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.