‘Don’t strut, Cheryl,’ Freddie Cass said. There was a pause. Then he said, ‘Don’t bleat, Lazlo’. And then, after another silence, ‘Good, Edie’.
‘I’m supposed to strut,’ Cheryl said, boredly, ‘in this scene’.
Freddie ignored her.
He said to Lazlo, ‘You’ll be blind by the end of the scene. Blind. Who’ll care about that if they’ve heard you whining for favours?’
Lazlo cleared his throat. Edie willed him not to apologise.
He said, ‘I am whining. I’m very unattractive by now. I’m completely self-centred because I’m dying’.
Freddie Cass waited. Edie glanced at him. He wasn’t looking at Lazlo, as was his wont when addressing someone, he was looking across the stage to where an electrician was dismantling a spotlight.
‘I’m not getting that’.
‘I’ll try again’.
‘Yes,’ Freddie said, ‘you will’. He sighed. ‘And you, Cheryl, will stop playing the little tart. Even if you are one’. He moved forward, towards the footlights, and touched Edie on the shoulder as he passed. ‘As you were’.
Edie went past Lazlo, upstage to the spot where the door to the garden would be when the set was up. Lazlo caught her eye as she passed him and gave her the briefest of winks. She widened her eyes at him. He looked quite undismayed by what Freddie had said, quite unlike his usual easily wounded self. He looked, astonishingly, like someone prepared to stand their ground. Perhaps, she thought, picking up the shallow flower basket that Mrs Alving was to bring in from the garden, this new energy and confidence could even be attributable to the simple fact that she had offered breakfast to Lazlo that morning and then overseen him while he ate it. He ate like Ben, with that peculiar combination of indifference and absorption that seemed to characterise hungry young men, consuming two bowls of cereal and a banana and four slices of toast as if they were simultaneously vital and of no consequence at all. She’d felt an extraordinary satisfaction, almost a relief, sitting opposite him with her coffee mug, and watching him eat. It had been so pleasurable that she had turned to Russell, to smile that pleasure at him, and found that he was reading the paper like someone in a pantomime, with the paper held up high, a screen against the outside world.
She reached across and banged the paper with a teaspoon.
‘Oy’.
‘One moment,’ Russell said, not lowering the paper. ‘Rude,’ Edie said cheerfully. ‘Meals are for conversation’.
Russell moved the paper sideways so that only Edie could see his face. ‘Not breakfast’.
Lazlo put his second piece of toast down. ‘Sorry,’ he said contritely. Edie smiled at him. ‘Not you,’ she said, ‘him’.
Russell moved the paper back to its original position.
‘If you ever marry,’ he said, not addressing Lazlo by name, ‘you’ll discover that all roads of fault and blame lead to “him”’.
Edie put her coffee mug down. She looked at Lazlo.
‘More toast?’
‘No thank you,’ Russell said.
‘I wasn’t addressing you. You have only had one slice of toast since the dawn of time. Lazlo, more toast?’ He looked longingly at the sliced loaf on the counter.
‘Could I …’
Edie stood up.
‘Of course you could’.
Russell shook the paper out like a bed sheet, and folded it with care.
‘I’m off’.
Edie, putting bread into the toaster, turned to glance at the clock. ‘You’re early’.
‘No’.
‘You never get in before ten’.
Russell said nothing. He stood up and pushed the newspaper across the table to Lazlo. ‘Have a good day’. ‘Thank you’.
He looked briefly across the kitchen, at Edie’s back. ‘See you later’.
She turned and gave him a wide smile. Then she blew him a kiss. He went out of the room, and they could hear him treading heavily up the stairs to the bathroom.
‘If it would be easier,’ Lazlo said diffidently, ‘I could always take breakfast up to my room’.
The toaster gave a small metallic clang and ejected two slices of toast on to the counter. Edie snatched them up and tossed them hastily on to Lazlo’s plate.
‘So overenthusiastic, that thing. And nonsense. About breakfast, I mean’.
‘I don’t want to upset anyone—’
Edie looked straight at him.
‘You aren’t. Russell is fine. Eat your toast’.
He began to butter it. She walked behind his chair, giving him a tiny pat on the shoulder as she did so, and went out of the room and up the stairs to the bathroom. Russell was bent over the basin, brushing his teeth. Edie leaned against the door jamb and crossed her arms.
‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘I could always do breakfast in relays. Matthew at seven, you at eight to fit in with your new work schedule, and Lazlo at nine’.
Russell stopped brushing and picked up a wet flannel from the edge of the bath and rubbed vigorously at his face with it.
‘Very funny’.
‘There’s no need,’ Edie said, ‘to be so unwelcoming. So rude. That poor boy is about as intrusive as wallpaper’.
Russell tossed the flannel into the bath.
‘It’s not him,’ he said, ‘as well you know’.
‘So,’ Edie said, ‘things change. They don’t go according to plan. What you picture as the future doesn’t turn out to be the reality of the future. That’s how it is, Russell, that’s how it’s always been. That’s life’.
He turned from the basin and walked past her into their bedroom to find his jacket. She detached herself from the bathroom doorway and went after him.
‘Russell?’
‘I am not complaining about life,’ Russell said, hunting in his jacket pockets for something. ‘I’m not objecting to the way things happen, the way things just turn out. What I find so difficult is when changes are made deliberately and obstructively’.
‘You mean me asking Lazlo here—’
Russell found his travel card and transferred it from one pocket to another.
‘You could construe it like that—’
‘You mean yes’.
He sighed.
He said, ‘You seem to be finding every excuse not to be alone with me’.
Edie gave a small bark of incredulous laughter. ‘Really? And who urged me to audition for the Ibsen?’
‘That’s different’. ‘Is it?’
‘That doesn’t involve your personal emotions’. Edie let a small silence fall, and then she said witheringly, ‘How little you know. And you an actors’ agent’. Russell took a step towards her. He looked down at her. He said, ‘This is fruitless’.
‘If I can’t even offer a lodger more toast without getting jumped on, it probably is’.
He put his hands on her shoulders.
He said, ‘I had just hoped that we could move on from what we’d been doing for close on thirty years to something we’ve never had a chance to do’. He took his hands away. ‘I suppose I was hoping to be married. Pure and simple. Just married’.
Edie reached out and straightened his jacket collar.
She said, ‘Maybe we have different ideas about what being married means’.
‘Not always—’
She looked up at him.
‘But this is now,’ she said. ‘We’re not dealing with always, we’re dealing with now. Which means me going downstairs now, and seeing what else I can stuff into that boy’.
Russell made a huge effort.
‘Well, he’s certainly appreciative—’
‘Yes,’ Edie said with emphasis, ‘he is,’ and then she left the room and went down to the kitchen where she found Lazlo putting plates in the dishwasher and Arsie on the table regarding the butter.