Other People's Children

by Joanna Trollope

  ‘There,’ Nadine said. She gave Rory the sandwiches on a plate and then leaned forward and kissed him. ‘Don’t worry.’

  He didn’t look at her. He took the plate and began to shamble towards the door.

  ‘Thank you,’ Tim Huntley said loudly, commandingly.

  Rory paused briefly.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ Nadine said.

  Rory went out of the room, letting the door bang behind him. They heard him cross the tiles of the hall, and then begin to climb the stairs, his tread slow and unsteady, like the tread of someone very much older than twelve.

  ‘I expect he’ll eat it in bed,’ Nadine said.

  ‘In bed—’

  ‘He’s made himself a sort of bedroom under the eaves. It’s very private. He won’t let any of us in there.’ She looked at Tim. ‘Coffee?’

  ‘Please,’ he said. He pulled out a chair from the table and sat down on it, resting his forearms on the tabletop. He looked at Nadine. ‘We’ve been discussing you, Mum and me.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘You’re not coping, are you?’

  Nadine filled the kettle, plugged it in and put two mugs, very precisely, beside each other, on the countertop.

  ‘If it’s any business of yours.’

  ‘We’re neighbours,’ Tim said. ‘This is the country, not some bloody town where you could drop dead and nobody’d notice.’ He paused, and then he said, ‘There were kids here, four or five years back. Living with their dad in a caravan. If you can call it living. He was useless, the dirty devil. Stoned or smashed half the time. The littlest kid got killed on the Ross road, hit by a truck, wandering about on her own, famished. The other kids got taken into care and their dad vanished. We knew they were there, Mum and me. But we didn’t know how bad it was. We didn’t know the half until the little girl got killed.’

  Nadine said nothing. She spooned coffee into the two mugs and screwed the lid back on the jar, very carefully.

  ‘You know what’s going on, don’t you?’ Tim said. Nadine put her hand on the kettle handle.

  ‘About what—’

  ‘Your kids.’

  She bowed her head.

  ‘It’s not just the boy pitching off half the time,’ Tim said. ‘Is it? It’s the girls, too. The little ‘un looks half-starved and the big one’s playing around with one of the Bailey boys.’

  ‘Who,’ Nadine said tightly, ‘are the Baileys?’

  Tim grunted.

  ‘You wouldn’t want to know. They’re a load of trouble. Four boys as bad as their dad. You don’t want your girl mixed up with the Baileys.’

  The kettle blew a noisy stream of steam into the air and switched itself off. Nadine, holding her wrist with the other hand to steady it, poured water into both mugs.

  ‘Milk?’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Sugar?’

  ‘Two,’ Tim Huntley said. ‘Cheers.’ He watched her set a mug down in front of him. Then she sat down herself, opposite.

  ‘Becky is in the sitting-room,’ Nadine said, ‘doing her homework. I take her to school every day and I collect her every day and I know where she is, all the time.’

  Tim eyed her.

  ‘You don’t know what she’s doing at school. And you can’t keep her shut in forever.’ He thought, briefly, of Becky’s overdeveloped, un-girlish figure. ‘She’ll break loose soon. One trip to Hereford or Gloucester and you’ll have lost her.’

  Nadine bent her head over her coffee.

  ‘Go away’

  ‘Look—’

  ‘Go away!’

  Tim Huntley leaned forward.

  ‘Don’t shout, because I’m not going. I haven’t come to interfere, I’ve come to help you stop something before it starts, before your kids really lose it.’

  Nadine lifted both hands and put them in front of her face. ‘We’re getting there, we are—’

  ‘No, lady,’ Tim said. ‘You aren’t. And if I find your boy in my yard again, without my permission, I’m calling the rozzers.’

  Nadine took her hands away and stared at him, aghast.

  ‘You wouldn’t!’

  ‘I would. For his sake, for yours. It’s no help to anyone to be allowed to run wild.’

  ‘I don’t allow it.’

  ‘But you can’t stop it. And soon there’ll be more you can’t stop.’

  Nadine said, unsteadily, ‘We’ve had a bad time. We – well, we got thrown out, or at least, that’s what it amounted to.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Tim said. ‘Why you got here’s nothing to me. It’s what happens now that counts.’

  Nadine swallowed.

  ‘I — don’t know what happens now.’

  ‘You shouldn’t live alone,’ Tim said. ‘You look to me like you’ve had a bit of a breakdown. You should live with other people. Maybe that commune place over towards Hay.’ He looked at the clay around Nadine’s fingernails. ‘Art and stuff. Gardening.’

  Nadine closed her eyes. She said, in the most decided voice she had yet used in this conversation, ‘I love my children.’

  Tim hesitated a moment and then he said, ‘There’s something else.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Their dad’s a head teacher, isn’t he? The lad said—’

  ‘Deputy,’ Nadine said with contempt.

  ‘Maybe—’

  She fixed him suddenly with her penetrating blue stare.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Tim said, cradling his coffee mug. ‘Maybe you should let their dad take his turn for a while?’

  Matthew sat by the telephone in the sitting-room. He sat very quietly, as if his quietness might suggest to Josie, next door in the kitchen, that he was still speaking. He needed her to think that because he needed time to think, himself.

  It had been Nadine on the telephone. She seldom rang him at home – had hardly rung him anywhere, except twice about Rory, for over a month – and Josie had answered the telephone.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, and then her expression blanked. Matthew took a breath.

  ‘I’ll get him,’ Josie said. She held the receiver out to him.

  ‘For you.’

  He took it. Josie was looking at him, as if she wanted something badly and he was supposed to guess what it was. Slowly, he turned his back, putting the receiver to his ear.

  ‘Hello.’

  Josie rushed past him into the kitchen and slammed the door, shudderingly. Nadine was crying. She was crying and crying the other end of the telephone and through the crying she was trying to accuse him of all the things she had always accused him of.

  ‘There’s no point to this,’ Matthew said, disgusted.

  ‘There is! There is!’

  ‘Then tell me,’ he said. ‘Cut the abuse and tell me.’

  He heard her blowing her nose violently.

  ‘They’re in bed,’ she said. ‘They can’t hear me.’

  Matthew waited. She blew her nose again. Then she said, ‘They’re coming to you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They’re in trouble,’ Nadine said. Her voice was now a fierce, hoarse whisper. ‘They’re playing truant and not doing their homework and getting into bad company. That’s what you’ve done to them, that’s what’s happened because you—’

  ‘Shut up,’ Matthew said. He was gripping the telephone receiver.

  ‘You made the problem,’ Nadine said. ‘You got them into this. Now you get them out.’

  ‘What’s brought this on—’

  ‘You know, you two-timing bastard, what brought this on!’

  Matthew took a deep breath.

  ‘You want the children to come here—’

  ‘I don’t want it!’

  ‘OK, OK, the children are to come here. Permanently? School and everything?’

  Nadine said faintly, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have you asked them?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Before you start shipping them wholesale about the place, hadn’t you better
ask them?’

  Nadine said, spitting the words out separately, ‘There isn’t any point.’

  ‘Because you don’t intend them to have any choice?’

  She shouted, ‘Because there isn’t one! If you don’t help, if they go on like this, if something happens, then we’ll neither of us have them!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There’s someone watching me,’ Nadine said unsteadily, ‘someone who saw some other children go wrong, someone who—’ She stopped.

  ‘Might report you?’ Matthew said.

  Nadine said nothing. He could hear her breathing, quick and ragged. Something close to pity stirred in him for a second, and then stilled.

  ‘I see,’ he said. He glanced towards the closed kitchen door. His heart was rising in him, with a sudden, luminous happiness. He said, trying to keep his voice empty of all potentially provocative emotion, ‘Do you want to discuss arrangements now?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Tomorrow? I’ll call you from school—’

  ‘OK,’ she said. She was beginning to cry again.

  He opened his mouth to say, ‘Give them my love,’ and closed it again, in case his rejoicing betrayed itself. Instead he said, ‘Till tomorrow then. Bye,’ and put the phone down.

  Then he sat there. He sat beside the quiet telephone, with his eyes closed and said thank you, fervently, to somebody. His children back, his children home again, his children where he could encourage them, protect them, supervise them, see them as he hadn’t seen them for almost eighteen months in the precious, trivial, course of ordinary daily dull family life. He felt almost dizzy, almost tearful. He had been gearing himself up for the last few weeks for a protracted, ugly, exhausting wrangle with Nadine about the children, about reasonable access to them, about even being able to telephone them in some kind of freedom – and he had never dreamed that this might be the alternative, that he might simply be handed the children with a suddenness that almost knocked him over. He said their names to himself. He visualized them.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said silently. ‘Thank you, thank you.’

  He opened his eyes. Across the room, the kitchen door stood firmly shut. Behind it, he could hear Josie clattering things in the kitchen and the sound of the classical-music radio station she played all day, carrying the portable set around with her from room to room. He stood up. The first radiance of relief and happiness was dimming slightly. It was no good hoping Josie would share it. It was no good expecting Josie to greet the news of his children’s coming to live with them with anything other than alarm. She might be horrified. She might be angry. She might, even, refuse. Matthew went across the sitting-room and opened the kitchen door.

  ‘Hi.’

  Josie was washing the saucepans left over from cooking their supper. She didn’t turn round.

  She said, ‘Why does she have to be so bloody dramatic?’

  ‘She is dramatic,’ Matthew said. ‘She just is. Always has been.’ He came further into the room and stood behind Josie. ‘And she was in a state tonight.’

  ‘So what’s new?’

  ‘Josie,’ Matthew said.

  She turned round, holding a pan and a coiled wire scourer. Her hands were dripping with suds.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Some kind of crisis. I don’t know exactly what because I didn’t ask because if I ask I get another earful about how it’s all my fault—’

  ‘The children?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Josie put down the pan and scourer and wiped her hands on a tea towel.

  ‘In trouble?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Serious trouble?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  She looked at him. His eyes were alight. A small, cold dread settled heavily and suddenly in the pit of her stomach.

  ‘Does she want you to go there?’

  ‘No—’

  Josie bit her lip. He put his arms round her but she wouldn’t let him pull her to him.

  ‘Honey, she can’t cope. She’s sending them here.’

  ‘Here!’ Josie said. ‘To live?’

  ‘Yes.’ He leaned forward and kissed her unresponsive neck. ‘Yes, to live here, go to school here. With us.’

  Josie said nothing. He put his nose tip to tip with hers. He couldn’t help smiling. ‘Is that OK?’

  She closed her eyes for a moment and then she said, in a hard, bright voice that neither of them recognized as hers, ‘Of course.’

  Chapter Eleven

  Rufus lay in bed and looked at the curtains he had chosen when he was four. They had flowers on them. Blue flowers on a pale-yellow background. For a year or two, he’d been so used to them, he’d stopped seeing them, but now he’d noticed them again and they really embarrassed him. Surely, even if flowers were what he thought he wanted when he was four, Josie should have had the sense to deflect him on to something else? He looked at his desk. It was new. It was sitting there waiting for him when he got to Bath, and it had two drawers and an angled lamp on a hinge, like the ones Tom had, in his office. So far, Rufus hadn’t done anything with his desk except sit in the chair that went with it and slide the drawers open and shut. They ran very well. Rufus admired that. Elizabeth had given him a box of coloured pencils, a huge box with seventy-two pencils in it, all their colours shading gently from one to another like a rainbow. They were artist’s pencils, Elizabeth said, and when she was about Rufus’s age she had had a box exactly like that. Rufus thought he would not take the box of coloured pencils back to Sedgebury but would keep them here, in one of his new desk drawers. Now that Rory was in the same bedroom with him all the time, there was very little privacy and Rory’s reaction to a box of coloured artist’s pencils was not something Rufus cared to think about.

  He sat up in bed. It was very, very nice to be in that bed, in that room, to be alone and quiet. Dale was next door, of course, having suddenly decided to stay the night, but the walls of this house were thicker than the walls of what Rufus thought of as Matthew’s house, so it was like being alone. When he got out of bed and pulled the curtains – which he would do quite soon because you couldn’t see the flowers so well with the fabric scrunched up – he would see the view he knew he’d see, the back of the house opposite across two gardens with a tree between that grew pale green bracts in summer and dropped them all over the place like tiny primitive aeroplanes. In the winter, you could see the house opposite and watch the people in it brushing their teeth and reading the paper and hoovering the carpet, but in summer, the tree hid them from view. Once, a man saw Rufus watching him, and waved, and Rufus was appalled and pitched himself on to the carpet under the window, out of sight.

  He got out of bed and padded over to the window, yanking the curtains as far sideways as they would go to squash the flowers up. The tree looked bare still, but a bit fuzzy, because of the new buds on its branches, some of which had minute little leaves beginning to come out of them. All the curtains and blinds in the house opposite were still drawn – it was Saturday after all – and down in the garden below, Rufus could see Basil, sitting by the stone girl with the dove on her hand, washing one paw very slowly and carefully, over and over again. Washing – and only ever washing very small sections of himself – seemed to be the only exercise he took.

  Rufus went into the bathroom beside Dale’s bedroom and had a pee. Josie always said to pull the plug but, as she wasn’t here to say it, he didn’t. He had a quick look in Dale’s sponge bag. It was very neat inside and smelled of scented soap and beside it was one of the elasticated velvet loop things she tied her hair back with. Rufus picked it up and twanged it experimentally. Then he went downstairs, jumping the last three steps of each flight, which he had always done since he discovered, about two years ago, that if you jumped at an angle you could also get a bit further across each half-landing at every jump. His father’s bedroom door was open, but the bed wasn’t made and there was the sound of an electric razor whining away behind the bathroom door. Rufus gave t
he door a friendly thump and sauntered on down to the kitchen.

  ‘Hello,’ Elizabeth said. She was already dressed and was laying bowls and plates round the table.

  He smiled, not looking at her, feeling suddenly shy.

  ‘Sleep well?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Are you pleased with your new desk?’

  He nodded again. ‘Brilliant.’

  She was opening cupboards. She said, with her back to him, ‘Do you like eggs?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘How do you like them?’

  He thought a moment.

  ‘Cooked—’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. She was laughing. ‘But scrambled, fried—’

  He hitched himself on to a chair.

  ‘Scrambled,’ he said.

  ‘Won’t you be cold, just in your pyjamas?’

  He shook his head. He looked at the cereal packets. They were all the muesli stuff Tom ate, nothing decent.

  ‘I don’t like muesli either,’ Elizabeth said, watching his expression. ‘It gets stuck in my teeth.’

  Rufus thought of the row of cereal packets at Sedgebury, six or seven of them, all different, all bought by Josie in an attempt to buy the right thing, to buy something Matthew’s children would eat. They did eat them, too, but not at meals. They wouldn’t even come to meals, sometimes, but there were cereal bowls all over the house and dropped bits on the stairs and floors. Rufus felt he was being a right little prig, coming to table when Josie called him, but he felt, even more strongly, that he didn’t have a choice. He only had to look at her face – not angry so much, though she was, but kind of desperate, with big eyes – to believe he wanted to do something to make her feel better, and if sitting at the kitchen table made her feel better, then he’d do it. Even if he had to suffer for it, and sometimes he did.