She folded the newspaper without any particular hurry and laid it on the glass-topped table beside her. Then she stood up. Matthew suddenly felt a little shaky.
Ruth said, in a voice presumably intended for the receptionist behind her barricade of brushed steel and black acrylic, ‘This won’t take long,’ then she bent and picked up her handbag and her briefcase.
Matthew put out an automatic hand to help her.
‘No, thank you,’ Ruth said.
She moved past him and began to walk towards the bank of lifts. Her back seemed to Matthew to be emphatically straight. He turned to follow her, and as he did so it came to him, from some weird reservoir of sheer instinct, exactly what it was that she was going to tell him.
The contract cleaning company told Edie that a house the size of hers would occupy four people for a whole day and, if she wanted the windows included, would cost something in the region of three hundred and fifty pounds. Of course, that excluded any cleaning inside cupboards, and if she wanted—
‘No, thank you,’ Edie said.
‘Then I assume a basic surface clean—’
‘No, thank you’.
‘Our quotations are extremely competitive—’ ‘I don’t doubt it’. ‘Mrs Boyd—’
‘Thank you,’ Edie said loudly, ‘but no thank you. No’. She threw the telephone into the armchair opposite. Ben had left a bath towel draped over the back of it. The rest of his possessions, including a duvet and a pillow, were piled behind the sofa, where Arsie had immediately found them and made a nest. It was a neat pile but it wasn’t, however you looked at it, a small one. The mere knowledge that it was there made Edie feel rather tearful.
It was awful, really, that Ben should be reduced to sleeping on the sofa in the first place. But what was worse was that Edie’s own feelings at having him home again were so confused, so unlike the rapture she had anticipated, that she hadn’t known who to be furious with first. She had raged at Russell for being Ben’s confidant before she was and then at Rosa for being in Ben’s bedroom and had only been prevented from turning on Lazlo by Rosa’s unexpected and forceful intervention. It had seemed to her, for a few days, intolerable that something she had longed for so intensely should be granted to her in a form that effectively stripped it of all its rightful satisfaction.
‘Don’t take it out on us!’ Rosa had yelled. ‘Just because you’ve got what you wanted in the wrong way!’
Lazlo had come to find her in her cupboard of a dressing room, painting on Mrs Alving’s Norwegian pallor.
‘I just wanted to say something—’
Edie went on blending make-up down over her jawline. She didn’t glance at Lazlo’s reflection, standing behind her and looking directly at her in the mirror.
‘You know I don’t like distracting conversations before a show’.
Lazlo said tiredly, ‘There isn’t a perfect moment. This hardly suits me either’.
Edie flicked a glance upwards. Lazlo’s expression was one of weary determination, rather than anxiety.
She said, ‘So?’
‘I’m moving out,’ Lazlo said. ‘You’ve been wonderfully kind and I am truly grateful, but it isn’t working any more’.
Edie gave a little gasp and put her make-up stick down. ‘Please don’t’.
‘If I go,’ Lazlo said patiently, ‘Rosa and Ben can have their rooms back. It’s what you all need’. Edie swivelled round from the mirror. ‘You mustn’t’.
‘Mustn’t?’
Edie said unsteadily, ‘I’d feel such a failure—’ There’d been a small silence and then Lazlo said gently, ‘I’m afraid I can’t help that’.
‘I wanted it to work,’ Edie said. ‘I wanted everyone to feel they had a home’. She looked away and then she said sadly, ‘I wanted to give you all a home’.
‘You did’.
Edie turned back to the mirror and picked up her make-up again. ‘But on my terms’. Lazlo said nothing.
‘And of course,’ Edie said, ‘you’re all too old for that. And so am I’. She glanced up at Lazlo’s reflection. ‘Please don’t go just yet’.
He smiled.
He said, ‘I’ll let you know when I’ve found somewhere,’ and then he leaned forward and put a hand on Edie’s shoulder and said in Osvald Alving’s voice, ‘You’ve managed without me, Mother, all this time!’
Edie had nodded. She’d put her own hand up to touch his briefly and then he’d gone out of the room and she didn’t see him again until they were on stage together, where their familiar dynamic seemed to have transformed itself into something altogether more fragile and fevered.
Now, sitting on the sofa among Ben’s possessions, fragile was what Edie chiefly felt, fragile and vulnerable and uncertain.
She looked across at the armchair, where she had flung the telephone. Perhaps she would ring Vivien. Vivien wouldn’t be any use of course and naturally Edie wouldn’t confide to her the present turmoil of her feelings, but all the same, there seemed to be a most pressing need to talk to someone and, at the very least, Vivien would do.
‘Is this too noisy for him?’ Rosa said.
Kate peered into the baby car seat she had laid on the empty restaurant chair next to her.
‘He’s asleep’.
‘It’s terribly clattery—’
‘He’s got to learn to sleep through it. He’s got to learn to sleep through everything I do because he’s coming with me everywhere I go. For ever’.
‘Even back to work?’
Kate closed her eyes briefly.
‘Please don’t talk about it’.
‘And you intend him to be the first grown man called
Baby?’
Kate picked up a menu and studied it. ‘He’s called Finlay’. ‘But you aren’t a Scot—’ ‘Barney is’.
‘No, he isn’t. He’s the most blah-blah English—’ ‘His family are Scottish,’ Kate said, ‘and this baby is called Finlay’.
‘And by Barney?’
‘Barney calls him George. He tells everyone he’s called George. He told Ruth—’ ‘Ruth?’
Kate gave a sharp little intake of breath.
Then she said, ‘What day is it?’
‘What does that matter?’
‘What day is it?’
‘Thursday,’ Rosa said. ‘Kate—’
Kate said hurriedly, ‘That’s OK then. She’ll have told him by now’.
Rosa twitched the menu out of Kate’s hands.
‘Tell me’. ‘Guess’.
‘I don’t want to guess. Tell me’.
Kate put her hands flat on the table.
‘Ruth came to see us last week. To see the baby. Bringing presents and stuff, one of those incredibly expensive baby suits that babies are always immediately sick on—’
‘Go on’.
‘And she seemed rather agitated and wound up and she cried when she saw Finlay and I asked her what the matter was and—’
‘She’s pregnant,’ Rosa said.
Kate regarded her.
‘Yes’.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I couldn’t. She made me promise. Until she told Matthew’.
‘When was she telling Matthew?’
‘Early this week’.
Rosa looked away.
She said, ‘I haven’t seen Matthew’.
‘Haven’t you?’
‘I never do. We live in the same house and, apart from hearing him thumping about over my head, we might as well not be. It’s as if we’re all steering round each other because if we don’t we’ll row’. She stopped and then she said, in a different voice, ‘Poor Matt. He’s been so down—’
Kate leaned forward.
‘What’ll this do?’
Rosa swung her head back to look at Kate. ‘I don’t know’. ‘Make or break?’ ‘I don’t know’.
‘You’d think,’ Kate said, ‘in this day and age, we could at least get contraception right, wouldn’t you? First me, now Ruth—’