Rosa rolled a bruised grape around the rim of her plate.
‘It’s not really the job that worries me so much, in a way. It’s how I’m going to live. How I’m going to live so that I can start on this debt, how I—’ She broke off and then she said, in a slightly choked voice, ‘Sorry’.
Vivien drew another line to intersect with the first one.
Then she said, ‘Come here’.
‘What?’
‘Come here. Come and live here for a while’. Rosa stared at her.
‘I couldn’t—’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, you’re my aunt—’
‘Exactly’.
‘And Mum—’
‘Might be very pleased’.
‘Might she?’
They looked at each other. ‘I don’t think so,’ Rosa said. ‘Does it matter?’ ‘Oh God—’
‘Does it really matter? Just while you get yourself sorted and start paying off these cards and find another job?’
‘Maybe—’
‘She’ll calm down,’ Vivien said. ‘You know Edie. Big bang, smaller mutterings, acceptance. She’ll be fine’. Rosa said slowly, ‘It would be wonderful—’
‘Yes. I’d love it’.
‘I’d make an effort—’
Vivien got up to get the coffee.
‘We both would’. She looked at Rosa over her shoulder. She smiled. ‘It might be quite fun’.
It might, she thought now, indeed be fun. It might also, dwelling upon the prospect, be both a relief and comfort to become in some way necessary again, a provider of all those things only women who had lived lives and run houses could properly provide. Vivien picked up her tea. Rosa had kissed her warmly before she had disappeared into the spare room, with a kind of brief sudden fervour people feel when they have unexpectedly been thrown a lifeline.
‘I only really came to talk,’ Rosa said. ‘I never thought—’
‘Nor did I,’ Vivien said. ‘One seldom does’.
She smiled into her tea. There was no hurry, really, about telling Edie.
Chapter Seven
The loft on Bankside was in a vast converted Victorian warehouse. Its brick walls, newly cleaned and pierced with modern windows in matte black frames, reared up from the charmingly – and also newly – cobbled alley that separated the building from a similar one ten feet away. If you looked skywards, you could see, on the two sides that looked towards the river, that little black balconies had been hung outside some of the higher windows, and on one of those, Matthew supposed, Ruth would emerge on summer evenings, holding a glass of vodka and cranberry juice, or whatever was the drink of the moment in her circle, and admire both the view and her sense of ownership.
Thinking this was not, Matthew found, at all comfortable. In fact nothing in his mind was, at the moment, in the least comfortable, being instead a sour soup of disappointment and self-reproach and a very real and insistent sadness. It wasn’t a simple matter of resenting Ruth, or even berating himself for not facing facts, because the whole situation had crept up on him – on them both – so insidiously, fuelled by things that were not acknowledged or uttered even more than by things that were openly expressed. He might curse himself for getting into this tangle, but the curses were only the more vehement because he could, looking back, see exactly how he had got there.
When Matthew had announced that there was no way he could share in the purchase of the flat, Ruth had become very still. She had looked at him for a long time, thoughtfully, and then she had said, ‘Will you do one thing?’
‘What thing—’
‘Come and see the flat. Just see it’. He shook his head.
‘No’.
‘Matthew, please’.
‘I can’t afford it. I don’t want to have my nose rubbed in what I can’t afford’.
‘It isn’t for you, I’m afraid. It’s for me. I want you to see the flat’.
He said nothing.
She said, almost shyly, ‘I want you to see what I’m buying’.
‘Why?’
‘I want you to be part of it—’
‘I can’t be’.
‘But you’ll come there, you’ll come and see me, surely?’ He hesitated. His heart smote him. He said, not looking at her, ‘Of course’. ‘Then come’.
‘Ruth—’
She moved towards him and put her hands on his shoulders. She looked into his face as intently as if she were counting his eyelashes.
‘Matt. Matt. This isn’t the end of us’.
Now, standing uneasily on those carefully patterned cobblestones, Matthew told himself that being kind – or cowardly – once was one thing: persisting in it was quite another and could lead to desperate situations. Whatever Ruth said, however beseeching she was, he must not allow her to believe that he felt other than he did, that he could somehow cope with a situation in which he only had power in the obvious department of bed, which was not, in the end, he knew, enough.
He pushed open the heavy glass door of the warehouse and entered an immensely tall foyer, floored in granite with long windows running right up to the roof. There was an industrial steel staircase curving up behind a bank of lifts and besides that nothing, not a picture nor an ashtray nor a piece of furniture, nothing but high, quiet acres of expensively finished dark gleaming space. He stepped forward into a lift and pressed the button for the sixth floor.
When the lift doors slid open, there was a sudden flood of light.
‘I saw you!’ Ruth said. She was standing in an open doorway with apparently nothing behind her. ‘I was watching from the balcony and I saw you!’
He bent to kiss her cheek. She moved to meet his mouth and missed it. He looked past her.
‘Wow’.
‘Isn’t it wonderful?’
He nodded. The room beyond the open door was pale and high and shining, and at the end there was nothing through the huge windows but sky.
Ruth took his hand.
‘You see? You see why I had to buy it?’
She towed him through the door. Then she let go and spun down the length of the room.
‘Isn’t it great?’
‘Yes’.
‘All this space! All this air! And Central London! I can walk to work!’
‘Yes’.
‘Come and see the bathroom,’ Ruth said. ‘The shower is so cool. And in the kitchen, the microwave is built into the cooker unit. It looks like a spaceship’.
Matthew followed her across the wooden floor, through a doorway in a translucent wall of glass bricks. She was standing in a shower made of a cylinder of satin-finished metal, punctuated with little glass portholes in blue and green.
‘Did you ever see anything like it?’
‘No,’ Matthew said, ‘I never did’.
Ruth stepped out of the shower.
She said, more soberly, ‘I wish it wasn’t like this’.
He nodded.
She said, ‘I wish it wasn’t you coming to stay in my flat. I wish it was ours’.
He leaned against the wall. The glass felt solid and cold through the sleeve of his jacket.
He said, too loudly, ‘I’m afraid I won’t be coming’.
She said nothing. She walked past him very quickly and went back into the big room. He followed her. She was standing by the sliding doors to the balcony looking at her view of the river.
She said, ‘Please don’t talk like that’.
He stayed standing a little behind her.
He said, ‘Ruth, I have to. If I come and stay here, it’ll change the balance between us. It’s changed already, of course, but it’d be worse. You can imagine how it would be. It’d be pitiful’.
She said fiercely, turning round, ‘You couldn’t be pitiful. I wouldn’t let you’.
He tried to smile.
‘You couldn’t stop me. It would just happen’.