‘What?’ Mallory was saying. ‘What, Dad, what?’
Then she swung round so she was facing the others.
‘Oh my God,’ Mallory said. ‘Oh sweet Jesus. Are you OK?’
CHAPTER TWENTY
Prue looked round Rose’s new sitting room with approval.
‘It’s very nice, Rosie.’
‘But there isn’t a garden.’
‘There’s a terrace. A balcony.’
‘It’s tiny.’
‘Now look, Rosie,’ Prue said, ‘it’s not that tiny. You can grow all kinds of things there, if you’re clever. And you are very clever with gardens.’
Rose said, childishly, ‘Well, thank goodness I am clever at something.’
Prue regarded her for a moment. She was holding the gardenia in a pot, trained neatly round a hoop, which she had brought Rose as a house-warming present, pointing out, as she did so, how many promising flower buds it had. She set it down carefully on the coffee table that had come, like all the rest of the furniture, from the mews house. She said, ‘Have you heard from him?’
‘From – Tyler?’
‘Of course Tyler, Rosie. Don’t play games with me.’
Rose sat down suddenly in one of the armchairs. ‘Yes, I have. Several times in fact.’ She looked up at Prue. ‘He’s in San Francisco. He thinks I’m mad.’
Prue settled herself in the second armchair and crossed her legs. ‘I doubt that. He just can’t understand how your mind works. Because it doesn’t work like his.’
‘No,’ Rose said. ‘It doesn’t.’
Prue waited a few seconds and then she said, ‘Do you miss him?’
Rose looked down at her lap. She nodded violently. ‘Terribly.’
‘I’m not one to beat about the bush,’ Prue said, ‘so I’ll ask you straight out. If he came back and proposed again, would you accept him?’
Rose raised her head. She sighed. ‘No,’ she said.
‘So you miss him but you don’t regret rejecting him?’
Rose looked straight at her sister. ‘Yes.’
Prue smiled broadly at her. ‘Well done, Rosie.’
‘It doesn’t feel like it. Those emails and texts from him saying how unhappy he is, how bereft, how he misses me, how he absolutely can’t understand my priorities . . .’
‘Priorities?’
‘He’s come to the conclusion that I’ve put money before him. Before happiness. Before the children. He thinks I’ve gone round the bend, and that all I mind about is money.’
‘Have you tried explaining otherwise?’
‘Oh!’ Rose exclaimed. ‘Have I! I’ve spent so much effort and energy in trying to explain myself to him, and himself to him, you can’t think. It’s hopeless, completely hopeless. I don’t know if he can’t hear me or won’t hear me, but the end result is the same every time. He’s the lovely romantic who puts emotions first and I’m the heartless materialist who puts money above everything.’
‘Face-saving,’ Prue said. ‘As far as he’s concerned.’
Rose struggled to get out of her chair. Then she stood, looking down at Prue. She said, ‘Let me make you some coffee.’
‘I’d like that. Rosie . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘If he thinks like that, why do you miss him so much?’
Rose made a clumsy little gesture. ‘He’s such a nice man. So easy and open. Rooms were sunnier if Tyler was in them.’
‘Only at the beginning,’ Prue said. ‘Everything’s always sunny at the beginning.’
Rose took a step back. ‘I was in love with him.’
‘And he was head over heels in love with you. Is that really what you’re missing?’
Rose said good-humouredly, ‘I really hate you.’
‘I know,’ Prue said. She smiled again. ‘You said something about coffee?’ She let a brief silence fall, and then she said, in her kindest voice, ‘It wasn’t about money really, was it, Rosie? It was about trust.’
*
Laura had spread lunch out on a table under her cherry tree in the garden. Angus had gone – reluctantly – to a stag weekend in the West Country, and Laura had said to Emmy why didn’t she bring Matthew round on Saturday, and they could have a picnic in the garden, if the weather was nice. So she had bought charcuterie and cheeses and interesting bread, and Jack, who was naked except for his gumboots and a grey-plastic Sith mask worn on top of his head, like a saucer-shaped hat held on by elastic, had helped her spread a cloth on the garden table and lay out the food.
Matthew had brought wine, in a cooler bag full of ice. He turned out to be a fan of Star Wars too, so was knowledgeable about the Sith mask, which Jack explained wasn’t new, but Daddy had found it on eBay. Matthew asked Jack why he was wearing gumboots and Jack said he didn’t like the feel of grass on his bare feet, which Matthew said was perfectly reasonable. He then held Adam on his knee for most of lunch, and fed him morsels of cheese and buttered bread, and Adam grew very loving after the food and wanted to stand up unsteadily on Matthew’s knee and kiss him ardently.
‘Goodness,’ Laura said admiringly to Emmy. ‘He’s a natural.’
Emmy was gazing at Matthew in a way Laura hadn’t seen her look at any man before.
Emmy said, almost dreamily, ‘He’s like that with me, too.’
‘What an asset.’
With one hand steadying Adam, Matthew reached out to pick up the wine bottle, which he then gestured with towards the girls.
‘Why not?’ Laura said, proffering her glass. ‘It’s Saturday, after all. And the first lunch outside of the year.’
Emmy held her own glass out. She said to Matthew, ‘Shall I tell Laura?’
He stretched past Adam with the wine bottle. He said, ‘Why not.’
‘Tell me what?’
‘Well,’ Emmy said, glancing at Matthew, ‘we’re moving in together. I’m going to Matthew’s, I’m going to live with Matthew.’
Laura raised her glass. ‘Wonderful!’
Jack stopped eating a stick of chorizo.
‘Why?’ he said to Matthew.
‘Because I asked her,’ Matthew said, ‘and she said yes.’
Jack said seriously, ‘She’s quite messy.’
‘I know,’ Matthew said, ‘I’ve been to her flat. But actually I’m fairly messy too.’
‘Are you,’ Jack said, going back to his chorizo, ‘going to marry her?’
Matthew didn’t look at Emmy. He said, ‘D’you think she’d have me?’
Jack said, ‘Grandma Rose isn’t going to get married after all, you know.’
‘So do you think there ought to be a wedding in the family somehow, then?’
Jack chewed for a moment, then he said, ‘Not necessarily.’
Everyone laughed. Laura said to Matthew, ‘We call spades spades in this house.’
He was looking at Emmy now. He said comfortably, ‘I rather like that.’
She looked back. ‘Me too.’
‘Enough, lovebirds,’ Laura said. She got up and went round the table to lift Adam off Matthew’s knee. ‘Up you come, you sticky horror. So good to have some happy news. After poor old Mum.’
‘Is she old?’ Jack asked.
‘It was the right decision,’ Emmy said. ‘It wasn’t going to work.’
‘What wasn’t?’ Jack said.
Emmy bent towards him. ‘Grandma Rose being married. That wasn’t going to work.’
Jack said nothing. He put down his chorizo and slid off his chair.
‘Jack,’ Laura said warningly. ‘You didn’t ask if you could get down.’
‘I need a wee.’
‘Then you ask.’
Matthew got up. ‘I do too.’ He held a hand out to Jack. ‘Show me where?’
Laura watched them cross the shaggy grass together, holding Adam on her hip.
‘He’s a keeper, isn’t he, Em?’
Emmy sighed happily. ‘Oh, I think so.’
‘I’m so pleased for you.’
‘Than
k you.’
Laura kissed the side of Adam’s head and brushed his hair back with her hand.
‘D’you think Mum’s OK, really?’
Emmy swept some breadcrumbs on the tablecloth into a neat pyramid. ‘I think she will be.’
‘It was such a shock. Maybe she even shocked herself. At least she’s gone back to work a bit. And we’ve managed to stop her giving us money.’
‘I like her flat,’ Emmy said, ‘It’s a sweet flat. I think she’ll like it too when she stops saying how cramped it is.’
Laura went back to her seat, carrying Adam. Once settled on her knee, he began devouring the crusts on her plate.
‘Talking of flats, Em, where does Matthew live?’
Emmy immediately looked transported again. ‘It’s wonderful. A garden flat at the very edge of Ladbroke Grove.’
‘And yours? What happens if you move in with Matthew?’
Emmy held out a grape to Adam, who seized it and crammed it into his mouth along with all the crusts.
‘Mallory’s taking it over.’
‘Mallory!’
Emmy nodded. ‘She’s got a job of some sort, an assistant stage manager or something, and she’s going to live in my flat.’ She pulled a quick face at Laura. ‘Just down the hill from Nat. She’s doing a great job consoling him.’
‘Do you think . . . ?’
‘Who knows,’ Emmy said. ‘Anything could happen. If I can fall for Matthew, Nat could fall for Mallory.’
‘Perhaps stop eating?’ Laura said to Adam. She tried to take a cheese rind out of his fist. ‘You’d think he had serious deprivation issues. Heavens. Nat and Mallory!’
Emmy held another grape out to Adam. ‘It isn’t Nat and Mallory that’s interesting, though, is it?’
‘Isn’t it?’
Emmy looked at her sister. ‘No, Laura, it isn’t. What is really interesting is Mallory – and Mum.’
*
The view from Rose’s flat was what had sold it to her. It faced west, and the glass doors of the sitting room folded back so that one could step out onto the – admittedly rather narrow – balcony and watch the sun go down over the miles and miles of London rooftops. There were different birds up here too, swooping, high-flying birds, and wind and cloudscapes, which was some compensation for the loss of trees and shrubs and any earth that Rose hadn’t carried up in the lift to her floor in a heat-sealed plastic sack. There were two bedrooms and a narrow kitchen whose end wall was almost all window, and where she could stand at night and watch the tail lights of cars in the street below glimmering like little scarlet sequins.
The translation agency for whom she’d used to work had been taken over and was uninterested in having her back. So she went doggedly, in person, to agency after agency, most of whom seemed only interested in employing people who could speak Chinese or Russian or Korean, until an agency in High Holborn agreed to take her on, at a modest rate per word, and sent her home with a test article in French on juvenile chronic arthritis, which she translated that evening, on her knee, sitting in the armchair that had once been Tyler’s favourite in the mews house. It gave her a headache, but also an indefinable satisfaction, intensified by emailing it off the next morning – like a child, she thought, handing a piece of written prep in to a teacher before time, with a flourish. It was in fact, she told Prue almost shyly, on the telephone, like coming home to herself, however heartsore that self was.
Weekends, she had said to Prue, candidly over their coffee, were difficult. Bleaker. Longer. Not eagerly anticipated any more; in fact, there was almost a longing for Monday mornings, for the life of the streets to start up again, for public transport to be crammed with resigned people doing what they had to do in order to earn weekends. She had felt something of this at the end of her marriage to William, but it was more acute now, as if Tyler had not just taken his person to California, but also a sense of the shared joy of time off. There had been walks with Tyler, meals with Tyler, movies and theatres and concerts with Tyler. Above all, there had been talks with Tyler, talks in which his eyes hardly left her face while he asked her what she thought, what she felt, what she imagined.
‘I don’t think,’ she said to Mallory, who had taken to spending most of her Sundays and Mondays, when her theatre was closed, in Rose’s flat, ‘that I have ever been so valued for my reaction, in all my life.’
Mallory was in her father’s chair, holding a glass of wine. She said to the wine, ‘I never felt that.’
Rose said quietly, ‘I know.’
‘He loves us,’ Mallory said. ‘But he can’t empathize. He can’t imagine what it’s like to be us. Mom couldn’t either, but then she didn’t want to. Daddy just doesn’t have what it takes.’ She glanced at Rose. ‘With us kids, I mean.’
‘I know,’ Rose said again.
Mallory put her head back against the armchair. Her eyes were closed.
‘Emmy’s moving in with Matthew.’
‘Yes,’ Rose said, ‘I’m so pleased. He’s so nice. He’s helping her find another job because he doesn’t think that they should work and live together.’
Mallory didn’t open her eyes. ‘Is he right?’
‘He’s right,’ Rose said. ‘In fact, I think he’s right about a lot of things. He’s taking Emmy out to Australia for her father’s wedding. He said she would kick herself if she didn’t go, and it would be hard to go alone.’
Mallory rolled her head sideways and opened her eyes. ‘Are the others going?’
Rose shook her head. ‘No.’
‘Did they talk about it?’
Rose smiled at her. ‘None of my business.’
Mallory said abruptly, ‘Am I some of your business?’
‘You – seem to be.’
Mallory sat up. She said, ‘Are you worried about Nat?’
‘Not really. He’ll get over it. He’s never been dumped before.’
Mallory said seriously, ‘I’m not getting over it. It’s why I came back to London.’
Rose took a sip of wine. ‘You’re different.’
‘How different?’
‘Needing healing from family deficiencies is very different to getting over being dumped.’
‘Will – Daddy get over you?’
‘I think so.’
‘He says he won’t. Ever. He says you were the one.’
Rose said softly, ‘None of us is ever the one. We’re just the only ones we meet.’
Mallory took a hank of hair in one hand and inspected the blue ends. ‘If Daddy hadn’t fallen for you, I’d never have met you.’
‘No.’
‘You glad about that?’
Rose got out of her chair and went over to the view, darkening to the west above the skeins of street lights. ‘Of course I am.’
‘You’ve got Laura,’ Mallory said, ‘and Nat and Emmy and Matthew. And Angus and Jack and Adam. And Prue.’
Rose didn’t turn. Mallory waited.
‘There’s always room,’ Rose said. She moved slightly so that Mallory could see her profile. ‘There’s always room, for another connection.’ She sounded as if she was smiling. ‘Family isn’t a finite thing.’
AN UNSUITABLE MATCH
Joanna Trollope is the author of twenty highly acclaimed and bestselling novels, including The Rector’s Wife, Marrying the Mistress and Daughters-in-Law. She has also written a study of women in the British Empire, Britannia’s Daughters, and ten historical novels under the pseudonym of Caroline Harvey. She was appointed OBE in 1996, and a trustee of the National Literacy Trust in 2012 and the Royal Literary Fund in 2016. She has chaired the Whitbread and Orange Awards, as well as being a judge of many other literature prizes; she has been part of two DCMS panels on public libraries, and is patron of numerous charities, including Meningitis Now and Chawton House Library. In 2014, she updated Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility as the opening novel in the Austen Project. An Unsuitable Match is her twenty-first novel.
Also by Joanna Trollope
&nb
sp; A Village Affair
A Passionate Man
The Choir
The Rector’s Wife
The Men and the Girls
A Spanish Lover
The Best of Friends
Next of Kin
Other People’s Children
Marrying the Mistress
Girl from the South
Brother and Sister
Second Honeymoon
Friday Nights
The Other Family
Daughters-in-Law
The Soldier’s Wife
Sense and Sensibility
Balancing Act
City of Friends
First published 2018 by Mantle
This electronic edition published 2018 by Mantle
an imprint of Pan Macmillan
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Associated companies throughout the world
www.panmacmillan.com
ISBN 978-1-5098-2348-2
Copyright © Joanna Trollope 2018
Cover photographs: lower window © Alamy, window boxes © Jeff Cottenden, cushions © Shutterstock, window boxes by The Windowbox Company
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Author photograph © Barker Evans
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