The fire, Freddie Cass had explained to Lazlo, was metaphorical as well as actual. The fire that burned the orphanage built in his dead father’s name was also the fire that was consuming all the lies that had been told to protect him and, in the process, his own life as his inherited malady began to possess and then devour him. Edie could see that Lazlo loved this kind of direction, loved falling under the spell of such fatalism. He’d come to find Edie afterwards, eyes shining.
‘I know what it’s about now, it’s not just something that’s happening, it’s something that had to happen, and you don’t know it yet, as my mother, because you’ve always thought you could protect me, by telling lies, by keeping the truth from me’. He gave Edie a quick, fervent hug. ‘This is amazing’.
He was sitting on the floor at the side of the stage now, in jeans and a shrunken grey T-shirt, hugging his knees and watching the others. His arms, wound round his knees, looked to Edie like a boy’s arms, rather than a man’s, not just because they were thin, but because they were slightly unformed, slightly tentative. Whether they were the result of Lazlo’s genetic make-up, or the result of the haphazard way he lived, was uncertain, but they lent a pathos to his absorption, a pathos that had been uppermost in Edie’s mind ever since Rosa had telephoned and said, in the throwaway way she had, at the end of a conversation, ‘D’you know where Lazlo’s living?’
‘No,’ Edie said, ‘why should I? He’s rather private about all of that. Somewhere in West London—’
‘Kilburn,’ Rosa said.
‘Well,’ Edie said, ‘not the perfect journey to work but not impossible—’
‘He lives,’ Rosa said, ‘in a room in someone’s granny’s house and she won’t open the windows because she’s panicked about burglars and it smells like a cat’s lavatory’.
‘Poor boy. Why is he living there?’ ‘It’s all he can afford—’ ‘What about family—’
‘All over the place,’ Rosa said, ‘and they don’t care’.
‘Surely—’
‘Mum,’ Rosa said, ‘he didn’t tell me all of this. I had to get it out of him’.
‘And why are you telling me?’
‘Because,’ Rosa said casually, ‘it’s the sort of thing you like to know’.
Edie sat up a little straighter and took her gaze off Lazlo’s arms. Then she put it back again. She thought of the house in Kilburn. She thought of Lazlo ravenously eating bagels after the first rehearsal. She thought of Lazlo taking off that T-shirt and devising some forlorn and unsatisfactory way to launder it. She thought of Matthew – unhappy but somehow safe – back in his own bedroom. She thought of Rosa’s empty bedroom next to it, and Ben’s, on the floor below.
Freddie Cass turned towards her from the stage. He didn’t, as was his custom, raise his voice.
‘Stage left, Edie, please,’ he said.
‘Dear Laura,’ Ruth wrote via email, ‘I need someone to talk to. Or someone to think aloud to. Please read this through to the end. Please’.
She paused and took her hands off the keyboard. She had set up a table – trestle, black, very expensive considering its construction hardly differed from the table her father used for one of his meticulous wallpapering sessions – in the window of her new sitting room so that she could glance up from her laptop and look out at her amazing view. There was nothing else much in her sitting room except the leather sofa – which Matthew had insisted she take – and a television and two tall metal lamps that threw their light modishly on to the ceiling.
‘It isn’t that I don’t want things,’ she’d written to Laura. ‘It’s more a case of adjusting to buying them on my own. It feels as if everything in my life has suddenly sort of liquefied – it’s quite exciting but it’s unnerving too. Perhaps I should just wait until I’ve calmed down a bit’.
Laura hadn’t replied to that message for four days. Ruth knew she was writing a lot and had even explained, slightly mortifying though it was to have to do so, that without Matthew to talk to, and being in a very preoccupying and distressing situation, which required a lot of talk in order to attempt to get her thoughts in some kind of sequence, she needed both a listening ear and a response. Laura, mindful of the fact that Ruth had nursed her steadily through a variety of affairs and a broken engagement prior to the lawyer in Leeds, said that of course she was always there when needed. The trouble was, Ruth thought, staring at some gulls riding the wind above the river, that even if people were there, as it were, they weren’t always there in the right spirit. Laura, however well-intentioned, inevitably had her spirit diverted by the prospect of her future, by the right fridge in her kitchen, the right music at her wedding. And I can’t blame her, Ruth thought, I certainly can’t resent her, but I haven’t yet got to the point where I can work through my thinking by myself. If, indeed, I ever get there.
She looked back at the screen. ‘Please,’ she’d written pleadingly. She could hear herself saying it.
‘What I mean is,’ she typed rapidly, ‘I need to get all this stuff out – issues, as human resources at work call them – and it would be very kind of you to read through to the end and even kinder to tell me if I’m mad or what passes for normal.
‘Laura, three people now have accused me of being ambitious and I mean accused, not described (no, one of them isn’t Matthew, but I think his mother is). A colleague (male) says he thinks of ambition as both a necessary and desirable part of his life, but when I think about it in relation to myself it seems to imply things I don’t like at all, like egotism and selfishness and the manipulation of other people for my own ends. I want to tell people that being good at work isn’t about me, it’s about the work. But why do I want to? And why do I feel especially compelled to, now, because I have achieved this flat and lost Matthew in the process?
‘And it gets worse. I don’t just feel guilty about what’s happened, I feel resentful about feeling guilty. Nobody, Laura, not my colleagues, not my family, not even Matthew before all this happened, said well done about getting to this level at your age. Or even well done about getting to this level. We praise children now until they can’t take failure of the smallest kind, so why can’t we praise women for being good at things that aren’t traditionally female? Why do women always, always have to be the givers? And if they stop giving, even for a minute, why is there this unspoken accusation that they have somehow surrendered on being truly female?
‘Laura, I don’t want to give up what I’m doing, I don’t want to give up my opportunities. I can’t believe that being accepted has to mean being frustrated too, but nor can I bear the thought that, if I make choices the way I just have, I’ll end up without a man and without a family because I’m not, somehow, allowed to have both.
I don’t want to downsize my ambition.
I want to live in this flat.
I want Matthew back.
Love, Ruth’.
The restaurant Max had chosen to take Vivien to, for dinner, was one she had never been to before. It had a conservatory at the back, which, Max said, was opened up in summer to the paved garden behind and they put up big white Italian market umbrellas, and candle lamps in the trees, and it was really a very, very nice ambience indeed.
Vivien, walking carefully to the table in her new sandals, decided not to ask how Max knew so much about this restaurant, particularly by candlelight. In the four years they had lived apart, Vivien had been out with two men, neither of whom became more than perfunctory lovers, and Max had had, to her certain knowledge three, and to her sharp suspicion five girlfriends, all younger, all long-haired and all sexually available and active. Max had never mentioned any of them by name, but Vivien knew that one was called Carly and one was called Emma and one was an air hostess whom Max had met on a flight back from Chicago and who had subsequently, and annoyingly, engineered a very cheap flight for Eliot to get to Australia. Maybe Emma and Carly and the air hostess had all been to the restaurant with the conservatory, with Max. And maybe, even if they had, sitting down with him as still her legal husband gave Vivien a trump card that no amount of long hair and sexual ingenuity could deprive her of.