Joanna Trollope: Second Honeymoon

‘Enough,’ she said to herself now, her elbows on Ben’s table. She twisted round. Against the wall, Ben’s bed stood exactly as he had left it, the duvet slewed towards the floor, the pillow dented, a magazine here, a pair of underpants there. It was tempting, she thought, holding hard to the chairback as an anchor, to spring up and fling herself down on Ben’s bed and push her face into his pillow and breathe and breathe. It was very tempting.

Downstairs the front door crashed again. She heard Russell’s feet on the tiles of the hall, heard him say something companionable to the cat.

‘Edie?’

She went on staring at Ben’s pillows. ‘I’ve got the newspapers,’ Russell called. ‘An orgy of them—’

Edie looked up at Ben’s bookshelves, at the space at the end where his teddy bear always sat, wearing Russell’s old school tie from over forty years ago. The bear had gone. She stood up, holding an awkward stack of crockery.

‘Coming,’ she said.

The garden was one of the reasons they had bought the house twenty years ago. It was only the width of the house, but it was seventy-five feet long, long enough for Matt, then eight, to kick a ball in. It also had a shed. Russell had loved the idea of a shed, the idea of paraffin heaters and fingerless gloves and listening to the football results on an old battery-operated radio. He saw seclusion in that shed, somewhere set apart from his family life and his working life because both were, by their very nature, all talk. He had a vision of being in the shed on winter weekend afternoons, probably wrapped in a sleeping bag, and looking back down the garden to the house, a dark shape with lit windows, and knowing that all that life and clamour was there for him to step back into, when he chose. It was a very luxurious vision, in that it encompassed both privacy and participation, and he clung to it during the years while the shed filled up with bikes and paint tins and broken garden chairs, leaving no space for him. It was even called ‘Dad’s shed’.

This Saturday afternoon, he told Edie, he was going to clear it out.

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s full of useless junk’. She was chopping things, making one of her highly coloured, rough-hewn salads.

‘And then?’ ‘Then what?’

‘When you have cleared out the shed, what will you do with it?’

‘Use it’.

Edie threw a handful of tomato pieces into the salad bowl.

‘What for?’

Russell considered saying for reading pornography in, and decided against it.

He said, ‘The purpose will become plain as I clear it’. Edie picked up a yellow pepper. She had gathered her hair on top of her head and secured it with a purple plastic comb. She looked, in some ways, about thirty. She also looked small and defiant.

‘You were clearing Ben’s room this morning,’ Russell said gently. ‘No,’ Edie said.

He went over to the fridge and took out a bottle of Belgian beer. The boys would drink it straight out of the bottle. Russell went across the kitchen, behind Edie, to the cupboard where the glasses were kept.

He said, his back to her, ‘What were you doing then?’ ‘Nothing,’ Edie said. ‘Thinking’. Russell took a glass out of the cupboard. He said, his back still turned, holding the glass and the bottle, ‘They just do grow up. It’s what happens’. ‘Yes,’ Edie said. ‘It’s what’s meant to happen’.

‘Yes’.

Russell turned. He put down the glass and the bottle and came to stand behind her. ‘He’s doing what he wants to do’. Edie sliced through the pepper.

‘I know’. ‘You can’t—’

‘I know!’ Edie shouted. She flung the knife across the table.

Russell moved to retrieve it. He held it out to her.

‘Stop chucking things. It’s so childish’.

Edie took the knife and laid it down on the chopping board with elaborate care. Then she leaned on her hands and looked down into her salad.

‘I love Ben as much as you do,’ Russell said. ‘But he’s twenty-two. He’s a man. When I—’

‘Please don’t,’ Edie said.

‘I met you when I was twenty-two’.

‘Twenty-three’.

‘All right, then. Twenty-three. And you were twenty-one’.

‘Just,’ Edie said.

‘I seem to remember us thinking we were quite old enough to get married’.

Edie straightened up and folded her arms.

‘We’d left home. We wanted to leave home. I left home at seventeen’.

‘Ben didn’t’.

‘He liked it here, he loved it—’ ‘And now he loves Naomi’. Edie gave a little snort. Russell went back to his beer.

He said, pouring it, ‘This happens to everyone. Everyone with children. It started with Matt, remember. Matt left at twenty-two’.

Edie moved away from the table and leaned instead against the sink, staring out into the garden.

‘You just don’t think,’ she said, ‘that it’s going to end’.

‘God!’ Russell said. He tried a little yelp of laughter. ‘End! Does parenthood ever, ever end?’

Edie turned round and looked at the table.

‘If you want any lunch,’ she said, ‘you finish that’.

‘OK’.

‘I’m going out’.

‘Are you? Where are you going?’ ‘A film maybe. Sit in a café. Buy a forty-watt light bulb’.

‘Edie—’

She began to walk towards the door to the hall. ‘Better practise, hadn’t I? For the next chapter?’

Outside the shed, Russell made a pile of things to keep, a pile of things to throw away, and a pile to ask Edie about. He had made a cheese-and-pickle sandwich from the last of the white sliced loaf – there would presumably be no more of those, without Ben around to indulge with them – and had eaten it sitting in a mouldy Lloyd Loom chair that had belonged to his mother, in the pale April sunshine. He would also have added a newspaper or two if the sunshine hadn’t been qualified by a sharp breeze blowing intermittently through the gap between the semi-detached houses that backed on to his own. They were much grander houses than his – broad steps to the front doors, generous windows to the floor, gravelled car-parking spaces – in a much grander road, but they faced east, rather than west, so they got the wind before he did, and only early sun.

Edie wasn’t back. She had returned briefly to the kitchen, wearing a cast-off denim jacket of Rosa’s, and kissed his cheek. He had wanted to say something, to hold her for a moment, but had decided against it. Instead, he let her bump her face against his, fleetingly, and watched her go. The cat watched her too, from a place on the crowded dresser where he was not supposed to sit, next to the fruit bowl. When the front door slammed, the cat gave Russell a quick glance and then went back to washing. He waited half an hour after Russell went out to the garden and then he came out to see what was happening, stepping fastidiously over the damp grass. As soon as Russell left the Lloyd Loom chair, he leaped into it and sat there, watching, his tail curled trimly round his paws and his expression inscrutable.

He was really Ben’s cat. Ben had been the only one of their children who had longed for an animal, who had gone badgering on about everything from a hippo to a hamster until, on his tenth birthday, Russell had gone to a dingy pet shop somewhere in Finsbury Park, and come home with a tabby kitten in a wire basket. Ben called the kitten Arsenal, after his chosen football club, and remained indifferent to the implications of this being inevitably shortened to Arsie. Arsie was now twelve and as cool as a tulip.

‘Look,’ Russell said to Arsie, ‘Rosa’s tricycle. She loved that’.

Arsie looked unmoved. Rosa’s tricycle, once metallic lilac with a white plastic basket on the front, was now mostly rust.