The lift doors slid open, revealing walls and floor made of stamped silvery metal. Matthew rode down to the ground floor with his eyes shut and emerged into the immense glass foyer that in turn gave on to a vast pale outdoor concourse where architectural trees planted in concrete drums blew stiffly about in the wind from the river. Matthew buttoned up his jacket to stop his tie whipping across his face, and plunged out towards the coffee shop on a distant corner. A large latte – a girl’s drink, but sometimes it offered just the right kind of unremarkable comfort – and half an hour nudging figures about would restore him, he was sure, to a place where anxiety resolved itself into being nothing more than a very temporary state of not quite understanding.

He carried his tall white mug to a table by the window. Across the square, even though the river itself was hidden, he could see a huge, clear sweep of sky, hurrying spring sky full of racing clouds and the sharp white trails of aeroplanes. He had never liked weather much, had always seen its unpredictability as vaguely threatening, but it was a pleasure to look at from behind the safety of glass, like looking at a turbulent painting, a Turner maybe, or a Goya, securely confined within a frame. He had once confessed to Ruth, in the early days when they were still entrancedly exploring one another, that he enjoyed the idea of the presence of chaos, somewhere out there, whirling away with all its arbitrary energies, but he couldn’t actually handle it if it came too close to him.

‘Oh, I know!’ she’d said, her eyes shining. ‘We couldn’t have a world without perfect control, but please may we be allowed to control our own bit of it, for ever and ever, Amen!’

After Edie, Matthew could not believe Ruth’s sense of order: her make-up in perspex boxes, her T-shirts in piles of three, her papers filed in translucent plastic folders made meticulously – and cheaply – in Japan. There were no leftovers in her fridge, no scattered newspapers on her sofa, no jumble of tired shoes in the bottom of her cupboard. Ruth had been a business consultant when he met her, and was now, at thirty-two, a junior head hunter for a firm that specialised in finance directors. When they met, she was earning a third again as much as he was; now, her income was closer to twice his. For the sake of his dignity – undefined as a danger area, but well understood by both of them – they had shared everything as an equal financial commitment on both sides: rent, bills, entertainment, travel. To create flexibility within this equable arrangement, a further understanding grew up that if Ruth contributed more money (a cashmere sweater for Matthew, Eurostar tickets to see an exhibition in Paris), Matthew would repay, without being asked, in kind (replant the window boxes, breakfast for Ruth in bed). It was a system, Matthew thought, that had worked very well for two and a half years and that his parents would consider not just barmy, but over-controlled to a point of inhumanity.

His parents’ opinion on most things was, in fact, something Matthew never sought. He loved them in a suspended, unexamined way, and while he found their way of life hopelessly dated, it was something that was as much part of them as their personalities. When he saw Ruth – these occasions were very seldom – seated at his parents’ kitchen table in her considered weekend clothes and forming such a contrast to the evolved disorder of her surroundings, he felt an unmistakable affection for the way he had been brought up, and a profound pride in the way he was living now. It was made easier, of course, by the fact that Edie and Ruth liked each other, that each fulfilled the expectations of how the other should be.

‘Ghastly cat,’ Edie would say, snatching Arsie off Ruth’s black cashmere.

‘Bliss,’ Ruth would say, sinking into one of the deep, battered armchairs in the sitting room, full of the kind of food she would never buy herself. ‘Instant destress’.

Periodically, Matthew would urge his parents to mend the house, update their wills, reconsider their futures. Encouraged by the success of persuading his father to specialise more, he had hoped to nudge his mother towards more commitment to work and thereby – though he bore his brother no grudge – detach her from the long, long nurturing of Ben. He was actually slightly congratulating himself on the success – or rather, lack of fireworks – in initial conversations with Edie about how life might be after Ben, when Ben confounded them all by announcing he was off to live with a girl none of them really knew, in her mother’s flat in Walthamstow. When told this news by Matthew, Ruth said, ‘Heavens. Where’s Walthamstow?’

Matthew was, he supposed, glad of Ben’s initiative. But it had been impulsively done and had left all kinds of ragged ends behind, which Matthew was only just beginning to collect his thoughts about when Ruth announced, quite suddenly, that it was time they were thinking of buying somewhere to live.

‘Actually,’ she said, ‘it’s not just time. It’s overdue. I should have bought five years ago’.

Matthew was in the middle of assembling a flatpack cabinet to house the television and DVD player. At the moment Ruth spoke, he was counting the screws supplied for the door hinges, and hoping that there would be sixteen as promised and not fifteen as seemed likely.

He said stupidly, ‘You didn’t know me five years ago’.

‘I’m not talking relationships,’ Ruth said. She was sorting her gym kit. ‘I’m talking property investment’.

Matthew looked down at the screws in his hand. It would be so bloody annoying to have to go shopping for one single screw. His father, of course, would have screws of every type, mostly paint-stained and kept unsorted in old coffee jars, but at least he would have them.

‘Matt?’

‘Yes’.

‘Did you hear me?’

‘Yes. You need four screws a hinge for this and they have given me fifteen’.

Ruth put the gym kit down and came across to where Matthew was standing. She put her hand into his and scooped up the screws.

‘Just concentrate on what I’m saying’.

He looked at her.

‘It’s time we bought a flat of our own,’ Ruth said.

That was a week ago. One week. In the course of that week they had talked endlessly about the subject and Ruth had given Matthew a number of things to read. One of these was a newspaper article that asserted that there were now over three hundred thousand professional young women working in the City with liquid assets of at least two hundred thousand pounds each.

‘I’m not there yet,’ Ruth said, ‘but I’m getting there. It’s time to start buying property for the long term’.

Holding his latte mug in both hands and gazing over it now at the flying clouds, Matthew knew she was right. What Ruth was proposing was not only shrewd and sensible but also indicated, from her use of the word ‘we’ in so many of these conversations, that she saw their future as something that they would unquestionably do together. All that, her rightness, her evident commitment, should have heartened him, should have enabled him to catch her enthusiasm for this great step she was proposing, and fling himself into the process with the eagerness that she clearly – naturally even -expected to match hers. And he would have, if he could. He longed to be able to seize upon this project as the exciting next stage of their relationship. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t because – he shut his eyes and took a swallow of coffee – he couldn’t afford it.

He had been over the figures twenty times. He had rearranged them, looked at them in the short term and in the long term, and come to a point that there was no escaping from, a point that made it plain, in black and white, that in order to match Ruth’s present expenditure in their lives and therefore preserve the fragile equilibrium of modern partnership, every penny he earned was already committed. He was not, baldly, in a position to finance any borrowing whatever, and such assets as he had were so small by comparison with Ruth’s that they were hardly worth mentioning. What crowned it all was that Ruth had little or no idea of how stretched he was for the simple reason that he had preferred her not to know. And as a result, here she was proposing to embark on something she assumed, because she had no reason not to, that he could comfortably join her in.

He glanced over his shoulder. The coffee shop was filling up, filling with people in his kind of suit, his kind of haircut. They looked, as people always looked when you yourself felt out of step with humanity, painfully secure and confident. Money should not be like this, Matthew told himself, swirling the tepid last inch of his coffee round the mug, money should not dictate or stifle or divide, money should never take precedence over loyalty or love. He gave a huge sigh and thumped the coffee mug down. Money should simply not matter this much. But the trouble was, it did.


‘I would have paid,’ Rosa said. ‘I wasn’t suggesting I go home for free. I was going to offer to pay but he never gave me the chance’.

Ben, lighting a cigarette, said indistinctly, ‘I give Naomi’s mum fifty quid a week’.

‘Do you?’

‘She pays all the bills. Says she’d rather have it that way’.

Rosa examined her brother. He looked – well, more sorted, somehow, even in the dim lighting of a pub, less flung together.

She said, ‘She also plainly likes ironing—’

‘Nope’.

‘Well, you look distinctly less scruffy’. Ben drew on his cigarette and said, with elaborate modesty, ‘I iron’. Rosa gaped.

‘Didn’t know you knew how’. He grinned, not looking at her. ‘Lot of things you don’t know’. ‘Clearly’. Rosa picked up her drink. ‘So you’re now playing happy families with Naomi’s mum’.

‘Hardly ever see her. She’s a caller at the bingo hall’. ‘I thought she worked in a supermarket’. ‘She does. And cleans offices’. ‘Heavens. Poor woman’.

Ben glanced at her.

‘No, she isn’t. She likes it. She says she likes being independent’. Rosa flushed. ‘Thanks a—’

‘Don’t patronise Naomi’s mum, then’. ‘I wasn’t—’

‘Your voice was,’ Ben said. ‘Your tone’. ‘Sorry’.

‘And I’m sorry about Dad. What’s going on?’ ‘I think,’ Rosa said, taking a swallow of vodka, ‘that he doesn’t want any competition for Mum’s attention’. Ben gave a snort.

‘I only meant for a few months,’ Rosa said. ‘Till the summer. September at the latest. I’d pay rent, I’d be out all the time, I’d feed the cat—’

‘I kind of miss the cat’.

‘I was just assuming in my naïve way that home is home until you have one of your own’. Ben blew smoke out in a soft plume. ‘Have you told Matt?’ ‘No point’.

‘Why?’

‘Because he and Ruth are thinking of buying a trendy loft’.

‘Room for you then’.

‘No thank you,’ Rosa said. ‘Ruth is great but she’s so organised and professional that I don’t feel I could begin to lay the mess of my life out in front of her’.

‘She might clear it up’.

Rosa made a face. ‘Pride,’ she said.

‘So,’ Ben said, holding his beer bottle poised, ‘What are you going to do?’ ‘Not sure’.

‘Have you asked Mum?’

Rosa looked full at him, as was her wont when skimping on the truth.

‘I can’t. I can’t be turned down by Dad and go straight to Mum’.

Ben grinned again.

‘Why not? You always used to’.

‘No,’ Rosa said, ‘I got turned down by Mum and went straight to Dad’.

Ben tilted his beer bottle.

‘Mum’d have you back’.

‘How do you know?’

‘Just do’.

‘Ben,’ Rosa said again, ‘I can’t’. He shrugged.

Rosa said slowly, ‘Kate said I could stay there’. ‘Fine, then’.

‘Well, no, not really. She’s pregnant and they’ve only been married five months and Barney’s lovely, really lovely, but he wants Kate to himself, he doesn’t want—’

‘Just like Dad,’ Ben said. He looked at the clock over the bar. ‘Gotta go, Rose. Meeting Naomi’.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Catch a movie, maybe. Don’t know’.

He bent sideways and retrieved from a canvas bag at his feet a black knitted hat, which he jammed down well over his hairline.

‘You look like a peanut,’ Rosa said. ‘That hat does nothing for you’.

Ben upended his beer bottle.

‘Naomi thinks it’s cool’.

He slid off his bar stool.

‘Hope things work out, Rose’.

‘Thanks’.

He winked.

‘You’ll find another job’. ‘And a flat. And a man’.

Ben leaned forward and grazed her cheek with his unshaven one.