‘Just ring him!’
Chapter Eleven
‘Are you sure?’ Lazlo said.
Edie pushed the sugar towards him across the café table.
‘Oh yes’.
‘But it would be your son’s room—’ ‘Or my daughter’s. We’ve had lots of actors there, over the last few years, on and off—’
‘Really’
‘Oh yes’.
‘What about,’ Lazlo said, taking two packets of white sugar, ‘your husband?’
‘He’s called Russell’.
‘I know,’ Lazlo said. ‘I just felt a bit shy’.
‘Shy?’
‘I don’t know my own father very well’. ‘Russell isn’t at all alarming. Russell is very used to actor lodgers’.
‘Have you told him?’
‘What?’
‘That,’ Lazlo said, ‘you were going to offer a room to me’.
Edie watched him tear the sugar packets across and pour the contents into the cushion of milky foam on the top of his coffee.
‘Lazlo dear, I don’t need to ask him’.
‘I said tell—’
‘I don’t need to tell him either. He likes having the house full. He likes having it used’. Lazlo began to stir his coffee.
‘I must say, it would be wonderful. It would make me feel—’ He stopped, and then he said, ‘Different’.
‘Good’.
He looked at her and then he looked away.
‘I would try – not to be a nuisance’.
‘If you were,’ Edie said, ‘I probably wouldn’t notice. My children, with the possible exception of Matthew, are usually a nuisance. If you don’t have any nuisance in your life, I’ve discovered, something dies in you. It all gets very bland and boring’. She leaned across the table. ‘When I was a child, I shared a bedroom with my sister, Vivien, and we fought all the time because she was very tidy and I was very messy, extra messy, probably, to annoy her, and when our mother said we could have separate rooms, I was miserable. There was no point in being messy on my own’. She looked across at Lazlo and smiled at him. ‘There still isn’t’.
He said, ‘Is that the sister that Rosa lives with?’
‘Yes’.
‘Are you still fighting?’ ‘Certainly,’ Edie said.
‘I never fight with my sister. I wouldn’t risk it. You have to have enough family to take that kind of risk’.
‘Goodness,’ Edie said, ‘what a dramatic view of family. You sound like a Russian novel. If that’s what you’re expecting, you’ll find us very dull’.
‘I don’t think so’.
She reached across the table and grasped his wrist. ‘We’ll like having you. Really’.
He shook his head and gave her a quick glance, and in the course of it, she saw he had tears in his eyes.
‘Heavens, Lazlo,’ Edie said, laughing. ‘Heavens, it’s only a room’.
The evening paper had two columns advertising rooms and flats to let. They varied in monthly price by several hundred pounds and also in tone of advertisement, some being baldly commercial and some more haphazard, personal offers of flat sharing. Ben was certain that Naomi, even if she could be persuaded to leave her mother’s flat, would be adamant about not sharing any accommodation with anyone other than Ben. It had been an eye-opener for Ben, living with Naomi and her mother, to see the fierceness with which privacy and possessions were not just owned, but guarded. Naomi’s mother didn’t refer to ‘the’ kettle or ‘the’ bathroom: both were ‘my’. For Ben, growing up in a house where ownership of anything that wasn’t intensely personal seemed comfortably communal, this domestic demarcation and pride had been very surprising.
‘Feet off my coffee table,’ Naomi’s mother had said to him on his first evening. ‘And the way I like my toilet seat is down’.
Ben had felt little resentment about this. Faced with a rigidly organised kitchen and a tremendous expectation of conformity, he had, rather to his surprise, felt more an awed respect. Naomi’s mother spoke to him in exactly the same way that she spoke to Naomi after all, and as Naomi plainly thought her mother’s standards and requirements were as natural as breathing, Ben was, at least for a while, prepared to pick up his bath towel and replace the ironing board – ironing was a bit of a revelation – on its specially designated hooks behind the kitchen door. Only once, in his first few weeks, did he say to Naomi, watching her while she made an extremely neat cheese sandwich, ‘Has your mum always been like this?’
Naomi didn’t even glance at him.
She shook her long blonde hair back over her shoulders and said evenly, ‘It’s how she likes it’.
Living the way you liked, even Ben could see, was what you were entitled to if you owned a house or paid the rent. Indeed, one of the reasons he had left home, besides the consuming desire to spend the nights in the same bed as Naomi, was a strong, if unarticulated, understanding that he wanted to live in a way that didn’t coincide with the way his parents were living but, as it was their house, their entitlement in the matter came before his. Living with Naomi’s mother was, especially at the beginning, no problem at all because of Naomi herself and because her mother, for all her insistence on her own particular rule of law, was someone whose palpable industry and independence required – and got -Ben’s deference. In addition, and to Ben’s abiding and grateful amazement, she seemed to find his presence in her flat and her daughter’s bed perfectly natural. There hadn’t been a syllable uttered, or even implied, that Ben could construe as an enquiry about their relationship, let alone a criticism.
All this, for some time, made Ben amenable to making his large male presence in a small female flat as invisible as possible. Indeed, it was only gradually, and not in any way triggered by a particular incident, that he began to feel a sense of being both watched and stifled. The setting down of his coffee mug or beer can, once a matter of discovery and trial and error, became insidiously more of an issue, as did the placing – or even presence – of his boots in the narrow hallway. Naomi’s mother didn’t operate by correcting her daughter or her daughter’s boyfriend more than once. After that, she took matters into her own hands and effected the changes she wanted, in silence, but in the kind of silence that made Ben, rather to his surprise, think wistfully of his own mother’s approach to domestic management. He had absolutely no desire to confront or displease Naomi’s mother, but it had begun to occur to him, several times a day, that he was on a hiding to nothing because she was, in fact, constantly changing the goalposts. That morning, the hunt for his boots had ended in discovering them in a plastic carrier bag hanging on a hook under his overcoat.
He’d said nothing to Naomi about moving out with him. With the newly hatched confidence of having had his older brother recently take his advice, he had decided that the best course of action was to identify some flats, or even rooms in flats, and choose one or two to show her so that she would have something to visualise and also have to make a choice. If he just said to her, ‘What about a place of our own?’ she’d look at him as if he wasn’t in his right mind and say, ‘What for?’ But if he had a key to a door, and opened it, and showed her the possibilities of a way of living that lay beyond it, she might be persuaded. Or at least, he thought, staring hard at a photograph in the window in front of him, she might hesitate a little before she said, ‘What for?’
‘I’ll have tomato juice,’ Kate said. Rosa paused on her way to the bar. ‘Are you sure? I’m paying—’
‘I only half feel like “drink” drink,’ Kate said, ‘and I don’t like the way people look at me when I drink it’.