Second Honeymoon

Chapter Thirteen

‘One seat in the back row, please,’ Ruth said, ‘and as far to one side as possible’.

The young man in the box office, who had clearly been surprised to find Ruth waiting when he opened up, said that there were better seats in the centre of the back, for the same price.

‘I know,’ Ruth said. She had put on a black canvas bucket hat and sunglasses, and thought, glancing unhappily in the mirror as she left the flat, that she looked like a Japanese tourist. ‘I’m sure they’re better, but the side is where I’d like to sit, please’.

The young man sighed, and slid the ticket towards her. Behind him, on the back wall of the little foyer, was a blown-up grainy poster photograph of Edie and Lazlo, in profile, facing each other, and then, superimposed across their torsos, the shadowy faces of the other actors. Cheryl Smith had the looks and the air, Ruth thought, that made other women immediately feel unwomanly.

She picked up the ticket.

‘Thank you—’

The young man nodded. This was not the kind of theatre where the staff said banal, populist things like, ‘Enjoy the show’. Behind her, other people were beginning to open the glass doors from the street, other people who might at any moment include Edie’s family, and therefore Matthew, and although Ruth was there in order to catch sight of Matthew, she was not at all certain that she could handle his catching sight of her. She bent her head so that wings of hair swung forward under the brim of her hat, and went quickly into the auditorium.

It was completely empty. Admittedly, the show wouldn’t start for half an hour, but the emptiness made Ruth feel vulnerable. She crept round the back of the stalls and took her seat in the far corner. If Matthew came, he would come with his family, naturally, and they would also, naturally, have seats in the centre, towards the front, and Matthew would be preoccupied by being in company, and by his mother’s big night, so it would not occur to him to look round the small auditorium and notice that, among the comfortably North London audience, there was a young woman masquerading – badly – as Yoko Ono, who was giving out elaborate signals of wishing strenuously not to be noticed. But if he did look round, and he did notice, there was then the miserable dilemma of how she would react to his reaction. If he didn’t realise it was her, how would she feel? If he did realise, and chose to ignore her, how would she feel? If he did realise and didn’t ignore her and did say something but not what she was longing to hear, how would she feel? The answer to all three questions was, of course, terrible.

It was no good, she thought, bending her head over the programme and staring unseeingly at Edie’s theatrical CV, telling herself she shouldn’t have come. It wasn’t a question of should or shouldn’t. It was more a question of desire urgent enough to amount to need. She was sure that just the sight of the back of Matthew’s head for two hours, just the knowledge that they were breathing the same air, would replenish the fuel in her emotional tank enough to get her through another few days, another week. To see him, simply to see him, might help reassure her that she had, in truth, done nothing wrong, that she was not the reason for his leaving, that she had not failed in some essential quality of womanliness, of femininity.

‘I thought,’ Laura had emailed from Leeds, ‘that Matthew was always so supportive of your career’.

Ruth hadn’t replied. She could have said, ‘He was. He is,’ but then she could foresee the questions that would follow and she couldn’t answer those, not the ‘But why, then?’ questions. If she could, she thought now, scanning rapidly down Edie’s numerous minor television appearances, she wouldn’t be here now, skulking in the back row of the theatre rather than sitting with Matthew’s family in the secure, acknowledged place of approved-of girlfriend. She felt a prick of incipient tears. She swallowed. No self-pity, she told herself sternly, no poor little me. You’ve chosen to come here so you’ll have to take the consequences. Whatever they are.

‘In the seventeenth century,’ Russell told Rosa, ‘there weren’t any theatrical foyers. In fact, I don’t think there were any before Garrick. The audience came in off the street and made their way through narrow dark tunnels and then, wham, suddenly emerged into the candlelit glory of the auditorium. Can you imagine?’

Rosa wasn’t listening. She was distracted by the fact that her Uncle Max had turned up wearing a double-breasted blazer with white jeans, and also that Ben, having said he’d come, and that he’d bring Naomi, was still not there and might have translated into action the doubtfulness in his voice about coming.

‘I always liked this theatre,’ Russell said.

He looked round. The auditorium was filling up and across the seats he could see several well-known newspaper theatre critics in their usual places, right on the edge, so that they could spring up the moment the curtain came down – or even before – to file their copy. He waved in a general sort of way.

‘There’s Nathaniel. And Alistair. I wonder how many performances of this they’ve sat through’.

‘If Ben doesn’t show up, I’ll kill him,’ Rosa said.

‘Ben?’ ‘Yes’.

‘Ben’s coming?’

‘Dad,’ Rosa said, ‘Mum is his mother too’. Russell waved to someone else. He said, ‘So nice of people to come. Halfway to Watford, after all—’

Rosa said suddenly, ‘That must be Naomi’. Russell turned. Ben, in his beanie hat and a denim jacket, was steering a slender girl with spectacular primrose hair through the door from the foyer. She was wearing a tiny dress with sequinned straps and her legs and shoulders were bare.

‘Barbie,’ Rosa said under her breath.

Russell pushed past her and made his way towards them.

He put a hand on Ben’s shoulder.

‘Old man—’

Ben looked awkward. He said, ‘This is Naomi’.

Russell smiled. He took his hand off Ben’s shoulder and held it out to Naomi. ‘How nice to meet you’.

She transferred her doll-sized handbag from one hand to the other, and put the free hand into Russell’s.

‘Hi there,’ Naomi said. She gave a tiny smile, revealing gappy white teeth. Her skin was flawless.

‘It’s nice of you to come,’ Russell said. ‘I’m afraid this isn’t a very cheerful play’.

Ben grunted.

Naomi said, ‘We go to musicals at Christmas. My mum likes Elaine Page’.

‘Fine voice,’ Russell said. ‘No singing this evening, though—’

Naomi said coolly, ‘I wasn’t expecting it’.

Rosa appeared at Russell’s elbow. She loomed over Naomi like a Valkyrie.

‘This is Rosa,’ Ben said, slightly desperately.

Naomi looked her up and down.

‘Pleased to meet you’.

‘Me too,’ Rosa said. She glanced at Ben. ‘Glad you made it’. He shrugged. He said, ‘Mum called me’. ‘Mum did? I called you’.

Ben sighed. He rubbed his hand over his head, pushing his beanie lower over his brows.

He said, ‘She rang to ask if I minded you having my room’.

Naomi was watching Rosa with brown eyes that were extremely sharp, despite their improbable size.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘Ben doesn’t need his bedroom now, does he?’

‘Well, no—’

‘So you can have it’. Naomi looked up at Ben with quiet possessiveness. ‘Can’t she?’ ‘Sure,’ Ben said.

Russell made a gesture for them to sit down. ‘Five minutes to curtain-up—’ Rosa looked at Naomi.

‘Won’t you be cold?’

Naomi flicked a glance over Rosa’s jacket. ‘I don’t feel the cold’. ‘Come on,’ Russell said, ‘seats time’. Ben put an arm round Naomi’s smooth narrow shoulders.

He said to Rosa, ‘She can always have my jacket’.

Rosa said nothing. She watched them turn away from her, Russell shepherding Naomi down the aisle towards her seat, bending towards her, talking, with Ben following behind with the bewildered air of someone trapped in an environment completely alien to him. Affectation, Rosa thought savagely, absolute affectation, all for Naomi’s benefit, parading independence, parading detachment from background, parading the kind of cool anyone with half an eye could see was fake. She saw Matthew – suited, with a tie – half get up from his seat to greet Naomi, and then Max leap up and bend over her hand like some afternoon-television games-show host, and then she saw them all settle down into their seats, all in a row, couple by couple, and then Matthew, in a seat next to Russell, and then a space left for her, at the end, a space with nothing on her other side but more space. Her eyes moved back along the row and rested on Vivien.

‘No hurry to go, darling,’ Vivien had said, putting the largest prawn from the seafood risotto on Rosa’s plate, ‘absolutely no hurry. Max can just wait till you’re ready to leave’. She’d giggled, and added another mussel to the prawn. ‘He can wait’.

Rosa began to walk slowly down the aisle towards her seat. There had been, really, nothing she could say but yes when Edie rang and said she’d heard about Vivien and Max and of course Rosa could come home, that day, if she needed to. But, if there had been nothing else to say, that didn’t mean that she had said yes with any relief, any thankfulness. Being grateful for the offer didn’t disguise, for a moment, the fact that the feelings of hopelessness and self-disgust, which she had, strangely, managed to escape from in Vivien’s overstuffed spare bedroom, hadn’t gone away but had merely been biding their time.

I wanted this, she thought, looking at her family. A few months ago, I wanted this, I wanted to go back home. And now I am, all I feel is a failure.

She eased herself into the end seat, next to her father. He was looking straight ahead, at the drawn curtains of the stage, and she could tell, from the look on his face, that he was thinking of nothing but Edie.

Vivien thought that if only Eliot could have been there too – with or without Ro, who was somehow very hard to visualise – she would have been completely happy. As it was, sitting in a darkening theatre with Max on one side of her – his pristine white knee lightly touching hers – and Ben on the other, and all the family beyond Ben, including Ben’s girlfriend, who looked as if she’d be an excellent test case for Max’s avowal of reformation, was a pretty good approximation to complete happiness. She had never, after all, envied Edie her acting talent, she had never wished she was Edie or wanted to live the way Edie did. She was, she told herself, very pleased for Edie that she’d got this part, just as she was very pleased for Edie that she’d managed to fill the house again, and that all the broken bridges were mended, and that she, Vivien, had played a part in sheltering Rosa until Russell came round to seeing that you couldn’t turn the poor girl away a second time. In fact, Vivien thought, noticing that she could feel Max’s shoulder as well as his knee, it had all turned out really well and everybody had got what they wanted, except that she wished Eliot was not in Australia, but even that was rather more bearable now knowing that Max not only felt the same, but had also suggested that they fly out for Christmas.

‘Our son,’ Max had said, speaking of Eliot, the other day. ‘Our son’.

Vivien smiled in the darkness. The curtains gave a small quiver and parted, slightly unsteadily, to reveal a large garden room with a view of a gloomy fjord visible through the back window. In the doorway to a conservatory beyond stood a working man with, apparently, a club foot. Opposite him, as if preventing him from coming any further in, was a remarkable-looking girl in a maid’s uniform, holding a large garden syringe.

‘Good God,’ Max said, in an audible whisper, ‘that’s never Edie?’

‘“Ah, but you see,”‘ Edie said, as Mrs Alving, ‘“here he has his mother. He’s a dear good boy, and he still has a soft spot for his mother.”‘

Matthew shifted a little in his seat. Edie looked impressive really, in a black dress with great full skirts and her hair drawn back under a white lace cap with black ribbons. She looked not just different, but distanced from her everyday self, and her voice was different too, and her gestures, and the way she spaced her words out. He’d seen her act before, of course, but really only on television and not, as far as he could remember, in anything where she wasn’t still recognisably his mother. He had wondered how he would feel, seeing her on stage being someone so very separate from her real self, whether he would be excited, or even embarrassed.

What he actually felt, sitting there in the dark between his father and his sister, was a surprising degree of interest, an interest that would intensify, he rather thought, when Lazlo made his entrance, when he saw his mother and Lazlo together on stage.

He could feel that Russell, on his left-hand side, was concentrating with the effort you use when you are willing someone to do well. That concentration, he thought, was typical of his father, typically generous, typically reasonable. Russell, after all, had had plenty to resent Edie for in the last few weeks, but for tonight had managed to put all grudges aside in order to focus on this production working, on Edie achieving something that had nothing to do with relationships or family or those tiny but telling shifts in power that meant you could go from light to dark in a matter of hours. One word was all it took, sometimes, one careless word. Or – Matthew tensed a little -the absence of words over a long, fatal period of illusory calm could result in the failure to stop a slide into something that couldn’t be rescued by words any more.

He had kept his vow not to contact Ruth. He had joined a new – cheaper – gym near his parents’ home and opened a savings account with his bank. Part of him was quite pleased about these manifestations of recovery, but part of him felt that they were pitiful, forlorn little plasters stuck on a still-gaping wound. And yet these efforts had to be maintained, even built on, because there could be no going back, even if he couldn’t visualise – and he had tried – a woman who he would simply like to be with as much as he had liked being with Ruth. In the night, when he woke, and remembered everything with a weary renewal of suffering, he missed Ruth’s just being there more than any other aspect of their relationship. For several years, after all, he had been wrapped in a companionship he had never had before and had never ceased to marvel at. He could discuss things with Ruth, confide things to Ruth, that it had never occurred to him as possible to articulate, and which were now bottling up again inside him despite his continued attempts to medicate himself by imagining what she might have counselled, how she might have responded.

He gave the briefest glance sideways, at his father. He was completely absorbed in what was going on, on stage, his elbows propped on the seat arms, his hands loosely clasped below his chin. Presumably, over all the decades he’d been married, his father had told his mother all kinds of things he hadn’t told anyone else – in fact, didn’t need to tell anyone else because he had Edie. Matthew looked back at the stage. Were all men like this? Were all men, if left to themselves, this lonely?

Abruptly on stage, Edie became extraordinarily illuminated. She flung out an arm, gesturing towards the open doorway.

‘“Listen,”‘ she said, her voice full of sudden rapture, ‘“there’s Osvald on the stairs! Now we’ll think about nothing but him.”‘

And then Lazlo, in a long pale coat, a hat in one hand and a pipe in the other, stepped dreamily on to the stage and the whole theatre turned to look at him.

Up in the little balcony – only three rows deep and uncomfortably steeply raked – Kate and Barney Ferguson watched the Boyd family rise for the interval.

‘I can’t move,’ Kate said. ‘It was enough trouble getting me in here and I’m not trying to get out again until the end’.

‘Oughtn’t you to go and see them?’

Kate looked down into the stalls.

‘Well, you could find Rosa and ask her to come and see me’.

Barney stood up.

‘Who’s the spiv?’

‘That,’ Kate said, ‘is Rosa’s Uncle Max. Married to Edie’s sister Vivien, in fuchsia pink’. She paused and then she said, ‘The colour Rosa and I have always referred to as menopause pink’.

Barney looked down, smiling.

He said tolerantly, ‘Nasty girls’.

‘That’s us’.

He turned in the narrow space between the seats and looked behind him.

‘I’ll just climb my way out and go and find her’.

‘Past an ice cream, perhaps?’

He smiled again.

‘Not that kind of theatre—’

‘No,’ Kate said. ‘More’s the pity’.

Barney bent and dropped a kiss on her head.

‘I like,’ he said, ‘knowing exactly where you are,’ and then he climbed over the seats behind him and made his way down to the foyer, which doubled as a bar during the interval.

Russell was standing at the bar lining up glasses. Barney touched his arm. ‘Evening, sir’.

Russell looked round. He was glowing. ‘You must be the last young man on the planet with manners. Isn’t she wonderful?’ ‘Brilliant,’ Barney said.

‘I mean,’ Russell said, starting to riffle through his wallet for notes, ‘I knew she could, I knew she had it in her, but she’s bringing something else to this. I’m bowled over. And by the boy’.

‘Not surprised—’

Russell took his hand out of his wallet and gripped Barney’s arm.

He said, almost conspiratorially, ‘Matt was in the Gents just now and overheard a couple of chaps saying there goes the next Hamlet and Gertrude and from his description of them, they’re surely—’

‘Barney,’ Rosa said, from behind them.

Barney turned.

He said, ‘She’s wonderful’.

Rosa nodded.

She said, ‘It’s given me quite a turn—’ ‘Ignorant child,’ Russell said affectionately. He turned back to the bar and began to gather up glasses. Rosa said, ‘Where’s Kate?’

‘Waiting for you. In what passes for the dress circle’. ‘Lovely of you to come,’ Russell said, over his shoulder. ‘Lovely of everyone. Lovely evening. Lovely everything.

Wine?’

Rosa took a glass neatly from her father’s grip and handed it to Barney.

‘I’ll go and find Kate’.

‘She’d like that. She’s wedged’.

Rosa slipped past him and vanished up the stairs. Barney took a sip of his wine. It tasted like the wine at student parties, the kind they’d bought in plastic bottles with screw-tops and amateur labels. It was offering Kate a glass of something much superior that had first induced her to look at him, to see beyond – he hoped – the name and the voice and the manners. And now look at him, married to her, mortgage with her, baby on the way, parents all forgiveness after an educational career in which school reports had struggled to perceive potential. Barney smiled privately into his wine. Nothing except happiness and current idolatry would have induced him to entertain even the thought of going to see an Ibsen play, let alone finding himself rather absorbed in it. Rosa’s mama was – well, really rather something.

He raised his eyes and looked across the group. Rosa’s brother Matthew – pretty successful, from the cut of his suit – was talking to the kind of girl Barney’s father would probably have referred to as a popsie. Barney made his way over to them and stared openly at Naomi. She was like something straight out of a sweetshop.

Matthew stopped what he was saying and said to Naomi, This is Barney. He’s married to my sister’s best friend’.

Naomi looked at him as one might regard something interesting but irrelevant from another species.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ she said.

‘Likewise—’

‘Naomi,’ Matthew said, ‘is Ben’s girlfriend’. ‘Lucky Ben’. Naomi didn’t smile.

She said instead, ‘Your wife’s pregnant, isn’t she?’ ‘How did you know?’

‘I listen,’ Naomi said, ‘I pay attention. I always did, even at school’.

‘More than I ever did—’ Matthew cleared his throat.

Barney switched his gaze from Naomi to Matthew and said, ‘Your mother is amazing’. Matthew nodded.

He looked a little bright-eyed, as if he was feverish. Now that Barney was paying attention, he thought Matthew also looked a bit gaunt, older, somehow.

He smiled and said, ‘I have to say, I wouldn’t exactly have hurried here, without Kate, but I’m awfully glad I did’.

‘It’s brilliant,’ Naomi said, ‘brilliant. I’m going to tell my mum. Does he die?’

‘God,’ Barney said, ‘is this going to be like Shakespeare, stage littered with bodies at the end?’

‘I don’t know,’ Matthew said, ‘I’ve never seen it before, either. I’ve never—’ He stopped.

‘You must be so proud of her,’ Naomi said. ‘If that was my mum up there, I’d be so proud’.

Matthew nodded.

‘I just wish – everyone could see her—’

‘Everyone?’

‘Well,’ Matthew said, swirling the inch of wine left in his glass round and round, ‘everyone I know—’

‘I’d feel like that,’ Naomi said. ‘I’d make them all come. I made Ben come’.

Matthew looked sharply at her.

‘Did you?’

‘Course,’ she said. ‘Family is family, isn’t it?’ ‘Yes,’ Matthew said.

Barney looked at Naomi’s shoulders, and the sequins lying over them, like little trails of stars. Then he thought of Kate sitting upstairs with her hands resting on the mound that was their baby because there was nowhere else to put them. Amazing how different women could be, how different they could become, how – differently they could make you feel about them. He swallowed.

He put out a hand and gave Matthew’s nearest shoulder a quick cuff.

‘Better get back—’

‘OK,’ Matthew said.

Barney glanced at Naomi.

‘Nice to meet you’.

She nodded.

‘All the best for the baby’.

‘Yes,’ Matthew said. ‘Give my love to Kate. Good of you to come’.

Barney put his wine glass down on the nearest surface and made for the stairs. There was a girl standing a little way up them, staring down into the bar, a dark girl in black, with a hat on, and sunglasses. In Barney’s father’s now collectable vinyl record collection from the sixties, there was, Barney remembered, a 45 rpm record whose cover featured a woman he’d been much struck by, when he was about fourteen, a French woman, all in black, with symmetrically cut black hair and black glasses. Her name was Juliette Greco, and Barney’s father, as an undergraduate as he called it, had hitch-hiked to Paris to hear her sing live in some dive on the Left Bank. Barney hadn’t thought about Juliette Greco for years, but this still, dark girl on the stairs, watching the crowd through the open doorway below her, had just the same cheekbones, just the same air of mystery.

‘Penny for them,’ Barney said cheerfully, as he went up past her, back to Kate.

‘I think,’ Edie said, ‘I’ll just stay down here for a bit’.

Russell, filling his nightly glass of water at the sink, turned round.

‘Really?’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’m tired but not tired. I couldn’t sleep yet. I’ll just stay down here and revel’. Russell turned the tap off. ‘Would you like me to stay with you?’ She shook her head.

‘Sure?’

‘Sure,’ Edie said.

He came across the room to where she was leaning against the cooker, and bent a little, to look into her face. ‘You were quite, quite amazing’. She looked down. ‘Thank you’.

He put the hand not holding the tumbler under her chin.

‘Look at me’.

Edie raised her chin an inch.

‘You were absolutely wonderful and I am unspeakably proud of you’.

She looked at him, saying nothing.

‘And I’m really sorry to have been such a grumpy sod about the children coming back and everything’.

‘Forget it—’

‘I loved watching their faces,’ Russell said. He let go of Edie’s chin and straightened up. ‘I loved seeing all that amazement and awe. If they’d had thought-bubbles coming out of their thick heads, they’d have read: “This is Mum? My Mum?”‘

Edie laughed.

She said, ‘They’re not thick’.

‘Only when it comes to seeing you as other than the provider of home comforts. Dear old room service’. ‘Not just them,’ Edie said, ‘guilty of that—’ ‘I know. I’m sorry. I’m truly sorry about—’ She put a hand up, across his mouth. ‘Enough’.

He nodded. She took her hand away.

She said, ‘I’ll be twenty minutes. You go up’.

He leaned forward and kissed her.

‘See you in twenty minutes, fantastic Mrs Alving’.

She smiled.

She said, stretching against the cooker, ‘You can’t imagine how it feels—’

‘No,’ he said, ‘I can’t, quite. But I can see,’ and then he turned and went humming out of the kitchen and Edie could hear him going up the stairs at a run, the way he had when they first had the house and everything seemed somehow an adventure.

She looked at the clock on the wall above the dresser. Twenty-past one. Arsie was curled up on the nearest kitchen chair, pretending, with great professionalism, that he wasn’t waiting to accompany her to bed. She stepped forward and scooped him up into her arms, and went over to unlock the kitchen door to the garden. Arsie stiffened slightly, alert to the awful possibility of spending the night outside, like any other cat.

‘Don’t worry,’ Edie said, holding him. ‘I’m only taking you out for company’.

The air outside was cool and sweet. It was only at night, Edie thought, that London somehow relaxed into its past, into the villages and huddles of huts it had once been, into a place that would quietly, un-urgently, outlive all its inhabitants. She walked slowly down the damp dark grass, holding Arsie against her neck and shoulder, admiring the way the white climbing rose whose name she could never remember shone in the gloom with an almost eerie luminousness, as if it had stored up energy in the daylight hours to use when darkness fell. There was a seat at the far end of the garden, beside Russell’s shed, a basic wooden playground bench, that they’d ordered from an offer in a Sunday newspaper without realising that Russell was going to have to assemble it, all one painful weekend, with the instruction sheets laid out on the grass, weighted with stones, and Russell crawling round them, cursing and saying he hadn’t got the right screwdriver. Edie sat down on the bench, and settled Arsie, rather tensely, in her lap.

Down the far end of the garden, the house shone like some tableau of domestic contentment. Its black outline stood sharply against the reddish sky, and every single window was lit, oblong after oblong of clean yellow light, with a shape moving here and there, Matt perhaps, Lazlo in Rosa’s bedroom, Rosa in Ben’s, Russell in the bathroom. To look at that, to look at what she was shortly going to return to, and to remember Freddie Cass’s arm briefly round her shoulders a couple of hours ago and his unengaged voice saying clearly in her ear, ‘Outstanding, Edie. Possibility of West End transfer not a fantasy,’ gave her a feeling of such hope and such pleasure and such energy that she could only suppose it was triumph.