An Unsuitable Match

by Joanna Trollope

  Rose nodded. Tyler leaned forward and kissed her mouth. Then he said, ‘So this is my idea. I suggest that you sell this house, give a wallop of money to your three children, and with the rest, we’ll go to the country and find a cottage for you and me.’

  Rose said, almost in a whisper, ‘A cottage.’

  He beamed at her. Then he slid his arms around her waist and pulled her to him.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘a cottage. For you and me. Don’t you think?’

  *

  Mallory and her friends were sharing a flat above a couple of shops – a pizza place and a hardware shop – on Kilburn High Road. There were four of them in the flat, sharing two bedrooms and a single cupboard-sized bathroom, but the rent was a manageable £350 a month each, and as all of them were on an Equity minimum wage on account of the theatre being deemed Category C for Small Theatres, a reasonable rent was significant. Mallory, who earned just over £600 a week for playing Kaia Fosli, also had a £25 supplement as the understudy for the part of Hilde Wangel, which she was careful to spend for the benefit of the whole flat, on extra wine, or a takeaway Chinese from the restaurant down the street. That she had money from her late mother in America was never mentioned: she would have regarded any display of prosperity as tactless to the point of crudity. She was, to her infinite gratification, a working actress sharing a flat with another actress, an assistant stage manager and a girl whose job it was to oversee both costumes and props. Money, Mallory knew from her time in New York, was a useful commodity, but in artistic, creative, self-expressive terms, beside the point.

  She was completely relaxed about having Nat in their chaotic sitting room. The stage manager and the props girl had both departed for the theatre and an audition for the next job, and only she and her friend Jess were lounging around the cheap dining table with its peeling veneer, drinking coffee among the detritus of last night’s wine bottles and last week’s unironed laundry. Jess Ballantyne, who played Hilde, and whom Mallory understudied for her princely £25, had long, thick auburn hair bundled up into a casual knot on the back of her head and wide grey eyes still smudged with the previous night’s makeup. Both girls wore leggings and oversized hooded tops. Their toenails, Nat observed, were carefully painted, and they had obviously slept in both earrings and rings. When Jess Ballantyne stretched her arm out to break off a piece of the brioche he had brought – ‘Take something,’ Emmy had urged him. ‘Breakfast or flowers or something’ – he noticed that although her fingernails were unpainted, there was a snake tattooed on her inner wrist, its head almost reaching the ball of her thumb. It gave him a small thrill to imagine where the snake ended, where its tail finally stopped. It was a thrill akin to the one he experienced when he realized that Jess, languid and supple in all her movements, wasn’t even bothering to look his way.

  ‘It’s good of you to see me,’ he said to Mallory.

  Mallory shrugged. Her red hair, concealed under a mouse-brown wig for the stage, was roughly tied back in a ponytail, with long fronds left to wave round her face. The nose stud, which he had noticed and been slightly disconcerted by at the hotel, was missing, and Mallory’s early-morning face, clean of makeup, had the innocent pallor of a child’s.

  ‘It’s not good, it’s just OK. Believe me. We may never see each other again.’

  Jess licked her fingers. She said, ‘Won’t you? I thought you guys’ parents were hooking up.’

  Mallory sighed. She rubbed her eyes. ‘Nothing to do with me.’

  Jess broke off another piece of brioche. She said, not looking at Nat, ‘Mal, he’s your dad.’

  ‘He is,’ Mallory said. ‘But it’s still nothing to do with me.’

  Jess turned suddenly and gave Nat the full force of her huge questioning grey gaze.

  ‘What?’

  Nat swallowed. What a girl. What an amazing girl. A little unsteadily, he said, ‘That’s . . . really what I came to ask you about. Your father, I mean. Which means – or, it kind of follows, I suppose – what do you feel about our parents?’

  Mallory raised her eyes. She looked straight at Nat. ‘Nothing,’ she said.

  Jess gave Nat a quick glance, which he hardly dared to interpret as conspiratorial. She turned to Mallory. ‘Babe, you can’t mean that. You can’t mean nothing. Nobody loses their mother and sees their father fall for someone else and feels nothing. No one does.’

  Mallory said steadfastly, ‘I don’t feel anything.’

  ‘I do,’ Nat said with emphasis.

  Jess flashed him another intense look. ‘There you go.’

  Mallory picked at something encrusted on the table. ‘Dad can fall for whoever he wants to.’

  ‘Mal,’ Jess said. ‘That’s not very nice for Nat to hear.’

  Nat’s heart swelled within his chest. He said, striving to sound gallant, ‘That’s OK.’

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ Jess replied. She bent towards Mallory. ‘If you really felt nothing, you wouldn’t sulk.’

  ‘I’m not sulking!’

  ‘Oh?’ Jess said. ‘So this display of teenage indifference is for real, then?’

  Nat felt dizzy with gratitude. Mallory said, looking at her nails, ‘Your mother’s a doll.’

  Jess took her nearest wrist. ‘Mal, this guy’s come for help. Can’t you see? He wants to know about your father.’

  Mallory extricated her wrist and held it with her other hand as if it had been damaged.

  ‘I can’t tell you anything.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because,’ Mallory said, suddenly flaring up, ‘I don’t know him. I didn’t know Mother either. She was always playing tennis, and if she wasn’t doing that she was doing something for, or with, her father. ‘If you want to know,’ she said, abruptly glaring at Nat, ‘I don’t know why they had kids except I don’t suppose they knew how not to; I don’t suppose contraception was very efficient back in the day. We were just four people living in the same house genetically connected but completely separate. I had my friends from school; Seth had his. Mother was out all the time, Daddy was at work.’

  She stopped as abruptly as she had begun. Nat said diffidently, ‘How – how would you describe your father?’

  Mallory looked at her nails again. ‘He’s OK.’

  ‘More than that?’

  ‘He’s a nice guy,’ Mallory said. ‘He never fitted in to Grandpa’s family; he was always kinda . . . English. To tell the truth, I have no idea why they thought it would be a good idea to get married. They didn’t fight, they just didn’t – have a connection.’

  ‘But,’ Nat persisted, taking courage from Jess’s evident sympathy, ‘you don’t like to see him having a connection with someone else?’

  Mallory pulled a face. ‘It means nothing to me.’

  ‘I think it does,’ Nat said bravely.

  ‘I said, she’s a nice lady.’

  ‘But you don’t want to see him blown away by her.’

  Mallory sat back in her chair. She looked at Nat. ‘Why d’you think I’m an actress? Why do you think I love belonging to a company? Why d’you think I talk like this about my father? Or my baking-obsessed brother? Why do you think I’ve trained myself not to care?’

  ‘But you do care,’ Jess said.

  Mallory stood up. ‘If my father decides to stay in London because of your mother, then I’ll know, won’t I? I’ll know where his priorities lie. Where they’ve probably always lain. I’m going to take a shower.’

  Nat stood up too. ‘Mallory—’

  ‘When the play closes Saturday,’ Mallory said, ‘I’m going back to New York. And nobody will care, one way or the other, will they?’

  ‘Your dad will miss you,’ Jess said. She was twisted round in her chair, and the snake on her arm was visible almost to her elbow. ‘Don’t you want him to be happy?’

  ‘Oh, sure.’ Mallory said, moving towards the door. Then she added, ‘It’s his life, poor guy. Maybe he thinks it’s just starting. Maybe he’s really excited to be a Brit back in Brita
in. Whatever, I wish him well.’ She paused in the doorway and looked at Nat. ‘Let them get on with it. You can’t ever stop people doing what they’re determined to do, anyway. So let them do what they want to do, why don’t you?’

  When she’d gone, Nat sat down again and Jess twisted back round in her chair. There was a small silence, then Jess said, ‘I don’t think that’s what you came for, was it?’

  He let out a long breath. ‘What was all that about?’

  ‘Old history,’ Jess said. ‘Old resentments. Did you have a happy childhood?’

  Nat picked up a nearby pen that was lying on the table and rolled it in his fingers like a cigar. ‘Hard to say. Yes, at the time, but clouded later by knowing what my father had been up to for so long. Maybe happiness when you’re little isn’t very formative.’

  ‘Mal’s a good actress.’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  She looked at him. ‘Seen the play?’

  ‘No. Only my mother has. She thought it was wonderful.’

  Jess scratched her arm thoughtfully. ‘Want to see it?’

  He grinned. ‘Now I do. Yes, please.’

  ‘I’ll get you a house seat. Friday? Saturday?’

  The sound of the shower splashing onto a plastic curtain was audible. Nat felt strangely buoyant, even though he had hardly obtained a fraction of what he had come for.

  ‘Both, please,’ he said.

  *

  Seth Masson’s bakery was easy to find online. There it was, Doughboy, listed as one of the top new bakeries in San Francisco, famous for its artisan breads, for its farmer’s cheese and green-onion turnovers at lunchtime, for sourdough loaves which were, said the reviews, sensational even in a sourdough-rich city. There were photographs of the exterior of the bakery, and close-ups of the best-selling tartines with burrata, and loaves piled in a wicker basket. There were also, Emmy discovered, photographs of Seth in a long ticking apron with ‘Doughboy’ printed across the bib, and a pretty, solemn-looking Japanese girl holding an open miniature hamper of muffins. She looked long and hard at photographs of Seth. He looked slighter than his father, with hair pulled back into what was presumably a single pigtail like an eighteenth-century mariner’s, and round John Lennon glasses, but his smile was like Tyler’s, wide and welcoming but not, somehow – unlike Tyler’s – to be resented. He wrote a weekly baker’s blog, full of words like ‘passion’ and ‘commitment’. There were Biblical references to bread being both the stuff and staff of life. He looked, as did the Japanese girl who was plainly his partner both personally and professionally, as if he really meant all the high-flown things he said. Perhaps you could only do that, without being laughed at, if you were American. Earnestness, Emmy thought, reflecting on the slogans she devised for work, was only valued in England as a target for mockery.

  She messaged Seth on his Facebook page, in response to his advertising Doughboy’s new range of jams – conserves, Seth called them – developed to be spread on their thick slices of sourdough toast.

  ‘Hi,’ Emmy wrote, ‘you don’t know me, but our parents know each other. Does the name Rose Woodrowe mean anything to you? I’m her daughter and – watch out – I’m going to act the pedant . . . doesn’t the word “conserve” only apply to jams made of small fruit? Isn’t the word you’re looking for “preserve”? Sorry! Love the photos of Doughboy – the bread looks amazing! Emmy W.’

  She added a couple of kisses, then took them off again. This was so weird, messaging the bread-mad son of a man your mother was insisting she was going to marry. Who wasn’t your father. When your mother was sixty-four. Sixty-four! Ye gods, as her Aunt Prue was wont to say in extremis, you couldn’t make this up: not the situation, not Emmy’s screen being filled up with the picture of some random sandwich shop in California which had suddenly become of intense significance. I mean, Emmy thought, bringing up the picture of Seth in his apron again, what are we all doing? What has she made us do, acting as she is? Here am I, online with someone I’ve never heard of to whom I am suddenly intimately connected, and there is Nat going off to pick the brains of an American actress with cranberry-coloured hair, all because our mother has gone ever so slightly off her head? Is she taking us all round the bend with her?

  On the table top next to her laptop, her mobile began to play its programmed carillon and spin round. She peered at the screen. It would be Nat. It wasn’t Nat.

  ‘Aunt Prue!’ Emmy said, holding her phone, slightly angled, under her hair.

  ‘Hello, dear.’

  ‘I haven’t talked to you for ages.’

  ‘I rang,’ Prue said, ‘to see if you are all right.’

  ‘All right?’

  ‘Yes, Emmy. If you and Nat and Laura are, let’s say comfortable, with what is going on with your mother.’

  Emmy closed her eyes briefly. ‘Oh. That.’

  ‘Yes, dear. That.’

  Emmy said in a rush, ‘To be honest, I don’t know what to think.’

  ‘Nor me, dear. I have yet to meet him.’

  ‘We only just have.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And,’ Emmy said, ‘he’s fine. I mean, he’s – well, I suppose he’s OK.’

  ‘Two arms, two legs, two eyes, nose et cetera?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Hair?’

  ‘Yes. Lots, actually.’

  ‘Glasses?’

  ‘Yes. Oh, Aunt Prue . . .’

  ‘What, dear?’

  ‘I’ve just got a knot in my stomach about it all.’

  ‘Well,’ Prue said briskly, ‘I have my own ideas about that knot.’

  ‘Please don’t tell me.’

  ‘It isn’t easy, being obliged to witness the spectacle of a parent in love. Quite apart from the insanity that being in love induces in everyone, there is the added awkwardness of seeing a parent in the grip, as it were. How is Laura?’

  Emmy leaned against the table. ‘She’s managing better than me. Than us. You know Laura. A bit distanced, a bit live and let live, a bit . . .’

  ‘Annoying?’

  ‘Only because I can’t be like her. I mean, she’s got her work and her boys and Angus and all that. This whole thing isn’t making her so – lonely.’

  ‘Lonely?’

  ‘I miss Mum,’ Emmy said simply, suddenly and profoundly feeling it to be true. ‘She’s sort of gone away, because of him. We argue about stuff. We never used to argue.’

  ‘If it’s any consolation,’ Prue said, ‘I haven’t heard from her in a month. I’ve left her the odd message but she hasn’t rung me. I expect she thinks I’ll tick her off.’

  ‘Would you?’

  ‘Hard to tell till I’ve met him,’ Prue said. ‘I have to admit that the idea doesn’t exactly appeal.’

  ‘She would say that’s because you’ve never married.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ Prue said resolutely, ‘because the right person never asked me. And all the drips and weeds who did were out of the question.’

  ‘Nobody,’ Emmy said, ‘has ever asked me.’

  ‘Have you ever hoped that anyone would?’

  Emmy closed her eyes again. ‘Not yet. Not – in real life.’

  ‘No. But your mother—’

  ‘I don’t get it,’ Emmy interrupted with a burst of energy. ‘I don’t see what she sees in him. I can’t see any of it.’

  ‘Is he an adventurer?’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Is he after her,’ Prue said in her explanatory, headmistressy voice, ‘for her money?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so but that’s why Nat took her to see a solicitor.’

  ‘A solicitor!’

  ‘Yes,’ Emmy said. ‘Didn’t you know?’

  ‘I think,’ Prue said solemnly, ‘that I had better come to London again.’

  ‘I don’t want her cornered, Aunt Prue. She’s already told us that we make her feel threatened and bullied. I don’t want her to feel worse, I just want her back. I just want my mum back the way she’s always been.’ S
he glanced at her laptop. It was sleeping, but if she touched the mousepad, Seth Masson would be there again in his ticking apron, reminding her that there was now, because of Rose’s feelings about Tyler, a whole new and unwanted yet intriguing cast of characters in her life.

  Prue said, with as much gentleness as she was capable of, ‘She’s my sister, Em. My only sister. I’ve always looked out for her.’

  ‘I know. I know. The painful thing just now is that she only wants to look out for herself,’ Em said.

  *

  Laura lay in the dark across the end of Jack’s bed. He had taken, since he graduated to a proper bed, to getting out of it half a dozen times after his supposedly good-night story, and padding down in spurious search of drinks of water and trips to the toilet. Neither Laura nor Angus had wanted to close his bedroom door or threaten him with a return to the baby status of a cot, like Adam’s, so an uneasy compromise had grown up involving a parent lying down in the dark at the end of his bed after his story and staying there until he was asleep.

  Jack liked this new arrangement. It was a pity that neither parent was at all inclined to use it as an opportunity for interesting conversation – how did aeroplanes stay up, were there angels, what happened if you never cut your nails? – but it was oddly empowering to feel an adult gradually becoming heavier and heavier somewhere near one’s feet as they sank into the slumber that somehow always eluded you. Jack lay in the dark, flicking his fingers against his teeth, or twisting his hair into instantly unravelling ropes, and listened to his mother’s breathing as it gently deepened into unconsciousness. She talked, sometimes, about feeling tired. Jack didn’t really know what she meant. He knew what it was like to feel anxious or busy or fractious or – occasionally – hungry, but this tired thing was a mystery. He never felt tired. When people said, ‘Go to sleep,’ he looked at them as if they were bonkers. You couldn’t go to sleep; it was impossible. It was just something that seemed, most nights, to happen.

  Laura held her breath in order to hear Jack’s own breathing lengthen and regularize. If she rose, however stealthily, before he was in a deep sleep, he would spring up and remind her sternly of her promise to stay.