An Unsuitable Match Read online

  He looked back at the house. It had been given to Cindy by her father. Not to both of them: only to Cindy. And he, Tyler, had allowed that to happen, just as he had allowed the two previous houses to happen, and the jobs and the now perpetual state of being beholden to a man who was never, ever, going to surrender his elder daughter to any other man on earth. Tyler jammed his fists angrily into his trouser pockets.

  ‘The trouble with you, my boy,’ his father-in-law was fond of saying, ‘is that for all your fancy English education, you don’t have the first idea about money. You think – no, don’t interrupt me – that you are kinda above money. And I am here to tell you that’ – pause for emphasis – ‘it just ain’t so. No, sir. Money is where it begins and money is where it ends. And I am the living proof.’

  Tyler had never argued back. Arguing with his father-in-law would have been like hammering on a locked steel door with his bare fists. In their different ways, neither Tyler nor Cindy had ever done anything that had contravened her father’s instructions, to the point where Tyler had begun to be overcome with shame at his own spinelessness. He had sat in the church at his father-in-law’s funeral and felt, rather than relief at this longed-for release, only a bitter sense of self-censure. Goodness knows what Cindy, her sparse hair covered by an ingenious silk turban, was thinking, sitting quite still beside her weeping mother, dry-eyed and inscrutable. It would be only a year before another tumour, this time in her right lung, would make itself known and begin its final remorseless mission to carry her off.

  Her father left his wife well provided for, for her lifetime, and a substantial sum to his daughters, in their unmarried names alone. To the sons-in-law he left cufflinks emblazoned with the crest of the California Institute of Technology, where he had studied engineering as a young man, and ‘not one single dime’, as Diane’s abandoned husband said, throwing his cufflink box down in disgust. Tyler, nearing sixty and by then visiting Cindy daily in hospital, said nothing to her, telling himself that he was sparing her but knowing that he was, in truth, overwhelmed by self-disgust, and execrating himself for a whole lifetime of supine acquiescence. When she tried to talk to him about life after her own death, or her will and how she had disposed of her assets, he’d refused to listen.

  ‘No, Cindy. No.’

  ‘But don’t you want to know?’

  ‘No, I don’t. I emphatically don’t. I want you to be well again, that’s all.’

  ‘But honey, I won’t be. You have to face the fact that I won’t be. The children—’

  Tyler said rapidly, ‘The children will be fine.’

  ‘I know. I know they will be. I’ll make sure they are. That’s one of the things I want to talk to you about.’

  He picked up her hand. It was as thin as the rest of her, bleached to an unfleshlike pallor. He kissed it and said, ‘I don’t want to hear a word. I know you’ll do the right thing. The kind thing. Like you always have.’

  After she died, Seth and Mallory discovered that she had left the value of their house, when sold, to cancer research at Stanford, and enough money for Seth to leave the job he’d reluctantly taken in IT and enrol at the San Francisco Baking Institute on Grandview Drive, to study under a teacher who specialized in highly hydrated wholegrain sourdough breads. Mallory, who inherited a precisely similar amount, immediately headed east, to New York City, intent upon gaining a place at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts or the Juilliard School. When neither would accept her, she ended up at an acting academy on Pace Plaza, and became as immersed in the world of the theatre as if she had been on another planet. Within six months of becoming a widower, Tyler’s working life came to a natural end, and he found himself having to leave his house because the sale was going through, as well as facing a weirdly blank and unanchored future. Cindy had left him enough to buy a modest apartment, and nothing more. The size of the legacy – only a fraction of what she had left her children – expressed her opinion of him very eloquently.

  He bought an air ticket to New York and took Mallory out to dinner. She booked a table at a tiny Korean restaurant in SoHo, and arranged to meet him there. Tyler took one look through the steamed-up window at the crammed and clattering interior full of people eating kimchi out of pottery bowls, and rang his daughter.

  ‘Sorry, sweetheart, but I can’t eat there. It won’t do. I want to talk to you.’

  ‘Dad, we can talk there, it’s cool—’

  ‘It’s deafening, Mallory. I’m going to see if Raoul’s will give us a table.’

  ‘Raoul’s? Where you and Mom always went?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But Dad—’

  ‘I’m walking to Princes Street right now, Mallory. I’ll see you there.’

  Mallory had coloured the ends of her hair dark blue, and wore jeans and a black leather jacket. She looked, Tyler thought, like someone who had been right back to the drawing board and started again, transforming herself from a conventional West Coast beach babe to an edgy urban creative. She said she was really happy.

  ‘You look it.’

  ‘I mean really, really happy.’

  ‘A man?’ Tyler said, smiling.

  Mallory rolled her eyes.

  ‘Oh my God, Dad. No. So no. It’s acting – I just love it. The theatre. I have never been as excited about anything as I am about the theatre.’

  ‘So do you want to tell me? About the theatre?’

  Mallory told him. She did not, he thought, stop talking for two hours. She talked right through a shared poulet de Bresse and a carafe of burgundy and a tarte tatin. At the end, rosy and replete with food and wine, she stood up to put her arms round him and tell him that although she hated that Mom wasn’t there to know how happy she was, she was just blown away that he, Tyler, had come all this way to support her and see for himself. He had held her in his arms and felt, as he had always felt when Cindy insisted that refusing her father’s loaded gifts would break his heart, that he couldn’t say what he had flown from California to say. He couldn’t dent her joyous mood by asking her what he was to do with the endless grey plateau of life that stretched ahead of him. So he held her and told her how happy he was for her and how she must tell him the minute she got a part in anything, however small, even if she was just a sundry spear-carrier like he had been, in school productions of the safely military Shakespeares.

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Of course. You’ll be the first person I call.’

  Only when she had gone, dancing down into the subway and leaving him standing staring after her, his hands in the pockets of his quintessentially American raincoat, did it occur to him that she had asked him nothing at all about himself. She hadn’t asked him about being retired, or where he would live after the house was sold, or whether he had seen Seth recently, let alone how he was feeling. She had been warm and sweet and affectionate and completely self-absorbed. Standing there at the top of the subway steps in New York City with the world cheerfully jostling past him, Tyler wondered if he was now entirely alone, or whether, despite all the apparent human connections in San Francisco, he always had been.

  He flew back to California because he had the ticket and had planned to. It had occurred to him to stay on in New York, or buy a ticket, on impulse, to Canada or Brazil, but in the end he docilely did what he had arranged with himself to do, and went home. Except, it wasn’t home any more. It was the house he and Cindy had shared for over a decade, but it wasn’t the house that Seth and Mallory had grown up in, and, in any case, it had been sold to a couple, the realtor said, who were just full of ideas as to what they could do with it.

  Tyler didn’t care. The house had become, for him, too much associated with Cindy’s illness, Cindy’s long, inexorable, stoical decline. He had no real desire to live there any more. On the other hand, he didn’t want to live anywhere very much. He couldn’t, in fact, visualize how life was to be lived, in the future, anywhere at all. In her quiet, considered way Cindy had left him enough money to buy his modest apartment, and
his pension from his late father-in-law’s business would enable him to live in it. If he could even start to imagine how that was to be done.

  His ex-brother-in-law, Jack, had moved to a small apartment just off Mission Street after his divorce. Both Cindy and Diane had been disapproving. When they were growing up, Mission Street had been almost exclusively Latino, and now they heard that it had become a haven for hipsters. Jack bought an apartment above a Chinese–Peruvian restaurant, and said the nightlife was remarkable. There was a cinema restaurant there, he said, where you could eat while watching a movie projected onto a wall. He acquired a girlfriend not much older than Mallory and announced to Tyler that he and the girlfriend were taking off for Santa Fe for a while – the girlfriend was an abstract painter – and why didn’t Tyler take over the apartment? So Tyler moved, almost sleepwalking, from a balconied house with a swimming pool on Pacific Heights to a two-bedroom apartment in the Mission, and sat on the edge of Jack’s bed, which the girlfriend had draped in ethnic shawls, and had a long interior dialogue with himself about what he was to do.

  The first person he tried to talk to about the future was Seth, who was now in his thirties, with long hair plaited down his back like a Sioux warrior. Having discovered bread, it was now his whole life, apart from the pretty Japanese woman who had been one of his first instructors at the Baking Institute and was now, he explained to his father, his partner in both life and love. He told his father that he was very happy to talk about the future. In fact, the future was exactly what he and Yuhui (‘Pronounced Yoofy, Dad,’ Seth told him. ‘I don’t want you embarrassing me by getting it wrong.’) wanted to discuss with him.

  They met, on Seth’s instructions, at a bakery that was something close to what Seth and Yuhui aspired to. Tyler had imagined he might explain to them something of the alarming lack of direction he was feeling himself, but it rapidly became plain that Seth and Yuhui had a definite plan for their own futures, which they were determined to explain, including what his own involvement in it was to be. They wanted, they said, to start their own coffee shop and bakery, and had found a site – ‘Daringly, but bear with me, Dad, I have worked this out’ – on the edge of the financial district.

  ‘Lunchtime specialities,’ Seth said. ‘For the money crowd. Smoked trout on sourdough with chilli–lemon apple and mey choy greens. A house mayo. A four-dollar loaf of sourdough to take home—’

  ‘Organic flour,’ Yuhui said earnestly. ‘Hand-kneaded.’

  ‘—and drip coffee. We’ll have wood countertops. The dough will be left to rise on wood countertops. We’ll be experimenting all the time. Fresh apple, maybe. Maple oatmeal, wholewheat.’

  It transpired that what they needed – wanted – was money. They had what Cindy had left Seth to buy a long lease on the building, but they needed more to convert it and equip it to the high-tech – but at the same time truly artisanal – standard that they aspired to. They were, Tyler thought, as he looked at their faces across the bakery table, evangelical. Bread to them was not just a passion, it was a mission. When Seth named the necessary sum for Tyler’s contribution, revealing it to be almost exactly the amount Cindy had left him to buy an apartment, it had hardly caused a ripple in his thinking before he agreed. Of course Seth should have the investment. Why not? It would be purposeful, interesting, enterprising, to be involved in an exciting start-up like this. It even had a name. They were, they announced proudly, as if revealing the name of a first baby, going to call it Doughboy.

  Only when he was home again, in Jack’s apartment, hunting for a skillet in which to fry eggs, did it occur to Tyler that he could not in fact hand over all the capital he had to Seth, for Doughboy. He had two children, after all. If he was going to invest in Seth’s future, then he would have to invest equally in Mallory’s. He didn’t in the least mind about being without capital – maybe, even, his father-in-law had been quite right about his lack of maturity over money – but he did mind very much about behaving equitably to both his children. He put the skillet down on the hob beside the eggs and called Seth immediately, to tell him that he was very welcome to half the amount they had discussed, but the other half was Mallory’s.

  Seth said cheerfully, ‘That’s fine, Dad. We haven’t even started on asking Yuhui’s family yet,’ leaving Tyler yet again with the feeling he had had that night in New York – that he had somehow ceased to be of real significance, that he was, even to his own children, somebody important when they infrequently thought about him, but usually peripheral. Those two people, whose diapers – nappies, he had firmly called them – he had changed, whom he had taken to school, and heard learning to read, whom he had taught to swim, and ride a two-wheeler, and surf, and run with a ball, had now surged out into their own worlds and been gladly swallowed up by them.

  It was a bad winter. For nine months, Tyler struggled, and he knew he was struggling. He could not bring himself to explain his overwhelming sense of lostness to his children, to his mother-in-law, to his sister-in-law, or to his few friends. He took care to have haircuts, to take his shirts to the Chinese laundry down the street, not to drink alcohol if he was alone, not to shuffle about in sneakers. The odd date was kindly arranged for him, but he hadn’t the heart for them. He wondered, not infrequently, what he did have the heart for. It wasn’t, if he was honest, that he was missing Cindy either, except as a habit whose very existence required some reciprocal effort. It was more – overwhelmingly more – that with Cindy gone, his identity in this wonderful city seemed to have vanished, like a cup of water thrown into an ocean. ‘What,’ he said to himself, over and over, ‘am I for?’

  At last, almost two years after Cindy’s death, and with no sign of Jack and the girlfriend returning from Santa Fe, a call from Mallory offered a chink of light. She had been cast in a play, she said; it wasn’t a major role but it was an Ibsen play, the director was a friend of hers, and the director was so excited because the play was going to have its run – ‘four weeks, Dad’ – in London.

  ‘London?’ Tyler said, ‘London?’

  ‘Yes,’ Mallory said happily. ‘Can you believe it? London. London, England. Can you come?’

  ‘To London? Sure, I can come to London. I haven’t been to London for ten years.’

  ‘You still sound so English.’

  ‘Not to the English, I don’t.’

  ‘Dad . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Will you – well, I want to sound more English. For this part. For my part. She’s the bookkeeper. Will you coach me? To sound like you do?’

  He had his telephone pressed to his ear. He closed his eyes. He could feel an extraordinary warmth beginning to spread down his limbs. He nodded vigorously, holding his phone.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Come soon,’ Mallory said. ‘Come now. You can sleep on my couch, the one in the living room. My roommates won’t mind, they are so cool. Come to New York and be my voice coach.’

  He flew at once, to New York. Mallory’s roommates seemed to take to him immediately. He went from a feeling of utter futility about everything in general, to its polar opposite of feeling of value and purpose, in a matter of days. And when Mallory said, ‘Come to London with me. For the rehearsals, as well as the run. Please,’ he didn’t even, in his English way, prevaricate.

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Of course I’ll come.’

  He emailed ahead to old school friends and university friends. He sat at the sharp-edged glass dining table in Mallory’s rented Brooklyn apartment and typed cheerful email after cheerful email. The thought of going back to London, of finding a flat there instead of staying in the kind of stately central hotel that Cindy had been brought up to regard as the only residential destination possible in that city, was almost heady. He felt both excited and strangely liberated, and when he looked at himself in the bathroom shaving mirror, he saw someone, at last, that he was quite pleased to see.

  The theatre where Mallory was acting in The Master Builder was in Kilburn, and she p
lanned to share a flat with other members of the cast, suggested by the theatre, nearby, on the High Road. Tyler, anxious not to crowd her after the weeks on her couch, and equally anxious to exploit his own green shoots of revived independence, took a flat – a room, really, with a bathroom the size of a cupboard – on the edge of Little Venice, where his grandmother had once had a house and a conservatory full of tangled vines and orchids. On his first night, staring out of his huge studio window at the moving lights of cars speeding along the Westway, he told himself sternly that he must not, not, surrender to any romantic rapture at being home.

  His days were busy, busier than they had been in over a year. The emails had borne fruit here and there, lunches and dinners, weekends in houses in the country, even a modestly paid offer of a consultancy with an old college friend who was handing his construction business over to his son. He went to the occasional rehearsal – by now something of a pet voice coach to the cast – and to other plays in other theatres; he made friends with the Bangladeshi from whom he bought milk and newspapers, the Latvian girl who took his shirts in to launder, the Cypriot Greek who gave him a haircut. In emails to Seth, he outlined his vigorous life back in London and reported that the opening night of Mallory’s play had been a solid success, so critically acclaimed that he, Seth, would have been proud of his sister. It was so good a production, in fact, that he was going to go back on other nights and see it again, during its month-long run. And, he confided to his son, he was thinking that maybe, just maybe, he might stay in London. Just for a year perhaps, just long enough to see if what he was feeling was transitory or indicative of something he could build on.