Joanna Trollope - Second Honeymoon

‘I think it’s all too much for your mother. I think it’s too much for all of you. I think I’m literally the last straw’.

‘No, you’re not—’

‘It’s wearing your mother out,’ Lazlo said. ‘She should be keeping her energy for acting, not for worrying about whether she’s remembered to buy more milk. And I shouldn’t be in your room. It’s your bedroom’.

Rosa looked at the ceiling.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘that’.

Lazlo said nothing.

She turned her head, very slowly, to look at him. ‘Why did you cover me up with a towel?’ He shrugged.

He said, without returning her look, ‘I didn’t know what else to do with you’.

Rosa gave a little shout of laughter.

She said, ‘I didn’t come up here because I was missing my room. I came up here because it was trespassing. I came up for a bit of mischief’.

Lazlo gave a quick smile.

‘Really?’

‘Really. I was fed up with being alone in the house and I was just prowling about’. She sat up straighter and put her hands in her lap. ‘You’re not displacing me. Promise’.

He said awkwardly, ‘It’s not just that. It’s – well, you’re a family—’

‘Yes, we are, but we’re all in transition, we’re all in a rather temporary situation. We’re not going to stay like this’. ‘I could easily go,’ Lazlo said.

‘Where?’

He shrugged.

‘I can find a room. I’m always finding rooms’.

Rosa stood up.

‘Don’t go,’ she said.

He turned his head to look at her.

‘I don’t want you to go,’ Rosa said. ‘I like you being here. Don’t go’.

From the landing below there was the sound of some disturbance and then Edie’s voice came clearly up the stairwell.

‘Who left these bloody sheets here? I nearly broke my neck. Rosa? Rosa!’

Rosa put her finger to her lips. ‘You’d better go,’ Lazlo whispered. She shook her head. ‘Rosa!’ Edie yelled.

‘I’m not going,’ Rosa whispered, ‘and nor are you,’ and then she stepped right up to him and kissed him on the mouth.

‘I don’t know why she’s coming,’ Kate said irritably to Barney. ‘Do stop asking. I could hardly tell her not to, could I?’

‘I don’t know her—’

‘Well, I hardly do. But she sounded rather urgent, poor thing, and I—’

‘Why poor thing?’

‘She is poor thing. Because of Matthew. I expect in her mind she somehow thinks coming to see us and the baby—’

‘He’s called George’.

‘I’m not sure about that. I’m not sure about that at all. He’s just the baby to me because there is no other baby as far as I’m concerned so there’s no confusion’.

Barney pointed to the front of her T-shirt.

‘You’re leaking’.

Kate looked down.

‘Sometimes you are so like your father—’

‘No I’m not,’ Barney said. ‘My father would never have gone shopping for nipple pads and a breast pump like I did. He didn’t come near us until we were house-trained. I only said you were leaking in case you wanted to change before Ruth came’.

‘Or in case you’re embarrassed by the contrast between my stained T-shirt and her business suit’.

‘No,’ Barney said patiently. ‘In case you are’.

The doorbell rang. Kate began to dab at her chest with a tea towel.

‘I’ll go,’ Barney said.

She heard him go down the wooden floor of their small hallway, and then the click of the door being opened.

‘Hello!’ she heard Barney say, sounding just like his father. ‘You must be Ruth’.

They materialised together in the kitchen doorway, Ruth in a black trouser suit carrying a pale-blue gift bag frothing with ribbons. She put the bag on the kitchen table. ‘Hello, Kate’.

Kate put the tea towel down. ‘Nice of you to come—’

‘I just brought you and the baby something—’ ‘Thank you’.

Barney moved behind her and laid the flat of his hand against the fridge door.

‘Drink?’

Ruth shook her head. Her hair, Kate observed, was as flawlessly cut as ever. ‘Go on,’ Kate said.

‘No. Really no. Thank you. I’d just love a glimpse of the baby, if I could. That’s all—’

‘He’s called George,’ Barney said, taking a bottle of white wine out of the fridge. ‘After my father and grandfather’.

Kate smiled at Ruth.

‘He isn’t,’ she said, ‘but that needn’t trouble you. Come and see him’.

‘George,’ Barney said comfortably, pouring wine. ‘George Barnabas Maxwell Ferguson’.

‘All his family do that,’ Kate said. ‘They all have these great strings of names. Mental’.

Ruth shot a glance at Barney. He looked perfectly composed.

He said happily, picking up his wine glass, ‘He’s brilliant. You’ll see’.

Kate led Ruth across the hallway back towards the front door. The little room beside it was in darkness except for a nightlight lamp shaped like a crouched rabbit. The room smelled of something sweet and new and innocent.

‘Oh—’ Ruth said.

Kate tiptoed across to a handsome cot that stood against the far wall. In it was a carrycot, and in the carrycot the baby slept on his side under a blue knitted blanket stitched with letters of the alphabet.

Ruth stooped forward.

‘Oh,’ she said again.

‘I know,’ Kate said.

Ruth put her hands on to the rail of the cot and bent down towards the baby. ‘He’s perfect—’

‘Yes,’ Kate said, ‘he is’. She looked at Ruth’s tailored dark shoulders dipping into the cot.

‘May I – may I kiss him?’

‘Of course,’ Kate said, surprised. ‘Go ahead—’

Ruth’s sleek dark head went down over the baby’s for an instant, and then she raised it, but only a little. Kate looked at her hands on the cot rail. Even in the dimness of the room she could see that her knuckles were white with tension.

‘Ruth?’

Ruth’s head moved a little, as if she was trying to nod it.

‘Ruth, are you OK?’

‘Yes,’ Ruth said. Her voice sounded slightly strangled.

‘Yes, I’m fine’.

She straightened up slowly, and then she put the back of one hand up against one cheekbone and then the other.

Kate peered.

‘Ruth, you’re not OK, you’re crying—’ Ruth shook her head. ‘I’m fine, really’. Kate waited.

Ruth looked back into the cot. ‘He’s so lovely—’

‘Ruth—’

Ruth turned and looked straight at Kate. A strand of hair had glued itself lightly to her cheek. She gave Kate a small and hopeless smile.

‘I’m pregnant,’ she said.

Vivien had decided that she would treat Edie to lunch. It would be on a Monday or a Friday so as to avoid her bookshop afternoons and Edie’s theatre ones, and she would take her to the rather nice restaurant in the basement of an upmarket clothes shop in Bond Street where they could, for once, Vivien told Max, lunch together like civilised sisters ought to do. Max was reading a sports-car magazine.

‘Bond Street?’

‘Yes,’ Vivien said. ‘Bond Street’.

Max shook the magazine slightly. He was still, Vivien noticed, wearing a bracelet.

‘I don’t quite see our Edie in Bond Street. Charlotte Street maybe, or Frith Street. But Bond Street—’

‘I like Bond Street,’ Vivien said.

Max eyed her. She was stretching across the sink to open the window behind it, and he could see every minute contour under her thin white trousers.

‘Whatever you say, doll’.

When Vivien telephoned Edie later in the day, Edie said, ‘Lunch?’ as if she’d never heard of it.

‘We ought to catch up,’ Vivien said. ‘We ought to have time together to catch up face to face instead of always talking on the telephone’.

‘You’re lucky to get that,’ Edie said. ‘I’ve hardly got time to brush my teeth at the moment’.

Vivien, admiring the pillar-box-red roses Max had brought her in their tall glass vase on the hall table, said she had booked a table in Bond Street.

‘Bond Street!’

‘Yes’.

‘I don’t know where that is’.

‘Edie,’ Vivien said, ‘this is my treat so please don’t behave like a child’.

‘Oo-er,’ Edie said childishly, ‘I haven’t got clothes for Bond Street’.

Vivien leaned forward and tweaked a rose.

‘Twelve-thirty Monday and no excuses’.

She put the telephone down and went back into the kitchen. Max was on his mobile when she came in and, when he saw her, he whipped it away from his ear and snapped it shut.

He grinned at her.

‘Caught red-handed—’

She affected not to notice.

‘Oh yes?’

‘A quick call to my bookie,’ Max said. ‘Thought I’d get away with it’. He put an arm out and patted her bottom. ‘And I nearly did’.

Edie arrived for lunch dressed entirely in black. She touched one earlobe as she sat down.

‘Even diamond studs. How Bond Street is that?’

Vivien put her reading glasses on.

‘Did Russell give you diamonds?’

‘No. Cheryl lent them to me. And they’re zircons’.

‘Zircons?’

‘Posh glass, I gather’. Edie looked round her. ‘This is very posh glass, isn’t it?’

‘Edie,’ Vivien said, ‘please don’t play-act all over the place and spoil our lunch’.

‘I can’t actually,’ Edie said, ‘I’m too tired’.

Vivien looked sympathetic.

‘Are you?’

Edie picked up the menu. ‘What do you think?’

‘I’ll only think wrong,’ Vivien said, ‘so why don’t you tell me?’

Edie said, staring at the menu, ‘I’m shattered. You’d think five adults living together would lead five fully adult lives’.

Vivien said, with a small smile, thinking of Max, ‘People like to be looked after’. ‘Including me’.