Russell walked into Rosa’s room and sat down on the edge of the bed. He put his elbows on his knees and leaned forward to stare at the carpet and a new, modern, striped cotton rug that had been laid on it. He had always, he told himself, liked the challenging quality in Edie’s nature, he enjoyed the way she wouldn’t take any form of rubbish lying down, the way she rose up to argue and rebel. But what was likeable, lovable even, in someone as a spectator sport wasn’t always as pleasurable, or even bearable, when one’s own feelings were involved. He couldn’t, in principle, object to her offering shelter to her own, or anyone else’s, child in trouble, but the difficulty was that he couldn’t be sure that filling the house up with young men, at this precise moment in time, was actually an act of altruism. The more he thought about it, the more he felt that not only was Edie asserting a right to use her house as she pleased, but that she was also making it painfully plain that the last thing she wanted was to be left alone in it with him.
Russell shifted his feet. He couldn’t remember when he had started looking forward to being alone with Edie, but it seemed to be a very long time ago. As each of his children left, he had felt an unmistakable pang, and he had also missed them, missed them, sometimes, quite keenly. But at the same time as those doors were closing, he had had a happy, anticipatory feeling about another one opening, one that led back, or perhaps led on to the relationship that had started it all, the relationship with the short, excitable girl in a cherry-coloured beret who he’d first seen queuing for cinema tickets to see High Society with Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra and Grace Kelly in a chignon.
And if that feeling wasn’t reciprocated, if Edie could no longer quite stand the thought of being left alone with him, then at best he was very disappointed and at worst he was very hurt. He also felt, looking round at the walls denuded of Rosa’s posters and pictures, peculiarly powerless. Edie had set something firmly in train, which, if he disrupted it, would only make him look an unpleasant and heartless person.
He got up, sighing, and went over to the window. The garden, from up here, looked pleasingly controlled and almost cared for. Neither he nor Edie had ever been enthusiastic gardeners but it was odd how, over the years, if you owned a garden you somehow acquired some knowledge about it by osmosis, and fell into the annual rituals of sowing and pruning and clipping. If he was honest, he’d actually indulged in a little fantasy or two about Edie and him being out in the garden together that summer, companionably trimming things or drinking wine under the torn garden umbrella. Like all fantasies, he supposed, that one owed its only existence to impossibility, but it had been nice to contemplate, even more than nice, when the reality was that Edie would now be too preoccupied even to consider tranquil moments, glass in hand, admiring the roses. He shook his head. What was he thinking of, sad old fool that he was? When the play’s run began,
Edie wouldn’t be looking to right or to left, let alone at the roses.
He moved slowly back, past Rosa’s bed all ready for Lazlo, and out on to the landing. The brown stain left by a long-ago wasp’s nest under the roof tiles was still there on the once-white ceiling, as was the split in the top step of the stair carpet and the missing knob to the newel post at the turn of the banisters. Doubtless, Russell thought, there were people who made lists of things to be repaired in their houses, and then attended to those lists with efficient toolboxes filled with the right tools for every job in special compartments, but if so he definitely wasn’t one of them. His mother had always told him, finding him reading as a child yet again, that he was lazy. Possibly she was right and would therefore be amazed to know that at the age of fifty-six and faced with a situation in his personal life he could neither control nor adjust to he was resolving to devote all the energies he had planned to use for a renewed life with Edie to his work.
When Max finally kissed Vivien, she had been ready for both him and it. The steady succession of dates, the careful way in which he had refrained from startling her, the new gravity of his goodbyes had made it absolutely plain to her that when he kissed her it would not be on impulse and therefore, if she had a single wit about her, she could see it coming. And so, when he stopped the car outside her house, and switched off the ignition and turned towards her, she was very excited and quite prepared. The kiss itself was possibly one of the best he had ever given her, being both familiar because of the past and unfamiliar because it hadn’t happened for well over four years. She received it with skill and just enough response to engage him. Then she got out of the car.
He got out too.
‘Can I come in?’
Vivien looked up at her house. Rosa’s bedroom window, above the front door, was still lit.
‘No, Max’.
Max looked up too.
‘Vivi—’
She reached out a hand and laid it flat on his chest.
‘No, Max. Not now’.
He seized her hand in both his.
‘But will you think about it?’
‘Yes’.
‘Promise, Vivi, promise. And I promise it’ll be different’.
She disengaged her hand and took a step away.
‘I said I’d think about it, Max,’ she said, ‘and I will. Thank you for a lovely evening,’ and then she stepped away from him in her heels and crossed her little front garden to the door. When she turned to wave goodnight he was standing staring after her in a way she had never dared to hope he would again.
Inside the house, Rosa had left the hall light on and a note by the telephone that said, ‘Alison rang. Can you do Tues p.m., not Wed, this week?’ and underneath, ‘Will take washing out of machine first thing, promise. X’. Vivien went past the telephone table and down the hall to the kitchen, which Rosa had left approximately tidy in the way Edie always left things tidy, with none of the finishing details attended to and no air of conclusion. Most nights, she would have spent ten minutes brushing up crumbs and putting stray mugs in the dishwasher, but tonight, in her mood of command and composure, she merely filled a glass with water, switched off the lights and made her way carefully upstairs.
There was a line of light still, under Rosa’s door. Vivien hesitated a moment and then knocked.
‘Come!’ Rosa called.
She was sitting up in bed in a pink camisole, reading Hello! magazine. Her hair, newly washed, was fanned out over her shoulders.
‘You do have lovely hair,’ Vivien said.
Rosa smiled at her over the magazine.
‘And you plainly had a lovely evening’.
Vivien hitched her cream wrap over her shoulders and settled on the edge of Rosa’s bed, cradling her glass of water.
‘Fusion tonight. Sea bass and curried lentils’. ‘And champagne?’
‘Oh yes,’ Vivien said, smiling, ‘always champagne’. Rosa put down the magazine. ‘You’re costing him a fortune’. Vivien nodded. ‘Oh, I should hope so—’ ‘Is this payback time now, then?’ ‘Oh no,’ Vivien said, ‘it’s just that a man like Max only understands value for money as exactly that. That’s why he never minded me being so literal’. She looked at the magazine. ‘Have you had a nice evening?’