Joanna Trollope - Second Honeymoon

Ruth ripped the second sheet off the jotting pad and tore it across. She glanced at her email to Laura. What possibilities it opened up for Laura to implore her – or instruct her – not to let herself down. She ran the cursor up the screen to cancel the message.

‘Do you,’ her computer asked politely, ‘wish to save the changes to this message?’

‘No,’ Ruth clicked. She looked at Matthew, laughing on his tropical beach. ‘Sorry,’ she said.

She could see, from the pavement below their building, that Matthew was home before her. She could also see, from the way the light fell, which lamps he had switched on and, from that, what sort of ambience there would be when she reached the second floor and even what kind of atmosphere. Sometimes, she wished she didn’t notice so much. Sometimes, she thought how peaceful it would be to be someone who didn’t observe so minutely and deduce so analytically. It meant, as Matthew had sometimes affectionately pointed out, that she lived her life twice, exhaustingly, once in preview, once in actuality.

‘What will you do,’ he’d said, holding her, his face against hers, ‘with the three spare days at the end of your life that you’ve lived already?’

She put her key into the main door. The communal hallway, solidly decorated in the style of a decade earlier, contained only a small reproduction side table on which all the mail for the building was piled. Matthew would already have sifted through the pile for their own mail, but something in Ruth needed to recheck it, every time she came in. Her father had been the same, she told herself consolingly, perpetually reassuring himself that everything was in order, even down to counting the change from his trouser pockets every evening before piling the coins, in precise order of size, on the chest of drawers in her parents’ bedroom. No wonder, she thought now, forcing herself past the side table without pausing, that she’d chosen someone like Matthew, someone who’d come from a family who regarded orderliness as a sadly psychotic condition. Two people like her in one relationship would simply have fossilised in their own methodicalness.

She ran up the two flights of stairs to their landing. The front door was slightly open and there was the sound of music, some of the dance-rock stuff Matthew liked.

She pushed the door wider open.

‘Hi there!’

Matthew appeared from the bedroom, feet bare on the wooden floor, but still in the shirt and trousers of his business suit. He bent to kiss her.

‘I like it,’ she said, ‘when you’re back first’.

He straightened.

He said, ‘I haven’t done anything, though, except take my jacket off—’ ‘I didn’t mean—’ ‘I know,’ he said.

She went past him into the sitting room. ‘Any mail?’ ‘Only dull things’.

She picked up the envelopes and glanced back at him. ‘Good day?’

‘So-so’.

She put the envelopes down.

She said, ‘I thought I’d go to the gym—’

Matthew leaned against the sitting-room door frame.

‘I thought you might’.

‘Want to come?’

Matthew shifted his shoulder.

‘No thanks’.

‘Then I—’

‘Ruth,’ Matthew said.

She looked down at the envelopes. Notifications of payment by direct debit every one, evidence of system and organisation, evidence of knowing that vital energies should not be dissipated in muddle and inefficiency, evidence—

‘Ruth,’ Matthew said again.

She looked at him.

‘Sit down’.

‘What are you going to say—’

‘Sit down,’ Matthew said. ‘Please’.

Ruth moved to the leather sofa – joint purchase, half-price in a January sale, excellent value – and sat down, her knees together, her back straight, as if in a business meeting.

Matthew padded past her and sat down at her side. He took her nearest hand.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘this isn’t very easy to say—’ ‘Does it have to be now?’

‘Yes. There isn’t a right time or, if there is, it mightn’t occur for weeks and I have to say this thing, I have to tell you’.

She gripped his hand.

‘What?’

He said, looking at the floor, ‘I’m really sorry’.

‘Matt—’

‘I wish it wasn’t like this. I wish I could match you in everything. You’re quite right to want to buy the flat. You’re quite right to want to climb the property ladder and I’m sure you’re right about not leaving it any later. And it’s a great flat’. He stopped and gently took his hand away. ‘It’s just,’ he said, ‘that I can’t manage it. I’ve tried and tried to see how, but I can’t afford it. I can’t, actually, afford how we’re living now and I haven’t faced up to that. Until now. I’m having to, now, because I’m having to face the fact that I can’t even think about buying the flat on Bankside with you’. He looked up from the floor and gave her a small smile. ‘So if you want to go ahead, go ahead without me’.

‘Aren’t you going to get up?’ Kate said. She was dressed in a velour tracksuit and had pulled her hair back tightly so that she looked about thirteen and far too young to be pregnant.

‘No,’ Rosa said.

‘It’s twenty to eleven—’

‘Yesterday,’ Rosa said, ‘I went to four crappy interviews and was turned down at every one. This afternoon I have three more. This morning I have decided not to punish myself any more than life seems to be doing anyway’.

Kate kicked at a pile of clothes and bags on the floor.

‘You could clear all this up a bit—’

Rosa looked.

‘Yes, I could’.

‘You’d feel better if you didn’t keep telling yourself that life’s got it in for you’.

‘Shall I,’ Rosa said, sitting up in bed and pushing her hair back, ‘talk to you when you’re feeling less priggish?’

‘You know,’ Kate said, ‘none of this is very easy for me. I want to help you, I want to make things nice for Barney, I want to stop feeling so awful and start feeling pleased about this baby, but it doesn’t help, Rosa, if you lie in bed in all this mess having the mean reds and not even trying’.

There was a pause. Rosa twisted her hair into a rope and held it against the back of her head. ‘How do you know I’m not trying?’ Kate kicked at the bags again. ‘Look at this—’

‘No cupboards,’ Rosa said, ‘no drawers. Floor last resort. Floor it is’.

‘There’s floor and floor. There’s attempt-at-tidy floor or there’s throw-everything-about-like-a-sulky-teenager floor’.

Rosa let her hair go.

‘I can’t believe we’re having this conversation. This is like talking to my mother’.

‘Not your mother, surely—’

‘No. Quite right. Not my mother. Your mother’.

‘Don’t take your spite out on my mother—’

‘Oh Kate,’ Rosa said wearily, pushing back the duvet and swinging her legs slowly out of bed, ‘don’t let’s do this’.

‘Then tidy up,’ Kate said shrilly. ‘Stop abusing my hospitality and make an effort’.

Rosa stood up. She looked down at Kate.

‘What would you like me to do?’

‘I would like you,’ Kate said, ‘to clear up this room. I would like you not to put washing in the machine and then just leave it there. I would like you not to finish the milk or the yoghurt or the bananas and then not replace them’.

‘Do you know,’ Rosa said, ‘you were never like this when we were students. You didn’t, as I recall, give a stuff about washing or bananas’.

Kate sighed.

‘I was thinking about Rimbaud then. And Balzac. And the practicalities behind the traditions of courtly love’. ‘And Ed Moffat’.

‘Well, yes’.

‘Ed Moffat didn’t make you want to count bananas—’ ‘I didn’t marry Ed Moffat,’ Kate said. ‘I wasn’t obliged to

Ed Moffat’.

Rosa stooped for her clothes. ‘Does Barney mind about bananas?’ ‘He minds about me minding’. Rosa looked at her. ‘But why do you mind?’ Kate rubbed her eyes.

‘Because being married changes things. It puts you in a different place, somewhere where it just suddenly seems childish to live in a student mess’.

‘Childish’.

‘Yes,’ Kate said.

Rosa found a pair of blue lace knickers on the floor and stood on one leg to put them on.

‘I’ve had a flat, you know. I’ve bought milk and paid bills and taken washing out of machines. I’ve done all that’.

‘Then why—’

‘Because I’ve lost control of things,’ Rosa said. She pulled the knickers up under her nightshirt. ‘It’s all kind of got away for the moment, like something big and slippery, just sliding off the edge. I’d love, frankly, to be back in charge of my own fridge’.

There 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.