,’ Edie said. She stepped back. ‘It’s – well, I’m very glad to see you’.
‘Are you?’
Edie looked at her.
‘Why shouldn’t I be?’
Ruth put out a hand to touch Arsie.
‘Well, I thought you thought—’
A drip from Edie’s hair slid on to Arsie’s shoulder and he sprang from her arms.
‘I did think’.
‘Yes—’
‘But a lot’s happened and I – well, my thinking has shifted a bit. You look very smart’.
Ruth made a little self-deprecating gesture.
‘You’ll have to forgive me,’ Edie said. ‘I was in a temper as well as in the shower. Coffee?’
‘Could – could I have tea?’
Edie looked at her.
‘I didn’t think you drank tea’.
‘I – didn’t’.
‘Come into the kitchen. There’s too much to apologise for in there so I won’t even start’.
Ruth said from the kitchen doorway, ‘It’s nice to be back—’
‘Is it? Have you been very unhappy?’
‘Yes’.
Edie picked up the kettle.
She said from the sink, her back turned towards Ruth, ‘So has Matthew’. ‘I know’.
‘Ruth,’ Edie said, ‘couldn’t you just have made a compromise? Couldn’t you just have made it possible for him to contribute something?’
Ruth went slowly across the room to the table and leaned against it. Then she put down her briefcase and took her sunglasses off her head and laid them on the table with precision.
‘I came,’ she said, ‘to tell you that I was pregnant’.
Edie froze for a moment. Then she turned off the tap and set the kettle down carefully in the sink.
‘Pregnant?’
‘Yes’.
‘I thought,’ Edie said with emphasis, ‘that you and Matthew hadn’t seen each other since you – parted’.
‘He came for dinner,’ Ruth said. ‘He came to my flat. I asked him to. I was missing him so much’.
Edie put her hands up to the collar of Russell’s bathrobe and held it against her neck. Then she turned round.
‘Does Matthew know?’
‘Of course’.
‘How – long has he known?’ ‘About two weeks’. Edie shut her eyes. ‘Two weeks—’
‘Yes’.
‘And – forgive me – but are you going to keep it?’
There was a small pause and then Ruth said, with barely suppressed fury, ‘Yes’.
‘But if you and Matthew aren’t—’
‘We are,’ Ruth said. ‘That’s why I’ve come. I’ve come to tell you what we’re planning’.
Edie put a hand out for a chair as if she was suddenly very old, and lowered herself into it. She didn’t look at Ruth. Instead she looked at the box of Grapenuts someone had left on the table.
‘But why come and tell me? Why not both of you? Why not tell Russell and me together? Why come like this, out of the blue—’
‘Because I wanted to,’ Ruth said. ‘Because you needed to know. Because you were so angry with me’.
‘I wasn’t—’
‘Oh yes,’ Ruth said. ‘Women are always angrier with other women. I’d hurt your son. I’d achieved more than he had. In your view, I’d rubbed his nose in it’.
Edie put her elbows on the table and her face in her hands.
She said, muffled by her hands, ‘You’ll learn’.
‘Oh,’ Ruth said, ‘I understood why you were angry. Of course I did. And I felt awful myself, awful at what I’d done and furious at being made to feel awful’.
Edie took her hands away from her face.
‘You’d better sit down’.
‘I’m fine—’
‘Sit down,’ Edie said. ‘Sit down and I’ll make you some tea’.
She got up and retrieved the kettle from the sink. She said, ‘Do your parents know?’ ‘Not yet’. ‘What?’
‘I’ll tell them next,’ Ruth said. ‘I’ll tell them at the weekend’.
‘But why—’
‘Because I wanted to see you first. Because I wanted to do something for Matthew’. Edie spun round. ‘Matthew’s not afraid of me!’
‘It wasn’t about that,’ Ruth said, ‘it’s about saving him having to explain himself again. It’s about me explaining to you how hard it is for women my age to deal with motherhood and work when both are so demanding and important, and how wonderful it would be if you could be on my side’. She paused. And then she added, ‘Irrespect
ive of Matthew’.
Edie said nothing. She went back to her chair and sat down in it and pulled the belt of the bathrobe tighter. Then she looked at Ruth across the table, at her polished hair and her sharply cut suit.
‘Do you think,’ she said, ‘that it’s any easier for me?’
‘Yes,’ Ruth said.
‘Do you?’
‘Yes,’ Ruth said, ‘I think that women after their families have gone are pretty unstoppable. That’s what it looks like, from where I’m standing’.
‘Really?’
Ruth leaned forward.
‘The classic reproach, the one about women promoting themselves at the expense of people who need their care, doesn’t apply to you. Not any more’.
‘Wait a moment—’
‘I don’t want to argue,’ Ruth said. ‘I didn’t come to argue. I didn’t even come to make comparisons. I came to tell you about the baby’.
Edie looked up. She stared at Ruth as if she was seeing her properly for the first time.
‘Oh, my God,’ Edie said. ‘A baby’.
Russell looked at the glasses of wine Rosa had already carried to the table from the bar.
‘No wish to be churlish,’ he said, ‘but this immediately makes me suspicious—’
‘You like red wine’.
‘I do indeed. But usually I have to buy the red wine I like. In the case of my children, I invariably buy the red wine’. ‘Well,’ Rosa said, ‘things are changing’. Russell sighed. ‘That’s what I was afraid of’.
‘Dad—’
‘You ask me to have a drink with you, you soften me up by getting the drinks in first and then you ask me for ten thousand pounds. That’s the form’.
‘No,’ Rosa said.
Russell picked up his glass.
‘Then I’ll just have a quick swallow before I know what it really is’.
Rosa said carelessly, ‘I’m being promoted’. Russell put his glass down again. ‘I thought it was a crap job and only temporary and you hated it’.
‘I’ve been asked,’ Rosa said, ‘to run the branch in Holborn. I get a thirty per cent rise in salary and my uniform will no longer have sunburst buttons’.
Russell eyed her.
‘So I congratulate you’.
‘Yes, please’.
‘And why couldn’t you tell me this at home?’ ‘Home’s difficult,’ Rosa said. Russell looked away.
‘I mean,’ Rosa said, ‘I probably help to make it difficult but it’s not, well, it’s not really working, is it, us all living together? It’s not very successful’.
Russell said, still looking away, ‘I never thought it would be’.
‘Well, you were right. You’re right about lots of things’.
He said tiredly, ‘Don’t try to placate me, Rosa. I’m beyond all that’. ‘I mean it’. ‘Well, thank you—’
‘And I don’t mind going to Holborn and I don’t mind working in a travel agency. I don’t mind’.
‘Ah,’ Russell said. He turned to look at her. ‘Why don’t you?’
‘Because,’ Rosa said, spreading her fingers flat on the table and regarding them, ‘another avenue has opened up’.
‘Not a work avenue, I take it—’
‘No’.
Russell took a swallow.
‘Lazlo?’
‘Yes. I didn’t know you knew’.
‘I didn’t know,’ Russell said, ‘but I guessed. It would be hard to live in the same house and not guess’. Rosa smiled down at her hands. ‘It’s very early days’.
‘Yes—’
‘And he’s terribly shy. I’m not sure – he’s ever had a real girlfriend before’.
‘He’s a nice boy,’ Russell said. ‘An honest boy’. ‘So you don’t mind—’
‘Mind?’
‘You don’t mind if Lazlo and I move out to live together?’
Russell leaned forward.
‘No, Rosa, I don’t mind. I’m very pleased for you’. She eyed him.
‘Will Mum be?’
‘I should think so—’
‘Will you tell her?’
Russell shook his head.
‘No’.
‘Dad—’
‘You must tell her. Lazlo must tell her’. Rosa made a little gesture. ‘I really don’t like to’.
What do you mean?’ Russell demanded, sitting upright. ‘What do you mean, you don’t like to? After all she’s done for you—’
‘It isn’t that’.
‘Well, then—’
‘It’s just,’ Rosa said, ‘that I know how much she’s done. I know how tired she is, I know how disappointed she is about the play not transferring, and I just don’t want to add to everything, add to the feeling of losing things’. She paused and then she said in a rush, ‘I mean I’m worried she’ll really feel it, with Matt going and now us—’
‘Matt?’ Russell said sharply.
Rosa put her hand over her mouth.
‘Oh, my God—’ ‘Rosa—’
‘I didn’t mean,’ Rosa said, ‘I didn’t mean to say anything about—’
Russell leaned across the table and grasped Rosa’s wrist. ‘What,’ he said, ‘about Matthew?’
Vivien sat in her hall beside her telephone table. On it lay a list of all the people she was going to telephone, one after another, in a calm and orderly fashion, and when the list was completed she was going to go upstairs with a new roll of heavy-duty dustbin bags and begin, without hysteria, to fill them with Max’s possessions.
The first person on the list was Edie. She had planned to ring Edie first and tell her what had happened and reassure her that she was, strangely and slightly light-headedly, perfectly all right. Then she intended to ring her solicitor and bank manager and Alison at the bookshop to tell her, in the phrase beloved of old-fashioned crime novels that didn’t need to trouble themselves with too much inconvenient reality, that something had come up, something that would prevent her coming in to the shop tomorrow, but that she would be in as usual on Wednesday. However, on reflection, she thought she would ring Edie after she had spoken to her solicitor and bank manager, rather than before, so that she could sound reassuring about having everything in hand and being composed and controlled.
She had been extraordinarily composed when she discovered, by asking Max outright about the amount of money he had received for the flat in Barnes, that he had never actually sold it. She had been rather less composed when it became evident that, not only was the flat not sold, but it wasn’t even on the market since it was still inhabited by Max’s last girlfriend, who was both refusing to leave and refusing to pay the bills. And she had, to her subsequent regret, lost all control when Max fell on his knees on her bedroom floor and told her that only she could save him from the rapacious harpy who was bleeding him dry, and that was why he’d wanted to come home, to a real, warm, loving woman whose sole aim wasn’t to castrate him as well as bleed him dry.
She had, of course, cried all night after that episode. She had expected to. What she hadn’t expected was, despite the dispiriting sensation of having a tremendous hangover, to feel such a relief the next day. It was unmistakable, this relief, a feeling that she was at last emerging from something that had beguiled her for too long in a profoundly unsettling way, and obscured her sense of purpose into the bargain. When Max, haggard in his lavish velour dressing gown, had stared into his coffee the next morning and said, ‘I need you, doll. I want you, I love you. Please, please forgive me,’ she’d been able to say, to her amazement, ‘Of course I forgive you, but I’m afraid I don’t want you any more’.
Sitting now on her telephone chair, she carefully tested her feelings as she had done a hundred times a day since Max’s revelations. Did she still love him? Did she even still want or need him? No, quite decidedly. Could she face the thought of all the days and months and years ahead without him? Yes, not quite so decidedly, but that was more, she thought, the prospect of no man at all rather than no Max. And, even that possibili
ty, the possibility of being on her own really meaning being on her own, was less unpalatable than seeing herself sliding back into being the person she seemed to be around Max, the anxious, appeasing, uncertain person who dealt with his unreliability with either silence or screams.
She looked again at her telephone list. She was going to rehearse very carefully what she was going to say to the solicitor because, although she obviously wasn’t going to blurt it all out before she actually saw him, it was important, she felt, to give him an idea, in a dignified way, of what she wished to see him about. Perhaps she wasn’t quite ready for that yet. Perhaps she wasn’t quite ordered enough in her mind to talk about it as distantly as she wanted to. Perhaps it would be better to ring Edie first, after all, and ask her advice about how she should tell Eliot. It was only when she thought of Eliot, she told herself, that she felt remotely unsteady.
She picked up the receiver and dialled Edie’s number. It would be an hour or two before Edie needed to go to the theatre, a time when Edie could be expected to give even half her attention to her sister, a time when …
‘Hello?’ Edie said. ‘It’s me—’
‘Vivi,’ Edie said, ‘you are just brilliant at picking the very moment when I really can’t—’ ‘No,’ Vivien shouted. ‘No!’
‘What?’
‘Listen to me!’ Vivien shouted. ‘Listen to me!’ And burst into tears.
* * *
Now that he had switched off even the television, the house was eerily quiet. Even the perpetual hum of London seemed to have withdrawn itself to a distance. The only sound, really, was Arsie who, having leaped on him the moment he lay down on the sofa, was now extended up his chest with languorous purpose and purring loudly. He had his eyes closed, but in a way that indicated to Russell that he could remain, at the same time, exceedingly watchful.
Beside them, on a padded stool, lay the evening newspaper, an empty wine glass and the plate that had borne Russell’s unsatisfactory supper. There had been nobody at home when Russell returned, and no indication as to where anybody was, or what they intended, except that the stack of Ben’s possessions behind the sofa appeared, Russell thought, slightly diminished. He had cleared up the kitchen in a perfunctory way against Edie’s return, made himself an unsuccessful omelette over too high a flame, finished the last third of a bottle of red wine, done the crossword in the paper and was now prone on the sofa wondering why an empty house should feel so peculiarly unrelaxing.
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