Second Honeymoon

Chapter Six

Barney reached across Kate to buckle her car seat belt. She put a hand out. ‘I can do it—’

‘I like doing it,’ Barney said. ‘My wanting to will probably wear off, so I should enjoy it while you can’. He pushed the buckle home. ‘You look better’.

‘I feel,’ Kate said, ‘marginally less awful. Marginally’.

Barney turned the ignition key.

‘Or you are relieved to be getting away from the flat for the weekend’.

Kate turned her head away.

‘Kate?’

‘Can’t hear you’.

‘Yes, you can. Even the prospect of being a daughter-in-law for forty-eight hours is better than trying to pretend that having Rosa in the flat isn’t like trying to manoeuvre round an agitated double bed all the time’.

Kate said nothing.

‘You were in her room,’ said Barney, pulling the car out into the street, ‘until one o’clock this morning’.

‘She was miserable—’

‘And then you can’t sleep so you’re miserable and then I’m miserable’. Kate beat lightly on her thighs with her fists. ‘Barney, we have had this conversation’. ‘But then nothing happens’. ‘It does. She’s got a job’. ‘Temping’.

‘It’s a job. She’s going to give us some rent’. ‘How much?’

‘Don’t be so completely vile’.

Barney waited until he had negotiated a small roundabout, and then he said, ‘OK. That was out of order. Sorry. But we wouldn’t be having this conversation, and I wouldn’t be saying things like that, if it wasn’t for Rosa’.

‘I know’.

‘The thing is, she doesn’t know how not to be a huge presence. She’s somehow all over the flat even when she’s in her room with the door shut’.

‘Barney,’ Kate said, looking straight ahead, ‘there are two weeks to go’.

‘And then?’

Kate said nothing.

Barney took a hand off the steering wheel and put it on one of Kate’s.

He said, more gently, ‘And then?’ ‘I don’t know’. ‘Promise me something’.

‘Oh—’

‘Promise me you won’t ask her to stay longer’.

Kate said, ‘I’ll try—’ ‘No’.

‘Barney—’

‘If you do,’ Barney said, ‘I’ll un-ask her. Not for my sake particularly but for yours. And ours’.

Kate put her head back against the seat and closed her eyes.

‘I just feel we’ve got so much—’ ‘Look,’ Barney said. ‘Look. Whatever we’ve got we’ve made ourselves. We haven’t taken something of Rosa’s’. Kate began, very quietly, to cry. Barney glanced at her.

‘Oh darling—’ ‘It’s nothing—’

He pulled the car quickly into the side of the road and put his arms clumsily round her.

‘Oh darling, don’t cry, I’m so sorry, don’t cry. Oh

Kate—’

‘It’s not you,’ Kate said unsteadily. ‘It’s me. And probably this baby’.

Barney loosened his arms and slid down until his cheek and ear were resting against Kate’s stomach.

‘This baby’.

Kate sniffed. She looked down, at Barney’s head in her lap, at his hair, his hand on her thigh.

She said, ‘It’s OK. I’ll tell her. If she doesn’t know already—’

‘She’s not a fool—’

‘No,’ Kate said. She blotted her eyes on her sleeve. ‘No, she’s not. That’s part of the trouble’.

Cleaning, Rosa thought, hunting for rubber gloves under Kate’s sink, wasn’t something she had exactly been brought up to do. Edie had been very strict about helping, had made sure that everyone – with the frequent exception of Ben – realised that the task of keeping a house going was a communal responsibility and that, just because she was the mother, it didn’t automatically follow that she was also unpaid room service. But Edie was not the kind of woman for whom crushed cushions and unscaled kettles represented the first signs of domestic anarchy; washing the kitchen floor was never, for her, going to take priority over helping Matthew make a model or dancing with Rosa in front of the landing mirror. It was only staying over in schoolfriends’ houses that had revealed to Rosa that people – some people – bought vacuum cleaners for their efficiency and not solely because they had a jolly little face painted on the cylinder. Nothing she saw, no amount of gleaming bathrooms, made her feel Edie’s attitude was wrong, but she did begin to see that the relief to be found in the small satisfactions of cleaning was very real and weirdly reliable. It was, in the end, living with Josh that had driven her to find the solid, if unglamorous, consolations of exercising control where you still could, in creating domestic order.

It was her intention, that Saturday, to create exactly that order in Kate and Barney’s flat. It was partly that she might find personal solace in burnishing surfaces and straightening rugs, but also because she might gain a form of unspoken forgiveness from Barney, in particular, and even – this was a long shot but desperate situations required desperate measures – prepare the way to asking if her month in the flat might be extended into two. She was keenly aware that she had not behaved well in the past fortnight, that she had conducted herself with the sort of sulky resentment associated with disaffected fourteen-year-olds, and that it looked to Kate as if she was motivated by no more than the most primitive and unattractive of envies.

If she was honest, she thought, spraying cleaning fluid lavishly across the kitchen surfaces, she was envious of Kate. Not envious of Kate having Barney, but envious of Kate and Barney wanting to be together, and having the unspeakable luxury of a future to look forward to. At the same time, however, she knew that this kind of envy was a bitter, destructive thing, as well as a disgrace in any commendable personality. And even, Rosa thought, scrubbing at a stain, if my personality is not commendable, and certainly hasn’t been recently, I would like it to be; I would like it, really, to be in charge of itself.

She straightened up. A pleasing sort of calm was beginning to overtake the kitchen. She thought of extending her efforts to the contents of the cupboards and then it occurred to her that to move so much as a box of lentils could be construed as criticism, which was, in her present shaky state, the last thing she wanted to convey. She wanted, rather, to make the flat look, by the time Barney and Kate returned, like a humble but unmistakable token of gratitude. She wanted, she acknowledged with difficulty, to appear sorry without actually having to say so.

From the sitting room, her mobile rang. Rosa went slowly to answer it, pulling off the rubber gloves and saying to herself, under her breath, as she seemed to have been saying for years every time the phone rang, ‘Make it a surprise, make it something nice, make it—’

‘Darling?’ Edie said.

‘Mum, hi—’

‘Are you all right? What are you doing?’ ‘Actually,’ Rosa said, ‘cleaning’. ‘Cleaning? Why?’

‘I want to. I like it. It’s Saturday morning. Cleaning time’.

‘Not in this house,’ Edie said. ‘I remember’.

‘Rosa, what’s happening?’ ‘Happening?’

‘Yes. We haven’t spoken for weeks—’ ‘Five days’.

‘I want to know if you’re OK’. Rosa stood a little taller.

‘I am’.

‘Are you?’

‘Yes, Mum. Thank you’. ‘Have you found a job?’

‘Yes’.

‘What—’

‘Not a good job. But a job. In a travel agency’.

‘Rosa—’

‘Don’t start’.

‘You’re so bright and beautiful,’ Edie said, ‘I don’t want you wasting yourself’.

‘Nor do I’. ‘Darling—’

‘Mum,’ Rosa said, interrupting. ‘What’s going on with you?’

‘Oh, that’.

‘Yes, that. I can tell there’s something’. ‘Well,’ Edie said, ‘I got the part’. ‘Mum! The Ibsen?’

‘Yes. Isn’t it odd?’

‘Odd?’

‘Yes. To get a part you don’t want when you weren’t trying’.

‘You do want it’.

‘Maybe’.

‘I think it’s wonderful,’ Rosa said. Her throat hurt, as if she were about to cry. ‘Congratulations. It’s brilliant’.

‘We’ll see,’ Edie said. ‘Read-through on Tuesday. I get to meet my stage son. Have you heard from Matthew?’

‘No—’

‘What about this flat he and Ruth are buying?’ Rosa put her hand to her throat. ‘It sounds all very hip young professional—’ ‘Darling, I wish—’

‘I don’t want an urban loft, Mum. Or a job in the City’. ‘Have you spoken to Ben?’ ‘I haven’t spoken to anyone’. ‘Rose, are you all right?’

Rosa shut her eyes. She mouthed, ‘Don’t keep asking’ at the ceiling. Then she said loudly, ‘Fine’. ‘If you’re not OK—’

‘I am. Ring me and tell me how Tuesday goes’.

‘Oh,’ Edie said, ‘OK’.

‘How is Dad?’ ‘In his shed’. ‘You’re joking’.

‘Would I?’

‘Give him my love,’ Rosa said.

‘Darling—’

‘Back to Mr Sheen!’ Rosa called. She held the phone away from her ear.

Edie’s voice came faintly from it, thin and small.

‘Bye, Mum!’

She went slowly into the kitchen, and leaned against the sink. Edie in her kitchen, herself in Kate’s, Matt and Ruth no doubt buying Alessi-inspired kettles for theirs, Ben and Naomi blissfully not giving kitchens a thought. She sighed. She had not given her mother what she wanted, on the telephone. She knew that she hadn’t given it because she couldn’t, for all the tired old reasons of loyalty and disloyalty that bedevil family life, the kind of reasons that made her mother and her mother’s sister ring each other and bitch about each other daily in equal measure. She leaned against the sink and folded her arms. It struck her, with a small ray of dawning hopefulness, that this thought of her aunt coming into her head might not be totally arbitrary and that, beyond fathers and mothers in the leaky support system provided by families, there could sometimes also be aunts. Rosa stood straighter and laid the rubber gloves down on the now gleaming draining board. Then she went thoughtfully back towards the sitting room, and her mobile phone.

‘I’m playing Osvald,’ the young man said. Edie smiled at him. ‘I guessed’.

He gave a small snort of laughter.

‘Not difficult, with a cast of five—’

He had fine features and the slight build Edie had always somehow associated with First World War poets.

He said, ‘Well, we’re the same colouring, anyway. Mother and son’.

She gave him an appraising glance.

‘I expect you got your height from your father—’

He grinned.

‘Among other things’.

‘I know,’ Edie said. ‘What a play’.

‘Not much light relief—’

‘That means rehearsals will be hilarious. They always are, if the play is dark’. The young man said, ‘My name’s Lazlo’. ‘I know. Very exotic’. ‘My sister’s called Ottolie’. ‘Is she an actor?’ Lazlo shook his head.

‘She’s almost a doctor’. He made a little gesture. ‘I’ve never played Ibsen before’.

‘Nor me. Not really’.

‘I didn’t think I had a hope—’

‘Nor me’.

‘It was an awful casting—’

‘Horrible’.

He smiled at her.

‘But here we are, Mama’.

‘I think,’ Edie said, smiling back, ‘you call me Mother dear. At least, in this version’. He bowed a little. ‘Mother dear’.

She looked across the room. A dark girl with her curls tied on top of her head with an orange scarf was standing in an extravagant dancer’s pose, feet and hips sharply angled, talking to the director.

‘What do you think of Regina?’

He turned his head.

‘Scary’.

‘You get to kiss her’. ‘Double scary’.

‘In two weeks’ time,’ Edie said, ‘you won’t be thinking that for an instant’.

He said, almost eagerly, ‘I’ve only been out of drama school a year, you see—’

She looked at him, full in the face. Then she smiled and took his hand.

‘How absolutely lovely,’ Edie said.

Barney had insisted that Kate take a taxi to work. It was her first Monday morning, after all, after feeling too terrible to leave the flat for three weeks, and he was taking no chances. He had booked the cab himself, and left a twenty-pound note weighted with an orange on the kitchen table, to pay for it. ‘Just this once,’ Kate said.

She had looked at the note and wished that he hadn’t left it. Solicitousness was all very well but the imposition of will implied by paying for something was rather different. She was extremely grateful for the thought, but not at all grateful for the money. She was still earning, after all: she would pay for her own taxi. She had picked up the orange and replaced it in the fruit bowl, and then wedged the money against it like a flag.

Sitting in the taxi, Kate felt an unmistakable rush of relief, relief at not wishing to die with such vehemence, relief at being out of the flat, relief at the prospect of the – compared to home – impersonality of work. Work was full of complications, and intractable people, but as she didn’t love them she didn’t have to take responsibility for them. Nor did she have to thank them, fervently, every time they did something properly that they were paid to do properly in the first place.

It was lovely of Rosa to have made such an effort in the flat. They had returned from a weekend in Dorset with Barney’s parents – too much food, Kate thought, too much kindness, too many cushions and anxious questions – to find the flat smelling strongly of bleach, and every room wearing a startled aspect, as if a violent upheaval had taken place without having, exactly, come to a settled conclusion afterwards. Rosa could start things and carry them energetically part of the way forward, but finishing them, calming them, tidying up tedious, final details was something she was unable to achieve because she couldn’t see that it was necessary. Her essays at university had been like that, Kate remembered, full of initial energy and enterprise and then simply stopping, some way from the end, as if a fuel supply had been cut off. Barney had looked at the sitting room.

‘It’s like someone left the window open, and a hurricane blew through’.

Kate had been very grateful – most grateful in fact -for Rosa’s not being there when they got back. She’d left a jug of pale supermarket tulips, all curved and clamped together, on the kitchen table and a note saying she’d gone away for the night. Kate, feeling treacherous, had opened Rosa’s bedroom door and looked inside. The bed was made, roughly speaking, and the floor was clear because all Rosa’s clothes had been mounded up in one corner, and covered, with its arms outstretched in a sort of bizarre embrace, by her orange tweed jacket. Kate swallowed. There was a mug and a glass on the upended wine carton Rosa was using as a bedside table. Kate resisted the urge to go and pick them up and closed the door again.

It was easier, the next morning, and with the unquestioned freedom of a working day ahead, to feel a simpler reaction to Rosa’s efforts. Losing a job, Kate reflected, was in some ways similar to the end of a relationship, even if it was a job you hadn’t exactly valued in the first place. When you were faced with rejection, in whatever situation and however deserved or undeserved, it wasn’t just your confidence that suffered, it was your faith in the future, your ability to see that any effort you might make could be a tiny investment in what would happen to you thereafter. I have to remember that, Kate thought, I have to remember how pointless daily life seems when you can’t see where you’re going. I have to remember what it must feel like when there isn’t even any wreckage to cling to.

The taxi drew into the kerb. Across a broad stretch of pavement rose the eccentric glass-and-steel façade of the broadcasting company where Kate had worked as a researcher for three interesting and purposeful years. It was the sort of job she had hoped for, all the time she was at university, all the time after university when she couldn’t find what she wanted, couldn’t seem to settle. It was, in fact, the sort of job Rosa should have had too.

Kate leaned forward and pushed a note through the glass screen in the taxi. How astonishing it was, how pleasurable, to be going back to work. She got out of the cab and stood for a moment on the pavement, her face tilted towards the sky. Married, she said to herself, pregnant, working. Go, girl.

In the coffee shop after the read-through, Lazlo said he was starving.

‘I was so nervous—’

‘It didn’t show’.

‘I kept thinking, this isn’t how I’m going to play it, this is wrong. I made him far more petulant than I want him to be. I don’t want to sound so sorry for myself. Would you like a bagel?’

‘I’ll get you a bagel,’ Edie said.

‘No, really, I asked you to have a coffee with me’.

‘And I am your mother,’ Edie said. ‘Don’t forget that’.

He regarded her. He said soberly, ‘I thought you were wonderful’.

Edie’s chin went up a little.

‘Not really. Don’t forget I’ve been doing this since you were in your pram’. ‘I don’t think so’.

She took her wallet out of her bag.

‘How old are you?’

‘Twenty-four’.

She looked satisfied.

‘I’ve been doing this since you were in your pram.

What kind of bagel?’

‘Toasted, please. Would two bagels be out of the question?’

‘Certainly not. And cream cheese?’ ‘How did you know?’ ‘Mother stuff,’ Edie said.

She threaded her way between the small metal tables to the counter. Behind it, a huge mirror reflected the room and she could see that Lazlo was watching her and that he looked as her children had looked after school examinations in subjects they were good at, exhilarated and exhausted. He was going, she thought, to be a good Osvald, just the right blend of intensity and youthful spirit, frightened enough to arouse sympathy, self-absorbed enough to be maddening. As for her – well, there was a lot to think about in Mrs Alving and most of it about lies. Watching Lazlo in the glass made her consider how rich it was going to be making those lies form the central core of violent maternal protectiveness in the way she played Mrs Alving. She could see, from where she was, how hungry Lazlo was. She could see he was watching her in admiration, certainly, but also he was watching because she would be returning to him with a tray of coffee and bagels, and something in the simplicity of that, the neediness of that, made her heart rejoice.

She went back to their table and put the tray down. ‘Can I ask you something?’ Lazlo said.

‘Yes’.

‘I want you to be honest—’

‘Oh, I am excellent at that,’ Edie said, unloading the tray, putting the bagels down in front of him. ‘I have a diploma in honest. Ask my family’.

He picked up a knife.

‘Your family—’

‘One husband. Three children, two of them older than you are’. ‘I don’t believe it—’

‘True’. She turned and put the empty tray down on a nearby table. ‘What do you want to ask?’

‘Will I—’ He stopped. ‘Will you what?’

‘Will I be any good?’

It was rather nice, Vivien thought, lying in the bath with a mug of valerian tea balanced on the edge, to think of Rosa settling down in her spare room. The room had been made up, of course, as it always was, in obedience to the dictates of Vivien and Edie’s childhoods, where whole areas of the house had been consecrated to this mythical creature called the visitor, who would expect exaggerated standards of perfection and formality were he or she ever to put in an appearance. There had not only been a front room smelling of furniture polish, but a spare bedroom upstairs that looked as if it belonged in a provincial hotel, with two beds shrouded in green candlewick covers and a wardrobe empty of everything except extra blankets and a clatter of hangers. Edie’s reaction to this arrangement had been to make sure her family lived abundantly in every corner of her house; Vivien’s, to emulate her mother. Rosa, in Vivien’s spare room, would find books and tissues and lamps with functioning bulbs. And if she chose, climbing into a bed where the sheets matched the pillowcases, to make comparisons, that was no affair of Vivien’s.

When Rosa had telephoned and asked to come and see her, Vivien had said of course, come to supper. Then she had suggested coming on Sunday and added, ‘Why don’t you stay the night?’

Rosa had hesitated.

‘Would that be all right?’

‘Of course. Wouldn’t you rather stay than trail back into Central London afterwards?’

‘Staying,’ Rosa said, ‘would actually be very wonderful’.

Vivien didn’t think Rosa looked very well. She had made an effort – clean hair, ironed shirt – but there was a kind of lustre missing, the kind that was turned up full wattage when you were in love but could equally be dimmed down according to varying degrees of distress, until it was almost extinguished.

It became plain, as supper progressed, and Vivien began to think that a single bottle of wine was looking both meagre and unhelpful, that Rosa’s current state of distress had been advancing upon her for several years. First there was the affair with Josh, and then the ending of the affair and subsequent derailment of prudence and capability, and now unemployment and debt.

‘Probably,’ Rosa said, eating grapes with the absent-mindedness of being already full, ‘I shouldn’t be telling you this’.

‘Why not? I’m your aunt—’

‘I mean, I shouldn’t be telling anyone. In a grown-up world, I should be sorting it. I should be waking up one morning full of resolve and vow to clear my life of clutter and make a list of priorities. I shouldn’t be wandering about like some hopeless animal that’s escaped from its field and can’t find the way back in’.

Vivien got up to make coffee.

‘Nice image’.

‘But not nice situation’.

‘No’. She reached up for the cafetière from a high shelf. She said, ‘Did you think of going back home?’

There was a pause and then Rosa said reluctantly,

‘I tried’.

Vivien turned round.

‘I can’t believe your mother turned you down—’

‘No—’ ‘Well, then’.

‘Dad did,’ Rosa said. ‘But nobody knows that but Ben. You’re not to say’. Vivien smiled at her.

‘Wouldn’t dream of it’. She spooned coffee into the cafetière. She said carefully, ‘Your mother couldn’t think why you chose to go and live with friends. Couldn’t understand it. Why you didn’t go home’.

‘Well,’ Rosa said, ‘I can’t, now’.

‘Can’t you?’

‘I can’t go whining to Mum after Dad said what he did’.

‘Which,’ Vivien said, switching on the kettle, ‘I can imagine. Men always want their wives to see them first. Except,’ she added lightly, ‘mine’.

Rosa looked up.

‘Perhaps that’s why you still like him’. Vivien came back to the table and sat down. ‘More wine?’

‘Yes, but no,’ Rosa said. ‘I’m selling bargain breaks to Lanzarote tomorrow’.

‘Nothing wrong with that. I sell a lot of books I wouldn’t read myself’. She picked up a fork and drew a line with it across her place mat. She said, ‘You’ll get another job’.

‘I hope so’.

‘It’s much easier to find a job if you’ve already got one’.

Rosa rolled a bruised grape around the rim of her plate.

‘It’s not really the job that worries me so much, in a way. It’s how I’m going to live. How I’m going to live so that I can start on this debt, how I—’ She broke off and then she said, in a slightly choked voice, ‘Sorry’.

Vivien drew another line to intersect with the first one.

Then she said, ‘Come here’.

‘What?’

‘Come here. Come and live here for a while’. Rosa stared at her.

‘I couldn’t—’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, you’re my aunt—’

‘Exactly’.

‘And Mum—’

‘Might be very pleased’.

‘Might she?’

They looked at each other. ‘I don’t think so,’ Rosa said. ‘Does it matter?’ ‘Oh God—’

‘Does it really matter? Just while you get yourself sorted and start paying off these cards and find another job?’

‘Maybe—’

‘She’ll calm down,’ Vivien said. ‘You know Edie. Big bang, smaller mutterings, acceptance. She’ll be fine’. Rosa said slowly, ‘It would be wonderful—’

‘Yes. I’d love it’.

‘I’d make an effort—’

Vivien got up to get the coffee.

‘We both would’. She looked at Rosa over her shoulder. She smiled. ‘It might be quite fun’.

It might, she thought now, indeed be fun. It might also, dwelling upon the prospect, be both a relief and comfort to become in some way necessary again, a provider of all those things only women who had lived lives and run houses could properly provide. Vivien picked up her tea. Rosa had kissed her warmly before she had disappeared into the spare room, with a kind of brief sudden fervour people feel when they have unexpectedly been thrown a lifeline.

‘I only really came to talk,’ Rosa said. ‘I never thought—’

‘Nor did I,’ Vivien said. ‘One seldom does’.

She smiled into her tea. There was no hurry, really, about telling Edie.