Second Honeymoon by Joanna Trollope Read Free Book Online

terror of being without a pair, without their simple reassurance. They seemed to be able to insulate him from fear, from the unknown, to protect him while still letting him see what lay ahead. When he finally had to trade them in for trainers, he’d known he’d never have such a straightforward mechanism for consolation ever again. And he’d been right.
    The lift doors slid open, revealing walls and floor made of stamped silvery metal. Matthew rode down to the ground floor with his eyes shut and emerged into the immense glass foyer that in turn gave on to a vast pale outdoor concourse where architectural trees planted in concrete drums blew stiffly about in the wind from the river. Matthew buttoned up his jacket to stop his tie whipping across his face, and plunged out towards the coffee shop on a distant corner. A large latte – a girl’s drink, but sometimes it offered just the right kind of unremarkable comfort – and half an hour nudging figures about would restore him, he was sure, to a place where anxiety resolved itself into being nothing more than a very temporary state of not quite understanding.
    He carried his tall white mug to a table by the window. Across the square, even though the river itself was hidden, he could see a huge, clear sweep of sky, hurrying spring sky full of racing clouds and the sharp white trails of aeroplanes. He had never liked weather much, had always seen its unpredictability as vaguely threatening, but it was a pleasure to look at from behind thesafety of glass, like looking at a turbulent painting, a Turner maybe, or a Goya, securely confined within a frame. He had once confessed to Ruth, in the early days when they were still entrancedly exploring one another, that he enjoyed the idea of the presence of chaos, somewhere out there, whirling away with all its arbitrary energies, but he couldn’t actually handle it if it came too close to him.
    ‘Oh, I know!’ she’d said, her eyes shining. ‘We couldn’t have a world without perfect control, but please may we be allowed to control our own bit of it, for ever and ever, Amen!’
    After Edie, Matthew could not believe Ruth’s sense of order: her make-up in perspex boxes, her T-shirts in piles of three, her papers filed in translucent plastic folders made meticulously – and cheaply – in Japan. There were no leftovers in her fridge, no scattered newspapers on her sofa, no jumble of tired shoes in the bottom of her cupboard. Ruth had been a business consultant when he met her, and was now, at thirty-two, a junior head hunter for a firm that specialised in finance directors. When they met, she was earning a third again as much as he was; now, her income was closer to twice his. For the sake of his dignity – undefined as a danger area, but well understood by both of them – they had shared everything as an equal financial commitment on both sides: rent, bills, entertainment, travel. To create flexibility within this equable arrangement, a further understanding grew up that if Ruth contributed more money (a cashmere sweater for Matthew, Eurostar tickets to seean exhibition in Paris), Matthew would repay, without being asked, in kind (replant the window boxes, breakfast for Ruth in bed). It was a system, Matthew thought, that had worked very well for two and a half years and that his parents would consider not just barmy, but over-controlled to a point of inhumanity.
    His parents’ opinion on most things was, in fact, something Matthew never sought. He loved them in a suspended, unexamined way, and while he found their way of life hopelessly dated, it was something that was as much part of them as their personalities. When he saw Ruth – these occasions were very seldom – seated at his parents’ kitchen table in her considered weekend clothes and forming such a contrast to the evolved disorder of her surroundings, he felt an unmistakable affection for the way he had been brought up, and a profound pride in the way he was