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Authors: Joanna Trollope
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looked back at the screen.
‘The thing is,’ she wrote, ‘that we have never had an I-have-this and you-have-that conversation. I suppose neither of us wanted to spell out the difference. And the difference hasn’t been a factor, really, up to now. We’ve managed rather well’. She paused. Laura was bound to challenge that. ‘Don’t ask why we didn’t sort it at the beginning. You know what beginnings are like. You don’tcare who earns what as long as you can be together and, by the time you start caring, it’s too late, the patterns of behaviour are in place’. She stopped and then she typed, ‘I love Matt’.
She lifted her hands off the keyboard and put them in her lap. Laura would tell her that everybody loved Matt, that Matt was the kind of thoughtful, decent, straightforward man who it would be perverse not to love. What Laura would also imply, from the current safety of her shiny new engaged situation, was that love might be about more than simply lovableness, it might include more stimulating elements like shared ambition and respect for professional achievement. She might also say – and she would be right – that Ruth and Matthew should have worked out this inequity early on in their relationship, that no amount of rapturous hand-holding on Devon beaches should have blinded Ruth to the fact that they had driven there in Ruth’s car, Matthew not possessing one, and were staying in the kind of hotel he quite candidly would not have considered.
It wasn’t, Ruth reflected, that he didn’t pay his way because he did, with sometimes almost painful eagerness, but she couldn’t help noticing that a tension about money had grown in him in the last year and, while she was genuinely sympathetic to that, she also felt that his concerns couldn’t take precedence over her ambitions, that what held him back shouldn’t hold her back too. If you made too many personal sacrifices, she and Laura had often agreed during late-night talking sessions with bottles of wine and Diana Krall on the stereo, you onlyended up resenting the person you’d made the sacrifices for. Those old words, like ‘duty’ and ‘honour’, belonged to the history books, to an ancient imperial vocabulary that didn’t belong in anyone’s hearts or minds any more. You couldn’t, as a woman, make yourself into someone lesser in order to accommodate a man’s weaknesses. You couldn’t agree not to want, not to strive for, a very desirable flat on Bankside because the man you were sharing your life with quite simply couldn’t afford to match your input. She picked up a ballpoint pen.
‘Does that mean,’ she wrote across her jotting pad, ‘that I don’t love him enough?’
She tore the page off the pad and screwed it into a ball.
‘Or,’ she wrote, ‘are my values so skewed that at this moment I almost want a flat more than a man? And why do I want this particular flat so much? What is it about
this
one?’
She looked across her desk. There was a photograph of Matthew there, in a black bamboo frame, taken on holiday in the Maldives, a holiday he had suggested and had then – she could see it – had anxieties about paying for. He looked quite without anxiety in the photograph. He was wearing a white T-shirt and a wide smile and his hair was ruffled against a sky as blue as delphiniums.
Ruth ripped the second sheet off the jotting pad and tore it across. She glanced at her email to Laura. What possibilities it opened up for Laura to implore her – or instruct her – not to let herself down. She ran the cursor up the screen to cancel the message.
‘Do you,’ her computer asked politely, ‘wish to save the changes to this message?’
‘No,’ Ruth clicked. She looked at Matthew, laughing on his tropical beach. ‘Sorry,’ she said.
She could see, from the pavement below their building, that Matthew was home before her. She could also see, from the way the light fell, which lamps he had switched on and, from that,
‘The thing is,’ she wrote, ‘that we have never had an I-have-this and you-have-that conversation. I suppose neither of us wanted to spell out the difference. And the difference hasn’t been a factor, really, up to now. We’ve managed rather well’. She paused. Laura was bound to challenge that. ‘Don’t ask why we didn’t sort it at the beginning. You know what beginnings are like. You don’tcare who earns what as long as you can be together and, by the time you start caring, it’s too late, the patterns of behaviour are in place’. She stopped and then she typed, ‘I love Matt’.
She lifted her hands off the keyboard and put them in her lap. Laura would tell her that everybody loved Matt, that Matt was the kind of thoughtful, decent, straightforward man who it would be perverse not to love. What Laura would also imply, from the current safety of her shiny new engaged situation, was that love might be about more than simply lovableness, it might include more stimulating elements like shared ambition and respect for professional achievement. She might also say – and she would be right – that Ruth and Matthew should have worked out this inequity early on in their relationship, that no amount of rapturous hand-holding on Devon beaches should have blinded Ruth to the fact that they had driven there in Ruth’s car, Matthew not possessing one, and were staying in the kind of hotel he quite candidly would not have considered.
It wasn’t, Ruth reflected, that he didn’t pay his way because he did, with sometimes almost painful eagerness, but she couldn’t help noticing that a tension about money had grown in him in the last year and, while she was genuinely sympathetic to that, she also felt that his concerns couldn’t take precedence over her ambitions, that what held him back shouldn’t hold her back too. If you made too many personal sacrifices, she and Laura had often agreed during late-night talking sessions with bottles of wine and Diana Krall on the stereo, you onlyended up resenting the person you’d made the sacrifices for. Those old words, like ‘duty’ and ‘honour’, belonged to the history books, to an ancient imperial vocabulary that didn’t belong in anyone’s hearts or minds any more. You couldn’t, as a woman, make yourself into someone lesser in order to accommodate a man’s weaknesses. You couldn’t agree not to want, not to strive for, a very desirable flat on Bankside because the man you were sharing your life with quite simply couldn’t afford to match your input. She picked up a ballpoint pen.
‘Does that mean,’ she wrote across her jotting pad, ‘that I don’t love him enough?’
She tore the page off the pad and screwed it into a ball.
‘Or,’ she wrote, ‘are my values so skewed that at this moment I almost want a flat more than a man? And why do I want this particular flat so much? What is it about
this
one?’
She looked across her desk. There was a photograph of Matthew there, in a black bamboo frame, taken on holiday in the Maldives, a holiday he had suggested and had then – she could see it – had anxieties about paying for. He looked quite without anxiety in the photograph. He was wearing a white T-shirt and a wide smile and his hair was ruffled against a sky as blue as delphiniums.
Ruth ripped the second sheet off the jotting pad and tore it across. She glanced at her email to Laura. What possibilities it opened up for Laura to implore her – or instruct her – not to let herself down. She ran the cursor up the screen to cancel the message.
‘Do you,’ her computer asked politely, ‘wish to save the changes to this message?’
‘No,’ Ruth clicked. She looked at Matthew, laughing on his tropical beach. ‘Sorry,’ she said.
She could see, from the pavement below their building, that Matthew was home before her. She could also see, from the way the light fell, which lamps he had switched on and, from that,
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