Rosa watched Kate spearing anchovy fillets.

‘I’m glad you’re hungry’.

‘Starving. Every two hours. Especially salty things. Do you want your olives?’

Rosa pushed her plate forward.

‘Mum sounded so forlorn’.

‘Isn’t that better than angry? Or offended?’

‘Not as far as guilt goes’.

‘If this baby’s a girl,’ Kate said, ‘I vow not to make her feel guilty’.

‘I think women just do. Even when it isn’t reasonable. I mean, Matt and his girlfriend have just split up and, although he’s devastated, he doesn’t feel guilty. But I bet she does’.

Kate stopped chewing.

‘How awful. Poor them’.

‘Yes’.

‘Is it this woman and ambition thing?’ Rosa sighed.

‘Well, she earns twice what he does’.

‘And I bet,’ Kate said, ‘however successful, she’s afraid that makes her unlovable’.

Rosa picked a cherry tomato off her plate.

‘Unsuccessful isn’t very lovable, either’.

Does moving into your aunt’s spare bedroom count as unsuccessful? she thought now. If by successful you mean financial independence, probably yes. But if you mean still having other humans in your life who’ll speak to you, probably no. She picked up an armful of shoes and boots and dumped them in the bottom of the wardrobe. They looked terrible, with the sad intimate terribleness that worn shoes always have. And in addition, if Vivien were to come into Rosa’s room while she was at work – not a happy thought, but not one that could be discounted, either – she would expect to see Rosa’s possessions in sufficient order to denote gratitude for housing them. Rosa bent down, her head muffled in the hanging folds of her clothes, and began to sort her shoes into pairs.

Below her, in the hallway, Vivien’s telephone started to ring. Vivien still had a landline with a cord, a cream plastic handset that sat on a little table with a shelf for directories and a pad and a pot of pens. Vivien drew mouths and eyes on the pad while she talked on the telephone, curvy mouths and thick-lashed eyes, swimming about the page as if they had an eerie life of their own.

‘Hello?’ Rosa heard Vivien say. Her voice was perfectly clear, even from a floor below and with Rosa’s door closed.

‘Oh,’ Vivien said, her voice lifting a little. ‘Oh! Max—’

Rosa got up from her knees and went quietly to the door, a red canvas basketball boot in one hand.

‘Saturday,’ Vivien said. ‘Saturday. Let me see. I’ll have to look’. Then she laughed. ‘I know. So old-fashioned. But you know me. Can’t even work the video machine. I’ll never get beyond paper and pencil’.

There was a rustling of paper.

Then Vivien said, ‘I’m working in the shop on Saturday. Yes, I do have to. Alison’s going to some literary festival for the weekend. Max, I – Well, the evening would be lovely. Goodness. Are you asking me out to dinner? What’s the etiquette for that, if we’re separated?’ She laughed again and then she said, in a fond tone Rosa recognised, ‘You don’t change. See you Saturday’.

There was the sound of the receiver being replaced, and then a small silence, and then Vivien’s heels went clicking down the wood floor of the hall with an unmistakable jauntiness. Rosa looked down at the boot in her hand. Josh had given her those. Or at least he’d been going to, right up to the moment of standing by the till in the shoe shop and Josh discovering, as he always discovered, that he had no means of paying for them except a crumpled five-pound note and a few coins. After she’d paid for them, he spent the five pounds on a single yellow rose for her, a rose so large and long-stemmed that people stared at her on the underground, going home.

A rose as showy as that must mean that something had happened, something romantic and definitive. Rosa dropped the boot on the carpet. All that had actually happened was that she had paid for yet another thing she didn’t want.

Her phone, lying on one of the twin beds in a slew of socks and tights, began to ring. Rosa glanced at the screen and picked it up.

‘Mum’.

‘Darling,’ Edie said, ‘how are you getting on?’ Rosa looked round the room. It remained somehow very much Vivien’s spare room.

‘Fine’.

‘I wondered,’ Edie said, her voice nonchalant, ‘if you’d help me out?’ ‘In what way—’

‘I have to have two members of the cast to supper. To help them bond. You know. The director asked me’.

‘I thought that’s exactly what directors are supposed to do’.

‘Not this one. Will you come? Will you come for supper and help make a crowd?’ Rosa frowned down at her socks.

‘When?’

‘Saturday. Are you busy on Saturday?’

‘No,’ Rosa said, shutting her eyes. ‘No, I’m not busy’.

‘Will you come?’

‘Um …’

‘No strings. No thin end of wedging. Promise’. ‘I’ve never been to an Ibsen—’

‘Doesn’t matter. Please’.

Rosa opened her eyes again. She could always stay here, of course, sitting in front of Vivien’s television watching Saturday-night rubbish while Vivien skipped out in a cloud of scent and anticipation. And how sad would that be?

‘OK,’ Rosa said.


Cheryl Smith arrived for supper wearing red satin jeans tucked into her pirate boots and a black off-the-shoulder sweater so far off her shoulders that Russell wondered if it would preoccupy him all evening. She kissed him warmly, leaving a shiny cherry-coloured streak on his cheek and said he’d been wonderful to her friend, Mitch Morris, whom Russell couldn’t remember ever having heard of, and maybe she could come and see him sometime.

He handed her a glass of red wine.

‘Anyone with talent who is prepared to work and to pay me ten per cent of their earnings is very welcome to come and see me’.

She laughed and drank half her glass in a swallow.

She said to Edie, ‘Great house’.

Edie was stirring coconut milk into a pan of curry.

‘When we bought this house, houses were affordable. It wasn’t surprising to have a house when you got married, it was normal’.

Cheryl arranged herself in her dancer’s pose.

‘I can’t see me ever owning anything’.

Russell looked at her, strictly above the shoulders.

‘What would you like to own?’

‘Oh, a car. A Morgan’.

Edie picked up a flat plastic box of kaffir lime leaves. ‘How many of these, do you think?’ Cheryl twirled her wine.

‘I never cook. At drama school I lived on vodka and cheese sandwiches. Now it’s red wine and pizza slices’.

‘Disgusting,’ Russell said, smiling.

Cheryl smiled back. She held her glass out to him.

Edie said, crumbling leaves into her pot, ‘Your mother would be horrified’.

‘My mother doesn’t cook either. It was my father that cooked. No wonder he left, really. Five kids refusing to eat the same thing’. She looked at Edie for the first time properly. ‘Wasn’t Lazlo supposed to be coming?’

Russell gestured towards the window.

‘He’s here’. ‘Where?’

‘In the garden. Talking to my daughter, Rosa’. ‘Our daughter,’ Edie said.

Cheryl moved over to the window and leaned to look out, stretching the red satin tight over her bottom as she did so.

‘He’s quite good,’ she said.

Russell looked at Edie.

Edie said, without turning, ‘Then why are you making it so hard for him?’

‘Because he’s only just out of drama school. It’s no good them thinking it’s easy’.

Russell hitched his leg across the corner of the table and regarded Cheryl’s bottom.

‘But possibly it isn’t very helpful for them to think it’s impossible and unpleasant either’. Cheryl turned.

She said, smiling, ‘Unpleasant? Oo, what a word’. ‘I would think,’ Russell said, ‘that you’d be rather good at unpleasant’. Cheryl winked. ‘Very good’.

‘Can you do pleasant too?’

‘Duller’.

‘But better,’ Edie said, coming across the kitchen with a wooden spoon held out for Russell to taste, ‘if trying to work with other people, which is, on the whole, what actors in a theatre are trying to do. Is that rather sweet?’

Russell took the spoon from Edie’s hand.

‘I think,’ he said, ‘that if I were Freddie Cass I’d have told you I could find another Regina very easily’.

Cheryl laughed.

‘Really?’

Russell handed the spoon back to Edie.

‘No. It’s the right sort of sweet’. He glanced at Cheryl.

‘Really’.

She put her nose in her glass.

‘Do you speak to all the people you represent like this?’ ‘All of them,’ Russell said. He got off the table. ‘They love it’.


‘Cheryl’s here,’ Lazlo said miserably to Rosa.

Rosa was wearing a sweater of Russell’s over her own clothes and had pulled the sleeves down well beyond her knuckles. She could see, in the reflection of the kitchen window, that she had a Neanderthal look, a huge body and endless arms.

‘Well, you knew she was coming—’

‘Look what she’s wearing’.

Rosa peered.

‘I expect that’s deliberate’.

‘She said to me in rehearsal the other day, “I’m not kissing you until I absolutely have to.” ‘That wasn’t very nice’.

‘I don’t know,’ Lazlo said, ‘what I’d do without your mother’.

Rosa looked at him. He was taller than she was, but as thin as a lath, with one of those sensitive handsome faces that looked somehow neither girl nor boy. Not her type. She shrugged herself down inside the sweater. Not her type at all.

‘It’s not just that she’s so nice to me,’ Lazlo said, ‘it’s that she knows what she’s doing and that helps me surrender to the part. D’you know what I mean?’