Education had, by contrast, been easy. Rosa had been good at education, good at friendships, comfortable with achievement. She had negotiated, from the age of eleven, a subversive but successful pathway between intelligence and rebelliousness, a pathway that her elder brother admired and her younger brother emulated. She had cultivated, all those long, busy, channelled educational years, a subtle flamboyance, which she had believed would carry her through both dullness and difficulty. And, almost, it had, until falling for a man who preferred to believe her publicity rather than what lay beneath it in more vulnerable reality exposed her in a way that seemed to have deconstructed all those assiduously built years of showy confidence in an instant.
Everyone had taken pains to tell her how much they disliked Josh. Under the conventional but false banner of telling her that everything they were about to say was because they had her welfare at heart, family and friends told her that Josh was spoiled, unreliable, immature and selfish. In reply, she would simply say, ‘I know’. She did know. She knew from the first few exciting but unnerving dates that Josh was neither able nor prepared to give her the steady glow of supportive love that women’s magazines assured her was every girl’s absolute right. But the relationship with Josh was not about anything steady or supportive. It was about being, in every sense, bowled over – bowled over by the electricity of his unpredictable company, bowled over by desire. Falling for Josh had been the heady, unbidden moment when Rosa, up to now counting herself serenely as one of life’s adoreds, turned into a helpless adorer. Josh could have anything he wanted as long as he didn’t go.
He didn’t go for almost two years. He moved into Rosa’s flat and spent hours playing poker on her computer or ringing long-distance on her telephone. He booked seats at ballets and theatres, nights in hotels, tables in restaurants without ever, mysteriously, managing to pay for them. He left roses on her pillow and messages on the bathroom mirror and tiny, beguiling presents wrapped in tissue paper in her shoes. She was driven to every extreme of emotion and temper by his presence and, when he finally left, she was convinced for months that not only had he left her with a frightening amount of debt, but also without any capacity to feel alive to the full ever again.
‘He wasn’t drama,’ Kate said to Rosa, ‘he was melodrama’.
Rosa had looked at the list in Kate’s hand. It was the beginning of her wedding-present list and it featured saucepans and bath mats and an espresso machine.
‘Give me melodrama any day,’ Rosa had said.
She wouldn’t, she thought, sitting on her bench beside her unwanted lunch, say that now. Josh had been an addiction and, when he had gone, she missed the dark glamour of that addiction, the tension and the sense that her adrenalin was always racing. And then, hour by hour, day by day, the enthralling substance Josh had represented drained out of her veins and left her, not exactly regretful, but certainly disorientated, lost, as if she had entirely abandoned the person she grew up with and was too altered now by experience to go back and retrieve it.
She glanced along the bench. The girl in the grey coat had stopped talking into her telephone and was now reading a Greek newspaper. Rosa picked up the remains of her wrap gingerly and rose from the bench. She carried the wrap over to the nearest litter bin, dropped it in, and then set off purposefully southwards, towards Shaftesbury Avenue.
Russell was on the telephone. An actor, who possessed a wonderfully flexible speaking voice and no sense of obligation to any work he considered beneath him, however lucrative, was explaining at length why he had failed, for the second time, to turn up for a studio appointment to record the voice of a cartoon tiger representing a major insurance company.
‘Sorry,’ Russell said at intervals. ‘It’s no good. It’s no good my putting in effort if you won’t match it’.
The door of Russell’s office stood open. Beyond, in the small reception area, furnished with wicker sofas and copies of Spotlight and The Stage, Russell’s assistant, Maeve, who had been with him almost all his working life, administered the agency with the assistance of a computer she always referred to as the Prototype, on account of its age. Russell liked Maeve to hear most of his conversations. He liked her to be a witness to his reasonableness in the face of often great provocation.
‘I’m sorry, Gregory,’ Russell said, ‘but I shall have to send them someone else. It’s very nice of them, actually, even to agree to that’.
The doorbell to the street door rang, a peculiar vibrating growl, which, like his carpet, he refused to let anyone change.
‘Sorry,’ Russell said, ‘but you’ve blown it’.
‘Oh!’ Maeve said into the intercom with pleasure. ‘Oh, it’s you! Come up!’
Russell put his hand over the mouthpiece of his telephone. His heart had lifted a little.
‘Who, Maeve? Edie?’
Maeve’s face appeared briefly round the door. ‘No,’ she mouthed, ‘Rosa’. Russell took his hand away.
‘Go away and think about it, Greg. Go away and think about how you are going to live until you are noticed by
Anthony Minghella. Then we might have another conversation’. He took the telephone away from his ear, listened for a few more seconds to Gregory’s aggrieved voice, and replaced it softly on his desk.
There were footsteps running up the last flight of stairs.
He heard Maeve open the door.
‘Well, there’s a cheerful sight. What a wonderful colour, nobody but you—’
‘Nobody but me,’ Rosa said. ‘Anybody else would have had more sense and bought black’.
‘I’m sick to death of black,’ Maeve said. ‘Leave it to the beetles, I say—’
Rosa appeared in the doorway of Russell’s office.
‘Dad?’
He got up and leaned across the desk to kiss her.
‘Lovely surprise—’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘passing—’
‘At lunchtime’.
‘Well … Actually I’m not hungry’.
‘Even,’ Russell said, ‘if I’m paying?’
She glanced down. Her shoulders drooped a little. Then she straightened up, shook her hair back and gave him a familiarly full-on smile.
‘That would be great. Because – well, because there’s something I’d like to ask you’.
Russell looked at her over his reading spectacles.
‘Is there?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Please’. And then she smiled again,
‘Daddy’.
Rosa looked at her father’s plate. Hers was empty, but his still bore a good half of his order of gnocchi.
She raised her fork, questioningly.
‘Can I?’
Russell gave his plate a little nudge. ‘Help yourself’.
Rosa speared two gnocchi and put them in her mouth.
Then she said, round them, ‘I mean, I’m not worried about finding another job. And I’m not at all concerned by what Bill Moreton thinks of me. I know I was doing a good job. I know it’.
‘Hmm,’ Russell said. He had ordered a bottle of wine and was now wondering if Rosa’s share was giving her a fleeting and unreliable confidence.
‘It wasn’t as if I was earning a fortune there anyway,’ Rosa said, spearing more gnocchi. ‘Lots of my friends are earning well over twenty by now’.
‘Have you ever worked out,’ Russell said, ‘what you need to earn?’
Rosa stopped chewing. She gave him a quick, direct look and dropped her gaze.