Second Honeymoon Read Online Free PDF

It’s very nice of them, actually, even to agree to that’.
    The doorbell to the street door rang, a peculiar vibrating growl, which, like his carpet, he refused to let anyone change.
    ‘Sorry,’ Russell said, ‘but you’ve blown it’.
    ‘Oh!’ Maeve said into the intercom with pleasure. ‘Oh, it’s you! Come up!’
    Russell put his hand over the mouthpiece of his telephone. His heart had lifted a little.
    ‘Who, Maeve? Edie?’
    Maeve’s face appeared briefly round the door. ‘No,’ she mouthed, ‘Rosa’. Russell took his hand away.
    ‘Go away and think about it, Greg. Go away and think about how you are going to live until you are noticed by
    Anthony Minghella. Then we might have another conversation’. He took the telephone away from his ear, listened for a few more seconds to Gregory’s aggrieved voice, and replaced it softly on his desk.
    There were footsteps running up the last flight of stairs.
    He heard Maeve open the door.
    ‘Well, there’s a cheerful sight. What a wonderful colour,
nobody
but you—’
    ‘Nobody but me,’ Rosa said. ‘Anybody else would have had more sense and bought black’.
    ‘I’m sick to death of black,’ Maeve said. ‘Leave it to the beetles, I say—’
    Rosa appeared in the doorway of Russell’s office.
    ‘Dad?’
    He got up and leaned across the desk to kiss her.
    ‘Lovely surprise—’
    ‘Well,’ she said, ‘passing—’
    ‘At lunchtime’.
    ‘Well … Actually I’m not hungry’.
    ‘Even,’ Russell said, ‘if I’m paying?’
    She glanced down. Her shoulders drooped a little. Then she straightened up, shook her hair back and gave him a familiarly full-on smile.
    ‘That would be great. Because – well, because there’s something I’d like to ask you’.
    Russell looked at her over his reading spectacles.
    ‘Is there?’
    ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Please’. And then she smiled again,
    ‘Daddy’.
    *        *        *
    Rosa looked at her father’s plate. Hers was empty, but his still bore a good half of his order of gnocchi.
    She raised her fork, questioningly.
    ‘Can I?’
    Russell gave his plate a little nudge. ‘Help yourself’.
    Rosa speared two gnocchi and put them in her mouth.
    Then she said, round them, ‘I mean, I’m not worried about finding another job. And I’m not at all concerned by what Bill Moreton thinks of me. I know I was doing a good job. I know it’.
    ‘Hmm,’ Russell said. He had ordered a bottle of wine and was now wondering if Rosa’s share was giving her a fleeting and unreliable confidence.
    ‘It wasn’t as if I was earning a fortune there anyway,’ Rosa said, spearing more gnocchi. ‘Lots of my friends are earning well over twenty by now’.
    ‘Have you ever worked out,’ Russell said, ‘what you
need
to earn?’
    Rosa stopped chewing. She gave him a quick, direct look and dropped her gaze.
    ‘No’.
    ‘Don’t you think—’
    ‘Did you?’ Rosa demanded. ‘Did you? At my age?’ ‘I was married—’
    ‘So?’
    ‘Two incomes—’
    ‘And a baby’. Rosa gave a little snort. ‘I’d love a baby’.
    Russell picked his plate up and exchanged it for Rosa’s empty one. Rosa looked down. ‘I couldn’t eat all that—’
    ‘Rosa,’ Russell said, ‘I’ve listened to you. I’ve listened to you very patiently and I quite agree with you that Bill Moreton was a second-rate boss who behaved accordingly. But you’d been in that job eight months. He didn’t exactly owe you a pension and a gold watch’.
    Rosa said nothing. It seemed to her that she was behaving exactly as she always vowed she would never behave again when with a parent. She could hear in her voice an undertone of whining and cajoling that reminded her of raging nights, when she was seven, or nine, or eleven, and had prayed fervently to be an orphan. She swallowed hard, against the plaintiveness.
    ‘It’s a very nasty thing to have done to you,’ Russell said, visualising Edie listening to him, ‘especially