Joanna Trollope - Second Honeymoon

He said, in a different tone, ‘I know how hard this might be for you even to contemplate, heaven knows, it isn’t very easy for me, but I’ve been thinking and the thought I’ve come up with, the thought that won’t somehow go away, is that, in order to give the children a bit of help and rearrange our own lives, we ought, really, if you think about it, to – to sell up too. We ought to sell this house’.

Edie went on looking at him.

There was a silence that seemed to go on for a disconcerting length of time, and then she said, ‘I know’.

The estate agent had said that, on the plus side, it was very rare for a house of this size and quality, and still unconverted, to come up in this particular area. However, he said – and he was quite difficult to take seriously, Edie thought, because of looking rather younger than Matthew and wearing a childishly terrible tie – the minus side, which was quite a significant minus, was that the house was so very unconverted that most buyers with the kind of cash they were envisaging would find it difficult to visualise it in an improved and modernised state.

They had both looked at him when he finished speaking as if he must be about to say more.

After a silence, he’d said, ‘You get my drift?’

Edie had looked at Russell.

Russell said politely, ‘No. Actually’.

The agent had taken a breath. Perhaps, Edie thought, we remind him of his own parents, and how he has to talk to them.

She said, to try and help him, ‘Are you saying it’s good or bad?’

He took another breath, and then he said what he had already said, only more elaborately.

‘I see,’ Russell said. ‘The house is in too bad a state to sell’.

‘No, no, it’s a very desirable house in a good area. It’s just that’ – he glanced round the kitchen – ‘it’s just that, the way it is, just now, the way it looks, because it looks so – very much of, um, well, it’s time, of course, it’s family life and all that, that the kind of purchaser we have in mind, well, we would like to have in mind for this kind of property, might, you see, have difficulty in, well, in seeing the potential’.

Edie had leaned forward.

She said, in a very kind voice, ‘You think we should tidy it up’.

The agent had stared at her with something approaching violent relief.

‘Yes’.

‘Well, that’s easy—’

‘No,’ he said, suddenly desperate again. ‘No. Not tidy up. Empty. Just – almost empty it’. He waved his arms. This room—’ He gestured out of the window. ‘That shed—’

‘Empty it—’

‘Yes’.

Edie said tolerantly, ‘You’ve watched too many television makeover programmes’.

He looked at her. He was almost glaring.

‘It’s not me,’ he said, ‘it’s them’.

And so, because of them, because of all those unknown, feared but longed-for people who would tramp round the house as if it belonged to no one but possibly to their futures, Edie was in Ben’s bedroom on a Saturday afternoon, with a roll of black bags and a bucket of water in which floated a new green pot scourer. If she looked out of the window – which she did a great deal as if trying to imprint the view from it on her mind as a kind of talisman – she could see the piles of peculiar objects that were growing at the end of the garden as Russell emptied the shed. Sometimes he stopped and gazed at the house and, if she was looking out of the window, he waved at her. She waved back, but she didn’t smile. This was, she felt, no moment, no time in their lives, for smiling.

She had expected to be taken over by emotion. She had relied upon the fact that every great event in her life so far had swept her up on a huge wave of blazing feeling, feeling so strong in essence and operatic in effect that she didn’t have to decide how to behave, she just surrendered and was swept away. But, for some reason she couldn’t fathom, this event, this business of moving house and thereby moving everything in their lives – except, Russell had pointed out, hopefully each other – wasn’t knocking her out, bowling her over. It was instead presenting her with a whole range of reactions, some of which were painful in a way she had anticipated, and some of which were extremely surprising. She could feel something close to anguish at the thought of, perhaps, not going up and down those stairs in six months’ time, but she could also feel that not having to go up and down the stairs might simultaneously spring her from years of habit which had, over time, quietly and insidiously become a prison.

‘Not an actual prison,’ she said to Russell. ‘Of course not. Just a prison of me going on and on being me’.

If she thought about people coming round the house and staring speculatively at the pale blotches on the walls that she was making by scrubbing the adhesive gum off so hard, she felt a dislike of them that almost amounted to loathing. But if, on the other hand, she turned that idea around and thought of nobody coming, nobody even wanting the house, she felt worse. She felt, she supposed, close to something Vivien had said, crying down the telephone one night after Edie had returned from her last but one night in Ghosts.

‘When I think,’ Vivien had said between sniffs, ‘when I think of Max deceiving me again, leaving me again, I feel awful. But when I think of him coming back, what it would be like if I had to have him back, I feel really, really terrible’.

Edie moved Ben’s bed away from the wall in order to attack the gum marks left by his Kate Moss poster. There were several socks nesting furrily against the skirting board and a gold-coloured earring like a flower and a sticky teaspoon. She picked them up gingerly and flung them across the bed on to the carpet. Ben was buying new socks now, new socks and bedlinen and a screwdriver for this little flat he’d found in Walthamstow, two streets away from the flat Naomi shared with her mother. It wasn’t much of a place, he said, but it had a sitting room and a bedroom and he was going to paint it with the help of another photographer’s assistant and then he was going to lay siege to Naomi.

‘What do you mean, lay siege?’

‘I’m going to make it really nice and then I’m going to wait’.

‘Wait? For what?’

He’d been filling his rucksack with possessions from behind the sofa. ‘Wait for her to see’.

‘Will she?’

Ben spread out a faded black T-shirt with a skull printed on the front and then he tossed it on the floor. ‘Oh yes,’ he said.

‘D’you mean,’ Edie said, ‘that you’ll cook supper and light candles and buy flowers?’

Ben inspected another black T-shirt.

‘Might do’.

‘And if it doesn’t work?’

‘Then,’ Ben said, chucking the second T-shirt after the first, ‘I’ll still end up with my own gaff and I’ll think again’.

Edie began on the next batch of gum patches with her scourer. Ben wouldn’t let her see this flat of his any more than Rosa and Lazlo would let her see the one they’d found in Barons Court.

‘Barons Court!’ Edie had said. ‘But that’s the other side of London!’

‘It’s a very nice flat,’ Lazlo said seriously. He looked at Rosa. ‘Piccadilly Line’. Rosa looked at Edie. ‘Good for work’.

‘Oh yes,’ Lazlo said, ‘very good for work’.

‘But why can’t I see it?’

‘You can,’ Rosa said, ‘in time. When we’ve – done something about the bathroom’.

She looked at Lazlo. They both giggled. He said, ‘And the kitchen’. They giggled again.

Edie said, ‘I really don’t see why you have to be so secretive’.

‘Not secretive, Mum. Just private’.

‘They’re paying two hundred pounds a week,’ Edie said to Russell, ‘and Ben’s paying a hundred and twenty-five. How will they manage?’

‘We don’t ask them,’ Russell said, ‘and we don’t worry. Certainly not until this fails to sell’. He put a hand on the nearest wall. ‘Which it won’t because I am going to paint the front door’.

‘I really think,’ Matthew had said, surveying the house from the street, ‘that you should at least paint the front door’.

‘It’s always been that colour’.

‘It isn’t the colour,’ Matthew said patiently, ‘it’s the chips’.

‘But—’

‘Do it, Dad,’ Matthew said. ‘Just bite the bullet and do it. Like the damp in the downstairs loo’.

Matthew, Edie thought, aiming her scouring pad towards the bucket, and missing, was different. He was, in one way, back to the Matthew he had been when he first met Ruth, the Matthew who had kindly, if patronisingly, told his parents how much better their lives might be if only they followed his advice. But there were new elements now, as well, elements that were softer and more sympathetic, elements induced, it seemed, by his knowledge that he was going to be a father. He had, for example, gone, almost at once, to live with Ruth in the flat that had been such a bone of contention between them, in order, he said, to look after her.

‘But she isn’t ill,’ Edie said. ‘Pregnancy isn’t an illness. It’s a – well, it’s a very natural state of being but she isn’t an invalid’.

Matthew was standing by the kitchen table, dressed for work and drinking orange juice.

‘I want to look after her. I want to make sure she eats the right things and gets enough rest. I’m going to the doctor with her’.

‘Are you?’

Matthew drained his glass.

‘I’m going for every ultrasound. I’m going whenever I need to know what Ruth knows’.

He had left his room as if he had never been in it. In fact, he had left it so completely that in order to visualise him in it at all Edie had to remember all the way back to the serious-minded boy in gumboots who had so feared the leak in the roof that going up and down the staircase had been a real test of courage for him. That was the boy who was now proposing not only to devote himself to his girlfriend’s pregnancy but also to put his own career on hold when Ruth’s maternity leave was over in order to care for their child. He said it was his choice to do that, he said it was what he wanted.