47
Matt stood at the back doors of The Mallory with a cup of coffee and said, ‘This garden is huge. It’s got tons of potential. Reckon your mum would consider changing the décor, a little? For the fête?’
Once again, she scanned for satire, finding none. Roisin would never have predicted that Matt would be excited by her mother’s pub in the sticks. It was like a rich kid loving the dictionary they got for Christmas.
She gazed out, standing shoulder to shoulder with Matt.
The lawn, surrounded by a neat privet perimeter hedge, was punctuated by half-a-dozen circular wooden picnic tables, still in decent nick. There was nothing wrong with it and nothing to get excited about. Matt was right: it had potential and a serious deficit of love.
‘I’d say no, then I remember if it’s you asking, she’d probably install one of those striped helter-skelters. I was coming to ask if you fancied doing last week’s walk again?’
‘Now? Yes, why not! That was good scenery.’ He lowered his voice. ‘How’d it go yesterday? Did Hunter come up?’
Roisin had already decided her decision in San Carlo last night would stay secret until she’d told Joe. Whatever else had happened between them, he didn’t deserve someone else finding out their relationship was definitively over before he did. Plus, as far as Matt knew, she’d never wavered.
‘Since your inquiries, I’ve discounted that Hunter stuff entirely. I feel pretty embarrassed, actually,’ Roisin said, checking her mother was definitely upstairs. ‘I’ve not watched the rest of yet, in case I go loopy again. Meredith and Gina tried to tell me I sounded insane. I wouldn’t listen. Now I’m cringing so hard I’m wearing my bum hole as a scrunchie, as Lorraine would say.’
‘For what it’s worth, I didn’t think it was insane,’ he said. ‘Not likely, but not insane either.’
Roisin said she appreciated that, while wondering if both he and Joe were engaged in a Battleships game of subtly undermining each other with her.
They got their jackets and headed out.
‘Joe doesn’t want to split up,’ Roisin said, as they got a safe distance from The Mallory. ‘He’s offering me life in Los Angeles and going to the Golden Globes. Or a house in West Didsbury if I walk away. Like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?’
‘L.A.? Are you going to go?’ Matt said.
‘No. What would I do out there? Listen to Joe’s Zooms? I’m just amazed he’s trying to save the relationship.’
‘Are you? Why?’
‘I honestly thought he’d checked out of it.’
They walked uphill in silence for a moment.
‘You talk about you and Joe in terms of what he wants and what he might be doing or thinking or feeling all the time, but say very little about yourself.’
‘Hah, yes. He said I was “undemanding”,’ Roisin shot back, though she knew she was replying quickly to mask her discomfort. She needed to do better than that. ‘… Something shifted, in the last year. It was confirmed for me in the fight we had. I always liked how intelligent and sharp and witty he was, but I’ve come to see Joe as— I see him differently. I worry that he’s got a very hard, pitiless streak.’
Matt did a double-take.
‘What?’
‘That … is new?’
‘New to me. Is that stupid of me?’
Matt hesitated, so Roisin assumed the answer to that was: yes.
‘I always assumed you liked that.’
‘What?’
‘That he’s a Mean Boy.’ He looked at her with an awkward expression. The uncertain, apologetic face someone pulls when they know a conversation has strayed beyond the limits that your conversations usually keep and can’t predict the reaction.
Roisin didn’t know what to say. Even allowing for the fact that Matt was pissed at Joe, he said it so simply, so starkly. As if it wasn’t subjective. It was the conversational equivalent of accidentally seeing yourself in the front-facing phone camera.
Joe was mean – and Roisin ‘liked it’?
She supposed she had. She thought he was clever. What did it say about Roisin, that she had chosen mean? How did you explain having fallen in love with someone who wasn’t nice?
It wasn’t a very sympathetic error.
‘I don’t want you to think I’d stay in a bad relationship for bribes,’ she said, not knowing what else to say.
‘I don’t think that,’ Matt said. ‘Not for a second.’
‘It’s been nearly ten years. I thought he might’ve been having monkey sex behind my back. I need to get my head together before next steps.’
‘Sure.’
Roisin needed to be alone to dwell on what Matt had said and she needed conversation about something else. She opted for Matt’s employment.
‘I’m going to be careful with my payoff, as I expect the raw terror of “no one else will hire me” will bear down suddenly in the middle of the night like the shrieking ghost in The Woman in Black,’ he said.
‘If you were really up against it, could your family not tide you over? You know I’m not saying that in the way Joe would.’
‘Hah. Nope. I’m sure I was disinherited years ago.’
‘Seriously?’ Roisin said, stopping dead for a second in surprise.
‘Yeah,’ Matt said, balled hands thrust in denim jacket pockets. ‘I mean, I assume I was. I’ve not seen my parents or my brother in four years, so I guess so. It’s a fair assumption.’
‘I’m so sorry. I had no idea.’
Matt lived in a city apartment at Deansgate Square with its own lift, a mezzanine bedroom with floating staircase and a herringbone parquet floor. Joe called it fur coat AND fur knickers wealth, but she supposed it could all be on tick.
‘No, I’ve not made it known. Please don’t tell anyone, either.’
‘Of course. But … you go home at Christmas?’ Roisin said, frowning, running sums in her head. ‘I thought I saw photos?’
‘I stay at some nice chintzy hotel and take a few pictures. Sometimes people take that to be my parents’ home. Or think that’s my family tradition. I never correct them. That’s all.’
‘Why don’t you want people – us – to know?’
He was a black sheep, and not a golden boy? Roisin was already perceiving him differently, and maybe that was why.
Matt gave her a sidelong glance. ‘I’d not want to single one person out, swear them to secrecy and put that burden on them.’
That was a nice way of saying that he didn’t trust it to circulate, whomever he chose.
‘… I didn’t tell you all because, firstly, I don’t want to get into why I’m estranged from them. Secondly, because some people would probably gloat.’
‘I’d not have suspected this at all. I’m really surprised.’ Roisin tried not to be just slightly hurt, working it out. He didn’t want Joe specifically to know. Whomever he’d told would think Roisin was safe as confidante, and Roisin couldn’t be trusted around Joe. Mrs Mean Boy.
‘I know why you’d not suspect it.’
‘Why?’
Matt pulled himself over a stile with easy agility and, once on the other side, offered a helping hand to Roisin, which she accepted.
When they resumed walking, Matt said, ‘Because I seem superficial and shallow, so my life must be a cinch. Guess what: superficial, shallow people can have shit happen to them, too.’
He threw her a smile to defuse this, and she couldn’t return it. She could hear how hurt he was.
‘No, you seem to handle things so effortlessly and have such a sunny disposition, that’s why. From the outside, your life seems well joyful, to use a phrase of my pupil Amir’s.’
‘When you put it like that. Thank you.’ He smiled. ‘I’ve cultivated the frivolous image enough, so who am I to complain. It was easier.’
‘If it helps, I’ve never discussed the complexities of my family background with the Brians either,’ Roisin said. ‘Which feels so surprising, given how close I am to the girls especially. I’d trust them with anything. I just can’t. It worries me that, at thirty-two years old, I must think it’s my shame and disgrace also. Why else keep it secret?’
‘Can I ask more about it?’ Matt said. ‘Are we playing “you show me your dysfunction and I’ll show you mine”, out here in the woods, or are we being way more elegant than that?’ They broke the mounting tension with laughter.
‘I was leaving that up to you,’ Roisin said. ‘Plus, you’ve got to go back and act normal around my mother.’
‘OK, you go first, because mine is worse, and you won’t want to say much after it.’
That might be bullishly overconfident, Roisin thought.