Emmy looked pointedly at her mother.
‘An engagement ring?’
‘Yes, darling.’
‘Mum. What are you doing?’
Rose lifted her chin.
‘I am looking to my future, darling. I am living my life in a way I grant you is unexpected, but it is both real and very exciting.’
Emmy sat down abruptly on the sofa. Tyler bent over her solicitously. ‘Would you like a drink, Emmy? Anything. We’ve got it all, brandy, vodka, wine . . .’
Emmy said, flustered, ‘No, nothing, I don’t want a drink, yes I do, yes, could I, I don’t know what . . .’
Tyler said helpfully, ‘I’ll make you a vodka and tonic.’
Emmy began to cry. Rose dropped her folded apron on the carpet and hurried to sit next to her, putting her arms round her daughter.
‘Darling. Darling Emmy. Don’t cry. Please don’t cry. There’s nothing to cry about, really there isn’t, there’s just plusses ahead of us, everything will be better than it has been – happier, more settled . . . promise you, darling.’
Emmy found a balled-up tissue in her sleeve and blew her nose into it.
‘It’s a shock,’ Rose said. ‘Of course it is. And there’ve been a lot of shocks recently, haven’t there?’ She smoothed Emmy’s hair back from her forehead, and then she said, almost conspiratorially, ‘Have you met Jess?’
Emmy sniffed into her tissue.
‘Who?’
‘Jess,’ Rose said. ‘Nat’s Jess.’
Emmy gave a shuddering sigh.
‘No,’ she said, ‘no. Not yet.’
‘Nor me. He seems – very smitten.’
Emmy inched out of her mother’s embrace.
‘Yes.’
‘Don’t think,’ Rose said, trying to reach Emmy’s hair still, ‘that I don’t know how hard that must be for you, Nat being with someone.’
Emmy said nothing. Tyler came back into the room with a tumbler clinking with ice cubes.
‘There,’ he said, handing it to Emmy. ‘Vodka, tonic and lime slices.’
She took it wordlessly and put it on the carpet by her feet.
‘Darling,’ Rose said. Her voice was pleading. ‘Darling. Please look at me.’
Emmy glanced at Tyler for a second.
‘Thank you for my drink.’
He said gallantly, ‘My pleasure.’
Rose reached out to put a hand on Emmy’s arm.
‘What a lot to take in, darling. Don’t think I don’t understand.’
Tyler had resumed sitting in his armchair, but on the edge, leaning towards them with his elbows on his knees. He said, ‘I’m so glad you’re in touch with Mallory.’
Emmy nodded.
‘Actually,’ he went on, ‘it’s exactly the kind of friendship we’d hoped for. Isn’t it, sweetheart?’
‘Darling,’ Rose said to Emmy, ‘what can I do to make you feel better? What?’
Emmy said, ‘I’m OK.’
‘No, you’re not. I can see you’re not.’
Emmy looked at the carpet, past her drink. ‘I talked to Mallory today.’
‘Did you? How lovely.’
‘On Skype,’ Emmy said.
‘How was she?’
Emmy stuffed the tissue back into her sweater sleeve.
‘She was fine. In a friend’s apartment in Brooklyn. She starts rehearsals next week.’
Tyler said, ‘So I imagine she’s learning her lines?’
‘She didn’t say. She wants me to go over.’
‘Well, do! Of course! Wonderful idea.’
‘I can’t,’ Emmy said flatly.
‘Why not, darling?’
Emmy stared at the carpet. ‘Don’t ask, Mum.’
‘But of course I must ask.’
‘Why d’you think?’
Tyler said, ‘Is it the money? Is it the cost of an airfare to New York?’
Emmy looked at Rose and gave the smallest nod of her head.
Tyler was smiling. ‘Is that all?’
‘All?’ Emmy said.
‘Yes,’ he said. He looked at Rose. His smile was very broad. ‘If it’s just a question of money,’ Tyler said, ‘I think we can help with that. Can’t we, sweetheart?’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Wood Cottage had a lovely garden. Rose could see that, could see how lovely it was and, more importantly, how it could be made lovelier. It faced south, it had enough trees, and there was a terrace outside the conservatory kitchen that was both wide and deep, and segued gracefully into the lawn without the need for steps. Tyler watched her going round the garden, noticing the planting, working out the amount of upkeep needed, squinting up at the angle of the sun. He imagined himself on a ride-on mower, making immaculate stripes on the tidy parts and cutting curving paths through the more casual ones, among the apple trees. Their apple trees. The thought of owning apple trees and a ride-on mower induced in him something close, he thought, to ecstasy. He wondered in amazement, thinking back, at how he had spent all those years of his marriage to Cindy living in houses of her father’s choosing, stepping out into gardens – yards – rigorously controlled by Moses. Looking back, he thought he must have been sleepwalking. If the existence of Seth and Mallory hadn’t been there to contradict him, he might have believed that he had spent thirty years simply dreaming. But he wasn’t dreaming now. He was looking at a house and a garden that might very well be his. A place he could put up shelves and clear guttering and cut the grass. He knelt down and brushed his hand reverently over the grass. The possibilities of ownership broke over him in a sudden flood of joy.
But the house. It was plain, from the moment she entered the house and saw the copper jugs shining in the over-restored brick fireplace, and the too-bright rugs on the improbably glossy floor, that Rose wasn’t going to like the house. The owners had replaced the original windows with diamond-paned double glazing in sturdy plastic frames. The conservatory kitchen was kitted out in stridently varnished wooden units, with fancy handles in antiqued metal, and fretwork cornices. There were jokey notices on the toilet walls and herds of whimsical china animals on the windowsills. Rose grew very quiet.
‘It’s just décor,’ Tyler said gently. ‘Surface stuff.’
‘The windows aren’t.’
‘The windows are a pity,’ Tyler said. ‘I’ll give you that. But this room’ – he gestured round the master bedroom, which he was trying manfully not to furnish in his mind’s eye – ‘is great. Big enough, double aspect, bathroom off it—’
‘A pink bathroom,’ Rose said.
‘Which could easily become a white bathroom, sweetheart. Quite a big bathroom, actually. With a window.’
Rose said, in a whisper, as if she didn’t want to hurt the room’s feelings, ‘I don’t like it.’
‘But you liked the garden.’
Rose looked about her.
‘I like most gardens. I like the fact of gardens. On principle.’
He came closer. ‘We can change the décor, you know, completely. We can change everything. Even the windows.’
She looked at him directly.
‘I don’t like it, Tyler.’
‘Could I ask . . .’ he said, and stopped.
‘What?’
‘Could I ask if you aren’t actually going to like anything? Because – because of selling the mews?’
She said robustly, ‘Hang on, darling, this is the first house.’
‘It’s a lovely house. In a lovely setting.’
‘I thought you wanted to go at my pace, whatever that turned out to be.’
‘I do,’ he said firmly.
‘Well, it doesn’t sound like it. This is the first house we’ve seen and you want me to love it at once and decide to buy it. That’s your pace. Not mine.’
He looked at her. Then he sighed, and smiled.
‘Yes,’ he said.
It occurred to Rose to say that, looking back, she knew she had acquiesced too much in her marriage to William, that it wouldn’t be
inaccurate to describe William as a bully, and that experience had made her very resistant to any kind of pressure subsequently. But looking at Tyler, eager and shamefaced all at once, softened her. She reached out to take his hand. She shook it slightly.
‘It’s the first house we’ve looked at,’ she said softly.
He grinned at her.
‘I know. I’m an idiot. I was, in my mind’s eye, already on a mower out there.’
She smiled back.
‘You’ll get your mower.’
‘It’s as if thirty years of pent-up desire for ownership, possession, happy certainties are suddenly flooding out of me.’
‘I know.’
‘I never got it, before,’ Tyler said. ‘I never understood about place, about somewhere belonging to one, about the idea that you could close a door on your own kingdom.’
‘Steady on!’
‘I mean it,’ Tyler said earnestly. ‘I mean it now. If I hadn’t met you, I might never have understood about home. Not properly, anyway. I’d have had a vague idea of England, a kind of acceptance of other people’s aspiration and pride and satisfaction in where they lived, but I wouldn’t have understood it, as I do now. I wouldn’t have wanted to join in.’
Rose squeezed his hand and let it go. She said, ‘The zeal of the convert, maybe.’
‘Probably.’
She looked round the room again.
‘It isn’t the décor, Tyler. It’s the feel of this house, the atmosphere.’
‘OK.’
She made a face at him. ‘Sorry.’
‘Me too,’ he said. ‘We’ve a lot to learn.’
She went out onto the landing where sunlight fell onto a deeply tufted small rug and a triangular stool with barley-sugar twisted legs. She looked back at him. She had been about to add to his last remark, ‘About each other as well as ourselves,’ but checked it. That was, she told herself, two instances of self-censorship in ten minutes. Was that new? Had she got used to freedom in that respect too?
She held out a hand to him.
‘It’s OK,’ Rose said. ‘This was our trial run. We’ll do better next time. Won’t we?’
*
It was, Nat realized, almost three weeks since he had seen his mother to speak to, face to face. It was about the same length of time since he had seen Emmy, but that, being altogether a more delicate and tricky situation, was something his mind shied away from even more comprehensively. But Rose – he was rather horrified with himself that he hadn’t seen Rose in all this time; had hardly seen her, in fact, since their visit to the solicitor. It wasn’t like him, he told himself, to neglect his mother and sisters. He had always prided himself, since William left, on being the man of the family, the rational, experienced broad shoulders that could bear the brunt of the less attractive aspects of modern life. He couldn’t but marvel, really, at the effect Jess Ballantyne had had – was having – on him, and how completely he had plunged into a relationship with her, to the exclusion not just of all else, but of all else that once constituted the backbone of his life. One minute his mother’s intention to re-marry and all the fall-out from that had filled his horizons; the next, it felt to him, it was Jess, Jess, Jess.
‘Don’t blame me,’ Jess said, lounging against him on the sofa. ‘You’re a big boy. Big boys choose to surrender, if that’s what they do. It is utterly unreconstructed to think that I have witchy wiles of some kind.’
He’d kissed her nearest shoulder. He quite agreed with her, even if part of him rather liked the idea of witchy wiles, of being the victim of some alluring and dangerous magic spell. In fact, he felt sorry for all those poor people out there who weren’t absolutely in thrall to a Jess Ballantyne, even if – as Jess had teasingly suggested – he couldn’t equate what he was feeling to what his mother might be feeling herself. What was absolutely natural and legitimate for him was somehow viscerally squirm-making when it came to her. It was still much easier to think about her financial protection than her emotions. In fact, when he tried to nerve himself to think about her emotions, his mind simply slammed to a halt.
‘I cannot go there,’ he said to Jess. ‘Yuck. I can’t.’
And Jess, curled up in one of his armchairs reading Shaw’s Major Barbara, had laughed. He had pounced on her, tried to take her reading glasses off, and she had resisted him completely, never taking her eyes off the page, dementing him with her indifference.
‘God,’ he’d said to her, ‘what am I to do about you? What?’
She said, still reading her text, ‘Go and see your mother. Go.’
So he did. He bought a bunch of early peonies, as smooth and tight as little pink cabbages, and went round to the mews house after work one day. Rose was alone, wearing the old corduroy trousers she kept for gardening in, and was entranced to see him.
‘Nat! Oh Nat, how lovely, how unexpected, what a—’
He kissed her cheek firmly.
‘Enough, Mum. I haven’t risen from the dead.’
‘Darling, I’m allowed to be pleased, surely?’
He pushed her gently down the hall towards the sitting room.
‘Yes, just not all this return of the prodigal amazement nonsense. You look great.’
‘I am great,’ Rose said. Her hair was ruffled and her cheeks were rosy. ‘And so, I gather, are you. Hm? Hm?’
He felt a helpless smirk cross his face.
‘Actually . . .’
‘Yes?’
He spread his hands. ‘I’m – blissful.’
She smiled at him. ‘I am so happy for you, darling.’
‘She’s – fabulous. Just fantastic.’
‘Can I meet her?’
‘Of course!’
Rose said, ‘Has Emmy met her?’
Nat looked out at the garden.
‘Not yet.’
‘Don’t you think—’
Nat held up a warning hand.
‘All in good time, Mum. And, may I say, none of your biz.’
‘But if it’s Emmy, it is.’
‘Shh,’ Nat said, smiling. He gave her shoulders a quick squeeze. ‘All OK, Mum?’
She nodded. ‘Very much so.’
‘Laura says,’ Nat said, ‘that you are looking at cottages and wearing a ring. Where is the ring?’
Rose patted a trouser pocket.
‘In here. For gardening.’
‘Can I see it?’
‘You don’t want to see a ring.’
‘Mum,’ Nat said, ‘I want to see your ring and I want to hear more about this cottage thing. I thought we’d agreed that you wouldn’t decide anything without talking to me. To us.’
Rose extracted her ring from her pocket and held it out.
‘There.’
Nat picked it out of her fingers and inspected it. Then he held it out to her.
‘Very pretty. And all paid for, I presume, by Mr Masson? Now then. This cottage idea?’
‘It’s only an idea.’
‘Funded by?’
Rose gestured to the sitting-room walls. ‘This.’
‘Selling this!’
‘Uh-huh,’ Rose said.
‘Jesus,’ Nat said. ‘Some cottage this would buy.’
‘Only a little bit of this.’
‘What? Would buy a cottage?’
‘Yes.’
Nat stared at her. ‘And the rest?’
Rose slid the ring back into her pocket. She said, ‘Let me make you some tea. Or a drink. Would you like a drink drink?’
‘Mum,’ Nat said warningly.
Rose said, ‘It’s only an idea so far. The cottage thing. Selling this. I’m just – thinking about it, as a plan for the future, for mine and Tyler’s future.’
Nat sat down in the chair Tyler usually occupied and crossed his legs. He steepled his fingers together, his elbows on the chair’s arms.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘OK. Just let’s suppose, for now. If you decide to sell this, and you and Tyler buy a cottage somewhere – this would all have to be
signed off by lawyers, you know, you do understand that? – what happens to the surplus left from selling it? Please do not say the words “joint account” to me.’
‘I wouldn’t,’ Rose said. ‘Nor would Tyler. No, the current thinking is . . . Actually, I mustn’t say. I mustn’t tell you something to your advantage that I haven’t properly told the girls.’
Nat sat up straighter, unlocking his fingers. He looked suddenly alert, his hands pressed flat against the chair’s arms.
‘Advantage?’
Rose nodded, reluctantly.
‘You mean . . . ?’
‘Please,’ Rose said, ‘no more. I shouldn’t have said what I’ve said. I shouldn’t even have hinted at it.’
Nat stood up. He said warmly, to his mother, ‘You’re lovely.’
She flapped her hands at him self-deprecatingly. ‘No, no.’
He moved towards her. He was beaming.
‘Mum,’ Nat said. ‘This is heaven sent. It really is. There was something, something about money, that I was nerving myself to ask you.’
*
It was a constant surprise, really, what Aunt Prue was aware of. You could suppose that she was immersed in her Sussex village life, going for constitutional walks, reading improving books, having sufficient social intercourse to be stimulated but not distracted, involving herself very much on her own terms with community demands, but it was far harder to visualize her acuity about her relations in London. Emmy knew that the sisters spoke on the phone infrequently but regularly and she also knew that Rose was very measured – guarded, even – in what she said. But for all that paucity of information, Aunt Prue seemed to know things and sense things, and this was a constant source of amazement.
‘Honestly,’ Emmy said to her aunt on the telephone. ‘Honestly. How do you know I haven’t met Nat’s girlfriend yet?’
‘I’m guessing,’ Prue said. ‘And I’m right. You are both, you and Nat, for different reasons, as reluctant as each other. And of course you are not at all used to not coming first with him. Are you?’
Emmy said, ‘I really really don’t want to be ticked off about this.’
‘You sound just like your mother.’
‘Who ticks you off?’ Emmy demanded.
‘Oh my dear,’ Prue said, ‘I do it to myself. All the time. I shall probably be very severe with myself after this call, and then I’ll go and walk it off.’
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