Joanna Trollope - Second Honeymoon

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?’

‘Max says,’ Vivien said, staring towards the window, ‘that he can’t afford it’. ‘Excuse me—’ ‘Please don’t’. ‘Don’t what?’

‘Don’t,’ Vivien said, ‘encourage me to think what I’m thinking’.

‘But he sold his flat!’

‘I know’.

‘And it was a big flat—’

‘I know, Edie. I know, don’t go on about it, don’t—’

‘Oh Vivi,’ Edie said, in a different tone, ‘oh, I’m sorry’.

‘It’s nothing. It’s just a trip’. She looked up again at the chiffon dress. ‘Nothing else,’ she said loudly, ‘to worry about’.

‘You sure?’

‘Oh yes. He’s very contrite. You can tell a really sorry man, can’t you?’

From downstairs came the two-beat tone of the doorbell.

‘Damn,’ Vivien said, sitting up. ‘Someone at the door’. ‘Ring me back, if you need to. I’m here till six—’ ‘I thought you had a headache?’ ‘It’s going,’ Edie said, ‘it’s really going. Vivi, what can I do—’

Vivien stood up and pushed her feet into her shoes.

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Thanks, but nothing. Nothing needs doing. It’s all fine’.

Outside the front door, a man from the local florist’s was waiting. In his arms he carried a bouquet of red roses, wrapped in cellophane, the size of a large baby.

He grinned at Vivien over the roses.

‘Afternoon!’ he said. ‘The lucky lady, I presume?’

Rosa had ordered a salad. It came with a ring of bread balls circling the rim of the plate, and Rosa had picked these off and piled them neatly on her side plate and pushed the plate away from her.

Lazlo paused in cutting up his pizza and eyed them.

‘Aren’t you going to eat those?’

Rosa shook her head. She had taken off whatever had been holding her hair back, and it was loose on her shoulders.

She glanced, smiling, at his pizza.

‘Isn’t that enough?’

He looked mournfully at his plate.

‘It’s never enough’.

She pushed the bread balls towards him. ‘Feel free’.

He said, in a rush, helping himself, ‘You were in the theatre this afternoon, weren’t you?’

There was a tiny beat and then Rosa said, ‘Yes. I was’.

Without looking at her, he said, ‘To see if I could cope without your mother there?’

She selected an olive from her salad and looked at it. Then she put it back.

‘I didn’t think of that’.

‘Didn’t you?’

‘No,’ she said, glancing at him, ‘I didn’t. And you could’.

He directed a small smile towards his plate.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I could, couldn’t I? I did wonder a bit. I hoped—’ He paused.

‘You hoped you could swim without your armbands’.

‘Yes,’ he said. He looked straight at her. ‘I did. Is that—’ He stopped.

‘No,’ Rosa said. ‘No. She’d want that, too. She’d want that for you’.

Lazlo cleared his throat.

‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘I’ve – well, I’ve got another part’.

‘Oh!’

‘In television,’ he said. ‘A six-parter. I’ve got quite a big role. I’m – well, I’m sort of second lead’. Rosa leaned forward. ‘This is wonderful’. ‘Do you think so?’

‘Of course it is,’ she said. ‘Of course it is! And you deserve it’.

‘Well—’

Rosa put down her knife and laid a hand on Lazlo’s wrist.

‘Mum will say the same. Mum will be thrilled’.

‘Are you sure? It’s Freddie Cass directing again. He -well, I hardly had to do a casting, it was just a formality. It seems a bit sneaky, it feels like I’m doing something behind her back, but I’m not really in a position to turn good work down’.

‘Stop it,’ Rosa said.