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of fact. Wouldn’t let me sympathise, really. I said come back home—’ ‘I bet you did—’
    ‘And she said no, no, she was fine, she’d got friends who were helping’. Edie paused, and then she said, ‘I do find that hard. Friends, not family’.
    ‘Friends are the new family’.
    ‘Sometimes I wonder why I bother to turn to you for consolation’.
    ‘I know,’ Vivi said. ‘I won’t do drama, will I? I won’t do it because, compared to mine, your life isn’t drama. Speaking of which—’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘What
about
drama? What about work?’ Edie sighed.
    ‘Nothing much. I must be turned down twenty times for every part I get. There’s a casting for an Ibsen next week—’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘Mrs Alving. In
Ghosts
. I won’t get it’.
‘Edie
. Why not?’
    ‘Because I won’t. Because I can’t
feel
about it at the moment. Because I’m all jangled up and raw—’ ‘And cross with Russell for being romantic’.
    ‘Yes’.
    ‘Edie,’ Vivi said, ‘I’ll ring you again when you have the manners, never mind the empathy, to remember to ask me a single question about
me’.
    Edie sat down at the kitchen table now and made space for her elbows among the papers. It was not like her, she told herself, to be so hopeless, to feel herself drifting, to be miserable and – Ben’s favourite word when he was small – grumpy. He’d say stressy, now, Edie thought, if he was still seven, and Rosa was eleven and Matt was thirteen, and there were still school mornings, with their inevitable chaos of uneaten things and forgotten things and unbrushed things. She’d imagined those times were timeless somehow, that either they would never end, or that she would change, gradually and peacefully, as they changed, so that she would be ready for the difference, ready to face a new chapter, ready, even, to confront herself.
    She brought her hands up to her face and held it. That was the problem, really, that was the element that was proving so difficult, this business of knowing how toarrange oneself. For years, almost thirty of them, she had known what she was for, what she was supposed to do. Sure, she’d been passionate about the theatre at school – still couldn’t, with complete equanimity, replay those scenes with her parents in which she had insisted on applying for drama school rather than university -passionate enough to appear unmoved at being turned down by the National Youth Theatre, and to persist until she gained a place at RADA. But, if she was honest, it had all been a bit sketchy since: stints in regional repertory companies, stand-in presenter on children’s television, advertisements, short runs in strange plays in tiny theatres. Nothing – nothing to boast about exactly.
    ‘I’m a jobbing actress,’ she’d said for years, holding a child, carrying groceries, clutching dirty bedlinen. ‘I’m up for anything. As long as it’ll fit round the children’.
    Secure in the essentialness of motherhood, she’d even, she recalled, been able to lecture herself. There’ll come a time, she’d told herself, when you’ll have to identify yourself
without
your children. They will simply shed you, like a snakeskin, and your support for them will become a need, your need. Motherhood, she’d declared grandly, will not be a proud, public banner any more, but a quiet, private admission. Rosa will take motherhood over and you, Edie, will have to submit to her supremacy. Well, the time had now come. And, like most anticipated things, the reality did not match the imagining. Rosa was years away in both circumstances and ambition from having a baby, and she, Edie, was as unprepared to surrender positive support for negativeneed as she possibly could be. Motherhood had been such a solace, had acceptably papered over so many cracks, had given her, if she was honest, such a seemly excuse for not risking failure or disappointment or loss of confidence, that she could not for the moment think what she was going to