Second Honeymoon by Joanna Trollope Read Free Book Online Page A

living now. It was made easier, of course, by the fact that Edie and Ruth liked each other, that each fulfilled the expectations of how the other should be.
    ‘Ghastly cat,’ Edie would say, snatching Arsie off Ruth’s black cashmere.
    ‘Bliss,’ Ruth would say, sinking into one of the deep, battered armchairs in the sitting room, full of the kind of food she would never buy herself. ‘Instant destress’.
    Periodically, Matthew would urge his parents to mend the house, update their wills, reconsider their futures. Encouraged by the success of persuading his father to specialise more, he had hoped to nudge his mother towards more commitment to work and thereby – thoughhe bore his brother no grudge – detach her from the long, long nurturing of Ben. He was actually slightly congratulating himself on the success – or rather, lack of fireworks – in initial conversations with Edie about how life might be after Ben, when Ben confounded them all by announcing he was off to live with a girl none of them really knew, in her mother’s flat in Walthamstow. When told this news by Matthew, Ruth said, ‘Heavens. Where’s Walthamstow?’
    Matthew was, he supposed, glad of Ben’s initiative. But it had been impulsively done and had left all kinds of ragged ends behind, which Matthew was only just beginning to collect his thoughts about when Ruth announced, quite suddenly, that it was time they were thinking of buying somewhere to live.
    ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘it’s not just time. It’s overdue. I should have bought five years ago’.
    Matthew was in the middle of assembling a flatpack cabinet to house the television and DVD player. At the moment Ruth spoke, he was counting the screws supplied for the door hinges, and hoping that there would be sixteen as promised and not fifteen as seemed likely.
    He said stupidly, ‘You didn’t know me five years ago’.
    ‘I’m not talking relationships,’ Ruth said. She was sorting her gym kit. ‘I’m talking property investment’.
    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 processwith 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