‘I know.’
She glanced at him. ‘Were you just waiting?’
He squeezed her shoulders a second time and let her go.
‘I was hoping,’ he said. ‘Put it that way.’
‘I want it. I’m a bit frightened by how much I want it. Suppose lots of other people want it too?’
He smiled.
‘It’s been on the market for over six months. I don’t think we’ll be fighting off too much competition.’
‘Oh, Tyler!’
He folded his arms. He said, teasingly, ‘Sober up, Rosie. Offers and surveys and checking the Land Registry and all that first. Suppose there’s a pig farm next door, or someone has permission to build a whole estate of houses—’
‘Stop it!’
He smiled at her again.
‘Just teasing. I’m thrilled to see you so happy. I was longing to see you happy . . .’ He stopped.
She blew him a kiss.
‘I know. It just had to be the right house, the very house.’
‘Sweetheart. Can I ask you something?’
‘Of course,’ she said, turning to look at the greenhouse, at a toppling stack of terracotta flowerpots, at the open kitchen door.
‘Would this cottage, if we can get it, compensate you for having to sell the mews house?’
She stopped turning, to look at him. Her expression was suddenly grave. ‘Oh yes,’ she said.
Oh yes, she thought now, lying in her bath. To exchange her London bath, even with its window, for that bath in the centre of the room with the lilacs and a copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets was what Prue would call a no-brainer. Prue would love the cottage. The children, surely, would love the cottage, would completely understand why the relationship with Tyler made absolute sense in such a setting, especially if she could be generous to them a good twenty years before any of them were expecting it. To live somewhere like that, on an acre of Hampshire earth as so many generations had done before her, would represent a resonance, a continuity, a sense of belonging and perpetuity she had never known before, never thought of as desirable or necessary.
She opened her eyes and slowly sat up, feeling the water shivering down her skin. She reached for her wine and took a grateful swallow. There was so much, suddenly, to look forward to, so much to plan, to relish. She put the wine glass down and got to her feet, reaching for the towel, and stood there in the water holding the towel against her, overcome with a flood of thankfulness. Without Tyler, without meeting Tyler again, none of this would be happening, none of it. Surely everyone, in the end, would understand that?
*
Emmy had flung herself, quite apart from the cooking, into work. There was no defined hierarchy in her office but a pecking order had inevitably emerged for all the insistence on first names and open plan and casual dressing, and the man who was nominally in charge of Emmy’s team noticed a significant and effective difference in her performance. Emmy was in to work half an hour earlier each morning and remained every evening to finish tasks that she would previously have left until the following day. She pulled off, in addition, various coups, including making an advertising campaign for a small artisan gin distillery into enough of a story to attract the attention of – and consequent coverage in – a national tabloid. The two brothers who had started the distillery with a loan from their father, in his garage, came into the office to be lauded by everyone, and to meet Emmy. The managing director, who was called Matthew and had ginger stubble and a propensity for lumberjack shirts raised his glass of celebratory Prosecco and made a speech which was partly about gin, but mostly about Emmy.
The brothers said that there had been a fifteen per cent increase in sales since the media coverage, and two bars in Shoreditch and one in Hoxton were now taking the gin. They said that the bottling company they used were also now treating them with a measure of respect rather than as yet another pair of naive amateurs. They looked at Emmy and asked was that her real name because they wanted to incorporate it somehow into the new raspberry-flavoured gin they were planning, as a tribute.
Emmy felt suddenly shy. She looked at her glass of Prosecco and said that actually her name was Emma. She’d been christened Emma.
‘Emma!’ Matthew said, as if making an announcement. ‘What does it mean?’
‘Whole,’ Emmy said to her wine glass. ‘Or universal, or something. The first Emma in England was Edward the Confessor’s mother.’
Everybody laughed, even though Emmy hadn’t said anything witty. The gin brothers made their way through the crowd and said that they were sure some bright idea of how to incorporate her name into the label on the new gin would come to them, but in the meantime, thanks a million, it was brilliant. Emmy hooked her hair behind her ear with her free hand and said that they were welcome and she was just doing her job. But she was glowing. She glowed all the way through the rest of the party and found herself, while walking up to Shaftesbury Avenue from work to get the bus home, ringing Rose.
‘Darling!’ Rose said, and then, as she always did, ‘Where are you? Is everything OK?’
‘I’m fine,’ Emmy said. ‘On my way home.’
‘Lovely.’
‘From – well, from a bit of a celebration actually, at work. A celebration about me, in fact. Something I did.’
Rose sounded, Emmy thought, a little distracted. She said, ‘Oh! What? How wonderful!’ but she said it in a slightly constrained way, as if she was holding something back. Emmy climbed onto the bus and made her way to a seat at the back, next to an olive-skinned boy who seemed to be utterly asleep, his head propped against the glass of the window.
‘I got free publicity for one of our campaigns in a national paper, Mum. It had an effect at once. The boys who make the product want to name their next idea after me.’
‘What is it?’
Emmy lowered her voice. ‘Gin.’
‘What?’
‘Gin, Mum. Gin. As in gin and tonic.’
Rose sounded bemused.
‘I see.’
‘I don’t think you do, Mum. And the gin isn’t important. What I was ringing to tell you is that I’ve had a bit of a success, at work.’
Rose’s voice was warm. ‘That’s wonderful. It really is. Very proud-making.’
Emmy looked sideways at the sleeping boy. His eyelashes were blue-black on his cheeks and as thick as fur. She said, ‘It’s kind of nice, to be praised for a work thing.’
‘You deserve it.’
‘Well . . .’
‘Emmy. Darling, have you got a moment?’
‘Sure,’ Emmy said, ‘I’m on the bus.’
‘There’s something,’ Rose said, ‘that I want to tell you. To say to you.’
The bus had stopped, and the boy woke and slipped out of his seat and off the bus in a single, seamless movement. Emmy shifted across so that she was by the window, and could see the boy running up Museum Street towards the British Museum. Where on earth was he going at such speed? She said, into her phone, ‘I’m here, Mum.’
‘I think,’ Rose said, her voice gathering energy, ‘that you’ll be able to go to New York soon.’
Emmy frowned out of the bus window. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘Darling,’ Rose said, ‘I thought you wanted to go to see Mallory in America.’
‘I did,’ Emmy said, ‘for about ten minutes. When Nat – oh, never mind. I thought I needed a break, a change of scene or something. And then Mallory said—’
‘Mallory?’
‘Yes. We were FaceTiming. Mallory said why didn’t I try just putting my back into work for a start. Instead of getting hung up on things I couldn’t change. So I have. And honestly, Mum, I never thought there’d be results so quickly, I never thought something would happen almost at once. I mean, I only took on this account two weeks ago, and I had this idea about the family angle – you know, two brothers, their dad’s garage—’
‘Emmy,’ Rose said, cutting across her, ‘Emmy, listen. If you want, still,
to go to America, I think you can.’
‘Mum. Are you listening? I don’t want to go to New York just now. I did, but now I don’t. Because of work. I’ve rung you to tell you that work has turned a corner, that I feel differently about work, that – that maybe work can become much more than just being something that pays the bills while I wait for a big something else to happen. I thought – for God’s sake, Mum, I thought you’d be pleased!’
There was a silence and then Rose said, without complete conviction, ‘I am.’
‘Well, why are you going on about New York then?’
There was a pause. Then Rose said carefully, ‘Emmy, something’s happened.’
‘A good thing?’ Emmy demanded. ‘A thing I’ll be pleased about?’
Rose’s voice gathered enthusiasm again. ‘Oh yes, darling. Yes you will. You can’t fail to.’
Emmy felt a sudden small lurch of suspicion. ‘What? What is it?’
Rose said in a voice full of barely contained rapture, ‘We’ve found a house!’
‘You what?’
‘On Thursday. Yesterday, was it? Heavens, yes, only yesterday! We saw the most heavenly little house.’
‘Mum . . .’
‘It’s basically eighteenth century. Brick, very doll’s house, utterly charming. It stands in an acre of the most lovely garden with apple trees, and there’s a church across the fields, and cows, and a free-standing bath . . .’
‘Mum!’ Emmy said loudly.
‘It’s so sweet.’
‘What,’ Emmy said fiercely, ‘do you think you are doing?’
She could hear Rose give a little gasp.
‘Sorry,’ Rose said, ‘that was all too much of a gush. I know it was. But I love it. I loved it as we drove up, it was quite extraordinary, to just know about a house in one’s guts, somehow, even before I’d stepped inside.’
The bus was approaching Rosebery Avenue. Emmy stood up and began to make her unsteady way between other passengers’ knees and then down the aisle.
‘You can’t do this, Mum.’
‘What can’t I do?’
‘You can’t just sell up in London and decamp to the country like this. You can’t just – fling one life aside and seize on another as if there weren’t any consequences.’
‘The consequences, may I remind you, are very much to your advantage,’ Rose said.
The bus had stopped. Emmy stepped out onto the pavement, her phone still held to her ear.
‘But I don’t want the money, I don’t want—’
‘Emmy,’ Rose said, interrupting yet again, ‘this is just more of the same, isn’t it?’
‘The same what?’
‘You haven’t changed,’ Rose said. ‘Have you? You haven’t changed since I first met Tyler again. At bottom, darling – and you will always be darling to me – you just can’t bear me to be fond of anyone but you children. Can you?’
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Nat was startled when Jess appeared from the bathroom, ready to go and have supper with Laura and Angus. She wasn’t wearing any of her customary exotica, but jeans and a checked shirt, and her hair, usually a cascade of long curls, was held back with the big butterfly clip she used to keep her hair off her face in the bathroom. She planted herself in front of him.
‘OK?’
He stood up and peered at her. He said, uncertainly, ‘Great. Fantastic. Always fantastic.’
She said, ‘I didn’t want to put a second sister off.’
‘You couldn’t.’
‘I wasn’t going to risk it. And I wasn’t going to risk comparative possessiveness, either.’
Nat thought fleetingly of Emmy, and with a distinct pang. He hadn’t seen Emmy in more than a fortnight now, which was one of the longest stretches of not seeing her in all their lives together, if you didn’t count their gap years where he had tried to feel useful building a primary school in Tanzania, and Emmy had wept over the plight of street children in São Paulo. They had come home sobered and distressed by the endlessness of the world’s problems to find Rose in her own state of dismay, having been confronted by William’s revelations about Gillian Greenhalgh. Nat remembered them all sitting round the circular table in the Highgate kitchen with an ill-advised bottle of cachaça that Emmy had brought back from Brazil, and with which she had made caipirinha cocktails. It had been a most confusing homecoming, with the relief outweighed by the disclosure, and the familiarity of two of the three women he loved most in the world severely tempered by what they had seen and what they were going to have to go through.
He took Jess’s hands.
‘It’ll be OK with Em. In time. I know it will.’
Jess licked her lips. Her face, Nat noticed, was almost clean of makeup, her mouth undefined by the red lipstick he usually found so dangerously confident and exciting.
‘Maybe.’
He kissed her forehead. ‘Laura’s very different, anyway. You’ll see.’
‘Mm,’ she said. ‘The doctor and the actress. Not sure.’
When they got to Laura’s house, Angus was upstairs settling the children and Laura was on the phone. She waved to them affably and gestured at the fridge and made bottle-tipping movements with her free hand, and then she wandered out of the kitchen and continued her conversation in the passage beyond.
‘I think she’s talking to a colleague,’ Nat said. ‘It doesn’t sound like a patient. Usually it’s a patient; she’s always talking to patients.’
Jess examined the boys’ paintings, attached to the fridge door with magnetic letters in primary colours.
‘How many children?’
Nat looked over her shoulder.
‘Those’ll be by Jack. He’s four. Very articulate.’
Jess indicated a purple handprint. ‘And that?’
‘Adam,’ Nat said. ‘He’s twenty months. Just grunts. Grunts and eats.’
Jess glanced at him. ‘You adore them. Don’t you?’
Nat opened the fridge. ‘S’pose so. Beer? Wine?’
‘Why can’t you admit that you adore them? And Emmy? Why can’t you admit that your family mean the world to you?’
Nat stared into the fridge. ‘Dunno.’
‘I’ll have a beer,’ Jess said.
‘OK.’
‘One of the things I like about you is that you feel things. You really do. I don’t know why I screwed up with Emmy. I don’t know what devil got into me.’
‘Or into Emmy,’ Laura said, coming back into the kitchen. ‘Em’s good at devils of her very own. We all are. It’s the human condition. Hi,’ she said to Jess, ‘I’m Laura. I hope Nat’s getting you a drink.’
Jess took Laura’s briefly outstretched hand.
‘I like the boys’ pictures.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Your beer,’ Nat said, holding out a bottle.
Laura looked at him.
‘Take the top off for her, Nat. Just take the top off. Honestly.’
‘If you give me the gadget . . .’ Jess said.
‘No. No. He can do it. He knows he should do it.’
Nat eyed his sister.
‘Am I in for a hard time? Are you going to tell me off as per usual?’
Laura considered him. She put her head slightly on one side.
‘Not exactly. But when Angus comes down, I need to ask you about something.’ She smiled at Jess. ‘D’you mind helping Angus with a paella?’
‘Not at all.’
‘Good,’ Laura said. She opened a drawer and rummaged to produce a bottle opener. She held it out to her brother.
‘There you are,’ she said. ‘Make yourself useful.’
*
‘Now,’ Laura said.
She was sitting on the swivel desk chair in her study, and Nat was nursing a beer on the sofa bed, which had been folded up and was piled with a number of Jack’s toy animals.
‘Please don’t just go for me.’
‘I won’t. I wasn’t going to, anyway. But we haven’t had the chance
to talk for so long and all this stuff keeps happening.’
‘Mum stuff?’
‘Yes,’ Laura said, ‘Mum stuff.’
She took a sip from the wine glass on her desk, then she said, ‘She’s nice.’
Nat felt a foolish smile spread involuntarily across his face.
‘Jess?’
‘Of course Jess. Angus will be very happy indeed having her to slice peppers for him, never mind having someone gorgeous to show his cooking off to.’
‘She is gorgeous.’
‘Emmy thought so.’
‘Did she? I thought Emmy—’
‘It was because she’s gorgeous that Emmy got off on the wrong foot with her, you dope. She was on the wrong foot from the get-go, and then she couldn’t get back onto the right one. Which leads me . . .’ She stopped.
Nat picked up a plush dolphin with exaggerated plastic eyes, and looked at it.
‘To what?’
‘Mum,’ Laura said. ‘Mum and her house.’
Nat put the dolphin on his knee.
‘I’m a bit out of touch.’
‘I’m afraid you can’t be,’ Laura said. ‘However besotted you are, you can’t stop focusing on Mum and the Tyler thing. You can’t. And you can’t blithely accept a wallop of money from Mum to have the flat to yourself, either.’ She leaned forward. ‘She shouldn’t be selling, Nat. She just shouldn’t. It’s very generous and typical of her to think of giving us all money, but she can’t. It’s feckless. It’s plain stupid. She’s not at an age where she can afford to give away anything because, who knows? Who knows how long she’ll live? Who knows whether she’ll get ill or whether something unexpected will happen? I mean, supposing she was hit by a cyclist? Or fell off a bus? What I’m trying to say, what I was trying to get across to her, is that not only is the money the mews house represents hers, it’s got to last her forever, and nobody knows how long that forever will be. So I just don’t think she should be encouraged to give away a single penny; I don’t think any of us should do anything other than make it absolutely plain to her that the last thing we want is any premature generosity from her.’
Nat was stroking the dolphin with a regularity that indicated he needed to do something calming.
‘I asked Dad.’
An Unsuitable Match Page 20