An Unsuitable Match

by Joanna Trollope

  ‘I want something of what you’ve got,’ he wrote to Seth, dangerously late at night from his London room. ‘And what Mallory has, with the theatre. I want to belong. I want to feel that I’m in the right place, for Christ’s sake.’

  Seth didn’t reply in kind. Seth never replied in kind. He replied with his own, and Yuhui’s news, with the progress they were making on the Doughboy project, how Yuhui’s father had lent them fifty thousand dollars for bread-making equipment and ovens. It didn’t matter, Tyler told himself, it didn’t matter that his children were so fired up by their own lives that they had no bandwidth left, in modern terms, to absorb anything of his. Especially when he was bursting – the feeling barely, explosively contained – to tell someone close to him that Rose Guthrie, or Woodrowe as she now was, had, by some miracle, walked back into his life.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Nat was insisting on a family conference. Rose had demurred – ‘Try not to be so pompous, darling’ – but Nat ignored her. He said that there was nothing she needed to do beyond being at home, and that he and Emmy and Laura would come and see her at a given time to, he said, ‘discuss this situation’.

  Rose had, of course, told Tyler. They were in bed, on a wonderfully quiet Sunday morning, with pale sunlight falling onto the disordered folds of Rose’s grey embroidered bedspread. It was, Rose thought, both an image and a moment of complete contentment: her head on his shoulder (his still-tanned shoulder), his arm supporting her while he read aloud from the Sunday newspaper, an article about pedestrians in the streets being too absorbed in the screens in their hands to notice either traffic or anyone else. He was reading beautifully, she thought, with just an edge of irony, and she could feel the faint vibrations of his voice resounding in the ear she had pressed against his skin. His skin. His smooth, astonishingly youthful, perfectly toasted skin, which she could now feel all down the length of her body. She closed her eyes. It had never been like this with William. Sex with William was efficient but brisk, with little talking. With Tyler, it could, in the best sense, take all day – leisurely, exploratory, full of conversation.

  She had even been able to say, quite frankly, the first time, ‘I am very nervous about this, you know. I’m so out of practice.’

  He said, smiling, ‘You don’t have to do anything.’

  ‘But I do, I can’t just lie there.’

  ‘Why not? Don’t you trust me?’

  ‘It isn’t that. It’s nothing to do with trusting you. It’s me, it’s this – this body, it’s being sixty-four, it’s—’

  ‘Shush,’ he said. He was smiling. He came close to her but didn’t touch her. He said, ‘Just leave it to me.’

  ‘Oh, Tyler . . .’

  He put his hands on her shoulders and pressed her gently down onto her bed. ‘Lie back.’

  ‘I – don’t want to disappoint you.’

  ‘You couldn’t.’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘Even if you tried, you couldn’t. Just remember, Rose, that I am getting what I never imagined I could have. Close your eyes.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Close them.’

  She had. She had closed them as instructed and only opened them again what felt like a long time later, when he said softly, ‘Look at me.’ And now, lying against his shoulder, she remembered not caring how surrendered she had looked, how dizzy, and suffused with a new and exhilarating liberty.

  ‘Tyler,’ Rose said now, opening her eyes.

  He stopped reading. ‘Is this actually very boring?’

  ‘It isn’t that.’

  ‘Ah?’

  ‘It’s the children.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, in a different tone, ‘the children.’

  Rose sat up in bed and tucked the duvet under her armpits, like a bodice. Tyler lay where he was, his spectacles on, lazily smoothing a lock of her hair – streaked with toffee-coloured highlights now, since his arrival – behind her ear.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tell me,’ he said.

  ‘They – my children, that is – have asked for a meeting. Here. Nat suggested it, Emmy wants it too and Laura is, as usual, going along with it. There’s – there’s a purpose to this meeting.’

  Tyler’s hand was now gently massaging her shoulder. He said, as if he were thinking only about her shoulder, ‘A purpose?’

  She turned slightly to look at him.

  ‘I think,’ she said, ‘it will be about money. About money if – if we get married.’

  Tyler smiled at her. ‘Of course.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘I’d expect your kids to be concerned about the money.’

  ‘Would you? Don’t you mind?’

  ‘Why should I mind?’ Tyler said.

  ‘But if we marry – and I have this house?’

  ‘Sweetheart,’ Tyler said, ‘I don’t care about the money. I never have. It drove Cindy and her father round the bend that I didn’t care, couldn’t care. Your money, your house. Fine by me.’

  ‘Really?’

  He shrugged. He said easily, ‘Really really.’

  ‘I – was dreading telling you. I thought it would put you off my children. And I so want you to like each other. I can’t tell you how much it matters to me that you like each other.’

  Tyler moved his hand to stroke it up and down her back.

  ‘I’m sure we will,’ he said. He gestured with the free hand that wasn’t touching her back. ‘You’ll see.’ He was smiling again. ‘I’m completely indifferent to money.’ He rolled sideways so that he could kiss her nearest arm. ‘It’ll probably infuriate you, my attitude to money. But it won’t scare the children.’

  *

  There was a mild argument about where the meeting should happen. Rose wanted them all to be in comfortable chairs, and on the sofa, in her sitting room, but Nat wanted them round her dining table, with something to write on, and iPads to look things up.

  ‘No,’ Rose said. ‘It’s a family discussion, not a board meeting.’ She had thought of adding, ‘Try not to be so like your father,’ but had restrained herself. Instead she said, ‘We can’t have a meeting as if we hardly know each other. In any case, I am not going to be lectured by you, so I will be in my own chair, thank you very much.’

  Nat made a face.

  ‘As you wish, Mum.’

  ‘I do wish.’

  ‘Whatever makes you happy,’ he said irritatingly.

  ‘I am happy.’

  ‘You look it,’ Nat said. ‘You look amazing. Wonderful. You look – well, you haven’t looked like this for as long as I can remember. Well done, Mr Masson.’

  ‘Please don’t talk about him like that.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘With just an edge of sarcasm,’ Rose said.

  Nat moved to put an arm round her shoulders.

  ‘Sorry, Mum. Perhaps when I meet him . . .’

  ‘Of course you’ll meet him. It’s just been so fast.’

  ‘Telling me.’

  ‘But don’t patronize me, darling. Don’t talk down to me, as if I need saving from myself somehow. This meeting, for example, isn’t just unnecessary, it’s far too soon.’

  Nat took his arm away. ‘Not if you intend to marry this man, Mum.’

  ‘I only told you he had asked me.’

  ‘But you’ll say yes.’

  ‘Probably.’

  Nat said warningly, ‘Mum . . .’

  Rose looked towards the door. ‘Is that someone at the front door? Emmy?’

  ‘Useful timing.’

  ‘I managed not to say it earlier,’ Rose said, ‘but sometimes you sound exactly like your father.’

  Nat looked at her. She had always been attractive, he thought, but there was a glow to her now, an extra energy that he couldn’t help admiring while at the same time feeling almost unable to bear knowing why it had come about. For a split second, he wanted to hurl himself into her arms and beg her to return to being just his mother. A second later, the impulse was gone.
He walked towards the door.

  ‘I’ll go and let Emmy in, shall I?’ he said.

  Rose went to find Laura, in the kitchen. Laura was on her phone, as usual, but she had assembled a tray of glasses and bottles of wine and water, and filled Rose’s salad bowl with the crisps that she had brought, ignoring Rose’s suggestion of providing smoked salmon perhaps, or slices of salami.

  ‘No,’ Laura was saying, ‘no. Tell her I’ll see him tomorrow if his temperature isn’t down. One more spoonful of Calpol only. One. Keep him drinking. Yes. Yes, thank you.’ She took the phone away from her ear and peered at it. ‘Honestly. Poor woman, she gets in such a state.’

  ‘Is the child a baby?’

  ‘Heavens, no,’ Laura said. ‘He’s seven. And far too fat. I want to see their ribs, at seven. Hungry and skinny.’ She glanced at her mother. ‘You look terrific, Mum.’

  ‘Thank you, darling. Even Nat said so.’

  Laura smiled at her. ‘Your mummy’s boy.’

  ‘No, he isn’t.’

  Laura leaned forward and said, almost conspiratorially, ‘Well, he won’t like this new development in your life. Will he?’

  Rose picked up the tray. ‘Perhaps turn your phone off?’

  ‘I was going to, Mum,’ Laura said, unperturbed. ‘I’m not on call tonight anyway.’

  Rose glanced at her. ‘I’m not looking forward to this.’

  Laura put her phone in her jacket pocket. ‘Why not?’ she said. ‘It’s your life, isn’t it?’

  *

  Emmy said that they had all been brought up by Rose not to be in any hurry about relationships, always to wait until the first giddy madness had subsided a bit before deciding anything about anyone. She was sitting on Rose’s sofa with a glass of wine in her hand and the bowl of crisps on the sofa beside her, and because her office in public relations prided itself on its informality, she was in jeans and boots worn with a sleeveless T-shirt and an immense muffler swaddling her neck.

  Rose said nothing. Nat was checking something on his iPad. Laura said, ‘Angus and I knew each other for three years before we lived together. And then another two before we got married.’

  ‘There you are,’ Emmy said to Rose, ‘five years. And you’ve known this Tyler man for four months.’

  ‘I knew him long ago.’

  ‘But not properly. Not really. It wasn’t like I knew all the boys at school. They were just kind of there.’

  ‘I wasn’t making a point against Mum,’ Laura said. ‘I was just saying. I think I take ages to fall in love anyway – I mean, Angus knew long before I did – so I’m not really much of a guide.’

  Nat put his iPad down. He said to Rose, ‘Don’t you think Em has a point, though? Don’t you think this is all far too fast? Far too fast, at least, to think of marrying.’

  Rose looked down at her wine. She hadn’t touched it. It occurred to her that she didn’t want to touch it, that she felt, for the first time ever, not much warm pleasure in having all her three children in her sitting room together. In fact, she thought, she was so far from feeling pleased and proud to have the children there that she really, if she was alarmingly candid with herself, wanted them gone. Nat was sitting in the chair Tyler usually sat in. Rose would have preferred, at that moment, to raise her eyes from her wine glass and look across the room and find Tyler there, and not Nat. It was, she told herself, an immensely improper thought: unnatural, unmaternal, unacceptable. But she could not deny that it had happened, that the thought was there.

  ‘Perhaps,’ she said, not looking up, ‘you would allow me to know my own mind.’

  Laura, absorbed in her phone again, said almost absently, ‘Of course.’

  ‘Not actually of course at all,’ Emmy said. She had made a neat pile of crisps of approximately the same size and was eating the resulting sandwich in small bites. ‘Laura, don’t be exasperating. You don’t mean it. You are just as concerned about this – this infatuation, as we are.’

  ‘I really can’t listen to this,’ Rose said.

  ‘We mustn’t fall out,’ Nat said to Emmy, ignoring his mother. ‘Don’t pick on Laura.’

  ‘Maybe don’t pick on me either,’ Rose said.

  Emmy finished her crisps and took a swallow of wine.

  ‘We’re not picking on you, Mum. We’re just worried. It’s worrying when your mother suddenly completely falls for someone like you seem to have done.’

  Rose looked up at her. She said levelly, ‘Why?’

  Emmy made a face. ‘Why?’

  ‘Yes. Why? Why can’t I have a life in just the way you expect, even demand, to do? Of course, you’re none of you used to there being a man in my life, are you, because there really hasn’t been one since your father, so I suppose I ought to expect a bit of over-reaction—’

  ‘We are not over-reacting,’ Nat said.

  ‘Aren’t you? Wanting a meeting, coming round here in a gang to tick me off . . .’

  ‘Not tick you off,’ Laura said.

  ‘What then?’

  ‘Just,’ Emmy said, picking up more crisps, ‘to try and help you to see that it would be a good idea – or the best idea – to slow down a bit.’

  ‘Yes,’ Nat said, emphatically.

  Rose looked at her eldest daughter.

  ‘Laura?’

  Laura looked up from her phone. She said almost vaguely, ‘Well, I certainly don’t want you hurt to any degree, but I also think you should be allowed to make your own choices.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Rose said, at the same moment that the twins shouted ‘Laura!’ in exasperation.

  ‘You aren’t helping,’ Nat said to Laura, and then to his twin sister, ‘Put those crisps down.’

  Emmy immediately put the handful of crisps back in the salad bowl. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It’s odd, isn’t it,’ Laura said, her eyes on her phone screen, ‘how she’s always done exactly what Nat says?’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Oh you do,’ Laura said, raising her eyes. ‘You always have. I mean, if Nat was all for this man in Mum’s life—’

  ‘Stop it,’ Rose shouted. ‘Stop it!’

  They gazed at her, three pairs of eyes fixed upon her in astonishment.

  ‘Goodness,’ Emmy said faintly. ‘You never shout.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Rose said more quietly, ‘I don’t usually have cause. But I do now. I do. I will not have you dictating who I see and who I – I love, and I will not have you telling me how I should conduct my relationships. I have stood by you all, supportively, through all your emotional ups and downs, and, I’ll have you know, I’ve been no trouble to you as a mother. I’ve never asked for anything, I’ve refused you nothing, I never interfere or criticize, and now, when I have a chance of happiness – no, not just happiness, but immense, profound happiness – all you can do is carp and judge and behave as if all I deserve is to be sent to some naughty step of your disapproving devising. Don’t you think I deserve some support? Don’t you think, after all these years of what you’ve had from me – which I’ve gladly given, I have to say – you might consider seeing things from my point of view, rejoicing that I have found someone who loves me, someone, I might add, that you haven’t even met? Don’t you think that after all I’ve been through, never mind all I’ve protected you from, that you might manage to feel just a fraction of the joy that this relationship brings me?’

  There was a stunned silence. Then Nat, under his breath, said, ‘Wow.’

  Laura leaned forward in her chair and stretched her arms out towards her mother, her phone sliding unheeded to the floor. ‘You’re a fantastic mother,’ she said.

  Emmy was crying softly into her muffler. She said incoherently, ‘That’s why, Mum. That’s why we’re just worried that it’s all going too fast, that you’ll be taken advantage of.’

  Nat got out of his chair and came to kneel beside Rose.

  ‘Sorry, Mum.’

  Rose put a hand out to ruffle his hair. She didn’t speak.

  Nat went
on, ‘Emmy’s right. We’re just worried. It’s made us all jumpy.’

  Rose flung an arm sideways to squeeze one of Laura’s hands. In a calmer voice, she said, ‘What exactly are you worried about? Why can’t you trust me to pick a trustworthy man?’

  Emmy sniffed. ‘Because you’re out of practice.’

  ‘So I don’t know what I’m doing?’

  ‘None of us does.’

  ‘I meet a man again,’ Rose said, ‘a man I first met when we were teenagers. And he’s a widower. And retired. And his children have inherited money from their mother and are launched on their careers. And I am alone, and solvent, and making do with a life I have learned to quite like, but didn’t sign up for when I married. And we fall in love and he asks me to marry him, and you react as if I was a teenage heiress being seduced by a scheming adventurer. Just stop. Just – just stop. Try to see it all from my point of view and rejoice with me.’

  Laura nodded. She bent to pick up her phone.

  Nat got off his knees, sighing, and stood looking down at his mother. ‘We should meet him.’

  Rose gestured, as if to indicate that that was what she had been aiming for all along.

  ‘Here,’ she said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Somewhere impersonal,’ Emmy said, putting her hand into the salad bowl.

  Nat swooped across the room and snatched the bowl off the sofa.

  ‘Emmy’s right. And would you stop eating crisps, Em.’

  ‘I like them.’

  ‘But you hate yourself for eating them all the time. Look how you are in the pub. Why don’t we meet in a hotel?’

  ‘A hotel?’

  ‘Angus could come,’ Laura said. ‘He ought to be there, really.’

  ‘Why?’ Emmy demanded.

  ‘He’s known Mum since before – well, he’s known Mum for over ten years.’

  ‘That’s no reason. He isn’t her child, after all.’

  ‘I’d like Angus to be there,’ Rose said. ‘I’m very fond of Angus.’

  ‘Right,’ said Nat. He was standing in the middle of the room, holding the salad bowl. ‘Right. We’ll meet in a hotel.’ He glanced at his mother. ‘OK?’