No Place For a Man Read Online Free PDF

suppose I should say. Well not all the time. I just thought as it’s the two of us, and you might need cheering up now Oliver’sgone, well I thought we could treat ourselves. Still, if you’d rather not …’
    ‘No, it’s not that. It’s just … anyway they’ve never got room, you have to book ages ahead. We could just walk up the road to the Leo, the food’s not bad. Angie and I go there sometimes.’
    Matt laughed. ‘I’m surprised Angie comes out in daylight. Apart from going to the gym for a bit of pampering I always imagine she spends the days in a coffin waiting for nightfall. Does the woman have any kind of job?’
    ‘Not really. She says that if David can still afford to run her as well as his new wife there’s no point in taking employment from those who need it more. She does a bit of charity stuff.’
    ‘Charity stuff! Ladies’ lunches that nobody eats to raise a few quid for the starving millions.’
    Jess frowned. ‘Where’s this new cynicism come from all of a sudden? You’ve never talked like this before.’
    Matthew disappeared into the cloakroom and returned with his favourite crumpled navy linen jacket. ‘I’ve never been out of work before,’ he said.
    The Leone Rosso (translated from the old Red Lion after much council wrangling and known locally as the Leo) was always busy at lunchtimes. Ben and Micky, subject to occasional speculation as to whether they shared more than the Leo, had been joint landlords for the two years since the Red Lion pub’s frayed lino had finally been ripped away from the fine old floorboards beneath and the tattered beige anaglypta peeled from the walls and replaced by cerulean paint and flat plain mirror. The pair had done their best to select all the most useful bits of what the local clientele required ina place to eat and drink, and come up with a clever mixture of Italian restaurant, coffee shop, pub, wine bar and delicatessen. Those who worked in the area found it an excellent place to take clients – relaxed enough for friendly discussion but with food good enough for people to feel business was being taken seriously. This green and pleasant part of south-west London also teemed with self-employed creatives who liked to do their bit of mixing with humanity by popping out during the day for salami and melted Brie in a baguette with a glass of something red and fortifying. After a chat with Ben about the price of Parmesan, a browse through the Daily Mail (just to check on gossip) and a double espresso it didn’t seem quite so lonely returning to a solitary desk to wrestle with a complex film treatment, a plot-sluggish novel or the dreaded VAT.
    Matthew felt as if he was about to be debriefed. It was Jess who’d marched in first and chosen the table, at the back of the restaurant well away from the bar and remote enough from other occupied tables to put off casual acquaintances from drifting over to say hello.
    ‘I don’t want a stream of people coming up to you and saying “Don’t often see you in here,” and then expecting you to tell them why you are,’ Jess said firmly as she perused the menu. Matt didn’t need to be told that, and neither did Micky serving at the bar, who had merely nodded a brief greeting as Jess strode past, as if instinctively recognizing that this lunch had more purpose than the merely social.
    Matthew had been tempted to put on a humble face, touch his forelock and say, ‘No, Miss’ but thought better of it. There was too much of an air of thingswaiting to be said, though only by Jess. He, being almost deliriously happy with life as a newly liberated, Job-Free Man, had nothing to say, nothing at all. It was all he could do to stop his face cracking up into grins and laughter.
    ‘It’s not as if I’m never in here,’ he argued feebly, but then resigned himself to selecting food.
    ‘OK, penne Amatriciana for me,’ he said. ‘And shall we have a bottle of something? Just something light?’
    ‘After last