Joanna Trollope - Second Honeymoon

‘Aren’t you going to see him before he’s thirty?’

Max looked straight at her.

‘Any time you’re ready, we’ll go out and see him’.

Vivien smiled at her champagne glass.

‘Oh’.

‘Say the word,’ Max said. Vivien leaned back in her chair. She said, looking away across the restaurant, ‘What happened to the air hostess?’ ‘She went back to her airline’.

‘And,’ Vivien said, feeling a small and happy surge of confidence, ‘you didn’t replace her?’

‘Oh, I tried,’ Max said, ‘I tried like anything’. ‘Should I know about this?’ He put his head on one side.

‘Only if you want to be very bored. As bored as I got. What are you going to eat?’

‘Guess’.

He looked down at the menu. ‘Avocado and red mullet’. ‘There,’ she said, ‘you haven’t forgotten’. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I haven’t’.

‘And you’ll have wild mushrooms and guinea fowl’.

‘Or duck’.

‘Oh yes, duck. I haven’t cooked a duck for four years’. Max glanced at her over the menu. ‘We should rectify that’.

‘I cook girls’ food now,’ Vivien said. ‘Fish and salads and pasta. Rosa’s on a diet’. ‘I hope you aren’t joining her’.

‘Well, I thought of it—’

‘Don’t,’ Max said, ‘you don’t need to. You’re—’ He stopped and grinned. Then he said, ‘What was I going to say, Vivi?’

‘I have no idea’.

‘What did you hope I’d say?’ ‘Stop it,’ Vivien said. ‘But you like it’. She lifted her chin. ‘Not any more’.

‘We’ll see’.

‘No, we won’t’. Max leaned forward.

He said, ‘Actually I am going to say something’.

‘Oh?’

‘I was going to say it later, but I think I’ll say it now’. He put the menu down and leaned towards Vivien across the table.

‘We had a good time last week, didn’t we?’

‘Yes—’

‘And you aren’t exactly miserable now—’ ‘Not exactly’.

‘Look,’ Max said, ‘look, Vivi. Things have changed, haven’t they? I’ve had a bit of freedom, you’ve had a bit of time to sort yourself out, Eliot’s grown up and gone—’ He paused and looked at her. ‘I was just wondering, Vivi, if you’d let me try again?’

While she was in the shower, Ruth played Mozart. It was a recording of Don Giovanni, and she turned it up very loud, so that she could hear it above the water, and the music and the water could combine in a way that would be briefly overwhelming and stop her thinking. Her mother had once said to her, when she was about fourteen, that it didn’t do to think too much, that you could think yourself out of being able to cope with ordinary life, which Ruth had then considered to be her mother’s excuse for ceaseless practical activity. She now thought her mother’s theory had possibly a certain truth to it, and that her mother’s passion for organisation and committees and busyness had been a way of dealing with not being able to use her capacities to the full. It was a case, perhaps, of accommodating yourself to what was permitted, as long as – crucial, this – you didn’t start raging against whoever did the permitting in the first place and why they’d got the power.

Ruth turned off the shower and stepped out into the bathroom and a wall of singing. She’d keep it that loud, she thought, until somebody from a neighbouring flat either complained or played something she hated at equal volume. She picked up a towel and wound herself into it, like a sarong, then went barefoot across the smooth, pale wood floor of her sitting room to her desk. She bent over her computer. There would be nothing in her inbox, just as there were no messages on her answerphone, no texts on her mobile. Apart from work, there’d been a sudden cessation of all communication, as if someone had shut a soundproof door on a party.

There was one new message on her email. She sat down in her bath towel and clicked her mouse.

The message was from Laura.

‘Dear Ruth,’ it said. ‘Just ring him!’

Ruth looked up at the ceiling high above her and closed her eyes. There was a lump in her throat.

‘Just ring him!’

‘Are you sure?’ Lazlo said.

Edie pushed the sugar towards him across the café table.

‘Oh yes’.

‘But it would be your son’s room—’ ‘Or my daughter’s. We’ve had lots of actors there, over the last few years, on and off—’

‘Really’

‘Oh yes’.

‘What about,’ Lazlo said, taking two packets of white sugar, ‘your husband?’

‘He’s called Russell’.

‘I know,’ Lazlo said. ‘I just felt a bit shy’.

‘Shy?’

‘I don’t know my own father very well’. ‘Russell isn’t at all alarming. Russell is very used to actor lodgers’.

‘Have you told him?’

‘What?’

‘That,’ Lazlo said, ‘you were going to offer a room to me’.

Edie watched him tear the sugar packets across and pour the contents into the cushion of milky foam on the top of his coffee.

‘Lazlo dear, I don’t need to ask him’.

‘I said tell—’

‘I don’t need to tell him either. He likes having the house full. He likes having it used’. Lazlo began to stir his coffee.

‘I must say, it would be wonderful. It would make me feel—’ He stopped, and then he said, ‘Different’.

‘Good’.

He looked at her and then he looked away.

‘I would try – not to be a nuisance’.

‘If you were,’ Edie said, ‘I probably wouldn’t notice. My children, with the possible exception of Matthew, are usually a nuisance. If you don’t have any nuisance in your life, I’ve discovered, something dies in you. It all gets very bland and boring’. She leaned across the table. ‘When I was a child, I shared a bedroom with my sister, Vivien, and we fought all the time because she was very tidy and I was very messy, extra messy, probably, to annoy her, and when our mother said we could have separate rooms, I was miserable. There was no point in being messy on my own’. She looked across at Lazlo and smiled at him. ‘There still isn’t’.

He said, ‘Is that the sister that Rosa lives with?’

‘Yes’.

‘Are you still fighting?’ ‘Certainly,’ Edie said.

‘I never fight with my sister. I wouldn’t risk it. You have to have enough family to take that kind of risk’.

‘Goodness,’ Edie said, ‘what a dramatic view of family. You sound like a Russian novel. If that’s what you’re expecting, you’ll find us very dull’.

‘I don’t think so’.

She reached across the table and grasped his wrist. ‘We’ll like having you. Really’.

He shook his head and gave her a quick glance, and in the course of it, she saw he had tears in his eyes.

‘Heavens, Lazlo,’ Edie said, laughing. ‘Heavens, it’s only a room’.

The evening paper had two columns advertising rooms and flats to let. They varied in monthly price by several hundred pounds and also in tone of advertisement, some being baldly commercial and some more haphazard, personal offers of flat sharing. Ben was certain that Naomi, even if she could be persuaded to leave her mother’s flat, would be adamant about not sharing any accommodation with anyone other than Ben. It had been an eye-opener for Ben, living with Naomi and her mother, to see the fierceness with which privacy and possessions were not just owned, but guarded. Naomi’s mother didn’t refer to ‘the’ kettle or ‘the’ bathroom: both were ‘my’. For Ben, growing up in a house where ownership of anything that wasn’t intensely personal seemed comfortably communal, this domestic demarcation and pride had been very surprising.

‘Feet off my coffee table,’ Naomi’s mother had said to him on his first evening. ‘And the way I like my toilet seat is down’.

Ben had felt little resentment about this. Faced with a rigidly organised kitchen and a tremendous expectation of conformity, he had, rather to his surprise, felt more an awed respect. Naomi’s mother spoke to him in exactly the same way that she spoke to Naomi after all, and as Naomi plainly thought her mother’s standards and requirements were as natural as breathing, Ben was, at least for a while, prepared to pick up his bath towel and replace the ironing board – ironing was a bit of a revelation – on its specially designated hooks behind the kitchen door. Only once, in his first few weeks, did he say to Naomi, watching her while she made an extremely neat cheese sandwich, ‘Has your mum always been like this?’

Naomi didn’t even glance at him.

She shook her long blonde hair back over her shoulders and said evenly, ‘It’s how she likes it’.

Living the way you liked, even Ben could see, was what you were entitled to if you owned a house or paid the rent. Indeed, one of the reasons he had left home, besides the consuming desire to spend the nights in the same bed as Naomi, was a strong, if unarticulated, understanding that he wanted to live in a way that didn’t coincide with the way his parents were living but, as it was their house, their entitlement in the matter came before his. Living with Naomi’s mother was, especially at the beginning, no problem at all because of Naomi herself and because her mother, for all her insistence on her own particular rule of law, was someone whose palpable industry and independence required – and got -Ben’s deference. In addition, and to Ben’s abiding and grateful amazement, she seemed to find his presence in her flat and her daughter’s bed perfectly natural. There hadn’t been a syllable uttered, or even implied, that Ben could construe as an enquiry about their relationship, let alone a criticism.

All this, for some time, made Ben amenable to making his large male presence in a small female flat as invisible as possible. Indeed, it was only gradually, and not in any way triggered by a particular incident, that he began to feel a sense of being both watched and stifled. The setting down of his coffee mug or beer can, once a matter of discovery and trial and error, became insidiously more of an issue, as did the placing – or even presence – of his boots in the narrow hallway. Naomi’s mother didn’t operate by correcting her daughter or her daughter’s boyfriend more than once. After that, she took matters into her own hands and effected the changes she wanted, in silence, but in the kind of silence that made Ben, rather to his surprise, think wistfully of his own mother’s approach to domestic management. He had absolutely no desire to confront or displease Naomi’s mother, but it had begun to occur to him, several times a day, that he was on a hiding to nothing because she was, in fact, constantly changing the goalposts. That morning, the hunt for his boots had ended in discovering them in a plastic carrier bag hanging on a hook under his overcoat.