Second Honeymoon Page 2

  Russell straightened up and looked at the house. Rosa’s window was on the top floor, on the left. Since Rosa had left home, they’d had the odd lodger in that room, and in Matt’s, next to it: drama students Edie was teaching or impoverished actors she’d once been in repertory with who had small parts in plays in little North London theatres. They were good lodgers on the whole, never awake too early, never short of something to say, and they provided, unconsciously, the perfect excuse to postpone any decision about moving to something smaller. The house might be shabby, in places very shabby, but it was not something Russell could imagine being without. It was, quite simply, a given in his life, in their lives, the result of being left a miraculous small legacy in his twenties, when he and Edie were living in a dank flat, with two children and a baby, above an ironmonger’s off the Balls Pond Road.

  ‘Four bedrooms,’ Edie had said, whispering as if the house could hear her. ‘What’ll we ever do with four bedrooms?’

  It had been in a terrible state, of course, damp and neglected, with mushrooms up the stairwell and a hole in the roof you could see the stars through. But somehow, then, with Edie enjoying a steady spell of television work, and the agency getting going, the house had seemed to them needy rather than daunting, more theirs, somehow, because it was crying out for rescue. They had no kitchen for a year, no finished bathroom for two, no carpets for five. Matt wore gumboots all his childhood, from the moment he got out of bed. It was perhaps no surprise that Matt should turn out to be the most orthodox of their children, the one with an electronic diary and polished shoes. When he came home, he was inclined to point out that the crack in the sitting-room ceiling was lengthening, that the smell of damp in the downstairs lavatory was not just a smell, that regular outside painting was a sound investment.

  ‘It’s hard,’ Russell said, ‘for us old bohemians to get worked up about such things’. ‘Then listen to me,’ Matt said.

  He said that often, now. He had started saying it after he left home, and returned, just for occasional meals, with a newly critical eye. ‘Listen to me,’ he’d say to Edie about a part she was reading for, to Russell about some new direction the agency might take, to Ben about his A-level choices.

  ‘You’re so adult,’ Edie would say, looking at him fondly. ‘I love it’.

  She loved it, of course, because she didn’t listen to him. She loved it the way she loved his regular haircuts and well-mannered clothes and competence with technology. It was amusing to her, and endearing, to see this well-put-together grown man in her kitchen, explaining to her how to send text messages on her mobile phone, and visualise him, simultaneously, once asleep in his cot or sitting, reading earnestly, on his potty. She could play games like that, Russell thought, because she still had Ben; the security of Ben gave her the licence not to take Matt seriously, not to see his maturity as anything other than sweet play-acting.

  If Matt was irritated by her attitude, he gave no sign. He treated her as he had always treated both his parents, as very well-meaning people of whom he was fond and who he needed to take practical care of because they seemed to decline to do it for themselves. It was plain he thought Edie indulged Ben, just as it was plain he thought Rosa indulged herself, but he kept these opinions to their proper place, on the edges of his own rightly preoccupying life. He worked for a mobile-telephone company, had a girlfriend with a job in the City, and with whom he shared a flat. He was entitled, Russell thought, inspecting a neat stack of broken lampshades and wondering why they had ever been considered worthy of salvage, to say, every so often, and to a family who lived so much more carelessly than he did, ‘Listen to me’.

  Russell did listen. He might not often take advice, but he listened. He had listened while Matt had explained, at tremendous length one evening in a cramped bar in Covent Garden, that Russell should specialise. Matt described his father’s agency, which represented actors who were particularly interested in film and television work, as ‘limping along’. Russell, nursing a glass of red wine, had been mildly affronted. After the next glass, he had felt less affronted. After the third glass, Matt’s proposal that Russell should specialise in providing actors for advertising voice-over work seemed less alien, less unattractively practical than it had an hour before.

  ‘I know it’s not theatre,’ Matt had said, ‘but it’s money’.

  ‘It’s all about money!’ Edie had cried, two hours later, brushing her teeth. ‘Isn’t it? That’s all it’s about!’

  ‘Possibly,’ Russell said carefully, ‘it has to be’.

  ‘It’s sordid. It’s squalid. Where’s the acting in bouncing on sofas?’

  ‘Not bouncing on them. Talking about them’.

  Edie spat into the basin.

  ‘Well, if you can bring yourself—’

  ‘I rather think I can’.

  ‘Well, just don’t ask me’.

  Russell let a pause fall. He climbed into bed and picked up his book, a biography of Alexander the Great. He put his spectacles on.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No. I rather think I shan’t’.

  Since 1975, Russell Boyd Associates (there were none) had occupied three attic rooms behind Shaftesbury Avenue. For almost thirty years, Russell had worked in a room that had undoubtedly once been a maid’s bedroom. It had a dormer window and sloping ceilings and was carpeted with the Turkey carpet that had once been in Russell’s grandparents’ dining room in Hull, now worn to a grey blur of weft cotton threads, garnished here and there with a few brave remaining tufts of red and blue and green. Matt, encouraged by Russell’s acceptance of his advice about the agency, then tried to persuade him to modernise the office, to put down a wooden floor and install halogen lights on gleaming metal tracks.

  ‘No,’ Russell said.

  ‘But, Dad—’

  ‘I like it. I like it just as it is. So do my clients’.

  Matt had kicked at several straining cardboard folders piled like old bolsters against the bookshelves.

  ‘It’s awful. It’s like your old shed’.

  Russell looked now, at his shed. It was half empty, but what remained looked intractable, as if prepared to resist movement. Arsie had left the chair and returned to the house and the sun had sunk behind the houses leaving a raw dankness instead. He glanced down at Rosa’s tricycle, on its side in the stack to be discarded.

  ‘Rosa’s bike’, she had always called it. Not ‘mine’ but

  ‘Rosa’s’.

  ‘Russell!’ Edie called. He raised his head.

  She was standing at the corner of the house, where the side door to the kitchen was. She had Arsie in her arms.

  ‘Tea!’ Edie shouted.

  ‘Look,’ Edie said, ‘I’m sorry’.

  She had made tea in the big pot with cabbage roses on it. It was extremely vulgar but it had intense associations for Edie, as everything in her life did, everything that reminded her of a place, a person, a happening.

  She said, ‘I was fed up with you because you wouldn’t understand’.

  ‘I do understand,’ Russell said.

  ‘Do you?’

  He nodded, tensing slightly.

  ‘Then tell me,’ Edie demanded. ‘Explain what is the matter’.

  Russell paused.

  Then he said, ‘It’s the end of a particularly compelling – and urgent – phase of motherhood. And it’s very hard to adjust to’.

  ‘I don’t want to adjust,’ Edie said. She poured tea into the huge cracked blue cups she had found in a junk shop in Scarborough, touring with – what was it? A Priestley play, perhaps.

  ‘I want Ben back,’ Edie said.

  Russell poured milk into his tea.

  ‘I want him back,’ Edie said fiercely. ‘I want him back to make me laugh and infuriate me and exploit me and make me feel necessary’.

  Russell picked up his teacup and held it, cradling it in his palms. The aroma of the tea rose up to him, making him think of his grandmother. She had saved Darjeeling tea for Sundays. ‘The champagn
e of teas,’ she said, every time she drank it.

  ‘Are you listening?’ Edie said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but you forget I know’.

  She leaned forward.

  She said, ‘How do I make you mind?’

  ‘Good question’.

  ‘What?’

  He put his cup down.

  He said, seriously, not looking at her, ‘How do I make you mind?’ She stared.

  ‘What?’ she said again.

  ‘I’ve been out there,’ Russell said, ‘for about three hours. I’ve been sifting through all sorts of rubbish, things that mattered once and don’t any more. And that’s quite painful, knowing things won’t come again, knowing things are over for ever’.

  ‘But—’

  ‘Wait,’ Russell said, ‘just wait. Rosa’s not going to ride that trike again, Matt’s not going to hit with that bat, you’re not going to read under that lampshade. That’s not comfortable, that’s not easy to know, to have to accept. But we have to, because we have no choice. And we also have something left’.

  Edie took a long swallow of tea and looked at him over the rim of her cup.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You talk about wanting Ben back. You talk about his energy and neediness and that way it makes you feel. Well, just think for a moment about how I feel. I didn’t marry you in order to have Matt and Rosa and Ben, though I’m thankful we did. I married you because I wanted to be with you, because you somehow make things shine for me, even when you’re horrible. You want Ben back. Well, you’ll have to deal with that as best you can. And while you’re dealing with it, I’ll give you something else to think about, something that isn’t going to go away. Edie – I want you back. I was here before the children and I’m here now’. He put his cup down with finality. ‘And I’m not going away’.

  Chapter Two

  When it came to business, Bill Moreton prided himself on his firing technique. His father, who had died before Bill was twenty, thereby bequeathing his son the luxury of mythologising him, had been a general surgeon. His basic belief had been ‘Cut deeply, but only once’, and Bill had adopted this mantra as his own, and had carried it, grandiosely, into the world of public relations where, in the process of building up a company, there had been a good deal of hiring and firing to do.

  Because many of Bill’s hiring choices were disastrous, he got in plenty of practice at subsequently firing them. He was impervious to any suggestions, however diplomatically put, about his judgement, and equally resistant to criticism about the manner in which he eradicated his own errors. The sight of an inadequate employee was a living reminder of Bill’s own inadequacies, and he could not endure it. The only way, he had discovered, to avoid confronting his mistakes was to summon the employee in question to his office – paperwork already in place – smile, sack them, smile again and show them the door.

  Which was exactly what he planned to do, this cool April day, to Rosa Boyd. Rosa was twenty-six, perfectly capable at her job, and a good-looking redhead if you liked your women on the big side and redheaded into the bargain. The reason for sacking Rosa was not the one Bill planned to give her, smilingly and briefly. He was going to tell her that she was not, he regretted, suited to public relations work because she lacked the patience to build up a relationship with a client that could take, oh, five or six years in some cases, with the client behaving most capriciously from the outset. What he was not going to tell her was that the company’s figures, drawn up as they always were in anticipation of the end of a tax year, were alarmingly poor, and that he had decided -against his accountant’s advice – to sack two members of staff because to sack one would have looked like victimisation. And so, Victor Basinger was to take early retirement – fifty-four was too old, anyway, for the PR game – and Rosa Boyd was to go.

  Bill stood by the window of his office, contemplating the blank view of the adjoining building it afforded, and rehearsed what he would say to Rosa. He had to be careful to adjust his tone to precisely the right pitch because even a hint of too much of anything might betray his uncomfortable knowledge that, for all professional and practical reasons, it should not be Rosa Boyd walking into his office to be sacked, but Heidi Kingsmill. The difficulty was that Heidi was an aggressive and volatile personality who had, five years before and by sheer fluke, brought the company one of its most reliably lucrative accounts. The fact that Heidi had done absolutely nothing constructive since, and was an emotional liability, could not be admitted. Nor could the fact that Bill had spent an energetic night with Heidi after an office Christmas party four years before and, although Heidi had not as yet exploited this fact, she made it perfectly plain that she always – if pushed – could. Bill’s wife had invested some of her private money in his company, and might be required, shortly, to invest more, and she was a woman who set a great, even hysterical, store by fidelity. So, all in all, it was Rosa Boyd who had to go, in order to keep a space of clear blue water between Heidi Kingsmill and Mrs Moreton.

  Bill heard a sound behind him. Rosa Boyd was standing in his office doorway, her right hand resting on the doorknob. She wore jeans and an orange tweed jacket and boots with immensely high heels. Her hair was loose. She looked to Bill about eight foot tall and mildly alarming.

  ‘Rosa!’ Bill said. He smiled. ‘Hello’.

  Rosa said nothing.

  Bill moved round his desk and patted the chair nearest to Rosa invitingly. ‘Sit down’. Rosa didn’t move.

  ‘Sit, Rosa,’ Bill said, still smiling. ‘This won’t take a minute’.

  Rosa gave a small sigh, and relaxed on to one leg.

  ‘Come in,’ Bill said. ‘Come in and shut the door. This is just between you and me. We don’t want the office hearing, do we?’

  ‘They know,’ Rosa said.

  Bill swallowed. He patted the chair again.

  He opened his mouth to speak, but Rosa said, before he could begin, ‘They’re taking bets. On how quickly you’ll do it’.

  Bill looked at the opposite wall.

  ‘I’m going to win,’ Rosa said. ‘I said it’d be under a minute. And I’m right’.

  And then she stepped backwards and pulled the door shut behind her with a slam.

  Kate Ferguson lay on the bathroom floor waiting to be sick again. She had been well prepared, she thought, for morning sickness in early pregnancy to afflict her in the mornings when Barney could bring her tea and a biscuit (Kate’s mother had sworn by Rich Tea) and hover round her in a clumsy, husbandly way. But she was not at all prepared to feel sick all day, every day, too sick to go to work, too sick to allow brown bread or coffee to tiptoe anywhere near her mind, let alone her kitchen cupboard, too sick to be even remotely civil to people who wanted to congratulate her, soppily, on being pregnant so soon after getting married.

  ‘So lovely,’ her mother’s best friend had said, ‘to see someone doing it properly. None of this heartless careergirl stuff, leaving having babies until you’re practically old enough to be a granny’.

  At this rate, Kate thought, moaning faintly against the floor tiles, she’d never be a granny because she’d never even be a mother if this is what it took to get there. It was such a terrible kind of nausea too, so engulfing, so endless, so devoid of any possibility of relief. The baby, down somewhere in those tortured realms, felt like an enemy, a malevolent walnut-sized goblin, remorselessly pursuing its own determined path of development. Barney had the photograph from the first ultrasound scan in his wallet but Kate didn’t really even want to look at it, didn’t want to give herself the chance to visualise this tiny thing that was making itself so violently unlovable. One minute, it seemed, she and Barney had been honeymooning in Malaysia and planning their excited, newly married lives back in London, and the next she was lying on the bathroom floor, clammy and ashen, whining and snivelling to herself without even a tissue for comfort.

  The phone rang.

  ‘Sod off!’ Kate shouted.

  The phone rang four times, and then
stopped. Then it started again. It would be Rosa. Kate and Rosa had started a four-ring pattern as a kind of signal to one another, at university, first as a let-out for dates that were either dull or dangerous and then simply as a demonstration of consciousness of the other. Kate began to pull herself, whimpering, across the bathroom floor and into the bedroom next door where her phone lay, muffled in the duvet.

  ‘I want to die,’ Kate said into it.

  ‘Still? Poor babe’.

  ‘Four weeks, nearly five. I hate this baby’. ‘Try hating your hormones instead’. ‘I can’t picture them. I can’t hate something I can’t picture’.

  ‘I’ll give you something to picture,’ Rosa said, ‘and you can hate him all you like. Bill Moreton’.

  Kate crawled up on to the bed and fell into the folds of the duvet.

  ‘What’s he done?’

  ‘Sacked me,’ Rosa said.

  Kate groaned.

  ‘Rosa—’

  ‘I know’.

  ‘What did you do?’ ‘Nothing’.

  ‘People don’t get sacked for nothing—’

  ‘In Bill Moreton’s skin-saving world they do. He can’t sack Heidi because he screwed her and she’d squeal. And the business isn’t doing well enough to support us all’.

  Kate rolled on to her side and crushed a pillow against her stomach.

  ‘Rosa, you needed that job’.

  ‘Yes’.

  ‘What did you say, five thousand on your credit cards?’ ‘Nearer six’.

  ‘You’d better come and live with us—’

  ‘No’.

  ‘Barney wouldn’t mind—’

  ‘He would. So would you. So would I’.

  ‘But thank you, Kate, all the same’. ‘Thank you, Kate’.