‘Is it – is it what Ruth wants?’ ‘Of course’.

‘But I thought you couldn’t bear the flat—’

‘What I couldn’t bear,’ Matthew said, ‘was the situation. And then I could hardly bear what followed it. But now it’s changed. Everything’s changed. Everything’.

Edie looked at him.

‘Yes,’ she said faintly.

She sat down now, on the edge of Ben’s bed, and then she lay back and contemplated the ceiling. When she and Vivien were growing up, she had always prided herself on being like their father, a restless man who found any kind of routine not so much anathema as impossible. Vivien, of course, was like their mother, the kind of person who sees change as some malevolent plot deliberately devised to distress her. But look at Vivien now, staring into the wreckage of the fragile edifice she’d spent so much of her life patching and mending, and not, repeat not, falling to pieces. It was Vivien who, in between looking for flats in Fulham for herself -’Why shouldn’t I live further in? Who’s to stop me living exactly where I want?’ – was urging Edie to think of where she and Russell might live after the house was sold. ‘Why don’t you think about Clerkenwell? Or Little Venice? Why don’t you have an adventure?’ It was Vivien who had said to Edie, ‘Going on is hard, but going back would be a whole lot worse’.

Going back. Edie stretched her eyes wide and focused on a long, wavering crack in the plaster above her head. To think now how she had longed to go back, how fiercely she had told herself that all she wanted, all she was truly able to do, lay in what she had already done, in the way she had lived her life since they had moved into the house. But if she was completely truthful with herself and somebody, some fairy godmother, materialised out of the battered walls of Ben’s bedroom and offered her the chance to go back, she would have to make sure of where she was going back to. Not, now, to maternal supremacy, not, now, to that beguiling power of sustenance and control, that luxurious simplicity of society-approved choice: children first, everything else second. What she would have to say, slightly embarrassedly, to the fairy godmother, was that she would indeed like to go back, but not very far back, back in fact only as far as the first night of the production of Ghosts, when she had known that she had done something exceptionally well, and been applauded for it.

‘How odd,’ she’d say to the fairy godmother, ‘to have one hunger almost replaced by one so very different’.

‘Not replaced,’ the fairy godmother would reply, adjusting her gauzy skirts, ‘merely augmented by, added to. Nothing, you see, stands still’.

Russell had said that. He’d been shuffling through some property brochures that Vivien had zealously sent and he said, ‘I never thought we’d leave this house, I never thought I could, but now I wonder if I could stay. Nothing stands still, does it, and I suppose, if it did, we’d stop breathing. It’s not change that’s so painful, it’s just getting used to it’.

Edie sat up slowly. It actually wasn’t getting used to change that hurt, it was getting used to the truth, or whatever that element was that wasn’t the illusions you’d clung to and comforted yourself with for more years than you’d care to remember. And once you’d started doing without the illusions, you got braver, you could breathe the thinner air, take longer strides, allow yourself to make claims. And the claim I want to make, Edie thought, getting to her feet and moving towards the window again, is to work. I want to act again, I want to be on a stage or in front of a camera, and I mind very much indeed that nobody has asked me, since Ghosts.

She looked down the garden. Russell was standing outside the shed holding Rosa’s old fairy cycle. Russell had said she must keep the faith, that there would be other parts, that he would help her to change agents if she thought that would make a difference. She leaned her forehead against the glass of the window and stared at him. He had put the bike down now and was pulling out of the shed yards and yards of crumpled green plastic netting that they had once used in an attempt to stop the boys’ footballs flying over the fence into neighbouring gardens. He looked purposeful and determined and, at the same time, as if this task was far from easy. He looked like someone who was doing something he didn’t want to do in order to be able to move on to something better. He looked like the kind of person Edie was going to have to be when she ate all the hard words and thoughts she had uttered and believed in the past about his agency, and asked him for work to tide her over until – until something better came up.

‘I’ll do anything,’ she planned to say to him, ‘and I’ll do it properly,’ and he would give her a long look back and say with emphasis, ‘Yes, you will’.

She took her face away from the window and bent to pick up the bucket. She would go downstairs now, and make a mug of tea and carry the tea down the garden to Russell, and she would ask him, there and then – humbly and there and then – if he could help her. She looked back from the doorway, at Ben’s room. It was his bedroom but it was also the past and there was, suddenly, excitingly, frighteningly, no time like the present. Not, that is, if you wanted a future. Edie closed the door behind her, and trod carefully down the stairs.

‘“Perhaps,”‘ Lazlo constantly said to her as Osvald Alving, ‘“Perhaps there’ll be lots of things for me to be glad about – and to live for …”‘

Arsie was waiting at the foot of the stairs. He looked up as Edie passed him and made a small, interrogative remark.

Edie paused and bent to touch the top of his head with her free hand.

‘“Yes,”‘ she said, as Mrs Alving had always said. ‘“Yes, I’m sure there will.”‘