Rosa leaned sideways and looked down at the baby. ‘Ruth of all people—’
‘Yes’.
‘I wonder if Mum knows’.
‘What’ll she say?’
Rosa put out a hand and laid it on the baby. ‘Can’t tell. She’s all over the place at the moment. It’s -well, it’s a nightmare at home at the moment’.
‘Is it?’
‘Yes,’ Rosa said. She straightened up, and then she said, with a small, private smile, ‘But rather interesting, too’.
Kate waited.
Rosa went on smiling to herself. Kate said crossly, ‘Well, go on’. ‘You can guess’.
‘Something happening? Between you and Lazlo?’ ‘Not – exactly’.
‘Well, then—’
‘But,’ Rosa said, ‘I’d quite like it to’. ‘I’m surprised’.
‘So am I’.
‘I thought he was geeky’.
‘He is rather. But—’ She stopped.
Kate looked at her.
‘I see’.
Rosa looked back.
‘Kate, what about Matthew?’
‘That’s all about to be common knowledge, isn’t it?’
‘D’you know,’ Rosa said, moving about the knife and fork at her place, ‘once I’d have hit the telephone. Once I’d have immediately rushed round to Dad’s office and rung Mum and texted Ben and generally gone into overdrive. But I don’t want to now. I don’t remotely feel like it’.
‘What do you feel then?’
‘Sad,’ Rosa said.
‘Sad?’
‘Yes,’ Rosa said. She looked down at Finlay again. ‘Yes. Sad. Sad that if it’s a baby, it had to be this way’.
‘Come on,’ Kate said vehemently. The baby won’t know!’
‘No,’ Rosa said. She picked up the menu again and held it out towards Kate, ‘But we will. Won’t we?’
The afternoon in the bookshop seemed to Vivien to be taking an unusually long time. It was the end of summer after all, so customers weren’t coming in for those optimistic stacks of paperbacks to take on holiday but, all the same, the few people who did come in seemed to be passing time rather than buying a book and Vivien watched them with irritation as they drifted idly about, fingering books they would never buy and infecting her with their mild restlessness. She had taken advantage of Alison’s absence to straighten things up a bit, sort the slew of scraps of paper by the till, realign the table of summer novels, but that was all that was possible really. Alison didn’t like her actually doing housework if she was the only person in the shop: she said it was off-putting for customers to be dusted round, made them feel that they were somehow an intrusion. She liked Vivien, if not actually helping a customer, to sit by the till lightly engaged in a task that could obviously be easily set aside. Alison herself was a knitter, great scarves and sweaters in the patterns and colours of the Andes, and she would have preferred Vivien to find herself some equally encouraging-looking, unthreatening occupation. Vivien’s propensity for tidying, though undeniably useful, could too easily be interpreted, by anyone sensitive to atmosphere, as taking precedence over the mild disorder created by the necessary process of commerce.
Vivien had taken up her position next to the rack of birthday cards. These were haphazardly arranged with no particular thought given to sequences of price or size, and it was harmless enough, Vivien thought, to separate the reproductions of Jack Vettriano paintings from black-and-white art photographs of elephants or kittens. The card rack also gave her a good view of the shop, which contained, at that moment, a young mother with a toddler in a buggy looking at board books, and a man in a faded gingham shirt browsing in biography.
It was not the sort of shirt, Vivien reflected, that Max would wear. If Max wore gingham at all, it would be very new and either navy blue or pale pink. It was odd, really, to be so familiar, all over again, with Max’s shirts, especially as – Max being Max and something of a shopper when it came to clothes – most of those shirts were new to her, and acquired in that peculiar space of time when she had been excluded from knowing any details of his personal life. And in those four years, Max had, sartorially speaking, started again. His taste might not have changed, but his wardrobe had and Vivien found it was very difficult sometimes to launder with equanimity garments that had plainly been to exotic places with women who were not her. A T-shirt printed with the logo of a luxurious hotel in Cyprus, and a Malaysian sarong had already gone in the bin rather than the washing machine and Vivien couldn’t decide whether it was a comfort to her or not that Max hadn’t commented on their disappearance.
But then, Max was being very careful not to allude to his bachelor days unless it was to say something dismissive. He’d been to Jersey on business the week before, staying in a hotel he’d stayed at previously and, Vivien suspected, not alone, and had arrived home a night early, claiming that the whole place was depressing and all he wanted was to be home again.
‘Bad memories,’ Vivien said, putting a glass of whisky down in front of him.
He blew her a kiss.
‘Horrible,’ he said.
The man in the gingham shirt approached the till and slowly laid down a large single-volume life of Napoleon.
‘Please,’ he said, over his shoulder.
Vivien slipped the card she was holding into a slot and hurried across. The man, staring dreamily into the space behind the till, was holding out his credit card. As she reached to take it, her mobile phone, in her handbag under the counter, began to ring in an insistent crescendo.
‘I’ll ignore that,’ she said brightly.
The man nodded. He watched her slip the book into one of Alison’s recycled bags, and run his card briskly through the machine. Then he bent and signed his name with the elaborate care of one who has just learned to do joined-up writing. Vivien watched him leave the shop, and then she seized her bag and rummaged in it for her telephone.
The caller had been Eliot. What was Eliot doing, ringing at five-thirty on an Australian morning? Was he ill? Vivien cast a glance at the mother and toddler. The toddler was now asleep in her buggy and her mother was grazing dispiritedly along the shelf of self-help books. Vivien rapidly dialled Eliot’s number.
‘Hi, Ma,’ Eliot said. ‘Are you all right?’
There was a pause and then Eliot said, ‘I’m great, Ma.
Why?’
‘It’s five-thirty in the morning. Why are you awake at five-thirty? Why are you calling me Ma?’
‘It’s a beaut morning,’ Eliot said reasonably. ‘We’re going to the beach’.
‘So you rang to tell me it’s a lovely day?’
‘No,’ Eliot said, ‘I rang because Dad rang me and I’d forget otherwise. I’d forget if I left it’.
The young mother pushed her buggy slowly past Vivien as if Vivien did not exist. Vivien watched her without pity, as she struggled with the door.
‘What,’ Vivien said more loudly when the shop was empty, ‘what would you forget?’
‘That it doesn’t matter to Ro and me that you can’t come for Christmas. We’re going to Bali’.
‘What?’
‘We’re going to Bali for Christmas,’ Eliot said. ‘We’ve got cheap flights. So it doesn’t matter’.
Vivien pulled Alison’s stool towards her and perched on it.
‘You said Dad rang you?’
‘Yeah’.
‘And Dad said we couldn’t come for Christmas after all?’ ‘Yeah’.
‘Did – did he say why?’
‘You should know,’ Eliot said. ‘Work or something’.
‘When did he ring?’
There was a silence, and then Eliot said uncertainly, ‘Yesterday?’
‘Well,’ Vivien said, her voice not quite steady, ‘why are you ringing me?’