Free Second Honeymoon by Joanna Trollope

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 everyevening 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