‘I’ll do anything,’ she planned to say to him, ‘and I’ll do it properly,’ and he would give her a long look back and say with emphasis, ‘Yes, you will’.
She took her face away from the window and bent to pick up the bucket. She would go downstairs now, and make a mug of tea and carry the tea down the garden to Russell, and she would ask him, there and then – humbly and there and then – if he could help her. She looked back from the doorway, at Ben’s room. It was his bedroom but it was also the past and there was, suddenly, excitingly, frighteningly, no time like the present. Not, that is, if you wanted a future. Edie closed the door behind her, and trod carefully down the stairs.
‘“Perhaps,”‘ Lazlo constantly said to her as Osvald Alving, ‘“Perhaps there’ll be lots of things for me to be glad about – and to live for …”‘
Arsie was waiting at the foot of the stairs. He looked up as Edie passed him and made a small, interrogative remark.
Edie paused and bent to touch the top of his head with her free hand.
‘“Yes,”‘ she said, as Mrs Alving had always said. ‘“Yes, I’m sure there will.”‘
Joanna Trollope has been writing for over thirty years. Her enormously successful contemporary works of fiction, several of which have been televised, include; The Choir; A Village Affair; A Passionate Man and The Rector’s Wife, which was her first #1 bestseller, and made her into a household name. Since then she has written The Men and the Girls; A Spanish Lover; The Best of Friends; Next of Kin; Other People’s Children; Marrying the Mistress; Girl from the South; Brother and Sister and Second Honeymoon. Her latest novel is Friday Nights. Trollope has also written Britannia’s Daughters, a non-fiction study of women in the British Empire, as well as a number of historical novels now published under the name Caroline Harvey. Joanna was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1996 for services to literature.
Visit her website at: www.joannatrollope.com
VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2010
Copyright © 2006 Joanna Trollope
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by
any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and
retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except
by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of
Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2010. First published in Canada in 2006 by
McArthur & Company, Toronto. Distributed by Random House of Canada
Limited, Toronto.
Vintage Canada with colophon is a registered trademark.
www.randomhouse.ca
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents
either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales
is entirely coincidental.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Trollope, Joanna
Second honeymoon / Joanna Trollope.
eISBN: 978-0-307-37386-1
I. Title
PR6070.R57S42 2010 823’.914 C2009-904964-3
v3.0
Table of Contents
Cover
Other Books By This Author
Title Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Copyright
Second Honeymoon Page 30