An Unsuitable Match

by Joanna Trollope

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Mallory said. Her voice changed suddenly and she sounded close to tears. ‘Of course I am. Enjoy your drink. I gotta run.’

  Well, Tyler thought, surveying the hotel bar and mentally selecting a pair of bucket chairs against the back wall, Mallory’s attitude, whatever it meant, wasn’t going to throw him off his stride. Probably it had only just dawned on Mallory that his feelings for Rose meant that he had, in her view, got over grieving for her mother, and this was taking some adjusting to. She had given no sign of distress in front of Rose’s family; had, in fact, conducted herself with more poise and social confidence than the rest of them put together. But maybe that was a front, a by-product of being an actress. Maybe, underneath, Tyler’s falling for Rose had awakened all kinds of feelings of grief and loss. Odd, that, if so. Cindy had been a conscientious mother but a faintly distant one, as if the lifelong allegiance to her father could not be compromised by any competitive devotions. Tyler indicated to the barman that he was heading towards his chosen chairs. Why did things – people, his children, Rose’s children – have to be so complicated? Why couldn’t they just look at him and Rose together, neither of them breaking up a marriage for God’s sake, and just be happy? He slid his raincoat off and draped it over the back of one of the bucket chairs. At least he was going to have a chance to reassure this boy of Rose’s that as far as any assets were concerned, he had less than nothing to fear.

  Nat was late. By the time he reached the bar, it was nearly forty minutes after the agreed time. Tyler stood up to greet him, holding out his hand and smiling. ‘I thought you might stand me up.’

  ‘It was the traffic, you know.’

  ‘Plus,’ Tyler said in a friendly voice, ‘you regretted agreeing to see me?’

  Nat lowered himself into a chair. ‘Sorry. Bit of a day.’

  ‘I know. You went with your mother to see a solicitor.’

  ‘You know!’

  ‘Of course I know. She rang me.’ He sat down again and said affably, ‘We speak several times a day. What are you drinking?’

  Nat looked at Tyler’s glass.

  ‘It’s a vodka and tonic,’ Tyler said helpfully. ‘Want one?’

  Nat shook his head. ‘Could I have a beer?’

  Tyler gestured for a waiter. He said solemnly to Nat, ‘I want you to know that I think you were quite right to get your mother to see a lawyer. Nat, which beer do you want?’

  Nat looked up at the waiter. ‘Could I get a Punk?’

  ‘Sorry, sir. We only have Budweiser here. Or Stella Artois.’

  ‘Mallory would tease me,’ Tyler said, ‘for choosing to meet you somewhere so staid.’

  ‘A Bud, please,’ Nat said to the waiter, and then, looking down again, ‘I don’t know what Mum told you. And a Bud’s fine.’

  ‘But it’s not craft beer.’

  ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘Nat,’ Tyler said, ‘could you just look at me?’

  Nat raised his eyes reluctantly. ‘OK.’

  ‘I’ll say it again. I’m only interested in your mother herself. That’s all. I have no designs on anything she has, anything that might be deemed as belonging to the family. I’m not materialistic. In fact, it used to drive Mallory’s mother round the bend, that I wasn’t.’

  Nat sat up a little straighter. He said, ‘Can I ask you something?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Nat cleared his throat. ‘Why do you want to marry my mother?’

  Tyler smiled broadly. ‘Isn’t it obvious? I adore her. I want to be with her all the time. I think the absolute world of her, Nat; in fact, I didn’t know that there could be anyone like your mother.’

  Nat’s beer arrived in a tall-waisted glass with a crest emblazoned on the side. He glanced at it, and then he looked back at Tyler.

  ‘OK. OK. But marriage. Why marriage? Why can’t you just – be together, if that’s what you want? I mean, you aren’t exactly going to have a family, after all, are you? I can’t see why you can’t just be a couple and not do the marriage thing.’

  Tyler said solemnly, ‘I’ve never actually proposed to anyone before your mother. I can’t remember exactly what happened with Mallory’s mother, but I think it was a kind of understanding that never quite got articulated; we just assumed, and her family did too, and then her mother produced an heirloom ring and gave it to me to give to Cindy. But when it came to your mother, I just knew. I knew I wanted to marry her, I wanted the world to know she had agreed to be my wife just as it will know and acknowledge when she is my wife. Nat, it is incredibly important to us that we are husband and wife for everyone to see. I can’t tell you how proud I am that she’s agreed. I can’t tell you how proud, even ecstatic I’ll be when she is Mrs Masson.’

  Nat sat quite still and looked at him. Then he said hoarsely, ‘Please . . .’

  ‘Please what?’

  ‘Please don’t marry her,’ Nat said. ‘Please don’t put her in that position.’

  ‘What position?’

  ‘The complicated legal position that will happen if you marry her.’

  Tyler took a swallow of his drink. ‘No, it won’t,’ he said, smiling at Nat.

  ‘It will. It will! Didn’t she tell you what the solicitor said?’

  ‘Something about a pre-nup? A trust?’

  ‘Yes. If you get married.’

  Tyler waved a hand. ‘I don’t mind, Nat. I don’t care what I sign. Anything any of you want that reassures you. Makes you happy. I’ll do whatever needs doing legally, no problem. But I’m set on marrying Rose. It’s what I want. I haven’t wanted much in my life that I’ve been willing to go to the wire for, but I do want this. I want to marry your mother, Nat. I want it more than anything. And what is more, she, bless all the angels in heaven, wants to marry me.’

  ‘Suppose,’ Nat said, almost wildly, ‘she has agreed because, being the person she is, she sees how much you want it and doesn’t want you to be disappointed?’

  Tyler looked at him benignly. ‘Sorry, Nat.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Your mother and I are absolutely at one about this. Whatever the legal hurdles, whatever documents you want drawn up, all fine by us. We’ll do whatever you want, whatever it takes. But’ – he picked up his glass again and tipped it towards Nat in a kind of jaunty salute – ‘we are going to get married, and that, my boy, is final.’

  *

  ‘Laura’s out,’ Angus said. ‘She’s at the hospital. Some patient she’s fond of mightn’t last the night. You can come in and wait for her if you want.’

  Nat stepped inside, past his brother-in-law, who was holding open the door from which he had scraped all the old varnish, but had not yet got round to re-painting.

  ‘Please,’ Nat said tiredly. ‘I left a message on her phone.’

  ‘She won’t pick it up if she’s working. I gave her a second phone for Christmas so I know I can always get through if I need to. You hungry?’

  Nat looked vaguely round the kitchen. Angus had papers spread across the huge kitchen table under the precisely aimed pools of light cast by three industrial metal lamps hanging on stout rubber flexes from the ceiling.

  ‘I’m doing our VAT return,’ Angus said. ‘I can make you an omelette. Or there’s cheese. Want a beer?’

  Nat slumped into the nearest chair. ‘I’m full of beer.’

  Angus crossed to the fridge, extracted a block of cheese loosely wrapped in greaseproof paper from a shelf in the door and put it in front of Nat, on the table. Then he added a knife and a plate, and the heel of an artisan-looking loaf on a breadboard.

  ‘Better eat, Nat. Have you had dinner?’

  Nat shook his head. ‘Peanuts. Literally. A handful of peanuts.’

  Angus filled a tumbler with water from a filter jug and put it beside the plate.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’

  Nat sighed. He began to saw a hunk off the loaf. ‘Is there any chutney?’

  Angus got up again, and went back
to the fridge.

  Nat said, ‘I had a drink with Mum’s man in some hotel bar. And . . .’ He paused, the bread knife in mid-air. ‘And, Angus, he says nothing, absolutely nothing, will stop them marrying. He’s as fixed on it – more, really – as she is.’

  Angus put a jar of chutney and a plastic box of olive-oil spread in front of Nat. Then he sat down opposite him. ‘Did you think you could talk him out of it?’ he said.

  Nat opened the greaseproof packet and cut an uneven wedge of cheese. ‘Yes. I thought I could tell him how complicated and unwise the lawyer told us marriage would be, but there wasn’t a chance. I mean, Mum was clearly shaken by this morning. She wouldn’t talk about it afterwards at all, which meant she was in shock, really, and I thought I could build on all that later, with him; I could say that it wouldn’t be fair on her, to drag her through the legal mangle, just to put a ring on her finger. But there wasn’t a chance.’ He bent forward and took a large and messy mouthful of bread and cheese. Round it, he said indistinctly, ‘God, I was hungry.’

  Angus said, ‘Have you talked to Emmy?’

  Nat shook his head, chewing. ‘I told her what happened this morning. But I haven’t told her about meeting – Tyler. It’s really hard to say his name, you know? Em knew I was meeting him, about his request, but she doesn’t yet know what happened. It was crazy, Angus. Crazy.’ He bent forward again and took another bite. ‘We were at complete cross-purposes. He wanted to tell me he isn’t remotely interested in whatever she’s worth and I wanted to persuade him not to marry her.’

  Angus put his elbows on the table. ‘Does Rose really want to get married?’

  Nat nodded, his mouth full again.

  Angus pushed up his sweater sleeves. ‘Woodrowe women are pretty hard to persuade not to do something they’ve set their hearts on. I didn’t want Laura going to the hospital tonight. I said, “Look, you’re Mr Nagdi’s GP, not a hospital doctor,” but she was determined to go because she likes him, she likes his wife and his whole family. She’d made up her mind. It sounds as if Rose has made up hers.’

  Nat drank half a tumbler of water with the same appetite he had applied to the bread and cheese. Then he put the glass down and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. He said, ‘She was really upset to hear what the lawyer had to say this morning. You could see she was. But I think they talked today, I think he won her over. I think she couldn’t resist him wanting to marry her so much. And’ – Nat pulled a face – ‘he was kind of OK tonight. Not smarmy. Not scheming. He just sat there smiling and saying how he adored her and wanted to marry her and I just wanted to hit him.’

  Angus grinned. ‘’Course you did. She’s your mum.’

  ‘You know how it is.’

  ‘Well, actually, I don’t. You know my story. But Rose is as good a mother-in-law as it gets, I suspect, so I get how you’re feeling.’

  Nat picked up the bread knife to cut another slice. ‘Can I?’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘To be honest,’ Nat said, ‘I didn’t want to tell Em all this. She seems really upset by it, really angry as well as sad, and I don’t want to dump on her till I’ve sorted it all a bit in my head myself. That’s why I wanted to talk to Laura.’

  Angus pushed the cheese packet towards his brother-in-law. ‘That Mallory girl . . .’

  ‘She was cool.’

  ‘Mightn’t she be able to give you a bit of a steer on her father?’

  Nat paused with his knife in the olive-oil-spread tub. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, won’t she have a view? I mean her mother died of cancer, and here’s her father proposing to marry someone else, from another country to boot. She won’t exactly be unaffected, will she? Maybe he’s done it lots of times before, maybe he’s always proposing to people, maybe he was a bad husband and made her mother miserable. Won’t Mallory be able to help? In fact, now I come to think of it, shouldn’t Mallory be as involved in all this as you three are?’

  Nat was laying thinner slices of cheese carefully across the bread on his plate. ‘Good thinking,’ he said soberly.

  ‘It’s only just occurred to me.’

  ‘She seemed the only person who could even begin to cope, on Monday.’

  ‘Call her,’ Angus said.

  At the far end of the table, a mobile phone began to vibrate. Angus sprang up to answer it. He peered at the screen.

  ‘She’s on her way back. Twenty minutes, she says.’

  Nat put the heels of his hands into his eyes. ‘Brilliant,’ he said. ‘Thanks, bro.’

  Angus crossed the kitchen and picked up the kettle. ‘Coffee?’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ‘I have no idea,’ Rose said, ‘what I want to do.’

  They were in her garden, and Rose was showing Tyler how to prune rose bushes. Tyler had never pruned anything in his life; had never, he said to Rose, been allowed to, because a gardener called Moses who travelled across the city from Mission Bay had looked after Cindy’s father’s garden, as well as Cindy and Tyler’s. Moses, Tyler told Rose, had very fixed ideas of how a garden should be, which was formal and precise and above all, controlled.

  ‘He’d have despaired of English gardens,’ Tyler said. ‘I think a herbaceous border would have been his idea of a horticultural nightmare.’ He looked down at his feet, where spring growth was beginning to push up between the paving stones. ‘He would hate this. What’s it going to be?’

  ‘Alchemilla mollis,’ Rose said. ‘Lime green and vigorous.’

  Tyler gazed at her. ‘I love you. I love you when you know things like that.’

  Rose blew him a kiss from her gardening glove. ‘Every woman my age in England knows about alchemilla mollis.’

  ‘Bet they don’t.’

  ‘Tyler,’ Rose said, clipping out long rogue fronds from a rose bush, ‘I’ve thought about it a lot, and I don’t want to do any of the things the lawyer suggested to me.’

  He took a breath. ‘OK,’ he said. He sounded deliberately measured.

  She said, snipping and not looking at him, ‘I can’t bear all this talk of agreements and pre-nups and discretionary trusts. I really hate it. I hate the bloodlessness of it, the underlying assumption that we need, somehow, guarding from each other, like dogs who can’t be left in the same room together in case they fight.’

  Tyler put the secateurs Rose had given him in his trouser pocket. He came to stand close to her. ‘I don’t think that’s the intention.’

  ‘It is,’ Rose said indignantly, snipping on. ‘It is. You should have heard this Ashton woman. I mean, she acknowledged that the law sounded cold, but her whole subtext, in everything she said, was to undermine all emotion, all human connection, only to do what was to my – but mostly the children’s – material advantage, as if money was all that mattered. As if this house’ – she gestured in its direction – ‘was a sort of gold mine.’

  Tyler said carefully, ‘Well, looked at in terms of assets, I suppose it is.’

  She glanced at him. ‘Whose side are you on?’

  ‘Yours. And only yours. I’m just trying to see the situation from Nat and Emmy’s point of view.’

  Rose said, ‘What do Seth and Mallory think?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  She stopped snipping and looked at him. ‘What d’you mean, you have no idea about your own children’s opinion of you re-marrying?’

  Tyler shrugged. ‘Seth can only think about bread and Mallory gives me the brush-off every time I broach the subject. In any case, Cindy left them money, and before you say don’t I resent the fact that she left money to them, and not anything much of her estate to me, the answer is absolutely no, I don’t at all. It was her family money and she left it to her family. Fine by me. You know how I am about money.’

  She put her head slightly on one side. Then she said fondly, ‘I do.’

  He grinned. ‘You may not feel so affectionate about my attitude to money in time. It drove Cindy insane. It drove my poor parents insane. I cann
ot mind about it, Rosie. I really try, but I can’t make it matter like it does to most people. Like it does, understandably, to Nat.’ He glanced towards the open doors to the sitting room. ‘Nat is plainly really worried about this house.’

  Rose followed his gaze. ‘I love it.’

  ‘Yes. But not, perhaps, like you love your children. Or even me.’

  ‘Why do you say that? This house has rescued me. Living here was where I didn’t just heal, I came alive again; I found liberty and independence.’

  ‘Rose . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Those feelings, what you’ve felt about this house, well, they were before me. Weren’t they?’

  She was standing looking at him, her hands in their suede gardening gloves hanging by her side. She said, a little uncertainly, ‘Yes.’

  ‘I mean,’ Tyler continued, stepping forward and putting his own hands either side of her waist, ‘I can quite see how this house saved you, gave you a purpose and a goal as well as liberty and independence. And I know how hard and ingeniously you’ve worked to live here, all the lodgers and the translations and probably the deprivations. All of which is magnificent. It really is. Magnificent. But now it’s going to be different. Very different. Because there’s me.’

  She didn’t speak. She stood in front of him, his hands warm through her shirt and her sweater.

  ‘I’ve had an idea,’ he went on.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘It’s an idea that maybe means we don’t even have to think about those bleak legal suggestions of pre-nups and asset-protection trusts. It’s an idea I think your twins will like.’

  ‘We can’t do something just to please the twins.’

  ‘No,’ Tyler said, ‘but if they’re mollified because of what we decide to do, that’s surely a plus?’

  Rose raised one hand to rub an itch on her nose with the back of one wrist. Then she said, ‘You’ve been thinking.’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘Since your drink with Nat.’

  ‘Yes,’ Tyler said. ‘I’ve been thinking of a way to stop him and Emmy fretting about us getting married. Because we are getting married.’