The difficulty was, how. Naomi’s texts had not suggested, in any way, that she was missing him as he was missing her. In fact, the brevity and scarcity of her communications might have led a fainter heart to think that she had definitively chosen an immediate future with her mother rather than her boyfriend. But Ben’s heart, buoyed up with his new self-knowledge, did not feel faint. It felt that, even if it did not succeed, it was going to make stupendous efforts first, before acknowledging even the possibility of failure. He would shower and shave, he decided, put on clean clothes, buy flowers for both Naomi and her mother – a significantly larger bunch for her mother – and take the tube, that very day, to Walthamstow.
The water in the shower changed abruptly from tepid to gaspingly cold. Edie, her eyes tightly shut against the shampoo cascading down her face, gave a scream. Then she gave another, a scream of rage this time, rather than shock. They had all had showers, of course, they had all showered and gone out, even Lazlo, and left her to do battle with the aftermath of their leaving. Also, she thought, stumbling out of the shower and fumbling about for a towel, to deal with an elderly boiler and a water tank designed for the needs of a small nuclear family who bathed by rota.
She found a damp towel and wrapped it tightly round her. Then she ran a basin of cold water and dipped her hair into it and rinsed her eyes. There was a perverse relief, somehow, in being able to cry because she had soap in her eyes, being able to blame some small, tangible element for the need to howl away to herself, wrapped in an already used towel, in the forlorn middle of a weekday morning. She straightened up a little and peered at herself in the mirror. Her hair hung in wet dark snakes. Her eyes looked as if they’d been buried. She looked, she decided, more like the embodiment of a state of mind than a human being. She reached out and pulled another dank towel off the pile on the chair and wound it round her head. Now she looked like a huge blue towelling thumb.
From downstairs, the doorbell rang.
‘Go away!’ Edie shouted.
It rang again, politely but firmly. Edie dropped the towel she had tucked round her armpits and clawed her way into Russell’s ancient bathrobe that was hanging on the back of the door. Then she went cautiously out on to the landing and pressed her forehead against the glass to see down into the street.
On the step directly below her a young woman was standing. She wore a dark suit and was carrying a briefcase and there were sunglasses perched on top of her head. Edie looked at the briefcase. It seemed familiar, familiar enough to picture it propped against the wall inside the front door. It was Ruth’s briefcase. Edie unscrewed the security bolt on the window and put her head out.
Ruth glanced up.
‘Edie,’ she said uncertainly.
Edie put her hand up to her immense blue turban. ‘Just – washing my hair—’
‘I’m sorry,’ Ruth said, ‘not to tell you I was coming, but Matt said you’d be in, and I—’ ‘Matt did?’
‘Yes,’ Ruth said. ‘Matt suggested I just come. When I said I wanted to’.
‘Wait,’ Edie said.
‘Look, if it really—’
‘Wait,’ Edie said. She slammed the window shut and tore off her turban. Then she ran downstairs. Arsie was sitting in the hall, affecting indifference to whoever had come. Edie picked him up and held him against her while she opened the door.
Ruth said at once, ‘I’m so sorry—’
‘Don’t be,’ Edie said. She stepped back. ‘It’s – well, I’m very glad to see you’.
‘Are you?’
Edie looked at her.
‘Why shouldn’t I be?’
Ruth put out a hand to touch Arsie.
‘Well, I thought you thought—’
A drip from Edie’s hair slid on to Arsie’s shoulder and he sprang from her arms.
‘I did think’.
‘Yes—’
‘But a lot’s happened and I – well, my thinking has shifted a bit. You look very smart’.
Ruth made a little self-deprecating gesture.
‘You’ll have to forgive me,’ Edie said. ‘I was in a temper as well as in the shower. Coffee?’
‘Could – could I have tea?’
Edie looked at her.
‘I didn’t think you drank tea’.
‘I – didn’t’.
‘Come into the kitchen. There’s too much to apologise for in there so I won’t even start’.
Ruth said from the kitchen doorway, ‘It’s nice to be back—’
‘Is it? Have you been very unhappy?’
‘Yes’.
Edie picked up the kettle.
She said from the sink, her back turned towards Ruth, ‘So has Matthew’. ‘I know’.
‘Ruth,’ Edie said, ‘couldn’t you just have made a compromise? Couldn’t you just have made it possible for him to contribute something?’
Ruth went slowly across the room to the table and leaned against it. Then she put down her briefcase and took her sunglasses off her head and laid them on the table with precision.
‘I came,’ she said, ‘to tell you that I was pregnant’.
Edie froze for a moment. Then she turned off the tap and set the kettle down carefully in the sink.
‘Pregnant?’
‘Yes’.
‘I thought,’ Edie said with emphasis, ‘that you and Matthew hadn’t seen each other since you – parted’.
‘He came for dinner,’ Ruth said. ‘He came to my flat. I asked him to. I was missing him so much’.
Edie put her hands up to the collar of Russell’s bathrobe and held it against her neck. Then she turned round.
‘Does Matthew know?’
‘Of course’.
‘How – long has he known?’ ‘About two weeks’. Edie shut her eyes. ‘Two weeks—’
‘Yes’.
‘And – forgive me – but are you going to keep it?’
There was a small pause and then Ruth said, with barely suppressed fury, ‘Yes’.
‘But if you and Matthew aren’t—’
‘We are,’ Ruth said. ‘That’s why I’ve come. I’ve come to tell you what we’re planning’.
Edie put a hand out for a chair as if she was suddenly very old, and lowered herself into it. She didn’t look at Ruth. Instead she looked at the box of Grapenuts someone had left on the table.
‘But why come and tell me? Why not both of you? Why not tell Russell and me together? Why come like this, out of the blue—’
‘Because I wanted to,’ Ruth said. ‘Because you needed to know. Because you were so angry with me’.
‘I wasn’t—’
‘Oh yes,’ Ruth said. ‘Women are always angrier with other women. I’d hurt your son. I’d achieved more than he had. In your view, I’d rubbed his nose in it’.
Edie put her elbows on the table and her face in her hands.
She said, muffled by her hands, ‘You’ll learn’.
‘Oh,’ Ruth said, ‘I understood why you were angry. Of course I did. And I felt awful myself, awful at what I’d done and furious at being made to feel awful’.
Edie took her hands away from her face.
‘You’d better sit down’.
‘I’m fine—’
‘Sit down,’ Edie said. ‘Sit down and I’ll make you some tea’.
She got up and retrieved the kettle from the sink. She said, ‘Do your parents know?’ ‘Not yet’. ‘What?’
‘I’ll tell them next,’ Ruth said. ‘I’ll tell them at the weekend’.
‘But why—’
‘Because I wanted to see you first. Because I wanted to do something for Matthew’. Edie spun round. ‘Matthew’s not afraid of me!’
‘It wasn’t about that,’ Ruth said, ‘it’s about saving him having to explain himself again. It’s about me explaining to you how hard it is for women my age to deal with motherhood and work when both are so demanding and important, and how wonderful it would be if you could be on my side’. She paused. And then she added, ‘Irrespective of Matthew’.