‘There’s Nathaniel. And Alistair. I wonder how many performances of this they’ve sat through’.

‘If Ben doesn’t show up, I’ll kill him,’ Rosa said.

‘Ben?’ ‘Yes’.

‘Ben’s coming?’

‘Dad,’ Rosa said, ‘Mum is his mother too’. Russell waved to someone else. He said, ‘So nice of people to come. Halfway to Watford, after all—’

Rosa said suddenly, ‘That must be Naomi’. Russell turned. Ben, in his beanie hat and a denim jacket, was steering a slender girl with spectacular primrose hair through the door from the foyer. She was wearing a tiny dress with sequinned straps and her legs and shoulders were bare.

‘Barbie,’ Rosa said under her breath.

Russell pushed past her and made his way towards them.

He put a hand on Ben’s shoulder.

‘Old man—’

Ben looked awkward. He said, ‘This is Naomi’.

Russell smiled. He took his hand off Ben’s shoulder and held it out to Naomi. ‘How nice to meet you’.

She transferred her doll-sized handbag from one hand to the other, and put the free hand into Russell’s.

‘Hi there,’ Naomi said. She gave a tiny smile, revealing gappy white teeth. Her skin was flawless.

‘It’s nice of you to come,’ Russell said. ‘I’m afraid this isn’t a very cheerful play’.

Ben grunted.

Naomi said, ‘We go to musicals at Christmas. My mum likes Elaine Page’.

‘Fine voice,’ Russell said. ‘No singing this evening, though—’

Naomi said coolly, ‘I wasn’t expecting it’.

Rosa appeared at Russell’s elbow. She loomed over Naomi like a Valkyrie.

‘This is Rosa,’ Ben said, slightly desperately.

Naomi looked her up and down.

‘Pleased to meet you’.

‘Me too,’ Rosa said. She glanced at Ben. ‘Glad you made it’. He shrugged. He said, ‘Mum called me’. ‘Mum did? I called you’.

Ben sighed. He rubbed his hand over his head, pushing his beanie lower over his brows.

He said, ‘She rang to ask if I minded you having my room’.

Naomi was watching Rosa with brown eyes that were extremely sharp, despite their improbable size.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘Ben doesn’t need his bedroom now, does he?’

‘Well, no—’

‘So you can have it’. Naomi looked up at Ben with quiet possessiveness. ‘Can’t she?’ ‘Sure,’ Ben said.

Russell made a gesture for them to sit down. ‘Five minutes to curtain-up—’ Rosa looked at Naomi.

‘Won’t you be cold?’

Naomi flicked a glance over Rosa’s jacket. ‘I don’t feel the cold’. ‘Come on,’ Russell said, ‘seats time’. Ben put an arm round Naomi’s smooth narrow shoulders.

He said to Rosa, ‘She can always have my jacket’.

Rosa said nothing. She watched them turn away from her, Russell shepherding Naomi down the aisle towards her seat, bending towards her, talking, with Ben following behind with the bewildered air of someone trapped in an environment completely alien to him. Affectation, Rosa thought savagely, absolute affectation, all for Naomi’s benefit, parading independence, parading detachment from background, parading the kind of cool anyone with half an eye could see was fake. She saw Matthew – suited, with a tie – half get up from his seat to greet Naomi, and then Max leap up and bend over her hand like some afternoon-television games-show host, and then she saw them all settle down into their seats, all in a row, couple by couple, and then Matthew, in a seat next to Russell, and then a space left for her, at the end, a space with nothing on her other side but more space. Her eyes moved back along the row and rested on Vivien.

‘No hurry to go, darling,’ Vivien had said, putting the largest prawn from the seafood risotto on Rosa’s plate, ‘absolutely no hurry. Max can just wait till you’re ready to leave’. She’d giggled, and added another mussel to the prawn. ‘He can wait’.

Rosa began to walk slowly down the aisle towards her seat. There had been, really, nothing she could say but yes when Edie rang and said she’d heard about Vivien and Max and of course Rosa could come home, that day, if she needed to. But, if there had been nothing else to say, that didn’t mean that she had said yes with any relief, any thankfulness. Being grateful for the offer didn’t disguise, for a moment, the fact that the feelings of hopelessness and self-disgust, which she had, strangely, managed to escape from in Vivien’s overstuffed spare bedroom, hadn’t gone away but had merely been biding their time.

I wanted this, she thought, looking at her family. A few months ago, I wanted this, I wanted to go back home. And now I am, all I feel is a failure.

She eased herself into the end seat, next to her father. He was looking straight ahead, at the drawn curtains of the stage, and she could tell, from the look on his face, that he was thinking of nothing but Edie.


Vivien thought that if only Eliot could have been there too – with or without Ro, who was somehow very hard to visualise – she would have been completely happy. As it was, sitting in a darkening theatre with Max on one side of her – his pristine white knee lightly touching hers – and Ben on the other, and all the family beyond Ben, including Ben’s girlfriend, who looked as if she’d be an excellent test case for Max’s avowal of reformation, was a pretty good approximation to complete happiness. She had never, after all, envied Edie her acting talent, she had never wished she was Edie or wanted to live the way Edie did. She was, she told herself, very pleased for Edie that she’d got this part, just as she was very pleased for Edie that she’d managed to fill the house again, and that all the broken bridges were mended, and that she, Vivien, had played a part in sheltering Rosa until Russell came round to seeing that you couldn’t turn the poor girl away a second time. In fact, Vivien thought, noticing that she could feel Max’s shoulder as well as his knee, it had all turned out really well and everybody had got what they wanted, except that she wished Eliot was not in Australia, but even that was rather more bearable now knowing that Max not only felt the same, but had also suggested that they fly out for Christmas.

‘Our son,’ Max had said, speaking of Eliot, the other day. ‘Our son’.

Vivien smiled in the darkness. The curtains gave a small quiver and parted, slightly unsteadily, to reveal a large garden room with a view of a gloomy fjord visible through the back window. In the doorway to a conservatory beyond stood a working man with, apparently, a club foot. Opposite him, as if preventing him from coming any further in, was a remarkable-looking girl in a maid’s uniform, holding a large garden syringe.

‘Good God,’ Max said, in an audible whisper, ‘that’s never Edie?’


‘“Ah, but you see,”‘ Edie said, as Mrs Alving, ‘“here he has his mother. He’s a dear good boy, and he still has a soft spot for his mother.”‘

Matthew shifted a little in his seat. Edie looked impressive really, in a black dress with great full skirts and her hair drawn back under a white lace cap with black ribbons. She looked not just different, but distanced from her everyday self, and her voice was different too, and her gestures, and the way she spaced her words out. He’d seen her act before, of course, but really only on television and not, as far as he could remember, in anything where she wasn’t still recognisably his mother. He had wondered how he would feel, seeing her on stage being someone so very separate from her real self, whether he would be excited, or even embarrassed.

What he actually felt, sitting there in the dark between his father and his sister, was a surprising degree of interest, an interest that would intensify, he rather thought, when Lazlo made his entrance, when he saw his mother and Lazlo together on stage.

He could feel that Russell, on his left-hand side, was concentrating with the effort you use when you are willing someone to do well. That concentration, he thought, was typical of his father, typically generous, typically reasonable. Russell, after all, had had plenty to resent Edie for in the last few weeks, but for tonight had managed to put all grudges aside in order to focus on this production working, on Edie achieving something that had nothing to do with relationships or family or those tiny but telling shifts in power that meant you could go from light to dark in a matter of hours. One word was all it took, sometimes, one careless word. Or – Matthew tensed a little -the absence of words over a long, fatal period of illusory calm could result in the failure to stop a slide into something that couldn’t be rescued by words any more.

He had kept his vow not to contact Ruth. He had joined a new – cheaper – gym near his parents’ home and opened a savings account with his bank. Part of him was quite pleased about these manifestations of recovery, but part of him felt that they were pitiful, forlorn little plasters stuck on a still-gaping wound. And yet these efforts had to be maintained, even built on, because there could be no going back, even if he couldn’t visualise – and he had tried – a woman who he would simply like to be with as much as he had liked being with Ruth. In the night, when he woke, and remembered everything with a weary renewal of suffering, he missed Ruth’s just being there more than any other aspect of their relationship. For several years, after all, he had been wrapped in a companionship he had never had before and had never ceased to marvel at. He could discuss things with Ruth, confide things to Ruth, that it had never occurred to him as possible to articulate, and which were now bottling up again inside him despite his continued attempts to medicate himself by imagining what she might have counselled, how she might have responded.