Of the eight doctors holding surgeries, Laura was the last but one to finish. She came out of the glazed door that led to the corridor of designated doctors’ rooms and made for Emmy with a wide smile that completely quelled Emmy’s mounting temper.
‘Em. So sorry. One thing after another today. Have you been here ages?’
‘Rather.’
Laura sat on the chair next to Emmy’s.
‘Why didn’t you phone me?’
‘I did. I WhatsApped you. Twice.’
Laura made a clucking noise of despair.
‘Oh Lord. I didn’t look at my family phone. It drives Angus mad that I only look at my work phone. He gave me this one especially.’
‘I know.’
‘Em,’ Laura said, ‘I’m really sorry. I am. But that’s that. I’m not saying it any more. Come home with me and tell me why you’re here. It isn’t an accident or anything, is it? It isn’t Mum?’
She stood up. Slowly, Emmy stood too. She said, ‘No, it isn’t Mum. Mum’s fine. It’s – oh, Laura. It’s Nat.’
‘What’s happened? Is he OK?’
‘Oh yes,’ Emmy said. She attempted a laugh. ‘He’s fine. He’s – really fine.’
Laura got her car keys out of her bag. ‘What then?’
‘I’ll tell you in the car.’
Laura put a hand out and held her sister’s arm. ‘Tell me now. What’s the matter? Or can I guess?’
Emmy looked round her. The waiting room was almost empty and the girls on the reception desk were packing up for the night. She said, ‘I think he’s fallen for someone.’
‘Yes,’ Laura said.
‘I think,’ Emmy went on, taking no notice, ‘that he’s really fallen. That he’s smitten. Completely – crazy.’ She looked at Laura as if she might cry. She said in a whisper, ‘I’ve never known him like this. I – I – Laura, I don’t know what to do.’
*
Tyler, Rose could not help noticing, had bought the latest copy of Country Life, and was studying the pages of property advertisements with far more than just idle curiosity. He looked very relaxed, sitting there in one of her armchairs, his legs crossed and the magazine propped casually along his thighs, but he was concentrating in a way that made her feel, for the first time in the months that she had known him, a distinct twinge of tension.
Lunch had gone well. In fact, lunch had gone remarkably well. Prue had been not just affable to Tyler but almost flirtatious, if someone now so resolutely impervious to the attractions of the opposite sex could ever be so described. Rose had watched her responding to Tyler’s questions about her past career, and felt a surge of pride in both of them for quite different reasons, and later, assembling a coffee tray despite Tyler’s offer to do it for her, a swell of sheer optimism that Prue, at least, might be seeing not just something of what she herself saw in Tyler, but was also feeling a straightforward pleasure in seeing Rose so happy. When she said goodbye to Prue, she took her sister in her arms for a proper embrace and thanked her warmly for coming. Prue, zipped up stoutly in her padded coat, and slightly flushed with both lunch and the comparative heat of London, allowed herself to be hugged but merely said, ‘Stay in touch, Rosie. OK?’ and went up the mews towards Harley Street with the same determined gait that she used for the Sussex Downs.
The moment she was gone, Tyler said, ‘Was I all right?’
Rose nodded. Then she smiled and kissed him.
‘You were. You so were. She really liked you.’
‘I liked her. I was impressed by her. D’you think she was reassured that I don’t have unprincipled designs on you?’
Rose nodded again. He caught her as she went past him.
‘I really don’t,’ he said. ‘You do know that?’
She paused.
‘I do.’
‘If you really don’t want a ring . . .’
‘I’d love a ring.’
He took her chin in his hand. ‘Really?’
‘Really.’
But now he was looking at Country Life with a different kind of focus, almost detached from her, as if he had a purpose that didn’t need her consent, or even her approval. He was wearing a denim shirt, open-necked, under a soft grey tweed jacket which was exactly the colour of his hair. He looked, as Prue had described him, personable. Highly, attractively personable. But . . .
Rose took a breath.
‘Tyler.’
‘Sweetheart,’ he said at once, his gaze still on the magazine.
‘Could – I ask you something?’
He put a hand flat on the magazine page to mark his place.
‘Anything.’
‘I don’t want to ask it. I feel rather . . . shy, asking it.’
He smiled at her. ‘Ask, Rosie. Ask whatever you want to.’
‘How . . .’ She stopped.
‘Go on.’
‘How would you pay for a ring?’
He laughed. He said, ‘With money, my darling.’
‘But – have you got any money?’
‘Rosie. Sweetheart. I have money to buy a ring.’ He picked up the magazine with both hands and gave it a little shake. ‘I have money to contribute to a cottage. You will never find me embarrassing you about money.’
She sat down on the arm of the companion chair to his. She said, playing with the earpieces of her reading glasses, ‘I just don’t quite know – where your money comes from. What you have. I hate talking like this. I really do. But . . .’
‘Prue told you to ask me?’
‘No,’ Rose said, ‘Prue didn’t mention how you might be fixed for money.’
‘Really? All my life, people have talked about money, asked me about money, boasted how much more money they have than I do and what clout it gives them.’
‘Tyler.’
‘What?’
‘Please stop,’ Rose said. ‘Don’t. That’s just what I was afraid of, that you’d feel insulted or threatened or misjudged.’
‘I don’t,’ he said. He was smiling again. ‘I don’t in the least. But I promise I have enough money to buy you a ring.’ He threw the magazine on the floor. ‘Did you, now I think of it, tell Prue that I am so far from being mercenary that I suggested you sell this house and give most of the proceeds to your children?’
Rose looked down at her reading glasses.
‘I did.’
‘And?’
‘She didn’t really react.’
‘Didn’t she?’
‘No,’ Rose said, ‘she just asked me how such a suggestion made me feel.’
Tyler waited a moment. Then he said quietly, ‘And?’
She sighed. She swung her spectacles by one arm, and then she put them on and looked at him through them.
‘To be honest with you,’ she said, ‘not good.’
*
Laura made a bed up for her sister in the little room on a half-landing at the back of the house that she used as a study. It had a built-in desk, and a bank of sockets above it for Laura’s laptop and phone chargers, and a hard-cushioned sofa which extended into a bed, filling the whole room so that Laura’s office chair was rammed under her desk. She found a spare duvet, and pillows, and a pair of soft old pyjamas of hers, and a new toothbrush, still in its packet, and put all these on the pulled-out sofa bed for Emmy. Then she went back down to the kitchen.
Emmy was sitting by the table, with Angus, drinking wine. Laura and Angus did not drink wine in the week, or if Laura was working at weekends, but Angus had wordlessly put a wine glass on the table when he saw Emmy, and taken a bottle of Chilean Muscadet out of the fridge, and she had drunk two thirds of it. She had also, round mouthfuls of one of Angus’s weekday specials of salmon steaks cooked in soy sauce and ginger, cried a good deal. She admitted that although she hadn’t seen Jess Ballantyne perform live, she had Googled her and found a clip on YouTube of her singing ‘Over the Rainbow’ in an Edinburgh Festival Fringe cabaret, and she was both hot-looking and had an amazing voice. In fact she was, said Emmy betwe
en sniffs, something of a stunner, and if Emmy then met her and discovered that she was nice as well – Nat obviously couldn’t be trusted to be any kind of judge of that – it would just add to the misery of everything.
At some point Angus, who often marvelled at how different two sisters could be, said,
‘But Em, love, surely all this has occurred to you before? I mean, it might just as well have been you as Nat. Surely by your age you’ve been through all this?’
‘Twenty-seven isn’t old!’ Emmy said indignantly.
‘No, but by twenty-seven, most people have had at least one major relationship.’
‘Not us,’ Emmy said. ‘Not me. Not Nat. Sure, we’ve had friends that were a bit more than that, but we always talked about it, we always asked each other what we thought, we kind of never let go of each other, whatever else was going on, and this time Nat has just gone ahead and plunged in without even telling me he was seeing her, not a word, not a single word until he suddenly wants to show her off to me as if – as if I’m supposed to congratulate him.’
Laura said, ‘It is his life, Em, you know. One or other of you, it was bound to happen.’
‘You always think that,’ Emmy said crossly. ‘You always do this tolerance, live-and-let-live thing. But you aren’t a twin. You don’t know.’
‘I know enough,’ Laura said, ‘to predict that if you don’t embrace this relationship of Nat’s, the only person who’ll suffer is you.’
Emmy sighed. ‘I know. It’s just so much, all at once.’
‘What is?’
Emmy looked at them both across the table. ‘All this romance,’ she said. ‘All this falling in love stuff. All this “can’t you be happy for me” nonsense. First Mum, and now Nat.’ She looked down at the smeared plate that had held her salmon. Then she said, ‘And you know what I’m thinking, don’t you? I might as well say it out loud, seeing as you are both so priggishly, thoroughly, married. So. What about me?’
CHAPTER NINE
Rose said she knew nothing about Berkshire. She’d never even been there. Well, she’d been through it, of course, on motorways, but she’d never stopped in it or looked at it or considered it. Sussex she knew a bit, East Sussex because of Prue and her school in Lewes, and now her cottage in Wivelsfield Green, but Berkshire was as unknown to her as . . . well, as Pembrokeshire or Cumbria were. So looking at this admittedly charming-seeming cottage with its thatched roof and views to something called Bucklebury Common was as strange to her as if Tyler was proposing they consider a Scottish castle or a Cornish cave.
Tyler said he understood. He completely saw how she felt. It was a huge change, but then their meeting and falling for each other was bound to create change in itself, wasn’t it, a change from being alone, from being directionless, from fighting the world without an ally? And you couldn’t expect change not to disconcert you, particularly if you were over the age – as they both definitely were – when change was only exhilarating.
He took her hands. She noticed that whenever he needed reassurance about anything, he touched her. He was always warm, when he touched her, always a robust physical presence who could be relied upon for his good humour as much as for his perpetual positivity. He held her hands and fixed her with his steady but unforceful gaze.
‘I just want to look at the cottage, Rosie. I just want you to look at it, to start getting your head round living somewhere else.’
Rose wanted to say, ‘Don’t say that,’ and didn’t. She looked back at him.
‘Wood Cottage,’ she said, and her tone sounded mocking to her.
‘Wood Cottage,’ he said, seriously. ‘Three bedrooms, an inglenook fireplace, beamed walls, a conservatory kitchen . . .’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means that it’s bigger than it was, and modernized, and light.’
‘All that garden . . .’
‘I thought,’ Tyler said, ‘that you loved a garden. I know you’re a good gardener.’
Rose said frankly, ‘I’m scared.’
‘What of? Living with me?’
She glanced round her. ‘No. Living – away from here.’
He brought her hands up to his mouth and kissed them.
‘That’s only because you never have. It’s a radical notion, I grant you, but that’s why I want to start getting your head gently, gently round it.’
She said nothing. He laid her hands against his chest and covered them with his own.
‘Sweetheart. Rosie. This isn’t the cottage. It’s just the first cottage we look at. That’s all. Think of it as a kind of – liberation.’
‘Liberation!’
‘Yes,’ Tyler said. His hands on hers were warm and supple, not imprisoning, just there. ‘Freedom from all these decisions about lawyers, from struggling to afford to stay here, from worrying about what the twins think. You’ll be released, Rosie. A released woman.’
She looked at him.
‘Will I?’
‘Of course you will. Plus you’ll have the companionship of me. Someone to make the bed with. Someone to go on holiday with. Someone, sweetheart, to do nothing with at weekends. You can teach me to garden.’
‘Tyler . . .’
‘Yes.’
‘Tyler,’ Rose said, ‘I love the idea of us doing nothing together.’
‘There you go.’
‘But I don’t quite get this thing about liberation.’
He pulled her hands up to encircle his neck, and then slid his own round her torso to embrace her. He laid his cheek next to hers.
‘Let’s take it step by step,’ he said. ‘You sell this house and you give three quarters of the proceeds to Laura and Nat and Emmy, so that they have their own assets from your estate twenty-five years before they were expecting them. So they’re happy, and you’re happy because you don’t have to go down all these legal asset-protection byways. And then, with the quarter that’s left from the sale of the house, plus whatever I can get out of America, we buy something like Wood Cottage – I know, I know, it’s only a first idea, a sort of metaphor, if you like – and it can be in your name only so the asset is always yours, and we live there, in a new community that only knows us as a married pair, happy ever after and unencumbered by any anxiety that the children might have. See?’
Rose was gazing over his shoulder. Her eyes came to rest on a painting she had bought at the Affordable Art Fair in Battersea Park five years before, an abstract of freesias in a glass vase against a dark background. It was, oddly for a flower painting, both mysterious and slightly dangerous. It represented some particular kind of release in Rose’s life, some taking charge, pleasing herself, buying something with money she had earned, on a whim. She blinked. No doubt the painting would look as strong and as significant on the half-timbered walls of Wood Cottage. Wouldn’t it?
She said, ‘I love the idea of giving money to the children when they don’t expect it.’
He tightened his hold slightly.
‘Yes.’
‘And I love the idea of living with you.’
She could hear that he was smiling.
‘Early-morning tea,’ he said. ‘Toddles round the garden when we get home from anywhere else. Evenings in front of the inglenook.’
She was laughing.
‘Stop it,’ she said. ‘You make it sound so elderly.’
‘I only meant to sound a contrast to being on our own, rattling about waiting for the next wave of life to pick us up and carry us somewhere.’
She took her face gradually away from his.
‘I know,’ she said, ‘I’m teasing.’
He regarded her almost fiercely. ‘I love you.’
‘I know,’ she said again.
‘And I want you to be happy and free from worrying about what anyone thinks.’
‘The twins—’
‘The twins,’ Tyler said, ‘will have enough money to pay off their mortgages. Laura and Angus can buy a house with a garden big enough for those boys to play crick
et and football in.’ He dropped his arms to link his hands behind her waist. He said tenderly, ‘All because their lovely mother is so generous.’
Rose smiled at him.
‘It would make me such a happy mum.’
‘Of course it would.’ He kissed her nose. ‘They are so lucky to have you.’
She looked up at the ceiling, leaning back luxuriously in his embrace.
‘I love giving them things,’ Rose said. ‘Don’t you think giving your children things is the best feeling in the world?’
‘No,’ Tyler said. ‘Even if I love that you do.’
She tipped her head back. ‘You’re so generous to me.’
‘Don’t know about that.’
‘Tyler,’ Rose said, suddenly focusing, ‘Tyler. Enough about me and what would be nice for me. What about you? What would you like to happen?’
He smiled at her. Then he let her go and put his hands in his pockets.
‘Me?’ he said. ‘What would I like to happen? Well, Rosie, what I would really like to happen next, and soon, is for you to get this house valued.’
*
Mallory was packing. She had decided to leave behind almost everything she had brought from America, and to return with only the things – clothes, jewellery, books, a Victorian hand mirror she had found in Camden Lock – that she had acquired during her four months in London. They had been an impressive four months in the sense that they had impressed themselves distinctly on her; the theatre, her flatmates, her theatre friends, Kilburn with its half-in, half-out-of-central-London feeling, its big-city vibe coupled with its strong sense of self. Gathering stuff up around the flat made Mallory feel emotional and nostalgic, as if she was saying goodbye to a powerful and vivid life experience that she wouldn’t readily know again, and to a particular kind of autonomy that you can only have in a community to which you don’t belong. Disentangling scarves and sweater sleeves from random piles of clothing – Jess Ballantyne especially had a completely communal notion of ownership – made her feel unsteady and tearful, as if she was saying goodbye to something whose absence she would feel keenly and for a long time.
An Unsuitable Match Page 12