‘What about,’ Vivien said, summoning a waiter, ‘some ground rules?’

‘Like?’

‘Like do your own washing, clean your own room—’ Edie put the menu down.

She said tiredly, ‘It’s more than that, really. It’s five people wanting five people’s separate space’.

The waiter paused by their table. ‘Two glasses of champagne, please’.

‘Vivi—’

‘Why not?’

Edie looked at her carefully. ‘I suppose you do look – happy’.

‘I am’.

‘Good,’ Edie said. ‘Max behaving—’

‘Oh yes’.

‘You’re sure—’

‘Flowers,’ Vivien said. ‘Treats, naughty shoes’.

‘Oh Lord’.

‘It’s like being at the beginning again, only it’s better because I know what I’m doing this time’. Edie folded her arms. ‘Is he staying in?’

‘Oh yes,’ Vivien said. ‘If we aren’t out, it’s candles on the kitchen table. Why don’t you bring Russell down to supper?’

Edie sighed.

‘Because I only have one evening a week free at the moment’. Vivien gave a stifled giggle. ‘Oops! Silly me’.

Edie said nothing. The waiter came back with two flutes of champagne. Vivien picked hers up and held it out towards Edie. ‘Happy days. Why don’t you just throw some of them out?’

Edie stiffened.

‘Oh no’.

‘Why not?’

‘I love having them there. I love having the house full again. It’s what I wanted’. ‘Even if it’s killing you?’

Edie picked up her own glass and took a tiny swallow.

‘It isn’t killing me’. ‘But you said—’

‘Oh,’ Edie said, picking up the menu again and leaning back in her chair, ‘you know me. Always saying things I don’t mean for effect’.

Vivien looked at her. Then she looked down at her own menu.

‘What about the scallops?’ she said.


Because they cost him nothing and simultaneously made him feel he was achieving something, Lazlo had begun taking long walks in the afternoon, accompanied by Russell’s copy of The Blue Guide to London. He had walked to Noel Road, to look at the house Joe Orton had once lived in, and then to Duncan Terrace to imagine Charles Lamb going in and out with perhaps his sister Mary watching for him from an upstairs window. He had been several times to the Estorick Collection to gaze anxiously at the Italian Futurist paintings and wonder exactly what made them so alarming. He had walked round Aberdeen Park and Highbury Fields, he had looked at churches and chapels and libraries and prisons, he had followed rivers and canals and handsome Georgian and Victorian terraces. And when he returned, after two or three hours of walking and thinking, he was struck both by how glad he was to be home and by how painfully impermanent that home inevitably was.

What was particularly disconcerting about this state of affairs was that his life was, really, going better than it ever had. He might still be on close to Equity minimum wage because Ghosts was hardly a lavish production, but he had had excellent notices, two better-known agents were offering their services, and he was, thanks to Edie and her family, living in the least hand-to-mouth circumstances he had known. Even his student debt, incurred in order to go to drama school, was beginning to look less like an unwelcome, unavoidable companion for the next twenty years. Yet an anxiety possessed him about what would happen next, about whatever happened next being sure to be inferior to what was happening now, which made him despair of ever possessing the capacity to appreciate good things when they happened to turn up. He had never been consumed by this disquiet while living in Kilburn. Maybe it was because living in Kilburn, in those particular circumstances, had been so bad that there was comfort to be drawn from being very certain that nothing could ever be worse. And now, living as he was, he could remember and visualise the downward slide back to somewhere like Kilburn very easily, and that prospect could reduce him, to his shame, to clinging to the edge of the basin in Edie’s bathroom, as he had the other morning, and panicking at the sight of his own frightened face in the mirror above it. What Matthew must have thought, Lazlo couldn’t, and daren’t, imagine. He had looked at Lazlo with the sort of look Lazlo remembered the older boys at school giving the younger ones when they hurt themselves playing rugby. Matthew was obviously the sort of guy who knew what to do with his inner demons.

Not knowing what to do with his own was one of the reasons, Lazlo was sure, that made him able to play Osvald. Maybe that was also what made him so certain that if he couldn’t be an actor then he couldn’t be anything. Freddie Cass had said to him that acting wasn’t something you wanted to do, it was something you had to do. Lazlo had been very happy to hear that, had felt a relief and a gratitude at having his own need sanctioned, but it hadn’t, oddly, assuaged the feeling of being an outsider in some way, a person who could only fully engage with other people if he was pretending to be someone else.

Which is why it was so very astonishing to have been kissed by Rosa. At first, he had simply thought she was teasing him, that kissing him was just a little more of the mischief that had led her to lie on his bed and fall asleep there. But although she had been flirtatious and light-hearted before she kissed him, she was quite different when she stepped back again. She had looked, fleetingly and amazingly, as if she was dreading that he might laugh at her. She had even almost said sorry.

‘Typical Rosa—’

‘What?’

She’d looked away, pushing her hair back.

She muttered, ‘Always blundering in where she’s not wanted—’

He’d been in too much of a turmoil even to consider saying, ‘You are wanted’. Anyway, at that moment, would such a statement have been true? Was it true now? What, in fact, did he feel about being kissed by her? What had he felt when he found her lying, quite unselfconsciously, on his bed? He couldn’t believe how many walks were occupied in wondering about this. He couldn’t believe the miles he seemed able to cover while asking himself if this girl, whom he’d rather dismissed as spoiled and careless and unappreciative of the solid support of her background, was actually and appealingly something of a fellow wanderer.

He’d shaken his head at Rosa. He’d meant her to infer that kissing him wasn’t a blunder. She’d put the back of her hand up against her mouth, and then taken it away and said, with a slightly uncertain smile, ‘Better go and sort the sheet crisis’.

He’d nodded. He hadn’t moved from where he was standing by the wall. She went over to the door and hesitated for a moment. He waited for her to turn so that he could at least smile at her, but she didn’t. She went out of the room and down the stairs to the landing below, and Lazlo heard Edie say, ‘I wonder, Rosa, if the sheets on the floor could possibly be yours?’ He waited for Rosa to scream something in reply, but she didn’t. Perhaps she was bundling the sheets up in her arms and taking them silently downstairs. Perhaps she had stepped over them and shut herself quietly in her room. Perhaps she was looking at herself in her bedroom mirror and wondering why anyone should want to return her kiss. Lazlo closed his eyes and slumped against the wall. Nil points, he told himself. Nil points to self.

‘Look at this diary,’ Maeve said.

Russell looked up. Maeve was standing in the doorway between their offices holding up the large cloth-bound book she preferred to use instead of anything more up to date.

‘You look at it,’ Russell said in a friendly voice. ‘It’s one of the things I pay you for’.

‘You are out,’ Maeve said, in the tone of one reprimanding a student about an overdraft, ‘every single night this week’.

‘Yes’.

‘And last week. And four nights next week’. ‘Yes. So is Edie’.

Maeve slapped her hand against the diary. ‘These are invitations you wouldn’t have countenanced accepting six months ago’. ‘Probably not’.

‘Why,’ Maeve said, ‘don’t you do something worthwhile, like going to a lecture? Why don’t you broaden your horizons?’

Russell reached across his desk for the telephone.

‘You mean well,’ he said, ‘but I have enough to bear without you adding to it’.

‘I’m trying to alleviate it—’

Russell was pressing buttons.

‘I’m trying,’ Maeve said, ‘to help’.

‘Hello?’ Russell said into the telephone. ‘Hello? Russell Boyd here. I was hoping to speak to Gregory—’

Maeve backed out of Russell’s office in time to hear the bell to the street door ring. She pressed the intercom, and on the tiny television screen that filmed whoever was standing outside she saw an unpromising-looking boy in a parka with a knitted hat.

‘Yes?’

The knitted hat leaned nearer the mouthpiece.

‘It’s Ben’. ‘Is it?’

‘Yes,’ Ben said without rancour. ‘It’s me’. ‘Take your hat off’.

Ben pulled off his beanie and pushed his face towards the camera. Maeve pressed the door-release buzzer to let him in. He came up the stairs at a slow and heavy trudge.

Maeve met him in the doorway.

‘Sorry, dear. You looked like one of those posters for Brixton Academy’.

Ben grinned at her.

‘Good’.

‘I’m afraid your father’s on the phone’. Ben shrugged.

‘I thought we might go out for a beer—’ ‘Well,’ Maeve said, returning briskly behind her desk, ‘all he ever does at the moment is go out for beers, so I don’t see why one of them shouldn’t be with you’.

‘OK,’ Ben said amiably. He wandered over to his father’s office and gestured through the doorway. Russell waved and motioned to his son to sit down. Ben leaned against the door jamb and folded his arms and looked at all the photographs of Russell’s clients slowly and consideringly.