She went on slowly up the stairs to the top floor. Matthew’s bedroom door was closed. Rosa opened it a little and put her head inside. The room looked much as it had always looked, rather careless and impersonal. Matthew’s suits, hanging on an extension rail, attached to his cupboard, looked like dressing-up clothes. There was a towel thrown over a chair back and an American thriller by his bed. Rosa closed the door again. Poor
Matthew, poor Matt. She put her forehead against the door. The room had reeked of stoicism, of someone bearing something painful and inevitable. It had seemed to Rosa more like a cell than a room.
Lazlo’s door was half open. Rosa gave the door a push and looked in. Then she moved forward, stepping across a new rug on the floor, noticing a Ghosts poster on the wall and a copy of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame on the chest where she’d kept her china-shoe collection. Lazlo, she decided, was very tidy. The tracksuit on his chair was folded, the boots on the floor in a pair, the rug on his bed straight. Rosa went over to the Ghosts poster pinned to the wall and examined it. It was strange to see her mother photographed by someone who didn’t see her as a mother, didn’t know her as a person. The portrayal of Edie as Mrs Alving gave Rosa a queer little rush of possessiveness, a desire to say loudly to all those people who simply saw her as an actress giving a fine performance, ‘Excuse me, but this is my mother! She wasn’t used to feeling like this, it wasn’t what she expected to feel, it was, in fact, as unbidden a feeling as the one of pure admiration that had overcome her when she saw Lazlo on stage, when she saw the way he and Edie could make her, for a while, utterly believe in something that bore no relation to the people they were in real life. Looking at their two profiles now, pinned up on the wall by Lazlo’s bed so that she could get close enough to touch their faces with her own face if she chose, Rosa felt herself consumed by a desire to be part of whatever it was they had, whatever it was they could make between them.
She turned sideways and looked down at the bed. Then she bent and put a hand on it. His bed. Her bed. She stood on one leg and then the other and pushed her shoes off. Then she sat down on the side of the bed. It yielded just as it always had, just as she expected it to. She swung her legs up sideways and lowered her head carefully on to the pillow.
‘Goldilocks,’ Rosa said, with a giggle, to the empty room.
Naomi said she didn’t want a curry. It then transpired that she didn’t want a pizza either, or pasta. Or Chinese. By then they were, for some reason, standing outside Walthamstow Town Hall, and Naomi was facing away from Ben, and staring at the fountain in front of it as if it was as absorbing as a television.
‘What then,’ Ben said. He had his hand in his pockets.
Naomi raised her eyes from the fountain and gazed instead at the door to the Assembly Hall.
‘I’m not really hungry’.
Ben sighed. The quotation chiselled into the stone over the Assembly Hall door read: ‘Fellowship is life and lack of fellowship is death’.
He said, ‘You mean you’re pissed off with me’.
Naomi didn’t move.
‘Course I am. Upsetting my mum like that’.
Ben waited a moment, and then he said, ‘I didn’t upset her. I didn’t say anything to her. It was you that upset her’.
‘I had to tell her,’ Naomi said, ‘didn’t I?’
Ben said nothing.
‘I had to tell her you wanted me to move into a flat with you, didn’t I?’
‘But you hadn’t said yes—’
‘I had to tell her I was thinking about it. I had to’. She gave Ben a brief, withering glance. ‘I tell her everything’. Ben gave a gusty sigh. ‘You’ll have to move out one day’.
‘Why?’
‘Well, no one lives with their parents for ever. They can’t. It isn’t normal’.
‘Are you,’ Naomi said sharply, ‘calling my mum and me not normal?’
‘No, of course not, but you’ll get married one day—’ ‘Not to you’.
‘And you’ll want a gaff of your own. Everyone does. I do. I want a place with you’.
Naomi lifted one bare arm and inspected its immaculate surface.
‘I can’t leave her’.
‘What, never?’
‘Since Dad went off, it’s just been me and her. We’ve done fine’. ‘I know’.
‘We’ve done fine having you there. She’s done a lot for you. She’s made you welcome’.
Ben said, slightly shamefacedly, ‘I know’. ‘It’s not like your family—’ ‘I know’.
‘We haven’t got all that money, a big house—’
‘I know’.
‘I’m all she’s got, Ben’.
Ben took off his beanie and scratched his head. He said, ‘Don’t you want to live with me?’ She gave a tiny shrug. ‘Don’t know’.
He said, with some energy, ‘I thought you liked me’.
‘I do’.
‘Well, then’.
Naomi put her arm down again and turned to face him for the first time.
‘Liking someone isn’t the same as living with them. I’ve never lived with anyone except Mum. How do I know what it’ll be like, living with you?’
Ben opened his mouth to say, cheekily, ‘Suck it and see,’ and thought instantly better of it.
He said instead, ‘Come on, Naomi, you know what
I’m like’.
‘I know what you’re like in my place. I don’t know what you’d be like in our own, without Mum there’.
He gave an exasperated little laugh.
‘Well, how will you ever know if you won’t even try?’
‘I haven’t said I won’t try—’
‘Well, you haven’t said you will’.
Naomi looked down at her white miniskirt, at the toes of her sharp white shoes.
She said, ‘Why can’t we go on as we are?’
‘Because—’
‘Well?’
‘Because I’m getting a bit – cramped in there’.
‘Cramped?’
Ben rolled his beanie into a tube and beat lightly against his chest with it.
‘I need – to live without parents. Without anyone’s parents’.
Naomi put her chin up.
‘Mum’s my best friend’.
‘She’s still your mum’.
Naomi suddenly looked acutely miserable.
‘I can’t imagine being without her—’
Ben said slowly, ‘Could you imagine being without me?’
She stared at him. ‘What d’you mean?’
‘I mean,’ he said, ‘that if you can’t leave your mum, and I can’t stay at yours any more, would you choose your mum?’
‘You’re a bastard,’ Naomi said.
‘No, I—’
‘You’re a selfish bastard. You’re a typical man, selfish bastard—’
He took a step forward and put his arms round her. She put her own arms up, elbows against his chest, and held him off. ‘Get off me—’ ‘I didn’t mean it,’ Ben said. ‘Get off!’
‘I didn’t mean it. I shouldn’t have said that. I shouldn’t have asked you to choose—’ She relaxed a fraction.
‘I’m sorry,’ Ben said.
She tipped her smooth fair head against him. ‘I’m sorry,’ Ben said again. ‘It’s only because I like you. It’s only because I want to be alone with you’. Naomi snuffled faintly against his T-shirt. ‘It’s got nothing to do with not liking your mum—’ ‘OK’.
Ben bent his head so that he could see part of her profile.
He said, ‘I expect I’m a bit jealous’.
‘OK’.
‘I’m sorry I started this’. Naomi looked up. Ben looked at her mouth. She said in a whisper, ‘I don’t know what I’ll do about Mum—’
He tightened his hold. ‘Nothing for now’. ‘She’ll go spare—’