An Unsuitable Match Read online

  Without looking up, William replied, ‘You never used to be like this.’

  She laughed. ‘But I was never put in this position. Not that I knew about, anyway.’ She added, ‘You are wondering how to tell . . . Gilly, that you won’t be able to afford a swimming pool and a tennis court in Melbourne, aren’t you?’

  ‘I think the children—’

  ‘Leave them out of it, William.’

  He straightened up abruptly and reached behind him for his coat. He said, in the professional voice she was used to hearing him use on the telephone, ‘I’ll think about it. I’ll let you know.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. She was smiling. You didn’t live with someone for over thirty years and fail to realize when you had won. ‘Thank you, William.’

  *

  Her family were outraged at her choice. Her sister said that she couldn’t understand how anyone in their right mind could possibly want to live in London if they had the chance not to. She made it sound as if it were some sort of punishment, rather than a choice. The twins said what they had said at the beginning, if with slightly less conviction once the value of a refurbished house in central London dawned upon them. Only Laura was affirmative; calm, steady Laura, with her architect husband and two small boys in the west London house that had been a neglected work in progress for the five years that she and Angus had lived in it together.

  ‘Do you think,’ Rose had said more than once, ‘that Angus might get round to boxing in the bath? Or, perhaps, putting doors on the kitchen cupboards?’

  ‘Sure,’ Laura would say, a baby held absently on one hip while she emailed a patient on the phone in her free hand. ‘One day. When he feels like it. When he finds the right panel. Or the right handles.’ She would smile at her mother. ‘Promise you, Mum. It doesn’t fuss me.’

  She was the only one to look round the mews house with approval.

  ‘It’s nice, Mum.’

  ‘I know. And it’s going to be nicer.’

  Laura gestured towards the garden. ‘The boys will be so safe there. And there are steps up to the lawn. They love steps.’

  ‘I can have them to stay. There’s a playground in Paddington Street Gardens.’

  ‘Lovely,’ Laura said. ‘I can imagine you here, on your own.’

  ‘So can I.’

  Laura looked at her.

  ‘Will you be OK, Mum, on your own? Really?’

  ‘Darling. I think so. I am determined to be. The last year has been so . . . strange that it hasn’t been a good indicator, and I can’t quite picture how life will be, what it will be like, day to day, but I do know that I don’t want you children fretting about me.’

  ‘We want you to be happy,’ Laura said, pushing up her sweater sleeves.

  ‘Of course you do. Apart from anything else, a happy mother is less trouble. A happy mother in London and a father far away in Australia.’

  ‘It’s good for him.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And frankly,’ Laura said, ‘it’s easier for us, not having to deal with him – and her – here. I mean, she’s OK as a person, but none of it’s actually very easy. I won’t refuse to meet her, like Nat and Em, but I’d rather not, to be honest. I think I’ll see them with the boys around. It’s like having a dog there in a difficult situation. It gives everyone a kind of let-out.’ She put her hands in her trouser pockets. ‘But you are another matter. You liked being married, didn’t you?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘I like it,’ Laura said. ‘It’s more interesting than people say. I can understand that you liked it.’

  ‘But now,’ Rose said steadily, ‘I can’t have it. I can’t have what I had. It’s over. Gone. So I have to make something else. And this’ – she gestured at the dingy sitting-room walls with their faded oblongs on the dated grasscloth covering where pictures had once hung – ‘is where it starts. This is the first practical project of my next chapter.’

  Laura gave her the sweet, slightly absent smile she bestowed on everyone in her life who showed the smallest sign of independence.

  ‘Good for you, Mum,’ she said.

  *

  Rose enrolled for a twenty-six-day training course as a handyman in a north London college scheme for apprentices of all ages. She was the only woman in the scheme and, she reckoned, at least ten years older than any of the other trainees. In under a month, she learned the basics of plastering and tiling, how to lay bricks and how to hang both wallpaper and a door. At the end of the course, and still wearing her overalls, she was interviewed by a national tabloid under the headline ‘Lady with a Spanner’. The organizers of the training course later told her that they’d had a fifteen per cent increase in female enrolment since the newspaper article. She waited for the children to say that they were proud of her. They said nothing. Angus, Laura reported in her neutral way, had boxed in their bath, which felt to Rose more like a mildly competitive reproof than any kind of compliment. It fell in the end to Nat, to the only son, emboldened by his new job with an asset-management company in the City, to corner her as she carefully spaced some tiles in one of her new bathrooms, and tell her that they were all worried.

  Rose was holding a box of plastic tile spacers. She looked at them, rather than at Nat. ‘Worried?’ she said, with artificial vagueness.

  ‘Yes, Mum.’

  ‘Well,’ Rose said, ‘of course I’m getting professionals in to do the re-wiring and serious plumbing, and all that—’

  ‘Mum,’ Nat interrupted, ‘don’t play dumb. Don’t do your lady-with-a-spanner act on me. You can fanny about with wrenches and screwdrivers all you want, but you have to live in this house when you’ve finished it. You have to have an income, to live in an expensive house in one of the most expensive areas of one of the most expensive cities in the world, Mum. This house, whatever it’s worth when you’ve done with it, isn’t going to put bread on the table just by being here. We’re worried, Mum, because we can’t see what you’re going to do for money.’

  Rose stooped to put the box of tile spacers on the floor.

  She said quietly, ‘I’m still translating.’

  ‘That’ll hardly pay your council tax!’

  ‘I can do more. There’s endless amounts of medical stuff to translate.’

  ‘Not enough.’

  Rose looked past her son. ‘I couldn’t ask Dad for more. I couldn’t – bring myself to.’

  Nat smiled at her.

  ‘I get that. We all do. But the difference is that Dad can work for another eight years in Australia, and then he gets a pension. Never mind what – well, supplements there are to his income. But you’ve got this, only this. You chose to have this, rather than money. Fair enough. No criticism. But, Mum, you’ve got to live in this house, as well as own it. Do you see?’

  Surrendering to deserved humiliation, Rose decided, could wait until Nat had gone. She took him down to her as yet untouched, old-fashioned kitchen and made him tea and gave him a chocolate-covered animal biscuit from the packet she had bought for Laura’s little boys, and promised that she would most earnestly address his concerns. Then she escorted him out of the mews without allowing him to reiterate, as he was plainly longing to, everything he had already said, and stood waving until he disappeared around the corner towards Cavendish Square. Then she returned to the house, closed the front door and slid down against it until she was sitting on the bare boards of the hall, staring at her denim-covered knees. Here she was, fifty-seven years old, divorced and penniless, having lurched her way from one crisis to another and always, it seemed, with a blindfold on. ‘Grow up, Rosie,’ Prue would say, and she’d be right. Nat was right – and his sisters, on whose behalf he had spoken, were right too. She looked about her, at the scarred damask wallpaper that the old consultant had chosen for his hallway. Dark green. Dark green in an already dark passage. She wasn’t actually penniless. She was certainly divorced, and unquestionably fifty-seven, but she wasn’t penniless. She had the house. She struggled to her feet
and put a hand protectively on the nearest dark-green wall. There was a reason the house had been so important and that same reason was going to enable her to live there. Somehow.

  *

  Now, seven years on, she was still there, and surviving. A series of lodgers – not hard to find, since she lived in the midst of an abundance of clinics and consulting rooms – plus a determined specialization in medical-translation work and a small legacy from her mother’s estate (‘You should invest it,’ Prue said. ‘It’s so short-sighted just to spend it.’) had enabled her to stay on in the mews house.

  ‘There’s no need, you know, to be defiant,’ her daughter Emmy said once, propped in the kitchen doorway with a bag of crisps in her hand. ‘I mean, we know you can do it, now. We know about how well you can cope.’

  Rose was making tea. She paused, her back to Emmy, holding the jar in which she kept everyday teabags.

  ‘It’s not about coping, Em. It isn’t even about defying anyone or anything. It’s about having my eyes open.’

  Emmy stopped crunching for a moment.

  ‘Come again?’

  Rose put the jar down and turned round.

  ‘I just don’t want not to see something crucial, ever again. I don’t want to sleepwalk past something I need to see or into something I can’t handle. I’ve made myself live here, not to show all of you that I could, but to show myself.’

  ‘Oh,’ Emmy said. She sounded genuinely astonished. ‘Oh. OK.’

  That conversation had been six months ago, two months before a friend – an ex-lodger who had subsequently become a friend – had taken her to a production of Ibsen’s The Master Builder at a little theatre in north London, where the part of the bookkeeper, Kaia Fosli, was played by a young American actress called Mallory Masson, whose English accent, everyone around Rose was saying admiringly, was absolutely excellent. And in the interval, while she was talking peacefully to her friend over a glass of white wine, they had been interrupted by a man, a tall, personable, grey-haired man in spectacles, who said, ‘Rose? Rose Guthrie? Is it really you?’

  She’d stared at him; said, awkwardly, ‘I haven’t been Rose Guthrie for forty years.’

  He laughed. He held out his hand.

  ‘I’m Tyler. Remember? Tyler Masson. From forever ago. That’s my daughter on stage. Playing Kaia. That’s my daughter, Mallory Masson.’

  Four months ago. Four heady, extraordinary months, culminating in the scene in this very kitchen, next to the salad bowl. Rose put her hands over her face for a moment.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said to him, in answer to him, knowing that her face gave everything away. ‘I can’t think, I can’t decide, I can’t . . .’

  He was still holding her hands captive.

  ‘No hurry,’ he said. ‘Tell me when you’re ready. You know, at least, what I want.’

  She looked up at him, and she knew her expression told him everything he wanted to know. She was longing to tell him, to give him the ultimate satisfaction of knowing that she – joyfully, willingly – accepted his proposal.

  ‘The thing is . . .’ she began, and stopped.

  ‘What?’ he said. He was smiling.

  ‘I just wonder how . . . I – we are going to tell the children?’

  CHAPTER TWO

  Tyler Masson had lost his American wife, Cindy, to cancer, three weeks after his sixtieth birthday. Cindy had first been diagnosed five years before, and had run the whole exhausting gamut of surgery and radiotherapy and chemotherapy at the celebrated cancer centre at Stanford near San Francisco, paid for – as so much in the Massons’ lives seemed to be – by her father.

  Cindy’s father, who had died before his daughter, had not had any faith whatsoever that either of his sons-in-law could be trusted to look after their wives. That Tyler was English, in addition to his other disadvantages, only deepened the contempt. Cindy’s father, still living in the substantial house in Pacific Heights where Cindy had grown up, had made sure that neither of his daughters would ever quite believe that they could manage without him, or his money. He had imprisoned his wife in the controllable social circuit of bridge afternoons, ladies’ lunches and shopping that he deemed suitable. His younger daughter, Cindy’s sister Diane, waited to divorce until her father was safely dead, and then set up house with another woman in a condo overlooking the Bay. Cindy, weighed down with the responsibilities of being the eldest and more vulnerably responsible child, developed terminal cancer.

  Tyler had known all along, at some level, that he would never be a match for his father-in-law. His early academic promise petered out, almost without him noticing. He met Cindy in London at some kind of transatlantic university exchange in 1977, when he was twenty-two, and that initial meeting segued somehow into a summer some years later, in San Francisco, and the offer of a job in Cindy’s father’s commercial-property company, which included the promise of help in obtaining a coveted green card in order to live and work in America.

  Tyler, coasting amiably through his post-student days, was a plum ripe for the picking. San Francisco, with its heady mix of new hippiedom and affluent tradition; sunny California; the easy sophistication of American life compared favourably with what he had left behind; Cindy herself with her lovely teeth and ability to both ski and play tennis, were all irresistibly seductive. After all, Tyler didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life, beyond not wanting, fairly strenuously, to follow his schoolmaster father into teaching. The morning after his early spring engagement to Cindy – an arrangement that seemed to have come about with no actual decision made on his part – he stood in his bedroom in the Baker Street house of his future parents-in-law, and looked down into their immaculate garden, and saw, to his wonder, that the glossy-leaved trees trained as espaliers along one wall bore not only starry white flowers, but, unmistakably, actual oranges. He was entranced. He stood there, wrapped in a post-shower (a shower!) towel, drying his ears with a second towel, and gazed with rapture at the oranges. This spectacular place, with its exotically mixed culture and separate showers in the bathrooms, also grew orange trees in gardens, which they, the Americans, quaintly called yards.

  ‘It’s a Cara Cara,’ Cindy’s mother said later. ‘Pink flesh. Very sweet. And beyond the oranges, you will have seen the Fuerte avocado trees.’

  Tyler had never seen an avocado, let alone tasted one. He had never eaten an orange straight from its tree, either. He looked from the Cara Cara orange on his plate, across the table at a glowing Cindy, and felt that he had done very much the right thing in becoming her fiancé. This place, this city, had the feel of the future about it, an air of beckoning promise. When he had to face Cindy’s father later in the day, for the inevitable interview, he felt he could do it buoyed up by being as much in love with what America held out to him as he surely was with Cindy.

  He was given a job overseeing contractors on commercial sites, and a house at the unfashionable end of Pacific Heights where even a glimpse of the Bay was out of the question. He asked Cindy why they had to accept this house, and Cindy said simply, as if it was perfectly acceptable, that it was Daddy’s decision. She had explained, very patiently, how much persuading she had had to do to bring her father round to the idea of her marrying Tyler Masson in the first place. Having won that enormous victory, she said, she wasn’t going to confront her father with a further, if lesser, defiance.

  Tyler said, trying to be rational, ‘But if he doesn’t pay for it—’

  ‘Of course he’s paying for it!’

  ‘But why? Why don’t we get a mortgage like everyone else, and be independent?’

  Cindy had elements of her mother in her. She came up to Tyler and linked her arms behind his neck.

  ‘Honey, it’d break his heart.’

  ‘Would it?’

  ‘Sure it would. Diane and me’ll always be his little girls. I can’t just – throw a gift like this house back at him.’

  Tyler put his hands on her slim ribcage. Attempting a smile, he said, �
�What about me?’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘Well, suppose I would rather we looked after ourselves, even if we don’t do it very well, at the beginning?’

  She put her head on one side and her ponytail swung out smoothly. ‘We’re the kids, honey,’ Cindy said, ‘and Daddy knows best. When we’re older, we can make changes. But not yet. You’ll see.’

  So Tyler waited. He waited through the birth of his son, Seth – named for his late maternal great-grandfather – and his daughter Mallory – named for her late maternal great-grandmother – and a change of job from overseeing contractors to liaising with architects. He waited through two changes of house, both dictated by his father-in-law. He waited for something to happen, that elusive something that had seemed to shimmer so tangibly close on the morning he had noticed oranges hanging on the trees outside his window. He waited for Cindy – blonde, trim, tennis-playing, conscientious – to promote him above her father in the pecking order of men in her life. It was only when she told him that her father was paying for her cancer treatment at the famous centre at Stanford that he realized he would never be first in her life, first in her consideration and estimation. In fact, since Seth was born, he, Tyler, hadn’t even been second. He’d looked at Cindy. She’d been crying at the confirmation of the cancer diagnosis, as neatly as she did most things.

  ‘Couldn’t we – go it alone? Together? Couldn’t we try and fix this in our own way?’ he said.

  Cindy blew her nose. She shook her head.

  ‘Why not?’ Tyler asked.

  She’d looked up at him. She was fifty-five years old, the children were in their late twenties and her father was reluctantly, angrily retired.

  ‘I couldn’t do it to him,’ Cindy said. ‘I couldn’t refuse him.’ And then she produced her usual trump card, the statement he had never had an answer to. ‘I couldn’t,’ Cindy said, her eyes wide with intensity. ‘It would break his heart.’

  Tyler had gone out then into what he still determinedly called the garden. He had looked up at the American sky and then at the citrus trees and avocado trees that Cindy had planted trimly in pots against a white wall to reflect the sunlight. None of it, that day, looked exotic and full of promise. It looked, instead, alien and mildly threatening, as if this cruel and hideous illness of Cindy’s was a manifestation of fundamental otherness in which he, Tyler Masson, with his American-accented children, would always be an outsider.