And now, look at her. Look at her. Deflected into carelessness about contraception by the urgency of her own need not to seem some unattractive freak, she was pregnant. She was in, by mistake, the most supremely female condition she possibly could be. And Matthew, not appalled as she feared he might be, not jubilant about his potency as men were supposed to be, had been, quite simply, moved. The news had touched him emotionally in a way she would never have predicted, a way she was not at all sure she felt herself. And that reaction meant that he would now certainly do what she had longed for him to do, and ring her.
What she would say when he did, however, she couldn’t be sure. In the perverse way of human things, especially longings, she wasn’t even sure how much she now wanted him to ring. When he did, he would ask questions, want to make plans and, as yet, she wasn’t sure what she wanted, how she saw the way ahead. What was so extraordinary, especially given the fact that babies had not even featured near the bottom of her agenda up to now, was that the painful loneliness she had felt since she and Matthew parted seemed to have subsided. Telling Matthew she was pregnant had given her a sensation of independence, as surprising as it was welcome. To her amazement, the baby, even at this stage, was a fact, and not a choice of any kind. She laid a hand carefully across her flat stomach. Perhaps she had now regained everything she had lost. Perhaps she now, oddly enough, held all the cards, all the approval. She took her hand off her stomach and put both on the keyboard.
‘I am,’ she wrote formally to Laura, ‘very well indeed’.
Rosa thought she hadn’t been to a matinee since she was small, and Edie and Russell used to take the three of them to matinee performances of musicals at Christmas. There had been something exotic about going into a theatre in daylight and coming out in the dark, as if some time travel had happened in those few hours and the world was now a different place. Twenty years later, a matinee didn’t seem so much exotic as out of step, a requirement to surrender and believe, against the evidence of all your senses, that almost amounted to a challenge.
The theatre was only a quarter full. Such people as had come sat scattered about and the girl selling programmes was yawning. Rosa went to the very back of the stalls in a belief that, even if Lazlo could see as far as that from the stage, he couldn’t see in detail. But that afternoon, it would be unlikely he’d be looking at anyone but Edie’s understudy. Edie was never ill, never missed performances, despised people who used health as an excuse for failing to fulfil obligations, but, all the same, Edie was in bed with a severe headache and a determination to perform that evening.
‘Miss me,’ she’d said to Lazlo, silhouetted in her bedroom doorway. ‘Mind you miss me’.
Rosa felt a twinge of disloyalty at seeing Edie’s understudy rather than Edie. But then, it wasn’t Edie she had come to see that afternoon, it was Lazlo, Lazlo with whom she’d made a plan, to meet in the interval between afternoon and evening performances. They were intervals he’d admitted were difficult to fill, as the need to conserve energy had to be balanced by an equal need not to relax down to a point from which it might be hard to rouse oneself up again. Rosa said she understood that, she could see that, and why didn’t they just have a quiet something to eat somewhere, no big deal?
Lazlo looked doubtful.
‘Usually I just read—’
‘Well this time,’ Rosa said, ‘just talk’.
‘OK,’ he said. He gave her his shy smile. ‘Thank you’.
She smiled back, but she didn’t tell him she would watch a performance first. She wanted to watch him in peace for a while, watch how he was without Edie, watch him, as it were, out of context. She wanted to see if she could discover why it was she found him so interesting and, even more, why she should want a man who was not in any way her type, and younger to boot, to think well of her. She settled back into her seat. There was a lot of the first act to get through – including the unwelcome sight of that awful Cheryl Smith acting so well – before the door on the left of the stage opened and Lazlo emerged, with his hat and his pipe, and said, with the hesitancy she had come to find so very appealing, ‘“Oh, I’m sorry – I thought you were in the study.”‘ She glanced down at the programme. He really had a very nice profile.
Vivien was lying on her bed when the telephone rang. She was lying there because she had planned to lie there anyway, to rest before Max took her to have dinner with a new client whom he said he wanted her to impress. So, when he rang and said that he was mortified but the client wanted to have dinner alone with Max because it was strictly business he wanted to discuss, Vivien had decided to go to bed anyway even if for different reasons.
‘I don’t know what to say, doll,’ Max had said. ‘I feel just terrible. And after promising you. But this one could be quite a big one, and you know how things are with me just now. A big one could make all the difference’.
Vivien, sitting by her telephone table in the hall, said nothing. She felt herself invaded, drawn back by the Vivien of the past, the Vivien who had stopped shrieking at Max and had taken instead to stonewalling him with silence.
Vivi?’ Max said. ‘Darling?’
‘Bye,’ Vivien said. ‘Hope it works,’ and then she put the telephone down and went upstairs to her bedroom and kicked her shoes off. If she couldn’t lie on her bed in anticipation, she would at least lie on it for consolation. She settled herself, with angry little twitches, and looked at the dress hanging on the cornice of her wardrobe. It was layered chiffon, printed in grey and white (‘Love you in those cool colours, doll’) and she had been going to wear it that evening.
The telephone on her bedside table began to ring. She looked at it thoughtfully.
‘No,’ she would say to Max, ‘no, you can’t change the plans again. I’m doing something else this evening now. I’m going to the cinema’.
She let it ring six times and then she picked up the receiver and held it away from her ear and waited.
‘Vivi?’ Edie said.
Vivien shut her eyes tightly for a second, as if to squeeze back tears.
‘Why aren’t you at the theatre? Don’t you have matinees on Saturday afternoons?’
Edie said deliberately, spacing the words out, ‘I have a headache’.
Vivien made a sympathetic noise.
Then she said, ‘You never have headaches’.
‘I have one now’.
‘You should take HRT. You should just admit your age and—’
‘I’m tired,’ Edie said loudly.
‘What?’
‘I’m just tired’.
‘Of course you are. Working, the house so full—’
‘I didn’t ring up to be lectured!’
There was a short pause and then Vivien said, ‘Why did you ring up then?’
‘I was lying on my bed,’ Edie said, ‘and there’s no one in, not even Russell, and I, well, I wanted to talk to someone’.
‘So I’ll do’.
‘Yes,’ Edie said, ‘you’ll do. How are you?’
‘Fine’.
‘Ironing Max’s Jermyn Street shirts and concocting a seduction supper and planning your trip to Australia—’ ‘We aren’t going to Australia’.
‘Vivi!’
Vivien put a hand up and blotted at the skin under one eye and then the other. ‘Nope. Not going’. Vivi, why not?’