It was no good, she thought, bending her head over the programme and staring unseeingly at Edie’s theatrical CV, telling herself she shouldn’t have come. It wasn’t a question of should or shouldn’t. It was more a question of desire urgent enough to amount to need. She was sure that just the sight of the back of Matthew’s head for two hours, just the knowledge that they were breathing the same air, would replenish the fuel in her emotional tank enough to get her through another few days, another week. To see him, simply to see him, might help reassure her that she had, in truth, done nothing wrong, that she was not the reason for his leaving, that she had not failed in some essential quality of womanliness, of femininity.
‘I thought,’ Laura had emailed from Leeds, ‘that Matthew was always so supportive of your career’.
Ruth hadn’t replied. She could have said, ‘He was. He is,’ but then she could foresee the questions that would follow and she couldn’t answer those, not the ‘But why, then?’ questions. If she could, she thought now, scanning rapidly down Edie’s numerous minor television appearances, she wouldn’t be here now, skulking in the back row of the theatre rather than sitting with Matthew’s family in the secure, acknowledged place of approved-of girlfriend. She felt a prick of incipient tears. She swallowed. No self-pity, she told herself sternly, no poor little me. You’ve chosen to come here so you’ll have to take the consequences. Whatever they are.
‘In the seventeenth century,’ Russell told Rosa, ‘there weren’t any theatrical foyers. In fact, I don’t think there were any before Garrick. The audience came in off the street and made their way through narrow dark tunnels and then, wham, suddenly emerged into the candlelit glory of the auditorium. Can you imagine?’
Rosa wasn’t listening. She was distracted by the fact that her Uncle Max had turned up wearing a double-breasted blazer with white jeans, and also that Ben, having said he’d come, and that he’d bring Naomi, was still not there and might have translated into action the doubtfulness in his voice about coming.
‘I always liked this theatre,’ Russell said.
He looked round. The auditorium was filling up and across the seats he could see several well-known newspaper theatre critics in their usual places, right on the edge, so that they could spring up the moment the curtain came down – or even before – to file their copy. He waved in a general sort of way.
‘There’s Nathaniel. And Alistair. I wonder how many performances of this they’ve sat through’.
‘If Ben doesn’t show up, I’ll kill him,’ Rosa said.
‘Ben?’ ‘Yes’.
‘Ben’s coming?’
‘Dad,’ Rosa said, ‘Mum is his mother too’. Russell waved to someone else. He said, ‘So nice of people to come. Halfway to Watford, after all—’
Rosa said suddenly, ‘That must be Naomi’. Russell turned. Ben, in his beanie hat and a denim jacket, was steering a slender girl with spectacular primrose hair through the door from the foyer. She was wearing a tiny dress with sequinned straps and her legs and shoulders were bare.
‘Barbie,’ Rosa said under her breath.
Russell pushed past her and made his way towards them.
He put a hand on Ben’s shoulder.
‘Old man—’
Ben looked awkward. He said, ‘This is Naomi’.
Russell smiled. He took his hand off Ben’s shoulder and held it out to Naomi. ‘How nice to meet you’.
She transferred her doll-sized handbag from one hand to the other, and put the free hand into Russell’s.
‘Hi there,’ Naomi said. She gave a tiny smile, revealing gappy white teeth. Her skin was flawless.
‘It’s nice of you to come,’ Russell said. ‘I’m afraid this isn’t a very cheerful play’.
Ben grunted.
Naomi said, ‘We go to musicals at Christmas. My mum likes Elaine Page’.
‘Fine voice,’ Russell said. ‘No singing this evening, though—’
Naomi said coolly, ‘I wasn’t expecting it’.
Rosa appeared at Russell’s elbow. She loomed over Naomi like a Valkyrie.
‘This is Rosa,’ Ben said, slightly desperately.
Naomi looked her up and down.
‘Pleased to meet you’.
‘Me too,’ Rosa said. She glanced at Ben. ‘Glad you made it’. He shrugged. He said, ‘Mum called me’. ‘Mum did? I called you’.
Ben sighed. He rubbed his hand over his head, pushing his beanie lower over his brows.
He said, ‘She rang to ask if I minded you having my room’.
Naomi was watching Rosa with brown eyes that were extremely sharp, despite their improbable size.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘Ben doesn’t need his bedroom now, does he?’
‘Well, no—’
‘So you can have it’. Naomi looked up at Ben with quiet possessiveness. ‘Can’t she?’ ‘Sure,’ Ben said.
Russell made a gesture for them to sit down. ‘Five minutes to curtain-up—’ Rosa looked at Naomi.
‘Won’t you be cold?’
Naomi flicked a glance over Rosa’s jacket. ‘I don’t feel the cold’. ‘Come on,’ Russell said, ‘seats time’. Ben put an arm round Naomi’s smooth narrow shoulders.
He said to Rosa, ‘She can always have my jacket’.
Rosa said nothing. She watched them turn away from her, Russell shepherding Naomi down the aisle towards her seat, bending towards her, talking, with Ben following behind with the bewildered air of someone trapped in an environment completely alien to him. Affectation, Rosa thought savagely, absolute affectation, all for Naomi’s benefit, parading independence, parading detachment from background, parading the kind of cool anyone with half an eye could see was fake. She saw Matthew – suited, with a tie – half get up from his seat to greet Naomi, and then Max leap up and bend over her hand like some afternoon-television games-show host, and then she saw them all settle down into their seats, all in a row, couple by couple, and then Matthew, in a seat next to Russell, and then a space left for her, at the end, a space with nothing on her other side but more space. Her eyes moved back along the row and rested on Vivien.
‘No hurry to go, darling,’ Vivien had said, putting the largest prawn from the seafood risotto on Rosa’s plate, ‘absolutely no hurry. Max can just wait till you’re ready to leave’. She’d giggled, and added another mussel to the prawn. ‘He can wait’.
Rosa began to walk slowly down the aisle towards her seat. There had been, really, nothing she could say but yes when Edie rang and said she’d heard about Vivien and Max and of course Rosa could come home, that day, if she needed to. But, if there had been nothing else to say, that didn’t mean that she had said yes with any relief, any thankfulness. Being grateful for the offer didn’t disguise, for a moment, the fact that the feelings of hopelessness and self-disgust, which she had, strangely, managed to escape from in Vivien’s overstuffed spare bedroom, hadn’t gone away but had merely been biding their time.
I wanted this, she thought, looking at her family. A few months ago, I wanted this, I wanted to go back home. And now I am, all I feel is a failure.
She eased herself into the end seat, next to her father. He was looking straight ahead, at the drawn curtains of the stage, and she could tell, from the look on his face, that he was thinking of nothing but Edie.