Other People's Children

by Joanna Trollope

  ‘About another hour, I should think.’

  ‘The thing is,’ Dale said in a confidential tone, ‘I rather want to ask him about something other than the car—’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I want to move,’ Dale said. ‘I want another flat.’ She poured boiling water into the teapot, and then pulled a chair away from the table so that she was close to Elizabeth. ‘In fact, I’ve seen one.’

  Elizabeth glanced at her.

  ‘Have you?’

  ‘Yes. It needs everything doing to it. I mean everything.’

  ‘But your father’s an architect—’

  ‘So handy, isn’t it? But it’s money again, really.’

  Elizabeth thought of her house which, although she no longer wanted it, she felt an absurd responsibility for, because of what it had brought her. She steeled herself.

  ‘There’s my house—’

  Dale smiled. She leaned over and patted Elizabeth’s arm, then she got up to pour the tea.

  ‘Thank you. That’s really sweet of you. In fact, I’ll confess I went and had a bit of a snoop. But it’s a bit permanent for me, a house. A bit committed. Do you know what I mean?’

  ‘Don’t you want to feel permanent?’

  ‘Not till I’ve got somebody to be permanent with me. I thought, you see—’

  ‘I know. I’m so sorry.’

  Dale carried the two mugs over to the window seat and held one out to Elizabeth.

  ‘Dad’s been so supportive. And Lucas. Have you met Lucas?’

  ‘Not yet. We are having lunch with him and Amy tomorrow.’

  Dale’s face changed.

  ‘Oh. Are you? I didn’t know—’

  Elizabeth took a sip of tea. Time for another small display of conscious generosity. Without looking up she said, ‘Why don’t you come?’

  ‘Why didn’t Dad say?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I spoke to him yesterday. Why didn’t he say?’

  Elizabeth looked up at her. The smiling composure was gone.

  ‘My dear, I don’t know. But come along, come along and join us.’

  Dale stared at her tea, her face dark. Then she retrieved a smile.

  ‘Yes. Yes, of course I will. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll just go and fossick about upstairs for some things I need.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Dale moved over to the door. By it she paused, looking back over her shoulder. Her voice was very kind.

  ‘Make yourself comfortable,’ she said.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Upstairs, it didn’t look to her as if anything had changed. Tom and Elizabeth were presumably sleeping together – that was something, Dale decided, simply to avert one’s mind from – but Elizabeth appeared to have left not so much as a toothbrush. When Josie had started sleeping with Tom, Dale remembered, she’d arrived wholesale as it were; her clothes in his cupboard, her pots and bottles in his bathroom, her shoes kicked off on the floor in front of the television. Dale had once found a long red hair stuck to the side of the kitchen sink. She had wanted to be sick.

  But Elizabeth was different. Climbing the stairs to the top floor and taking her keys out of her pocket, Dale told herself firmly that she must remember – and make the effort to remember – how different Elizabeth was. She had even made herself say so, as proof of her good intentions, to Lucas and Amy.

  ‘I may not want her,’ Dale had said. ‘I may not want Dad to marry again, ever, but if he’s going to, she’s OK. She’s different.’

  ‘What kind of different?’ Amy said. Amy had liked Josie, who had been kind to her and allowed her to practise new make-up techniques on her. They’d had a lot of laughs together, up in that bathroom. Josie had been fun.

  ‘A quiet professional,’ Dale said. ‘Very decent. And not clinging. She isn’t all over Dad all the time.’

  Lucas said, teasing, ‘There wouldn’t be room for two of you.’

  Dale ignored him.

  ‘I feel better, now I’ve met her. I really do.’

  ‘She sounds pretty boring,’ Amy said.

  ‘She is. But that’s fine. Fine by me.’

  Lucas had looked at her, a long, hard look.

  ‘She’ll still be his wife, Dale.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Wives come first.’

  ‘No—’

  ‘They do.’

  ‘Not always. Not necessarily. Only if they insist on it.’

  She put the key into the lock on her bedroom door, and turned it. She could never see her bedroom without emotion, never enter it without a rush of remembering enveloping her, all those years of remembering, intense years in which she had battled with so much, with grief, with longing, with the knowledge that she must one day leave home, and the terror of doing it. When she had met Neil, she had packed up half the room in an extraordinary spirit of release, only taking one photograph of her mother and nothing from her teenage years. She had been exhilarated, proud of herself, congratulating herself on taking only things that would contribute to the future, not detain her damagingly in the past. But even then, even when she left to live with Neil, she had taped up the keyhole and locked the door behind her. Josie wasn’t a snoop but she wasn’t on Dale’s side, either. In any case, Pauline had to be protected from Josie who was openly jealous, Dale told Neil, if you can believe that it’s possible – or seemly – to be jealous of a woman dead at thirty-two when you’re alive yourself. And Dale’s bedroom was full of Pauline.

  She went over to her dressing table, her teenage dressing table flounced, at her thirteen-year-old request, in pink-and-white, and laid the key on the glass-covered top. She looked round her. Composedly, from many angles, her mother looked back at her. Elizabeth Brown was nice, Dale was certain of that; she was nice and decent and a bit boring but for all that, she was marrying Dale’s father and in consequence, Dale’s bedroom would have to stay locked. Not just for present privacy, but to safeguard the past, Dale’s past: Dale’s childhood.

  Chapter Ten

  ‘But this is the third time,’ Clare’s form teacher said. ‘The third time this week you’ve said you couldn’t do your homework.’

  ‘I can’t,’ Clare said. She was wearing the approximation of school uniform that most of the kids wore, and the hem of her skirt had come down at one side. She didn’t seem to have noticed.

  ‘Is there somewhere at home you can do your homework?’ the teacher said.

  Clare thought of the kitchen.

  ‘There’s a table.’

  ‘Is it quiet?’

  It was quiet, Clare reflected, if her mother wasn’t in the kitchen but was upstairs in her studio making clay coil pots which were her new passion. There was clay everywhere. The bottom of the bath was gritty with it.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then really you have no excuse. Your brother and sister have homework, don’t they?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where do they do theirs?’

  Clare considered. Becky spent angry half-hours on the floor of their bedroom with music on so loudly it made Nadine scream, and emerged announcing the shitty stuff was done. Rory never seemed to do any homework at all. He took his school bag into his burrow, but Clare didn’t think he even opened it. They both gave Clare the strong impression that, not only was it not cool to do homework, but that it was utterly pointless to do it. Homework was for nothing, it was just some meaningless discipline devised by teachers for their own obscure ends. Clare was not sure she believed this. Something in her didn’t mind homework, no doubt part of the same thing that didn’t mind school, either. It was nice belonging, it was nice going somewhere every day that stayed the same, that treated you the same as everyone else. It wasn’t rebelliousness that prevented Clare from doing her homework, but hopelessness. Every night, she got her books out and put them in the space she’d cleared in the remains of the last meal that was almost always still there, and sat down in front of them. And sat there. She sat and stared and
could do nothing. She couldn’t look at words, she couldn’t pick up a pencil.

  ‘Where,’ the teacher said patiently, ‘do your brother and sister do their homework?’

  Clare looked at her. She was young, with a round face and brown curly hair. Clare would have hated to have had curly hair.

  ‘Around somewhere—’

  ‘Clare,’ the teacher said. ‘You must do your homework. Do you understand? You must do it, not because I say so, but so I can see if you understand what you’ve been taught in class.’

  Clare nodded. She felt, in the face of such a reasonable explanation, that she must be truthful in reply.

  ‘But I can’t.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘I can’t do it.’

  ‘Do you mean, you don’t understand it?’

  ‘No,’ Clare said. ‘But when I get home I can’t do anything.’

  The teacher regarded her. She looked tired, but then so many of the kids looked tired with unsupervised television sets in their bedrooms and parents too weary for repetitive discipline.

  ‘Is your mother at home? When you get home?’

  Clare nodded.

  ‘Maybe I should talk to her—’

  ‘No,’ Clare said.

  ‘Why not?’

  Clare said, quoting Nadine, ‘We’ve got to make a go of it.’

  ‘Because,’ the teacher said delicately, ‘you’re on your own?’

  Clare nodded again. Her eyes were filling. She hadn’t seen Matthew for six weeks and three days and there’d been a battle that morning when Nadine had wanted to wash the Disneyland tracksuit.

  ‘You’ll shrink it!’

  ‘I won’t—’

  ‘You will, you will, don’t touch it, I don’t want it washed—’

  Nadine had snatched it from her, and when she was in the lavatory, Clare had retrieved it from the pile of dirty laundry and hidden it inside Rory’s duvet cover. There’d be trouble, when Nadine arrived to collect her and confronted her about the tracksuit.

  ‘Can you have one more try tonight?’ the teacher said.

  Clare sighed. It wouldn’t be any good. She said miserably, ‘I can’t think.’

  ‘I see,’ the teacher said. She stood up. ‘Are you sure I can’t talk to your mother?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, then I’d better talk to someone else.’

  Clare looked up at her, with a gleam of hope.

  ‘My dad?’ she said.

  In the sitting-room of the cottage, Becky sprawled on the sofa. It was broken-springed, inevitably, and she had padded the places where there were no springs at all, or they stuck up through the worn cretonne cover like spears, with a cushion and an old blanket. The television was on some kids’ programme with one of those pitiful over-zany presenters in big specs with scrubbing-brush hair, but Becky could hardly see it because of the snowstorm effect on the screen, as the reception was so bad. She didn’t care. She didn’t want to watch the programme anyway; she just wanted the company of having the television on, the illusion of having people around, things happening.

  It was cold in the sitting-room. Becky had become quite adept at lighting fires, but there was something wrong with the way the wind was blowing, and the fire wouldn’t burn up properly. She had rolled herself in the duvet off her bed, but even all wadded up like that she felt cold inside, like you do when you’re scared about something. She moved slightly, so that the cigarette packet in her jacket pocket wasn’t pressing uncomfortably into her breast, and thought of what else was in that pocket. A white tablet, wrapped in foil, with a bird stamped on one side and a smiley face on the other. A boy at school had given it to her. He’d said he could get a fiver for it but he’d give it to her if she’d go out with him at the weekend. Clubbing, he said. He was a big, loose-limbed, heavy-looking boy from the year above Becky and most of the time that he was talking to her and nonchalantly tossing the little foil packet from hand to hand he was looking at her breasts.

  Becky wasn’t sure why she had accepted the foil packet. It was flattering, in a way, to be asked out, to be offered, as a bribe for going out, membership of a particular group, and the boy who’d asked her was definitely one of half a dozen or so in the school regarded as a catch. He had a reputation, of course, a name for wanting to go all the way, for refusing to wear a condom, for knowing the scene, but that made him dangerous which in turn made him desirable. If she went out with him at the weekend, she couldn’t pretend she didn’t know what she was in for and, in any case, part of her wanted to be in for it very much, wanted to feel high and wild and sexy. And free. But there was another part. It was a part which had only grown up in her recently and whose constraining effect she resented very much. But she couldn’t pretend it wasn’t there. She couldn’t tell herself, any longer, that as someone of not yet sixteen she had no responsibilities or obligations and shouldn’t be asked to have any. Burdens had arrived, whether she wanted them or not, with her parents’ divorce, and the most complicated of those burdens was Nadine. Nadine was a mother, a mother three times over, but she wasn’t what you thought of when you said the word ‘mother’ to yourself. She was more, Becky was coming to realize, like someone who needed a mother herself, a higher authority who’d help her get her act together. Becky could see – she thought the others could see, too, by the way they were behaving – that things were slipping out of control. It wasn’t just the household things, it was more a feeling that Nadine didn’t know where she was going or what the next days or weeks were for, and her fear of not knowing hung around her, almost like a smell. If Becky went clubbing with Stu Bailey on Saturday night and took her ecstasy tablet and ended up having sex – for the first time – in a multi-storey car-park at four in the morning, she might feel she’d made it, she might feel she’d broken out of some cage and was at last flying free, but she’d still have to come home sometime afterwards, sometime later, and find Nadine. It might be worth it, it might be worth anything Nadine could say or do, to get right out of their tangle of troubles for a single night and blow her mind. But then, on the other hand, it might not. You couldn’t separate things, Becky was unhappily coming to realize, you couldn’t do a thing and then not expect the consequences to come trolling back sometime later and smack you in the face. It was a risk she was facing, if she went out with Stu Bailey, and even if she wanted the risk, she wasn’t sure she could face the consequence.

  She sat up and took her cigarettes out of her pocket and lit up. Then she took out the ecstasy tablet and unwrapped it. It looked as innocent as glucose. She sniffed it and then, with a small leap of excitement, licked it. It tasted of nothing. It smelt of nothing. It lay on her palm smiling up at her. It would cost her, it occurred to her, five pounds – her last five pounds – to own it, and, at the same time, to be free of Stu Bailey and his stare fixed on her breasts. If she wanted to be free, that is. If she wanted not to be wanted any more, never mind what he wanted her for. And he’d want her more, if she turned him down, anyway.

  She folded the foil back carefully round the tablet, and put it in her pocket. Her cigarette tasted sour and tired. She closed her eyes for a moment. She ought to go for it, she knew that, she ought to take the brief power to decide that had been handed to her and use it any way she bloody well wanted. But … She opened her eyes and chucked her cigarette into the sulking fire. Suppose Nadine found out? Suppose Stu Bailey really hurt her? Suppose … Becky leaned forward and turned the volume up on the television until the room seemed to judder and then she flung herself back down on the sofa and pulled the duvet over her head.

  ‘That’s the fifth time,’ Tim Huntley said. He stood, legs astride, hands on hips, in Nadine’s kitchen, looking down at her. She was sitting at the table. Beyond her, with a rip in his black school blazer, stood Rory, leaning against the refrigerator and fiddling with the plastic magnets on the door.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Nadine said. Her voice was low.

  ‘A farm isn’t a play place,’ Tim
said. He looked from Nadine to Rory. ‘A farm’s lethal. It’s not just the machines, it’s the poisons. I’ve got enough weedkiller there to finish off half Hereford. And a gun. You’re lucky I didn’t turn the gun on you.’

  Rory mumbled.

  ‘What?’ Nadine said.

  ‘I wasn’t doing nothing—’

  ‘You were there,’ Tim said. ‘You were there, without my knowledge or permission. If you’re there, a stranger, you might do yourself harm and you might cause harm, too. A cow might miscarry, you might spread an infection—’

  Rory bent low over the refrigerator door.

  ‘Sorry—’

  ‘I should think so. Why weren’t you at school, anyway?’ He looked at Nadine. ‘Why wasn’t he at school?’

  She was trembling slightly.

  ‘I thought he was.’

  ‘I don’t like it,’ Rory said and then, muttering, ‘It’s boring.’

  Tim moved forward and leaned on the table.

  ‘That’s no excuse. It’s the law you have to go to school and it’s the law you have to stay there.’

  Nadine glanced at Rory.

  ‘Are you being bullied?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘What’s wrong then?’

  He hesitated. Then, with a sweep of his hand, he detached all the magnets from the door and sent them scattering across the floor.

  ‘I can’t stay there,’ he said. ‘I can’t stay here, I can’t—’ His voice shook a little.

  ‘You got homework?’ Tim asked.

  Rory nodded.

  ‘Why don’t you go and do it, then? While I have a word with your mum?’

  Rory kicked the refrigerator.

  ‘I’m hungry—’

  ‘I expect you know where the bread bin is.’

  Nadine stood up.

  ‘I’ll get it—’

  Tim watched her. He noticed, as she sliced the bread and spread it clumsily with peanut butter, that her hands were shaking. Rory didn’t offer to help her. Tim opened his mouth to tell him to get off his idle backside, and closed it again. He’d shouted at Rory enough for one day, hauling him out physically from the shed where the tractors lived and ripping his blazer in the process. Rory had accepted the shouting mutely. He hadn’t seemed frightened and he hadn’t seemed sullen. He just appeared to accept what Tim was bellowing as more of the same, more of what he was already tiredly used to. Tim had flung him into the Land Rover bodily, like a sack or an animal carcass, and had then relented and given him half a chocolate bar that was lurking in the mess in the glove compartment. Rory had pretty well swallowed it whole.