Other People's Children

by Joanna Trollope

  ‘You must reconcile yourselves to it,’ she’d said. ‘You must learn.’

  They didn’t, she thought, much like their new schools, but they bore them. They were inevitably more rural than the schools in Sedgebury, and though no rougher, the roughness took a different form, and Nadine worried that her children didn’t quite understand the un spoken rules of this more reticent, countrified community with its own kind of unarticulated toughness. She thought they’d got quieter. When she was talking to them, or angry, she blamed this new quietness on Matthew and Josie, but when she was alone in the cottage in the middle of the day, she sometimes, and despite all the frightening turbulence of her feelings, admitted that it was not as simple as that. When she dropped them at school, she always said, ‘Three-thirty!’ to them, as if encouraging them to think she was only seven hours away. Becky had suggested that she didn’t drive them all the way to school, but dropped them at a collecting point, halfway, where they could join the school bus. But she’d said no.

  ‘You need me,’ she said to Becky. ‘For the moment, anyway. You need me to be there.’

  ‘And I,’ she thought to herself, reversing the car badly in the gateway to Becky and Rory’s school, ‘need them to be there. I’d just drown without them.’

  When she got home, she resolved, she would clean the cottage and do some washing and put at least clean pillow cases on the beds – if there were any – and find something to make a fire with. She might even ring the chimney sweep. She would also, with the screwed-up fiver she had found in her jacket pocket – a heavy knitted jacket she hadn’t worn since last winter – buy something for supper. Macaroni and cheese maybe, or potatoes and eggs. When she was a student, she’d lived on potatoes and eggs. For half a crown, you could buy enough of both to last you as egg and chips for three days. Her skin had got terrible. She remembered it clearly, because she’d always had good skin, the kind of skin you didn’t have to bother with because it seemed to take care of itself, and it developed spots and rough, dry patches and went dead-looking, in protest at all the egg and chips. So she’d switched, with the kind of exaggerated enthusiasm that she’d always been at the mercy of, to a macrobiotic diet and ate bean curd and brown rice. Her skin took a pretty poor view of that, too. Nadine put her hand up now, in its rough bright mitten, and touched her face. Her skin had never recovered really. Matthew had told her, when she complained to him about it, that she’d gone too far, pushed it beyond its limits. He was always accusing her of that, always telling her that she pushed everything too far, people, causes, opinions, him. Matthew … At the thought of his name, Nadine gave a little scream out loud and beat impotently on the steering wheel.

  She drove the car slowly up the lane to the cottage – they’d first seen it when the hedges were bright with blackberries and rosehips, but now they were only dark and wet with winter – and parked it in the lean-to. There were so many holes in the corrugated-iron roof of the lean-to that the car might as well have lived outside, for all the protection it was afforded. But it suited something in Nadine to park it there, religiously and pointlessly, every time she returned to the cottage, forcing everyone to struggle across the neglected garden carrying school bags and shopping and the things she bought, all the time, because she had had a brief fierce conviction when she first saw them, that they would change her life for the better – a birdcage, a second-hand machine for making pasta, a Mexican painting on bark.

  The kitchen in the cottage offended her by looking exactly as they had all left it over an hour before. She’d offered the children a breakfast of cereal softened with long-life orange juice out of a carton, because there was no bread or butter or milk, and they’d all refused. Clare had drunk another mug of powdered hot chocolate and Becky had found, somewhere, a can of diet Coca-Cola over which she and Rory squabbled like scrapping dogs, but they would none of them eat anything. Nadine had remembered children in the younger classes at Matthew’s school, whom he’d found scavenging in Sedgebury dustbins in their dinner hour, having had no breakfast and possessing no money for lunch.

  ‘At least I tried,’ Nadine said to the kitchen. ‘At least I offered.’

  She went across the room, and filled the kettle. It would be more economical to wash up and wash the kitchen floor with water boiled in the kettle than to use water heated by the electric immersion heater. It ate money. There was a meter in the dank hall, and it ticked away loudly all day, whether the lights or the cooker or the immersion heater were on or not, menacingly reminding Nadine that it was devouring money, all the time. She looked out of the window above the sink and saw the despondent winter garden and felt a wave of new despair rise chokingly up her throat at the prospect of being stuck here, for the next four or five hours, alone with her thoughts, until the blessed necessity of going to get the children would release her briefly from her cage. She had never minded solitude before, indeed had sought it, insisted on it, told Matthew she would, quite literally, go mad for lack of it, but now she feared it; feared it as she had never feared anything before. Tears of fright and misery (self-pity, Matthew would have called it) rose to her eyes and she lifted her mittened hands and pressed them into her eye sockets.

  ‘Oh God,’ Nadine said. ‘Oh God, oh help, help, oh help.’ The telephone rang. Nadine took her hands away from her eyes and sniffed hard. Then she moved sideways and lifted the receiver.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Nadine?’

  ‘Yes—’

  ‘It’s Peggy,’ Matthew’s mother said. ‘Didn’t you recognize my voice?’

  ‘No,’ Nadine said. She leaned against the kitchen counter. Throughout her marriage to Matthew, Peggy had never telephoned Nadine until Josie had come on the scene. Then she had begun to ring in a way that suggested to Nadine they were in some kind of conspiracy together. Nadine had put the phone down on her. She might have welcomed some kind of conspiracy against Josie, but not with Peggy.

  ‘How are the children, dear?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Sure? Have you got enough money?’

  Nadine said nothing.

  ‘Look,’ Peggy said. ‘Look. I’ve rung with a little suggestion. Derek and I’ll help you. We can’t spare much, but of course we’ll help you. For the children.’

  ‘No, thank you,’ Nadine said.

  ‘You don’t sound well, dear.’

  ‘I’m tired,’ Nadine said. ‘I didn’t sleep very well last night—’

  ‘Shame,’ Peggy said. ‘So much on your mind.’

  Nadine held the receiver a little way from her ear.

  ‘Peggy, I’ve got to go—’

  ‘Yes. Yes, of course you have. You must be so busy, doing it all single-handed. I just wanted you to know we’re always here, Derek and me. Money, whatever. You only have to ask.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Give my love to the children. And from Grandpa.’

  ‘Bye,’ Nadine said. She put the receiver down and bowed her head over it. Why was it, why should it be, that when she was longing for company, for some communication, for some tiny sign that she wasn’t really as abandoned as she felt herself to be, that a telephone call should come from one of the few people she had always truly detested, a person who had steadily conspired against any chance of success that her marriage to Matthew might have had?

  The kettle began to boil, its ill-fitting lid jerking under the pressure of the steam inside. Nadine leaned over and switched it off. She went across to the table and stacked the bowls and plates and mugs scattered about it into haphazard piles, and carried them over to the sink and dumped them in a plastic washing-up bowl. Then she picked up the washing-up liquid bottle. It was called ‘Ecoclear’ and had cost almost twice as much as the less environmentally friendly brand on the supermarket shelf next to it. It also, as Rory had pointed out, didn’t work, dissolving into a pale scum on the water’s surface and having little effect on the dirty plates left over from the night before. Nadine squeezed the plastic bottle. It gave a wheezy sigh. I
t was almost empty.

  Nadine went over to the dresser on the far side of the kitchen and unhooked the last clean mug. She spooned coffee powder into it and filled it up with water from the kettle. Then she found a hardened cellophane packet of muscovado sugar and chipped off a piece with the handle of the teaspoon, stirring it round and round in the coffee with fierce concentration until it finally melted. She took a sip. It tasted strange, sweet but faintly mouldy, as almost everything had tasted during those uncomfortable but exhilarating months in the women’s protest camp in Suffolk.

  Holding the mug, Nadine went back to the kettle and with her left hand poured the contents awkwardly over the dishes piled in the sink. Then, cradling the mug in both hands, she went out of the kitchen, down the hall past the ticking meter, and up the stairs to the landing. All the doors were open on the landing, revealing piles of clothes on the floors, and rumpled beds and the plastic carrier bags of nameless things that the children carried about with them. In the bathroom, the lavatory seat was up, and there were lumps of damp towel by the bath and the rickety shower curtain had come down, halfway along, drooping in stiff, stained, plastic folds.

  Nadine went around the landing, and closed all the doors. What she couldn’t see, she might not think about. Then she stooped down, and holding her mug of coffee carefully so as not to spill it, crawled into Rory’s tunnel of duvets under the eaves and buried herself there.

  ‘We’ve been waiting nearly an hour,’ Becky said. She climbed into the front seat beside Nadine. In the driving mirror, Nadine saw Rory slide in next to Clare, his face shuttered as it always was when he didn’t want anyone to interfere with him, ask him things.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Nadine said, ‘I went to sleep. I didn’t sleep much last night, and I went to sleep this morning, by mistake. For too long.’

  She glanced in the driving mirror. Clare was yawning. Her hair, which she had wanted cut in a bob, needed washing, and fronds of it stuck out here and there, giving her a neglected look.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Nadine said again. ‘Really. I was just so tired.’ She put the car into reverse. ‘Had a good day?’

  The children said nothing. Nadine gave them, as she turned the car, a quick glance. They weren’t sulking, she could see that. They just didn’t know how to reply to her in a way that was both truthful and wouldn’t upset her. The car was moving forward again. Nadine gave Becky’s nearest thigh a quick squeeze.

  ‘Hungry?’

  ‘You bet,’ Becky said.

  ‘We’ll stop at the village shop,’ Nadine said. ‘I found a fiver. We’ll buy potatoes and eggs and have a bit of a fry up. Egg and chips. What about that? Egg and chips.’

  There was a pause. Rory was gazing out of the window and Becky was staring at her chipped nail polish. Then Clare said, ‘We had egg and chips for lunch. At school.’

  Chapter Four

  Dale Carver parked her car with great competence in a space hardly bigger than its length, almost underneath the first-floor windows of her brother’s flat. She fixed the steering-wheel lock, got out, pulled the back window screen over the car stock she carried all the time as a publisher’s travelling rep, and locked the car. She glanced up. The curtains were pulled across the windows of Lucas’s sitting room and there were lights on inside. At least he was home. He’d said he’d try and be home by seven, but that so many people at the local radio station where he worked had flu, he might have to stay late and cover for someone. Or maybe the lights meant that Amy was there. Amy was Lucas’s fiancée. She was the head make-up girl for the nearest television station and they had met in the course of their work. Dale knew that her father, Tom, while liking Amy – ‘Sweet,’ he’d say. ‘Very nice. Sweet’ – felt that Lucas’s choice of future wife was, to put it mildly, unadventurous.

  Holding a bottle of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc and the proof copy of a new American novel for Lucas – Dale found she couldn’t help giving him these slightly intellectual presents in front of Amy – Dale climbed the front steps of the house and rang the middle bell. There was a crackle, and then Lucas’s voice said, ‘Dale?’

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Come right up.’

  ‘Ten seconds,’ Dale said.

  It was a game between them, to see how fast she could race along the hall – it depended upon what she was carrying – and up the stairs, lined with old prints of Bath and Bristol (there was a penalty if she knocked one off), to Lucas’s front door where he’d be standing, counting.

  ‘Eleven,’ he said.

  ‘It never was!’

  ‘Nearly twelve.’

  ‘Liar,’ Dale said.

  He kissed her. He was wearing a black shirt and black trousers and an open, faintly ethnic-looking waistcoat, roughly striped in grey and black. Dale indicated it.

  ‘Cool.’

  He winked.

  ‘Present from a fan.’

  ‘Hey. Does Amy know?’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ Amy said. She appeared behind Lucas, her blond hair in the curly froth round her face which Dale sometimes privately wondered how Lucas could bear to touch. It had a faintly woolly look to it, like a poodle.

  Lucas winked at Amy.

  ‘It’s better than knickers. Or condoms.’

  Amy pulled a face.

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘I’ve brought these,’ Dale said to Lucas, holding out the book and the bottle. He took them, peering at the book’s title.

  ‘Wow. Great.’

  ‘It’s brilliant,’ Dale said. ‘You think you never want to read another word about Vietnam, but this is different.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Lucas said, still looking at the book. ‘Thanks.’

  Amy took the wine bottle out of his hand.

  ‘I’ll chill this.’

  She was wearing leggings and ankle boots and a big T-shirt.

  ‘He’s an amazing guy,’ Dale said to Lucas of the author of the book. ‘He had an awful childhood with almost no education but he’s just a brilliant natural writer.’

  Lucas smiled at her.

  ‘I’ll look forward to it.’

  From the kitchen off the sitting-room, Amy called, ‘Want a coffee?’

  ‘I’d rather have a drink,’ Dale said. She moved into the centre of the sitting-room, between the twin sofas covered in rough pale linen. ‘A drink drink. I’ve been down to Plymouth today. The traffic was vile.’

  Lucas picked a vodka bottle off the tray inserted into a bookcase and held it up, enquiringly.

  ‘Lovely,’ Dale said. ‘The very thing.’

  ‘Why,’ Lucas said, pouring vodka, ‘don’t you get another job? Why don’t you do something that doesn’t mean all this travelling? If you want to stay in publishing, why don’t you go on to the editorial side or something?’

  ‘It would mean going to London,’ Dale said. ‘I don’t want to go to London.’

  Amy came out of the kitchen holding a mug.

  ‘I thought you liked London.’

  ‘I do. To visit. Not to live there.’

  ‘It’s funny,’ Amy said, ‘the way you two always want to stick around your dad.’

  Lucas handed Dale a tumbler of vodka and tonic and ice.

  ‘We don’t,’ he said, ‘not deliberately. It’s just happened, because of the areas we got jobs in.’

  ‘I couldn’t wait to get away from Hartlepool,’ Amy said. She sat down on the nearest sofa, holding her mug and looking at Dale, taking in her trouser suit and her small jewellery and her smooth hair, tied back behind her head with a black velvet knot. ‘Or my father. Nothing on earth would make me live within miles of my father.’

  ‘We’re not going to,’ Lucas said. He looked at his sister. ‘You’re too skinny.’

  Dale made a face. She sat down on the sofa opposite Amy and took a big gulp of her drink.

  ‘Things haven’t been brilliant lately. First Neil walking out—’ She paused, took another gulp of her drink and then said, ‘And now Dad.’

  Lucas sat down next to Amy,
leaning back with his arm across the sofa behind her.

  ‘What about Dad?’

  ‘He’s got a woman,’ Dale said.

  Amy looked amazed.

  ‘He hasn’t!’

  ‘He hasn’t,’ Lucas said. ‘I’ve seen him often lately and he’s never said a word.’

  ‘He hasn’t said a word to me, either,’ Dale said. ‘But I know.’

  ‘Come on,’ Lucas said. He was half-laughing. ‘Come on. Josie hasn’t been gone a year—’

  ‘Men do that,’ Amy said. ‘Don’t they? They can’t stand being alone, so when their wives die or push off, they just grab the first next one. My dad did that. Mum hadn’t been gone to Canada a month, and he’d got that tart in there.’

  ‘Dale,’ Lucas said, ignoring her, ‘you’re making this up. You’re understandably upset about Neil and you’re seeing shadows. There isn’t any evidence. Anyway, we wouldn’t need any. Dad would tell us. Dad would say.’

  Dale pushed an ice-cube in her drink under the surface.

  ‘He wouldn’t say, if he didn’t want us to know.’

  ‘But why wouldn’t he want us to know?’

  ‘Because he’d know,’ Dale said, ‘that we wouldn’t like it.’

  Lucas grinned. He gave Amy’s shoulders a squeeze.

  ‘Speak for yourself. I wouldn’t mind.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ Dale said.

  Amy leaned forward and put her mug on the black coffee table.

  ‘She’s right, you know. She really is. You don’t want other women moving in and taking what’s yours. You’ve had Josie already.’

  ‘She didn’t take much,’ Lucas said.

  Dale said, still looking at her drink, ‘Rufus did.’

  ‘Hey!’ Lucas said. ‘Cool it! Poor old Rufus. He’s your half-brother, remember!’

  ‘He wouldn’t be,’ Dale said, ‘if it wasn’t for Josie.’

  ‘Look,’ Lucas said. He took his arm away from Amy and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. ‘Look. Josie’s gone. Josie’s over. Dad doesn’t have to pay another penny to Josie. He gave her some money to help buy a house, but he isn’t supporting her because she’s married this Matthew guy. He just has to support and educate Rufus as he did us and then Rufus’ll find a job and be independent, like we did.’