She said, ‘What do you suggest instead?’ Max looked at the curtains a bit longer, and then he said, ‘Velvet would be nice’.
‘Velvet!’
‘Yes. Why not?’
‘You,’ Vivien said, ‘are stuck in the seventies’. ‘I was young then—’ ‘I know’.
‘And in some ways,’ Max said, transferring his gaze from the curtains to Vivien’s feet, ‘I haven’t grown up at all’. He grinned again and sat up a little straighter. ‘Luckily for you’. Now, looking at the blank squares of linen laid out on her bed, Vivien tried to recall the warm feeling of acquiescence that had induced her to think of changing her bedroom. Max hadn’t actually called it ‘our’ bedroom but, with his clothes in the cupboards and his aftershave on her bathroom shelf, she knew she had rather conceded exclusive possession. And sometimes – often even – that shared occupancy was wonderful, leaving her with a glow that lasted long enough to enable her to look with pity at women who came into the bookshop to buy novels to beguile solitary evenings. It was extraordinary not to be in that position any more, the position of buying single salmon steaks and half-bottles of wine and four-roll packs of lavatory paper. But there was also some little reservation too, some small but unmistakable loss of freedom, the freedom to have gauzy white curtains instead of plain dark ones that wouldn’t, as Max said while they were taking rather a riotous shower together, make a red-blooded man feel like a fairy.
Vivien turned her back on the fabric samples and went across the landing to her guest room. Even when Rosa occupied it, it felt like Vivien’s guest room because although Rosa had a lot of possessions and was hardly tidy, she had managed, all the time she was there, to convey the sense that her living there was impermanent and therefore superficial. Max, however, had colonised the room. He had given up – ‘I only want to be with you, Vivi’ – his large flat in Barnes and, despite the fact that all his furniture and a lot of his possessions had gone into store, he had still managed to arrive at the cottage in Richmond with an astonishing number of things. Vivien’s guest room had vanished, almost completely, under piles of boxes and bags, sliding heaps of clothes on hangers, small mountains of shoes and sports kit. Some of it, Vivien thought, was familiar, but much of it, most of it really, was not. She took a little breath. The room now smelled of Max, of his aftershave. Close to her feet was a new tennis racket in a sleek black cover and a pair of tan suede driving loafers with studded backs. Vivien had never seen either of them before. She gave a little shiver of excitement. She had got Max back, certainly, and a lot of him was known of old. But there were other aspects that weren’t so known, that were changed, new almost. She glanced down at the driving shoes. They looked Italian. It was, she thought with a little internal skip of pleasure, like having a lover in the house.
It had not occurred to Rosa that, in a household of five people, she would ever find herself alone. When pondering the implications of trailing home with all her worldly goods squashed, depressingly, into black bin bags, at the shameful age of twenty-six, she had consoled herself by thinking that there would always, at least, be company. She would not, as she had in the cottage in Richmond, spend evenings on the sofa eating the wrong things out of boredom while watching programmes on television she had absolutely no recollection of next day.
Yet here she was, six days into being at home again, mooning round the kitchen by herself on a Tuesday evening, watched by Arsie from his position next to the fruit bowl, with a kind of knowing pity. Edie and Lazlo were at the theatre, Russell had gone to a reception somewhere and Matthew was having dinner with a colleague from work. It wasn’t simply that they were all out that was upsetting Rosa, but that no one had seemed to notice that she would be on her own. Of course, it wasn’t reasonable to expect a family of working adults to behave like a family of school-aged children, but reasonableness, Rosa realised, was not top of her reaction list just now. It would have made all the difference – all the difference, she was sure – if Edie had left the briefest of notes about something in the fridge for Rosa’s supper, or something she’d noticed that Rosa might like to read or watch. She couldn’t help resentfully noticing, either, that Edie rather clucked round the boys at breakfast. Did you have to be a boy, then, to get maternal attention? Was there something extra abject about being a girl who hadn’t coped with the outside world? Rosa made an angry lunge for an apple from the fruit bowl, and Arsie followed her movement with disapproval.
What added to the sense of disorientation, she decided, was that the kitchen itself was so very much the same. She could remember that blue paint going up on the walls and Edie madly machining the striped curtains on the kitchen table, so eager to see the effect of them hanging up that she had never finished the hems. The dresser was so much a fixture it had almost grown into the wall behind it, the table and chairs she’d known all her life, also the yellow pottery sugar bowl, the mismatched mugs, the Spanish ceramic jar of wooden spoons, the over-zealous toaster, the little red-handled paring knife, which was the only one that really cut anything – oh, it was all so achingly, deeply familiar, but managed, simultaneously, to be disturbingly alien because the life lived in it had changed. Rosa had been away five years, and in five years the kitchen table had stopped being a family altar and reverted to being a kitchen table. This room, this house, this street had stopped, in essence, being her home, and turned itself, slightly chillingly, into merely the place where she grew up.
She took her apple and dawdled across the hall to the sitting room. Unlike Vivien, Edie was impervious to crushed cushions, just as she was impervious to piles of old newspapers and magazines. The sitting room looked as if several people had simply walked out and left it at the end of a day. Rosa leaned in the doorway, chewing, and wondered whether anyone would notice if she shook up the sofa cushions and removed discarded papers. If they did they would no doubt tease her and make her cross. If they didn’t, she would have done it for nothing and that would equally make her cross. Was it, in any case, her sitting room any more? If this was now her parents’ house, what level of domestic responsibility would constitute interference? You could hardly, after all, as a rent-paying adult, see ‘helping’ your mother the way you had when you were twelve. She and Edie would always be mother and daughter, but the relationship was no longer one of dependency and lunch boxes. Rosa threw her apple core accurately into the wicker waste-paper basket by the fireplace and took her shoulder away from the doorframe. Edie’s sitting room was no longer automatically her daughter’s affair.
She turned away and began to trudge up the stairs. She had anticipated a small feeling of triumph in occupying Ben’s bedroom – the bedroom of the cherished baby, after all, right opposite his parents and significantly larger than either her or Matthew’s bedroom on the top floor. But the reality had been rather a disappointment. Ben’s room might be larger, but the view wasn’t as good as from higher up, and it wasn’t as private. The plumbing from the bathroom next door banged and gurgled and the door had a way of swinging quietly open as if she were stealthily being spied on. Also, the décor was dismal and the curtains ran off the rail with alacrity if drawn without the utmost delicacy. Three months ago, Rosa would have shocked herself if she’d confessed to liking the carefully considered feminine comforts of her aunt’s spare bedroom, but now, secretly, she thought of them with a certain wistfulness. Ben’s bedroom, even overlaid with her colourful and characterful possessions, remained resolutely Ben’s bedroom. It wasn’t home and it certainly wasn’t hers.