Second Honeymoon by Joanna Trollope Read Free Book Online Page B

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 overloyalty 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