Joanna Trollope - Second Honeymoon

‘Oh, good,’ Edie said faintly.

‘To be honest, I think she’s seen it coming’.

‘Well, not to would be like missing an elephant in your bathroom—’

‘She’s doing so well,’ Vivien said, ignoring her sister. ‘She’s working hard and not going out and—’

‘That’s enough,’ Edie said. ‘Rosa is my daughter’.

‘I’ll tell her very gently—’

‘Frankly,’ Edie said, ‘you could do it on your knees, and in a whisper, and it still wouldn’t alter the fact that you’re telling her to go’.

Everyone in the house, Edie was certain, was awake. There had been faint movements from the top floor for hours and, although Russell was very still, beside her, there was a kind of subdued alertness about his stillness that indicated he was not asleep. The clock radio beside their bed showed two-forty-five and the curtains glowed with the half-dark of summer city night-time. Only the cat, in a trim and resolute doughnut at the end of their bed, was asleep. Above and beside her, all the other occupants of the house were as restless as she was.

She turned her head on the pillow and looked at Russell. He was on his side, face turned towards her, eyes closed. His hair, worn rather long as it always had been, and thank goodness it wasn’t thinning, was ruffled. He was breathing neatly and evenly through his nose. His mouth was closed. Even in the dim light, Edie could see that really Russell had worn very well, that he hadn’t got wizened or paunchy, that he hadn’t, despite a considerable nonchalance about looking after himself, let himself go. He looked, lying there, like a real person to Edie, like someone you could trust because what you saw you got. He looked, as a man, as a human being, as far away from Vivien’s Max as if he’d come from another planet.

He’d always, in fact, been amused by Max. He’d been much kinder, if Edie was honest with herself, about Vivien’s feelings for Max than her sister had ever been able to be. When Max had appeared once in a camel-hair overcoat, Russell had been much more good-natured about it than Edie had been. He let her make jokes about second-hand car dealers but he didn’t join in. He was of the opinion that if this liaison had ever made Vivien happy then that was all that was necessary to know. Sometimes Edie had admired this forbearance; sometimes it had driven her nuts.

She reached out a hand and touched one of his.

‘Russ’.

He didn’t open his eyes. ‘Mmm,’ he said. ‘Are you awake?’

‘Mmm’.

‘I think the boys are—’ He said, ‘Nothing to do with us’. ‘Probably Matt’s thinking about Ruth and Lazlo’s thinking about Osvald’.

‘Probably’.

She took hold of the hand she had touched. ‘Vivien rang today’.

‘Mmm’.

‘She’s started it all up again with Max’. Russell opened his eyes.

‘Has she?’

‘Yes. Big time. Dates and flowers and promises it’ll all be different’.

‘Well, perhaps it will’. ‘You know Max—’

Russell gave a small yawn. He squeezed Edie’s hand and then extracted his own and tucked it under his shoulder. He closed his eyes again.

He said, ‘Maybe he’s changed’.

‘That’s what she says’.

‘Maybe she’s right’.

‘Well, I do hope so,’ Edie said, ‘because she’s letting him move back in again’. Russell opened one eye. ‘Good luck to her’.

Edie moved her face an inch or two closer to Russell’s. ‘She’s staying in her cottage. She says that’s what she wants. Max is coming to live with her’.

‘Yes’.

‘Russell. Listen. Vivien’s cottage is where Rosa is living. Rosa is living in Vivien’s spare bedroom’.

Russell opened both eyes and lifted his head from the pillow.

‘Oh my God—’

‘She’s there now,’ Edie said. ‘She’s had supper with Vivien because Vivien was cooking something special in a really weaselly Vivien-ish way before telling her she was throwing her out’.

Russell gave a groan and turned over on to his back. Edie could see that he was staring straight up at the ceiling.

‘I just keep thinking about her,’ Edie said. ‘I keep picturing her lying in bed there, with Vivi all excited and starry-eyed through the wall, wondering what on earth she’s going to do now, where she’s going to go, how she’s going to tell us that yet another thing has gone wrong’.

Russell said nothing. He lifted an arm to scratch his head briefly, and then he lowered it again.

‘Look,’ Edie said, ‘I know how you feel. I know it’s difficult. I know it isn’t what you want. But I can’t bear thinking about what Rosa’s feeling, I can’t bear her thinking she’s got nowhere to go. I just can’t bear it’. She paused, and then she said, ‘I want to make it a bit easier for her. I want to make a move before she feels she has to. I want to tell her she can come home’.

‘One seat in the back row, please,’ Ruth said, ‘and as far to one side as possible’.

The young man in the box office, who had clearly been surprised to find Ruth waiting when he opened up, said that there were better seats in the centre of the back, for the same price.

‘I know,’ Ruth said. She had put on a black canvas bucket hat and sunglasses, and thought, glancing unhappily in the mirror as she left the flat, that she looked like a Japanese tourist. ‘I’m sure they’re better, but the side is where I’d like to sit, please’.

The young man sighed, and slid the ticket towards her. Behind him, on the back wall of the little foyer, was a blown-up grainy poster photograph of Edie and Lazlo, in profile, facing each other, and then, superimposed across their torsos, the shadowy faces of the other actors. Cheryl Smith had the looks and the air, Ruth thought, that made other women immediately feel unwomanly.

She picked up the ticket.

‘Thank you—’

The young man nodded. This was not the kind of theatre where the staff said banal, populist things like, ‘Enjoy the show’. Behind her, other people were beginning to open the glass doors from the street, other people who might at any moment include Edie’s family, and therefore Matthew, and although Ruth was there in order to catch sight of Matthew, she was not at all certain that she could handle his catching sight of her. She bent her head so that wings of hair swung forward under the brim of her hat, and went quickly into the auditorium.

It was completely empty. Admittedly, the show wouldn’t start for half an hour, but the emptiness made Ruth feel vulnerable. She crept round the back of the stalls and took her seat in the far corner. If Matthew came, he would come with his family, naturally, and they would also, naturally, have seats in the centre, towards the front, and Matthew would be preoccupied by being in company, and by his mother’s big night, so it would not occur to him to look round the small auditorium and notice that, among the comfortably North London audience, there was a young woman masquerading – badly – as Yoko Ono, who was giving out elaborate signals of wishing strenuously not to be noticed. But if he did look round, and he did notice, there was then the miserable dilemma of how she would react to his reaction. If he didn’t realise it was her, how would she feel? If he did realise, and chose to ignore her, how would she feel? If he did realise and didn’t ignore her and did say something but not what she was longing to hear, how would she feel? The answer to all three questions was, of course, terrible.

It was no good, she thought, bending her head over the programme and staring unseeingly at Edie’s theatrical CV, telling herself she shouldn’t have come. It wasn’t a question of should or shouldn’t. It was more a question of desire urgent enough to amount to need. She was sure that just the sight of the back of Matthew’s head for two hours, just the knowledge that they were breathing the same air, would replenish the fuel in her emotional tank enough to get her through another few days, another week. To see him, simply to see him, might help reassure her that she had, in truth, done nothing wrong, that she was not the reason for his leaving, that she had not failed in some essential quality of womanliness, of femininity.

‘I thought,’ Laura had emailed from Leeds, ‘that Matthew was always so supportive of your career’.

Ruth hadn’t replied. She could have said, ‘He was. He is,’ but then she could foresee the questions that would follow and she couldn’t answer those, not the ‘But why, then?’ questions. If she could, she thought now, scanning rapidly down Edie’s numerous minor television appearances, she wouldn’t be here now, skulking in the back row of the theatre rather than sitting with Matthew’s family in the secure, acknowledged place of approved-of girlfriend. She felt a prick of incipient tears. She swallowed. No self-pity, she told herself sternly, no poor little me. You’ve chosen to come here so you’ll have to take the consequences. Whatever they are.

‘In the seventeenth century,’ Russell told Rosa, ‘there weren’t any theatrical foyers. In fact, I don’t think there were any before Garrick. The audience came in off the street and made their way through narrow dark tunnels and then, wham, suddenly emerged into the candlelit glory of the auditorium. Can you imagine?’

Rosa wasn’t listening. She was distracted by the fact that her Uncle Max had turned up wearing a double-breasted blazer with white jeans, and also that Ben, having said he’d come, and that he’d bring Naomi, was still not there and might have translated into action the doubtfulness in his voice about coming.

‘I always liked this theatre,’ Russell said.

He looked round. The auditorium was filling up and across the seats he could see several well-known newspaper theatre critics in their usual places, right on the edge, so that they could spring up the moment the curtain came down – or even before – to file their copy. He waved in a general sort of way.