Other People's Children

by Joanna Trollope

  A car stopped below at the little gate and Tom Carver got out. He had a long roll of paper under his arm, the drawings he had promised to bring of her new living space, her new bathroom, her new ingenious guest bedroom made out of the old bathroom, her new patio at the back to be gouged out of the hillside and decorated with a table and chairs at which, Tom Carver promised her, she would eat breakfast in the brief morning sun. She banged on the window as he climbed the path and he looked up and waved. She went down into the narrow hall that was soon to be absorbed into the living space, and let him in.

  ‘Bloody cold,’ he said.

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Much colder up here than down where I live. How are you?’

  ‘Fine,’ she said.

  ‘When I was going through my divorce,’ Tom said, ‘and people asked me how I was, I used to say, “Rock bottom, thank you,” and they’d look really offended. It’s a social obligation to be fine, isn’t it, otherwise you’re a nuisance.’

  ‘But I am fine,’ Elizabeth said.

  He gave her a brief look.

  ‘If you say so.’

  He went past her into the sitting-room and unrolled the drawings on the floor.

  ‘This house isn’t in the least regular. We always think of the Georgians as so symmetrical, but most houses in Bath are just approximate. I like it. It makes them more human somehow, those eighteenth-century builders saying to each other, “Just wallop that bit in there, Will, they’ll never notice.”’

  Elizabeth knelt on the floor. The drawings were very appealing, all those orderly lines and shaded areas in faded indigo, lettered with a quiet architectural flourish.

  ‘Did you always want to be an architect?’

  ‘No. I wanted to be a doctor. My father was, and so was my grandfather, and I refused to consider it, out of pique, after my elder brother won a medical scholarship to Cambridge.’

  Elizabeth ran her finger over the shaded rectangle that would be her south window seat.

  ‘Do you regret it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you think that regretting it makes you a better architect?’

  He squatted on the floor beside her.

  ‘What a very nice question, Miss Brown.’

  ‘Elizabeth.’

  ‘Thank you. The truthful answer is that it’s made me quite a successful architect.’

  ‘And I,’ said Elizabeth, ‘am quite a successful civil servant.’

  ‘Is that a reprimand?’

  Elizabeth stood up.

  ‘Just a little warning. Why haven’t you put the sink under the north window?’

  ‘Because I’ve put a door to the garden there.’

  ‘But I don’t want two outside doors in this room.’

  Tom stood, too.

  ‘Then we shall think again.’

  ‘I’ll need space for gumboots, won’t I, and coats, and somewhere to be out of the rain when I take them off.’

  Tom stooped and laid his finger on the plans.

  ‘There.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘And there’s an outside door for all that there. This door was for the summer. To carry trays through. That sort of thing. A summer Saturday. Friends coming for a drink.’ He stopped. He straightened up and looked at her. He said, in a different voice, ‘You can’t really imagine living here, can you?’

  ‘No,’ she said. She put her hands in her coat pockets. ‘At least – I thought I could, when I first saw it. But perhaps that was partly seeing all the life that was going on around it. But I’m sure it will happen. Imagination has never been my strong suit.’

  Tom gave the drawings on the floor a small, deft kick so that they obediently rolled themselves up again.

  ‘Tell you what. I’m going to take you down to my house, which at least is warm, and give you some coffee, and we’ll talk—’

  ‘I’m not having second thoughts—’

  ‘I’d like to be certain of that before I tell you how much I’ve already cost you.’

  Elizabeth said, with some force, ‘I want this house.’

  Tom bent and picked the roll of drawings up. He glanced at her. He was smiling.

  ‘I believe the first two words of that sentence,’ he said, ‘at least.’

  Elizabeth sat at Tom Carver’s kitchen table. It was a long table, of old, cider-coloured wood, and it had a lot of disparate things on it – a pile of newspapers, a bowl of apples with several keys and opened letters in it as well as fruit, a clump of candlesticks, a stoppered wine bottle, a coffee mug, a torch – but they looked somehow easily intentional, as Tom’s clothes did. The kitchen was a light room, running right through the depth of the house, with French windows at one end through which Elizabeth could see the painted iron railings that presumably belonged to a staircase going down to the garden. It was the kind of kitchen you saw in showrooms or magazines, where no amount of supremely tasteful clutter could obscure the fact that every inch had been thought out, where every cupboard handle and spotlight had been considered, solemnly, before it was chosen.

  Tom Carver put a mug of coffee down in front of her.

  ‘Your expression isn’t very admiring.’

  ‘I’m not used,’ Elizabeth said, ‘to being in houses where so much care has been taken.’

  ‘That’s my profession, however.’

  ‘Yes, of course. I didn’t mean to be rude.’

  ‘I didn’t think you were.’ He sat down opposite her. ‘The original occupants of this house would have taken a fantastic amount of care. Wouldn’t they? Especially in the public rooms. Think how fashionable Bath was.’ He paused, and pushed a bowl of brown sugar towards her. ‘Why do you want to live in Bath, anyway?’

  ‘My father lives here. I know it. It’s easy from London.’

  ‘Why didn’t you buy a house in London, with a garden, and just come to see your father the odd weekend?’

  Elizabeth put a spoonful of sugar into her mug and stirred it slowly.

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t think of it. My mind got taken up with this cottage and garden idea.’

  ‘The Anglo-Saxon rural idyll.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘It’s a very romantic idyll,’ Tom said, ‘very persuasive. Saxons dancing round maypoles—’

  ‘But they didn’t,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Did they? They crept about in the mud dressed in rags and were dead before they were thirty.’

  ‘Idylls don’t like that kind of fact. Idylls depend upon an absence of mud and the presence of all your own teeth. Do you have an idyll?’

  Elizabeth took a swallow of coffee.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Sensible girl,’ Tom said.

  ‘I’m not sure I am,’ Elizabeth said, ‘but after my mother died, I was very conscious of wanting to change something, do something new, add something. I didn’t want to change jobs because I’m only a year or two away from something quite senior, but I felt – well, I felt that I might be turning into one of those women who taught us at school, and who we used to pity, in our superior and probably quite inaccurate fourteen-year-old way, for having nothing in their lives but us.’

  Tom cupped both his hands round his mug.

  ‘Have you ever been married?’

  There was a tiny beat.

  ‘No,’ Elizabeth said.

  ‘Have you ever wanted to be?’

  Elizabeth looked down into her coffee. Half of her wanted to tell him primly that he didn’t know her anything like well enough to ask such a thing and the other half wished to confide, in a rush of relief at being able to, that she only ever seemed to want to marry men who were already firmly married and that it troubled her that she only felt able to release herself into loving if there was no real danger she might have to commit to it. And yet – and this was an increasing pain — the loneliness caused by this inhibition was getting daily harder to bear. It was beginning to colour everything. It was making her think, as her father had pointed out, that every half-full glas
s of whisky was in fact merely half-empty. When she had stood in the little house in Lansbury Crescent that morning, she had been able to visualize her solitude there, but not the scene that Tom had suggested, of a summer evening, with the garden door open and a tray of drinks on a table on the patio, and a group of friends. She had friends, of course she did, friends she went to the cinema and theatre with, friends who asked her round for Sunday lunch and failed to fool her, for a moment, despite their loud comical wails of complaint, about the deep proud satisfaction they felt in having children. You could – and she had other single friends who did this – make friends into a kind of family, but in the end your separateness awaited you, not so much in your empty flat, as in your heart. This fact had struck her very forcibly only the week before, when she was filling in a kidney-donor card at her local surgery. Who should be notified in the event of her death? My father, she wrote. And then she paused. When her father was dead, who would it be then?

  ‘I thought,’ she said to Tom Carver, ‘that we were going to talk about my house.’

  ‘We are.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘I’m luring you into telling me if you really want to spend maybe fifteen thousand pounds on something your heart might not quite be in.’

  ‘Why should it matter to you?’ Elizabeth said rudely. ‘Why should you care? You’ll get your fee in any case, whether I like the house or I don’t.’

  Tom Carver got up and went across to the kitchen counter where he had left the coffee pot. He said equably, ‘You’re quite right. With most clients, I don’t really care. They’re the ones who are making the choices after all, and the consequences of those choices are their responsibility. But—’ He paused.

  ‘But what?’

  ‘You’re a nice woman,’ he said simply. He held the coffee pot above her mug. ‘More coffee?’

  She shook her head. He filled his own mug. He said, ‘Can I show you something?’

  ‘Of course.’

  He put the coffee pot down and went to the other end of the kitchen which was arranged as a kind of sitting-room, with a sofa and armchairs and a tele vision set. He came back carrying a framed photograph, and set it down in front of Elizabeth.

  ‘There.’

  It was a photograph of a little boy, a boy of perhaps – Elizabeth was never very certain of children’s ages – about seven. He was extremely attractive, with thick hair and clear eyes and a scattering of freckles. He wore a checked shirt and jeans and he was sitting astride a gate or a fence, staring at the camera as if he had nothing to hide.

  ‘My boy,’ Tom said. ‘He’s called Rufus. He’s eight.’

  ‘He looks angelic,’ Elizabeth said.

  ‘I rather think he is,’ Tom said. ‘At least, in his absence, I do.’

  Elizabeth moved the photograph a few inches away from her. ‘Is he away at school then?’

  ‘No. He lives with his mother.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ Elizabeth said.

  ‘His mother left me,’ Tom said. ‘Almost a year ago. She left me for the deputy-head teacher of a secondary school at a place called Sedgebury, in the Midlands.’

  Elizabeth looked at the photograph again.

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘She’s a teacher, too,’ Tom said. ‘They met at a conference on pastoral care in state education. He has three children. They were married last week.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Elizabeth said again.

  ‘Perhaps I should have expected it. Plenty of people told me so. She’s fifteen years younger than I am.’

  Privately, Elizabeth thought that this vanished wife might be about the same age as she was, herself.

  She said, cautiously, ‘Mightn’t it be a matter of temperament, not age? My parents were twelve years apart, and they were very happy—’

  He smiled at her.

  ‘In our case, it was both.’

  The telephone rang.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said.

  He went across the kitchen to where the telephone hung on the wall and stood with his back to Elizabeth.

  ‘Hello? Hello, darling. No. No, I’ve got someone here. No, a client. Yes, of course you can. Sunday morning. All well with you? Good week? I wish they’d get you a carphone with all that travelling. OK, darling, fine. Lovely. See you tomorrow.’

  He put the telephone down.

  ‘My daughter.’

  Elizabeth looked up.

  ‘Your daughter!’

  He came back to the table, smiling.

  ‘My daughter, Dale. This is turning into rather a confessional. It must be something to do with your face. I have a daughter of twenty-five and another son of twenty-eight.’

  ‘How?’ Elizabeth demanded.

  ‘By the conventional method. My first wife died twenty years ago, from some virus contracted on holiday in the Greek Islands. She was dead in ten days.’

  Elizabeth stood up.

  ‘Saying what bad luck seems rather inadequate.’

  He looked at her.

  ‘But that’s all it was. I thought, at one point, I would simply die of grief but even at the lowest ebb, I knew there was no-one to blame. It was chance, a hazard, that random blow the ancient world was so respectful of.’

  ‘Did you bring the children up on your own?’

  ‘Yes. Until nine years ago, when Rufus was on the way and I married Josie.’

  ‘But your first children were nearly grown up then—’

  ‘Nearly. It wasn’t easy. In fact, it was largely awful. Dale and Lucas – Dale particularly – were used to having me to themselves.’

  Elizabeth turned to look for her coat.

  ‘I’ve never had any competition for my father. Maybe I’m lucky—’

  Tom said, ‘Look, I’m sorry. I really am very sorry. I never meant to burden you with all this, I never intended to do anything except, in the kindest way, discover what you really want to do about this house.’

  She lifted her coat off a nearby chairback. He rose and took the coat from her and held it out for her to put on.

  ‘I don’t know now.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘You’ve made me think. Or at least, this morning has.’

  He left his hands on her shoulders for a second after the coat was on.

  ‘Have you enjoyed it?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Even though I’ve dumped on you?’

  ‘I didn’t mind that. Sometimes—’ She paused.’ Sometimes, people don’t, because they don’t think I’ll understand.’

  He came round to look at her.

  ‘I would so like to give you lunch.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Right now,’ he said.

  ‘Well!’ Elizabeth’s father said. ‘All settled?’

  ‘No,’ Elizabeth said. She looked round the room. ‘At least, not about the house. Did you say you’d found somebody to clean this?’

  ‘Yes,’ Duncan Brown said. ‘Two mornings a week.’

  ‘Has she been yet?’

  ‘It’s a he. Part-time bartender at The Fox and Grapes. No, he hasn’t.’

  ‘It’s awful, Daddy. It’s really dirty.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t seem to notice.’

  ‘Or mind.’

  ‘Not in the least.’

  ‘I think,’ Elizabeth said, ‘I must do something about the bathroom, at least.’

  ‘Why don’t you tell me about the day instead?’

  ‘I feel a bit shy about it—’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I’ve learned a lot about Tom Carver in a short space of time.’

  ‘Why,’ Duncan said, taking his reading glasses off, ‘should that make you feel shy?’

  Elizabeth leaned in the doorway to the tiny hall.

  ‘Because he told me so much. I’m not used to it. I’m not used to people telling me things about themselves unless they want to show off to me. And he didn’t. He seemed to – well, to want
me to know.’

  ‘Ah,’ Duncan said.

  ‘Don’t sound so knowing.’

  ‘It wasn’t so much knowing, as light dawning.’

  ‘There isn’t any to dawn. We had lunch in a wine bar and he talked much more than me.’

  ‘That doesn’t surprise me. You never were much of a talker.’

  ‘Daddy,’ Elizabeth said, ‘I’m beginning to wonder if I should have bought that house.’

  Duncan put his reading glasses back on and looked at her over the top of them.

  She said, ‘Tom asked me if I could imagine living there, and I’m not sure I can.’

  ‘Dearest,’ Duncan said, ‘when you were five and we were going camping in Brittany, you said very politely to your mother and me that you didn’t think you’d come because you couldn’t think what it would be like.’

  ‘What did I think when I got there?’

  ‘You seemed to like it. I taught you how to ask for bread and you went trotting off every morning to the baker’s, looking extremely serious, and came back with the right loaf every time.’

  ‘But this is different.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘It’s bigger.’

  ‘Only proportionately. You’re bigger, too.’

  ‘I don’t want,’ Elizabeth said suddenly, ‘to buy another chunk of solitude. I don’t want to delude myself that I’m making a change when I’m actually only doing more of the same in a different place.’

  Duncan stood up. Crumbs from the pale, dry water biscuits he ate with his mugs of soup showered like dandruff from the creases of his cardigan. He looked, as he had always consolingly looked, like an elderly heron, his head thrust forward on a long thin neck, on a long thin body.

  ‘You’re an old bag lady, really,’ Elizabeth said fondly.

  He smiled at her. He said, ‘And you’re a nice woman.’