Vivien thought that if only Eliot could have been there too – with or without Ro, who was somehow very hard to visualise – she would have been completely happy. As it was, sitting in a darkening theatre with Max on one side of her – his pristine white knee lightly touching hers – and Ben on the other, and all the family beyond Ben, including Ben’s girlfriend, who looked as if she’d be an excellent test case for Max’s avowal of reformation, was a pretty good approximation to complete happiness. She had never, after all, envied Edie her acting talent, she had never wished she was Edie or wanted to live the way Edie did. She was, she told herself, very pleased for Edie that she’d got this part, just as she was very pleased for Edie that she’d managed to fill the house again, and that all the broken bridges were mended, and that she, Vivien, had played a part in sheltering Rosa until Russell came round to seeing that you couldn’t turn the poor girl away a second time. In fact, Vivien thought, noticing that she could feel Max’s shoulder as well as his knee, it had all turned out really well and everybody had got what they wanted, except that she wished Eliot was not in Australia, but even that was rather more bearable now knowing that Max not only felt the same, but had also suggested that they fly out for Christmas.
‘Our son,’ Max had said, speaking of Eliot, the other day. ‘Our son’.
Vivien smiled in the darkness. The curtains gave a small quiver and parted, slightly unsteadily, to reveal a large garden room with a view of a gloomy fjord visible through the back window. In the doorway to a conservatory beyond stood a working man with, apparently, a club foot. Opposite him, as if preventing him from coming any further in, was a remarkable-looking girl in a maid’s uniform, holding a large garden syringe.
‘Good God,’ Max said, in an audible whisper, ‘that’s never Edie?’
‘“Ah, but you see,”‘ Edie said, as Mrs Alving, ‘“here he has his mother. He’s a dear good boy, and he still has a soft spot for his mother.”‘
Matthew shifted a little in his seat. Edie looked impressive really, in a black dress with great full skirts and her hair drawn back under a white lace cap with black ribbons. She looked not just different, but distanced from her everyday self, and her voice was different too, and her gestures, and the way she spaced her words out. He’d seen her act before, of course, but really only on television and not, as far as he could remember, in anything where she wasn’t still recognisably his mother. He had wondered how he would feel, seeing her on stage being someone so very separate from her real self, whether he would be excited, or even embarrassed.
What he actually felt, sitting there in the dark between his father and his sister, was a surprising degree of interest, an interest that would intensify, he rather thought, when Lazlo made his entrance, when he saw his mother and Lazlo together on stage.
He could feel that Russell, on his left-hand side, was concentrating with the effort you use when you are willing someone to do well. That concentration, he thought, was typical of his father, typically generous, typically reasonable. Russell, after all, had had plenty to resent Edie for in the last few weeks, but for tonight had managed to put all grudges aside in order to focus on this production working, on Edie achieving something that had nothing to do with relationships or family or those tiny but telling shifts in power that meant you could go from light to dark in a matter of hours. One word was all it took, sometimes, one careless word. Or – Matthew tensed a little -the absence of words over a long, fatal period of illusory calm could result in the failure to stop a slide into something that couldn’t be rescued by words any more.
He had kept his vow not to contact Ruth. He had joined a new – cheaper – gym near his parents’ home and opened a savings account with his bank. Part of him was quite pleased about these manifestations of recovery, but part of him felt that they were pitiful, forlorn little plasters stuck on a still-gaping wound. And yet these efforts had to be maintained, even built on, because there could be no going back, even if he couldn’t visualise – and he had tried – a woman who he would simply like to be with as much as he had liked being with Ruth. In the night, when he woke, and remembered everything with a weary renewal of suffering, he missed Ruth’s just being there more than any other aspect of their relationship. For several years, after all, he had been wrapped in a companionship he had never had before and had never ceased to marvel at. He could discuss things with Ruth, confide things to Ruth, that it had never occurred to him as possible to articulate, and which were now bottling up again inside him despite his continued attempts to medicate himself by imagining what she might have counselled, how she might have responded.
He gave the briefest glance sideways, at his father. He was completely absorbed in what was going on, on stage, his elbows propped on the seat arms, his hands loosely clasped below his chin. Presumably, over all the decades he’d been married, his father had told his mother all kinds of things he hadn’t told anyone else – in fact, didn’t need to tell anyone else because he had Edie. Matthew looked back at the stage. Were all men like this? Were all men, if left to themselves, this lonely?
Abruptly on stage, Edie became extraordinarily illuminated. She flung out an arm, gesturing towards the open doorway.
‘“Listen,”‘ she said, her voice full of sudden rapture, ‘“there’s Osvald on the stairs! Now we’ll think about nothing but him.”‘
And then Lazlo, in a long pale coat, a hat in one hand and a pipe in the other, stepped dreamily on to the stage and the whole theatre turned to look at him.
Up in the little balcony – only three rows deep and uncomfortably steeply raked – Kate and Barney Ferguson watched the Boyd family rise for the interval.
‘I can’t move,’ Kate said. ‘It was enough trouble getting me in here and I’m not trying to get out again until the end’.
‘Oughtn’t you to go and see them?’
Kate looked down into the stalls.
‘Well, you could find Rosa and ask her to come and see me’.
Barney stood up.
‘Who’s the spiv?’
‘That,’ Kate said, ‘is Rosa’s Uncle Max. Married to Edie’s sister Vivien, in fuchsia pink’. She paused and then she said, ‘The colour Rosa and I have always referred to as menopause pink’.
Barney looked down, smiling.
He said tolerantly, ‘Nasty girls’.
‘That’s us’.
He turned in the narrow space between the seats and looked behind him.
‘I’ll just climb my way out and go and find her’.
‘Past an ice cream, perhaps?’
He smiled again.
‘Not that kind of theatre—’
‘No,’ Kate said. ‘More’s the pity’.
Barney bent and dropped a kiss on her head.
‘I like,’ he said, ‘knowing exactly where you are,’ and then he climbed over the seats behind him and made his way down to the foyer, which doubled as a bar during the interval.
Russell was standing at the bar lining up glasses. Barney touched his arm. ‘Evening, sir’.
Russell looked round. He was glowing. ‘You must be the last young man on the planet with manners. Isn’t she wonderful?’ ‘Brilliant,’ Barney said.
‘I mean,’ Russell said, starting to riffle through his wallet for notes, ‘I knew she could, I knew she had it in her, but she’s bringing something else to this. I’m bowled over. And by the boy’.
‘Not surprised—’
Russell took his hand out of his wallet and gripped Barney’s arm.
He said, almost conspiratorially, ‘Matt was in the Gents just now and overheard a couple of chaps saying there goes the next Hamlet and Gertrude and from his description of them, they’re surely—’