He’d said nothing to Naomi about moving out with him. With the newly hatched confidence of having had his older brother recently take his advice, he had decided that the best course of action was to identify some flats, or even rooms in flats, and choose one or two to show her so that she would have something to visualise and also have to make a choice. If he just said to her, ‘What about a place of our own?’ she’d look at him as if he wasn’t in his right mind and say, ‘What for?’ But if he had a key to a door, and opened it, and showed her the possibilities of a way of living that lay beyond it, she might be persuaded. Or at least, he thought, staring hard at a photograph in the window in front of him, she might hesitate a little before she said, ‘What for?’


‘I’ll have tomato juice,’ Kate said. Rosa paused on her way to the bar. ‘Are you sure? I’m paying—’

‘I only half feel like “drink” drink,’ Kate said, ‘and I don’t like the way people look at me when I drink it’.

‘Do they?’

‘Well, I think they do’.

‘Right,’ Rosa said, ‘tomato juice it is’.

‘Should you be paying?’

‘Yes’.

‘Can you—’

‘I got a bonus this month,’ Rosa said. ‘Slovenia will be overflowing this summer, thanks to me’.

Kate said, smiling, ‘So you’re making headway on the money?’

Rosa shook her hair back.

‘Well, I can afford the interest on the interest’.

‘Rosa—’

‘I can afford to buy you a tomato juice’. ‘I don’t want you—’

‘I do,’ Rosa said and went away to the bar.

Kate shrugged off her jacket and pushed her shoes off, under the table. She hadn’t told Barney she was meeting Rosa for a drink because, for some reason, Barney had assumed that not having Rosa in their flat meant not having Rosa in their life, either. He maintained that this was not because he didn’t like Rosa, but only that he didn’t think Rosa was good for Kate: too demanding, he said, too exhausting, too needy. Kate, who had declined, in the course of their lavish and traditional wedding, to promise to obey him, wondered if that was, in fact, exactly what she was doing. What was it, in an emotional relationship, that constituted a loving and generous action, and what – only apparently differentiated by a whisker – an act of submission instead?

Rosa came back and put two glasses on the table. Kate’s tomato juice had a stick of celery planted in it and a wedge of lemon balanced on the rim. She took the celery out and laid it, dripping, across the ashtray on the table.

Then she said, licking tomato juice off her fingers, ‘I saw Ruth’.

Rosa looked up from her drink. ‘Why did you?’

‘It was chance,’ Kate said. ‘We were both buying fruit in Borough Market’.

‘And?’

‘She looked awful. And was sort of agitated. I think she thinks everyone disapproves of her’. ‘I do,’ Rosa said.

Kate leaned back, adjusting her T-shirt round her belly. ‘Do you now?’ ‘Uh huh’.

‘For hurting Matthew? Or for being very good at what she does and earning a lot of money?’ Rosa eyed her.

‘For hurting Matthew, of course’.

‘Really’.

‘Yes, really’.

‘I don’t believe you,’ Kate said. ‘I think you can’t handle her being ambitious’. ‘Well, you aren’t ambitious—’

‘Yes, I am,’ Kate said. ‘I didn’t think about it before I got pregnant, but I think about it a lot now and I know that I don’t just like my job, I want it’.

Rosa picked up her drink.

‘I don’t think I am—’

‘Maybe not. And that’s fine. What’s not fine is thinking badly of poor Ruth because she is’. ‘Poor Ruth, is it?’

‘Yes,’ Kate said, ‘poor Ruth. She looked to me like she misses Matthew like anything’.

‘Well, she chose to go ahead with this flat—’ ‘And he chose—’ ‘He had to,’ Rosa said. ‘Oh, Rosa—’

‘It was humiliation or get out’.

‘But she wasn’t doing the humiliating,’ Kate said. ‘Or do you think she should have taken a lesser job and earned less just to make him feel better? How humiliating is that?’

Rosa closed her eyes.

‘He’s my brother’.

‘About whom,’ Kate said, ‘you are often very rude. Of course you should be sorry for him but don’t load all the blame on Ruth just because she’s doing what a man would be praised for doing’. She leaned forward again and said, ‘What does your mother say?’

‘She’s thrilled Matt’s gone home’.

‘Is that all?’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘Is your mother’s only reaction being pleased to have Matthew back again?’ Rosa sighed.

‘Of course not. She likes Ruth but she doesn’t understand why she’s done what she’s done. It wasn’t the way she did things, it was always family first with Mum’.

‘That’s generational’.

‘Kate,’ Rosa said, ‘I thought we were going to have a quiet drink and be pleased to see each other, but all you do is want to argue’.

Kate took a swallow of tomato juice.

She said, ‘You need arguing with’.

‘Why, thank you—’

‘You need jolting and galvanising. You need to use that brain of yours, you need to stop just drifting along—’ ‘Oh, shut up,’ Rosa said.

‘Rose, I’m your friend, I’m—’

‘Sorted and organised and married and interestingly employed and pregnant and insufferable’.

Kate picked up the stick of celery and jabbed it into the ashtray for emphasis.

‘When did you last do anything decisive?’

Rosa said, without looking at her, ‘Last week’.

‘And what was it, precisely?’

‘I helped,’ Rosa said deliberately, ‘someone I don’t really like find somewhere to live’.

‘Oh?’

‘An actor. In Mum’s company. He’s going to rent my room’.

‘What?’

‘He’s going to rent my bedroom. Mum offered it to him. So she’s got two bedrooms full now and Dad is not happy’.

Kate stared at her.

‘This is bizarre’.

‘Isn’t it just’.

‘And you living with your aunt—’ ‘Yes. So don’t go on at me about drifting and being hopeless’.

Kate put the celery down and reached across to grasp Rosa’s hand. ‘Sorry’.

‘That’s OK’.

‘It’s probably hormones,’ Kate said. ‘Everything I do at the moment seems to be hormones. I have this enormous urge to get everything sorted’.

Rosa turned her hand over to give Kate’s a squeeze, and then took it away.

‘I hope it’s catching—’

Kate grinned at her.

‘What’s it like, living with your aunt?’

Very comfortable and very restricting. It’s so funny, she’s dating—’

‘She isn’t!’

‘Well, it’s only my uncle, who she’s separated from. She keeps skipping out on Saturday nights, all kitten heels and chandelier earrings’.

‘Sweet or sickening?’

‘Oh, sweet mostly,’ Rosa said. ‘It’d only be sickening if Uncle Max was anything other than a joke’.

‘Does she come into your room and sit on your bed and tell you all about it?’

‘No, thank you’.

Kate reached awkwardly behind her, for her jacket.

‘I ought to go—’

‘Supper—’

‘Well, Barney’s cooking,’ Kate said, ‘but he does quite like to be admired’.

Rosa leaned back, holding her glass.

‘There you go,’ she said with satisfaction. ‘There’s always a price to pay’.


The door to Ben’s bedroom on the first-floor landing was open. Through it, on the bed, Russell could see a pile of cushions that looked familiar but out of context and a mauve felt elephant and a lampshade made of strings of pink glass beads. He moved closer. On the floor by Ben’s bed was an old white numdah rug, appliquéd with naïve animals and flowers, which he recognised as the rug he and Edie had given Rosa when she was five, as a reward for stopping sucking her thumb. Now that he looked at them with more attention, he saw that the cushions – Indian brocade, Thai spangles – and the lampshade were also familiar from Rosa’s room, as was the elephant and a mirror edged with pearly shells and a gauze sari which, at one point, Rosa had pinned clumsily to the ceiling over her bed to try and create some kind of exotic canopy.

Russell went out of Ben’s room and up the stairs to the top floor. The door to Matthew’s room was closed but the one to Rosa’s room, next door, was open, almost defiantly wide open, Russell thought, as if to make an emphatic point. Through it, he could see that although the furniture in Rosa’s room hadn’t been moved, the atmosphere had been definitely changed. There was a plaid rug on the bed, new dark-blue shades on the lamps, and the chest of drawers, which had always displayed Rosa’s childhood collection of china shoes and thimbles, was empty except for a black-framed mirror propped against the wall. Edie had taken all the girl she could find out of the room and replaced it with boy. And she had done this for the benefit of someone Russell hardly knew, who appeared quite homeless and therefore liable to stay indefinitely, and who was not just homeless but penniless also, so Edie was only asking him to pay forty pounds a week, which had infuriated Matthew – who was their own son and paying almost twice that – as well it might.

Russell walked into Rosa’s room and sat down on the edge of the bed. He put his elbows on his knees and leaned forward to stare at the carpet and a new, modern, striped cotton rug that had been laid on it. He had always, he told himself, liked the challenging quality in Edie’s nature, he enjoyed the way she wouldn’t take any form of rubbish lying down, the way she rose up to argue and rebel. But what was likeable, lovable even, in someone as a spectator sport wasn’t always as pleasurable, or even bearable, when one’s own feelings were involved. He couldn’t, in principle, object to her offering shelter to her own, or anyone else’s, child in trouble, but the difficulty was that he couldn’t be sure that filling the house up with young men, at this precise moment in time, was actually an act of altruism. The more he thought about it, the more he felt that not only was Edie asserting a right to use her house as she pleased, but that she was also making it painfully plain that the last thing she wanted was to be left alone in it with him.