Joanna Trollope - Second Honeymoon

Edie sat up slowly. It actually wasn’t getting used to change that hurt, it was getting used to the truth, or whatever that element was that wasn’t the illusions you’d clung to and comforted yourself with for more years than you’d care to remember. And once you’d started doing without the illusions, you got braver, you could breathe the thinner air, take longer strides, allow yourself to make claims. And the claim I want to make, Edie thought, getting to her feet and moving towards the window again, is to work. I want to act again, I want to be on a stage or in front of a camera, and I mind very much indeed that nobody has asked me, since Ghosts .

She looked down the garden. Russell was standing outside the shed holding Rosa’s old fairy cycle. Russell had said she must keep the faith, that there would be other parts, that he would help her to change agents if she thought that would make a difference. She leaned her forehead against the glass of the window and stared at him. He had put the bike down now and was pulling out of the shed yards and yards of crumpled green plastic netting that they had once used in an attempt to stop the boys’ footballs flying over the fence into neighbouring gardens. He looked purposeful and determined and, at the same time, as if this task was far from easy. He looked like someone who was doing something he didn’t want to do in order to be able to move on to something better. He looked like the kind of person Edie was going to have to be when she ate all the hard words and thoughts she had uttered and believed in the past about his agency, and asked him for work to tide her over until – until something better came up.

‘I’ll do anything,’ she planned to say to him, ‘and I’ll do it properly,’ and he would give her a long look back and say with emphasis, ‘Yes, you will’.

She took her face away from the window and bent to pick up the bucket. She would go downstairs now, and make a mug of tea and carry the tea down the garden to Russell, and she would ask him, there and then – humbly and there and then – if he could help her. She looked back from the doorway, at Ben’s room. It was his bedroom but it was also the past and there was, suddenly, excitingly, frighteningly, no time like the present. Not, that is, if you wanted a future. Edie closed the door behind her, and trod carefully down the stairs.

‘“Perhaps,”‘ Lazlo constantly said to her as Osvald Alving, ‘“Perhaps there’ll be lots of things for me to be glad about – and to live for …”‘

Arsie was waiting at the foot of the stairs. He looked up as Edie passed him and made a small, interrogative remark.

Edie paused and bent to touch the top of his head with her free hand.

‘“Yes,”‘ she said, as Mrs Alving had always said. ‘“Yes, I’m sure there will.”‘