An Unsuitable Match Read online

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER ONE

  He had said it. He had actually said the words. All right, he’d been half laughing, shaking his head as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was saying, and they’d been washing up at the time, so his hands had been in the sink, holding a saucepan to rinse it under the running tap, but all the same, he had said, ‘D’you know, Rose, I have to tell you that I don’t think – no, I know that I have never felt like this before.’

  Then he’d put the saucepan down on the counter and turned the tap off. And said, ‘I must have felt something like it, with Cindy, I suppose. I must have. Mustn’t I?’ He’d picked up a tea towel to dry his hands and he’d looked at her, straight at her, and he’d said again, ‘But I’ve never felt like this. I’ve never felt about anyone as I do about you.’

  She was standing by the central unit in her kitchen, the unit that housed the sink and the sleek glass hob, holding the salad bowl that they had just eaten from, and that he had washed up by hand because she’d bought it thirty years before, in Umbria, and didn’t think that it would withstand the dishwasher.

  She said only, ‘Oh, Tyler.’

  He said, ‘I mean it.’

  She nodded, without complete conviction. ‘I – know you do.’

  He moved towards her and took the salad bowl out of her hands, and set it down on the counter. Then he took her face in his hands.

  ‘Rose Woodrowe,’ he said, ‘I’m in love with you.’

  She nodded again. She felt something wild and wonderful surging up inside her, a mad kind of rapture. She said, idiotically, in a whisper, ‘But I’m sixty-four.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘And a grandmother—’

  ‘I’m sixty-three,’ he said, interrupting. ‘I could be thirty-three. Or ninety-three. It’s irrelevant. Completely, utterly irrelevant. You are who you are. And I am completely in love with that. Get it?’

  She blinked. She said faintly, ‘It’s – a kind of miracle . . .’

  ‘No, it isn’t. Well, I suppose it is, a bit, that we met again.’

  She stepped back a pace, and dislodged his hands.

  ‘I meant,’ she said, ‘that it’s a miracle to me that you feel as you do.’

  He took a step towards her and put his arms round her to prevent her retreating further.

  ‘Typical of you,’ he said, ‘to put it that way. All I can think is that my younger self must have been off his stupid head not to grab you thirty years ago.’

  ‘Forty-seven,’ she said.

  His eyes widened.

  ‘Forty-seven?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Very. Tennis camp at some Dorset school, summer of 1969. I was seventeen and had just sat my A levels. You were sixteen and had precociously done the same.’

  ‘I got four As,’ he said proudly.

  She pulled a face. ‘Did you now.’

  They both laughed. He held her hard against him and said, against her cheek, ‘I was mad about you then. But I didn’t dare –’

  She closed her eyes. ‘On the contrary, you were too busy daring with those flirty girls from Cranborne Chase.’

  ‘Was I?’

  She took her face away from his. ‘I’m not going to humour you, Tyler. Or flatter you. You behaved like a classic teenage hormonal boy mess.’

  He released his hold enough to look at her and said, soberly, ‘Sorry.’

  ‘No need to apologize.’

  ‘I know I wanted you to notice me.’

  She put her hands into his hair. Still thick, even if grey now, still with that kind of curve and bounce that gives even a plain face charm. And Tyler Masson’s face was not at all plain.

  She said, ‘I think you were the kind of boy who wanted everyone to notice you. And we did. There was your name to begin with.’ She seemed to focus suddenly. ‘Yes, your name. Why on earth are you called that?’

  ‘Tyler?’

  ‘Yes, Tyler.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, smiling easily down at her, ‘it was my mother’s idea. She believed, being from Kent, that Wat Tyler of the Peasants’ Revolt was some kind of ancestor. And my father drew the line at my being called Walter, which Wat is short for. So they compromised on Tyler.’

  Rose made a face. ‘With Masson, for heaven’s sake.’ She removed her hands from his hair.

  ‘Ancient,’ Tyler said breezily. ‘The first Massons came over from France after the Norman Conquest. They were stonemasons. Any more useful etymology I can assist you with?’

  She was giggling. ‘No!’

  ‘Go on about what made you notice me as a schoolboy.’

  Rose made an effort at composure. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘there was your height. And a kind of confidence—’

  ‘Insecurity,’ he said.

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘And what about you? What did you feel?’

  She glanced at him. She said, ‘I just wanted to be liked.’

  ‘God,’ he said, ‘I like you. I like you so much. There isn’t a way I know to express how much I like you.’

  ‘I can’t quite believe it.’

  He bent to peer into her face. ‘I don’t get it. I absolutely, utterly don’t get it. How can you doubt your total lovableness for a single second?’

  ‘Upbringing, possibly. Character. Family position – the younger of two girls. I don’t know. All I do know is that when you say what you’ve just said, I think I’m going to blow up like a firework.’

  He linked his hands behind her waist. He said teasingly, ‘What did I just say?’

  ‘Don’t . . .’

  ‘Repeat to me what I just said.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Rose.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Rose. I, Tyler Masson, have never felt about a woman in all my sixty-three years the way I feel about you. OK?’

  She nodded yet again. ‘OK.’

  ‘And in my blithe and arrogant male way, I am assuming that you feel something of the same about me. Do you?’

  She looked up at him. His eyes, slightly magnified by the lenses of his spectacles were, she observed, not exactly matching in colour, one being a distinctly greener kind of hazel.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  She was waiting for him to kiss her, but although he was looking down at her mouth, he made no attempt to touch it with his own. Instead he said, ‘Just one more thing.’

  ‘Oh?’

  He released her waist and took her hands in his instead, bringing them up to hold against his chest. ‘I’ve never done this before.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, let’s just say that if anyone proposed to anyone in the past, it was a mixture of Cindy doing the asking and me doing the assuming. But the thing is, Rose . . .’

  He stopped. She waited. He lifted one of her hands up to his mouth and kissed the palm. Then he said, ‘The thing is, Rose, that I desperately – really desperately – want to marry you.’

  *

  She had bought the little house seven years ago, after the divorce. It had been, in terms of the minimal employment of lawyers, a civilized divorce, largely
because William Woodrowe wanted to marry someone else, and Rose was chiefly concerned about protecting the children from the spectacle of openly quarrelling parents. William, it transpired, had been having an affair with the senior nurse on his surgical cardiac team for well over a decade. It was an affair – if you could fairly describe such an established relationship as an affair – known, and after so long, largely accepted in both the London hospitals, public and private, where he operated, and Gillian Greenhalgh was treated with much of the deference that automatically accompanied the consort of a leading consultative surgeon. When Rose came to hospital functions as William’s wife, Gillian stayed away. When Gillian was in charge of the nursing staff in an operating theatre, Rose was neither mentioned nor considered. And when new members of the surgical teams asked what on earth was going on with Mr and Mrs Woodrowe and Gillian Greenhalgh, there would be a lot of dismissive eye-rolling and shrugging and muttered mentions of a weird triangular way of doing things, search me how they all manage it.

  They managed it, quite simply, because Rose did not know. Over the long years of their courtship and marriage, ever since she had encountered William Woodrowe at a cousin’s wedding, she had been aware of his appeal as a doctor as well as his comfortably flirtatious manner. What else, for goodness’ sake, had induced her to stand, precariously balanced on heels on the coconut-matting floor of a wedding marquee, and ply him for so long with eager questions about his research fellowship at Imperial College? He had sounded then as he sounded when he asked for a divorce thirty-two years later: confident, kindly and essentially reasonable. Then he had said, ‘I think you are indulging me, encouraging me to go on about myself like this. But I would so much like to indulge you, if you would let me give you dinner in London.’

  And later, just before her fifty-seventh birthday:

  ‘I don’t really think it’s a question of you indulging me, exactly, in setting me free. I think it’s more a matter of acknowledging that our marriage has been a great success, but that it has run its course. It really has, Rose. It’s over.’

  So although she had taught herself to expect and accept that William’s personality and William’s vocation would result in some inevitable straying now and then, she had equally instructed herself to regard them as the built-in hazards of a marriage such as theirs, a career such as his. There had unquestionably been episodes occasioning intense anxiety, but the long term, she had always told herself, would prevail over short-term threats. The idea that another, alternative relationship was quietly, steadily, secretly establishing itself did not occur to her, so when the solid fact of it was made plain to her, she was as psychologically winded as if the breath had literally been knocked out of her.

  Once the first, violent shock was over, she had castigated herself, of course she had. How could she have been so blind, so obtuse, as to not see what was really going on behind the smokescreen of infatuated student nurses and susceptible junior doctors and patients longing to find a saviour in their cardiologist? How convenient it had been that her preoccupations as a mother and a part-time translator from French and Italian into English had involved visits out of London to schools and universities and European cities, and how stupid she was not to have suspected that William’s encouragement of both roles in her life, maternal and professional, often gave him the liberty to be with Gillian in her useful absences.

  She thought back, with a disgust initially directed purely at herself, at all the Christmas and holiday phone calls that she had never doubted to be from anxious patients, as William had calmly assured her they were – ‘I’m just going to close my study door, darling, because I’m afraid this may take some time.’ Nor had it ever occurred to her that the endless medical conferences in foreign hotels, which William had reassured her would be tedious for her in the extreme, might involve Gillian as his companion. Indeed he often mentioned that Gillian would be there, implying that her involvement was purely professional rather than revealing that she was really there to share his bed. The smooth and ingenious falseness was one thing; her own failure to perceive how thoroughly she had been deceived, and for how long, had been quite another.

  Her older sister, Prue, a retired headmistress, had been characteristically firm.

  ‘Now, Rosie, you can’t make a career out of beating yourself up. Nor of being outraged at what a complete shit William has turned out to be. It’s boring, frankly. Betrayed women who can’t let go of their betrayal are beyond tedious. To be frank with you—’

  ‘When are you ever anything else?’

  Her sister had closed her eyes as if Rose had said something far best ignored.

  ‘To be frank with you,’ Prue repeated, resuming in exactly the same tone, ‘you are not only better off without him psychologically, you are better off materially too. He has to give you somewhere big enough to house the children—’

  ‘No he doesn’t,’ Rose said. ‘The children are grown up.’

  ‘When the children come to stay,’ Prue said, in the voice she had used with obstreperous fathers in the past, ‘they need to be housed. So do their partners. And in Laura’s case, their children. So you can choose where you want to live, and William has to fund it if he doesn’t want to pay a great amount more in legal fees.’

  ‘Um,’ Rose said. She was trying to imagine wanting to live anywhere ever again. Prue took her shoulders in a purposeful grasp.

  ‘I’ll help you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ll help you,’ Prue said. ‘To find a house.’

  Rose gestured round Prue’s retirement-cottage kitchen, as orderly and charmless to Rose’s eye as Prue’s kitchens had always been.

  ‘But we have completely opposite tastes in houses.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Prue said. She smiled at Rose. ‘What I like will help make up your mind to like the exact opposite. It will be an entirely constructive exercise.’

  *

  It was Laura, Rose and William’s doctor daughter Laura, who had found the mews house. It had three bedrooms, a garage and even a garden, and it was at the end of a cobbled mews five minutes’ walk from Oxford Street. Laura, a GP in west London, had heard about it on her professional grapevine. It was unmodernized and had been lived in by an old-school consultant in Harley Street, who wore a gold watch chain across his pinstriped waistcoat and kept a vintage Bentley in the garage.

  The twins had been horrified at the idea of their mother ending up in the heart of London’s medical district.

  ‘Mum,’ Nat said to her, his weekend T-shirt accessorized with high-end earphones, ‘are you off your head? The very bit of London you can’t stand? Every quack in London as your neighbour? Seriously?’

  Emmy, who had the most sentimental attachment of all of them to the house in Highgate where they had grown up, decided to be more personal.

  ‘Why do you want to live anywhere, Mum, that has anything whatever to do with Dad? After what he’s done. After how he’s treated you. Why would you ever want to live somewhere that reminded you of him?’

  But the mews house didn’t. It was curiously detached, in character and atmosphere, from everything that surrounded it. Sure, as you emerged from the mews, you were confronted by a clinic for cosmetic surgery and a surgery specializing in dental implants, but beyond their front doors, you could turn into New Cavendish Street and in a few minutes be sitting in a coffee shop on Marylebone High Street with a little supermarket across the way that sold everything from milk to washing powder.

  William said that the house was too expensive, and that quite apart from the asking price, modernizing it would be prohibitively costly. It was ten months on from his announcement that their marriage was over, and a satisfactory offer had been accepted on the Highgate house. William and Rose were in a cafe halfway up Highgate Hill, with a table firmly between them. Rose was drinking tea. She poured a second cup and said steadily, ‘You can afford it. We can afford it.’

  William looked at the ceiling. ‘Out of the question,’ he said sho
rtly.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ Rose said, ‘that you can’t talk to me like that any more. I have created no real difficulties for you in all the years we’ve known each other. But now I want something and I intend to have it.’

  ‘I thought your heart was in the Highgate house.’

  ‘Once. Not now.’

  ‘I thought,’ William went on, clearly slightly aggrieved, as if Rose were the one who had created the situation, ‘that you didn’t care where you lived.’

  ‘Nine months ago, I didn’t. Till I saw this house, I didn’t. Now I do. I can see myself living in this house.’

  William put his elbows on the table, either side of his coffee cup.

  He said, ‘I suppose you should know that I have accepted a professorship in Melbourne.’

  ‘Goodness.’

  ‘The Cardiac Society of Australia and New Zealand have offered me the post. I’ll be heading up a team at a major hospital and directing a research institute. And . . . ah . . . Gilly is to be head of nursing for cardiology and chest medicine at the same hospital.’

  Rose looked out of the window. ‘Hooray,’ she said faintly.

  ‘So we’ll be out of your hair. You can live anywhere. We’ll be in Australia.’

  Slowly, her gaze swung back to him. ‘But I don’t want to live anywhere. I want to live in the mews house.’

  ‘I can’t afford it.’

  Rose sat very still. She looked at him for a long time and wondered what had happened to the Rose that had once thought that life without him was too fantastical a notion even to be contemplated.

  ‘It isn’t you alone, William. It’s us. It’s the us who were married for over thirty years and had three children. It’s the us who enabled you to have a fulfilling private and professional life. I’m not going to depend upon you for a single penny after we are divorced, but I am going to have this house, this particular house, which I shall make sure is my pension in the future, too.’

  William looked down at his hands on the table and sighed. He is wondering, Rose thought, how he is going to tell Gillian – Gilly! – that he has agreed to buy a house for me that will cost much more than half the sale value of the Highgate house.

  Rose said pleasantly, ‘You both have pensions, after all. And you will both be earning, in Australia.’