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do, without it.
    She took her hands away from her face and laid them in front of her, palms down on the table. On top of the pile about two feet away lay the copy of Ibsen’s plays that Russell had brought down from the bookcase on the first-floor landing when he heard about the casting for
Ghosts
, the student copy that she had had at RADA, full of her energetic underlinings. Ibsen had been obsessed by the past. He’d written once that ‘we sail with a corpse in the cargo’. Ibsen was, Edie decided, the very last thing she needed at the moment. She picked up a copy of the
Islington Gazette
that was lying close to her elbow, and covered the book with it. Out of sight: out of troubled mind.
    Holding a telephone between his hunched shoulder and his ear, Matthew Boyd was writing down some information.
    ‘Open plan. Interior walls of glass brick. View of Tate Modern and Millennium Bridge. Four hundred thou -wow,’ Matthew said. ‘Four hundred thousand?’
    ‘That was what Ruth told me,’ the agent said.
    Matthew made a face. What was an estate agent, who hardly knew her, doing calling Ruth Ruth? He said, ‘I don’t think—’ and the agent said, ‘Admittedly,top whack. But she said she could consider that if the place was right’.
    ‘She—’
    ‘And the value of lofts in Bankside have almost tripled since the mid-nineties’.
    Matthew drew an angry line under his jottings. He and Ruth had not, as far as he could remember – and he was good at remembering – discussed Bankside. They had discussed Docklands and Hoxton and Clerkenwell, but not Bankside. Bankside was much more central and therefore much more expensive. The budget – putative, but shared, obviously – had been three hundred. Tops. Matthew added teeth to his line.
    ‘I’ve made an appointment for Ruth to see it,’ the agent said.
    ‘You—’
    ‘She asked for Saturday morning, so this is a courtesy call’.
    ‘A—’
    ‘Saturday morning at ten-thirty. It’s about three hundred square metres, by the way. Shall I tell Ruth or will you?’
    Matthew wrote ‘Sod off’ in capital letters above the teeth.
    ‘I will,’ he said, and rang off.
    He dropped the phone on his desk and shoved his chair back so violently that it cannoned into Blaise’s desk behind him. Blaise was on the telephone, handsfree. He put his hand over the mouthpiece.
    ‘Oy!’
    Matthew stood up. He mouthed ‘Sorry’ in Blaise’s direction. Then he bent over his desk and retrieved his phone. Ruth’s was the first number in his speed-dial address book.
    ‘Hello,’ her voicemail said, cool and friendly. ‘This is Ruth Munro’s telephone. I’m away from my desk just now so please leave me a message’.
    ‘Ring me,’ Matthew said. He took a breath. ‘Please, I mean. Please ring me’.
    He dropped the phone in his pocket and turned to make coffee-drinking gestures at Blaise. Blaise nodded. Matthew went quickly across the office, threading his way between the grey plastic desks, and made for the lifts. They had all, as usual, collected on the top floor. He made a face at himself in the brass panel that lined the wall between the lifts.
    ‘Cross,’ Ruth had said to him at the weekend, tapping away at her laptop and not looking up. ‘You look so cross’.
    He looked at himself now, stretched and blobbed by the soft reflections in the brass. Cross might be how he looked: frightened was how he felt. And frightened was how he had always hated feeling, ever since those first unnerving nights in that new ramshackle house when he was a child and they expected him to sleep, knowing that there were holes in the roof, real holes through which anything might swoop, anything clawed and fanged and malevolent. His gumboots, Matthew remembered, had been his salvation. Solid and reassuring and rubber, he had worn them in the uncarpeted house all day for years,and slept with them by his bed. When they began to cramp his toes, he would pester Edie for new ones, so great was the