Joanna Trollope - Second Honeymoon

‘I’m not an actress’.

He glanced at her quickly.

He said politely, ‘What do you do?’

Rosa looked away.

She said in an offhand way, ‘I’m in the travel business’. ‘You don’t sound as if you like it very much’.

‘I don’t’.

‘That’s what’s so extraordinary about acting. It isn’t a choice’. He stopped and then he said, apologetically, ‘But you know that. Because of your mother’.

Rosa looked towards the kitchen window again. Edie was gesturing at them to come in. First she’d sent them out so that she could soften Cheryl up without Lazlo to persecute and now she was summoning them back again. Rosa sighed.

‘She wasn’t like that. She did jobs around us, we sort of knew she did it, but I suppose we didn’t take it in much—’

Lazlo stared at her.

‘Don’t you know how good she is?’

Rosa stared back.

‘Oh yes’.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘it just sounded as if you weren’t quite aware—’

‘She’s my mother,’ Rosa said. Lazlo said nothing.

Rosa began to move away from him across the damp grass towards the house.

She said, ‘That didn’t come out as I meant it to’.

‘No’.

Rosa stopped.

She said, without meaning to, ‘I sound spoilt—’ There was a long pause, and then Lazlo said, from behind her, in the spring dusk, ‘Actually, you do’.

Sitting on the underground on his way up to North London, Matthew looked at the other people in the carriage. It was early evening, just after work, so the train was full, not just with tired men holding computer cases and newspapers, but tired women with computer cases too and handbags and supermarket shopping bags. Some of the women were young, and reminded Matthew of Ruth, young women with considered haircuts and business suits and the air, which none of the men had, of having thought – or possibly had to think – about much more all day than simply the things at work they had to react to. They made him remember, unhappily, the way Ruth had kept all the strands of their life together, persistently rounding up stray aspects in a manner that, particularly when they were first together, made him marvel.

Blaise, at the desk behind him at work, said that personally he had marvelled himself to a standstill about modern women.

‘They’re too much for me,’ he’d said by way of commiseration over Matthew’s break-up. ‘Girls now, I mean. Now-girls’.

He was giving up girls for a while, he said, and concentrating on getting his pilot’s licence. He said if Matthew wanted flying lessons too he was sure he could arrange it. Flying made you feel in charge of things and, at the same time, free of demands, and people, and the business of never quite living up to others’ expectations.

‘I’m not even living up to my own expectations at the moment,’ Matthew said.

Blaise didn’t take his eyes off the screen in front of him.

‘Lower them, then,’ he said.

Matthew got out of his seat now, on the underground, and gestured towards it at a pale woman, carrying a huge professional camera case and an enormous lever-arch file clasped against her chest.

She hardly glanced at him.

‘Thank you—’

An elderly black woman beside her, in a felt hat and horn-rimmed spectacles, turned to look at her.

‘I shouldn’t think he heard that’.

The pale woman, balancing case and file with difficulty on her lap, said nothing.

There’s not many young men with the manners now—’

‘It’s all right,’ Matthew said. ‘It’s OK’.

‘So why discourage the few decent ones we’ve got?’ An ugly colour began to spread patchily up the pale woman’s neck.

Matthew bent down.

‘She did say thank you. I heard her’.

The black woman regarded him impassively. ‘She should have looked at you. She should have smiled. Why shouldn’t you be as tired as she is?’ ‘I’m not—’

‘Some woman,’ the black woman said loudly, ‘is a lucky woman to have you. Some woman is lucky to have such a gentleman’.

Matthew looked away. His neck felt as miserably inflamed as the pale woman’s looked. A fat man strap-hanging a foot away caught his eye and winked. Matthew made a face and briefly closed his eyes.

The train pulled into Moorgate Station and stopped. The black woman, crucifix swinging at her neck as she moved, rose to her feet and made for the door.

As she passed Matthew, she said distinctly, ‘You tell that lady of yours she’s a lucky woman’.

There was faint tittering round him and sweat was sliding in an unmistakable trickle down between his shoulder blades. He looked at the pale woman for a glance, at least, of commiseration, but she was staring rigidly at the floor.

Edie had said to meet her after rehearsals. She had described where to find her, saying he would recognise the rehearsal hall in Clerkenwell because it had a yellow poster outside advertising Pilates in Pregnancy classes. She’d said that they could go for a drink together, possibly even have supper. She’d sounded so pleased to hear him, so relieved and gratified that he’d rung, that he wondered what had happened to propel him into her personal spotlight. It was the place, after all, usually occupied by Ben, who took it, as he seemed to take most things, entirely for granted. It was also the place, Matthew realised, that he had scarcely spared a thought for, over the last couple of years, because he hadn’t needed to. He rather wished he didn’t need to now.

The rehearsal hall was, Edie said, about ten minutes from the underground station, and he should aim for the spire of St James’s Church. Matthew thought, gazing skywards from the Farringdon Road, that that was exactly the kind of directions his mother had always given, instructing you to look out for a memorable, preferably romantic landmark that was not actually visible until you were standing almost beside it because she hadn’t taken the surroundings into consideration. When they were small, Matthew remembered, Edie would often point out of the window and ask them what they could see and they would say, tepidly, oh the grass and the shed and the back of the house where the Great Dane lived and she would say no, no, no, beyond that, through that – couldn’t they see oceans and castles and deserts with camels? Edie would have no trouble, Matthew thought, standing in the Farringdon Road and seeing St James’s, Clerkenwell, far away to the north beyond the Clerkenwell Road. And perhaps, by the same token, Edie would have no trouble in seeing through the miserable thickets Matthew had got himself tangled up in, and out beyond to something altogether brighter and more hopeful. Something that would stop him feeling he had spent the last two years circling round in a huge wild loop that had merely ended in a rather lesser place than he had been in before he started.

She was waiting for him outside the hall, leaning against the Pilates poster with her arms folded, and her sunglasses on.

He bent to kiss her cheek.

‘Am I late?’

Edie put both arms round his neck and pulled him down towards her.

‘No. We finished early. We did a lot of the joy of living today and it wore everyone out, being joyful’.

Matthew said, his face against his mother’s, ‘I didn’t think Ibsen was joyful’.

‘Norway wasn’t. Norway was dire, in Ibsen’s day. Work was a curse and a punishment for sin’.

‘Jolly—’

Edie let Matthew go. She looked up at him. ‘You don’t look good at all’.

‘No’.

‘Matt?’ she said. ‘Matthew?’ She took his hand. ‘What’s happened?’

He glanced down the street. ‘Let’s find a pub’. ‘Are you ill?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘nothing like that’. He moved back towards the pavement, pulling her. ‘I’ll tell you,’ he said, feeling the loosening sensation of relief flowing into his chest, into his head. ‘I’ll tell you everything’.

Russell went to the preview of a new American play at the Royal Court Theatre, left at the interval and made his way home on a number 19 bus. He had asked Edie to come to the theatre with him, but she had a late rehearsal, she said, and some other commitment that she was vague about but not particularly mysterious, and certainly not mysterious in a way that might cause Russell disquiet. There had been disquieting moments in the past, to be sure, moments when Edie seemed suddenly over-alert about an actor she was playing opposite or, once at least, a father on the parent-teacher association panel at one of the children’s schools, panels that Edie made vociferous and energetic contributions to. And, if he was honest, Russell had had lunches, and some afternoons, and even a weekend once, when he had been reminded of how powerfully attractive a new personality, a new face and body, can be to even the most faithful of eyes. It wasn’t anxiety about what Edie might be doing that propelled Russell on to his bus before the second half of the play, but more a resurgence of the feeling that was becoming very familiar to him now, a feeling of just wanting Edie to be there, to be with him, to give another, a vivid, dimension to what he was seeing and hearing. He supposed, if he was honest, that it was years since he had actively missed Edie when she wasn’t with him. Well, if that was the case, he was certainly making up for it now. He looked out of the bus window at the thronged mid-evening pavements and wondered how he would arrange himself, in his mind and in his feelings, when he reached home and found that Edie wasn’t there.

But she was. She was sitting at the kitchen table reading the evening paper with her glasses on and a mug of tea. Beside the paper on the table, where he was not allowed, Arsie was posed like a cat on an Egyptian frieze, elongated and very, very still.