Page 4 of Rivals to Lovers
Wes’s mother had a name that people associated with home and gardening. Her name was the kind that people looked for, one that paired well with the phrasestamp of approval. Over the past thirty years, she had, both literally and figuratively, remade herself as Ulla, with a self-titled magazine and lifestyle brand.Ulla, it turned out, meantdeterminationin Old Norse, but really it was a shortening of her given name, Ursula. She didn’t want to be thought of as a sea hag and had “rebranded” herself back in the nineties, before there was such a thing as rebranding. Had Wes’s mother invented rebranding? It seemed like a thing she would take credit for in an interview, of which she had had many in her life. The evidence decorated her office walls in his parents’ home in Connecticut.
Wes made eye contact with a glossy photograph of his mother above her desk. It was attached to an interview about “having it all” fromLadies’ Home Journalin 2006. Ulla didn’t look much older than the photograph from that article. She kept her gray hair long and well tended, and her skin wasn’t wrinkleless, exactly, but it had that barely lined Helen Mirren–esque beauty that women ten years younger than Ulla seemed to envy. She flicked through the PDF in front of her, the manuscript of a client Wes was considering taking on, and grimaced. “Harissa again. This is the fourth recipe in this collection with harissa.”
“You don’t like harissa?”
“I don’t like harissa in quiche, I can tell you that much.” Ulla looked up from the tablet, then slid it back to Wes. “I wouldn’t take it if it were my choice. The other book, the onewith the Cornish game hen and cherry recipe, that collection was better.”
“Is a Cornish game hen actually its own thing, or did farmers create a fancy word for small chickens?” Wes asked.
“Just because you’re short doesn’t mean you can joke about short birds.”
Wes wasn’tshort. At five ten, he was just not taller than many men. “Statistically, I’m above the national average. And I’d look tall to any chicken.”
Ulla stared critically at him. “You’re being peevish.”
“I’m not.”
Ulla rolled her eyes and stood. “Fine, then. Let’s go.”
He was being peevish, but nerves could do that to him. Sometimes he thought that being sent away to boarding school was the thing that had saved his relationship with his parents. They had a few years away from his hormones, and Wes had a few years away from their nagging. They had sent top-notch care packages regularly, every three weeks. They or their staff. If you could count on one thing from a mother who was one of the leading experts in beauty, home, and health journalism, it was a lot of freebies. Wes had grown up with very soft hands, even during the height of his high school and college boxing career. His very soft hands (he still took good care of them, especially with all the typing) were slightly sweaty from nerves, because they had an appointment for a very important tea in approximately twenty minutes.
Would he have gotten the job he had without his parents’ home being close to the Morgan family estate? He didn’t know. He did know that it didn’t hurt that these were the circumstances he was handed. It would have been foolish not to take advantage of them. It wasn’t as though EstellePerry-Morgan had watched Wes grow up in a traditional neighborly way: seeing him toss baseballs with his dad in the street or something. He certainly hadn’t tried to sell her fundraiser candy bars. Instead, it was the kind of proximity that came from large charity donations. Knowing that your brick in the new hospital sidewalk was next to your neighbors’. Being wealthy meant knowing who gave where and checking the size of the font for their name on plaques relative to yours.
Estelle’s name was usually very large.
Her house was large, too, and so was her last name on the wrought iron gate that Wes and Ulla drove through. The name broke intoMORandGANas the entrance gate opened. The property had been E. J. Morgan’s, and Estelle’s grandfather’s before. Built in the late nineteenth century, the house was the kind that had a title: The Hill. This was due partially to literary tourism. Estelle didn’t relish large groups tromping through her yard every weekend, however, so she had a rule to limit it to school groups and special events only.
Ulla allowed Wes to drive them in her blue Maserati Levante. It handled like his daily driver, a Honda he stubbornly paid for himself, only with a panoramic sunroof. He was not enough of a gearhead to really appreciate luxury cars, but he could appreciate the way people looked at him when he drove them. He looked taller, an ex had told him, when Wes posed next to his father’s Lotus Evora. The Lotus was jokingly referred to as his father’s second child, one he never allowed his first child to drive without first taking a shower.
Estelle’s driveway was flagstone, long and curving up toward the majestic mansion at the top of the eponymous Hill, and Wes liked the way the Maserati climbed it—perhaps it was better than his Honda. The mansion itself wassprawling and elegant, a true testament to the Georgian style. Estelle’s mother, E. J. (Elizabeth Jean) Morgan née Haute, was born and raised there, though she, like the main character inThe Proud and the Lost, had moved away during her late teens. After the death of her parents, E. J. had moved back to the estate, married, and had Estelle.
“She loved and hated the Hill,” Estelle had told Wes on their first meeting. “She was fond of the gardens, but the house itself—the size of it necessitating a staff of at least ten at any given time, especially with my needs as a child—it was too much for her. She was too much of an introvert. It never escaped my notice, nor her critics, that the Hill was the kind of place that she had written Eliza escaping from. Me, though, I had always wanted a house exactly like this. Growing up here was a dream.”
“This” was a sprawling ten-bedroom mansion with an elevator tastefully centered in the house to assist Estelle’s coming and going. Estelle had used a wheelchair since her youth. While Estelle had been E. J.’s only child, Estelle had adopted two daughters, who both had several children, and one family or the other was usually circling in or out of the estate at any given time. Wes had barely said more than two words to either daughter, but it was likely that—perhaps soon—control would be given over to one of them. Had he not been stepping back from managing the estate, he would have gotten to know them well.
One of the updates was a large, zero-entry inground swimming pool, with a cement deck and hot tub, and a tennis court out beyond another set of large, tastefully trimmed evergreen bushes. Wes knew these amenities existed because his mother had told him, but he had not seen thempersonally. The Hill had twice been featured inUlla, and so his mother had a more than passing familiarity with Estelle and the life she lived. With these magazine spreads in mind, Wes walked up the ramp to the front door.
Estelle’s assistant welcomed them. Gary was in his early sixties with black, curly hair. His large, red mouth reminded Wes of one of those characters on the Guess Who cards from his childhood. Wes’s footsteps echoed under the vaulted ceiling of the entryway. The decor would have been too much if it had been anything other than white. White flooring, white walls, and soft white light from the (white) metal chandelier above. The entryway led through a wide hallway that arced off in several directions, but they were led away from the one that smelled the nicest—Wes wondered if she was having cherry cobbler with her dinner—and toward the primary office area.
Estelle stared out the window, which admittedly was hard not to stare out of. It took up a majority of the back wall and looked out on the peony garden, whose blooms were beginning to appear for the season. The patch of peonies looked out of place, but it was beautiful. So was Estelle. She turned to acknowledge her guests and smiled with an open expression and bright, brown eyes. They softened her entire face, which could have looked gaunt otherwise. Estelle was not preserved in the way Ulla was, with that stopped-time beauty that Wes’s mother was known for. Estelle had a lived-in loveliness that made you want to see her picture in black and white to see the contrast written there.
On her desk was a pile of correspondence, Wes’s letter among the rest. He had told his mother neither about writing a novel nor that he was resigning as representative of the estate.He could have, in fact, taken a meeting with Estelle solo, but having Ulla’s unassuming and undeterred confidence nearby always buoyed him. Despite being glad his mother was there, he hoped for an excuse to speak to Estelle alone. Eventually.
“Please sit,” Estelle said, gesturing to two white leather couches on the other side of her spacious walnut desk. She moved behind it and sighed. “It’s been such a long time, Ulla.”
“Too long,” Ulla agreed amiably.
“Your son wrote a novel?” Estelle asked without further preamble.
Ulla’s face hardly ever registered surprise, either from the Botox or a misconception that not knowing everything might appear rude. She pursed her coral lips, then nodded. “Seems like it.”
“Well, not all calls can be purely social, can they?” Estelle said with a papery laugh. “In fact, I was wondering if you might take a stroll with Gary, Ulla? He’s meeting with a new landscaper next week to discuss this peony monstrosity. I love them, I do, but I’m not sure how to tie them in to the rest of the property. Would you mind looking?”
“Of course, of course,” Ulla said, standing again.
“We’ll have a raspberry tart when you come back,” Estelle said. “Your recipe.”
Unless the recipe had come from the early days of the magazine, credit was due to one of Ulla’s expert recipe craftspeople. In her magazine, they were on the masthead under the label KITCHEN TEAM, as if they didn’t do 90 percent of the work these days.
