Joanna Trollope - Second Honeymoon

He gave a little intake of breath.

He said again, ‘Are you sure?’

‘Sure, sure’.

‘It’s just,’ he said, ‘that I owe her so much. Helping me, sheltering me—’

‘She was there when you needed her’. Rosa took her hand away and picked up her knife again. ‘And vice versa’.

Lazlo said nothing. He put a mouthful of pizza into his mouth and chewed.

Then he said, ‘Why did you come this afternoon?’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘to look at you’.

‘You’d seen me’.

‘To look at you without any distractions’.

‘I’m not very good at this,’ Lazlo said, ‘but – but what did you see?’

She leaned back and folded her arms. Her hair was very preoccupying.

She said slowly, ‘Enough. I saw enough to give me courage’.

Lazlo put down his knife and fork. He had the anxious, excited sensation he’d had several times recently, that some outside force was going to come bowling into his life and make changes for him, the kind of changes he knew he didn’t have much capacity for making on his own.

Rosa said, leaning back, watching him, ‘You’re moving out’.

Lazlo nodded.

He said, ‘I must. There’s no room. I feel awful, Ben sleeping on the sofa—’ ‘Where are you going?’ Lazlo looked at his plate.

‘I’ve started looking for a flat. Just a small one. The money will be better in television—’ ‘I’ll come with you,’ Rosa said. He felt his face flame up. ‘Come with me!’

‘Yes’.

He said clumsily, ‘I – I don’t know you—’

Rosa unfolded her arms and leaned forward. She put her elbows on the table and propped her chin on her hands.

‘Yes, you do’.

‘But I—’

‘Lazlo,’ Rosa said, ‘you know me. You’re just so much in the habit of thinking of yourself as an outsider that you don’t believe you know anyone’.

He raised his eyes very slowly and looked at her.

‘You are suggesting we live together?’

‘Yes’. ‘But—’

‘Live together,’ Rosa said, ‘as in live together. Not sleep together’. She paused and then she said lightly, ‘Necessarily’.

‘I wasn’t expecting this,’ Lazlo said. ‘I couldn’t even have imagined this. You are offering to share a flat with me?’

‘Yes’. ‘Why?’

Rosa said seriously, ‘Because I must move out and on too. Because I need the motivation to get a better job. Because I can’t afford to live on my own yet. Because I don’t want to live with another girl who’s a sort of duplicate of me. Because I like you’.

He felt his skin scorch again.

‘Do you?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘I don’t quite know what I—’

‘Don’t bother,’ Rosa said. ‘Don’t try and say anything. Or feel it, for that matter. Just think about what I’ve said’. She looked at his plate. ‘That pizza will be revolting cold’.

Russell was half turned away from Edie in bed, half asleep, when she clutched him.

‘Russell—’

Her fingers were digging into his shoulder, into his upper arm. His mind came dragging back from the soft dark place it was falling into.

‘Edie? Edie, what is it?’

He twisted himself back towards her and she shoved her face against him.

She said, almost into his skin, ‘We’re not going in’.

He extracted his arms from the folds of the duvet and put them awkwardly round her.

‘Edie love, you knew that—’

‘We’re not going in,’ Edie said again in a harsh, tearful whisper. ‘The play’s not transferring. It’s all over’. Russell adjusted his hold.

He said gently, ‘You knew that. You knew Freddie wasn’t really trying to find a theatre, you knew that was all talk. You’ve known that for weeks’.

‘I’ve only just realised it,’ Edie said. ‘I don’t want this to end. I don’t want this play to be over’.

‘There’ll be other parts—’

‘No, there won’t. This was freak luck. Freddie’s taking Lazlo with him to do this Italian detective thing and he never mentioned it to me’.

‘Perhaps there’s no part in this cast for you—’

‘I thought,’ Edie said, ‘I’d be in the West End. I thought I’d have my name—’ She stopped.

Russell said, ‘And I thought you were so tired and fed up you just wanted it all to stop’.

Edie said nothing. She moved her face slightly so that her cheek lay against his chest.

He waited a few moments and then he said, ‘You’ve loved this run, haven’t you? You’ve loved being on stage’. Edie nodded.

Then she said in a whisper, ‘I’m so afraid of it stopping’.

‘It’s not the last’.

‘You don’t know— ’

‘No, but I have a pretty good hunch’.

He felt her face move as if she was looking up at him.

‘Do you?’

‘Yes,’ Russell said.

‘Do you really think I’m any good?’

‘Yes,’ Russell said, ‘and so do other people’.

‘But not Freddie Cass’.

‘Yes, he does. But there’s a part for Lazlo in his new project and not a part for you’.

‘Really?’

‘Really’.

‘I don’t think,’ Edie said, laying her cheek back against him, ‘I don’t think I could bear it if I couldn’t work again’.

Russell let a small silence fall, and then he said comfortably, ‘And I’m sure you won’t have to bear anything of the kind’.

‘I don’t feel at all certain about that—’

He said nothing. He moved slightly, to free up an arm, and then he yawned into the dimness above Edie’s head. From somewhere above them, the floorboards creaked.

Edie stiffened.

She said, in quite a different voice, ‘There’s something going on between Rosa and Lazlo’.

‘Is there?’

‘Yes, definitely’.

He felt another yawn beginning. He said, round it, ‘Does it matter?’ Edie said vigorously, ‘I don’t like it, Russell. I really don’t. Not here. Not in my house’.

‘Ah’.

‘I mean, if you take people in, take people back, it’s only fair, isn’t it, to expect a little—’ She stopped and then she said sadly, ‘I don’t mean that’.

‘I thought you didn’t. I hoped you didn’t’.

‘I didn’t’.

‘What did you mean then?’

She said, in the same dejected voice, ‘It all feels so fragile’.

‘What does?’

‘What they’re doing, both of them so uncertain, so without a proper planned future—’

‘Don’t you think,’ Russell said sleepily, ‘that we looked just as fragile in our day? That dismal flat, all those babies, me earning three thousand a year if I was lucky?’

‘Maybe—’

‘I think we did. In fact I’m sure we did. I expect our parents – mine certainly – had a version of exactly this conversation’.

‘Russell?’ ‘Yes’.

‘I just wanted,’ Edie said, ‘to keep everything safe. I just wanted to make everything all right for all of them. I wanted to be back in control of things—’

‘I know’.

‘And I can’t’.

Russell moved his head a little and gave Edie a brief kiss.

‘I know,’ he said again.

The trouble was, Ben reflected, that he hadn’t thought things through. He had supposed, rather vaguely, that he would go back to a few weeks of his old life – unexciting but familiar and easy – and then he would take up, in an unspecified but attractive way, his new life with Naomi. It had not occurred to him, in trying to get what he wanted while causing as little upheaval as possible, that all the wrinkles wouldn’t somehow just iron themselves out of their own accord. It had not really crossed his mind that Naomi meant exactly what she said when she told him she needed space to think, and that space included hardly being in touch with him at all beyond a few text messages of the kind you might send to any old common or garden friend. And it had certainly never struck him that ambling back home, even without his father’s full blessing, would prove to be anything but easy or familiar.