Joanna Trollope - Second Honeymoon

Edie moved Ben’s bed away from the wall in order to attack the gum marks left by his Kate Moss poster. There were several socks nesting furrily against the skirting board and a gold-coloured earring like a flower and a sticky teaspoon. She picked them up gingerly and flung them across the bed on to the carpet. Ben was buying new socks now, new socks and bedlinen and a screwdriver for this little flat he’d found in Walthamstow, two streets away from the flat Naomi shared with her mother. It wasn’t much of a place, he said, but it had a sitting room and a bedroom and he was going to paint it with the help of another photographer’s assistant and then he was going to lay siege to Naomi.

‘What do you mean, lay siege?’

‘I’m going to make it really nice and then I’m going to wait’.

‘Wait? For what?’

He’d been filling his rucksack with possessions from behind the sofa. ‘Wait for her to see’.

‘Will she?’

Ben spread out a faded black T-shirt with a skull printed on the front and then he tossed it on the floor. ‘Oh yes,’ he said.

‘D’you mean,’ Edie said, ‘that you’ll cook supper and light candles and buy flowers?’

Ben inspected another black T-shirt.

‘Might do’.

‘And if it doesn’t work?’

‘Then,’ Ben said, chucking the second T-shirt after the first, ‘I’ll still end up with my own gaff and I’ll think again’.

Edie began on the next batch of gum patches with her scourer. Ben wouldn’t let her see this flat of his any more than Rosa and Lazlo would let her see the one they’d found in Barons Court.

‘Barons Court!’ Edie had said. ‘But that’s the other side of London!’

‘It’s a very nice flat,’ Lazlo said seriously. He looked at Rosa. ‘Piccadilly Line’. Rosa looked at Edie. ‘Good for work’.

‘Oh yes,’ Lazlo said, ‘very good for work’.

‘But why can’t I see it?’

‘You can,’ Rosa said, ‘in time. When we’ve – done something about the bathroom’.

She looked at Lazlo. They both giggled. He said, ‘And the kitchen’. They giggled again.

Edie said, ‘I really don’t see why you have to be so secretive’.

‘Not secretive, Mum. Just private’.

‘They’re paying two hundred pounds a week,’ Edie said to Russell, ‘and Ben’s paying a hundred and twenty-five. How will they manage?’

‘We don’t ask them,’ Russell said, ‘and we don’t worry. Certainly not until this fails to sell’. He put a hand on the nearest wall. ‘Which it won’t because I am going to paint the front door’.

‘I really think,’ Matthew had said, surveying the house from the street, ‘that you should at least paint the front door’.

‘It’s always been that colour’.

‘It isn’t the colour,’ Matthew said patiently, ‘it’s the chips’.

‘But—’

‘Do it, Dad,’ Matthew said. ‘Just bite the bullet and do it. Like the damp in the downstairs loo’.

Matthew, Edie thought, aiming her scouring pad towards the bucket, and missing, was different. He was, in one way, back to the Matthew he had been when he first met Ruth, the Matthew who had kindly, if patronisingly, told his parents how much better their lives might be if only they followed his advice. But there were new elements now, as well, elements that were softer and more sympathetic, elements induced, it seemed, by his knowledge that he was going to be a father. He had, for example, gone, almost at once, to live with Ruth in the flat that had been such a bone of contention between them, in order, he said, to look after her.

‘But she isn’t ill,’ Edie said. ‘Pregnancy isn’t an illness. It’s a – well, it’s a very natural state of being but she isn’t an invalid’.

Matthew was standing by the kitchen table, dressed for work and drinking orange juice.

‘I want to look after her. I want to make sure she eats the right things and gets enough rest. I’m going to the doctor with her’.

‘Are you?’

Matthew drained his glass.

‘I’m going for every ultrasound. I’m going whenever I need to know what Ruth knows’.

He had left his room as if he had never been in it. In fact, he had left it so completely that in order to visualise him in it at all Edie had to remember all the way back to the serious-minded boy in gumboots who had so feared the leak in the roof that going up and down the staircase had been a real test of courage for him. That was the boy who was now proposing not only to devote himself to his girlfriend’s pregnancy but also to put his own career on hold when Ruth’s maternity leave was over in order to care for their child. He said it was his choice to do that, he said it was what he wanted.

‘Is it – is it what Ruth wants?’ ‘Of course’.

‘But I thought you couldn’t bear the flat—’

‘What I couldn’t bear,’ Matthew said, ‘was the situation. And then I could hardly bear what followed it. But now it’s changed. Everything’s changed. Everything’.

Edie looked at him.

‘Yes,’ she said faintly.

She sat down now, on the edge of Ben’s bed, and then she lay back and contemplated the ceiling. When she and Vivien were growing up, she had always prided herself on being like their father, a restless man who found any kind of routine not so much anathema as impossible. Vivien, of course, was like their mother, the kind of person who sees change as some malevolent plot deliberately devised to distress her. But look at Vivien now, staring into the wreckage of the fragile edifice she’d spent so much of her life patching and mending, and not, repeat not , falling to pieces. It was Vivien who, in between looking for flats in Fulham for herself -’Why shouldn’t I live further in? Who’s to stop me living exactly where I want?’ – was urging Edie to think of where she and Russell might live after the house was sold. ‘Why don’t you think about Clerkenwell? Or Little Venice? Why don’t you have an adventure?’ It was Vivien who had said to Edie, ‘Going on is hard, but going back would be a whole lot worse’.

Going back. Edie stretched her eyes wide and focused on a long, wavering crack in the plaster above her head. To think now how she had longed to go back, how fiercely she had told herself that all she wanted, all she was truly able to do, lay in what she had already done, in the way she had lived her life since they had moved into the house. But if she was completely truthful with herself and somebody, some fairy godmother, materialised out of the battered walls of Ben’s bedroom and offered her the chance to go back, she would have to make sure of where she was going back to. Not, now, to maternal supremacy, not, now, to that beguiling power of sustenance and control, that luxurious simplicity of society-approved choice: children first, everything else second. What she would have to say, slightly embarrassedly, to the fairy godmother, was that she would indeed like to go back, but not very far back, back in fact only as far as the first night of the production of Ghosts , when she had known that she had done something exceptionally well, and been applauded for it.

‘How odd,’ she’d say to the fairy godmother, ‘to have one hunger almost replaced by one so very different’.

‘Not replaced,’ the fairy godmother would reply, adjusting her gauzy skirts, ‘merely augmented by, added to. Nothing, you see, stands still’.

Russell had said that. He’d been shuffling through some property brochures that Vivien had zealously sent and he said, ‘I never thought we’d leave this house, I never thought I could, but now I wonder if I could stay. Nothing stands still, does it, and I suppose, if it did, we’d stop breathing. It’s not change that’s so painful, it’s just getting used to it’.