Edie said nothing. She went back to her chair and sat down in it and pulled the belt of the bathrobe tighter. Then she looked at Ruth across the table, at her polished hair and her sharply cut suit.
‘Do you think,’ she said, ‘that it’s any easier for me?’
‘Yes,’ Ruth said.
‘Do you?’
‘Yes,’ Ruth said, ‘I think that women after their families have gone are pretty unstoppable. That’s what it looks like, from where I’m standing’.
‘Really?’
Ruth leaned forward.
‘The classic reproach, the one about women promoting themselves at the expense of people who need their care, doesn’t apply to you. Not any more’.
‘Wait a moment—’
‘I don’t want to argue,’ Ruth said. ‘I didn’t come to argue. I didn’t even come to make comparisons. I came to tell you about the baby’.
Edie looked up. She stared at Ruth as if she was seeing her properly for the first time.
‘Oh, my God,’ Edie said. ‘A baby’.
Russell looked at the glasses of wine Rosa had already carried to the table from the bar.
‘No wish to be churlish,’ he said, ‘but this immediately makes me suspicious—’
‘You like red wine’.
‘I do indeed. But usually I have to buy the red wine I like. In the case of my children, I invariably buy the red wine’. ‘Well,’ Rosa said, ‘things are changing’. Russell sighed. ‘That’s what I was afraid of’.
‘Dad—’
‘You ask me to have a drink with you, you soften me up by getting the drinks in first and then you ask me for ten thousand pounds. That’s the form’.
‘No,’ Rosa said.
Russell picked up his glass.
‘Then I’ll just have a quick swallow before I know what it really is’.
Rosa said carelessly, ‘I’m being promoted’. Russell put his glass down again. ‘I thought it was a crap job and only temporary and you hated it’.
‘I’ve been asked,’ Rosa said, ‘to run the branch in Holborn. I get a thirty per cent rise in salary and my uniform will no longer have sunburst buttons’.
Russell eyed her.
‘So I congratulate you’.
‘Yes, please’.
‘And why couldn’t you tell me this at home?’ ‘Home’s difficult,’ Rosa said. Russell looked away.
‘I mean,’ Rosa said, ‘I probably help to make it difficult but it’s not, well, it’s not really working, is it, us all living together? It’s not very successful’.
Russell said, still looking away, ‘I never thought it would be’.
‘Well, you were right. You’re right about lots of things’.
He said tiredly, ‘Don’t try to placate me, Rosa. I’m beyond all that’. ‘I mean it’. ‘Well, thank you—’
‘And I don’t mind going to Holborn and I don’t mind working in a travel agency. I don’t mind’.
‘Ah,’ Russell said. He turned to look at her. ‘Why don’t you?’
‘Because,’ Rosa said, spreading her fingers flat on the table and regarding them, ‘another avenue has opened up’.
‘Not a work avenue, I take it—’
‘No’.
Russell took a swallow.
‘Lazlo?’
‘Yes. I didn’t know you knew’.
‘I didn’t know,’ Russell said, ‘but I guessed. It would be hard to live in the same house and not guess’. Rosa smiled down at her hands. ‘It’s very early days’.
‘Yes—’
‘And he’s terribly shy. I’m not sure – he’s ever had a real girlfriend before’.
‘He’s a nice boy,’ Russell said. ‘An honest boy’. ‘So you don’t mind—’
‘Mind?’
‘You don’t mind if Lazlo and I move out to live together?’
Russell leaned forward.
‘No, Rosa, I don’t mind. I’m very pleased for you’. She eyed him.
‘Will Mum be?’
‘I should think so—’
‘Will you tell her?’
Russell shook his head.
‘No’.
‘Dad—’
‘You must tell her. Lazlo must tell her’. Rosa made a little gesture. ‘I really don’t like to’.
What do you mean?’ Russell demanded, sitting upright. ‘What do you mean, you don’t like to? After all she’s done for you—’
‘It isn’t that’.
‘Well, then—’
‘It’s just,’ Rosa said, ‘that I know how much she’s done. I know how tired she is, I know how disappointed she is about the play not transferring, and I just don’t want to add to everything, add to the feeling of losing things’. She paused and then she said in a rush, ‘I mean I’m worried she’ll really feel it, with Matt going and now us—’
‘Matt?’ Russell said sharply.
Rosa put her hand over her mouth.
‘Oh, my God—’ ‘Rosa—’
‘I didn’t mean,’ Rosa said, ‘I didn’t mean to say anything about—’
Russell leaned across the table and grasped Rosa’s wrist. ‘What,’ he said, ‘about Matthew?’
Vivien sat in her hall beside her telephone table. On it lay a list of all the people she was going to telephone, one after another, in a calm and orderly fashion, and when the list was completed she was going to go upstairs with a new roll of heavy-duty dustbin bags and begin, without hysteria, to fill them with Max’s possessions.
The first person on the list was Edie. She had planned to ring Edie first and tell her what had happened and reassure her that she was, strangely and slightly light-headedly, perfectly all right. Then she intended to ring her solicitor and bank manager and Alison at the bookshop to tell her, in the phrase beloved of old-fashioned crime novels that didn’t need to trouble themselves with too much inconvenient reality, that something had come up, something that would prevent her coming in to the shop tomorrow, but that she would be in as usual on Wednesday. However, on reflection, she thought she would ring Edie after she had spoken to her solicitor and bank manager, rather than before, so that she could sound reassuring about having everything in hand and being composed and controlled.
She had been extraordinarily composed when she discovered, by asking Max outright about the amount of money he had received for the flat in Barnes, that he had never actually sold it. She had been rather less composed when it became evident that, not only was the flat not sold, but it wasn’t even on the market since it was still inhabited by Max’s last girlfriend, who was both refusing to leave and refusing to pay the bills. And she had, to her subsequent regret, lost all control when Max fell on his knees on her bedroom floor and told her that only she could save him from the rapacious harpy who was bleeding him dry, and that was why he’d wanted to come home, to a real, warm, loving woman whose sole aim wasn’t to castrate him as well as bleed him dry.
She had, of course, cried all night after that episode. She had expected to. What she hadn’t expected was, despite the dispiriting sensation of having a tremendous hangover, to feel such a relief the next day. It was unmistakable, this relief, a feeling that she was at last emerging from something that had beguiled her for too long in a profoundly unsettling way, and obscured her sense of purpose into the bargain. When Max, haggard in his lavish velour dressing gown, had stared into his coffee the next morning and said, ‘I need you, doll. I want you, I love you. Please, please forgive me,’ she’d been able to say, to her amazement, ‘Of course I forgive you, but I’m afraid I don’t want you any more’.