‘You’ve been tired for weeks,’ Maeve said. ‘You’ve been out all hours at things a tinker wouldn’t trouble himself with, and your house isn’t your own, and nor is your wife and you can’t get up the energy to lick a stamp. Can you?’
‘It’s only age—’
‘It’s not,’ Maeve said, ‘it’s attitude. It’s circumstances. Your present circumstances are not conducive to your health and well-being. What are you trying to prove?’
There was a pause and then Russell said, clearly and slowly without looking up, ‘I was trying to fill a gap’.
‘Well,’ Maeve said, ‘there you have it’.
‘And the gap is still there’.
‘Tell her’.
‘I can’t,’ Russell said.
‘Of course you can! She’s a reasonable woman—’ ‘No,’ Russell said. ‘Why not?’
He looked up at her, his face slightly sideways. He said, ‘Because she’s got a gap of her own. One she’d never thought she’d have’.
‘Oh,’ Maeve said, ‘those children—’
‘No,’ Russell said. He picked his pen up again and pulled the folder towards him. ‘No, not the children. Work’.
‘I was going to tell you, doll,’ Max said. He drew imaginary intersecting lines on his chest. ‘Honestly I was. Cross my heart’.
Vivien sighed. Max had been an hour later home than he had promised and she had spent that hour vowing that she would not, the moment he walked through the door, confront him about not going to Australia. And then she had heard the front door slam and Max’s quick steps coming down the hall and the minute they were in the kitchen she’d spun round from the cooker and said, ‘Eliot rang today’.
Max had taken a pace backwards. He’d always done that, when attacked, as if physically retreating before gunfire, and it annoyed her quite as much as it always had done.
He then put his hands up, as if surrendering.
‘How was he?’
‘Don’t,’ Vivien said. She was holding a wooden spoon coated with sauce. ‘Don’t what, honey?’
‘Don’t,’ Vivien shouted, ‘pretend you don’t know!’
Max dropped his hands. He came forward and stood in front of her in an attitude of contrition.
‘I was going to tell you, doll. Honestly I was. Cross my heart’.
Vivien turned back to the cooker. ‘Ringing Eliot about something that concerns me isn’t just something that slips your mind. It’s deliberate’.
Behind her back, Max closed his eyes for a moment. Then he opened them and said, ‘The thing is, Vivi, I didn’t know how to tell you’.
Vivien didn’t turn.
‘Tell me what?’
‘That – oh hell, this is so embarrassing’.
‘What is?’
Max came and stood beside Vivien. He touched her arm. She shook him off. ‘It’s money, doll’. She shot him a glance.
‘What is?’
‘I’m really sorry, but I’m afraid this isn’t the year for going to Australia. I’m so ashamed. I’m so ashamed to tell you that there just isn’t the money. Simple as that’.
Vivien tasted her sauce and reached past Max for the salt.
He seized her outstretched arm. ‘I’m so sorry, Vivi. I shouldn’t have got your hopes up’.
Vivien removed her arm from Max’s grasp.
She said, ‘You’re not running the flat now. Your living expenses have halved. What d’you mean, there isn’t the money?’
Max drooped.
‘Sorry, sweetheart. Honour bright, it’s not there’.
Vivien said unsteadily, ‘You promised me’.
‘Oh, look now, doll, it wasn’t a promise. It was a great idea, a lovely idea to go out and see our boy, but it was only an idea. Be fair!’
Vivien put the saucepan to the side of the cooker and turned out the gas.
She said again, not looking at him, ‘You promised me’.
‘Look here,’ Max said, ‘we’ll go in the spring. I’m sure I’ll see my way clear in the spring—’
Vivien looked at him.
‘Where’s the money gone?’
He spread his hands.
‘Maybe it wasn’t there, doll, maybe I didn’t want you to think I couldn’t give you everything you wanted’. He tried a smile. ‘Maybe I was just being a bit over-optimistic. You know me’.
‘Yes,’ Vivien said. She took a step nearer and when her face was only a foot from his, she said loudly, ‘Liar!’
Max tried to hold her by the arms.
‘Now wait a second, Vivi—’
She flailed her arms sideways to elude him.
‘Liar!’ she said. ‘Liar! Just like you always were!’
‘Please, doll—’
‘Promises!’ Vivien shouted. ‘Promises, to get what you wanted! Promise me what you know I want! There never was the money to go and see Eliot, was there, or if there was, you’ve spent it, haven’t you, you’ve gone into some stupid venture with some stupid shyster—’
‘No!’
‘Then you’re paying off debts. Aren’t you? Who is she? Who’s the tart you’re paying to keep quiet?’
Max reached out and firmly gripped her upper arms.
‘Vivien darling, don’t. Don’t do this. Please don’t! This is just like the bad old days—’
‘Yes!’
‘There’s nothing to get steamed up about,’ Max said. ‘Nothing. It’s just a muddle, a typical Max muddle—’ ‘Then why did you ring Eliot first?’
‘Well, I—’
‘You rang him first,’ Vivien said, ‘so that I couldn’t talk you out of it. I bet you bought his flights to Bali, I bet you did that because you don’t want to go to Australia with me. You don’t want to spend all that money on me!’
‘Nonsense—’
Vivien wrenched herself free.
‘I sound like I used to,’ she screamed, ‘because you sound like you used to. Exactly like!’ ‘I didn’t buy those flights to Bali—’ Vivien glared at him.
‘Liar!’
‘Don’t keep calling me that—’
She took a step back and then she spun round and stormed across the kitchen. In the doorway, she paused, her hand on the knob, and then she said furiously, ‘I wouldn’t have to, if you weren’t!’ and crashed the door shut behind her.
Matthew’s computer case lay in the hall, as if he’d thrown it down carelessly on his way in. As far as Rosa could tell, he was the only one at home. The kitchen and sitting room were disordered but empty, and the doors to both first-floor bedrooms were open. Rosa stood in the dusky evening light on the landing and listened intently. There was no sound, no music. She looked upwards for a minute, and then made her way back downstairs to the kitchen.
It didn’t look as if anyone had had supper. It didn’t look, in fact, as if anyone had done anything in the kitchen that day except have breakfast in a scattered sort of way and then leave in a hurry. Someone had propped an untidy bunch of envelopes against a cornflakes box, but no one had opened them. There was a banana skin blackening on a plate and two half-drunk mugs of cold coffee. The spoon Rosa had stuck in the honey twelve hours before was exactly where she had left it. If Matthew had come into the kitchen that evening, he’d plainly neither had the appetite to eat nor the heart to clear up.
Rosa ran water into the kettle and switched it on. Then she assembled, on the painted wooden tray with decoupage flowers she remembered making in a craft class when she was fourteen, a cafetière and two mugs and a packet of digestive biscuits. Then she added Edie’s dusty bottle of cooking brandy and two pink Moroccan tea glasses. When the kettle boiled, she made coffee in the cafetière, took a plastic bottle of milk out of the fridge and carried the tray out of the kitchen and up the stairs.