‘Matt—’
‘We’ve had a wonderful time,’ he said, ‘and it’s got nothing to do with not loving you—’ She stepped forward and seized his arms. ‘Suppose I don’t buy it! I mind far more about you—’ He stepped back, gently extricating himself. He said, shaking his head, ‘It wouldn’t work—’ She dropped her arms.
She said miserably, ‘I didn’t mean this to – be like this’.
‘I know you didn’t’.
‘Are – are my values all skewed?’
‘Nope’.
‘Please – please don’t leave’. He looked round the table. ‘It’s a wonderful place. You’ll be really happy here’.
‘Matt—’
He leaned forward and laid the palm of his hand against her cheek.
He said, ‘And you’re doing the right thing,’ and then he took his hand away and walked back across the echoing floor to the landing and the lifts.
Edie took a garden chair into the angle of the house where, if you tucked yourself right into the corner, you could elude every breath of wind. She also carried a mug of coffee, her script and, somehow, two ginger biscuits, a pen and her telephone. Behind her, sensing a sedentary moment of which he might take advantage, padded Arsie.
The sun, shining out of a washed blue sky, was quite strong. It showed up unswept post-winter garden corners, and interesting patterns of blistered paintwork and lingering blackened leaves on the clematis above Edie’s head. She thought, settling herself into the chair and arranging her mug and phone and biscuits on a couple of upturned flowerpots to hand, that this was the first time, the first moment, in the last five weeks, when she had felt the possibility of pleasure, a tiny chance for the future to hold something that could, in turn, hold a small candle to the past. She let Arsie spring into her lap, waited while he trampled himself down into position, and then rested her script on top of his purring tabby back. Sun, cat, acting, Edie thought. She patted the script. No, not quite that. Russell would put it differently. Sun, cat, work.
‘I can’t believe this is work,’ Lazlo had said to her at the first rehearsal.
She’d been looking at her lines.
Without glancing at him, she said, ‘By the end of this rehearsal, you’ll know it is’.
By the end of the rehearsal, he’d been ashen. He’d looked as if he might cry. He’d been all over the place, all the wrong emphases, no sense of timing, not listening, in panic, to what the director was saying.
‘Go away,’ Freddie Cass said to him. ‘Go away and learn those lines and come back to me empty’.
‘Empty?’
‘Empty. We’re starting again. We’re not starting from Lazlo, we’re starting from the play’.
Ivor, the Norwegian, had taken him and Edie for a consoling drink. Now that the cast was established Ivor had exchanged patronage for paternalism.
He put a hefty arm round Lazlo’s shoulders.
‘Drink that. Relax’.
Lazlo looked like a boy in a fairy tale, rescued by a genial giant. He drank his drink and shivered a little and Edie and Ivor smiled at each other across his bent head and told him that everyone had first rehearsals like this, everyone got overexcited at one point or another, and made fools of themselves.
Lazlo looked mournfully at Edie.
‘You didn’t,’ he said.
‘Not on this occasion’.
‘Tell me,’ Lazlo said miserably, ‘about a time when you did’.
They’d ended up drinking two bottles of wine and putting their arms round each other and when Edie got home, Russell took one look at her and said, ‘Shall I say I told you so?’
It was true that the play was drawing her in and therefore providing a distraction from her preoccupations, but that didn’t mean, Edie decided, tilting her face to the sun and closing her eyes, that she didn’t notice that none of the children were telephoning, nor that she didn’t feel painfully aware that she knew very little about Matthew’s new flat or Rosa’s living arrangements, or Ben’s girlfriend, or any of their working lives. She had promised herself that she wouldn’t keep ringing them, and she clung to that promise with the tenacity usually required to stick to a rigorous diet, but it didn’t mean she didn’t think and wonder and worry. And feel left out. Playing Mrs Alving was wonderful because it stopped her, sometimes for hours at a time, from waiting for the telephone to ring: but it wasn’t a solution, it was only a diversion.
Beside her, quivering on its upturned flowerpot, her phone began vibrating.
‘It’s me,’ Vivien said.
‘Damn’.
‘Thank you so very much—’ ‘I was hoping you were Matthew. Or Ben’. ‘At eleven-thirty in the morning?’ ‘Why not?’
‘People only ring their mothers in the early evening. It’s a sort of tradition’. ‘Vivi,’ Edie said. ‘You sound very perky’.
‘Well, the sun’s out and my new little blue clematis is flowering and Eliot has passed his first diving exam’. ‘How useful’.
‘It is, if you’re living in Australia, near interesting coral reefs’.
‘Would you call it a career?’
‘I rang,’ Vivi said, ‘to ask how you are. Actually’.
‘And actually, I’m very pleased to hear you. Nobody rings me now. Nobody. I’ve vanished. Was it Germaine Greer who said that women over fifty are invisible?’
‘Probably. But I expect she was thinking of them as sex objects’.
Edie shifted in her chair a little and the script slid to the ground. Arsie didn’t move.
‘I only want to be a mother object. I’ll think about sex again when I’ve sorted this stage. Actually, talking of mothers, I’ve got a sweet new stage son. He’s twenty-four and anxious and pads round after me like a puppy’.
‘Well,’ Vivien said, ‘there you are then. Sorted’.
‘I want to know how my real children are’.
There was a tiny pause and then Vivien said, almost cautiously, ‘I can tell you how one of them is, I think—’
‘Can you?’ Edie said sharply. She sat up, pulling her knees together. Arsie dug his claws in. ‘Ow. What do you mean?’
‘I saw Rosa—’
‘Did you?’ ‘Yes’.
‘Why did you see Rosa?’
Vivien said lightly, ‘Oh, she came to supper’.
‘Did she?’
‘And stayed the night’.
Edie opened her mouth to say, truthfully, that she didn’t know or, untruthfully, that she’d forgotten, and decided against both of them.
Instead she said, in a voice that entirely betrayed her feelings, ‘Good!’
‘I rather thought,’ Vivien said unkindly, ‘that she’d have told you’.
Edie leaned forward to detach Arsie’s claws from the fabric of her trouser knees.
She said, as normally as she could, ‘How was she?’
‘Well,’ Vivien said, ‘I thought she was putting on a bit of a brave face. I mean, this travel agency job is fine, but it isn’t really stretching her, you know. She knows that, of course, but it’s money, isn’t it?’
‘Yes—’
‘The real trouble was living with Kate and Barney. They’re too newly married, really, to cope with having anyone else there. She didn’t actually say she didn’t feel welcome, but I could tell she was having a bad time’.
‘Was?’
‘Oh yes,’ Vivien said, almost airily. ‘We sorted the living thing at least’.
Edie closed her eyes.
‘She’s coming to live with me, for the moment,’ Vivien said. ‘That’s why I’m ringing, really. I thought you should know’.
Edie opened her eyes again. She gripped the telephone.
‘Let me get this straight, Vivi. Rosa is working in a travel agency, and living with Kate and Barney didn’t work out so she – she has asked to live with you?’