An Unsuitable Match

by Joanna Trollope

  ‘Not from what Emmy said. Emmy told me you had all been summoned to meet him. At a hotel.’

  Laura said nothing.

  ‘Laura?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Did you hear me?’

  ‘Dad,’ Laura said. ‘Just let Mum do her own thing, would you?’

  ‘Of course,’ William replied. ‘I wouldn’t be telling you any of this if Em hadn’t sounded so concerned.’

  ‘Well, you know Em . . .’

  ‘She and Nat have found a solicitor to advise on the situation, and I just wanted to say that I know someone—’

  ‘No, Dad.’

  ‘Laura—’

  ‘Listen,’ Laura said again, stretching out for her glasses, which were on the low cupboard beside her bed. ‘You know how Emmy is. You know how Nat is too, about Mum. They just want to make sure—’

  ‘Suppose they’re right?’ William demanded. ‘Suppose this man of your mother’s sees a vulnerable woman with a very nice central London property and—’

  ‘He’s a nice man,’ Laura said.

  ‘How can you tell, on the strength of one meeting?’

  Laura put her glasses on. She took a deep breath.

  ‘Don’t you think,’ she said to her father, half a world away, ‘that whatever Mum does or doesn’t do is really no concern of yours?’

  There was a silence and then William said, in a hurt tone, ‘Laura.’

  ‘Em shouldn’t have rung you. She’s got me and Nat to talk to, if she’s worried.’

  There were sudden rapid small footsteps on the stairs, coming up, accompanied by babble – Jack and Adam, with blessed timing. Laura smiled into the phone. ‘Dad, I can hear the boys. They’ll be two seconds. Wouldn’t you like to talk to them?’

  *

  Sundays, Emmy thought to herself, were supposed to be for relaxing. Constructive relaxing. Ideally, according to the conformity laid down by social media, Sundays started with a lie-in, followed by a leisurely brunch somewhere with friends, and perhaps a cycle ride along the Regent’s Canal, followed by an evening on the sofa with a box set of a Nordic noir drama, all bridges across the Baltic and snowflake sweaters. That is, if you were in the mood. And you had a boyfriend, someone – she couldn’t picture more than his outline – called Matt or Andy, who had a good job somewhere and was very attentive and supportive – but not clingy – and could cook, and perhaps played rugby, but who never left wet towels on the bed or cut his toenails in front of the television. Someone that Nat liked. Someone to whom she could say, ‘Am I making too big a deal out of this whole Mum thing?’ and who would say seriously, in return, ‘It is a big deal, Em, and you are quite right to be worried, but I have a brilliant idea about how to distract you.’

  Which might mean taking her out to do something unexpected, or making love to her, or spoiling her in some imaginative domestic way – whatever it was, Emmy thought, would be not just fantastic in itself, but would also deflect her from her intense, almost obsessive preoccupation with her family.

  It wasn’t, she thought, either right or fair to be so influenced by what was going on with her mother. She had never really – apart for the odd and largely manufactured teenage tantrum – had any problem with her mother. Rose had always been a reasonable mother, a mother who might sometimes be firm, but who was invariably fair. And who was always, always on her side. Emmy remembered being sent to detention once, at school, for something she hadn’t done, and Rose just . . . sorted it. She had come to the school and been very charming to the teacher who had given Emmy the undeserved detention, and very charming to the real culprit, and the upshot was there was a private moment in which the teacher said sorry to Emmy in front of Rose, and all three of them were smiling. Rose wouldn’t let Emmy talk about it later. She wouldn’t even talk about it herself. She simply said, ‘It’s over, darling, over,’ and Emmy, who was thirteen at the time and poised to see injustice erupting everywhere, had felt nothing but admiration. Which was what she felt when her father told them that he was leaving both the family and the country to live and work in Australia with Gillian Greenhalgh, and Rose had not uttered a syllable of condemnation or vengefulness in her children’s hearing. She had been, all Emmy’s life, someone she could trust.

  Until now. Seven years on from William’s announcement and all its complicated fall-out, managed by Rose with familiar fortitude and application, and . . . this happens. The person of the greatest stability and reliable sustenance in Emmy’s life had abruptly morphed into someone she hardly recognized, a capricious, erratic person whose emotional priorities seemed to have been scattered to the four winds, as if – as if, Emmy thought, she was like some teenage kid whose head had been completely turned by flattery.

  ‘She’s too old for this!’ Emmy had cried to Laura.

  Laura was sending an email with one hand and feeding banana slices to Adam with the other. ‘No one ever is,’ she replied annoyingly.

  ‘That’s why,’ Nat said later in the pub, looking at his iPad, ‘I want to get a solicitor in place. If she’s gone a bit bonkers, I want to make sure at least her assets are safe. I can’t control her heart, much though I’d like to, but I can at least look after the nuts and bolts.’

  He’d tried to make an appointment with a solicitor in a firm in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. He’d told Emmy that the firm specialized in wills and the protection of assets, and that he would accompany Rose.

  ‘Can I come too?’ Emmy said.

  Nat looked at her appraisingly. ‘Of course,’ he replied.

  It had crossed Emmy’s mind to say, ‘You don’t think Mum will mind, do you? If we both come?’ but she had quelled the thought. Even if Rose minded, she reflected now, fidgeting round her studio flat with irritable Sunday apathy, she would have to put up with it. Being accompanied to see a solicitor by two of her three children, who were only concerned for her and her future, was not oppressive, Emmy told herself, but supportive. She paused in front of a mirror and inspected her teeth. Maybe what was wrong with her wasn’t Sunday, or the lack of a mythically satisfactory boyfriend, but the abrupt reversal of roles; the very fact that her mother had become, apparently, the feckless child and she, Emmy, the responsible adult. Perhaps that accounted for her malaise. It was, now it had occurred to her, an illuminating thought. Surely that reversal of roles, happening almost overnight, was enough to send the most balanced person into a tailspin. Wasn’t it?

  *

  ‘No,’ Rose said.

  She wasn’t smiling. Nat waited for her to add ‘I’m sorry’ to the ‘no’, but she didn’t. She picked up the cappuccino she had ordered in the City coffee shop and took a neatly managed mouthful of foam, then she put the cup down again and regarded it. Not Nat, but her coffee cup.

  He glanced at his watch. He had ten minutes left before his official lunch hour was up. Rose had not wanted lunch, so Nat had eaten a crayfish and rocket wrap with his Americano on his own and explained, through mouthfuls, that he had found a solicitor who specialized in exactly Rose’s situation, and he would like to make an appointment to see her whenever her and Rose’s and his and Emmy’s diaries could be co-ordinated. Rose did not demur about the principle of seeing a solicitor. She didn’t say anything helpful and accommodating like ‘Of course, darling, how very thoughtful and caring of you to think of it,’ but she didn’t object, either. She said instead, ‘If you children really, really think that it’s necessary.’

  And Nat had nodded vigorously around his mouthful of crayfish. As soon as he could speak clearly, he said, ‘Mum, I do. We all do. I’ve talked to the girls, and we are unanimous.’

  Rose gave a little sigh. ‘I’ve no wish at all to be difficult. Or . . . or silly.’

  ‘Good,’ Nat said firmly. He took a pull at his bottle of water. ‘That’s great. So I’ll make an appointment some time next week for you and me and Emmy to go and see this Grace Ashton woman—’

  ‘No,’ Rose said with emphasis.

  ‘But you just said—’

/>   ‘I said I agreed to see a solicitor. But I’m not going to be frogmarched in by you and Emmy as if I were a – a prisoner. Like someone who has done something wrong that needs to be punished.’

  ‘Mum, we need to be there, we need to know what the legal position is, over protection of your assets, we need—’

  ‘You need,’ Rose said, raising her eyes to look at him. ‘I don’t need. I might permit, but I don’t need you to be there as if I were too old and gaga to be able to understand how not to be exploited.’

  ‘Mum, please,’ Nat said wearily.

  Rose said nothing. She wasn’t looking mulish, he admitted, but unquestionably removed, as if the urgency of his position was a matter of indifference to her. After what felt to him an unnatural length of time, she said, ‘I’ve got several things to say. Could you please not interrupt me until I’ve said them?’

  He nodded. Time was ticking on, but the delicacy of the negotiation was going to have to take priority. Rose picked up the teaspoon in her saucer and scooped up a small cushion of milk foam.

  ‘I expect it was very naive of me to think you would all see something of what I see in Tyler straight away, but I really did not consider how antagonistic you and Emmy would be. No, don’t interrupt. You agreed to hear me out, and I have hardly started. So – it was an unsuccessful first meeting and I imagine I am partly to blame in being so idiotically hopeful that you would understand both what I see and appreciate in him. But – there we are. Monday night happened and it was as it was. I was very upset by Monday night, very, and I owe it almost entirely to Tyler’s generosity and good nature that I’m not upset still. I rang him at two in the morning and he came at once and – this is important, Nat – he understood far better than I did how you and Emmy, especially, felt about meeting him. He was completely generous, Nat. Completely. In fact, he said that if you hadn’t been protective of me, he would have been surprised and distressed himself.’

  She paused, lifted the spoonful of foam to her mouth. Then she put the spoon back on the saucer precisely. Nat opened his mouth, and Rose raised a hand to silence him.

  ‘In a minute, darling. In a minute. So, because of Tyler’s understanding and general forgiving nature, I am prepared to see a solicitor. I don’t want to, I don’t like having you dictate to me this way, but I will. But I’m not going with both of you as if I’m not of sound enough mind to go on my own. Laura isn’t insisting on coming too, is she? If you and Emmy want to come, why shouldn’t Laura come too, so that all three of you can sit round me like guard dogs?’

  Nat looked at his watch again. ‘Laura doesn’t want to come. But I do and Em does. We want to come – oh God, Mum, I’m so sick of saying this – not because of us and some agenda you insist we have, but because of you. We want to be there because we care about you, we want to look after you. Mum, I’ve got to go.’

  ‘Of course,’ Rose said politely. She didn’t move.

  Nat slid off his stool and stood up. He looked down at her and said, in the tone of one addressing a tiresome and recalcitrant child, ‘I’ll make an appointment, then. For you and me and Emmy.’

  Rose stood too, and gathered up her bag and umbrella. ‘Just you and me, darling. Just the two of us. Or Emmy and me. I don’t mind which of you it is, but I’m only going with one of you.’ She straightened up and smiled at him. ‘I think that’s called a compromise, isn’t it?’

  *

  Prue came to London in order to see her sister. As was her wont, she did not telephone ahead to make arrangements that suited them both, rather she announced her own plans and was, as she had managed to be all Rose’s life, curiously difficult not to obey. William had always found Rose’s compliance with her sister’s instructions completely incomprehensible. Rose herself said that she could see how it looked, but that try as she might, she was weirdly unable to do other than submit. So, although she had made her usual token resistance to Prue’s imposition of herself for a night at the mews – ‘Don’t go to any trouble for me, Rosie, an omelette is all I’ll want for supper’ – she had given in.

  Tyler said, ‘Of course you should see your sister. I look forward to meeting her.’ He had then waited for Rose to say how eager she was herself for such a meeting, how keen her sister would be to meet the first man of real significance in Rose’s life since William, but she didn’t. Instead, she gave him a swift kiss, an almost placatory kiss, and said, ‘All in good time. Or, at least, in Prue’s good time,’ and then added, to head him off before he even uttered the question, ‘Not this time. I need to talk to her alone. Next time perhaps.’ He glanced at the photograph of Prue that Rose kept in what she called the Family Gallery, in her sitting room. Prue was on the Isle of Skye in the photograph, on a walking holiday, pausing with both hands clasped on top of a thumb stick, stoutly booted with wind-ruffled hair. She looked formidable.

  She arrived within five minutes of the time she had informed Rose to expect her, wearing a new nylon backpack which she said was an innovation in her life, and very successful so far. From it, she extracted a jar of her homemade chutney – ‘Such a glut of green tomatoes last year’ – and a cult Italian novel – ‘I know how narrowly you read, Rosie, unless pushed’ – and then looked round Rose’s sitting room in search of criticizable changes.

  ‘Actually,’ she said in mildly surprised tones, ‘it looks charming.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Well,’ Prue said, ‘I did wonder if the advent of Mr Masson in your life might have had a palpable influence.’

  ‘He isn’t that kind of man,’ Rose said firmly. ‘He doesn’t want me to be different. That’s what’s such a relief, Prue. He just wants me to be as I am. That’s what he likes.’

  ‘Ah,’ Prue said. She lowered herself into an armchair and crossed her legs, thrusting one foot in the air for Rose’s inspection. It was clad in a large grey trainer with a blindingly white sole and fluorescent orange laces. ‘My newest find. Indecently comfortable. Nine ninety-nine in the market. What do you think?’

  ‘Honestly?’

  ‘Honestly.’

  ‘I think they’re practical but hideous.’

  Prue lowered her foot. ‘Me too,’ she said cheerfully. ‘But practical is what I’m after. Now then, Rosie. How are the children?’

  Rose sat down on the sofa opposite her sister. ‘In what way?’ she asked warily.

  Prue put her fingertips together. ‘About Mr Masson, Rosie.’

  ‘I was afraid you’d ask that. I was afraid, Prue, because as usual, I’ll probably tell you.’

  ‘Not good then.’

  ‘Laura’s fine. Or at least, behaving in a manner that makes it easy for me, or as easy as it could be.’

  Prue studied Rose over her steepled fingertips. ‘So the twins are being tiresome.’

  ‘Not exactly tiresome . . .’

  ‘Rosie.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The twins do not want you to have another serious relationship in your life after their father.’

  Rose noticed that her sister had declared this a fact, rather than a possibility. She plucked at the piping on the nearest sofa arm.

  ‘It’s protective. I know it is. They just don’t want me to be taken advantage of, even though Tyler is the last man to want to exploit me.’

  ‘Or . . .’ Prue said, and then stopped.

  Rose stopped plucking and looked up. ‘Or what?’

  Prue lowered her hands so that they were lying on the arms of her chair. ‘Or Nat doesn’t want any other man to supplant him as number one in your affections. And Emmy – well Rosie, in my opinion, Emmy is jealous.’

  Rose stared at her sister. ‘Jealous?’

  ‘Yes,’ Prue said calmly, ‘jealous. Even her mother, her elderly mother in her sixties, has a boyfriend before she does.’ She re-crossed her legs and the orange laces flashed. ‘Never underestimate the power of the primitive in any emotional situation. Our veneer of civilized conduct is paper thin. Don’t look so shocked, Rosie. It isn
’t blasphemous, what I’ve just said. It’s common sense.’

  *

  Tyler found, as he had intermittently found all his life, that he needed to do something. These impulses for action were, he knew, both random and unreliable, but they were also urgent and seductive. They had accounted for, in the past, his decision to go to California in the first place and, more recently, his decision to marry Cindy, and even more recently, his decision to fly to New York to find Mallory, and then London to support Mallory, which had resulted, so spectacularly, in the life-changing relationship with Rose.

  When Rose had rung at two o’clock that morning, so distressed and confused, he hadn’t even hesitated. Of course he’d been awake himself, miserable and troubled, and had felt nothing but a surge of sheer relief at hearing her ask him, with a diffidence he found irresistible, if he would come round. Of course he would come round! He would gladly have crossed hot coals, nay continents, to come round. He was engulfed by sheer thankfulness at being able to act, being able, by going to the mews within half an hour of her call, to sort things, soothe them, disentangle them. He stood in Rose’s narrow hallway, holding her and stroking her hair, while she said all kinds of apologetic and complicated things that he wasn’t really listening to. It didn’t matter to Tyler, what had happened, what she’d said, what she’d been thinking, how deranged she had been by her twins’ conduct; it only mattered that he could hold her and stroke her and make her better.

  ‘There, there,’ he’d said, his eyes closed in order to focus on the rapture of relief. ‘Don’t worry, sweetheart, it’s over. It’s over.’

  That moment and what followed had been, Tyler thought, heaven sent. He thought that such opportunities – rare and precious – were what he had been designed for. He didn’t congratulate himself on being good at forgiveness, he just recognized it as something that came naturally to him and gave him a satisfaction like no other. Cindy had sometimes pointed out that this capacity was the good side of his inability to take a stand, or make a forceful decision, or exhibit a mildly ruthless but attractive male desire to dominate, all of which drove her mad. Tyler would say, trying to deflect her exasperation, ‘You’ve got your father for all that,’ and Cindy would slam out of the house to try and take her frustration out on the tennis court. Her reaction to him made Tyler sad, but not powerfully so. Not sad enough, in any case, to consider in any depth how he might change his ways.