Joanna Trollope - Second Honeymoon

‘Um’.

‘It was a nice audience,’ Edie said. ‘Lovely, really. Not a bad house in numbers terms either. They were paying attention. It was – well, it was me’.

‘What was?’

‘It was me,’ Edie said, ‘not paying attention’. Russell got up and moved Edie’s wine glass so that she could reach it.

‘There’.

‘Thank you’.

‘I think,’ Russell said, ‘that you know so clearly what you are doing that, even when you aren’t paying attention, it doesn’t matter’.

Edie sighed.

‘It does’.

Russell looked round the kitchen. He said guardedly, ‘Well, I think you should go straight to bed now, and I’ll do whatever needs to be done’. Edie took a gulp of her wine. ‘Are they all in?’ ‘I have no idea’.

‘I can’t go to bed unless they’re all in’.

‘Edie—’

‘I can’t,’ Edie said idiotically. ‘I never could and I never will be able to’.

Russell closed his eyes.

He said under his breath, ‘Mad and untrue’.

‘What?’ ‘Nothing’.

‘Don’t mutter at me,’ Edie said. ‘Don’t wait up for me just to mutter’.

Russell took a breath. ‘What needs doing?’

Edie let out a little yelp of sarcastic laughter.

‘It would be quicker to make a list of what doesn’t need doing—’

‘Look,’ Russell said. ‘Look. This is worse than when they were at school. This is worse than when they were students. Just stop trying to do everything. Just stop. They’ll all do more if they only know what you want!’

Edie turned her face aside.

‘I can’t let them’.

‘Why not?’

‘Because they’re poor and broken-hearted and in a mess of one kind or another and it’s all my fault’.

‘Rubbish,’ Russell said vehemently. ‘Absolute rubbish bloody crap. You’re behaving like this because you need to justify not wanting to let go’.

Edie put her face down sideways on the table.

‘Give me strength—’

‘Me too,’ Russell said.

Edie sniffed.

Russell ignored her.

She said, not moving from the table, ‘Why on earth did you stay up if you only want to bawl me out?’

There was a silence. Russell cleared his throat. Edie stared at the cooker and thought how the tiles on the wall behind it needed cleaning.

Then Russell said, ‘There’s something I have to tell you’.

‘She’s in reception,’ Blaise said to Matthew.

Matthew was looking determinedly at his screen. He didn’t reply.

‘She’s been there since nine’.

‘I know’.

‘She says you know she’s here’.

‘Yes’.

‘Matt,’ Blaise said, bending down to try and interpose his head between Matthew and the computer screen, ‘you can’t leave her sitting out there. You can’t’.

Matthew said, ‘The only way I’ve been coping with any of this is by not seeing her’.

‘It’s no good, you know, just ducking out—’

Matthew transferred his gaze from the screen to Blaise.

‘And d’you know what will happen if I go out to her? She’ll ask if we can go and talk and because it’ll be a public place and I can’t make a scene I’ll say yes, and we’ll go and have a coffee or something and then she’ll start saying that it can work, that she’ll do anything I want and I’ll say it’s too late, because it is, and then she’ll cry and I’ll feel a complete bastard and say I have to go and I’ll get up and come back here and everything will be even worse, yet again, than if I hadn’t gone in the first place’.

Blaise straightened up a little. Then he sat on the edge of Matthew’s desk and stretched his legs out.

He said, ‘She says she’s just got one thing to tell you and it won’t take long’.

‘It doesn’t matter what it is—’

Blaise flung his head up and looked at the ceiling.

‘Matt, you don’t have a choice’.

‘Oh I do. It’s the last thing I do have’.

‘Whatever you feel about her, you were in a relationship and you do have to listen to her, one more time. It’s humiliating for her, sitting out there, with people like me, who knew about the two of you, tramping through. She can’t be doing this because she wants to’.

‘Why not?’

‘She isn’t that kind of girl’. ‘She’s become that kind of girl,’ Matthew said. ‘Only because you’re treating her like this’. Matthew flung his chair back and shouted, ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ Several people at nearby desks looked up. One girl called, ‘Shut it!’

‘Don’t lecture me,’ Matthew hissed. ‘Don’t preach at me’. Blaise shrugged. ‘Leave you to it’. Matthew said nothing. Blaise went back to his desk.

Matthew raised his eyes to the level of his screen and became aware that some of the people who had looked up when he shouted were still looking, in the unnervingly focused way of people waiting for the next development in a drama. Matthew shot his chair back in towards his desk and leaned to peer at his screen, his hand on the mouse. He counted to fifty and then he got up and walked, as slowly and nonchalantly as he could manage, across the office towards the reception area. He did not glance at Blaise as he passed him.

Ruth, wearing a business suit, was sitting in a black leather armchair, reading a copy of the Financial Times. Her hair was pulled back in a spiky knot behind her head and she had on the red-framed reading glasses Matthew remembered her telling him she hardly needed visually but found a useful psychological barrier in some meetings. Matthew paused. Ruth glanced up, on cue, and regarded him over her newspaper.

He walked across and stood awkwardly in front of her. She was wearing a completely inscrutable expression.

He said lamely, ‘Well, here I am’.

She folded the newspaper without any particular hurry and laid it on the glass-topped table beside her. Then she stood up. Matthew suddenly felt a little shaky.

Ruth said, in a voice presumably intended for the receptionist behind her barricade of brushed steel and black acrylic, ‘This won’t take long,’ then she bent and picked up her handbag and her briefcase.

Matthew put out an automatic hand to help her.

‘No, thank you,’ Ruth said.

She moved past him and began to walk towards the bank of lifts. Her back seemed to Matthew to be emphatically straight. He turned to follow her, and as he did so it came to him, from some weird reservoir of sheer instinct, exactly what it was that she was going to tell him.

The contract cleaning company told Edie that a house the size of hers would occupy four people for a whole day and, if she wanted the windows included, would cost something in the region of three hundred and fifty pounds. Of course, that excluded any cleaning inside cupboards, and if she wanted—

‘No, thank you,’ Edie said.

‘Then I assume a basic surface clean—’

‘No, thank you’.

‘Our quotations are extremely competitive—’ ‘I don’t doubt it’. ‘Mrs Boyd—’

‘Thank you,’ Edie said loudly, ‘but no thank you. No’. She threw the telephone into the armchair opposite. Ben had left a bath towel draped over the back of it. The rest of his possessions, including a duvet and a pillow, were piled behind the sofa, where Arsie had immediately found them and made a nest. It was a neat pile but it wasn’t, however you looked at it, a small one. The mere knowledge that it was there made Edie feel rather tearful.

It was awful, really, that Ben should be reduced to sleeping on the sofa in the first place. But what was worse was that Edie’s own feelings at having him home again were so confused, so unlike the rapture she had anticipated, that she hadn’t known who to be furious with first. She had raged at Russell for being Ben’s confidant before she was and then at Rosa for being in Ben’s bedroom and had only been prevented from turning on Lazlo by Rosa’s unexpected and forceful intervention. It had seemed to her, for a few days, intolerable that something she had longed for so intensely should be granted to her in a form that effectively stripped it of all its rightful satisfaction.

‘Don’t take it out on us!’ Rosa had yelled. ‘Just because you’ve got what you wanted in the wrong way!’

Lazlo had come to find her in her cupboard of a dressing room, painting on Mrs Alving’s Norwegian pallor.

‘I just wanted to say something—’

Edie went on blending make-up down over her jawline. She didn’t glance at Lazlo’s reflection, standing behind her and looking directly at her in the mirror.

‘You know I don’t like distracting conversations before a show’.

Lazlo said tiredly, ‘There isn’t a perfect moment. This hardly suits me either’.

Edie flicked a glance upwards. Lazlo’s expression was one of weary determination, rather than anxiety.

She said, ‘So?’

‘I’m moving out,’ Lazlo said. ‘You’ve been wonderfully kind and I am truly grateful, but it isn’t working any more’.

Edie gave a little gasp and put her make-up stick down. ‘Please don’t’.

‘If I go,’ Lazlo said patiently, ‘Rosa and Ben can have their rooms back. It’s what you all need’. Edie swivelled round from the mirror. ‘You mustn’t’.

‘Mustn’t?’

Edie said unsteadily, ‘I’d feel such a failure—’ There’d been a small silence and then Lazlo said gently, ‘I’m afraid I can’t help that’.

‘I wanted it to work,’ Edie said. ‘I wanted everyone to feel they had a home’. She looked away and then she said sadly, ‘I wanted to give you all a home’.

‘You did’.

Edie turned back to the mirror and picked up her make-up again. ‘But on my terms’. Lazlo said nothing.