Second Honeymoon by Joanna Trollope

Author:Joanna Trollope [Trollope, Joanna]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: C429, Kat, Extratorrents
ISBN: 9780786288960
Publisher: Thorndike Press
Published: 2005-12-31T05:00:00+00:00

The evening paper had two columns advertising rooms and flats to let. They varied in monthly price by several hundred pounds and also in tone of advertisement, some being baldly commercial and some more haphazard, personal offers of flat sharing. Ben was certain that Naomi, even if she could be persuaded to leave her mother’s flat, would be adamant about not sharing any accommodation with anyone other than Ben. It had been an eye-opener for Ben, living with Naomi and her mother, to see the fierceness with which privacy and possessions were not just owned, but guarded. Naomi’s mother didn’t refer to ‘the’ kettle or ‘the’ bathroom: both were ‘my’. For Ben, growing up in a house where ownership of anything that wasn’t intensely personal seemed comfortably communal, this domestic demarcation and pride had been very surprising.

‘Feet off my coffee table,’ Naomi’s mother had said to him on his first evening. ‘And the way I like my toilet seat is down’.

Ben had felt little resentment about this. Faced with a rigidly organised kitchen and a tremendous expectation of conformity, he had, rather to his surprise, felt more an awed respect. Naomi’s mother spoke to him in exactly the same way that she spoke to Naomi after all, and as Naomi plainly thought her mother’s standards and requirements were as natural as breathing, Ben was, at least for a while, prepared to pick up his bath towel and replace the ironing board – ironing was a bit of a revelation – on its specially designated hooks behind the kitchen door. Only once, in his first few weeks, did he say to Naomi, watching her while she made an extremely neat cheese sandwich, ‘Has your mum always been like this?’

Naomi didn’t even glance at him.

She shook her long blonde hair back over her shoulders and said evenly, ‘It’s how she likes it’.

Living the way you liked, even Ben could see, was what you were entitled to if you owned a house or paid the rent. Indeed, one of the reasons he had left home, besides the consuming desire to spend the nights in the same bed as Naomi, was a strong, if unarticulated, understanding that he wanted to live in a way that didn’t coincide with the way his parents were living but, as it was their house, their entitlement in the matter came before his. Living with Naomi’s mother was, especially at the beginning, no problem at all because of Naomi herself and because her mother, for all her insistence on her own particular rule of law, was someone whose palpable industry and independence required – and got -Ben’s deference. In addition, and to Ben’s abiding and grateful amazement, she seemed to find his presence in her flat and her daughter’s bed perfectly natural. There hadn’t been a syllable uttered, or even implied, that Ben could construe as an enquiry about their relationship, let alone a criticism.

All this, for some time, made Ben amenable to making his large male presence in a small female flat as invisible as possible.

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