‘Barney,’ Rosa said, from behind them.
Barney turned.
He said, ‘She’s wonderful’.
Rosa nodded.
She said, ‘It’s given me quite a turn—’ ‘Ignorant child,’ Russell said affectionately. He turned back to the bar and began to gather up glasses. Rosa said, ‘Where’s Kate?’
‘Waiting for you. In what passes for the dress circle’. ‘Lovely of you to come,’ Russell said, over his shoulder. ‘Lovely of everyone. Lovely evening. Lovely everything.
Wine?’
Rosa took a glass neatly from her father’s grip and handed it to Barney.
‘I’ll go and find Kate’.
‘She’d like that. She’s wedged’.
Rosa slipped past him and vanished up the stairs. Barney took a sip of his wine. It tasted like the wine at student parties, the kind they’d bought in plastic bottles with screw-tops and amateur labels. It was offering Kate a glass of something much superior that had first induced her to look at him, to see beyond – he hoped – the name and the voice and the manners. And now look at him, married to her, mortgage with her, baby on the way, parents all forgiveness after an educational career in which school reports had struggled to perceive potential. Barney smiled privately into his wine. Nothing except happiness and current idolatry would have induced him to entertain even the thought of going to see an Ibsen play, let alone finding himself rather absorbed in it. Rosa’s mama was – well, really rather something.
He raised his eyes and looked across the group. Rosa’s brother Matthew – pretty successful, from the cut of his suit – was talking to the kind of girl Barney’s father would probably have referred to as a popsie. Barney made his way over to them and stared openly at Naomi. She was like something straight out of a sweetshop.
Matthew stopped what he was saying and said to Naomi, This is Barney. He’s married to my sister’s best friend’.
Naomi looked at him as one might regard something interesting but irrelevant from another species.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ she said.
‘Likewise—’
‘Naomi,’ Matthew said, ‘is Ben’s girlfriend’. ‘Lucky Ben’. Naomi didn’t smile.
She said instead, ‘Your wife’s pregnant, isn’t she?’ ‘How did you know?’
‘I listen,’ Naomi said, ‘I pay attention. I always did, even at school’.
‘More than I ever did—’ Matthew cleared his throat.
Barney switched his gaze from Naomi to Matthew and said, ‘Your mother is amazing’. Matthew nodded.
He looked a little bright-eyed, as if he was feverish. Now that Barney was paying attention, he thought Matthew also looked a bit gaunt, older, somehow.
He smiled and said, ‘I have to say, I wouldn’t exactly have hurried here, without Kate, but I’m awfully glad I did’.
‘It’s brilliant,’ Naomi said, ‘brilliant. I’m going to tell my mum. Does he die?’
‘God,’ Barney said, ‘is this going to be like Shakespeare, stage littered with bodies at the end?’
‘I don’t know,’ Matthew said, ‘I’ve never seen it before, either. I’ve never—’ He stopped.
‘You must be so proud of her,’ Naomi said. ‘If that was my mum up there, I’d be so proud’.
Matthew nodded.
‘I just wish – everyone could see her—’
‘Everyone?’
‘Well,’ Matthew said, swirling the inch of wine left in his glass round and round, ‘everyone I know—’
‘I’d feel like that,’ Naomi said. ‘I’d make them all come. I made Ben come’.
Matthew looked sharply at her.
‘Did you?’
‘Course,’ she said. ‘Family is family, isn’t it?’ ‘Yes,’ Matthew said.
Barney looked at Naomi’s shoulders, and the sequins lying over them, like little trails of stars. Then he thought of Kate sitting upstairs with her hands resting on the mound that was their baby because there was nowhere else to put them. Amazing how different women could be, how different they could become, how – differently they could make you feel about them. He swallowed.
He put out a hand and gave Matthew’s nearest shoulder a quick cuff.
‘Better get back—’
‘OK,’ Matthew said.
Barney glanced at Naomi.
‘Nice to meet you’.
She nodded.
‘All the best for the baby’.
‘Yes,’ Matthew said. ‘Give my love to Kate. Good of you to come’.
Barney put his wine glass down on the nearest surface and made for the stairs. There was a girl standing a little way up them, staring down into the bar, a dark girl in black, with a hat on, and sunglasses. In Barney’s father’s now collectable vinyl record collection from the sixties, there was, Barney remembered, a 45 rpm record whose cover featured a woman he’d been much struck by, when he was about fourteen, a French woman, all in black, with symmetrically cut black hair and black glasses. Her name was Juliette Greco, and Barney’s father, as an undergraduate as he called it, had hitch-hiked to Paris to hear her sing live in some dive on the Left Bank. Barney hadn’t thought about Juliette Greco for years, but this still, dark girl on the stairs, watching the crowd through the open doorway below her, had just the same cheekbones, just the same air of mystery.
‘Penny for them,’ Barney said cheerfully, as he went up past her, back to Kate.
‘I think,’ Edie said, ‘I’ll just stay down here for a bit’.
Russell, filling his nightly glass of water at the sink, turned round.
‘Really?’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’m tired but not tired. I couldn’t sleep yet. I’ll just stay down here and revel’. Russell turned the tap off. ‘Would you like me to stay with you?’ She shook her head.
‘Sure?’
‘Sure,’ Edie said.
He came across the room to where she was leaning against the cooker, and bent a little, to look into her face. ‘You were quite, quite amazing’. She looked down. ‘Thank you’.
He put the hand not holding the tumbler under her chin.
‘Look at me’.
Edie raised her chin an inch.
‘You were absolutely wonderful and I am unspeakably proud of you’.
She looked at him, saying nothing.
‘And I’m really sorry to have been such a grumpy sod about the children coming back and everything’.
‘Forget it—’
‘I loved watching their faces,’ Russell said. He let go of Edie’s chin and straightened up. ‘I loved seeing all that amazement and awe. If they’d had thought-bubbles coming out of their thick heads, they’d have read: “This is Mum? My Mum?”‘
Edie laughed.
She said, ‘They’re not thick’.
‘Only when it comes to seeing you as other than the provider of home comforts. Dear old room service’. ‘Not just them,’ Edie said, ‘guilty of that—’ ‘I know. I’m sorry. I’m truly sorry about—’ She put a hand up, across his mouth. ‘Enough’.
He nodded. She took her hand away.
She said, ‘I’ll be twenty minutes. You go up’.
He leaned forward and kissed her.
‘See you in twenty minutes, fantastic Mrs Alving’.
She smiled.
She said, stretching against the cooker, ‘You can’t imagine how it feels—’
‘No,’ he said, ‘I can’t, quite. But I can see,’ and then he turned and went humming out of the kitchen and Edie could hear him going up the stairs at a run, the way he had when they first had the house and everything seemed somehow an adventure.
She looked at the clock on the wall above the dresser. Twenty-past one. Arsie was curled up on the nearest kitchen chair, pretending, with great professionalism, that he wasn’t waiting to accompany her to bed. She stepped forward and scooped him up into her arms, and went over to unlock the kitchen door to the garden. Arsie stiffened slightly, alert to the awful possibility of spending the night outside, like any other cat.