Joanna Trollope - Second Honeymoon

Matthew looked down at the screws in his hand. It would be so bloody annoying to have to go shopping for one single screw. His father, of course, would have screws of every type, mostly paint-stained and kept unsorted in old coffee jars, but at least he would have them.

‘Matt?’

‘Yes’.

‘Did you hear me?’

‘Yes. You need four screws a hinge for this and they have given me fifteen’.

Ruth put the gym kit down and came across to where Matthew was standing. She put her hand into his and scooped up the screws.

‘Just concentrate on what I’m saying’.

He looked at her.

‘It’s time we bought a flat of our own,’ Ruth said.

That was a week ago. One week. In the course of that week they had talked endlessly about the subject and Ruth had given Matthew a number of things to read. One of these was a newspaper article that asserted that there were now over three hundred thousand professional young women working in the City with liquid assets of at least two hundred thousand pounds each.

‘I’m not there yet,’ Ruth said, ‘but I’m getting there. It’s time to start buying property for the long term’.

Holding his latte mug in both hands and gazing over it now at the flying clouds, Matthew knew she was right. What Ruth was proposing was not only shrewd and sensible but also indicated, from her use of the word ‘we’ in so many of these conversations, that she saw their future as something that they would unquestionably do together. All that, her rightness, her evident commitment, should have heartened him, should have enabled him to catch her enthusiasm for this great step she was proposing, and fling himself into the process with the eagerness that she clearly – naturally even -expected to match hers. And he would have, if he could. He longed to be able to seize upon this project as the exciting next stage of their relationship. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t because – he shut his eyes and took a swallow of coffee – he couldn’t afford it.

He had been over the figures twenty times. He had rearranged them, looked at them in the short term and in the long term, and come to a point that there was no escaping from, a point that made it plain, in black and white, that in order to match Ruth’s present expenditure in their lives and therefore preserve the fragile equilibrium of modern partnership, every penny he earned was already committed. He was not, baldly, in a position to finance any borrowing whatever, and such assets as he had were so small by comparison with Ruth’s that they were hardly worth mentioning. What crowned it all was that Ruth had little or no idea of how stretched he was for the simple reason that he had preferred her not to know. And as a result, here she was proposing to embark on something she assumed, because she had no reason not to, that he could comfortably join her in.

He glanced over his shoulder. The coffee shop was filling up, filling with people in his kind of suit, his kind of haircut. They looked, as people always looked when you yourself felt out of step with humanity, painfully secure and confident. Money should not be like this, Matthew told himself, swirling the tepid last inch of his coffee round the mug, money should not dictate or stifle or divide, money should never take precedence over loyalty or love. He gave a huge sigh and thumped the coffee mug down. Money should simply not matter this much. But the trouble was, it did.

‘I would have paid,’ Rosa said. ‘I wasn’t suggesting I go home for free. I was going to offer to pay but he never gave me the chance’.

Ben, lighting a cigarette, said indistinctly, ‘I give Naomi’s mum fifty quid a week’.

‘Do you?’

‘She pays all the bills. Says she’d rather have it that way’.

Rosa examined her brother. He looked – well, more sorted, somehow, even in the dim lighting of a pub, less flung together.

She said, ‘She also plainly likes ironing—’

‘Nope’.

‘Well, you look distinctly less scruffy’. Ben drew on his cigarette and said, with elaborate modesty, ‘I iron’. Rosa gaped.

‘Didn’t know you knew how’. He grinned, not looking at her. ‘Lot of things you don’t know’. ‘Clearly’. Rosa picked up her drink. ‘So you’re now playing happy families with Naomi’s mum’.

‘Hardly ever see her. She’s a caller at the bingo hall’. ‘I thought she worked in a supermarket’. ‘She does. And cleans offices’. ‘Heavens. Poor woman’.

Ben glanced at her.

‘No, she isn’t. She likes it. She says she likes being independent’. Rosa flushed. ‘Thanks a—’

‘Don’t patronise Naomi’s mum, then’. ‘I wasn’t—’

‘Your voice was,’ Ben said. ‘Your tone’. ‘Sorry’.

‘And I’m sorry about Dad. What’s going on?’ ‘I think,’ Rosa said, taking a swallow of vodka, ‘that he doesn’t want any competition for Mum’s attention’. Ben gave a snort.

‘I only meant for a few months,’ Rosa said. ‘Till the summer. September at the latest. I’d pay rent, I’d be out all the time, I’d feed the cat—’

‘I kind of miss the cat’.

‘I was just assuming in my naïve way that home is home until you have one of your own’. Ben blew smoke out in a soft plume. ‘Have you told Matt?’ ‘No point’.

‘Why?’

‘Because he and Ruth are thinking of buying a trendy loft’.

‘Room for you then’.

‘No thank you,’ Rosa said. ‘Ruth is great but she’s so organised and professional that I don’t feel I could begin to lay the mess of my life out in front of her’.

‘She might clear it up’.

Rosa made a face. ‘Pride,’ she said.

‘So,’ Ben said, holding his beer bottle poised, ‘What are you going to do?’ ‘Not sure’.

‘Have you asked Mum?’

Rosa looked full at him, as was her wont when skimping on the truth.

‘I can’t. I can’t be turned down by Dad and go straight to Mum’.

Ben grinned again.

‘Why not? You always used to’.

‘No,’ Rosa said, ‘I got turned down by Mum and went straight to Dad’.

Ben tilted his beer bottle.

‘Mum’d have you back’.

‘How do you know?’

‘Just do’.

‘Ben,’ Rosa said again, ‘I can’t’. He shrugged.

Rosa said slowly, ‘Kate said I could stay there’. ‘Fine, then’.

‘Well, no, not really. She’s pregnant and they’ve only been married five months and Barney’s lovely, really lovely, but he wants Kate to himself, he doesn’t want—’

‘Just like Dad,’ Ben said. He looked at the clock over the bar. ‘Gotta go, Rose. Meeting Naomi’.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Catch a movie, maybe. Don’t know’.

He bent sideways and retrieved from a canvas bag at his feet a black knitted hat, which he jammed down well over his hairline.

‘You look like a peanut,’ Rosa said. ‘That hat does nothing for you’.

Ben upended his beer bottle.

‘Naomi thinks it’s cool’.

He slid off his bar stool.

‘Hope things work out, Rose’.

‘Thanks’.

He winked.

‘You’ll find another job’. ‘And a flat. And a man’.

Ben leaned forward and grazed her cheek with his unshaven one.

He said, in an Irish accent, ‘Keep the faith,’ and then he shouldered his bag and pushed his way through the happy-hour drinkers to the door.

Rosa looked down at her own drink. Before seven o’clock, if you paid for one, you got the next one free. Two vodkas might provide her with enough brief courage to ring Katie and ask if, after all, for just a short while and paying rent of course, she might sleep in the tiny room beside the front door that Barney was intending to decorate ready for the baby. She raised a hand and signalled, smiling, at the barman.

Vivien Marshall worked part-time in a bookshop. She would have liked to have worked more, but if she did her husband, Max, from whom she had been separated for four years, might notice and stop paying her the maintenance that he was perfectly entitled not to pay now that Eliot really had left home definitively, and gone to Australia. It wasn’t the money in itself that Vivien wanted, useful though it was in maintaining the cottage in Richmond, and the car, but the contact it provided with Max. When he had suggested that they separate – she had known it was coming but had chosen to shut her eyes to it, like someone in an impending car crash – she had agreed in order to prevent him reacting to any objection by insisting that they divorce.

Vivien did not want to divorce Max. She didn’t even, maddening and undependable as he had always been, much want to be separated from him. Not only was he Eliot’s father but he was also, for Vivien, an exciting and energising presence whose absence had rather drained the colour out of things, particularly other men.

‘You’d think,’ she said to Alison who managed the bookshop, ‘that you’d be thankful not to live on tenterhooks any more, whatever tenterhooks are. But actually, I rather miss them’.

Alison, who was not attracted to men of Max’s type who wore leather and denim well into middle age, said she thought they had something to do with stretched damp cloth in the dyeing trade.

‘What do?’ Vivien said.

Alison sighed. Max might not, as a type, be to her taste but there were times when she felt a sympathy for him. Vivien was someone who couldn’t help, it seemed, being a permanent small test of patience.

‘Tenterhooks,’ Alison said, and put her glasses on.

Vivien went back to dusting. When Alison had offered her the job, years ago when Eliot was still young enough to let her kiss him at the school gates, she had made it very plain that bookselling was not a white-handed occupation involving delightful literary conversations with cultivated customers.