Joanna Trollope - Second Honeymoon

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.

The loft on Bankside was in a vast converted Victorian warehouse. Its brick walls, newly cleaned and pierced with modern windows in matte black frames, reared up from the charmingly – and also newly – cobbled alley that separated the building from a similar one ten feet away. If you looked skywards, you could see, on the two sides that looked towards the river, that little black balconies had been hung outside some of the higher windows, and on one of those, Matthew supposed, Ruth would emerge on summer evenings, holding a glass of vodka and cranberry juice, or whatever was the drink of the moment in her circle, and admire both the view and her sense of ownership.

Thinking this was not, Matthew found, at all comfortable. In fact nothing in his mind was, at the moment, in the least comfortable, being instead a sour soup of disappointment and self-reproach and a very real and insistent sadness. It wasn’t a simple matter of resenting Ruth, or even berating himself for not facing facts, because the whole situation had crept up on him – on them both – so insidiously, fuelled by things that were not acknowledged or uttered even more than by things that were openly expressed. He might curse himself for getting into this tangle, but the curses were only the more vehement because he could, looking back, see exactly how he had got there.

When Matthew had announced that there was no way he could share in the purchase of the flat, Ruth had become very still. She had looked at him for a long time, thoughtfully, and then she had said, ‘Will you do one thing?’

‘What thing—’

‘Come and see the flat. Just see it’. He shook his head.

‘No’.

‘Matthew, please’.

‘I can’t afford it. I don’t want to have my nose rubbed in what I can’t afford’.

‘It isn’t for you, I’m afraid. It’s for me. I want you to see the flat’.

He said nothing.

She said, almost shyly, ‘I want you to see what I’m buying’.

‘Why?’

‘I want you to be part of it—’

‘I can’t be’.

‘But you’ll come there, you’ll come and see me, surely?’ He hesitated. His heart smote him. He said, not looking at her, ‘Of course’. ‘Then come’.

‘Ruth—’

She moved towards him and put her hands on his shoulders. She looked into his face as intently as if she were counting his eyelashes.

‘Matt. Matt. This isn’t the end of us’.

Now, standing uneasily on those carefully patterned cobblestones, Matthew told himself that being kind – or cowardly – once was one thing: persisting in it was quite another and could lead to desperate situations. Whatever Ruth said, however beseeching she was, he must not allow her to believe that he felt other than he did, that he could somehow cope with a situation in which he only had power in the obvious department of bed, which was not, in the end, he knew, enough.