Other People's Children

by Joanna Trollope

‘I should leave him,’ Elaine said. She raised her voice just a little so that Rufus could hear her. ‘He can come in if he gets cold.’

  Josie had looked anxiously down the street. It was an unremarkable residential street, lined with pairs of semi-detached houses, all built in the late seventies, all just like their own. Some of the gardens were neat and empty, some were densely, busily planted, but most just indicated, with scatterings of toys and washing lines and dustbins and cars on blocks waiting to be mended, the random preoccupied nature of family life. Josie didn’t know anyone in the street yet, didn’t know what kind of street it was, whether it was a safe street for an eight-year-old to sit out in, and whether the traffic that raced down it periodically, using it as a rat run to and fro from the centre of Sedgebury and work, was about to race again.

  ‘Come in,’ she said coaxingly to Rufus. ‘Come in. We’ve brought you a present.’

  He didn’t look at her. He looked, instead, across the street at the house opposite which had an ornamental wishing well in the garden with a plastic cat creeping down its roof.

  ‘No, thank you,’ Rufus said.

  After a while, Josie and Elaine went into the house. Rufus didn’t turn, but he sensed, rather than saw, that they were by the sitting-room window watching him. He thought of getting up and walking off, but he couldn’t quite summon up the rebelliousness for that. Nor did he want to frighten Josie. He just wanted her to know, in a way she could make no mistake about, that 17 Barratt Road might be the place she had taken him to live, but it was not his home. A home was somewhere different. A home had emotional associations that you were absolutely familiar with, that you had known for a large part of your life, that made it a natural place for you to be. 17 Barratt Road had no such associations – at least, not for Rufus – and was in no way a natural place for him to be. It was, instead, a very hard place for him to be and he wanted to make this extremely plain. To Josie, to his grandmother, to – Matthew.

  It seemed a long time until someone came out to him, so long that he was really quite cold and was beginning to notice that it was getting dark. Some of the houses down the street already had their Christmas trees up and Rufus could see the lights. They were mostly coloured lights which Rufus knew were in some way inferior to plain white ones. He supposed they’d have a tree at No.17. He didn’t much want one but you sort of had to, at Christmas. Despite the sparkling trees in the street, Rufus couldn’t believe that Christmas was coming. It didn’t feel Christmassy at all, away from Bath and with the prospect of Matthew’s children coming. Rufus kicked harder. Matthew’s children were a problem to him that Josie didn’t even seem to begin to understand. He heard footsteps on the concrete strips of the drive – not Josie’s footsteps – and then he observed, out of the corner of his eye, that Matthew was sitting on the low wall about eight feet away. Matthew didn’t speak. He sat facing the opposite way to Rufus and he had his hands in his pockets. Rufus hunched his shoulders.

  ‘Won’t you come in?’ Matthew said after a while.

  Rufus said nothing. He didn’t want to go in, but he was beginning not to want to stay outside, either.

  ‘I won’t come in with you,’ Matthew said. ‘I’ve got something to do in the garage. If you go in it’ll only be Mum and Granny.’

  Rufus ducked his head. He muttered something.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s not that—’

  ‘No,’ Matthew said, ‘I don’t expect it is. But it’s all I can think of, at the moment, to help you.’

  He looked at the house. They’d bought it two months ago, after eight months in a cramped flat where they assured each other, repeatedly, of how different things would be when they had a proper home. The lights were on in the sitting-room and Josie and Elaine were seated on the sofa and an armchair, with mugs of tea. The armchair came from the house Matthew had shared with Nadine, and Josie had found the sofa on a skip in the next street.

  Half their furniture had been obtained that way, the half that wasn’t Matthew’s, or didn’t belong to Josie from her years in Bath. The other side of Sedgebury, stacked in a locked garage belonging to a friend of Matthew’s who wasn’t using it, was Nadine’s share of their joint furniture. She had refused to take it to Herefordshire with the same vehemence that she had refused to use her share of the proceeds from the sale of the previous family home to buy a flat in Sedgebury. Matthew knew she had bought a car, but he didn’t know what else she had done with the money. There hadn’t been much of it, heaven knows, after they’d paid off the mortgage, but there was enough for Nadine to make a mess of or even just to lose. She lost money like other people lost socks in the wash. It used to drive him insane.

  He glanced at Rufus. It was quite dark now, but he could still see his face faintly, staring down at his relentlessly kicking feet. Rufus had come into Matthew’s life with his own money, Tom Carver’s money, which would feed him and clothe him and transport him and send him on school trips. It was, of course, right that it should be so, right that Tom Carver should support his own son, but there was something about Tom Carver’s money being in Matthew’s household that was difficult to bear. Matthew was worried about money – without Josie’s help, he’d never have been able to put down the deposit on this house – but that didn’t stop him preferring the independence of anxiety to the need to acknowledge that another man’s money was helping him to scrape by. Josie had said that almost all the money she had put into the house was her own, money she had saved from her teaching job in Bath, but, looking at some of her clothes and her possessions, Matthew sometimes wondered if she was being tactful. Too tactful, perhaps, almost patronizing, as if she thought that the truth about her money was something he couldn’t be expected to handle. And he felt that, felt it keenly. Josie was so openly admiring of so much Matthew did, notably of his teaching skills, his capacity to like the young, work with them, send them on their way with higher hearts. ‘You do good,’ she’d said to him several times. ‘You do the good that matters.’ But when it came to the handling of money, or attitudes to it, she didn’t seem to have that confidence, and he noticed.

  Cars were beginning to come down Barratt Road, their headlights swooping up and down as they negotiated the ridges in the road that the council had put there to slow them up. Some of them caught Rufus and Matthew in a brief yellow glare and showed Matthew that Rufus was shivering.

  ‘You have to come in—’

  Rufus didn’t look at him.

  ‘Why didn’t Mummy come?’

  ‘To get you in? Because I offered. You looked a bit lonely.’

  ‘I like it,’ Rufus said.

  ‘Yes,’ Matthew said. He stood up and came to put a hand on Rufus’s shoulder. ‘Come on.’

  Rufus sprang away from him on to the pavement, then he ducked sideways through the drive gate and tore up the concrete strips to the house. Matthew heard the door open and then slam. He remembered, when he was about Rufus’s age, indulging in a fantasy which sustained him for months about being an orphan, about being an object of pity and admiration in a world which did not, most definitely, include his mother or his father, or his baby sister, Karen. He could recall, even at a distance of thirty-five years, the glamour of that imagined loneliness, that solitary courage. And then he looked up and saw, in the lit sitting-room ahead of him, Josie rising to greet Rufus who was coming into the room very slowly, the picture of deep reluctance. My Josie, Matthew thought, stirred at the sight of her, mine. He saw her try to put her arms round Rufus and Rufus gracefully elude her to sit on the sofa by his grandmother. Matthew turned away and began to walk towards the garage. Mine – and also someone else’s, long before me.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Clare stood in the bedroom doorway.

  ‘Is this where I’m sleeping?’

  ‘Yes,’ Josie said. She was smiling. It had taken her several days to get the girls’ room ready, including extracting, from the locked garage, duvet covers and pillowcases that belonged to Matthew’s children.
She had laundered these, and made up the beds with them, and bought bedside lamps and a pinboard and put down a white wool Greek rug that used to lie on the floor of Rufus’s nursery in Bath, when he was a baby. The results were very pleasing. Matthew, who had painted the walls and hung up dark-blue curtains patterned with stars which Josie had found in a charity shop, said the girls would be thrilled. They’d never, he said, had a room half so pretty. He had taken Josie in his arms and kissed her, and told her she was generous.

  ‘Our first Christmas, all together. And you’re putting so much into it.’

  ‘I like doing it,’ she said. It was true. She did like it, did relish the feeling that she was doing something to stabilize the lives of Matthew’s children who, it was plain, had always lived in a very uncertain and irregular way. Josie had only had one encounter with Nadine, which had been brief and disconcerting, but which had left her with the hope – a very real hope – that Nadine would not be a hard act to follow.

  ‘They’re afraid of her,’ Josie said to Matthew.

  He had looked doubtful.

  ‘Yes, they are,’ she’d said and then she’d said it again, insisting, ‘They’re afraid of her moods.’

  ‘I think,’ Matthew said unhappily, ‘that they love her.’

  Even if they did, Josie told herself, brushing out the fringe on the Greek rug, it wouldn’t prevent them from seeing how good it was, how reassuring, to have meals at regular intervals and a clean, cheerful house and no rows. There would certainly be no rows. Rows, Matthew said, had punctuated his life with Nadine with relentless regularity, sending china and children flying. Josie had been shocked, listening to him. She and Tom had argued, certainly – mostly about Dale – but neither of them had ever thrown anything. It wouldn’t have occurred to them and, if she had her way, it would soon not occur to Matthew’s children either, as a means of communication. She would be very patient with them, she told herself, very, and not ask or expect anything in return for months. She felt, being in charge of the house and the family, that she would have endless patience with the members of it in return for that power, a power she had never really had in the house in Bath because she had walked into it already complete with the Carver family and all their habits and traditions, including – and this had been abidingly hard – the ghost of Tom’s dead wife, Pauline. Pauline, canonized by dying so young and so unjustly, pervaded the house with a subtle strength that Josie would have respected if she hadn’t felt so threatened by it. It was years before Dale would even allow Josie inside her bedroom, let alone permit her to help choose its decor and bedlinen, and when she finally did, Josie was much taken aback by the number of photographs of Pauline. Nadine, by comparison with Pauline, was a most manageable opponent; she was clearly a rotten mother, a lousy housekeeper, she’d never earned a contributory penny and she was alive.

  Clare dropped three or four bulging carrier bags on the floor by the nearest bed. They keeled sideways and various discouraging and grubby garments flopped out.

  ‘Do you like it?’ Josie said.

  Clare said nothing.

  ‘Those are your duvet covers and pillowcases—’

  Clare gave the beds a cursory, indifferent glance.

  ‘Are they?’

  ‘Yes. Aren’t you pleased to see them again?’

  Clare began to fiddle with her bottom cardigan button.

  ‘I don’t remember them.’

  ‘I hope,’ Josie said, persisting, ‘that I’ve put them on the right beds. I’ve put yours there, and Becky’s on the bed by the window.’

  ‘Becky won’t sleep by the window,’ Clare said. ‘She only uses the window to chuck her fag ends out of.’

  Josie smiled.

  ‘Sorry, but I don’t want her smoking in here.’

  Clare sighed. She trailed across the room, stumbling over the Greek rug and rucking it up, and looked at the pinboard.

  ‘What’s that for?’

  ‘Posters. Your posters and postcards and maybe paintings you do at school.’

  ‘In my year,’ Clare said, ‘we do pottery.’

  ‘Well, surely you’ve got some posters, haven’t you? Pop groups and models and things?’

  Clare stared at her.

  ‘Models?’

  Josie stooped to flick the rug straight.

  ‘It was only a suggestion.’

  ‘Becky likes Oasis,’ Clare said. ‘They won’t fit up there.’

  ‘Clare,’ Josie said, ‘I’ll leave you to kind of look about. Open cupboards and things. You know where the bathroom is.’

  Clare shot her a quick glance.

  ‘I’m not using the bathroom,’ Becky had said that morning, on Hereford station. ‘I’m not. I’m not sitting where she’s sat.’

  ‘What you gonna do then?’ Rory said.

  Becky blew out a cloud of smoke.

  ‘Crap in the garden.’

  Rory and Clare had taken no notice of this. Becky had long ago lost the power to shock them. But Nadine, waiting with them until the train came, had cackled with laughter. Something in Clare had wished Nadine wouldn’t and wished that she didn’t always make something much harder which was hard enough anyway. Like standing in this room with someone she didn’t want in her life and who plainly wanted something from her, some sign that the room was nice, that she’d been kind. Clare turned her head and stared out of the window. If she put toilet paper on the seat, maybe it would be OK to sit where Josie sat. As long as Becky didn’t see her doing it.

  ‘We haven’t decorated the tree,’ Josie said, ‘have we, Rufus? We left it for you and Rory to do, didn’t we?’

  Her voice sounded false to her, bright and silly like a parody of a nursery-school teacher in a class of recalcitrant four-year-olds.

  She said to Rory, ‘Did you do a tree for your mother in Herefordshire?’

  ‘No,’ he said. He wore, as all the children did, the same clothes he had worn for the wedding. He stood beside the boxes of Christmas-tree ornaments and bags of silver tinsel, gnawing at a cuticle on one thumb. He had a spot, Josie noticed, one side of his nose and a generally stale air, as if neither he nor his clothes had been washed for weeks.

  ‘Come on,’ Josie said to Rufus.

  Rufus bent and picked up the box of Christmas-tree lights.

  ‘These are new ones—’

  ‘I know.’

  He looked at her. He gave her a long, steady glance of reproach for having Christmas-tree lights which were different from the tremendously long string of little white lights, bought by Tom, which adorned the tree each year in Bath.

  ‘I couldn’t get plain,’ Josie said. She should have said, truthfully, that the coloured ones, bought from a Sikh trader in Sedgebury market, had been the cheapest she could find, but she was not yet ready, she found, to admit economic exigency to Rufus.

  ‘These are common,’ Rufus said disdainfully.

  Rory stopped chewing for a moment and looked at him.

  ‘They should be white,’ Rufus said.

  Josie put her hands up to her hair and adjusted the band that held it back from her face.

  ‘They’re all we’ve got.’

  ‘Where’s the telly?’ Rory said.

  Josie pointed.

  ‘There.’

  Rory made as if to move towards it.

  ‘When you’ve done the tree,’ Josie said. ‘Come on, it’s lovely doing the tree.’ It was too, once, with Tom in charge and tiny Rufus laboriously hanging things on the lowest branches and even Dale, in the end, joining in. It was one of the few moments increasingly, in the year, when Josie could feel that she had been right to marry Tom, that they had a good life together, that it didn’t matter that she couldn’t love him as she had always hoped she would love a husband, with that excited, triumphant love that she had tried to make happen, defiantly, marching up the aisle, nearly five months pregnant, in an ivory corded silk dress cut high under the bust, like a medieval dress, to disguise her growing bump. Now, of course, that kind of l
ove was easy. She only had to think of Matthew, let alone see him, to feel a leap inside her, like a flame or a jet of water. She had wondered, at the beginning, if this exhilaration was just sex, but it was still here, almost eighteen months after that first meeting at the conference in Cheltenham, and not only here, but stronger. She loved Matthew, she loved him. He made her happy and proud and pleased and, in the best sense, provocative. And it was Matthew’s child, standing in her sitting-room, who was being so obdurate about a task which had always, during long years of emotional disappointment, managed to lift Josie’s heart.

  ‘OK,’ she said to the boys. ‘OK. I’ll challenge you. I’ll challenge you to take these inferior lights and all the other tacky things that you so plainly despise and make something of this tree. I’m going to get lunch. What about spaghetti bolognese?’

  Neither boy indicated that he had even heard her.

  ‘I’ll be twenty minutes,’ Josie said. ‘And then I’ll come back in here and expect to be amazed. OK?’

  She looked at them. Rufus, sighing, took the lid off the box of lights and Rory, still chewing his thumb, bent to flick out of the nearest bag with his free hand a skein of silver tinsel. Josie went out of the sitting-room and closed the door. Rufus looked at Rory. Rory didn’t look back. Instead, he dropped the skein of tinsel and ambled over to the television.

  ‘Where’s the remote control?’ he said.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Becky had been smoking. When she finally dawdled into the kitchen for lunch, she brought a strong waft of cigarette smoke with her. She was wearing her denim jacket and a long black skirt with a rip in it and her hands were almost obscured in thick mittens knitted of black and fuchsia-pink and emerald-green wool. She was also carrying something screwed up in an old white plastic bag, and when she sat down, she dumped the thing in the bag on the straw table mat in front of her.

  Josie, standing by the stove with the ladle for helping out the pasta, decided to wait and say nothing. This wasn’t easy. Nothing that morning had been easy and tears and temper were knotting themselves up inside her chest and throat in a way she couldn’t remember them doing since the early days as Tom’s wife, when sixteen-year-old Dale talked incessantly, and directly, to her father, about her dead mother. This morning’s troubles had been different in kind, but no less upsetting in intensity. There had been no attempt by Matthew’s children to unpack nor to evince the slightest interest in the house or the possibilities of the life they might live there, even when it was pointed out to them that they would be back among their old Sedgebury school-friends. Becky had even left her bags outside the back door, refusing to look at her bedroom at all, and had then vanished. When Josie went upstairs to see if Clare was all right, she found her bedroom just as they had both left it and the bathroom floor mysteriously strewn with pieces of unused but crumpled lavatory paper. There was no sign that either soap or a towel had been touched. In Rufus’s room, which Rory was to share, Rory’s rucksack, black-and white and covered with badly applied stickers citing the names of football players for Newcastle United, sat directly in the doorway, as if poised for flight straight back out again.