An Unsuitable Match

by Joanna Trollope

  ‘But I don’t believe it is what she wants. I think it was, it really was, at the beginning, when it was all such an adventure, so exciting and head-turning, but I don’t think it’s that any more.’

  Emmy raised her head. ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘No,’ Laura said, ‘I don’t. Not any longer. I think she doesn’t want to disappoint him now. Or let him down. You know what she’s like. She always thinks she owes people.’

  Emmy said with sudden resolution, ‘She doesn’t owe me a single thing.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘I couldn’t bear her to make some sort of sacrifice because she thinks I’d like the money.’

  ‘Ah,’ Laura said. She turned back to her onion. ‘That’s better.’

  Emmy came to stand very close to her sister.

  ‘Don’t you think she’s OK, then?’

  Laura was chopping. She said carefully, ‘I think she’s OK mostly, yes. And, if you want to know, I think he’s fine in lots of ways. I think he really does adore her.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘There’s just something,’ Laura said.

  ‘What kind of something?’

  ‘It’s hard to put my finger on. Too romantic, maybe. Even too Mum-obsessed. Something missing, something about background, family. And there’s money. I don’t think he’s at all greedy or anything, I just think he’s a bit – hopeless, I suppose. Impractical about money. Just a vague sort of unease I have about him, that he’s a kind of impractical dreamer.’

  Emmy leaned against the counter close to her sister.

  ‘What does Angus think?’

  Laura scraped the onions into the frying pan.

  ‘Nice guy. Plainly mad about Mum. But why hasn’t he any money?’

  ‘Hasn’t he?’

  Laura flicked her a glance. ‘Have you seen any evidence? One rented one-room flat here and apparently nothing to sell in America?’

  Emmy said cautiously, ‘Does it have to be about money, in the end?’

  ‘Not if it was you. But if it’s Mum, and she’s sixty-four, yes.’

  ‘I hated the idea of Tyler at the beginning. So did Nat.’

  ‘Because of Dad?’

  ‘Oh no,’ Emmy said with emphasis. ‘Because of Mum.’

  Laura picked up the jar of curry paste. ‘This?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So,’ Laura said, ‘you know where I’m coming from.’

  Emmy nodded vehemently. She said, ‘So what do we do?’

  Laura spooned curry paste into the onions.

  ‘You start,’ she said, ‘by not going to New York. And Nat starts by not throwing Tim out of his flat. Where’s a wooden spoon? I’m almost done.’ She turned to look at Emmy. ‘Which brings us neatly to the other thing on my list of topics to talk with you about. What happened that evening between you and Jess?’

  *

  Tyler heard from Seth that Mallory had been to San Francisco. It was an unsatisfactory call, because although Seth was very friendly, he was also very preoccupied because a new batch of sourdough starter had grown a mould which Seth had never experienced before and which, even though it was to be immediately discarded, was a matter of grave concern. He wanted to explain to his father that although the mould wasn’t deep into the starter, and the whole culture could probably be revived with proper feeding at the right temperature, he couldn’t, with public health concerns, take the risk. So when Tyler wanted to ask specifics about Mallory, and the reasons for Mallory’s going to San Francisco, and the content of any conversations Mallory might have had with Seth, he was unable to give his father any more than the briefest of replies. Yes, she looked fine, he thought, and seemed OK and had work lined up after the show she was in, but no, he had no idea when he’d see her again – jeez, Dad, it was surprising enough to see her as it was!

  Tyler rang Mallory. There was no reply. He left a message to call him. Then he sent her a text and a second text, and considered ringing Rose’s Emmy to ask if she had spoken to Mallory recently, but something held him back. It was the something – not quite definable – that always afflicted him when it came to Rose’s children. He liked them. He was very sure about that. He liked them all, and he admired Laura. Laura was doing the kind of professional job that benefitted her fellow man and thus was deserving of real respect. And those twins of Rose’s were both in paid employment and were likeable and personable. But – and there was a but in Tyler’s mind – he wasn’t making progress with any of them. He might like them, and they might show no sign these days of not liking him in return, but he wasn’t getting anywhere with any of them.

  So, quite apart from wanting to know why she had suddenly flown to San Francisco, Tyler wanted to talk to Mallory about Emmy, ask if there was anything he should know about her, if there was anything he was doing that offended her, or troubled her. Because he really didn’t want that. He really – and he was aware of his own earnestness as he thought about it – wanted to improve his relationships with Rose’s children. He liked them and he wanted them to like him. He wanted, he realized, for them to feel that they were all part of his and Rose’s future. He wanted them to be more than just there. He wanted them to participate.

  He tried Mallory’s phone again. It would be early evening in New York, well before evening theatre performances began.

  ‘Hi,’ Mallory’s message said, ‘this is Mallory’s phone. I’ll call you back.’

  Please do, Tyler thought. He wouldn’t leave another begging message. Please do.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ Tyler said.

  They were sitting in a Hampshire pub, before their appointment to see the brick cottage, eating, in Tyler’s case, a ploughman’s lunch. It was a very substantial version of a ploughman’s lunch and included generous wedges of English cheese, as well as little heaps of walnut halves, and dried cranberries, and apple chutney in a separate miniature pot. Rose had eaten two of the walnut halves and a sliver of cheese but said that she wasn’t really hungry; certainly not hungry enough to merit her own order.

  She paused, a single cranberry in her fingers.

  ‘Have you?’

  ‘I think,’ Tyler said, ‘that we should throw a party.’

  Rose put the cranberry down on a paper napkin.

  ‘Goodness.’

  ‘Don’t you think? I mean, surely you’ve given lots of parties in your time?’

  ‘But not for ages. Years. In fact, I think the last proper party I gave was when I was still married to William. We used to have open house on Christmas Eve – but you don’t want to hear about that.’

  He smiled at her.

  ‘I’m fine with hearing about you and William giving parties. Of course you gave parties. How could you be married all those years and not give parties?’

  Rose had a fleeting memory of those Christmas Eve parties, of the noise in the festively decorated house, and the tension caused by William always being late, arriving in a blast of bonhomie and universal sympathy for the nobility of his work that had occasioned his lateness, when the reality – a pre-Christmas assignation with Gillian Greenhalgh – had been so very different. She looked briefly at her aquamarine.

  ‘A party . . .’

  ‘Why not?’ Tyler said. ‘Your friends, my English friends, such as they are. I’ve met your children, after all, I’ve met your sister, but I haven’t met your friends. I’d like to. I’d like to meet your friends.’

  Rose smiled, as if to herself.

  ‘I’d like that too.’

  ‘Would you? Would you really?’

  She glanced at him. ‘Why do you ask?’

  Tyler put down a chunk of granary bread. He said, seriously, ‘I ask because I don’t want to pressure you into doing anything you don’t want to do. I may want to have a party, but I don’t want you to have one against your will.’

  She said seriously, ‘It wouldn’t be.’

  ‘It could be our party. Our first party. As a couple.’

&nbs
p; ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It could.’

  ‘In fact, I know a wine merchant. I was at school with someone who now has his own wine business.’

  She nodded. ‘Good.’

  ‘Rosie. What is it? Would you rather we didn’t have a party?’

  ‘I’d love to have a party. I want to have a party.’

  He held the ploughman’s plate out to her. ‘That’s wonderful. I’m so glad. Have some more cheese.’

  She shook her head. He lowered the plate to the table again.

  ‘Honestly,’ he said, ‘you live on air. I take you out to lunch and you eat half a tomato and a tadpole.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Ten to two,’ he said. ‘Shall we move?’

  ‘A party,’ Rose said. ‘A party! It’s so long since I even thought about a party.’

  Tyler reached out to give her hand a quick squeeze.

  ‘Cottage first. Then party. We can talk about both, going back to London. Rose . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Do you . . .’ He stopped.

  ‘Do I what?’

  ‘Do you feel OK about this cottage, about seeing this cottage?’

  She stood up and wound the scarf she was carrying round her neck.

  ‘Don’t hold me to it,’ she said, ‘but I feel fine about this cottage. More than fine, actually. In fact, I feel that this cottage might be the one. And,’ she added, picking up her bag and threading it onto her arm, ‘I am up for this cottage, and a party.’

  *

  Nat ran Tim to earth by his coffee machine. Tim had been for an early morning run, and was preparing, as was his wont, to cycle to work in his running gear and shower at work before donning the suit and shoes he was carrying in an ergonomically designed backpack. He was making himself, as he often did, a double espresso before his ride.

  Nat leaned on the counter beside him and folded his arms across his bare chest. He had left Jess asleep and climbed into a pair of pyjama trousers on his way to the door. There had been a time, not so very long ago, when he and Tim had done an early-morning run together and in unspoken competition. Tim had not commented on this friendly habit having ceased any more than Nat commented on the nutritional unsuitability of following a ten-kilometre run with a double espresso. He simply yawned a bit and ruffled his hair back and forth and watched Tim drop coffee capsules into the machine’s mechanism.

  ‘Want one?’ Tim said. His hair stood up in sweat-soaked spikes but his shorts and T-shirt, fashioned out of some miracle modern fibre, looked both cool and dry.

  Nat yawned again and extracted something from a back tooth.

  ‘No ta, mate.’

  Tim put his favourite mug – commemorative, designed for the 2016 UEFA European Championship – under the spout of the coffee machine and pressed the start button.

  ‘Don’t tell me not to drink this.’

  ‘Wouldn’t dream of it.’

  Nat eyed the mug. It was thick and white, with a red-cross football on it, and, in deliberately amateur lettering, the slogan ‘C’mon England’.

  ‘Been meaning to ask you something.’

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘Now that me and Jess . . .’ He stopped.

  Tim glanced at him. ‘Am I in the way?’

  Nat raised an arm to scratch between his shoulder blades.

  ‘No, mate. Not really. Not exactly.’

  Tim was watching his coffee drip into the mug. ‘Seems to me,’ he said, ‘that I leave the bathroom in a much more civilized state than she does.’

  Nat grinned. He said proudly, ‘Wouldn’t be difficult.’

  ‘But you’d like me out?’

  ‘It’s more,’ Nat said, ‘that we’d like the place to ourselves.’

  ‘So I’m in the way. Like I said.’

  The coffee stopped dripping. Tim switched off the machine and picked up his mug. He looked at Nat again.

  ‘What about the mortgage?’

  Nat pulled a face. ‘Tricky. There might be a solution, but I’m not counting on it.’

  Tim was qualified as an accountant. He raised his mug briefly in Nat’s direction, as if making a toast.

  ‘Don’t you think you’d better be sure before you decide finally? What’ll you do with a second bedroom anyway? Or maybe I’d better not ask.’

  ‘Look, mate,’ Nat said, ‘no offence. Honestly. I’m just kind of – sounding you out. Telling you what’s on my mind.’

  Tim took a swallow of coffee, screwed his eyes shut, took another and banged his mug down.

  ‘That’s better. Nothing like endorphins followed by caffeine.’ He bent to pick up his backpack. ‘Love seems to be catching in your family right now.’ He hoisted the backpack onto one shoulder. ‘I’ll look for another room, OK?’

  ‘It’s not that you’re not welcome, mate.’

  Tim took flexible sunglasses on a rubber lariat out of a zippered pocket in his backpack and put them on. Then he turned his head, suddenly transformed into that of a giant insect, and clumped Nat on his shoulder.

  ‘I’m cool with it. I am. I’ll ask around. See ya.’

  After he’d gone, Nat wandered to his laptop, which he’d left on the glass table he’d been so proud to own until Jess told him that it wasn’t so much cool as suburban, and switched it on. He bent over it, yawning, and noticed that among the emails which had relentlessly arrived during the night, there was one from his sister, Laura. It was short, as Laura’s emails – uncharacteristically for a woman – usually were.

  Hi Nattie – can we meet? Something I need to discuss with you. Supper here at the weekend? Girlfriend very welcome. L xx

  Nat sighed. Being in rehearsal, rather than performing, Jess would be free at the weekend, in the evening. And of course she and Laura should meet. Needed to meet. Laura, he told himself, was not like Emmy, and in any case, he was far from averse to showing Jess off. But if Laura met her then of course Rose would be next. Which meant, these days, Tyler too. He straightened up and ran his tongue round his teeth. What a pity, he thought, what a terrible pity that you couldn’t hold on to that first, utterly thrilling and entirely private mutual ecstasy of a new relationship for more than a moment before the world crowded in, peering and asking questions and making judgements. He glanced at the closed bedroom door. At least, even if he couldn’t think how the mortgage was to be afforded without Tim, he could tell Jess that he had put Tim in the picture. He had started the ball rolling, which in turn had started off several other balls. Jeez, he thought, heading back to the coffee machine, why does anything so wonderful have to come at such a price?

  *

  Rose lay in the bath. There was a glass of wine balanced on the edge, brought by Tyler, and a big towel within reach for when she got out of the water, also left by Tyler. Tyler was, at this moment, downstairs with a Lebanese cookbook and the beginnings of supper. As the bathroom was just above the kitchen, she could hear the rumble of radio news and the odd clash of a saucepan, and through the west-facing window of the bathroom, she could see a late-spring sunset streaking a duck-egg-blue sky with streaks of coral and apricot. She closed her eyes for a moment and swished the water pleasurably across her stomach with her right hand. This, she thought to herself, is contentment: deep, satisfied contentment. It might not have the insane fervour of a new or sudden passion, but it has so much that is both steadier and more profound instead.

  Behind her closed lids, she took herself through the rooms of the Hampshire cottage. They were pretty rooms with eighteenth-century proportions and panelled shutters at the windows. Nothing was very big, certainly, but there were good ceiling heights and a couple of carved fireplaces and a magnificent and unexpected landing, like an extra room, with a sash window looking over the garden. Standing at that window, Rose had gazed not only at the garden but at the lane beyond it, and, beyond that, at a field full of decorative Jersey cows, stands of mature trees in brilliant new leaf, a collection of haphazard tiled roofs, and a church tower with a weathervane on one pinnacle that had caught the sun with a fl
ash of fire.

  The cottage had four bedrooms, one of which could easily be made into a second bathroom, two reception rooms and a kitchen with a solid-fuel cooker installed in a substantial chimney breast. Outside there was a paved terrace, a greenhouse, flowerbeds, a vegetable garden, lawns and apple trees. The present owner had waxed the floors, eschewed curtains in favour of the shutters, and painted all the exterior woodwork white. In the bathroom, a cast-iron, claw-footed bath stood in the centre of the room and there were white cotton rugs on the floor either side of it, and a painted table at the head end on which stood a pottery soap dish, a stack of books and a patterned jug of white lilac.

  ‘Well?’ Tyler had said softly, from behind her.

  She’d been speechless. In truth, from the moment the agent had opened the door to the front hall, flooded with light from the landing above, Rose had capitulated. Whatever optimism she had – or hadn’t – concealed from Tyler before they actually saw the cottage was unleashed to an overwhelming degree the moment she stepped under the white-painted lintel and onto the cider-coloured floorboards. It was a moment of recognition, a sort of homecoming, an exultant feeling of not wanting to live in such a house so much as just needing to.

  In the garden, Tyler had put his hands in his pockets and surveyed the apple trees.

  ‘We could have hens.’

  Rose swallowed. ‘I’ve never had hens.’

  ‘Nor me. But it can’t be that difficult. Bantams, perhaps, with feathery feet.’

  ‘Tyler . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s – wonderful. Isn’t it?’

  He took one hand out of his pocket and put an arm round her shoulders.

  ‘Do you think so? Do you really think so?’

  She nodded vigorously. He gripped her shoulders. She said, ‘Is it mad?’

  ‘Is what mad?’

  ‘Is it mad to fall for a house so suddenly, so completely?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say so.’

  ‘I thought,’ she said, ‘that I wouldn’t like anything in the country. That I wouldn’t like the country.’