Free Second Honeymoon by Joanna Trollope Page B

was a small silence. Then Kate shuffled through the bags on the floor and put her arm round Rosa.
    ‘Sorry’.
    ‘Me too’.
    ‘But you see—’
    ‘Yes,’ Rosa said, ‘I see. Of course I see’.
    ‘I can’t share my life with you the way I once did—’
    ‘I know’.
    ‘But I want to be there for you—’ ‘Please,’ Rosa said, pulling off her nightshirt. ‘Please don’t say that’. ‘Why not?’
    ‘Because it’s such an awful, meaningless phrase’. ‘But Rose, I’m your friend, I want to—’ Rosa looked at her. ‘You are’.
    ‘What?’
    ‘Helping. You’ve given me a roof and a bed and I’m grateful. I am also sorry about the bananas’. She bent and picked up a black bra. ‘I will sort this room’.
    Kate watched her.
    ‘You’re so lucky,’ she said, ‘to have
normal-sized
breasts still. Seen mine?’
    *        *        *
    There had been no word from the director of
Ghosts
. From past experience, Edie knew that this meant she hadn’t got the part, but then, she told herself, she’d known that the moment she’d walked into the room for her casting and sensed the profound boredom her presence aroused. Just after the casting, she had been buoyed up by a kind of righteous indignation – how dare they be so rude, so dismissive, so unprofessional? – and then she had sunk slowly down, as she had done hundreds of times over the years, through disappointment and discouragement, to the kind of weary resignation that made her agent’s consoling platitudes sound more clichéd every time they were uttered.
    ‘They are a good outfit, Edie, they do pull off some marvellously fresh interpretations, but
every
one complains about the way they behave and I know really distinguished people, if you’ll forgive the comparison, dear, who’ve been simply treated like dirt and it just isn’t right or reasonable that they can fill theatres the way they do after treating people like that, but the fact is they do and that’s why I put you up in the first place because it would have been such a step up for you, but there we are.
Sorry
, dear,
sorry
. But don’t take it personally. We’ll get you there, promise. You’re just about right now for one of Shakespeare’s mad old queens. Don’t you think?’
    Yes, Edie thought, lying on Ben’s bed in the middle of a Thursday afternoon, still clasping the clean towels she’d been bringing upstairs to the airing cupboard when she had spied his bed through the open door of his room and been irresistibly drawn towards it, yes,mad certainly, and old any minute and why not a queen since being anything more realistic seemed to be, at the moment, out of the question? Why not point out, to the Royal Shakespeare Company, what they’d been missing in Edie Allen all these years and watch them throw crowns at her in an agony of remorseful recompense? Why not continue pretending that the world, as she knew it, hadn’t fallen to pieces and left her washed up somewhere alien and empty with no notion of how to proceed? Why not keep saying, as Russell kept saying, that this is a rite of passage that all mothers go through, and do not all go off their heads for ever in the process?
    Edie shut her eyes. It would be luxurious, in a way, to be truly off her head, to be so much in another place mentally and emotionally that any requirement to behave conventionally was neither demanded nor expected. The difficulty for her was that she could see how much easier it would be for Russell, for herself even, if she could slide seamlessly from one stage to another, from something almost all-consuming to something still supportive but more detached, but the trouble was that these states of mind and heart did not seem to be a matter of will but more a matter of chance. There were women who could manage to be both kind and somehow still cool; and there were fierce women, women whose feelings tossed them about like corks in a storm. If you were fierce, Edie thought, you