Other People's Children

by Joanna Trollope

  Karen stretched across and put a hand on Rory’s arm.

  ‘You should look after Rufus.’

  Rory didn’t glance at her.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he’s your stepbrother now and there’s three of you lot.’

  Rory belched.

  ‘Don’t show off,’ Karen said.

  Rory said, staring across the table, ‘Nothing’s changed.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Mum said. About this wedding. It doesn’t change anything. She said.’

  Karen took a breath.

  ‘Excuse me, but it has. A lot’s changed. You’ve got a stepmother and a stepbrother now and you’ll have to get on with it.’

  There was a small sound between them. A tear, quite unbidden, was sliding down Rufus’s cheek and he had flung up a horrified arm to stop it.

  ‘Oh my God,’ Karen said.

  Rory took a last swallow of Coke and shoved his chair back.

  He said, without looking at Rufus, ‘Want to play Kick the Can?’

  ‘OK?’ Matthew whispered.

  Josie nodded. Despite her elation at the day, at being truly Matthew’s, she hadn’t been able to keep her gaze from straying permanently to Rufus. He looked to her incredibly small, much smaller than eight, as small as the first day she had taken him to primary school and he had said, looking at the playground he had visited so often the previous summer term in order to accustom him to it, ‘No.’

  ‘Rufus,’ she’d said, ‘this is school. This is what you’ve been longing for. You’ll love it.’

  He had taken his hand out of hers and put it out of her reach behind his back.

  ‘No,’ he’d said again.

  He couldn’t say no now, in the same certain, careless-of-opinion, five-year-old way, but he could look it. Everything about him looked it – the way he sat hunched over his plate, the way he wouldn’t look at any one, the way he only spoke in whispered mono syllables. Josie had seen Karen trying to talk to him and had then sensed rather than seen, because her view was blocked by Karen’s half-turned back, some kind of little incident which resulted in Rory slouching away from the table followed by Rufus, with his head down. Neither had asked permission to go.

  Matthew leaned closer. She could feel his breath warm on her ear.

  ‘Can’t wait till later.’

  ‘Matt—’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The boys have gone—’

  ‘They’ll be scuffling about in the car-park. They’ll be fine.’

  ‘I don’t think any of the children are fine.’

  ‘No,’ he said. He took her hand again. ‘No, they aren’t. But they will be. This is just the beginning.’

  ‘Perhaps we shouldn’t be going away—’

  ‘Honey,’ Matthew said, ‘we are going away for three whole nights. That’s all. And that’s for us. Like today is.’ He glanced round the table. ‘Look. Your mother, my father, our children, your best mate, my sister, my best mate, all here for us, because of us, because of what we’re going to make of the future, what we’re going to repair of the past.’ He shook the hand he held. ‘I love you.’

  ‘Same,’ she said. ‘Same. I tell you though, my best mate thinks we haven’t done it quietly enough. She thinks we should have just sloped off at dead of night with a couple of witnesses.’

  ‘Let her,’ Matthew said. ‘Let her. We’re not marrying her. We’re not marrying anybody but us.’

  ‘I don’t like being disapproved of,’ Josie said. ‘Not even by someone I know as well as I know Beth.’

  ‘How lovely,’ Matthew said. ‘How just lovely that you mind.’ He gazed at her, his eyes on her mouth in a way that always made her feel faint. ‘Nadine would have relished every moment.’

  On the other side of the table, Beth Saddler, Josie’s oldest schoolfriend from long-ago schooldays in Wimbledon, asked Matthew’s father if it would be all right if she smoked.

  ‘Don’t see why not,’ he said. ‘Ashtrays everywhere, aren’t there? I’d join you except it’s the one thing I’ve given up that I’m sticking to.’

  Beth took out a packet of cigarettes and a lighter from her handbag and put them beside her plate.

  ‘I’ve been dying for one for hours.’

  ‘It’s times like these,’ Matthew’s father said. ‘They give you the fidgets.’

  ‘I was at Josie’s first wedding. It was the full white works, in church. Even though she was pregnant. Was Matthew’s?’

  ‘Nope,’ Matthew’s father said. He emptied the last of the nearest bottle into his glass. ‘It was registry office and a curry lunch.’ He made a face. ‘I can taste it still.’

  ‘I can’t quite take this talk of weddings, somehow. A second marriage isn’t a wedding, it’s just a second marriage. It ought to be so quiet you can hardly hear it. Is that how your wife feels?’

  Matthew’s father drained his glass.

  ‘I haven’t had the foggiest, for forty-five years, what my wife feels.’

  Beth said, almost as if he hadn’t spoken, ‘I mean, it’s this step thing. I know it’s frightfully common and all that, but a stepparent must be a very unsatisfactory parent for a child to have. I know it’s nobody’s fault. I know it’s just a fact. But all today we’ve kind of assumed that it’s all going to be all right, this wedding, this marriage, these children, that it’s natural.’

  Matthew’s father looked at her.

  ‘You married?’

  ‘No,’ Beth said, ‘but I’ve been living with someone for seven years.’

  Matthew’s father grunted.

  ‘Children?’

  ‘No.’

  He scratched his ear.

  ‘Seems to me,’ he said, ‘that there’s good parents and there’s bad parents and there’s good stepparents and there’s bad stepparents and the whole thing nowadays is such a bloody muddle that if you get a good one of anything you’re pretty bloody lucky.’

  Beth picked up her cigarettes and her lighter, and then put them down again, neatly and sharply, one on top of the other.

  ‘Oh,’ she said.

  ‘She’s smoking,’ Becky said.

  Ted Holmes, who had met Matthew on a climbing holiday in France twenty years before and had remained a friend ever since, said so what.

  ‘So I’m going to,’ Becky said.

  Ted eyed her. She was tall for her age, with a pronounced bosom already and her mother’s astonishing blue eyes, as light and blank as the eyes of beautiful, dangerous aliens in a John Wyndham novel.

  ‘Who are you aiming to upset, then?’

  Becky shrugged.

  ‘No-one.’

  ‘Or everyone.’

  ‘Who’d notice?’

  ‘Your father. Your grandfather.’

  Becky said, ‘Mum doesn’t care.’

  ‘She isn’t here,’ Ted said, ‘to care or not to care.’

  Ted had always found Nadine a complete nightmare. Matthew had met Nadine soon after that first climbing holiday and Ted had been horrified.

  ‘Boy,’ he said to Matthew. ‘Boy, don’t do it. Don’t. She’s chaos. She’s crazy.’

  Matthew had punched him. They’d had an awkward, clumsy, unpractised fight in a pub car-park which the publican had easily broken up by simply telling them to stop. Matthew had gone ahead and married Nadine and then Ted had met a girl at his local squash club, and had embarked on a courtship so long and uneventful that he sometimes thought it would still be going on if she hadn’t said she’d leave him if he didn’t marry her. He liked being married, once he was. Penny was an even better wife than she’d been a girlfriend, and after five years, without much fuss, she gave birth to twin boys who were now at home, with measles, and Penny was at home, too, nursing them, instead of being here with Ted in an Italian restaurant in Sedgebury supporting old Matthew.

  ‘I think,’ Ted said to Becky, ‘that you want to leave that cigarette until you’re on the train. You’re going back to Hereford tonight, aren’t you?’ />
  Becky nodded.

  ‘Mum meeting you?’

  ‘If her old banger makes it. It’s a complete wreck. It’s all Dad’ll give her.’

  ‘Now, now.’

  ‘It’s got a hole in the floor in the back. You can see the road.’

  ‘Your mother,’ Ted said, eyeing Becky’s piebald fingernails, ‘she got a job?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘If she had a job, she could buy a better car.’

  ‘Why should she?’

  ‘We’ve all got to try,’ Ted said. ‘We’ve all got to do our bit.’

  Becky pulled a strand of hair out in front of her face to inspect it.

  ‘Not when it’s all unfair.’

  ‘Unfair?’

  Becky said, not looking at Josie, ‘She’s got a new house, hasn’t she? And their car is pretty nearly new.’

  ‘And who’s that unfair to?’

  ‘Mum.’

  ‘Becky,’ Ted said, suddenly not caring, ‘your mother wouldn’t know something fair if she met it in her porridge.’

  She dropped her strand of hair and glared at him.

  ‘Pig,’ she said.

  He shrugged. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘If it makes you feel better.’

  She took a breath.

  ‘Nothing does!’ she shrieked. ‘Nothing does! And nothing ever will!’ And then she burst into tears and banged her head down into her cold and untouched pizza.

  ‘Ted said sorry,’ Matthew said.

  Josie, lying back with her eyes closed against the headrest of the passenger seat of the car, said why did he feel he had to.

  ‘For upsetting Becky.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He wouldn’t tell me, but it was something to do with Nadine. Some home truth, no doubt. He couldn’t stand Nadine.’

  Josie felt a small glow of affection for Ted Holmes. It warmed her, creeping across the chill that had settled on her, despite all her earlier happy excitement, at the moment of saying goodbye to Rufus. He was going to stay with Elaine, her mother, for three days. He held up his face for a kiss, and his face was quite empty of expression as if he were being kissed by someone he hardly knew because he’d been told to allow it.

  ‘Bye, darling.’

  ‘Bye,’ he said.

  ‘Have a lovely time,’ Elaine said. ‘Don’t worry. Don’t think about him.’

  Josie looked at her gratefully. None of this was what Elaine would have chosen, but she was trying, she was really trying to accept it, to make something of it.

  ‘Mum was good,’ she said to Matthew now.

  He reached out for her nearest hand.

  ‘She was,’ he said. ‘And Dad was fine and Karen was fine and my mother was a disaster.’

  Josie rolled her head so that she could see his profile and the jawline she so much admired, that was such a surprising turn-on when she was never conscious of even noticing men’s jawlines before.

  ‘And the children—’

  ‘Josie,’ Matthew said. He took his hand away from hers and put it on the steering wheel again. ‘Josie, we’ve got three nights together and two days and, during those three nights and two days, we are not even going to mention the children.’ He paused, and then he said in a voice that was far less positive, ‘We’ve got the rest of our lives for that.’

  Chapter Two

  Elizabeth Brown stood at the first-floor windows of the house she had just bought and looked down at the garden. Down was the operative word. The garden fell away so steeply to the little street below that some previous owner had terraced it, in giant steps, and put in a gradual zigzag path so that you could at least get to the front door without mountaineering. If Elizabeth left this bedroom, and went into the little one behind it that she intended to turn into a bathroom, she would see that the land, as if it were taking absolutely no notice of this terrace of houses that had been imposed upon it, rose just as sharply behind as it fell away in front, culminating in a second street at the top, and a back gate and a garage. The whole thing, her father had said when he came to see it, was like living halfway up a staircase.

  ‘I know,’ she said. She loved her father and relied upon his opinion. ‘Am I mad?’

  ‘Not if you want it.’

  She did. It was unsettling to want it because it was so entirely not what she had intended to buy. She had meant to buy a cottage, a cottage that would be a complete contrast to the efficient but featureless London mansion-block flat in which she spent her working week. When Elizabeth’s mother died, and her father decided to sell his antiquarian book business in Bath and move to a flat there big enough to accommodate the books and whisky bottles and cans of soup which were all he required for sustenance, he gave Elizabeth some money. Serious money, enough – if she chose to – to change the shape of her hard-working, comfortable but uneventful professional life. Enough to buy a cottage. A cottage in the hills around Bath, with a garden.

  ‘You ought to garden,’ her father said. ‘Seems to suit women. Something to do with nurturing and producing. Look for a garden.’

  She’d seen dozens of gardens, dozens, and the cottages that went with them. She’d even made an offer on a couple and found herself oddly undisappointed when someone else made a higher bid, and won. She looked at cottages and gardens for a whole summer, travelling down on Friday nights to Bath, staying with her father in considerable discomfort among the book piles, viewing all Saturday and sometimes on Sunday mornings, and then returning to London on Sunday after noons to order herself for the week ahead.

  ‘There isn’t an idyll,’ her father said. ‘You have to make those.’ He’d looked at her. ‘You’re getting set in your ways, Eliza. You’ve got to take a leap. Take a punt.’

  ‘You never have—’

  ‘No. But that doesn’t mean I think I’m right. Buy a tower. Buy a windmill. Just buy something.’

  So she did. On a warm Sunday morning in September, she cancelled the viewing of a cottage in Freshford, and went for a walk instead, up the steep streets and lanes above her father’s flat. It was all very curious and charming and the hilly terraces were full of gentle Sunday-morning life: families, and couples with the radio on, audible through open windows, and desultory gardening and dogs and a pram or two, and washing. Here and there were ‘For Sale’ notices thrust haphazardly into front hedges, but Elizabeth didn’t want a town house, so she didn’t look at them except to think, with the wistfulness that was now so much part of her daily thinking that she hardly noticed it, how nice it must be to need to buy a house in a town near schools, to put a family in. How nice to have to do something, instead of wondering, with a slight sense of lostness that her friends loudly, enviously, called freedom, what to choose to do.

  She stopped by a gate. It was a low iron gate and on it was a badly hand-painted notice which read ‘Beware of the agapanthus’. Beside it, a ‘For Sale’ notice leaned tiredly against a young lime tree, as if it had been there for some time. She looked up. The garden, tousled and tangled, but with the air of having once been planned by someone with some care, rose up sharply to the façade of a small, two-storey, flat-fronted stone house in a terrace of ten. It had a black iron Regency porch and a brick chimney and in an adjoining garden, a small girl dressed only in pink knickers and a witch’s hat was singing to something in a shoebox. Elizabeth opened the gate and went up the zigzag path.

  Now, three months later, it was hers. There were no leaves on the lime tree, and the garden had subsided into tawny nothingness, but the lime tree was hers and so were these strange semi-cultivated terraces which were, Tom Carver said, full of possibility. Tom Carver was an architect. Her father knew him because architecture had been one of the speciality subjects of her father’s bookshop and had suggested to Elizabeth that she get him in to help her.

  ‘Nice man. Good architect.’

  ‘Well, I’m good at this sort of thing,’ Tom had said, standing in the tiny sitting-room. ‘I’m good at making space.’

  She nodded g
ratefully. It disconcerted her that she, who spent all her working life either subtly directing people towards decisions, or briskly making them herself, should feel so helpless in this house, as if it represented all kinds of possibilities that she doubted she was up to.

  ‘I’m not sure I want a house at all, you know,’ she said to Tom Carver.

  ‘But you want this one.’

  ‘I seem to—’

  He was perhaps in his mid- or early fifties, a burly man with a thick head of slightly greying hair and a surprising ease and lightness of movement. He wore his clothes, she noticed, with equal ease, as if they were exactly what he had intended to wear. Elizabeth seldom felt like that. Work was fine, work was no problem because all it demanded sartorially was an authoritative but sober neatness. It was play that was the problem. She never, all her life, could quite get the hang of clothes for play.

  ‘I think we should knock this right through,’ Tom Carver said. ‘And give you one really good space for living in. Then you’ll have north and south light as well as room to swing an armful of cats.’ He ran his knuckles over the party wall to the room behind. ‘What do you do?’

  ‘I’m a civil servant.’

  ‘Treasury?’

  She blushed, shaking her head.

  ‘Heritage. Mostly – libraries.’

  ‘Why are you blushing? Libraries are admirable.’

  ‘That’s the trouble.’

  He smiled.

  ‘Shall we make this house very bohemian?’

  She was laughing. She said, ‘I’d be appalled.’

  ‘I’m not serious,’ he said, ‘but it doesn’t do any harm to undo a few buttons. If we put the kitchen on the north side of this room, you’ll have the south side for sitting.’

  ‘I mustn’t sit,’ Elizabeth said. ‘I mustn’t. I must garden.’

  I must learn how, she thought now, looking down at it. In the efficient flat off Draycott Avenue, there wasn’t so much as a window box, and the house plants friends brought her – she was the kind of woman, she had noticed, to whom friends did bring plants, and not bunches of flowers, armfuls of lilies or lilac – always died, mostly, she thought, because of her anxiety over them. But this garden was different. Gardens had Nature in them, not just instructions on plastic tags. Nature plainly, and however arbitrary it was, went on providing its miraculous energies and respites, so that there was some other element to gardening than just following the recipe. I suppose I’m the age for gardening, she thought. Isn’t rising forty when people start, when they realize it’s the only chance they’ll have to make living things grow and happen?