Free Second Honeymoon by Joanna Trollope Page A

and I haven’t faced up to that. Until now. I’m having to, now, because I’m having to face the fact that I can’t even think about buying the flat on Bankside with you’. He looked up from the floor and gave her a small smile. ‘So if you want to go ahead, go ahead without me’.

Chapter Five
    ‘Aren’t you going to get up?’ Kate said. She was dressed in a velour tracksuit and had pulled her hair back tightly so that she looked about thirteen and far too young to be pregnant.
    ‘No,’ Rosa said.
    ‘It’s twenty to eleven—’
    ‘Yesterday,’ Rosa said, ‘I went to four crappy interviews and was turned down at every one. This afternoon I have three more. This morning I have decided not to punish myself any more than life seems to be doing anyway’.
    Kate kicked at a pile of clothes and bags on the floor.
    ‘You could clear all this up a bit—’
    Rosa looked.
    ‘Yes, I could’.
    ‘You’d feel better if you didn’t keep telling yourself that life’s got it in for you’.
    ‘Shall I,’ Rosa said, sitting up in bed and pushing her hair back, ‘talk to you when you’re feeling less priggish?’
    ‘You know,’ Kate said, ‘none of this is very easy forme. I want to help you, I want to make things nice for Barney, I want to stop feeling so awful and start feeling pleased about this baby, but it doesn’t
help
, Rosa, if you lie in bed in all this mess having the mean reds and not even
trying’.
    There was a pause. Rosa twisted her hair into a rope and held it against the back of her head. ‘How do you know I’m not trying?’ Kate kicked at the bags again. ‘Look at this—’
    ‘No cupboards,’ Rosa said, ‘no drawers. Floor last resort. Floor it is’.
    ‘There’s floor and floor. There’s attempt-at-tidy floor or there’s throw-everything-about-like-a-sulky-teenager floor’.
    Rosa let her hair go.
    ‘I can’t believe we’re having this conversation. This is like talking to my
mother’.
    ‘Not your mother, surely—’
    ‘No. Quite right. Not my mother.
Your
mother’.
    ‘Don’t take your spite out on my mother—’
    ‘Oh Kate,’ Rosa said wearily, pushing back the duvet and swinging her legs slowly out of bed, ‘don’t let’s do this’.
    ‘Then tidy
up,’
Kate said shrilly. ‘Stop abusing my hospitality and make an
effort’.
    Rosa stood up. She looked down at Kate.
    ‘What would you like me to do?’
    ‘I would like you,’ Kate said, ‘to clear up this room. I would like you not to put washing in the machine andthen just leave it there. I would like you not to finish the milk or the yoghurt or the bananas and then not replace them’.
    ‘Do you know,’ Rosa said, ‘you were never like this when we were students. You didn’t, as I recall, give a stuff about washing or bananas’.
    Kate sighed.
    ‘I was thinking about Rimbaud then. And Balzac. And the practicalities behind the traditions of courtly love’. ‘And Ed Moffat’.
    ‘Well, yes’.
    ‘Ed Moffat didn’t make you want to count bananas—’ ‘I didn’t marry Ed Moffat,’ Kate said. ‘I wasn’t
obliged
to
    Ed Moffat’.
    Rosa stooped for her clothes. ‘Does Barney mind about bananas?’ ‘He minds about me minding’. Rosa looked at her. ‘But
why
do you mind?’ Kate rubbed her eyes.
    ‘Because being married changes things. It puts you in a different place, somewhere where it just suddenly seems childish to live in a student mess’.
    ‘Childish’.
    ‘Yes,’ Kate said.
    Rosa found a pair of blue lace knickers on the floor and stood on one leg to put them on.
    ‘I’ve had a flat, you know. I’ve bought milk and paid bills and taken washing out of machines. I’ve done all that’.
    ‘Then why—’
    ‘Because I’ve lost control of things,’ Rosa said. She pulled the knickers up under her nightshirt. ‘It’s all kind of got away for the moment, like something big and slippery, just sliding off the edge. I’d love, frankly, to be back in charge of my own fridge’.
    There