Joanna Trollope: Second Honeymoon

‘You’d think,’ she said to Alison who managed the bookshop, ‘that you’d be thankful not to live on tenterhooks any more, whatever tenterhooks are. But actually, I rather miss them’.

Alison, who was not attracted to men of Max’s type who wore leather and denim well into middle age, said she thought they had something to do with stretched damp cloth in the dyeing trade.

‘What do?’ Vivien said.

Alison sighed. Max might not, as a type, be to her taste but there were times when she felt a sympathy for him. Vivien was someone who couldn’t help, it seemed, being a permanent small test of patience.

‘Tenterhooks,’ Alison said, and put her glasses on.

Vivien went back to dusting. When Alison had offered her the job, years ago when Eliot was still young enough to let her kiss him at the school gates, she had made it very plain that bookselling was not a white-handed occupation involving delightful literary conversations with cultivated customers.

‘It’s more like always moving house. Endless heavy boxes and books parcelled up in shrink wrap. Non-stop tidying and cleaning. Lists. Difficult people’.

Vivien had looked round the shop. Alison’s predilection for all things South American was very obvious: brilliantly coloured wool hangings, posters of Frida Kahlo and Christ of the Andes, a shelf of Chilean poets.

‘I like housework,’ Vivien said.

She always had, if she thought about it. When she and Edie had shared a bedroom as children, her side of the room – fiercely marked out by a strip of pink bias binding drawing-pinned to the carpet – had been both tidy and clean. On Saturday mornings she had dusted her ornaments with lengths of lavatory paper, and was apt to cover her favourite books in library film. It was this fondness for keeping house that she supposed drew her towards Max, towards a man who, although outwardly organised, was inwardly chaotic. He gave her the excited feeling that she was breaking rules to be with him, that she had kicked over the tidy traces of her upbringing and embarked on a heady and abandoned adventure. The trouble was that, in time, the tidiness reasserted itself and Max said he couldn’t breathe. He began to set her challenges – champagne in the middle of the night, impulse trips to New York, having sex in the car in sight of neighbours’ front windows – and, when she couldn’t rise to them, he looked at her sadly, and sighed, and told her motherhood had changed her, had made her into someone he no longer recognised.

Working her way along the travel section with a new synthetic duster that was supposed to attract dirt to it like a magnet, Vivien thought that it wasn’t motherhood that had changed her: it was Max. Motherhood had been something she felt very comfortable with, something, indeed, that she would have liked to extend to brothers and sisters for Eliot if she had not been so preoccupied with not giving Max the opportunity for straying. Max had, in truth, given her a brief and glorious holiday from herself, but he hadn’t changed her. He had tried, and part of her had hoped he would succeed, but the basic Vivien stayed the same and preferred, if she was honest, filling the freezer with puréed carrot cubes for baby Eliot to suddenly dropping everything domestic in favour of some scheme of Max’s that meant packing for an unknown destination without any certain timetable or sartorial guidelines.

Eliot, Vivien couldn’t help noticing, was not like his father. Nor was he much like her. Eliot wanted life to be as simple as possible, which meant as little pressure in it, and discussion about it, as possible. His Australian girlfriend, as far as Vivien could detect from conversations on the telephone, made laconic seem an urgent word. They had a flat five minutes from the beach, they worked lightly, played water sports and drank beer. The latest photograph Eliot had emailed back showed them both on the beach, thin and brown, with similar bleached spiky hair and bead bracelets. The girlfriend was called Ro.

‘Short for Rosemary?’ Vivien had asked.

‘No,’ Eliot said, after a pause. His voice already had a faint Australian edge to it, making every statement a question. ‘Not short for anything. Just Ro’.

When he had rung off – ‘Gotta go, Mum. Take care’ -Vivien had cried a little. Then she had got up from the kitchen table where she had been crying, blown her nose and assembled the clothes for dry-cleaning – folded, not dumped – in a carrier bag. An hour later, she had managed to recount her conversation with Eliot to his father on the telephone without crying at all.

‘That’s good,’ Max said. She could hear the faint tap of laptop keys as he spoke. ‘Good for you, Vivi. You’re getting used to him being grown-up’. He paused and the tapping stopped. Then he said, in the voice he had always used to indicate he knew he’d chosen the right sister, ‘Not like Edie’.

Vivien leant against the section on Eastern Europe. She rested the duster on top of several city guides to Prague. Maybe Max was right. Maybe what made her cry after talking to Eliot was not that he was twenty-two and had chosen to live in Cairns, Queensland, Australia, but that he wasn’t eight or ten any more, with a life that she had both detailed knowledge of and control over. And maybe that knowledge and control had, for a few years only, been absorbing enough for her not to fret about Max, about what he wanted and what she could – and more importantly, couldn’t – provide. Crying for Eliot was crying for a lost small boy, not crying for a lost role, like Edie.

Vivien put a hand up and pushed her duster to the back of the Prague guides. Edie was distraught, really, quite unhinged by the last of her children going and pretty well indifferent to poor old Russell’s feelings. Vivien liked Russell, always had, but you couldn’t compare him to Max for dash and glamour, just as his children, his and Edie’s children, were making, with the exception of Matt, who was the only one Max had ever had time for, a very amateurish business of leaving home. Poor Rosa: too proud to go home, too short of money to stay independent. And Ben living with a girl he’d met having his hair cut, one of the Saturday-morning juniors. She gave the final volumes of the travel section a little triumphant flourish of the duster. Poor Edie.

‘For how long?’ Barney Ferguson said.

He was standing at the foot of the bed wearing a bath towel wrapped around his hips. His hair was wet. Kate lay against the pillows with the tea he’d brought her, and the biscuit halves of a custard cream that she had peeled away from the filling.

‘I did ask for plain biscuits’.

Barney shook his wet head.

‘They were all I could see. Except for pink wafer things. How long is she staying?’ Kate shut her eyes.

‘A month?’

‘A month!’

Kate bit a tiny piece out of one of the biscuits. ‘Four weeks. Only’.

‘Four weeks isn’t only,’ Barney said. ‘That’s a fifth of the time we’ve been married’. Kate opened her eyes. ‘Barn, I couldn’t not ask her’.

‘Why?’

‘Because she’s my best friend and she’s on her absolute uppers’.

‘I’m your best friend’. ‘My best woman friend’. ‘Suppose she doesn’t get a job—’

‘She will. She’s got to’.

‘And supper, us having supper together—’

‘She’ll go out’.

You said,’ Barney pointed out, ‘that she’s got no money’.

Kate shut her eyes again. ‘Please, Barn’.

He moved round the bed so that he could sit close to her on the edge.

‘I just want you to myself’. ‘I know’.

‘And although I like Rosa, I do , I don’t quite like her enough to want to live with her’. Kate sighed.